06/21/2008
Albert Jay Nock
This
essay first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1936. An MP3 version of this
article, read by Dr. Floy Lilley, is available
for free download.
I
One
evening last autumn, I sat long hours with a European acquaintance while he
expounded a political-economic doctrine which seemed sound as a nut and in
which I could find no defect. At the end, he said with great earnestness:
"I have a mission to the masses. I feel that I am called to get the ear of
the people. I shall devote the rest of my life to spreading my doctrine far and
wide among the population. What do you think?"
An
embarrassing question in any case, and doubly so under the circumstances,
because my acquaintance is a very learned man, one of the three or four really
first-class minds that Europe produced in his generation; and naturally I, as
one of the unlearned, was inclined to regard his lightest word with reverence amounting
to awe.
Still,
I reflected, even the greatest mind cannot possibly know everything, and I was
pretty sure he had not had my opportunities for observing the masses of
mankind, and that therefore I probably knew them better than he did. So I
mustered courage to say that he had no such mission and would do well to get
the idea out of his head at once; he would find that the masses would not care
two pins for his doctrine, and still less for himself, since in such
circumstances the popular favorite is generally some Barabbas. I even went so
far as to say (he is a Jew) that his idea seemed to show that he was not very
well up on his own native literature. He smiled at my jest, and asked what I
meant by it; and I referred him to the story of the prophet Isaiah.
It
occurred to me then that this story is much worth recalling just now when so
many wise men and soothsayers appear to be burdened with a message to the
masses. Dr. Townsend has a message, Father Coughlin has one, Mr. Upton
Sinclair, Mr. Lippmann, Mr. Chase and the planned-economy brethren, Mr. Tugwell
and the New Dealers, Mr. Smith and Liberty Leaguers — the list is endless. I
cannot remember a time when so many energumens were so variously proclaiming
the Word to the multitude and telling them what they must do to be saved. This
being so, it occurred to me, as I say, that the story of Isaiah might have
something in it to steady and compose the human spirit until this tyranny of
windiness is overpast. I shall paraphrase the story in our common speech, since
it has to be pieced out from various sources; and inasmuch as respectable
scholars have thought fit to put out a whole new version of the Bible in the
American vernacular, I shall take shelter behind them, if need be, against the
charge of dealing irreverently with the Sacred Scriptures.
The
prophet's career began at the end of King Uzziah's reign, say about 740 B.C.
This reign was uncommonly long, almost half a century, and apparently
prosperous. It was one of those prosperous reigns, however — like the reign of
Marcus Aurelius at Rome, or the administration of Eubulus at Athens, or of Mr.
Coolidge at Washington — where at the end the prosperity suddenly peters out
and things go by the board with a resounding crash.
In
the year of Uzziah's death, the Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and
warn the people of the wrath to come. "Tell them what a worthless lot they
are." He said, "Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to
happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don't mince
matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give
it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I
ought to tell you," He added, "that it won't do any good. The
official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the
masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they
carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get
out with your life."
Isaiah
had been very willing to take on the job — in fact, he had asked for it — but
the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question:
Why, if all that were so — if the enterprise were to be a failure from the
start — was there any sense in starting it? "Ah," the Lord said,
"you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing
about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as
best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has
gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up
a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them
hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set
about it."
II
Apparently,
then, if the Lord's word is good for anything — I do not offer any opinion
about that, — the only element in Judean society that was particularly worth
bothering about was the Remnant. Isaiah seems finally to have got it through
his head that this was the case; that nothing was to be expected from the
masses, but that if anything substantial were ever to be done in Judea, the
Remnant would have to do it. This is a very striking and suggestive idea; but
before going on to explore it, we need to be quite clear about our terms. What
do we mean by the masses, and what by the Remnant?
As
the word masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations
of poor and underprivileged people, laboring people, proletarians, and it means
nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass man is one who has
neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we
know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those
principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people
make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called
collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the
masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The
Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these
principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave
to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.
