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The
Reverend Mr. Opitz is a member of the staff of The Foundation for Economic
Education, a seminar lecturer, and author of the book, Religion and
Capitalism: Allies, Not Enemies.
Bring together the shades of Erasmus, Shakespeare and Goethe and try to imagine
what they would do. Play poker? Visit the Stock Exchange? Absurd! They would
talk together. The precious converse of noble minds is the most truly human of
all human relations, and demands at least as much artistry as Kreisler brought
to the Mendelssohn Concerto. It need not be argued that Albert Jay Nock belongs
on the same plane as the aforementioned to assert that he was of their spirit
and that he did bring a considerable finesse to any discussion. Nock loved good
talk; kindled by a responsive companion he was a brilliant conversationalist. He
loved good food as well, but a meal was primarily a means of lubricating the
flow of ideas. To the table he brought a mind trained and tuned to concert
pitch, a mind well stocked with ideas gleaned from great literature and
broadened by wide experience here and on the continent.
Nock’s ideas were perhaps not so original as he was, but he had made them his
very own; his thinking ran along lines quite at variance with the familiar
channels scooped out by the popular pundits of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Having framed his convictions independent of any school or party, he
was able to view the intellectual passions and battles of the day with clinical
detachment. Consequently, he appeared to many of his contemporaries as a man of
monumental prejudices, almost an anachronism.
Convictions or prejudices, Nock orchestrated his brilliantly, and would on
occasion—I am told—discourse over food barely touched while his dinner
companion downed a hearty meal. “Lingering over the table,” writes Felix
Morley, “we touched on many subjects, all of them irradiated by the light of
his brilliant mind and mellowed by the warmth of his personality.” “Ideas
never failed him,” Ellery Sedgwick adds. “Others have their storehouses of
learning, but Nock’s mental files were available on the instant. The classics,
all of them one might say, French memoirs, learning polite and impolite,
everything neatly classified and pigeonholed.”
All this is as it should be. In “The Decline of Conversation,” an essay in
the collection entitled On Doing the Right Thing, Nock remarks that
“The civilization of a country consists in the quality of life that is lived
there, and this quality shows plainest in the things people choose to talk about
when they talk together, and in the way they choose to talk about them.” In
good conversation there is a symphonic quality, themes and variations, a
blending and harmony of widely ranging minds which take delight in ideas for
their own sake, minds able to play freely over and around ideas without
prepossession and willing to follow an argument wherever it leads them. In a
debate there’s a loser, but in a discussion there are only winners.
Nock projected some quality—we’d call it charisma today—which caused those
in his company to surpass themselves. “You find yourself coming out with
things you didn’t know you had it in you to say,” recalls a friend.
A Living with Others
Conversation is “a living with others,” the dictionary tells us, “a manner
of life.” It’s a cultivated way of handling leisure, and it has a
synergistic effect on the people involved—provided they meet Rabelais’ test,
being “flee, well-born, well bred, and conversant in honest companies.” For
it is the amiable who shall possess the earth, sang the Psalmist (Ps. 37); not
the sectaries who see things through the distorting lens of the ego and try to
conscript every idea into the service of a faction. The True Believer cannot
become a good conversationalist, for “conversation depends on a copiousness of
general ideas and an imagination able to marshal them.” It’s an intellectual
dance of reciprocal inspiration, exhibiting “a power of disinterested
reflection, an active sense of beauty, and an active sense of manners.” AJN
thought of his Freeman as a sort of conversation, “a fellowship of fine
minds in all parts of the globe.”
Nock came into full possession of his powers during his editorship of The
Freeman, 1920- 1924, from his fiftieth to his fifty-fourth year. He had had
a solid grounding in the classics at St. Stephens, and his valedictory address
to the class of ‘92 reveals a remarkably disciplined mind for one so young. He
went on to earn a graduate degree in theology, then furthered his education
informally during the next two decades by reading and travel—steeping himself
in the worlds of scholarship, culture, and affairs.
As his inner life ripened the visible man followed suit; slim, poised and
assured, impeccably attired—a commanding presence. He became the Albert Jay
Nock his friends knew during his Freeman days and after; a man of immense
reserve, a person around whom legends cluster, a writer whose erudition and
prose style earned him a select following—larger now than the corporal’s
guard he had a generation ago. It was not in him to become a popular thinker and
writer; he wrote for the Remnant and tried to do a solid body of work for the
future. “The first rate critic’s business,” he wrote, “is to anticipate
the future, work with it, and look exclusively to it for his dividends.” The
future Nock worked for is catching up with him!
