Human Rights in China: Sujiatun
A Place Called Sujiatun
Are they killing Falun Gong, for their organs?
by Jay Nordlinger
There is a horrifying story going around the world: In the northeast of China, thousands of prisoners are being held, so that they can be killed for their organs. The prisoners are practitioners of Falun Gong, the meditation-and-exercise system. The facility at which they are being held — called a “concentration camp” or a “death camp” — is at Sujiatun. Chinese human-rights activists believe that this name should cause the same shudders as Treblinka and the others.
I cannot say whether this story is true; I can say that one ought to pay attention.
Of course, “organ-harvesting” is a very familiar story: The PRC has been doing it, with prisoners, for many years. In 2001, the U.S. Congress held hearings on the matter, which caused a sensation. But the sensation died down, as sensations tend to do. Organ-harvesting has gone on, with no negative consequences for the Chinese government.
Organ-selling is a huge business for the Chinese. You can obtain organs in China as you can nowhere else: any type, and very speedily.
The subject of organ-harvesting has been revived by the discovery of Sujiatun. I will not attempt to do justice to this story in this space (as though justice could be done). I will mainly direct you to the website of the Epoch Times, and specifically to its archive on Sujiatun: here. The Epoch Times is an international newspaper whose reason for being is to tell the truth about China. Media in China itself, of course, are government-owned or -controlled.
I also wish to direct you to an article by the tireless Bill Gertz of the Washington Times: here.
How do we know about Sujiatun? Mainly through two witnesses, indescribably brave. One is a woman whose husband was a doctor who took part in the organ-harvesting; the other is a Chinese journalist, long based in Japan, who investigated the matter. Both are now in the United States, in hiding, in fear of their lives. I talked to the journalist, by phone, on Monday morning.
First, a further word about the woman: You can read an Epoch Times interview with her here, and a follow-up story here. They will give you all the details a human mind can take, and probably more. In brief, her husband became deranged by his work, unable to go on. The wife did not intend to step forward as a witness, but concluded that she had no choice.
I will indulge in just a few details. The woman’s husband said to her, “You don’t understand my suffering. Those Falun Gong practitioners were alive. It might be easier for me if they were dead, but they were alive.”
The woman also said this, to the Epoch Times: “Some poor farmers from nearby places were hired to work in the boiler room. [This served as the crematory.] They were penniless when they first came. . . . But they could scrape up some watches, finger rings, necklaces, and so on. The amount is not small.”
Finally, she said, “I would like to expose this to the international community, so those who are not yet killed can be saved. Also, I would like to expose this as an atonement for my family.”
Now to the Chinese journalist: His name is Jin Zhong — or so he calls himself for the purpose of media reports. I spoke to him when I was meeting with some Falun Gong activists in a New York conference room. One of them, Charles Lee, was recently released from a Chinese prison after three years’ confinement. He was tortured, and I will be writing about him in the next issue of National Review. Dr. Lee is a U.S. citizen, by the way.
And, in a strange twist, he bore witness to organ-harvesting, while a young medical researcher in China, years ago. Prisoners would be shot in the back of the head, and their bodies would be hustled to a waiting van. There, doctors would extract their organs; Charles Lee served as an assistant, holding the instruments. Sometimes, the prisoners seemed not quite dead, he says.
Before Dr. Lee and I talked, I was able to interview Jin Zhong by phone, using an associate of Dr. Lee’s as a translator.
For an extended report on Mr. Jin, please see this Epoch Times article. I will say simply that he found out about Sujiatun when he was investigating SARS, and the extent of the Chinese government’s cover-up of that problem. Some local officials let slip information about the Falun Gong camp, and its purpose. He could not believe what he was hearing: It was too horrific, too inhuman. But he pursued the story, and confirmed that what he had heard was true.
I ask Mr. Jin whether the officials felt guilty about this murder and organ-harvesting. He says, “Not at all.”
Mr. Jin soon attracted the attention of the police, and was twice detained. He says he was tortured, while in detention. He managed to return to Japan, and then come to the United States. His family remains in Japan, and he says they have received death threats. Obviously, he fears for his own life here in America. PRC agents have never been respecters of national territory.
For those who care, Mr. Jin is not himself a Falun Gong practitioner. (Neither is the woman whose husband performed organ-harvesting.) “I’m not even interested,” says Mr. Jin. But he is interested in humanity, and in justice. He says, “I trust that the CCP [the Chinese Communist Party] will try to kill me,” for telling about Sujiatun. His life would have been far easier if he had kept quiet, but his conscience would not allow it.
I compliment him on his bravery. He says, “You’re a journalist. You wouldn’t have done any differently, in my position.” I reply, “I can only hope that that is so.”
Is the U.S. government aware of Sujiatun? Mr. Jin says he has informed interested congressmen and their aides. And friends of human rights in the media are weighing in. Peter Worthington concluded a piece in the Toronto Sun this way: “China’s use of prisoners as guinea pigs, or as a supply to meet world demand, makes Nazi medical experimentation seem almost benign by comparison.”
No one should bet that Sujiatun will penetrate the world’s consciousness. Governments everywhere are keen on smooth relations with the PRC; media, even in free countries, seem to want to help them. The reluctance of major newspapers and TV networks to report on atrocities in China is a sad subject.
And I recall what Robert Conquest, the great analyst of totalitarianism, once told me: The world has seldom wanted to believe witnesses. Ten, 20, or 30 years later, maybe, but rarely sooner.
Testimony out of the early Soviet Union was scoffed at; these were “rumors in Riga.” Tales of the Holocaust were Jewish whining. When escapees from Mao spilled into Hong Kong, they were “embittered warlords.” When Cubans landed in Florida, they were “Batista stooges.” And so on.
There is an extra incentive to look away from persecution when the victims are Falun Gong. Many people are suspicious of these meditators and slow-motion exercisers, with their strange philosophy. And massive Communist propaganda against them has not been without an effect. Western business leaders see Falun Gong standing in their way, or at least irritating them.
I have no idea what will happen to Jin Zhong, or to the wife of the doctor, or to the prisoners who remain in Sujiatun. It may well be that, with some international attention, the Chinese government will Potemkinize the place. They have done as much before, as have many governments like them. And it could be that people will simply not care about Sujiatun, no matter what is proven.
My main hope, at the moment, is that readers will glance at the reports I have mentioned, especially those in the Epoch Times. Because, sometimes, the unthinkable needs to be thought about, just a bit.
http://www.nationalreview.com/nordlinger/nordlinger200603300722.asp
“Birkenstocked Burkeans,” “Crunchy Conservatives,” and “Granola Conservatives”
Birkenstocked Burkeans
Confessions of a granola conservative.
By Rod Dreher
Boston College professor Peter Kreeft discovered this phenomenon a few years ago. Kreeft said he and three friends fit John Courtney Murray’s four American political types: radical, liberal, traditionalist, and conservative. One day, Kreeft, a traditional Catholic, discovered a close affinity with the Marxist atheist in the group. What did it was driving around Cambridge and judging everyone’s reaction to a new housing development the conservative Republican had moved into. It was clean, well lighted, green, and spacious, with attractive amenities.
Kreeft and his friend Dick, the radical, thought it was an abomination, because it was ugly and therefore inhuman. The conservative said the fact that they cared about how the place looked marked them as “artsy-fartsy,” but the traditionalist and the radical argued that beauty was one of the most important things there is.
Soon, Kreeft and his radical friend found out that despite the gulf that separated them on politics, they shared a number of areas of agreement (suburbs bad; nature good; big business and big government bad; small business and small government good). Kreeft determined from this that “beneath the current political left-right alignments there are fault lines embedded in the crust of human nature that will inevitably open up some day and produce earthquakes that will change the current map of the political landscape.”
