The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies

by Ryszard Legutko

The antidote to commerce was—as evidenced by Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga—art as a pure, disinterested expression of imagination in pursuit of the beautiful and the sublime. But over time it became clear that commerce and capitalism had been blamed somewhat hastily, and that the causes lay deeper. More perceptive thinkers soon realized that the very success of technology, productivity, and industry, that great achievement of the genius of modern man, was conducive, as José Ortega y Gasset persuasively argued, to the sterility of imagination and the triumph of self-satisfied pettiness. There was and still is something paradoxical in the fact that the historically unprecedented explosion of technology and industry, which brought wealth and security to millions of people and which would not have been possible without a high degree of creativity, was a major factor in reducing people’s aspirations and, astonishingly, giving mediocrity a touch of respectability.