The Fate of Man in the Modern World by Nicholas Berdyaev

Author:Nicholas Berdyaev [Berdyaev, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
Published: 2012-12-02T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER III

NEW FORCES IN THE WORLD’S LIFE

I

NEW forces have entered world history. The process of democratization began a long time ago, but the end of the war witnessed the complete occupation of the stage of history by the mobilized masses. This is the basic factor of modern history. Before this, the masses had never been permitted to occupy the centre of the stage in any active role. But within history itself there was steadily growing up what I call the prosaicness of history: history has always based itself upon large numbers—upon the collective. States and social institutions were always created for the masses, for the average man and not for the spiritual aristocracy. Man has always been overwhelmed by large numbers; the talented by the mass of the mediocre, quality by quantity. But the large number, the collective, never played so great a role as in our time. As I said above, the masses once lived and grew as do the plants, in organic structure and harmony, and their life was ordered by positive religious beliefs. But the organic structure and harmony have decayed and religious beliefs have lost their power. And now at a moment in history so difficult that we are threatened with anarchy, the masses burst in upon the centre of the stage. But their entry is not altogether formless: they appear, organized into collectives. This entrance of the masses is accompanied by what amounts to an obsession for organization. Hence the tendency toward dictatorship, the search for a leader who will replace the fallen authorities.

Well-organized collectives, a striving toward unity in one huge collective—these are part of the new forces of our epoch. And the basis of these newly-formed collectives is usually organizations of youth, communist, fascist, nazi. Human society is evidently no longer able to live individualistically, but only in unions, fraternities, corporations, collectives. The divorced, individualistic, isolated life is a bourgeois result of capitalist society where man is a wolf to his fellows and every man thinks only of himself. This situation cannot continue. The bourgeois and individually profitable life was possible only for certain privileged people with a special calling, not for the average man nor the mass. The direct result of this new role of the mass, organized into collectives, and their participation in culture, is a lowering of cultural quality, a barbarization: culture is now armed with the weapons of civilization. The style of life is changing, as is the type of popular interests and the direction of public consciousness. A quality-culture was connected with aristocracy (not in the social sense, of course). And this aristocratic element is now threatened with extinction. The cultural elite is undergoing a regular pogrom. This is the case both in Soviet Russia and in Hitlerist Germany. That Germany which once confessed a regular cult of the intellectual, the professor, the philosopher, the university, a cult which was often exaggerated and almost comic, has now ceased completely to respect these things and is ready to wipe them off the slate.

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