A mixed bag of essays--some odd, some striking, some tremendously insightful--from an early 20th century libertarian author and thinker. The best of the collection is "Anarchist's Progress" where the author describes losing his innocence about the nature, purpose and ethics of the modern State--a journey and a loss of innocence that many of us are going through in this era.
"Artemus Ward"
* Artemus Ward (born 1983, died 1867 at age 33) as one of America's great early humorists.
* "Ward was a first-class critic of society; and he has lived for a century by precisely the same power that gave a more robust longevity to Cervantes and Rabelais." Nock urges readers "to reëxamine the work of a first-rate critic, who fifty years ago [from 1924, thus referring to the 1870s] drew a picture of our civilization that in all essential aspects is still accurate."
* Interesting references to Baldwinsville, NY, under the stresses of the American Civil War.
* Interesting thoughts here distinguishing between intelligence and genuine understanding: comparing the understanding of highly educated men with the understanding of an uneducated man who saw reality for what it was, experts (and pedants) versus practical people who lived in the day-to-day world.
This is quite an interesting piece of literary criticism and style criticism. For example, Nock writes about Artemus Ward's "joyful appraisal, assessment, and representation." That there was a singular joy in how he observed and humorously rendered social criticism, cleanly, efficiently and with genuine joy, even though during his era there was very little joy in society. "But the true critic has his resources of joy within himself, and the motion of his joy is self-sprung. There may be ever so little hope of the human race, but that is the moralist's affair, not the critic's. The true critic takes no account of optimism or pessimism; they are both quite outside his purview; his affair is one only of joyful appraisal, assessment, and representation."
* On the importance of writing with a proper "temper" or a "persuasive amiability" in order to reach your reader. Great thoughts here on rhetoric, what works, what doesn't, why it works, etc.
"The Decline of Conversation"
Observing (accurately!) how Americans talk about the particular, the mentally tangible, things like the business they're in, the things that they're doing for work; how to an American, anything else is navelgazing; how American's simply don't like to talk (like Europeans do) about ideas or ideals.
* In fact if you try to force an American into a conversation about ideas/ideals, they'll be weirded out by you, they'll think you're some kind of Commie pinko.
"On Making Low People Interesting"
* An essay on the decline of literature, on the shallowness of modern literature, something as true in the 1920s, apparently, as it is today!
* On how Charles Dickens could make a character "interesting enough to remember" in a mere paragraph; whereas it require 300 pages of description in a modern [i.e., 1920s-era] psychological novel to do the same...and likely the character still wouldn't be as interesting.
* A bit of a "kids these days" essay on an evergreen topic: how modern American culture is shallow and boring to the point where there's nothing interesting enough for an artist even to do anything with it: "I, therefore, suggest, with all possible delicacy, that hopes of the 'great American novel' are extravagant. This art requires great subjects; and the life about us does not provide them. It requires a very special order of correspondence between the artist and his environment; and the life about us does not promote this or even permit it. Our civilization, rich and varied as it may be, is not interesting."
"A Cultural Forecast"
* On the vapidity of American culture; how it's just true that it's vapid and shallow, there's nothing you can really do about it, and even the highest of our culture is something like the Chautauqua Institution, mocked by William James as a sort of manufactured artifice of culture. But at the end of the day it is what it is and artists of the period (after all, you can't help that you're in the period that you're in) have to simply create. This essay is another "statement of mourning" about lowbrow American culture.
"Towards a New Quality-Product"
* Questioning certain central assumptions about education, "...we tacitly assume that education and instruction are the same thing, whereas they are really quite different."
* On how fundamental conventions of certain institutions are left alone, are never brought under discussion: they're like the water that we swim in (think about HOA boards, the structure of town councils, the two-party system, etc., no one ever asks why are they structured this way, what does this structure imply, and should we even have this in the first place?
* "The Fathers of the Republic were well aware of the difference between a republic and a democracy, and it is no credit to the intelligence of their descendants that the two are now almost invariably confused." Ouch. He's right.
