Appadurai gassing on about Ortega Gasset

Ortega Gasset represented Spain's 'Generation of 1898'- the year America took away their colonies- Cuba and the Philippines. This humiliation led his cohort to seek to 'Europeanize' themselves by turning towards Germany- a retrograde move because it was the Anglo-Saxon world which was more developed and which would develop much further yet. Instead of going in for Pragmatism, Gasset got stuck with a vitalist, wholly vacuous, type of Phenomenology. 

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says-

Although Ortega hesitates to proceed as far as Cohen, that is, to postulate the “facts” of science to be determined completely by thought, a sort of Neo-Kantian metaphysics remains in his fundamental philosophical point of view. For instead of positing pure thought as solely real, Ortega replaced Cohen's logic with the notion of “human life”. In other words, Ortega's generalized view of existence contains human life in place of human logic as the underlying unifying principle of reality. Ortega's major writings were concerned with the idea of life as the “dynamic dialogue between the individual and the world”; he was not concerned, as was Cohen, with assigning to external experience a reality that is contingent upon the principles of logic and mathematical physics. 

Ortega did not understand that Einstein had used 'the principles of logic and mathematical physics' to show that Phenomenology was not just empirically wrong, it was simply stupid. There could be no relationship between the 'laws of thought' and 'scientific facts' for a purely a priori reason discoverable by an armchair 'Gedanken' or thought experiment. It would be foolish to replace 'laws of thought' by 'lived life' because life is biological. It evolves stochastically, in a manner only Game theoretically understandable, on an uncertain fitness landscape.
The Stanford Encyclopedia states

Albert Einstein, he argued, struck the first telling blow against the concept of an objective reality—a concept that assumes the existence of universal time and space into which nature fits, independently of the observer. Einstein demonstrated that there is no single spatial and chronological frame of reference.

But everybody on Earth is part of very very nearly the same 'spatial and chronological frame of reference'. It is not the case that I am cruising at the speed of light while you, slowpoke that you are, are managing only a few thousand miles per hour.

Every observer is confined to a specific and relative time-space system.

But, for our species, it is almost exactly the same system.

Ortega perceived, in this system, the “human point of view” as that reality in which we live: situations, persons and things.

But 'situations' are game theoretic and feature Knightian uncertainty. 'Persons' represent 'an extended phenotype'. They are more like a coalition than a sovereign. As for things, Science discovers new facts about them all the time.

To establish distance between ourselves and reality as a manner of understanding these lived experiences—which are by no means absolute—we have to project ourselves into the place of another person and situation. In doing so, we may come to distinguish among persons, things and situations and thereby come to observe reality more closely (Obras, III: 361, 363, 362).

It is more likely that we will fool ourselves. Our lucubrations may have some literary or modish value. But they will have nothing to do with 'reality' and everything to do with silly availability cascades marking as deeply provincial cretins. It is not the case that 'lived experience' determines the truth of Scientific facts. Rather, Scientific advances may change our biology and have definitely changed our 'lived experience'. That is why the STEM subjects 'pay for themselves'. They improve 'lived experience' so much that we gladly pay for further Research. By contrast, Phenomenology did not pay for itself. It was a waste of resources. It now attracts only credential craving dunces. This is a wholly imaginary type of scholarship and Arjun Appadurai- an anthropologist too fastidious to spend his time with naked cannibals- has made a good living exploring a 'social imaginary' of an impoverished and puerile kind.

He has written an article titled 'The Revolt of the Elites' in the Wire-

José Ortega y Gasset is a largely forgotten 20th century thinker, an unconventional Spanish philosopher whose most important social science work, 'The Revolt of the Masses', reflected his fears about a world in which liberal individuals were disappearing and the “mass man” was emerging.

