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Ortega on the Crisis of Western Civilization
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15024 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1988 |
4,530 Words |
| Author
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Nicholas Capaldi
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Addressing himself in 1930 to the moral crisis of Western civilization, Jose Ortega y Gasset was led to observe that:
"The world to-day is suffering from a grave demoralization which, amongst other symptoms, manifests itself by an extraordinary rebellion of the masses, and has its region in the demoralization of Europe (of which the United States is an extension). The causes of this latter are multiple . . . Europe is no longer certain that it rules, nor the rest of the world that it is being ruled…. No one knows toward what center human things are going to gravitate in the near future, and hence the life of the world has become scandalously provisional . . . He will be a wise man who puts no trust in all that is proclaimed, upheld, essayed, and lauded at the present day. All that will disappear as quickly as it came.
"… There exists to-day no politician who feels the inevitableness of his policy . . . Life to-day is the fruit of an interregnum, of an empty space between organizations of historical rule--that which was, that which is to be. For this reason it is essentially provisional. Men do not know what institutions to serve in truth."
The Revolt of the Masses
Although Ortega was writing more than fifty years ago, it is impossible not to see this as an apt description of our situation. The recognition of the moral crisis to which Ortega refers is by now a commonplace. It is the recognition of loss of meaning, a loss of genuine faith in anything. Ortega's response was to document that crisis, to explain it as the immediate product of the rise and rebellion of the masses, and finally to search for the intellectual roots of the crisis in the hope of overcoming it.
Let us turn first to Ortega's characterization of the crisis. The lack of meaning we find in the institutions of our own time and place reflects a deeper anxiety about whether any epoch can be definitive, but it would be premature to attribute this anxiety to the doctrine of historical relativism. Our sense of loss about time and history is confined to the past, for it is the past that we longer respect. On the contrary, we feel ourselves to be superior to everything that is in the past. We feel that we have transcended the limitations of the past, that we are capable of everything and anything. Yet it is precisely because we feel capable of everything that there is no standard for preferring one thing over another. Our potential is limitless, but the lack of limits reflects the absence of all norms. Lacking any overall sense of a plan or program, we lurch from one crisis to another, "dodging the difficulties of the hour" instead of trying to solve them.
In comparing our own moral crisis with the crisis of the past, Ortega discovers what is unique and central to our own. Previous civilizations perished when their underlying principles proved insufficient. Does that mean that the underlying principles of Western civilization and of our own time are insufficient? Ortega answers in the negative. According to him, our age is marked by the failure to understand the principles of our civilization because we have lost contact with, or the memory, of past, we fail to see how the present evolved from the past; failing to comprehend that process, we fail to understand what we are doing.
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