Well, maybe. All I can tell you is that the crunchy-granola lefties are often right about little things that make life richer. Take food, for example. After we married, Julie and I had to teach ourselves how to cook. We quickly discovered how much better food tastes if it hasn’t been processed. We’d go to farmers’ markets in the city to buy produce, and before we knew it, we were making and canning our own apple butter. Not only did the stuff taste dramatically better than what was on offer in the supermarket, but there was a real sense of pride in knowing how to do these things for ourselves, like our grandmothers did. We realized one day that pretty much the only young to middle-aged people we knew who cared about these things were … lefties.
We were also startled to discover how large the homeschooling movement is here in New York City, and that it’s primarily a phenomenon of the left-wing counterculture. Given our backgrounds in Texas and Louisiana, we assumed religious conservatives were the only folks interested in homeschooling. I did some reporting on homeschoolers in Manhattan, and learned that most of them did it for the same reasons we plan to: an unwillingness to trust the state schools here with something as important as our children’s education.
All sorts of things started to occur to us. The music we like — jazz, hard country, bluegrass, Cuban son — is something you can only hear on, umm, public radio or see on public television. When we began talking about buying a house, we realized we wanted something old and funky, in the sort of neighborhood that your average Republican would disdain. We found that though the Shiite environmentalists drive us nuts, there was also something off-putting about the way many conservatives speak with caustic derision about environmental conservation. Two weeks ago, some conservative friends were driving me down the Pacific Coast Highway, and I was overwhelmed by the beauty, as they are. “I’m afraid we have to tip our hats to the tree-huggers,” said one. “If it weren’t for them, much of what you see would be covered with tract houses and malls.”
Here’s something else I’ve noticed: The Granola Conservatives I know tend not to be wealthy, but labor in the creative and intellectual vineyards as writers, professors, and artists. They also tend to be religious. It’s foolish to go too far in metaphysicalizing questions of taste, but a big part of it, at least for those of us who are part of older Christian traditions, comes from learning to see the world sacramentally. In the sacramental vision, which is shared by Catholics and the Orthodox, the spirit world is mediated through the material world, which is another way of saying we experience God in creation. To someone imbued with a sacramental vision, qualities inherent in things — from the food we eat to the buildings we live in — matter in profoundly spiritual ways.
Admittedly, this is very close to what David Brooks identified as classic bourgeois Bohemian (“Bobo”) behavior. “Marx once wrote that the bourgeois takes all that is sacred and makes it profane. The Bobos take everything that is profane and make it sacred,” he writes in Bobos in Paradise, his highly entertaining foray into pop sociology. “We take the quintessential bourgeois activity, shopping, and turn it into quintessential bohemian activities: art, philosophy, social action.”
In Brooks’s view, the Bobo will spend lots of money on things he believes (though not consciously) possess the power to transfer spiritual or moral qualities to its owner. This debased form of sacramentalism is an ersatz, consumerist version of the real thing, which doesn’t fetishize objects themselves, but which is really a way of thinking about the importance of aesthetics to the good life. This may be a distinction without a discernible difference; Brooks told me that conservative writers just have to live with the fact that we share certain tastes with the predominantly liberal intellectual class. But if there’s nothing to it, and the consumer choices people make are purely a function of social determinism, then it leaves no room for the person who purchases certain products simply because the products look good, taste good or offer superior value, despite costing more. It means accepting bad beer, lousy coffee, Top-40 radio, strip malls, and all popular manifestations of cheapness and ugliness as proof that One Is Not an Effete Liberal. And that’s just as phony as anything the Bobos stand for.
Curious about the possible spiritual aspect of this phenomenon, I wrote to my crunchy-right friends Julianne Loesch Wiley (a Catholic) and Frederica Mathewes-Green (Orthodox), both of whom have long been active in the pro-life movement, to ask them how they reconciled their conservatism with their countercultural tastes. Frederica responded first, saying that she embraced her “mother-earth hippie aesthetic” in her liberal youth, and has stuck with it even though she’s now firmly in the religious conservative camp.
“What hooked me then, and continues to hold me, and what is the underlying theme of the contemporary liberal side of this aesthetic, is authenticity,” she said. “I read a piece in American Demographics a few years ago about this, that the hook for progressives is this concept of ‘authenticity,’ the distrust of mass-produced sentiment or materials.”
She thinks secular leftists, having emptied the world of God, hunger for something to anchor their lives, and seek it out in various manifestations of Boboism. As a believing Christian and a religious conservative, though, Frederica still feels a kinship with this longing, “because I find in the presence of the old and funky furniture and things I live with a reminder of the goodness of the material world God made, and visited, and fills.”
“Every single thing that comes into my house, down to the salt shakers, have to first pass a test of being persuasive, winsome, original, odd — ‘authentic.’ I think that this is a cousin to what you and Julie are doing with food and other tastes. You’re looking for true quality and refusing to be satisfied with Purina People Chow. You have your antennas up for what is real, original, worthy. And to many conservatives, that sounds stuck-up and suspiciously lefty.”
Catholic Julianne says she absorbed a lot of her “natural” ideas through her anti-abortion activism. Awe over the miracle of birth led her to study natural-childbirth practices, which hooked her up with herb-savvy Earth Mother types in Birkenstocks — “and before you know it, I was eating nutritional yeast on my baked potatoes. Eeuh! Liberal!”
Teaching her kids to read early made Julianne think that maybe the intellectually deadening public school wasn’t the best thing for them, and she became a homeschooler without quite realizing what was happening. “That’s supposed to be right-wing,” she wrote. “But I was first introduced to homeschooling by John Holt, who was left-wing. How do I know? There were certain telltale phrases he used. He didn’t trust the Establishment. He didn’t trust the government schools. But that’s right wing now. Funny how I went straight from left wing to right wing without ever once passing through a phase where I trusted the government.”
That’s an amusing line, but it also points out how so many of us depend on labels to frame our experiences so as not to be disturbed by the idea that somebody on the other side might be on to something good, beautiful or true. Somebody’s got to pioneer these things. My wife gets a kick out of the fact that she’s the only housewife in the neighborhood who carries home her organic vegetables in a National Review Online tote bag. Who knows, one of these days, maybe one of the liberal housewives doling out the Swiss chard on delivery day will ask her about the flat tax. Dare to dream, you Birkenstocked Burkeans, and pass the hippie carrots.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTFmYmUzNGZiMGFjN2EwMDlhODk1MDg0N2UzOTlkYWE=
Churchill and the Jews
Saving Civilization From Itself
Churchill understood that the Jews are the bedrock of Western tradition.
“Why should we Anglo-Saxons apologize for being superior?” Winston Churchill once growled in exasperation. “We are superior.” Certainly Churchill’s views of what he and other late Victorians called the “lesser races,” such as blacks and East Indians, are very different from ours today. One might easily assume that a self-described reactionary like Churchill, holding such views, shared the anti-Semitism prevalent among Europe’s ruling elites before the Holocaust.
But he did not, as Martin Gilbert vividly shows in “Churchill and the Jews.” By chronicling Churchill’s warm dealings with English and European Jews throughout his long career, and his heartfelt support of Zionism, Mr. Gilbert conveys Churchill’s deep admiration for the Jewish people and captures his crucial role in creating the state of Israel. Churchill offers the powerful example of a Western statesman who–unlike other statesmen in his own time and ours–understood the malignant nature of anti-Semitism and did what he could to oppose its toxic effects.
His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had been a close friend and ally to many wealthy British Jews, almost notoriously so, given the rancid snobbery of his circles. The son rarely failed to follow his father’s inclinations, in this matter as in others. Jews like the Rothschilds and the banker Sir Ernest Cassel helped to advance Winston Churchill’s early career (including watching over his finances after his father’s death), and he repaid their support in part by publicly condemning the kind of anti-Semitism that was all too common in England’s upper classes. But his actions were not merely an expression of personal thanks.
