T'Hi: MOB AND
THE
ELiH
6i7
accepted the "ideas" of the mob. What the spokesmen of humanism
and liberalism usually overlook, in their bitter disappointment and
their unfamiliarity with the more general experiences of the time,
is that an atmosphere in which all traditional values and proposition:;
had evaporated (after the nineteenth-century ideologies had refuted
each other and exhausted their vital appeal) in a sense made it easier
to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which had
become pious banalities, precisely because nobody could be expected
to take the absurdities seriously. In the growing prevalence of mob
attitudes and convictions-which were actually the attitudes and
convictions of the bourgeoisie cleansed of hypocrisy-those who tradi–
tionally hated the bourgeoisie and had voluntarily left respectable
society saw only the lack of hypocrisy and respectability, not the
content itself.
Since the bourgeoisie claimed to be the guardian of Western
traditions and confounded all moral issues by parading publicly virtues
which it not only did not possess in private and business life, but
actually held in contempt, it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty,
disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least
destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest.
What a temptation to flaunt extreme attitudes in the hypocritical
twilight of double moral standards, to wear publicly the mask of
cruelty if everybody was patently inconsiderate and pretended to be
gentle, to parade wickedness in a world, not of wickedness, but of
meanness. The intellectual elite of the twenties who knew little of the
earlier connections between mob and bourgeoisie was certain that
the old game of
epater le bourgeois
could be played to perfection if
one started to shock society with an ironically exaggerated picture
of its own behavior.
At that time, nobody anticipated that the true victims of this
irony would be the elite rather than the bourgeoisie. The avant-garde
did not know they were running their heads not against walls but
against open doors, that a unanimous success would belie their claim
to being a revolutionary minority, and would prove that they were
about to express a new mass spirit or the spirit of the time.
It
is the irresistible desire for the unmasking of hypocrisy which
explains the remarkable fact that Hitler's and Stalin's widely publi–
cized opinions about art and their persecution of modern artists have
