n+1: Revolt of the Elites
What would elite culture look like if you forgot about class for a second? Essentially an opposite point of view to Bourdieu’s was offered by Ortega y Gasset in his 1929 classic The Revolt of the Masses (which foresaw that European variety of politico-cultural populism known as fascism). The beautiful blindness of Ortega’s analysis was to ignore social distinctions in favor of existential differentiation. Aristocrat and mass man were, in his mischievous usage, not social categories at all but separate dispositions: “Doubtless the most radical division of humanity that can be made is that between two classes of creatures: those who demand much of themselves and assume a burden of tasks and difficulties, and those who require nothing special of themselves, but rather for whom to live is to be in every instant only what they already are.” The mark of superior people, in Ortega’s sense, is that they consider themselves inferior to what they may become. Self-improvement, for all that it smacks of the self-help shelf at Barnes & Noble, is also, in this way, the rallying cry of the only kind of elite worth having.
Ortega’s señorito satisfecho, on the other hand — the little satisfied mister — is perfectly content with the mediocrity he has already attained and the common-sense vision he already perceives. His education stands at an end before it’s begun. Conveniently he confuses formal democracy, or the equal right to an opinion, with a democracy of quality in which all views possess equal value — until some are proved superior by commanding a mob following. Today The Revolt of the Masses reads like an existential X-ray of the soul of Bush or Palin, creatures of different social classes who account their similar stuntedness an achievement. This is the antielitism of the elites — by no means confined to the GOP — whose adherents despise the knowledge that things could be better, that they themselves could be better. Meanwhile they secure the ruin of our country by insisting on its perfection.
The excellence and timeliness of this article cannot be overstated.
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