A student of history, Churchill came to feel that Judaism was the bedrock of traditional Western moral and political principles–and Churchill was of a generation that preferred to talk about principles instead of “values.” For Europeans to turn against the Jew, he argued, was for them to strike at their own roots and reject an essential part of their civilization–”that corporate strength, that personal and special driving power” that Jews had brought for hundreds of years to Europe’s arts, sciences and institutions.
To deny Jews a national homeland was therefore an act of ingratitude. Churchill became a keen backer of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which broached the idea of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As a friend to Zionist leader Chaim Weizman, and as colonial secretary after World War I, Churchill made establishing such a homeland a matter of urgency. “The hope of your race for so many centuries will be gradually realized here,” Churchill told a Jewish audience in Jerusalem during his visit in March 1921, “not only for your own good, but for the good of all the world.”
By “all the world” Churchill most pointedly meant to include Palestine’s Arabs. As Mr. Gilbert recounts, Churchill was dismayed and disgusted by Arab resistance to Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine. “The Jews have a far more difficult task than you,” he told Arab representatives, since “you only have to enjoy your own possessions,” while the Jewish emigrants from Europe and elsewhere would have to carve a society out of a barren wilderness.
Yet Churchill was convinced that Arab civilization would benefit from contact with an entrepreneurial and morally centered people. “Speaking entirely as a non-Jew,” he wrote, “I look on the Jews as the natural importers of western leaven so necessary for countries in the Near East.” At the same time, Churchill tried to ensure that Palestinian Arabs got their own national homeland. It was Churchill who, as colonial secretary, decided to separate Transjordan (modern-day Jordan) from the rest of Palestine, assuming that Transjordan would become the site of the Arabs’ future state and that other parts of Palestine (including the West Bank of the Jordan River) would be open to Jewish settlement.
Churchill was to be disappointed by the results of his Middle Eastern efforts, as Arabs hunted down and murdered Jewish settlers by the hundreds in the 1920s and 1930s–just at the time when Adolf Hitler was building his own regime around the persecution of the Jews in Germany. As early as 1930 Churchill realized that the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies carried the stench of an ancient evil. “Tell your boss from me,” he said to a Hitler acquaintance in the late summer of 1932, as the Nazi Party was on the verge of power, “that anti-Semitism may be a good starter but it is a bad finisher.”
In December 1942, Churchill–now prime minister–learned from a Roman Catholic member of the Polish resistance, a man named Jan Karsky, that thousands of Jews were being rounded up and sent by cattle cars to what turned out to be the death camp at Belzec, in eastern Poland. Churchill used the Karsky report to compel the Allies, including the Russians, to condemn “a bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination” in Germany–although he understood that the best way to halt the slaughter would be the speedy destruction of Hitler’s empire. The chief of Britain’s air staff, Sir Charles Portal, warned that any air raids “avowedly conducted on account of the Jews would be an asset to enemy propaganda,” and Churchill reluctantly bowed to his advice. Nonetheless, in 1943 he wanted a film that documented the atrocities committed against the Jews to be shown to every American serviceman before the invasion of Europe.
After the war, Churchill felt that the most fitting response to the Holocaust would be to punish those guilty of the most horrific crimes against the Jews and to fulfill the promise of a Jewish homeland that he and Britain had made almost 30 years earlier. When Ernest Bevin, Britain’s Labour Party foreign minister, hesitated to recognize Israel nine months after its founding, for fear of inflaming Arab opinion, Churchill swung back hard: “Whether the Right Honorable Gentleman likes it or not, the coming into being of a Jewish State in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand, or even three thousand years.” Israel was just recompense, Churchill felt, not only for what the Jews of Europe had lost but for what they had given to civilization over the centuries.
This view, of course, no longer prevails. Today the existence of Israel is apparently something to be regretted, even deplored, not only in Arab capitals but in European ones and on American university campuses. Paradoxically, such feelings intensified after 9/11, an event that should have made us all aware of who the friends of Western civilization really are–and who its enemies. Martin Gilbert’s book reminds us that anti-Semitism is the dark turn of the modern mind against itself, and a form of cultural patricide.
Mr. Herman’s “Gandhi & Churchill” will be published by Bantam in April.
Celebrating Our Ignorance
CELEBRATING OUR IGNORANCE
Honors Convocation Address
Calvin College
April 25, 1996
Dr. David A. Hoekema
Academic Dean and Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College
The purpose of this Honors Convocation is to recognize the remarkable achievements of students at Calvin College and to offer thanks for the gifts and talents with which you have been entrusted. I have a slightly different purpose in mind in this address, however. First, I want to celebrate how little you have learned. And then, before I conclude, I will point out with gratitude how little you have achieved. In fact I am speaking as much to my colleagues on the faculty as to those of you who are students. To be sure, we have spent even more of our lives and our fortunes in the pursuit of knowledge than you have thus far. Books and articles on our shelves attest to our professional accomplishments, and diplomas on our walls confer the right to attach little bouquets of letters behind our names–Ph.D., M.F.A., M.B.A., Th.M.–that impress the folks back home and may even help get a bank loan. Yet it is the ignorance of the faculty no less than that of students that I celebrate this evening.
Exactly two weeks ago at this very hour of the evening, Madeleine L’Engle sat right here, in the wheelchair to which recent surgery has confined her, and offered us at Calvin a glimpse of the joys and challenges of her vocation as a writer of fiction that explores the spiritual dimensions of life. All her life, she said, she has been obsessed with hard questions about who we are, what happens when we die, and why God permits so much suffering. Yet she has recoiled from those who pretend to have wholly satisfactory answers to such questions, from theologians and preachers who claim more wisdom than anyone can truly offer. This week on “All Things Considered” I heard a strikingly parallel warning against the dangers of facile answers to difficult questions–this time in the voice of the popular writer Erma Bombeck, whose passing was marked by clips from previous interviews. A friend, she recounted, sought to comfort her daughter when a favorite pet died by assuring her, with more compassion than theological warrant, “We shouldn’t be sad–after all, Frisky is in heaven with God.” “But Mom,” her five-year-old philosopher answered in a matter-of-fact tone, “what does God want with a dead dog?”
In your programs of study at Calvin you have asked a great many difficult questions, and for some of them you have found answers. Let us suppose that you are a senior and have had the good judgment and courage to complete a major in philosophy, for example. No doubt you can tell me, if I ask you, about Heraclitus’ conception of the natural world as the interplay of opposing forces in perpetual flux, and you can describe Parmenides’ insistence that an eternal and unchanging unity can be discovered by the soul. You can recount Socrates’ search for a ground on which to build our moral lives. You can explain, too, how Plato united Heraclitean plurality and Parmenidean unity in his system, which held that the true, the good, and the beautiful lie concealed beneath the surface of the world of experience. You can explain further how Aristotle took the world apart once more and put it back together, shaped neither by a personal God nor by an eternal realm of the Forms where the soul dwells but rather by an all-pervasive orderliness in nature. And with all this you have only begun to tell me what you know. You can describe the interplay between Greek metaphysics and Christian theology in the medieval period, the irruption of quantitative methods and scientific reason in the philosophies of Descartes and Locke, and the reconfiguration of all claims to knowledge in light of Kant’s critique and Hegel’s historical perspective. You can trace the ways in which the thinkers of our own century continue to probe the nature of the person, the relationship between us and our world, the place of language and the meaning of history. Think back to the first weeks of your first philosophy course–remember how puzzled and frustrated you were by your first Philosophy 153 test?–and you can measure how far you have come. But do you have any answers yet to the really important questions? Can you tell me who we are as persons, and whether there is a self that is distinct from the body? Can you explain what makes the testimony of our senses a reliable basis for knowledge? Can you even give a satisfactory answer to the question that Socrates put to his fellow Athenians so many centuries ago: what sort of life ought a human being to strive for? If you know this, Socrates implied, you should surely be able to persuade everyone else to follow your lead. Can you? Alas, you cannot, and neither can I, nor any of your professors. There is a kind of progress discernible in the history of philosophy, each generation correcting the errors and blind spots of its predecessors. Yet the questions persist. Those for which we still have no fully satisfactory answers are at least as numerous, and perhaps more important, than those we can answer. But not all of you are philosophy majors, more’s the pity. And the rest of you may be thinking to yourselves: Yes, yes, that’s why I didn’t major in philosophy. At least in history, or biology, or engineering, we can get some answers! But let’s look a little deeper.