The
picture which Isaiah presents of the Judean masses is most unfavorable. In his
view, the mass man — be he high or be he lowly, rich or poor, prince or pauper
— gets off very badly. He appears as not only weak minded and weak willed, but
as by consequence knavish, arrogant, grasping, dissipated, unprincipled,
unscrupulous. The mass woman also gets off badly, as sharing all the mass man's
untoward qualities, and contributing a few of her own in the way of vanity and
laziness, extravagance and foible. The list of luxury products that she
patronized is interesting; it calls to mind the women's page of a Sunday
newspaper in 1928, or the display set forth in one of our professedly
"smart" periodicals. In another place, Isaiah even recalls the
affectations that we used to know by the name "flapper gait" and the
"debutante slouch." It may be fair to discount Isaiah's vivacity a
little for prophetic fervor; after all, since his real job was not to convert
the masses but to brace and reassure the Remnant, he probably felt that he
might lay it on indiscriminately and as thick as he liked — in fact, that he
was expected to do so. But even so, the Judean mass man must have been a most
objectionable individual, and the mass woman utterly odious.
If
the modern spirit, whatever that may be, is disinclined towards taking the
Lord's word at its face value (as I hear is the case), we may observe that
Isaiah's testimony to the character of the masses has strong collateral support
from respectable Gentile authority. Plato lived into the administration of
Eubulus, when Athens was at the peak of its jazz-and-paper era, and he speaks
of the Athenian masses with all Isaiah's fervency, even comparing them to a
herd of ravenous wild beasts. Curiously, too, he applies Isaiah's own
word remnant to the worthier portion of Athenian society;
"there is but a very small remnant," he says, of those
who possess a saving force of intellect and force of character — too small,
preciously as to Judea, to be of any avail against the ignorant and vicious
preponderance of the masses.
But
Isaiah was a preacher and Plato a philosopher; and we tend to regard preachers
and philosophers rather as passive observers of the drama of life than as
active participants. Hence in a matter of this kind their judgment might be
suspected of being a little uncompromising, a little acrid, or as the French
say, saugrenu. We may therefore bring forward another witness who
was preeminently a man of affairs, and whose judgment cannot lie under this
suspicion. Marcus Aurelius was ruler of the greatest of empires, and in that
capacity he not only had the Roman mass man under observation, but he had him
on his hands 24 hours a day for 18 years. What he did not know about him was
not worth knowing and what he thought of him is abundantly attested on almost
every page of the little book of jottings which he scribbled offhand from day
to day, and which he meant for no eye but his own ever to see.
This
view of the masses is the one that we find prevailing at large among the
ancient authorities whose writings have come down to us. In the 18th century,
however, certain European philosophers spread the notion that the mass man, in
his natural state, is not at all the kind of person that earlier authorities
made him out to be, but on the contrary, that he is a worthy object of
interest. His untowardness is the effect of environment, an effect for which
"society" is somehow responsible. If only his environment permitted
him to live according to his lights, he would undoubtedly show himself to be
quite a fellow; and the best way to secure a more favorable environment for him
would be to let him arrange it for himself. The French Revolution acted
powerfully as a springboard for this idea, projecting its influence in all
directions throughout Europe.
On
this side of the ocean a whole new continent stood ready for a large-scale
experiment with this theory. It afforded every conceivable resource whereby the
masses might develop a civilization made in their own likeness and after their
own image. There was no force of tradition to disturb them in their
preponderance, or to check them in a thoroughgoing disparagement of the
Remnant. Immense natural wealth, unquestioned predominance, virtual isolation,
freedom from external interference and the fear of it, and, finally, a century
and a half of time — such are the advantages which the mass man has had in
bringing forth a civilization which should set the earlier preachers and
philosophers at naught in their belief that nothing substantial can be expected
from the masses, but only from the Remnant.
His
success is unimpressive. On the evidence so far presented one must say, I
think, that the mass man's conception of what life has to offer, and his choice
of what to ask from life, seem now to be pretty well what they were in the
times of Isaiah and Plato; and so too seem the catastrophic social conflicts
and convulsions in which his views of life and his demands on life involve him.
I do not wish to dwell on this, however, but merely to observe that the
monstrously inflated importance of the masses has apparently put all thought of
a possible mission to the Remnant out of the modern prophet's head. This is
obviously quite as it should be, provided that the earlier preachers and
philosophers were actually wrong, and that all final hope of the human race is
actually centered in the masses. If, on the other hand, it should turn out that
the Lord and Isaiah and Plato and Marcus Aurelius were right in their estimate
of the relative social value of the masses and the Remnant, the case is
somewhat different. Moreover, since with everything in their favor the masses
have so far given such an extremely discouraging account of themselves, it
would seem that the question at issue between these two bodies of opinion might
most profitably be reopened.
