The Genial Mr. Nock; E. Opitz

BRING TOGETHER the shades of Er asmus, Shakespeare and Goethe and try to imagine what they would do. Play poker? Visit the Stock Ex change? Absurd! They would talk together. The precious converse of noble minds is the most truly hu man of all human relations, and de mands at least as much artistry as Kreisler brought to the Mendels sohn 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 fi nesse to any discussion. Nock loved good talk; kindled by a responsive companion he was a brilliant con versationalist. He loved good food as well, but a meal was primarily a 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 Capi talism: Allies, Not Enemies. Edmund A. Opitz The Genial Mr. Nock means of lubricating the flow of ideas.

To the table hie brought a mind trained and tuned to concert pitch, a mind well stockep 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 pundi ts of the nine teenth and twentieth centuries. Having framed: his convictions in dependent of an(Y 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 contem poraries as a man of monumental prejudices, almost an anachronism. Convictions or prejudices, Nock orchestrated his brilliantly, and 686 THE FREEMAN November would on occasion-I am told-dis course over food barely touched while his dinner companion downed a hearty meal. "Lingering over the ta ble," writes Felix Morley, "we touched on many subjects, all ofthem irradiated by the light of his bril liant mind and mellowed by the warmth of his personality." "Ideas never failed him," Ellery Sedgwick adds. "Others have their store houses of learning, but Nock's men tal files were available on the in stant. The classics, all of them one might say, French memoirs, learn ing 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 con sists in the quality of life that is lived there, and this quality shows plain est 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 com ing 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 Hfe." It's a cultivated way of handling leisure, and it has a syn ergistic effect on the people in volved-provided they meet Rabe lais' test, being "free, well-born, well bred, and conversant in honest com panies." For it is the amiable who shall possess the earth, sang the Psalmist CPs. 37); not the sectaries who see things through the distort ing lens of the ego and try to con script every idea into the service of a faction. The True Believer cannot become a good conversationalist, for "conversation depends on a copious ness of general ideas and an imagi nation 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 offine 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 1982 THE GENIAL MR. NOCK 687 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 theol ogy, 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 visi ble 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 wri ter .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 catch ing up with him! Autobiographyof Ideas Nock was a virtuoso in these mat ters, and we shall not see his like again. But we can follow his devel opment as meticulously set forth· by the man himself in Memoirs ofa Superfluous Man. 1jhis book (whose ti tle 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 re jected with annoyance-until a friend suggested "a purely literary and philosophical autobiography." Nock fell in with this j notion because, as he said, "every person of any intel lectual quality develops some sort of philosophy of existence; he acquires certain settled views of life and of human society; and ifhe would trace out the origin and course of the ideas contributory to that philosophy, he might find it an interesting ven ture." Thus, the Memoirs, "the au tobiography of a,mind in relation to the society in which it found itself."

11....·.' ";" The N',',.•!oCkian Society, "~.~. .. 30 South Broadway, . " J Irvington, N.V. 10533, offers Nock's Memoirs at a discount price of $3.00. Nock closes his final chapter, pri vacy still intact; but the attentive reader's mind has been subtly in vaded, and it wOluld be a dull fellow indeed who could!deny that the hours spent with this book were not among his mostmemoI1'able reading expe riences. Nock discourses on educa tion, literature~ women, politics, economics, religion and death, and he does so in 'matchless, eighteen 688 THE FREEMAN November 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 per son'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 col umn 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 tes timony to the nature of our civiliza tion; 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 scholar ship, 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 Atlan tic, and The American Mercury.

World War II brought him perma nently 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 in formed, or some one will, but I fore see I shall not be writing much at length. On his last day Lord Hough ton said, 'I am going to join the ma jority' and you know how I always prefer the minority.' Witty fellow!" The minority lost AJN on the nine teenth of August, nineteen hundred forty five. It is Nock's attitude toward life that chiefly interests us, the de mands he put upon it, his expecta tions 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 famil iar testimony of Sir Isaac Newton: "I do not know what I may appear to 1982 THE GENIAL MR. NOCK 689 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 ordi nary, 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 im portance 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 sen ses, 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 con tact 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 con tact 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 pos ture 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 pre occupation-writing, reading, edi torial work, cQnvivial relations. "They have helped the truth along without encumbering it with them selves," 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 ap proach. Most of our contemporaries are arrayed on the other side of the fence. They are what H. G. Wells used to refer to as "gawqsakers." Nervously apprehensive that the world is about to go to hell in a handbasket the typ ical Modern runs around yelling "For gawdsake let's dd 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 an nounced a new role for the intellect.

No more for us j the old delights of knowledge to be' enjoyed for its own sake; mankind has come of age, hav ing graduated '~from knowledge as an esthetic enjQyment of the prop erties of nature regarded as a work 690 THE FREEMAN November of divine art, to knowing as a means of secular control ... [Nature] is now something to be modified, to be in tentionally controlled." Mr. Nock would have none of this, for he knew that a culture which denies or perverts the claims of in tellect and knowledge will pay dearly for it. So, within the limits of his native reserve he took a refined de light 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 ap praisal, assessment, and represen tation," 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 to gether in this world."

