Avoiding tragedy requires a sense of it, which in turn requires a sense of history. Peace, however, leads to a preoccupation with presentness, the loss of the past and a consequent disregard of the future. That is because peace by nature is pleasurable, and pleasure is about momentary satisfaction. In an era of extended domestic peace, those who deliver up pleasures are the power brokers. Because pleasure is inseparable from convenience, convenience becomes the vital element in society.

“The mass man loves gags,” writes Saul Bellow in his introduction to the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset’s 1929 work The Revolt of the Masses. “He is a spoilt child, demanding amusement, given to tantrums… His only commandment is Thou Shalt Expect Convenience.” Ortega y Gasset’s “mass man” is the self-satisfied specialist in a postindustrial society who knows expertly his own corner of the universe but is ignorant of the rest: “a learned ignoramus.” The mass man, writes Ortega y Gasset, “is obviously interested in automobiles, anesthetics, and all manner of sundries. And these things confirm his profound lack in interest itself. For all these things are mere products of civilization, and the passion he displays for them makes more crudely obvious his insensibility to the principles which made them possible.” Oretega y Gasset also says that a “world overabundant in possibilities” for the mass man “automatically produces grave deformities, vicious forms of human existence…” Dictated by convenience and gratification, the mass man realizes no limits to his pleasure. And “barbarism,” Ortega y Gasset reminds us, “is the absence of norms and of any possible appeal based on them.”

I think that quote about the automobile is talking about how everybody wants a car, but the amount of effort and specialization required to make an automobile is beyond anyone’s comprehension. People want a car, but they don’t understand the political, scientific, mechanical, and logistical structures that go into producing it.

What I think of are the strongly religious types who love technology, but hate science. It is that sort of disconnect where people can be highly knowledgeable and highly ignorant all at the same time.

The book (obviously) goes into much more detail, and it’s pretty interesting. I would recommend it, even if he is often heavy-handed. I think at the very least it makes you consider the issue of elitism versus populism in a new way.