First, what about you history majors? No doubt you could provide a brilliant and lucid account of the economic and social forces that drove European explorers out onto the oceans in the sixteenth century, of the ways in which the African-American family has been shaped by the experience of slavery and Reconstruction, and of why Japan closed its ports to European vessels for so many centuries and finally let Commodore Perry break the wall of isolation in the 1850’s. But these are easy questions, warm-up pitches for the real game. Try your hand with some real questions. Can you explain why the world today is characterized by close international cooperation and moving inexorably toward a single global economy, while at the same time ethnic and tribal animosities cause the streets of Bosnia and the rivers of Rwanda to flow with blood? Can you tell me why the Western societies that have attained the highest levels of individual freedom and prosperity still struggle with deeply rooted divisions of race and class, or why the growing wealth of some seems only to plunge their neighbors a few miles away deeper into poverty? Why is it that human societies seem never to live up to the promises that emerge from the brightest moments of their history?
Perhaps we need to leave the domain of the humanities for the sciences, where both questions and answers lie nearer to hand. Take a look sometime at your parents’ biology textbooks, for example. You will be astonished at how much of the content of your biology courses was not known a generation ago. We all noticed the political transformation that caused the breakup of the Soviet Union, but many of us parents have been startled to discover, when our children sought help with high-school biology, that the two kingdoms into which we thought the whole world of living things could be divided–animals and plants–have undergone a strange sort of taxonomic mitosis, and now there are five. In an article I read recently I saw four successive diagrams of the structure of the cell, drawn from textbooks dated approximately ten years apart. Thirty years ago, the picture was simple and elegantly functional. Within the clearly drawn boundary of the cell membrane, cytoplasm filled the interior. Apart from the strands of genetic material coiled up in the nucleus, there was nothing much else of interest–only a few assorted bits and pieces whose functions were little understood but could safely be ignored. Subsequent textbooks at ten-year intervals added more and more details of organization and function. The most recent of these was breathtaking in its complexity, resembling a schematic diagram for a computer chip more than a traditional biological drawing. What once appeared to be simple parts with a few readily described functions–the cell membrane, the nuclear membrane, the mitochondrial bodies–have now become as complex and intricate as was the former picture of the entire cell. The sophisticated tools of biological and biochemical research have yielded a detailed and nuanced picture of the internal economy and organization of the cell, uncovering the many ways in which each cell responds to the needs of the living organism and contributes to its ability to cope with the challenges of the environment. But how much more there is that we do not know! We can only guess at the precise functions of many of the substructures within the cell. Just within the past year geneticists have completed an accurate and comprehensive map of the human genome, thanks to an extraordinary worldwide collaborative effort. Yet we have only begun to be able to guess at which genes are linked to specific traits of appearance and behavior or to the development of disease. What is it that causes some cells to ignore the normal internal signal to stop multiplying, causing the fatal excesses that we know and dread as cancer? Why do some individuals destroy their own pancreatic cells for the production of insulin, causing diabetes? In response to such questions we can offer enormous quantities of data but no real answers. What is the impact of environmental pollutants on human and animal reproduction? We are scarcely any farther along the path to an answer to this urgent question than the ancient Greeks were in trying to explain communicable diseases.
By now the senior engineering majors may be sitting smugly in their seats–those few whose senior design project is far enough along so that they could attend this event, at any rate. In Engineering, you may be thinking, we tackle concrete problems and find real solutions. We don’t spend our time worrying over the nature of knowledge, the meaning of history, or the functioning of biological structures too small to be seen. We make stuff, and we make it work. Sure, there are lots of questions we cannot answer. But give us an appropriate question and we’ll give you the answer. Can you build a bridge at this spot to carry four lanes of traffic, within the limits of this year’s county road budget? Can the structural supports in that bicycle rack be made of composite plastic instead of steel? Will the pollutants we have detected in the topsoil leach into the aquifer from which the wells nearby draw their water? Give us the facts–the capabilities of the materials and the relevant specifications–and we will find the answer. But do these answers really provide the whole story? Will the bridge simply help move people to their destinations more efficiently, for example, or will it open up a delicate ecosystem to heavy use that may destroy its character? What is an acceptable level of pollution in a drinking water source? Does technology itself sometimes threaten the quality of human life? Are some projects technically feasible but morally objectionable? Should a Christian accept a job designing trigger devices for tactical nuclear weapons? Is it appropriate to devote one’s talents to the design of elaborate gadgetry to control the interior climate of luxury cars or the zoom ratios of home video cameras? Or should those of us who know how to make things, and make them work, all be trying instead to find solutions to the persistent problems of urban decay, polluted groundwater, and industrial smog?
A week ago I put the following question to my colleagues on the faculty and staff by means of the “Town-Crier” electronic bulletin board: I am working on a draft of my address for the Honors Convocation, knowing that the faculty expect something witty, profound, and uplifting, or failing that, something that will keep them awake some of the time. I find myself wondering how a sample of my colleagues would answer the following question: “What is the most interesting and important question in your discipline or field of research for which there is no satisfactory answer?’ In very short order I received 30 responses, from nearly every department and several administrative offices. Some have already been incorporated into what I have said. Here are some additional samples:
* Why hasn’t increased emphasis on business ethics in undergraduate and graduate education resulted in a significantly better record of ethical decisions?
* What should we make of Paul’s virtual silence about Jesus’s life and teachings before his Passion?
* What is the nature of intelligence–which is to say, who is really retarded?
* Why is there sex–which is the basis for much of the social behavior of animals, yet whose origin remains a perplexing puzzle for biologists and ecologists?
* How did life arise on the earth? By what means and what processes were inorganic compounds transformed into organic compounds, and in turn into amino acids, proteins, and the complex communities of the cell? Can any coherent story that can be told about this without invoking direct divine manipulation of millions of individual molecules? Does a more coherent story emerge if we do invoke such direct intervention?
* How is it possible for events such as the Holocaust, the African slave trade, and the Rwandan massacre to occur? Can we even begin to understand how human beings can cause such evil, or how it can occur in a world created and sustained by a loving God?
* How do liquids and gases flow in enclosed spaces? How is turbulence created, and what does it look like at the smallest level?
* Qu’est-ce que si passe quand l’on apprends une langue nouvelle–comment est-ce possible? Oder, wenn Sie diese Frage besser verstehen kûnnen, was gescheht als man eine andere Sprache lernt, und wie ist es mûglich, da zu tun?
* What sort of remapping of the brain and retraining of the mind makes it possible to learn to speak, and eventually even to think, in another language?
* Why does mathematics work? Why does a completely abstract symbolic system not only provide accurate tools for explanation of what we observe but also offer accurate predictions of matters we have never observed?