Underlying an attitude such as this is a profound confidence in the cos mic process. The Universe is biased in our favor so we are entitled to en joy 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 bo nus, a by-product of men and women pursuing with some measure of suc cess the life goals appropriate to hu man nature. If the major social in stincts and drives are not given harmonious and balanced expres sion the society is warped and un lovely 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 civi lization mired in "economism" is the result. This is a consequence of ideas, wrong ideas, and any cure must be gin by repairing our faulty think ing. 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, watch ing one such series of events unfold, pointed to the person who had set them in motion and remarked sar castically: "I knew· that man would save the world, but I did not know he'd do it so soon!" The only enduring reforms are 1982 THE GENIAL lV1R. NOCK 691 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 disqui sition; his teaching method is para bolical. 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 be gin to understand how vast are the regions beyond conscious human control and how well things function in those realms. Turn to the essay entitled "Snor ing as a Fine Art" found in the col lection bearing that title. General Kutusov commanded the Russian forces arrayed against Napoleon. No question about Kutusov's compe tence 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 con tends, 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 an other-as Kutusov knew they would-and virtually engineered their own defeat.

The point is that some people have the ability to quiet the conscious in tellect and let other parts of the mind supply guidance. Nock is more nearly on his own ground when he cites the instance of Wordsworth. "Words 'worth unquestionably had some thing; and when: he was content to leave that something in charge of his poetical operations-when he reso lutely bottled up the conscious and intellectual Wordsworth, and corked it down-he was a truly great poet. When he summoned up the con scious 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 di rection was simply awful." Nock does not disparage the intel lect and the "knowing" peculiar to it when he writes: "Socrates knew nothing, and was proud of it. He car ried the magnificent art of Not Knowing to the jlegallimit, and oh, my dear friend, ,what an incompar ably great and splendid art that is!"

It has been pOInted out by Michael Polanyi and others that there is a 692 THE FREEMAN November "tacit dimension" in all knowledge, that in any epistemological situa tion 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 dis tinction between Pedantry and Cul ture. "The pedant's learning re mains too long on the surface of his mind; it confuses and distorts suc ceeding impressions, thus aiding him only to give himself a conventional account of things, rather than leav ing his consciousness free to pene trate 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 dis interested play over any object pre sented to it." And this, Nock affirms, "Means acquiring a vast deal of use less knowledge, and then forgetting it."

Nock is talking about residual knowledge, so thoroughly known that we do not need to attend to it; it at tends 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 con scious intellect to point out that there is layer upon layer of mind beyond the intellect, and that for some pur poses 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 ani mosities, alarm no pride of opinion, nor do they seek to beat a person off 1982 THE GENIAL MR. NOCK 693 his chosen ground-under their in fluence 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 col umn called "Miscellany," using the pseudonym Journeyman. These va grant paragraphs were later col lected and published as The Book of Journeyman. Nock viewed contem porary 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 rail lery played over them all. He sur veyed 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 powe~s and his potential.

In the course o~ this survey we've picked up only a jfew bits and pieces as we've skirted the shore ofthe 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 delight ful. 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 i agrees that "edu cate" is not a transitive verb. The only education i$ self-education and Albert Jay Nock has already blazed that trail. , IDEAS ON LIBERTY THERE IS NO social engineering that can radicallyirenovate a civilization and change its character, and at the same time keep it going, for civili zation is an affair of the human spirit, and the direction of the human spirit cannot be reset by means that are, after aU, mechanical. The best thing is to follow the order of nature, and let a, moribund civilization simply rot away, and indulge what hope one can that it will be followed by one that is better. This is the course that nature will take with such a civilization anyway, in spite of anything we do or do not do. Revolts, revolutions, dictatorships, experiments and i~novations in political practice, all merely mess up this process and imake it a sadder and sorrier business than it need be. They are only so much machinery, and machinery will not express anything beyond the intentions and char acter of those who run it.

ALBERT J. NOCK, A Journal ofForgotten Days Glenn L. Pearson Socialism Eats the Seed Grain ONE of the moral tragedies of social ism is that its economics is not built on savings, but on consumption. And this, also, is one of the main reasons it always has failed and always will fail. Economic failure is tragic be cause it means deprivation that can disrupt human plans and go even so far as to take human lives. In fact, starvation is a common aspect of life in countries where some type or an other of socialism has been in oper ation long enough to have dissipated whatever wealth had accumulated prior to the socialist takeover. In those countries where poverty was already present when socialism was introduced, such as in some post World War II African nations, starMr. Pearson is recently retired after many years of writing and teaching at Brigham Young University and the Church Education System of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.