Isaiah's Job
March 1936
Albert Jay Nock
Editor?s note: With
socialist, communist and other collectivist governments everywhere, the
American journalist Nock was deeply pessimistic, yet here he expressed
confidence that a small number of friends of liberty, whom he called
?the Remnant,? would somehow keep the ideals alive.
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 insasmuch 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 of be he lowly, rich or poor, prince
or pauper -- gets off very badly. He appears as not only weak-minded and
weak-willed, but as by consequence knavish, arrogant, grasping,
dissipated, unprincipled, unscrupulous.
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 tedius 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 reknown 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 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.
Soi 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.
Source: Albert Jay Nock, Free
Speech and Plain Language (New York: William Morrow, 1937), pp.
248-265.
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