Gaseous Gasset liked Nietzche. He thought people like himself who had a superior 'lived reality' should form an Elite and save Society from the smug, materialistic, philistines. Sadly, Gasset's political life was a failure. He ran away from the Republic and only returned for a while to Franco's Spain after the Second World War when the regime was keen to keep in America's good books. Thankfully, this meant that technocrats could run things and so Spain's economic development took off. Its 'mass-man' could become Western European rather than, as Gasset had said of Unamuno, suffering the doom of 'Africanization'. Like Heidegger's Germany, Gassy Gasset's Spain moved in a Liberal direction under American tutelage. Thus Pragmatism won. Phenomenology shat the bed.

Ortega’s idea of the mass man was not a picture of the poor, the destitute or the proletarian multitude but of a mass of average men, who were rendered similar by their tastes, dispositions and values, rather than by their dispossession. In this way, Ortega was closer to the later American critics of the men “in the grey flannel suit” than to the Frankfurt School critics of mass society. Still, Ortega was an early voice in seeing the masses, of whatever kind, as revolting against the liberal ideals of the 19th century.

But the liberals of the 18th century thought the masses were revolting against them as did those of the 17th century and so forth. Gasset was unusual in that he got elected to Parliament shortly after publishing a book about the Revolting Masses. But those Masses kept revolting more and more revoltingly and so he ran away. Franco systematically raped and beat the shit out of the revolting Masses till it was safe for Gassy Gasset to come back.

I return to Ortega now because I think the 20th century has exhausted the major forms of mass revolt

because revolting masses get beaten and raped and Gulaged till they stop being so revolting.

and that we have entered a new epoch which is characterised by the “revolt of the elites”.

Coz Appadurai posed as a Leftie to an American audience. So he is making out he is against elites though he was part of the Credentialist Ponzi scheme which promised students entry into power elites.

These revolting elites are those who support, surround, promote and flatter the new autocracies of Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orban and many others who have created what could be called ‘populism from above’ – where the people are electoral tools for a mass exit from democracy.

Coz if someone Appadurai doesn't like gets elected it must be because there was a 'mass exit from democracy'.

Why call this behaviour of the new autocratic elites a “revolt” rather than simply predatory capitalism, cronyism, neoliberalism in its latest guise, disaster capitalism, all of which are available terms?

Why not simply speak of Fascism and compare everyone you don't like to Hitler?

Who are these new elites and what are they revolting against?

There has been no change in the composition of elites around the world over the last thirty years. Nor, truth be told, has there been any 'revolt'. True, a certain sort of academic has lost prestige- but that was bound to happen because they started to publish stuff in e-zines available to the masses who soon discovered these guys were stupid, ignorant and more than a little kray kray.

First, they are revolting against all the other elites whom they despise, hate and fear: liberal elites, media elites, secular elites, cosmopolitan elites, “Harvard” elites, WASP elites, older economic elites, intellectuals, artists and academics (these categories are a pool, from which different national populists choose the appropriate national and cultural terms). So, this is an elite which disguises its own elitism in a discourse of anti-elitism.

Just as Appadurai is doing here. Essentially he is describing a Paretian 'circulation of elites'. But that sort of thing has always happened. There is nothing new here.

Second, this revolt is against all those who are believed to have betrayed the real elites and captured power illegitimately: blacks in the US, Muslims and secularists in India, leftists and LGBT people in Brazil, dissenters, NGOs and journalists in Russia, religious, cultural and economic minorities in Turkey, immigrants, workers and trade unionists in the United Kingdom.

Because the US and India and Brazil and Turkey and Russia and the U.K are all so similar, naturally you'd see the same sorts of revolts happening in each of them! But what about the 'yellow vests' in France? Why no mention of 'populist' movements in Italy and Greece and Spain? What makes them different?

This is a revolt by those who think they are true elites against those they consider usurpers or false elites.

Very true. Ghanchis have been saying for a long time- 'we are hereditary oil-pressers by caste. We are the true elite.' That's why Modi is Prime Minister. From birth he was told that he had an entitlement to the highest office in the land.