* Exposing a pupil to instruction is not the same as educating that pupil, the effect of the exposure "may quite well be no more than the effect of exposing a duck's back to rain."
* Questioning the fact that everybody ought to go to school, or questioning the fact that everybody ought to go to college: the idea is borderline seditious, yet it presumes that all children are "schoolable" and, per Nock, this assertion is "flagrantly at variance with fact."
* Think of a system like Henry Ford's motor car plant: the raw materials are students coming in and the output is "educated people," but if you have mass inflow of a wide range of quality of raw material you're not going to be able to make cars that work at all, the system cannot function on the lowest common denominator.
* The author goes through examples of writing from students at a large American University who were presumably literate and intelligent. "Diabetes was Milton's Italian friend."
* On the difference between formative knowledge (knowledge that "forms" us) and instrumental (functional, vocational, professional) knowledge; we mistakenly assume instrumental knowledge is all we really need; we also mistakenly assume that this instrumental knowledge will "do duty" for formative knowledge; or that we even confuse the two forms of knowledge totally.
* When we switched our education system to one of mass production the idea was that we would make people who would fit where they were needed in our labor markets (meaning instrumental knowledge would produce chemists, engineers, doctors, lawyers, workers of whatever form needed).
* Formative knowledge was discarded or left in vestigial form, because we want to prepare our students not for the world but for the workforce.
* Nock walks through an experiment he would like to perform of running a small university of 250 students where the only requirements for entrance would be:
+ knowledge of arithmetic and algebra up to quadratics,
+ the ability to read and write Greek and Latin
+ and nothing else
And then the test of this experiment would be to see how the graduates stood after their lives in all-around ability, enlightenment, character, general culture, good judgment, and good sense "compared with those of their contemporaries otherwise trained." An interesting thought experiment where you teach using only Lindy-like materials.
* He shares this idea with an English friend who responds: "As I understand your scheme, you are planning to breed a batch of cultivated, sensitive beings who would all die six months after they were exposed to your actual civilization." (!!!)
"Anarchist's Progress"
* The author's loss of innocence about the function, purpose and effectiveness of the State.
* Nock starts by discussing his journey learning to distinguish between the law and genuine ethics; he sees a judge throw a lad into prison even though it the judge himself openly state that it was the wrong thing to do, but the law left him no option; Nock thus discovers "the primary intention of government was not to abolish crime but nearly to monopolize crime" and "no better device could be found for doing it" than the inculcation of a purely legalistic frame of morals; thus morality and ethical decisions will be dealt with from a bureaucratic perspective, rather than from the humanity or decency of officials in that bureaucracy.
* He learns about the sausage factory of how legislative bodies work. "I was even more impressed by the prevalent air of cynicism; by the frankness with which everyone seem to acquiesce in the view of Voltaire, that government is merely a device for taking money out of one person's pocket and putting it into another's."
* "The way of the politician is 'a long step removed from common honesty.'" quoting Abraham Lincoln.
* Also: "Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on office, a rottenness begins in his conduct." --Thomas Jefferson
* English parliamentarian John Bright noting "that he had sometimes known the British Parliament to do a good thing, but never just because it was a good thing." That's a money quote right there, worth remembering.
* This essay reads like something Jonathan Swift would write, it's quite good.
* Nock also notes that everybody disparages politics, saying "oh that's just politics," but these same people at the same time still manage to assume somehow "that politics existed for the promotion of the highest social purposes." "They assumed that the State's primary purpose was to promote through appropriate institutions the general welfare of its members."
* [I don't want this to be true, but yet it unfortunately is true that it yields a far more accurate model of reality to presume, a priori, that the State hates you, hates us, hates us all; it's fascinating (and eerie) how much more accurate your predictions will be of what a State will do once you adopt this "prediction model" as a default!]
