Three quotations on the artificiality of civilization

Detail of A View Through Three Arches of the Third Storey of the Colosseum, by CW Eckersberg

First—by artificial I do not mean fake, but rather the product of art in the old sense or craftsmanship, the result of creativity and hard, skilled work.

From Chapter 10, “Primitivism and History,” of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s 1930 book The Revolt of the Masses:

Nature is always with us. It is self-supporting. In the forests of Nature we can be savages with impunity. We can likewise resolve never to cease being so, without further risk than the coming of other peoples who are not savages. But, in principle, it is possible to have peoples who are perennially primitive. Breyssig has called these “the peoples of perpetual dawn,” those who have remained in a motionless, frozen twilight, which never progresses towards midday.

This is what happens in the world which is mere Nature. But it does not happen in the world of civilisation which is ours. Civilisation is not “just there,” it is not self-supporting. It is artificial and requires the artist or the artisan. If you want to make use of the advantages of civilisation, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilisation—you are done. In a trice you find yourself left without civilisation. Just a slip, and when you look around everything has vanished into air.

Ortega’s concern throughout The Revolt of the Masses is with the “mass-man,” the creature of the West’s middle class following the explosion of industry, technology, and prosperity in the 19th century, and most especially with the fact that the mass-man takes civilization and everything that has made his life possible for granted:

The mass-man believes that the civilisation into which he was born and which he makes use of, is as spontaneous and self-producing as Nature, and ipso facto he is changed into primitive man.

When I read these passages they reminded me of the following from CS Lewis’s essay “The Necessity of Chivalry,” which I have revisited many times over the last few years. Having begun with a quotation from Malory on the character of Sir Launcelot, “Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; thou wert the sternest knight to they mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest,” Lewis meditates on the fusion of meekness and sternness:

The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop.

Like Ortega, Lewis has a clear picture of the consequences of neglecting, of not maintaining this artificial work:

If we cannot produce Launcelots, humanity falls into two sections—those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be ‘meek in hall’, and those who are ‘meek in hall’ but useless in battle—for the third class, who are both brutal in peace and cowardly in war, need not here be discussed. When this dissociation of the two halves of Launcelot occurs, history becomes a horribly simple affair. The ancient history of the Near East is like that. Hardy barbarians swarm down from their highlands and obliterate a civilisation. Then they become civilised themselves and go soft. Then a new wave of barbarians comes down and obliterates them. Then the cycle beings over again. Modern machinery will not change this cycle; it will only enable the same thing to happen on a larger scale. Indeed, nothing much else can ever happen if the ‘stern’ and the ‘meek’ fall into two mutually exclusive classes. And never forget that this is their natural condition. The man who combines both characters—the knight—is a work not of nature but of art; of that art which has human beings, instead of canvas or marble, for its medium.

Finally, the line from the late Sir Roger Scruton that served as the keystone of his thought:

Good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.

I’m reading the authorized English translation of Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses, which is available in its entirely online here. You can watch CSLewisDoodle’s rendition of “The Necessity of Chivalry” here. It is collected in Present Concerns, which is where I first read it. Perhaps the best place to start with Scruton’s thought as encapsulated in that last line is Culture Counts: Faith & Feeling in a World Besieged, which I read last year.