lp4guld

of the spirit. It roused their minds against the government, not theirhands. It took the form of a slow but progressive loss of toleranceand a deepening suspicion of existing institutions.Moreover, the war had wrought darkly upon the minds and heartsof many. Sigmund Neumann, pursuing his thesis of permanent revolution,sees the basic faith of the era of liberalism in the ultimategoodness and improvement of mankind profoundly shaken by thewar. Four years of war had bred the cult of violence. The heroicvirtues became popular. Moral anarchy reigned. Why not? The socalledChristian virtues of humility, love, charity, personal freedom,the strong prohibitions against violence, murder, stealing, lying,cruelty—all these are washed away by war. The greatest hero is theone who kills the most people. Glamorous exploits in successful lyingand mass stealing and heroic vengeance are rewarded with decorationsand public acclaim. You cannot, when the war is proclaimed,pull a switch and shift the community from the moral code of peaceto that of war and then, when the armistice is signed, pull anotherswitch and reconnect the whole society with its old moral regulationsagain. Thousands of people of all ranks who have found a relish inthe morals of war come back to you with these rudimentary instinctscontrolling their behavior while thousands of others, trapped in asort of no man's land between these two moralities, come back toyou poisoned by cynicism.These economic and human disturbances set the stage for severaltypes of men. The notion that all the immoral or amoral performancesthat are exhibited in such times of stress as followed Germany'sdefeat proceed from the hearts of wicked men is far from the truth.There is a sort of person who is well named by Ortega the "excellentman," as distinguished from the common man. This excellent manis "one who makes great demands upon himself and for whom lifehas no savor unless he makes it consist in something transcendental.He does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression.When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless andinvents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with whichto coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline." 1These are the men who are the living and active disciples of thex The Revolt of the Masses, by José Ortega y Gasset, W. V. Norton, New York, i932·I2O