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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
Nicholas Capaldi is editor of Public Affairs Quarterly and is
McFarlin Endowed Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Tulsa in Oklahoma. |
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
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