Gratitude: reflections on what we owe to our country - book excerpt - special issue: 35th Anniversary 1955-1990

National Review, Nov 5, 1990 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

The orphan. Solitary, estranged from tradition and therefore from communion: he is the figure of modern alienation, the making of the mass-man. Ortega y Gasset anatomized this avatar of modernity. Two decades ago I set out to write a book to remark the 35th anniversary of the appearance of his classic. I intended to call my little book The Revolt against the Masses, because I thought I saw on the social horizon in America signs of a disposition to reject the nescient aimlessness Ortega had diagnosed. The antinomian explosion that followed-we speak sometimes of the Vietnam years," sometimes of the kid years," or, simply, of "the Sixties"proved I had profoundly misread the auguries.

Ortega's analysis of the mass-man, in the rubble of the ensuing social explosion, is timelier today than when he wrote it, or when I first thought to respond. I very much wish that the meaning of the word "masses" was not so fixed in the Anglo-Saxon world as the aptest word to describe what Ortega was declaiming against, because the word as we use it has either Marxist or plutocratic connotations. True, the "masses" about which Marx wrote weren't the huddled masses welcomed by the Statue of Liberty: the masses of Emma Lazarus were merely the numerous poor. The masses of Marx were the proletariat, the hollow men of the Industrial Revolution.

Not Ortega's masses. Ortega was talking about a quality of mind unrelated to factors of wealth or poverty-or, indeed, of erudition. He was talking about the disposition of modern man to take for granted everything he enjoys, without any sense of incurring an obligation, either to repay the old woman from whose larder he has helped himself, or even to share with others what the larder contains.

A handy analogue is the challenge of conservation. The insight has gradually crystallized in the common consciousness that a man who cuts down a tree owes the planet one seedling. In the first decades of the twentieth century, that obligation was institutionalized in the United States by various laws generally associated with the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. The question became subtler as, with more polished instruments at hand, we developed skills to measure more impalpable abrasions against the planet than the missing tree. We began to ponder endangered species. And the finite supply of fossil fuels. And then the invisible particulates that attack the human lung and the ozone layer over the earth.

About our debt to the planet there is nowadays a considerable consciousness. A thriving social movement is concerned with conservation in the widest sense. As with almost every movement, there are advocates who go to extremes. (Admire as I did President Kennedy's Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, I remember writing at the high tide of his influence that Mr. Udall sometimes left the impression that he would have arrested the development of the West rather than risk getting in the way of one meandering buffalo.) But forget fanaticism: the consolidation of a social insight is what matters.