* Why is it that the fundamental principles of physics are all entirely indifferent to the direction of time’s passage, and yet in all the phenomena that we observe in the world around us it is obvious that time can move only forward and never backward?
* Can we truly understand the past, or can we only understand what one observer or another believed was occurring? Can history ever yield truth, or only a succession of different perspectives?
* What is the nature of the “missing mass” that we must posit in order to explain the behavior of the stars and galaxies but that has eluded all attempts at detection?
* How can we reconcile the conflicting claims of freedom of expression, on the one hand, and the rights of individuals and groups to respect in society, on the other?
* What makes music beautiful, and how does it touch our emotions?
* Why have real wages in the United States remained stagnant for twenty years?
* And, inevitably, one of my philosophy colleagues identified the most important question to which we have no satisfactory answer as this one: “What counts as a satisfactory answer to a question?”
How should we respond to this rich sampling of the puzzles and perplexities that occupy members of Calvin’s faculty and staff? Let me return to my title and invite you to celebrate with me how very little we know. We can give thanks for such a wonderful profusion of ignorance, such a rich offering of questions that demand our attention even while they yield no satisfactory answers. What a blessing it is, after all, to have come so far in our learning that we can understand and puzzle over these questions and their importance! Before you began your college study, how many of these questions would you even have understood? How many do you understand now? (I will not answer that question myself.) We might think of education as adding valuable items to two baskets, a basket of answers and a basket of questions. If the former becomes filled while the latter is frequently empty, you are not truly receiving an education in the liberal arts, an education that lays the foundation for a life of learning and for spiritual and intellectual growth. As you carry on your studies and follow your vocation in later life, you should strive to keep adding to the contents of both baskets.
Once in a while you may hear a professor or even a resident advisor–trying to persuade you to spend less time in the coffeeshop, perhaps–tell you that most of what you need to learn in college is between the covers of your textbooks. Don’t believe it for a moment. Textbooks are not divinely revealed sources of authority: they are highly selective attempts to persuade you that what the author thinks you should study is what you should really study. What you find between the covers of the text is deeply shaped by the author’s questions. Its value lies as much in the questions that the text leads you to ask as in any information it contains. You cannot learn biology or engineering or philosophy without careful study of the assigned texts. But you will not really obtain the benefits of your study until you reflect on what they contain, recognize their limitations and occasionally their outright mistakes, and articulate your own questions. So your education may indeed begin with careful study of texts. Learning to read critically and intently is an essential discipline in every field of study. But texts come to life and have meaning when you interpret and apply the information and the ideas that you find there. This process begins in the classroom, no less when students are speaking than when the instructor holds the floor. By no means does it stop when the class disperses. The real work of learning–formulating questions, seeking answers, testing ideas against those of others–goes on also in the residence hall, library lounge, the dorm Bible study, the van heading for the track meet, and the planning meeting for a service-learning project. Most of our learning comes not simply from reading texts but from conversation with each other, students and staff and faculty alike, and above all by putting our growing understanding to use in class presentations and writing. Bit by bit, lab by lab, assignment by assignment, coffee-shop session by coffee-shop session, termpaper by termpaper, we become more deeply aware of who God is, who we are, and what sort of world we have been placed in. And the more we learn, the more clearly we discern how vast is our remaining ignorance.
Recall the excitement when, months after the Hubble space telescope was launched, and its repaired mirror at last yielded images of breathtaking clarity from the farthest reaches of the universe. And what did these images show? Did they finally penetrate to the limits of space and show us everything that there is? Far from it: instead we saw millions more stars and galaxies than we can see from earth’s surface, a profusion of richness in the created order that boggles the imagination. It is the same with all learning. The finer our tools of analysis become, and the greater the reach of our means of inquiry, the greater the number of unknown regions and unanswered questions that will come into view for the first time. If you have caught the spirit of love for learning that underlies everything we do at Calvin College, you will never stop challenging yourself to consider questions that you cannot answer–to ensure that your basket of answers does not become full while the other basket empties out. You who are about to graduate are nearly done making tuition payments. You may even come to the end of your loan payments, possibly even before you retire. But if you truly understand how splendid it is to be ignorant, you will never cease asking questions of yourself and of others that you cannot answer.
I am nearing my conclusion, but I have not forgotten my promise at the beginning to speak in appreciation not only of your ignorance but also of your lack of truly significant achievements. It is not that you have been idle or have no fruits of your labors during your studies to exhibit. Many of you have received highly competitive scholarship and fellowship awards, enumerated in tonight’s program. Three of you have completed the college’s honors program, which speaks well not only for your intellectual gifts but also for your persistence. Some of you have completed significant programs of research in collaboration with your instructors, while others have contributed to the campus environment by writing for Chimes and Dialogue. The achievements of others include schoolchildren whose hearts and minds have been lifted up by your example as a student teacher or a volunteer, children who are far less likely today than they were a year ago to yield to the forces that perpetuate despair and poverty in our cities. Others among you have worked to bring hope and comfort to your fellow students when they were in distress and need, as resident advisors or simply as friends. Some have built houses for poor communities during spring breaks, while others have worked to build up the lively worshiping community that gathers in our chapel each Sunday evening. All of these are splendid things to have done, and I salute you for them all.
Yet I insist that in a larger sense you have really achieved nothing of lasting significance. The reason is that, for all our ignorance, there is one thing that we know at Calvin College, and it is this: we know that every human endeavor, no matter how grand or how trivial, how successful or how disastrous, fades into insignificance in comparison to the glorious transformation that God works in our lives through the teaching, the sacrifice, and the living presence of Jesus Christ. Of course we should strive to do our work well, and help each other when we fall short. Certainly we do well to acknowledge and celebrate the outstanding achievements of some among us. But even as we do this we need to remember that in the largest sense not a scrap of all that we do is of ultimate importance. Of our own initiative and by our own powers, we can accomplish nothing of lasting significance. Yet in all that we do God works through us, reconciling us to God in Jesus Christ and advancing the kingdom of righteousness and peace. Let me underscore my point by a passage from a new book by popular religious writer Robert Farrar Capon, The Astonished Heart (Eerdmans, 1996): To begin with, Christianity is not a religion; it’s the end of all religion. Religion is a human activity dedicated to the job of reconciling God to humanity and humanity to itself. The Gospel, however–the Good News of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ—is the astonishing announcement that God has done the whole work of reconciliation without a scrap of human assistance. It is the bizarre proclamation that religion is over, period. All the efforts of the human race to straighten up the mess of history by plausible religious devices–all the chicken sacrifices, all the fasts, all the mysticism, all the moral exhortations, all the threats–have been canceled by God for lack of saving interest. More astonishingly still, their purpose has been fulfilled, once and for all and free for nothing, for by the totally non- religious death and resurrection of a Galilean nobody. Admittedly, Christians may use the forms of religion–but only because the church is the sign to the world of God’s accomplishment of what religion tried (and failed) to do, not because any of the church’s devices can actually get the job done. (p. 2)
Please join me, therefore, in a joyful celebration of how little we know and how little we can achieve. For from that knowledge flows the joy of a life dedicated to hard tasks and hard questions, confident in the knowledge that neither our wisdom nor our achievements are finally in our hands but in the hands of the One who made us and sustains us daily in love.
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/philosophy/writings/couri.htm
C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, a commentary by William Griffin
The Whos and Whats of Mere Christianity
Millions of people have read Mere Christianity, but few can give forthright answers to the following two questions:
WHAT IS MERE CHRISTIANITY?
The words “Mere Christianity” weren’t original to Lewis. In the seventeenth century Richard Baxter, an Anglican divine with Puritan predilections, used the words “Mere Christianity” in his book The Saints’ Everlasting Rest. The work was something like the sixteenth-century Spaniard Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises in that it prepared the soul, through a series of measured steps, for its heavenly home. The first ten chapters described Heaven, who’ll be there and who won’t, and why one must pursue Heaven strenuously while on earth. The last six chapters prescribed the Anglican method, with Puritan overlay, of pursuing the heavenly, and indeed heavily contemplative, life.