Third, the revolt of these new elites is against the chains that have bound them in the epoch of liberal democracy.

But, Appadurai you silly man, you are saying their revolt has succeeded! Thus no 'chains bound them' in the preceding epoch.

They hate liberty, equality and fraternity, except for themselves.

How does Appadurai know? Perhaps he thinks those he castigates are like unto himself in this respect.

They hate checks and balances, which they view as illegitimate restrictions on their freedom to act without restraint. They hate regulations of any type, especially of corporate privileges, which they see as a conspiracy against capitalism which they view as their private jurisdiction. And above all, they hate deliberation and procedural rationality, since they involve listening, patience and adherence to collective rationalities. They also do not believe in the separation of powers, except when their friends control the legislature and the judiciary.

Appadurai is describing the behavior of senior Liberal Arts Academics like himself. But the upshot is that portion of the Academy shrinks and becomes adversely selective. If regimes are dysfunctional, they get voted out. Why pretend that any of the 'autocrats' Appadurai mentions can't be displaced at the next General Election?

What this means, most simply, is that the revolt of the new elites is against democracy, but the twist is that this revolt is undertaken in the name of the people.

No. The twist is there are no new elites- more particularly because Appadurai insists they are actually the old elites rebelling against the increasing power of Homosexual Minorities.

In other words, the modern idea of the people has been completely split from the idea of demos and democracy. This is a revolt – in the sense that uprisings to seize power are always revolts – but not a revolution, intended to change something in the fundamental order of polity or economy. This revolt is the effort by one elite to replace another.

So this isn't a revolt. It is merely the ordinary working of the law of the circulation of elites.

All this might seem overly general and historically familiar if we do not ask a few sociological questions. What is the nature of this new elite? Who defines its conditions of entry? Who speaks for it? What are its social roots? These questions quickly bring us to specific societies and states.

But specific societies and states have already decided that people who ask sociological questions are as thick as shit.

In the case of the United States, the elite that Trump speaks for and to come from backgrounds like his: they are not over-educated, they are mobile entrepreneurs or politicians, they are the rulers of the Republican Senate, the Republican side of the House, and Tea Party jetsam and flotsam at every level of politics. In addition, they include the more megalomaniac or neo-fascist CEOs (including Silicon Valley icons like Peter Thiel), the vast majority of the television and radio media, and the extensive network of racist and greedy evangelical pastors, churches and donors. Add to this the careerist hacks in the major right-wing think-tanks.

But these guys have been around for a long time! Where is the 'revolt'?

At the very core of this network of elites without any obvious cultural roots, status or history are secret networks such as those in the Federalist Society,

Wow! The Federalist Society is a 'secret network'! Who knew!

with ties to such transnational groups as Opus Dei.

who employ albino assassins.

These are networks of opportunism, greed and profiteering which have no other traditional ties or values.

coz Opus Dei aint Catholic. It is a bunch of Jews, Freemasons, atheists and other such rootless cosmopolitans.

A similar picture could be painted of the elites of the current regime in India, which is openly contemptuous of every democratic institution except elections. It is composed of half-educated economists, career thugs, kleptocratic business tycoons that work through monopoly, lobbying and straightforward corruption, and the newly shameless class of criminal politicians and legislators.

But this has always been the case! Still, things have gotten better. Unlike Manmohan, Modi does not have any actual murderers in his Cabinet.

The revolt of this elite is against every person or group associated with Nehruvian socialism, secularism and pluralism.

Yet, one of Nehru's two great-grandsons is an M.P for the ruling party while the other is with the Opposition. Had his Daddy not died in a glider accident, Maneka, not Sonia, would be heading the Congress party and Varun, not Rahul, would be a P.M candidate.

It is an elite that believes that the Hindu Right (their own club) are the sleeper-saviours of Indian history, waking up after the long slumber of Mughal, British and Congress rule, an alliance forged in the crucible of anti-Muslim ideologies, policies and pogroms. There is no real class unity for this revolting elite, except for their hold on the means of impunity, political, social and economic. Like Trump’s elite partners, this is an elite of opportunism, lubricated by contempt for participatory institutions of every type.

