José Ortega y Gasset, a fellow Spaniard, once discerned a “radical ingratitude” in the type of modern person he called “mass man” and portrayed as the spoiled child of history. Mass man is heir to a long and brilliant past. The good things in life in the world he was born into—security, freedom, wealth, vacations to warm places—are in fact the outcome of a specific historical process, but mass man doesn’t see it that way. Newly risen to education and prosperity, he imagines himself liberated from the past, and has grown hostile to it as to any limiting factor. The good things in life have
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