Autobiography of Ideas
Nock was a virtuoso in these matters, and we shall not see his like again. But
we can follow his development as meticulously set forth by the man himself in Memoirs
of a Superfluous Man. This book (whose title summons up Turgenev) is not an
autobiography in the usual sense of that term. Every suggestion that he write a
book about his life was rejected with annoyance—until a friend suggested “a
purely literary and philosophical autobiography.” Nock fell in with this
notion because, as he said, “every person of any intellectual quality develops
some sort of philosophy of existence; he acquires certain settled views of life
and of human society; and if he would trace out the origin and course of the
ideas contributory to that philosophy, he might find it an interesting
venture.” Thus, the Memoirs, “the autobiography of a mind in relation
to the society in which it found itself.”
Nock closes his final chapter, privacy still intact; but the attentive
reader’s mind has been subtly invaded, and it would be a dull fellow indeed
who could deny that the hours spent with this book were not among his most
memorable reading experiences. Nock discourses on education, literature, women,
politics, economics, religion and death, and he does so in matchless,
eighteen-carat English prose, spiked with apt quotations and laced with
allusions. Nearly a lifetime of reflection had been spent on each of the topics
here aired, and this book is Nock’s final statement and testament. It is the
book by which he will be finally judged, the one in which he himself took most
satisfaction. It is a book to be enjoyed and then mastered; and as the dyer’s
hand is stained by the medium he works in so does the magic of the Memoirs
work on a person’s whole outlook and philosophy.
His Life Abroad
Nock’s Freeman has an enviable reputation in American journalism,
ranked as the high water mark by many. After four glorious years it ceased
publication with its issue of March 5, 1924, having bade farewell to its
readership a month earlier. An item in AJN’s final Miscellany column offers a
rueful reflection on the contemporary civilization.
Nock notes that deep grooves are worn in the wooden counters of the change
booths in the older elevated railway stations, and muses, “There seems
something symbolic about them. They are in their way, a testimony to the nature
of our civilization; they are our counterpart of the grooves worn in the stone
steps of European cathedrals by the feet of innumerable devotees.” With this
parting shot he left these shores to live and work abroad for long periods
during the next fifteen years. These were fruitful years, marked by his
brilliant Rabelais scholarship, his classic essay on Jefferson and another on
Henry George, his book on the State, A Journal of These Days, and
numerous articles in magazines like Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The
American Mercury. World War II brought him permanently back to these shores,
where he lived his final years.
A month before his death he wrote to a friend, “I have been really quite ill,
feeble and worthless, and have now reached the point of letting the quacks roll
up their sleeves and do their worst . . . I’ll keep you informed, or some one
will, but I foresee I shall not be writing much at length. On his last day Lord
Houghton said, ‘I am going to join the majority, and you know how I always
prefer the minority.’ Witty fellow!” The minority lost AJN on the nineteenth
of August, nineteen hundred forty five.
It is Nock’s attitude toward life that chiefly interests us, the demands he
put upon it, his expectations of what it had to offer him, his tactical approach
as he sought to avail himself of its bounty. Open the Memoirs. It is a
fair presumption that the quotation Nock selected for the title page of this
book had a special meaning for him. We read the familiar testimony of Sir Isaac
Newton: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to
have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself in now
and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the
great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered around me.”
The seashore is broad enough to support a related analogy, having to do with the
search for truth. This time imagine that the man at the water’s edge is blind.
He’s just been told that a message of enormous importance from someone he
loves is written in the sand in Braille, and that the incoming tide will soon
obliterate it. There’s no time to spare, so no wasted motion! Loss of vision
has keyed up the man’s other senses, and the heightened expectancy generated
by this crisis situation pushes alertness and sensitivity still higher. But he
restrains himself. He knows that if he thrusts his fingers too rudely against
the sand his contact with the letters will erase them; so, he gets himself out
of the way and deliberately, with the utmost delicacy, eases his hands over the
sand until he establishes tactile contact with the Braille, at which point he
brings all his finesse into play and lets the message seep through his
fingertips.
Alert-Passivity
This points to the attitude or posture of alert-passivity, of
interest-affection, which some people are occasionally able to bring to bear.
