This
piece was originally published in 1962 by The Foundation For Economic Education
(FEE), Irvington-on- Hudson, New York 10533. The author is Albert Jay Nock
(1870-1945). For Walter L. Matt, the founding editor of the Traditional
Catholic fortnightly, The Remnant, it would become one of the
primary inspirations behind his choice of the name of his newspaper, when it
was established in 1967.
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 3 or 4 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...
I referred him to the
story of the prophet Isaiah. (I shall paraphrase the story in our common speech
since it has to be pieced out from various sources.)
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
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".
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. But 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 of 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...
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...
The main trouble with this [mass-man approach] 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.
The Remnant want only the
best you have, whatever that may be. Give them that, and they are satisfied;
you have nothing more to worry about.
In a sense, nevertheless,
as I have said, it is not a rewarding job. 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.
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 2 things
about them. You can be sure of those-dead sure -- 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. 2 things you do
know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you.
Except for these 2 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 -- as
well as 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 prophet's attempt -- the only attempt of the kind on the
record, I believe -- to count 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 too 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 10 to 1 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 vendettas 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 direction.
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 full-grown 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.
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