Nor did the concept of “Mere Christianity” originate with Lewis. In the sixteenth century, Richard Hooker created a distinctive theology for a denomination that needed one—the new Anglican Church—and the prose he did it in was masterful. As Lewis said in English Literature of the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, “The style is, for its purpose, perhaps the most perfect in English.”
Of Hooker’s masterwork, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a multi-volume work published in the 1590s, Lewis had this to say:
Hooker had never heard of a religion called Anglicanism. He would never have dreamed of trying to “convert” any foreigner to the Church of England. It was to him obvious that a German or Italian would not belong to the Church of England, just as an Ephesian or Galatian would not have belonged to the Church of Corinth.
Hooker is never seeking for “the true Church,” never crying, like Donne, “Show me, deare Christ, thy spouse.” For him no such problem existed. If by “the Church” you mean the mystical Church (which is partly in Heaven), then of course, no man can identify her. But if you mean the visible Church, then we all know her. She is “a sensibly known company” of all those throughout the world who profess one Lord, One Faith, and one Baptism.
Sometime in 1943, Lewis began making the words “Mere Christianity” his own. That was in his Introduction to St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, translated from the Greek by his friend Sister Penelope Lawson, CSMV. “The only safety [against the theological errors in recently published books],” wrote Lewis, “is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity (‘mere Christianity’ as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective.”
In 1952 Lewis used the words again, this time in a book title. Mere Christianity was the overarching title for the BBC Radio talks, which had already been published in three books: The Case for Christianity, published in England under the title Broadcast Talks (1943), Christian Behavior (1943), and Beyond Personality (1945).
In the Preface to this combined work, Lewis gave a descriptive definition of Mere Christianity.
Ever since I became a Christian, I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbors was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.
Is Mere Christianity, then, a denomination?
Clearly, Mere Christianity isn’t a denomination, but if it isn’t, how may one describe it?
If one were to make a pie chart using a real pie—a really good pork pie or game pie available at most British pubs in Lewis’s time—the slices would stand for the denominations (Methodist, Anglicans, Presbyterians, etc.), and the size of the slices would indicate the membership, greater or lesser depending on the day the pie was sliced. Where is Mere Christianity on this chart? It’s not any individual slice, but one may discover it if one describes a small circle with the focal point at the center of the pie.
This concentric circle, crossing as it does all the denominational lines, constitutes what may be called Mere Christianity. It’s omni-denominational in one sense, and yet in another, it’s nulli-denominational. It looks like a pork pie, tastes like a pork pie, and yet, centered around the center, it smacks of Heaven for all Christians. Now you taste it, now you don’t. It’s how you cut the pie. And Lewis cut it circularly.
“It is at her center,” wrote Lewis in as generous a spirit as Hooker’s, “where her truest children dwell, that each communion is really closest to every other in spirit, if not in doctrine. And this suggests that at the center of each there is something, or a Someone, who against all divergences of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice.”
WHO IS A MERE CHRISTIAN?
If there’s such a thing as Mere Christianity, but if Mere Christianity isn’t a denomination, then can there be such a thing as a Mere Christian? I’ve yet to meet one. I presume there are many, but there’s no way to count them or indeed no reason to hold them to account. There’s no sacrament to mark them as MCs (if I may so abbreviate), no membership card, no sacred certificate declaring baptism or marriage, no profane piece of paper stating birth or death. Hence, the MC, if he or she exists, is an invisible, mysterious, perhaps even mystical, being.
I suppose a case could be made that one who buys a copy of Mere Christianity is an MC, in potency if not already in act, but even here there’s a fallacy. One is not what one reads. One may approach the cash register or cash point with a book plainly entitled Homosexuality, and not be a homosexual, no matter what the snoops in the line may think; and the same holds true for the purchaser of Mere Christianity.
After all, Democrats buy books by Republicans, and Tories buy books by Laborites. The obese buy diet books, and the obtuse buy how-to books. Hence, it’s not much of a hop, skip, and jump to Christians who buy copies of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian or A.N. Wilson’s Against Religion: Why We Should Try to Live Without It. All readers buy books in order to know, not necessarily to follow. Which is another way of saying that buying a copy of Mere Christianity however ostentatiously, and reading it, however surreptitiously, and stashing it under one’s pillow. however superstitiously, doesn’t make one an MC.
But if one takes the contents of Mere Christianity to heart and tries to put into practice some of its prescriptions, then one may be well on his or her way to becoming a bonafide MC. But who would know? Not many, if any. How, then, would one MC identify another? There’s no secret handshake, no variation in the Sign of the Cross. But Jesus Christ would know, and if that’s the case, that’s really all that matters.
http://www.explorefaith.org/lewis/mere.html
Albert Jay Nock, Forgotten Man of the Old Right
Albert Jay Nock, Forgotten Man of the Old Right
by Jeffrey A. Tucker
For an earlier generation of American dissidents from the prevailing ideology of left-liberalism, a rite of passage was reading Albert Jay Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, which appeared in 1943. William F. Buckley was hardly alone in seeing it as a seminal text crucial to his personal formation.
Here it is in one package, an illustration of the level of learning that had been lost with mass education, a picture of the way a true political dissident from our collectivist period thinks about the modern world, and a comprehensive argument for the very meaning of freedom and civility – all from a man who helped shape the Right’s intellectual response to the triumph of FDR’s welfare-warfare State.
It was destined to be a classic, read by many generations to come. But then the official doctrine changed. Instead of seeing war as part of the problem, as a species of socialism, National Review led the American Right down a different path. Nock’s book was quickly buried with the rise of the Cold War State, which required that conservatives reject anything like radical individualism – even of Nock’s aristocratic sort – and instead embrace the Wilson-FDR values of nationalism and militarism.
Instead of Nock’s Memoirs, young conservatives were encouraged to read personal accounts of communists who converted to backing the Cold War (e.g. Whittaker Chambers), as if warming up to the glories of nukes represents some sort of courageous intellectual step. To the extent that Nock (1870–1947) is known at all today, it is by libertarians, and for his classic essay Our Enemy, The State (1935), and his wonderful little biography, Mr. Jefferson (1926). Both are great works. He was also the founder of The Freeman in its first incarnation (1920–1924), which held to the highest literary standards and provoked unending controversy with its sheer radicalism.
However, it is with the Memoirs, this wonderful little treatise – part autobiography, part ideological instructional – that we are given the full Nockian worldview, not just his politics but his culture, his life, and his understanding of man and his place in the universe. The book makes a very bracing read today, if only because it proves how little today’s “conservative movement” has to do with its mid-century ancestor in the Old Right. It is also instructive for libertarians to discover that there is more to anarchism than childish rantings against the police power.
The phrase Man of Letters is thrown around casually these days, but A.J. Nock was the real thing. Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, he was homeschooled from the earliest age in Greek and Latin, unbelievably well read in every field, a natural aristocrat in the best sense of that term. He combined an old-world cultural sense (he despised popular culture) and a political anarchism which saw the State as the enemy of everything that is civilized, beautiful, and true. And he applied this principle consistently in opposition to welfare, government-managed economies, consolidation, and, above all else, war.
In the introduction to my edition, Hugh MacLennan compares the Memoirs to The Education of Henry Adams, and expresses the hope that it will “one day be recognized as the minor classic it really is.” Well, I can predict that this time is not coming soon. Given its contents, consistency, relentless truth telling, and, above all, its sheer persuasive power, it is a wonder that the book is in print and that we are even allowed to read it.