III
But
without following up this suggestion, I wish only, as I said, to remark the
fact that as things now stand Isaiah's job seems rather to go begging. Everyone
with a message nowadays is, like my venerable European friend, eager to take it
to the masses. His first, last and only thought is of mass acceptance and mass
approval. His great care is to put his doctrine in such shape as will capture
the masses' attention and interest. This attitude towards the masses is so
exclusive, so devout, that one is reminded of the troglodytic monster described
by Plato, and the assiduous crowd at the entrance to its cave, trying
obsequiously to placate it and win its favor, trying to interpret its
inarticulate noises, trying to find out what it wants, and eagerly offering it
all sorts of things that they think might strike its fancy.
The
main trouble with all this is its reaction upon the mission itself. It
necessitates an opportunist sophistication of one's doctrine, which profoundly
alters its character and reduces it to a mere placebo. If, say, you are a preacher,
you wish to attract as large a congregation as you can, which means an appeal
to the masses; and this, in turn, means adapting the terms of your message to
the order of intellect and character that the masses exhibit. If you are an
educator, say with a college on your hands, you wish to get as many students as
possible, and you whittle down your requirements accordingly. If
a writer, you aim at getting many readers; if a publisher, many purchasers; if
a philosopher, many disciples; if a reformer, many converts; if a musician,
many auditors; and so on. But as we see on all sides, in the realization of
these several desires, the prophetic message is so heavily adulterated with
trivialities, in every instance, that its effect on the masses is merely to
harden them in their sins. Meanwhile, the Remnant, aware of this adulteration
and of the desires that prompt it, turn their backs on the prophet and will
have nothing to do with him or his message.
Isaiah,
on the other hand, worked under no such disabilities. He preached to the masses
only in the sense that he preached publicly. Anyone who liked might listen;
anyone who liked might pass by. He knew that the Remnant would listen; and
knowing also that nothing was to be expected of the masses under any
circumstances, he made no specific appeal to them, did not accommodate his
message to their measure in any way, and did not care two straws whether they
heeded it or not. As a modern publisher might put it, he was not worrying about
circulation or about advertising. Hence, with all such obsessions quite out of
the way, he was in a position to do his level best, without fear or favor, and
answerable only to his august Boss.
If
a prophet were not too particular about making money out of his mission or
getting a dubious sort of notoriety out of it, the foregoing considerations
would lead one to say that serving the Remnant looks like a good job. An
assignment that you can really put your back into, and do your best without thinking
about results, is a real job; whereas serving the masses is at best only half a
job, considering the inexorable conditions that the masses impose upon their
servants. They ask you to give them what they want, they insist upon it, and
will take nothing else; and following their whims, their irrational changes of
fancy, their hot and cold fits, is a tedious business, to say nothing of the
fact that what they want at any time makes very little call on one's resources
of prophesy. The Remnant, on the other hand, want only the best you have,
whatever that may be. Give them that, and they are satisfied; you have nothing
more to worry about. The prophet of the American masses must aim consciously at
the lowest common denominator of intellect, taste, and character among
120,000,000 people; and this is a distressing task. The prophet of the Remnant,
on the contrary, is in the enviable position of Papa Haydn in the household of
Prince Esterhazy. All Haydn had
to do was keep forking out the very best music he knew how to produce, knowing
it would be understood and appreciated by those for whom he produced it, and
caring not a button what anyone else thought of it — and that makes a good job.
In
a sense, nevertheless, as I have said, it is not a rewarding job. If you can
touch the fancy of the masses, and have the sagacity to keep always one jump
ahead of their vagaries and vacillations, you can get good returns in money
from serving the masses, and good returns also in a mouth-to-ear type of
notoriety:
Digito
monstrari et dicier, Hic est!
We
all know innumerable politicians, journalists, dramatists, novelists and the
like, who have done extremely well by themselves in these ways. Taking care of
the Remnant, on the contrary, holds little promise of any such rewards. A
prophet of the Remnant will not grow purse proud on the financial returns from
his work, nor is it likely that he will get any great renown out of it.
Isaiah's case was exceptional to this second rule, and there are others, but
not many.