So, Appadurai's 'social imaginary' lets him see India and America as identical. Yet, one country is rich. The other is poor. Their histories are very different. Yet, for Appadurai, they are identical. What happens in one country must happen in the other because Americans and Indians are virtually identical.

Although I do not know enough about the social origins and pet peeves of Erdogan’s crew, or Putin’s, or Bolsonaro’s, or Duterte’s, I am prepared to speculate

on the basis of impartial ignorance

that each of these revolting elites has a similar profile: resentment of traditional cultural and social elites, contempt for liberal proceduralism, hatred of intellectuals, academics, artists, activists, socialists, feminists, admiration for capitalism so long as it regulated only in their favour, and a hatred of democracy matched by their cultish pursuit of the voter (rather than the people).

Appadurai has made a great discovery. Everybody is actually the same person. Why bother with Geography and Linguistics and so forth? Whatever Appadurai says is happening in one country- viz. the elites are revolting- must be happening everywhere else. Such is the power of the 'Social imaginary'.

Orban has just declared his eternal and absolute power in Hungary, Trump has required his name to be printed on COVID-19 relief checks and said that he can use emergency powers to do whatever he likes in the present crisis. Modi has more or less declared himself above the constitution of India, has made common and public cause with Bolsonaro, Trump and Netanyahu, and has used the COVID-19 crisis to extend to all of India the policies of curfew, police beatings, false imprisonments and generalised repression tested in Kashmir. In all these moves, these leaders rely on a network of sympathisers and collaborators who believe that they will thrive if they comply with the Supreme Leader.

Previously, Appadurai had mentioned Boris Johnson as representing a similar 'revolt of the elites'. Why no mention of BoJo in the above list?

Thus, if the elites who characterise many of the world’s new populist autocracies are “populists from above” elites revolting against previous elites, revolted by liberal democracy, how do we account for their followers, their voters, and their base, the “people” in whose name and with whose burning consent they are undoing many democratic structures, values and traditions?

We know how Appadurai accounts for them. They are all actually the same person.

There are some familiar answers to this most troubling question. One is that these autocrats understand and use the instruments of affect (sentiments of love, loss, sacrifice, hate, anger) whereas their opponents are adrift in a sea of quasi-academic arguments about concepts, norms and logic, which have lost all popular purchase.

In other words, guys who get elected talk like normal people while guys who don't get elected talk gobbledygook.

The second is that there is something about the global rise of technologies of aspiration (advertising, consumer goods, celebrity cults, corporate windfalls) that has made the poor and subaltern classes impatient with the slowness of liberal deliberative processes. They want prosperity and dignity now, and these leaders promise it to them.

Unlike when Obama was in office when people said 'we don't want prosperity and dignity now. We prefer poverty and humiliation.'

Another argument is that the lower classes are so fed up with the exclusion, impoverishment and humiliation that they identify with their predatory leaders (who simply grab what they want) that they are more than ever susceptible to the distractions of ethnophobia (against Muslims, refugees, Chinese, Gypsies, Jews, migrants, and so on). All these arguments make some sense in some national contexts

to Appadurai. But the man is as stupid as shit.

But I suggest that the biggest insight that Ortega y Gasset offers is to help us to see that we are in the beginnings of an epoch in which the revolt of the masses has been captured, coopted and displaced by the revolt of the elites.

So Gassy Gasset helps Appadurai to see he is at the beginning of some epoch or the other. For him personally, if not death, it is likely to be dementia. For the rest of us, however, no epoch is beginning or ending. We now know that the Liberal Arts are shite. Professors of shite subjects develop a mania for parading their naked imbecility on shittier and shittier E-fora. Just think, if Appadurai had kept his mouth shut and pretended to know about headhunting cannibals, we'd still think well of him.