There is no culture where there is no acceptance of certain final intellectual positions to which a dispute may be referred. There is no culture where aesthetic controversy does not recognise the necessity of justifying the work of art. And let us not deceive ourselves, this is what is beginning to appear in Europe under the progressive rebellion of the masses. The traveller who arrives in a barbarous country knows that in that territory there are no ruling principles to which it is possible to appeal. Properly speaking, there are no barbarian standards.
Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.
The varying degrees of culture are measured by the greater or less precision of the standards. We must not think that they seem strange simply because they are new. The enthusiasm for novelty is so innate in the European that it has resulted in his producing the most unsettled history of all known to us. The element of strangeness in these new facts is not to be attributed to the element of novelty, but to the extraordinary form taken by these new things. Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.