* In interesting metaphor for the true vs presumed nature of the State in his discussion of a harrow that people call a plow. We're told it is a plow, but it's really a harrow, and when we use it to plow all it really does is harrow. "Surely such a spectacle would make an intelligent being raise some inquiry about the nature and original intention of that machine." And yet no one ever asked this "about the nature and original intention of the State."
* Some real money quotes here: "Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime that I spoke of a moment ago, and that it makes the monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien. There is, for example, no human right, natural or Constitutional, that we have not seen nullified by the United States Government."
* The author reads Francis Parkman's book The Conspiracy of Pontiac and notes how Parkman was puzzled by the fact that the Indians never formed a State; Thomas Jefferson remarked the same; Nock notes also that Marx in Capital "that economic exploitation cannot take place in any society until the exploited class has been expropriated from the land." "These observations attracted my attention as possibly throwing a strong side light upon the nature of the State and the primary purpose of government, and I made note of them accordingly."
* "I was struck with the fact that the republican, constitutional-monarchical and autocratic States behaved exactly alike."
* [See my note above on predictive models for State behavior] Nock also notes that it's far more predictive to just assume that the political class was a criminal organization, you can much more easily predict precisely what it would do--otherwise you couldn't predict what they would do at all... This is a pretty funny observation, but also disturbing: "...if in any given circumstances one went on the assumption that they were a professional-criminal class, one could predict with accuracy what they would do and what would happen; while on any other assumption one could predict almost nothing."
* On the State's tendency towards working against the general welfare of the people: "The general upshot of my observations, however, was to show me that whether in the hands of Liberal or Conservative, Republican or Democrat, and whether under nominal constitutionalism, republicanism or autocracy, the mechanism of the state would work freely and naturally in but one direction, namely: against the general welfare of the people."
* "The State did not originate in any form of social agreement [see for example what Rousseau argues in The Social Contract], or with any disinterested view of promoting order and justice. Far otherwise. The State originated in conquest and confiscation, as a device for maintaining the stratification of society permanently into two classes--an owning and exploiting class, relatively small, and a propertyless dependent class. Such measures of order and justice as it established were incidental and ancillary to this purpose; it was not interested in any that did not serve this purpose; and it resisted the establishment of any that were contrary to it."
* Nock on the two ways to create wealth: the economic means or political means; economic means = from your own labor or capital; "political means" = using the state as a mechanism to expropriate wealth from those who produce it via economic means. The State produces a twisted incentive here is to get out of producing wealth by economic means and instead and get into the method of producing it politically [in other words get inside the machine; think of it like a type of Cantillon effect]. "This instinct--and this alone--is what gives the state its almost impregnable strength. The moment one discerns this, one understands the almost universal disposition to glorify and magnify the State and to insist upon the pretense that it is something which it is not--something, in fact, the direct opposite of what it is."
* "Mr. Jefferson said that if the centralization of power were ever effected at Washington, the United States would have the most corrupt government on earth." Holy cow was this ever a predictive statement.
"On Doing the Right Thing"
* Nock noting various Mark Twain-like differences between Americans and English: "each assumes that they have a common language, when actually they have nothing of the kind... Indeed, I believe they would come to nearer a real understanding of each had to learn a new language to get on with."
* The idea that laws don't dictate morality but most of us confuse the law with morality; and that under freedom you can actually develop a true moral compass. If your morality is driven by a legal code or by an authoritarian system it's not really morality, likewise under true freedom you get certain paradoxes like people would have the freedom both to drink themselves to death, or to not drink at all.
* Likewise note the presumptions underlying a legalist/authoritarian view where it is assumed that without all their rules, laws and controls civilization "would at once begin to thieve and murder and generally misconduct itself if the restraints of law and authority were removed." [You could easily derive other second order effects of this legalist view: you'd have "rule cascades" and "goal displacements" happening constantly for example (for more on this, see The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller).]
"A Study in Manners"
* On rediscovering and revising history: Nock hears a candidate in the campaign of 1924 who claimed that the Founding Fathers "had established a government of the people, for the people, and by the people." (!!! That is hilarious.) "The Founding Fathers, in fact, did no such thing--far from it. They had the greatest horror of popular government; they dreaded it like the plague... Their enthusiasm for popular government was about as strong as the late Judge Gary's or Mr. Pierpont Morgan's, and had the same motive."