To follow Nock, what traits must a man of the Right have? He must be both fiercely independent and believe in the power of social authority; he must love tradition but hate the State and everything it does; he must believe in radical freedom while never doubting the immutability of human nature and natural laws; he must be anti-materialist in his own life while defending economic freedom without compromise; he must be an elitist and anti-democrat yet despise elites who hold illicit power; and he must be realistic about the dim prospects for change while still retaining a strong sense of hope and enthusiasm for life.
I’m not sure I can think of anyone but Murray Rothbard who consistently upheld the Nockian position after Nock’s death, and it is his Memoirs that provides a full immersion in his genius. Consider Nock’s main literary device: to take a commonplace subject, make a casual and slightly quirky observation about it, one that wins your affections, and then surprise and shock by driving the point to score a deadly blow against some great evil that is widely taken for granted:
“Another neighbor, a patriarchal old Englishman with a white beard, kept a great stand of bees. I remember his incessant drumming on a tin pan to marshal them when they were swarming, and myself as idly wondering who first discovered that this was the thing to do, and why the bees should fall in with it. It struck me that if the bees were as intelligent as bees are cracked up to be, instead of mobilizing themselves for old Reynolds’ benefit, they would sting him soundly and then fly off about their business. I always think of this when I see a file of soldiers, wondering why the sound of a drum does not incite them to shoot their officers, throw away their rifles, go home, and go to work.”
In the course of his 325-page narrative, he employs this casual device again and again, until you begin to get the message that there is something profoundly wrong with the world, and the biggest thing of all is the State. In Nock’s view, it is the State that crowds out all that is decent, lovely, civilized. He demonstrates this not through deduction but through calm and entertaining tales of how rich and varied and productive life can be when the State does not interfere.
In a society without the State, for example, the “court of tastes and manners” would be the thing that guides the operation of society, and this “court” would have a much larger role in society than law, legislation, or religion. If such a court were not in operation, because people are too uncivilized or too ill-educated to maintain it, there was nothing the State could do to uplift people. No matter how low a civilization is, it can only be made to go lower through State activity.
Though an old-school Yankee of the purest-bred sort, he completely rejected what came to be the defining trait of his class: the impulse to try to improve others through badgering and coercion:
“One of the most offensive things about the society in which I later found myself was its monstrous itch for changing people. It seemed to me a society made up of congenital missionaries, natural-born evangelists and propagandists, bent on re-shaping, re-forming and standardizing people according to a pattern of their own devising – and what a pattern it was, good heavens! When one came to examine it. It seems to me, in short, a society fundamentally and profoundly ill-bred. A very small experience of it was enough to convince me that Cain’s heresy was not altogether without reason or without merit; and that conviction quickly ripened into a great horror of every attempt to change anybody; or I should rather say, every wish to change anybody, for that is the important thing. The attempt is relatively immaterial, perhaps, for it is usually its own undoing, but the moment one wishes to change anybody, one becomes like the socialists, vegetarians, prohibitionists; and this, as Rabelais, says, ‘is a terrible thing to think upon.’”
Given such views, it is hardly surprising that he had nothing but contempt for politics, which then and now seeks not to only manage society but manage thought as well:
“My first impression of politics was unfavorable; and my disfavor was heightened by subsequently noticing that the people around me always spoke of politics and politicians in a tone of contempt. This was understandable. If all I had casually seen…was of the essence of politics, if it was part and parcel of carrying on the country’s government, then obviously a decent person could find no place in politics, not even the place of a ordinary voter, for the forces of ignorance, brutality and indecency would outnumber him ten to one.”
But, with Nock’s infallible flair for radicalism, his logic takes him further down the anarchist road:
“Nevertheless there was an anomaly here. We were supposed to respect our government and its laws, yet by all accounts those who were charged with the conduct of government the making of its laws were most dreadful swine; indeed, the very conditions of their tenure precluded their being anything else.”
Nock is capable of surprising readers who think they might be able to anticipate the biases of a traditionalist-anarchist. Sometimes old-style, rightist aristocrats who wax eloquent on the virtues of tradition fall into strange left-wing habits of extolling the environment as something glorious and virtuous on its own, and somehow deserving of being left alone. Nock had no interest in this strange deviation. Consider his experience with the woods and nature:
“In those years [living in rural areas] I undoubtedly built up and fortified the singular immunity to infirmity and disease which has lasted all my life; but in those years also my congenital indifference to nature in the wild, natural scenery, rocks, rills, woods and templed hills, hardened into permanent distaste. Like the Goncourts, I can see nature only as an enemy; a highly respected enemy, but an enemy. ‘I am a lover of knowledge,’ Socrates said, ‘and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country.’”
Nock was thus not an American Tory by any stretch, though his cultural outlook was as high-brow as any landed aristocrat’s. What’s more, unlike the socialist anarchists and most conservatives of today, Nock believed in and understood the crucial importance, even centrality, of economic liberty:
“If a regime of complete economic freedom be established, social and political freedom will follow automatically; and until it is established neither social nor political freedom can exist. Here one comes in sight of the reason why the State will never tolerate the establishment of economic freedom. In a spirit of sheer conscious fraud, the State will at any time offer its people ‘four freedoms,’ or six, or any number; but it will never let them have economic freedom. If it did, it would be signing its own death-warrant, for as Lenin pointed out, ‘it is nonsense to make any pretence of reconciling the State and liberty.’ Our economic system being what it is, and the State being what it is, all the mass verbiage about ‘the free peoples’ and ‘the free democracies’ is merely so much obscene buffoonery.”
In fact, he understood even technical points of economics that are completely lost on most conservatives today. Here is Nock on the 1920s bubble economy:
“Many no doubt remember the ‘new economics’ hatched in the consulship of Mr. Coolidge, whereby it was demonstrated beyond question that credit could be pyramided on credit indefinitely, and all hands could become rich with no one doing any work. Then when this seductive theory blew up with a loud report in 1929, we began to hear of the economics of scarcity, the economics of plenty, and then appeared the devil-and-all of ‘plans,’ notions about pump-priming, and disquisitions on the practicability of a nation’s spending itself rich…. Ever since 1918 people everywhere have been thinking in terms of money, not in terms of commodities; and this in spite of the most spectacular evidence that such thinking is sheer insanity. The only time I was ever a millionaire was when I spent a few weeks in Germany in 1923. I was the proud possessor of more money than one could shake a stick at, but I could buy hardly anything with it.”
And on fiscal policy:
“Another strange notion pervading whole peoples is that the State has money of its own; and nowhere is this absurdity more firmly fixed than in America. The State has no money. It produces nothing. It existence is purely parasitic, maintained by taxation; that is to say, by forced levies on the production of others. ‘Government money,’ of which one hears so much nowadays, does not exist; there is no such thing. One is especially amused at seeing how largely a naïve ignorance of this fact underlies the pernicious measures of ’social security’ which have been foisted on the American people. In various schemes of pensioning, of insurance against sickness, accident, unemployment and what-not, one notices that the government is supposed to pay so-much into the fund, the employer so-much, and the workman so-much…. But the government pays nothing, for it has nothing to pay with. What such schemes actually come to is that the workman pays his own share outright; he pays the employer’s share in the enhanced price of commodities; and he pays the government’s share in taxation. He pays the whole bill; and when one counts in the unconscionably swollen costs of bureaucratic brokerage and paperasserie, one sees that what the workman-beneficiary gets out the arrangement is about the most expensive form of insurance that could be devised consistently with keeping its promoters out of gaol.”
