The Factor

 

From Pages 163 to 166 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer, lays out how mass movements have been a factor in human history. I quote him and then comment on his content.

 

Hoffer: “                                                 125

 

As indicated in Section I, mass movements are often a factor in the awakening and renovation of stagnant societies. Though it cannot be maintained that mass movements are the only effective instrument of renascence, it seems yet to be true that in large and heterogeneous social bodies such as Russia, India, China, the Arabic world, and even Spain, the process of awakening and renovation depends on the presence of some wide-spread fervent enthusiasm which perhaps only a mass movement can generate and maintain. When the process of renovation has to be realized in short order, mass movements may be indispensable even in small homogeneous societies. The inability to produce a full-fledged mass movement can be, therefore, a grave handicap to a social body. It has probably been one of China’s great misforutnes during the past hundred years that its mass movements (the Tai-ping rebellion and the Sun Yat-sen revolution) deteriorated or were stifled too soon. China was unable to produce a Stalin, a Gandhi or even an Ataturk, who could keep a genuine mass movement going long enough for drastic reforms to take root. Ortega y Gasset is of the opinion that the inability of a country to produce a genuine mass movement indicates some ethnological defect. He says of his own Spain that its ‘ethnological intelligence has always been an atrophied function and has never had a normal development.’

 

It is probably better for a country that when its government begins to show signs of chronic incompetence it should be overthrown by a mighty mass upheaval—even though such overthrow involves a considerable waste of life and wealth—than that it should be allowed to fall and crumble of itself. A genuine popular upheaval is often an invigorating, renovating and integrating process. Where governments are allowed to die a lingering death, the result is often stagnation and decay—perhaps irremediable decay. And since men of words usually play a crucial role in the rise of mass movements, it is obvious that the presence of an educated and articulate minority is probably indispensable for the continued vigor of a social body. It is necessary, of course, that the men of words should not be in intimate alliance with the established government. The long stagnation of the Orient has many causes, but there is no doubt that one of the most important is the fact that for centuries the educated were not only few but almost always a part of the government—either as officials or as priests.

 

The revolutionary effect of the educational work done by Western colonizing powers has already been mentioned. One wonders whether India’s capacity to produce a Gandhi and a Nehru is due less to rare elements in Indian culture than to the long presence of the British Raj. Foreign influence seems to be a prevailing factor in the process of social renascence. Jewish and Christian influences were active in the awakening of Arabia at the time of Mohammed. In the awakening of Europe from the stagnation of the Middle Ages we also find foreign influences—Graeco-Roman and Arabic. Western influences were also active in the awakening of Russia, Japan and several Asiatic countries.”

 

My response: Hoffer seems correct that foreign influences can lead to change, even renascence in any society.

 

H: “The important point is that the foreign influence does not act in a direct way. It is not the introduction of foreign fashions, manners, speech, ways of thinking and of doing things which shake a social body out of stagnation. The foreign influence acts mainly by creating an educated minority where there was none before or by alienating an existing articulate minority from the prevailing dispensation; and it is this articulate minority which accomplishes the work of renascence by setting in motion a mass movement. In other words, the foreign influence is merely the first link in a chain of processes, the last link of which is usually a mass movement, and it is the mass movement which shakes the social body out of its stagnation. In the case of Arabia, the foreign influences alienated the man of words, Mohammed, from the prevailing dispensation in Mecca. Mohammed started a mass movement (Islam) which shook and integrated Arabia for a time. In the time of the Renaissance, the foreign influences (Graeco-Roman and Arabic) facilitated the emergence of men of words who had no connection with the church, and also alienated many traditional men of words from the prevailing Catholic dispensation. The resulting movement of the Reformation shook Europe out of its torpor. In Russia, European influence (including Marxism) detached the allegiance of the intelligentsia from the Romanovs, and the eventual Bolshevik revolution is still at work renovating the vast Muscovite Empire. In Japan, the foreign influence reacted not on men of words but on a rare group of men of action which included Emperor Meiji. These practical men of action had the vision which Peter the Great, also a man of action, lacked; and they succeeded where he failed. They knew that the mere introduction of foreign customs and foreign methods would not stir Japan to life, nor could it drive it to make good in decades the backwardness of centuries. They recognized that the art of religiofication is an indispensable factor in so unprecedented a task. They set in motion one of the most effective mass movements of modern times. The evils of this movement are abundantly illustrated throughout this book. Yet it is doubtful that any other agency of whatever nature could have brought about the phenomenal feat of renovation which has been accomplished by Japan. In Turkey, too, the foreign influence reacted on a man of action, Ataturk, and the last link in the chain was a mass movement.

 

J. B. S. Haldane counts fanaticism among the only four really important inventions made between 3000 B.C. and 1400 A.D. It was a Judaic-Christian invention. And it is strange to think that in receiving the malady of the soul the world also received a miraculous instrument for raising societies and nations from the dead—an instrument of resurrection.”