Nock exemplified this kind of receptivity no matter what his immediate
preoccupation—writing, reading, editorial work, convivial relations. “They
have helped the truth along without encumbering it with themselves,” said
Artemus Ward of men of his stripe. Nock was fond of this sentence, for it
defined his style, and suited his temperament. Would his style have been
different if Nock had been one of Sheldon’s mesomorphs, inclined toward
somatotonia? The speculation is vain. He was what he was, and we can say only
that bodily make up and chemistry did not stand in the way of his characteristic
approach.
Most of our contemporaries are arrayed on the other side of the fence. They are
what H. G. Wells used to refer to as “gawdsakers.” Nervously apprehensive
that the world is about to go to hell in a handbasket the typical Modern runs
around yelling “For gawdsake let’s do something!” He has wearily accepted
the joyless task of straightening out the cosmos, and the first step is to
improve others. The incomparable John Dewey gave us marching orders when he
announced a new role for the intellect. No more for us the old delights of
knowledge to be enjoyed for its own sake; mankind has come of age, having
graduated “from knowledge as anesthetic enjoyment of the properties of nature
regarded as a work of divine art, to knowing as a means of secular control . . .
[Nature] is now something to be modified, to be intentionally controlled.”
Mr. Nock would have none of this, for he knew that a culture which denies or
perverts the claims of intellect and knowledge will pay dearly for it. So,
within the limits of his native reserve he took a refined delight in people and
things as they really are, to be enjoyed for their own sake. He knew that joy is
not only the first fruit of the spirit but the first business of the critic as
well; “his affair is one only of joyful appraisal, assessment, and
representation,” as he put it in the essay on Artemus Ward. Nock goes on to
say, “that for life to be fruitful, life must be felt as a joy; that it is by
the bond of joy, not of happiness or pleasure, not of duty or responsibility,
that the called and chosen spirits are kept together in this world.”
Underlying an attitude such as this is a profound confidence in the cosmic
process. The Universe is biased in our favor so we are entitled to enjoy the
scene while nature takes its course. This is not dull passivity; it is akin to
the alert-passivity a skilled horticulturalist displays as he nurses along an
exotic bloom in order that the plant might become what it really is. The
Reformer forgets that only God—or Nature—can make a tree . . . or a society.
Society is not some entity that can be gotten at directly to improve it; a good
society is a bonus, a by-product of men and women pursuing with some measure of
success the life goals appropriate to human nature. If the major social
instincts and drives are not given harmonious and balanced expression the
society is warped and unlovely as a result.
The social drives in Nock’s catalog are five in number, and he indicts modern
culture for allowing the claims of only one of them. The claims of intellect and
knowledge have been disallowed; likewise the claims of beauty and poetry,
religion and morals, social life and manners. Only the instinct for making money
and getting on in the world has been turned loose, he charges, and a
civilization mired in “economism” is the result. This is a consequence of
ideas, wrong ideas, and any cure must begin by repairing our faulty thinking.
Society cannot be improved by working on the level of events; once things have
gotten this far they are in the past tense. Reformers work on events, which is
why the world is periodically wrecked by those who set out to save it.
Talleyrand, watching one such series of events unfold, pointed to the person who
had set them in motion and remarked sarcastically: “I knew that man would save
the world, but I did not know he’d do it so soon!”
The only enduring reforms are those which take place below the surface of
events; that’s where the future is being born. And all you can reform there is
yourself—provided you start early enough and live long enough. The only thing
you can do for “society,” Nock contends, is to present it with one reformed
unit. Having sounded this hopeful note, what was Nock to do except declare for
superfluity?
Letting Things Alone
It is not Nock’s way to make a point by means of a philosophical disquisition;
his teaching method is parabolical. He let people alone and he let things alone,
believing that there are forces at work in them which make for integration and
growth—if we don’t interfere. Interfering comes naturally, however; letting
things alone is an acquired skill. A taste for this skill seeps in as we begin
to understand how vast are the regions beyond conscious human control and how
well things function in those realms.
Turn to the essay entitled “Snoring as a Fine Art” found in the collection
bearing that title. General Kutusov commanded the Russian forces arrayed against
Napoleon. No question about Kutusov’s competence or his courage, but why
didn’t he provide some action? Why didn’t he engage the French army head on
and give Napoleon a thorough trouncing? Why did he snore through staff meetings?
Well, Nock contends, it was because the General was playing hunches; he
“sensed” what the little Corsican was going to do—and that’s what
Napoleon did! The French made one blunder after another—as Kutusov knew they
would—and virtually engineered their own defeat.