* The author notes an intriguing event in 1800 when New York State's legislature flipped to anti-federalists; Hamilton wrote to Governor John Jay urging him to recall the legislature (which would subvert the will of the people, but it would save the national election for the Federalist Party since New York's electoral power at that time would have easily put Jefferson in the Presidency). Hamilton famously said "In times like these in which we live, it will not do to be over-scrupulous." "Governor Jay did not move in the matter" despite his distaste for Jefferson and dislike of his populism, he considered it unbecoming, ill-mannered, to do something like this.
* The idea of manners as much more than just deportment, covering an entire range of conduct.
* See also Baron Tauchnitz paying full royalties to foreign authors in the days before international copyright as another example: "[Tauchnitz] was governed by a sense of manners; for no law compelled him to pay anything."
* The idea of manners that hold people to a standard, rather than relying on legalistic rules and laws to shape and dictate morality. An aristocratic type of comportment; something per Nock that is one of the very few useful holdover qualities from a properly functioning aristocracy.
"Thoughts on Revolution"
* Nock runs into a friend in Paris who he hadn't seen in a long time; the friend had been involved in Russia during the Revolution, and had kind of lost his intellectual and ethical bearings while there: "I am sure there isn't a man in it who was not bent solely on doing his level best for the masses of Russia," the friend claims.
* "The real revolution takes place when the shift of economic power is effected from one class in society to another."
* In the United States, a discussion of whether farmer/labor/planting interests should be above or below the interests of bankers/industrialists; note that resolving this took almost a century, banking and industrial power drafted the Constitution and controlled it for the first ten years or so of American history, but then was dislodged under Jefferson (and then dislodged still further by Andrew Jackson later); then with the "second revolution" (meaning the Civil War) agricultural interests were flattened once and for all. [This is quite an interesting way to think about power shifts in the United States!!]
* "The only intelligent revolution is one you keep brewing all the time." Nock had a lot of foresight about Russia here.
"To Youngsters of Easy Means"
* On how people today are patrons of the arts but don't practice them and are ignorant of them in ways they aren't even aware of. Nock encourages rich, leisured people to practice--rather than fund--the arts.
* "I know that if I were a rich man I would do precious little with endowing institutions, and content myself with nosing out individuals of the right sort, and endowing them."
To Read:
The Complete Works of Artemus Ward (public domain; free on Kindle)
The works of Sherwood Anderson
William Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Turgenev: First Love
Willa Cather: The Song of the Lark
Francis Parkman: The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada
**Charles A. Beard: Rise of American Civilization
**Franz Oppenheimer: The State
Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France
Samuel Butler: The Way of All Flesh
Harry Johnston: The Man Who Did the Right Thing
Vocab! (Holy cow there were some world-class words in this book)
energumens: a fanatical devotee ("the energumens of Mr. Wilson's political formulas")
factitious: something that is contrived, even though it is based on fact
chlorotic: anemic, iron deficient
aselgeia: unbridled lust, excess, licentiousness, lasciviousness, wantonness, outrageousness, shamelessness, insolence
sculch: trash, junk, rubbish
brummagem: cheap, showy, or counterfeit ("a vile brummagem substitute for the genuine article")
in limine: literally "on the threshold"; as a preliminary matter, at the outset
credenda: doctrines to be believed; articles of faith (as distinguished from "agenda")
flagitious: criminal; villainous
equipollent: equal or equivalent in power, effect, or significance
atrabilious: melancholy or ill-tempered (literally "affected by black bile)
peculium: The savings of a son or a slave, with the father's or master's consent; a little property or stock of one's own; a special fund for private and personal use
adventitious: happening or carried on according to chance, rather than design or inherent nature ("my adventures were always adventitious, always thrust on me")
nugatory: trifling, of no value