Life & Wisdom Quote by Wyndham Lewis

Revolution, in Wyndham Lewis's hands, isn’t a heroic rupture; it’s a fashion that’s gone off the boil. The jab in "taken for granted" is aimed less at reactionaries than at self-proclaimed radicals who treat upheaval as a default setting - a cultural backdrop like traffic noise. If revolt becomes an expectation rather than a risk, it stops feeling like a choice with stakes and starts reading like a pose. Lewis’s sting is aesthetic as much as political: boredom is the ultimate insult from a modernist who believed style reveals seriousness. Calling revolution "dull" implies it has hardened into a genre, complete with predictable slogans, predictable enemies, predictable gestures.

The subtext is contempt for the routinization of shock. Early 20th-century Europe had made "the new" into a civic religion - Futurists promising speed, avant-gardes promising rupture, ideologues promising total reset. After World War I and amid the churn of competing -isms, constant talk of overturning everything could feel like background radiation. Lewis, a Vorticist and professional contrarian, had watched rebellion become institutional: manifestos, salons, party lines, even commodified outrage. When revolt is assumed, it no longer terrifies power or tests the rebel; it just supplies identity.

There’s also an implied warning: a society that normalizes revolution may drift toward spectacle over substance. If the thrill of transgression is always available, the appetite escalates, and politics turns into performance - not because people don’t care, but because the script is easier than the danger. Lewis makes cynicism sound like critique, and that’s the point: he’s trying to embarrass his era out of its lazy radicalism.