It
may be thought, then, that while taking care of the Remnant is no doubt a good
job, it is not an especially interesting job because it is as a rule so poorly
paid. I have my doubts about this. There are other compensations to be got out
of a job besides money and notoriety, and some of them seem substantial enough
to be attractive. Many jobs which do not pay well are yet profoundly
interesting, as, for instance, the job of research student in the sciences is
said to be; and the job of looking after the Remnant seems to me, as I have
surveyed it for many years from my seat in the grandstand, to be as interesting
as any that can be found in the world.
IV
What
chiefly makes it so, I think, is that in any given society the Remnant are
always so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know,
more than two things about them. You can be sure of those — dead sure, as our
phrase is — but you will never be able to make even a respectable guess at
anything else. You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor
what they are doing or will do. Two things you do know, and no more: First,
that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two
certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness;
and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to
pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination,
insight and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his
trade.
The
fascination and the despair of the historian, as he looks back upon Isaiah's
Jewry, upon Plato's Athens, or upon Rome of the Antonines, is the hope of
discovering and laying bare the "substratum of right thinking and well
doing" which he knows must have existed somewhere in those societies
because no kind of collective life can possibly go on without it. He finds
tantalizing intimations of it here and there in many places, as in the Greek
Anthology, in the scrapbook of Aulus Gellius, in the poems of Ausonius, and in
the brief and touching tribute, Bene merenti, bestowed upon the
unknown occupants of Roman tombs. But these are vague and fragmentary; they
lead him nowhere in his search for some kind of measure on this substratum, but
merely testify to what he already knew a priori — that the substratum did
somewhere exist. Where it was, how substantial it was, what its power of
self-assertion and resistance was — of all this they tell him nothing.
Similarly,
when the historian of 2,000 years hence, or 200 years, looks over the available
testimony to the quality of our civilization and tries to get any kind of
clear, competent evidence concerning the substratum of right thinking and well
doing which he knows must have been here, he will have a devil of a time
finding it. When he has assembled all he can and has made even a minimum
allowance for speciousness, vagueness, and confusion of motive, he will sadly
acknowledge that his net result is simply nothing. A Remnant were here,
building a substratum like coral insects; so much he knows, but he will find
nothing to put him on the track of who and where and how many they were and
what their work was like.
Concerning
all this, too, the prophet of the present knows precisely as much and as little
as the historian of the future; and that, I repeat, is what makes his job seem
to me so profoundly interesting. One of the most suggestive episodes recounted
in the Bible is that of a prophet's attempt — the only attempt of the kind on the
record, I believe — to count up the Remnant. Elijah had fled from persecution
into the desert, where the Lord presently overhauled him and asked what he was
doing so far away from his job.
He
said that he was running away, not because he was a coward, but because all the
Remnant had been killed off except himself. He had got away only by the skin of
his teeth, and, he being now all the Remnant there was, if he were killed the
True Faith would go flat. The Lord replied that he need not worry about that, for
even without him the True Faith could probably manage to squeeze along somehow
if it had to.
"And
as for your figures on the Remnant," He said, "I don't mind telling
you that there are 7,000 of them back there in Israel whom it seems you have
not heard of, but you may take My word for it that there they are."
At
that time, probably the population of Israel could not run to much more than a
million or so; and a Remnant of 7,000 out of a million is a highly encouraging
percentage for any prophet. With 7,000 of the boys on his side, there was no
great reason for Elijah to feel lonesome; and incidentally, that would be
something for the modern prophet of the Remnant to think of when he has a touch
of the blues. But the main point is that if Elijah the Prophet could not make a
closer guess on the number of the Remnant than he made when he missed it by
7,000, anyone else who tackled the problem would only waste his time.
The
other certainty which the prophet of the Remnant may always have is that the
Remnant will find him. He may rely on that with absolute assurance. They will
find him without his doing anything about it; in fact, if he tries to do
anything about it, he is pretty sure to put them off. He does not need to
advertise for them nor resort to any schemes of publicity to get their
attention. If he is a preacher or a public speaker, for example, he may be
quite indifferent to going on show at receptions, getting his picture printed
in the newspapers, or furnishing autobiographical material for publication on
the side of "human interest." If a writer, he need not make a point
of attending any pink teas, autographing books at wholesale, nor entering into
any specious freemasonry with reviewers. All this and much more of the same
order lies in the regular and necessary routine laid down for the prophet of
the masses; it is, and must be, part of the great general technique of getting
the mass man's ear — or as our vigorous and excellent publicist, Mr. H.L.
