It is not enough however to withhold approval of modern inventions on the grounds of their dangerous side alone; there is more than this to the affair. One hears of the 'benefits' claimed for what men have agreed to call 'progress', and that one might even consent so to call, provided one take care to make it clear that there is no question of any but a purely material progress; but are not these 'benefits', of which people are so proud, very largely illusory? Our contemporaries claim they increase their 'welfare' by this means; in our opinion, the end they set themselves, even if it were really attained, is hardly worth the expenditure of so much effort; but what is more, it seems a very debatable question whether they do attain it. In the first place, the fact should be taken into account that not all men have the same tastes or the same needs, and that there are still some who would wish to avoid modern commotion and the craving ... for speed, but who can no longer do so. Could anyone presume to maintain that it is a 'benefit' to these people to have thrust on them what is most contrary to their nature? It will be said in reply that there are few such men today, and this is considered a justification for treating them as a negligible quantity; in this, as in the field of politics, the majority arrogates to itself the right to crush minorities, which, in its eyes, evidently have no right to exist, since their very existence defies the egalitarian mania for uniformity. But if the whole of mankind be taken into consideration, instead of merely the Western world, the question bears a different aspect: the majority we have just spoken of then becomes a minority. A different argument is therefore used in this case, and by a strange contradiction it is in the name of their 'superiority' that these 'egalitarians' seek to impose their civilization on the rest of the world, and that they bring trouble to people who have never asked them for anything; and, since this 'superiority' exists only from the material point of view, it is quite natural that the most brutal means are used to assert it. Let there be no confusion on this point: if the general public accepts the pretext of 'civilization' in all good faith, there are those for whom it is no more than mere moralistic hypocrisy, serving as a mask for designs of conquest or economic ambitions. It is really an extraordinary epoch in which so many men can be made to believe that a people is being given happiness by being reduced to subjection, by being robbed of all that is most precious to it, that is to say of its own civilization, by being forced to adopt manners and institutions that were made for a different race, and by being constrained to the most distasteful kinds of work, in order to make it acquire things for which it has not the slightest use. For that is what is taking place: the modern West cannot tolerate that men should prefer to work less and be content to live on little; as it is only quantity that counts, and as everything that escapes the senses is held to be nonexistent, it is taken for granted that anyone who is not in a state of agitation and who does not produce much in a material way must be 'lazy'. In evidence of this and without speaking of the opinions commonly expressed about Eastern peoples, it is enough to note how the contemplative orders are viewed, even in circles that consider themselves religious. In such a world, there is no longer any place for intelligence, or anything else that is purely inward, for these are things that can neither be seen nor touched, that can neither be counted nor weighed; there is a place only for outward action in all its forms, even those that are the most completely meaningless. For this reason it should not be a matter for surprise that the Anglo-Saxon mania for sport gains ground day by day: the ideal of the modern world is the 'human animal' who has developed his muscular strength to the highest pitch; its heroes are athletes, even though they be mere brutes; it is they who awaken popular enthusiasm, and it is their exploits that ,command the passionate interest of the crowd. A world in which such things are seen has indeed sunk low and seems near its end.