A special contribution of Nock’s book is his comprehensive critique of the pre-New Deal reform movements that culminated in the Progressive Era. Though he had once identified himself as a true liberal in the Jeffersonian sense, he was a close observer of the early stages of liberalism’s corruption, when it came to mean not liberty but something else entirely. He saw the essential error that the liberal movement was making:
“Liberals generally – there may be have exceptions, but I do not know who they were – joined in the agitation for an income-tax, in utter disregard of the fact that it meant writing the principle of absolutism into the Constitution. Nor did they give a moment’s thought to the appalling social effects of an income-tax; I never once heard this aspect of the matter discussed. Liberals were also active in promoting the ‘democratic’ movement for the popular election of senators. It certainly took no great perspicacity to see that these two measures would straightway ease our political systems into collectivism as soon as some Eubulus, some mass-man overgifted with sagacity, should maneuver himself into popular leadership; and in the nature of things, this would not be long.”
In time, of course, the liberal reform movement began to adopt a mild version of the class-war rhetoric of the socialist left, and the longer this went on, the more the political process came to be a struggle not between liberty and power but between two versions of State domination:
“What I was looking at was simply a tussle between two groups of mass-men, one large and poor, the other small and rich, and as judged by the standards of civilized society, neither of them any more meritorious or promising than the other. The object of the tussle was the material gains accruing from control of the State’s machinery. It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it; and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalized privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.”
From Nock’s point of view, the Great Depression and the two world wars saddled America with a new faith in the State, and along with it came a shift in people’s loyalties, from themselves, their families, and communities to the Grand National Project, whatever it may be. We see the same thing today on the right and left, when questioning any aspect of the war on terrorism gets you branded as a heretic to the national religion. Nock would have nothing to do with it:
“I am profoundly thankful that during my formative years I never had contact with any institution under State control; not in school, not in college, nor yet in my three years of irregular graduate study. No attempt was ever made by anyone to indoctrinate me with State-inspired views – or any views, for that matter – of patriotism or nationalism. I was never dragooned into flag-worship or hero-worship, never was caught in any spate of verbiage about duty to one’s country, never debauched by any of the routine devices hatched by scoundrels for inducing a synthetic devotion to one’s native land and loyalty to its jobholders. Therefore when later the various aspects of contemporary patriotism and nationalism appeared before me, my mind was wholly unprepossessed, and my view of them was unaffected by any emotional distortion.”
What, then, is patriotism, if not faith in one’s government? Can patriotism be considered a virtue at all to the civilized man, and, if so, in what does it consist. Consider this passage of immense power:
“What is patriotism? Is it loyalty to a spot on a map, marked off from others spots by blue or yellow lines, the spot where one was born? But birth is a pure accident; surely one is in no way responsible for having been born on this spot or on that. Flaubert had poured a stream of corrosive irony on this idea of patriotism. Is it loyalty to a set of political jobholders, a king and his court, a president and his bureaucracy, a parliament, a congress, a Duce or Fuhrer, a camorra of commissars? I should say it depends entirely on what the jobholders are like and what they do. Certainly I had never seen any who commanded my loyalty; I should feel utterly degraded if ever once I thought they could. Does patriotism mean loyalty to a political system and its institutions, constitutional, autocratic, republican, or what-not? But if history has made anything unmistakably clear, it is that from the standpoint of the individual and his welfare, these are no more than names. The reality which in the end they are found to cover is the same for all alike. If a tree be known by its fruits, which I believe is regarded as good sound doctrine, then the peculiar merit of a system, if it has any, ought to be reflected in the qualities and conditions of the people who live under it; and looking over the peoples and systems of the world, I found no reason in the nature of things why a person should be loyal to one system rather than another. One could see at a glance that there is no saving grace in any system. Whatever merit or demerit may attach to any of them lies in the way it is administered.
“So when people speak of loyalty to one’s country, one must ask them what they mean by that. What is one’s country? Mr. Jefferson said contemptuously that ‘merchants have no country; the mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.’ But one may ask, why should I? This motive of patriotism seems to me perfectly sound, and if it should be sound for merchants, why not for others who are not merchants? If it holds good in respect of material gains, why not of spiritual gains, cultural gains, intellectual and aesthetic gains? As a general principle, I should put it that a man’s country is where the things he loves are most respected. Circumstances may have prevented his ever setting foot there, but it remains his country.”
In the early years of the American republic, patriotism and loyalty were primarily directed toward one’s town or county, because it was very likely the place that the things one loves are most respected. Something like national patriotism was unknown. It came to be imposed under consolidation. Under today’s conservative view of patriotism, that our loves must be dictated by the State, there would be no argument against the idea that we ought to be patriotic toward Nato or the UN. Nock had this to say about global consolidation:
“Some of the more adventurous spirits, apparently under the effects of Mr. Wilson’s inspiration, went so far as to propose educating all mankind into setting up a World State which should supersede the separatist nationalist State; on the principle, so it seemed, that if a spoonful of prussic acid will kill you, a bottleful is just what you need to do you a great deal of good.”
Nock would also be dissident on the Right today concerning the freedom of association, which he saw as the very essence of freedom itself.
“I know, however, that the problem of no minority anywhere can be settled unless and until two preliminaries are established. First, that the principle of equality before the law be maintained without subterfuge and with the utmost vigor. Second, that this principle be definitively understood as carrying no social implications of any kind whatever. ‘I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following,’ said Shylock; ‘but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.’ These two preliminaries demand a much clearer conception of natural as well as legal rights than I think can ever prevail in America.”
Nock is sometimes presented as a brooding man who despaired for his country. There seems to be truth in that, but what’s most impressive is how he managed to keep his chin up and find personal joy in fighting evil, or at least exposing it as much as possible.
“All I have done towards the achievement of a happy life, has been to follow my nose…I learned early with Thoreau that a man is rich in proportion to the numbers of things he can afford to let alone; and in view of this I have always considered myself extremely well-to-do. All I ever asked of life was the freedom to think and say exactly what I pleased, when I pleased, and as I pleased. I have always had that freedom, with an immense amount of uncovenanted lagniappe thrown in; and having had it, I always felt I could well afford to let all else alone. It is true that one can never get something for nothing; it is true that in a society like ours one who takes the course which I have taken must reconcile himself to the status of a superfluous man; but the price seems to me by no means exorbitant and I have paid it gladly, without a shadow of doubt that I was getting all the best in the bargain.”
There are aspects of Nock that call for correction. His views on marriage and the family are highly unconventional, for example, and he sometimes takes his notion of the “remnant” too far, appearing to endorse passivity in the face of rising despotism, for example. He refused to join any antiwar movements, not because he disagreed with their goal but because he didn’t believe his participation would do any good.
But here is where his example is more instructive than his theory: Nock fought against the State with the most powerful weapons he had, his mind and his pen. Despite his claim, he was not superfluous at all, but essential, even indispensable, as are all great libertarian intellectuals.
Pass the Memoirs on to a twenty-year-old student and you stand a good chance of arming him against a lifetime of nonsense, whether it comes from the tedious Left that loves redistribution and collectivism or the fraudulent Right that is completely blind to the impossibility of reconciling war and nationalism with the true American spirit of freedom.
Isaiah’s Job by Albert Jay Nock
Isaiah’s Job
by Albert Jay Nock
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 can not 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 favourite 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 can not 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, labouring 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 fervour; 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 can not 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 twenty-four hours a day for eighteen 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 eighteenth 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 favourable 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 centred 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 favour 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 favour, 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 favour, 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 tough 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 two thousand years hence, or two hundred 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 seven thousand 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 seven thousand out of a million is a highly encouraging percentage for any prophet. With seven thousand 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 seven thousand, 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 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.
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 centred 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.
This essay first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1936.
Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) was an influential American libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic. Murray Rothbard was deeply influenced by him, and so was that whole generation of free-market thinkers.