Mencken, puts it, the technique of boob bumping. The prophet of the Remnant is
not bound to this technique. He may be quite sure that the Remnant will make
their own way to him without any adventitious aids; and not only so, but if
they find him employing any such aids, as I said, it is ten to one that they will
smell a rat in them and will sheer off.
The
certainty that the Remnant will find him, however, leaves the prophet as much
in the dark as ever, as helpless as ever in the matter of putting any estimate
of any kind upon the Remnant; for, as appears in the case of Elijah, he remains
ignorant of who they are that have found him or where they are or how many.
They did not write in and tell him about it, after the manner of those who
admire the vedettes of Hollywood, nor yet do they seek him out and attach themselves
to his person. They are not that kind. They take his message much as drivers
take the directions on a roadside signboard — that is, with very little thought
about the signboard, beyond being gratefully glad that it happened to be there,
but with every thought about the directions.
This
impersonal attitude of the Remnant wonderfully enhances the interest of the
imaginative prophet's job. Once in a while, just about often enough to keep his
intellectual curiosity in good working order, he will quite accidentally come
upon some distinct reflection of his own message in an unsuspected quarter.
This enables him to entertain himself in his leisure moments with agreeable
speculations about the course his message may have taken in reaching that
particular quarter, and about what came of it after it got there. Most
interesting of all are those instances, if one could only run them down (but
one may always speculate about them), where the recipient himself no longer
knows where nor when nor from whom he got the message — or even where, as
sometimes happens, he has forgotten that he got it anywhere and imagines that
it is all a self-sprung idea of his own.
Such
instances as these are probably not infrequent, for, without presuming to
enroll ourselves among the Remnant, we can all no doubt remember having found
ourselves suddenly under the influence of an idea, the source of which we
cannot possibly identify. "It came to us afterward," as we say; that
is, we are aware of it only after it has shot up fullgrown in our minds,
leaving us quite ignorant of how and when and by what agency it was planted
there and left to germinate. It seems highly probable that the prophet's
message often takes some such course with the Remnant.
If,
for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea
which lodges in the Unbewußtsein of
a casual member of the Remnant and sticks fast there. For some time it is
inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades the man's
conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite
forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps
thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting
thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make
him do.
For
these reasons it appears to me that Isaiah's job is not only good but also
extremely interesting; and especially so at the present time when nobody is doing
it. If I were young and had the notion of embarking in the prophetical line, I
would certainly take up this branch of the business; and therefore I have no
hesitation about recommending it as a career for anyone in that position. It
offers an open field, with no competition; our civilization so completely
neglects and disallows the Remnant that anyone going in with an eye single to
their service might pretty well count on getting all the trade there is
Even
assuming that there is some social salvage to be screened out of the masses,
even assuming that the testimony of history to their social value is a little
too sweeping, that it depresses hopelessness a little too far, one must yet
perceive, I think, that the masses have prophets enough and to spare. Even
admitting that in the teeth of history that hope of the human race may not be
quite exclusively centered in the Remnant, one must perceive that they have
social value enough to entitle them to some measure of prophetic encouragement
and consolation, and that our civilization allows them none whatever. Every
prophetic voice is addressed to the masses, and to them alone; the voice of the
pulpit, the voice of education, the voice of politics, of literature, drama,
journalism — all these are directed towards the masses exclusively, and they
marshal the masses in the way that they are going.
One might suggest,
therefore, that aspiring prophetical talent may well turn to another
field. Sat patriae Priamoque datum — whatever obligation of
the kind may be due the masses is already monstrously overpaid. So long as the
masses are taking up the tabernacle of Moloch and Chiun, their images, and
following the star of their god Buncombe, they will have no lack of prophets
to point the way that leadeth to the More Abundant Life; and hence a few of
those who feel the prophetic afflatus might do better to apply themselves to
serving the Remnant. It is a good job, an interesting job, much more
interesting than serving the masses; and moreover it is the only job in our
whole civilization, as far as I know, that offers a virgin field.
Author:
Albert Jay Nock (October
13, 1870–August 19, 1945) was an influential American libertarian author,
educational theorist, and social critic of the early and middle twentieth
century. Murray Rothbard was deeply influenced by him, and so was the whole
generation of free market thinkers of the 1950s.
https://mises.org/library/isaiahs-job