The point is that some people have the ability to quiet the conscious intellect
and let other parts of the mind supply guidance. Nock is more nearly on his own
ground when he cites the instance of Wordsworth. “Wordsworth unquestionably
had something; and when he was content to leave that something in charge of his
poetical operations—when he resolutely bottled up the conscious and
intellectual Wordsworth, and corked it down he was a truly great poet. When he
summoned up the conscious Wordsworth, however, and put it in charge, as
unfortunately he of ten did, the conscious Wordsworth was such a dreadful old
foo-foo that the poetry churned out under its direction was simply awful.”
Nock does not disparage the intellect and the “knowing” peculiar to it when
he writes: “Socrates knew nothing, and was proud of it. He carried the
magnificent art of Not-Knowing to the legal limit, and oh, my dear friend, what
an incomparably great and splendid art that is!”
It has been pointed out by Michael Polanyi and others that there is a “tacit
dimension” in all knowledge, that in any epistemological situation we actually
know more than we are consciously aware of. A great diagnostician examines a
patient and, in addition to observing specific symptoms, takes in the person as
a whole before offering his conclusion. After the conscious intellect has done
its job you work from the “gut,” the place where you store “useless”
knowledge.
Acquiring Vast Knowledge–and then Forgetting It
The essay entitled “The Value of Useless Knowledge,” found in the collection
entitled Free Speech and Plain Language, draws a sharp distinction
between Pedantry and Culture. “The pedant’s learning remains too long on the
surface of his mind; it confuses and distorts succeeding impressions, thus
aiding him only to give himself a conventional account of things, rather than
leaving his consciousness free to penetrate as close as possible to their
reality, to see them as they actually are . . . Culture’s methods,” on the
other hand, “are those of exercising the consciousness in a free and
disinterested play over any object presented to it.” And this, Nock affirms,
“Means acquiring a vast deal of useless knowledge, and then forgetting it.”
Nock is talking about residual knowledge, so thoroughly known that we do not
need to attend to it; it attends to us. Analogously, years of training have
educated a pianist’s fingers to the point where, if he tried to direct them
individually over the keyboard, they’d rebel and refuse to play even the
simplest melody. It is not to diminish the role of the conscious intellect to
point out that there is layer upon layer of mind beyond the intellect, and that
for some purposes the intellect must be stilled if we would avail ourselves of
this pool of “useless knowledge.” When this thought finally sinks in the
Social Planner with his “rational controls” will be an extinct breed. Adam
Smith’s Invisible Hand can be trusted, the market works, there’s coherence
in the nature of things and its wisdom is put at the service of those willing to
cooperate with it.
An essay in Snoring invokes the court jester to illustrate the tactic.
The jester, because of his outlandish appearance and his wry humor, could say
things to the king which would cost the court philosopher his head. Today’s
counterpart of the fool is the cartoonist and the witty newspaper paragrapher.
Nock says he gets more sound sense out of these men than from the editorial
writers, for the best of them have “an intuitive sense of the plain natural
truth of things,” and they deliver it up to us in a mode we can accept.
“They arouse no animosities, alarm no pride of opinion, nor do they seek to
beat a person off his chosen ground—under their influence his ground
imperceptibly changes with him.”
Suzanne LaFollette was the editor of The New Freeman, which began
publication with the issue of March 15, 1930, and ran for a little more than a
year. Nock contributed a column called “Miscellany,” using the pseudonym
Journeyman. These vagrant paragraphs were later collected and published as The
Book of Journeyman. Nock viewed contemporary American culture with a
critical eye, finding little to like in it. He referred to it as an idea-less
world. Education, music, manners, religion, business, politics—his raillery
played over them all. He surveyed Europe and reflected ruefully that everything
about it he admired came out of a philosophy at variance with his own. Besides
sound theory, he muses, you have to have the right kind of people to work it,
and where are you going to get ‘em? We look for a new formula when what is
needed is a new vision of the human person, his powers and his potential.
In the course of this survey we’ve picked up only a few bits and pieces as
we’ve skirted the shore of the main body of Nock material; the next step has
to be total immersion. He’s to be read, mainly because he’s fun to read;
even when he’s wrong he’s delightful. Most of the time he is right, I
believe; his judgments are sound. And the spirit and temper which pervade his
pages gently nag at the reader until he agrees that “educate” is not a
transitive verb. The only education is self-education and Albert Jay Nock has
already blazed that trail. []
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