Today, I had the good fortune to meet Mr. Albert Jay Nock. Jonah Goldberg introduced me to him. [Full Text] As it turns out Nock is a remarkable, indifferent “liberal” who never sought an audience, but figured his audience would find him.
He put it this way: “The wise social philosophers were those who merely hung up their ideas and left them hanging, for men to look at or to pass by, as they chose. Jesus and Socrates did not even trouble to write theirs out, and Marcus Aurelius wrote his only in crabbed memoranda for his own use, never thinking anyone else would see them.”
In watching the advance of statism in the 1930s, whether cloaked in National Socialism, Communism or even Roosevelt’s New Deal, he likened his task to that of Isaiah. In a 1936 Atlantic essay “Isaiah’s Job” he wrote:
“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 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"”. [Full Text]
But that was written in the 1930s. Today things are different, as Goldberg pointed out:
“And that is why the Right is in so much better shape than it was during Nock’s time, even as liberals are mounting a statist revival. Yes, statism is on the march again, but anti-statism isn’t an amusing pursuit for cape-wearing exotics like Nock anymore; it is the animating spirit of institutions launched and nourished by lovers of liberty. Retreating into the Nockian cocoon of the good life may be appealing, but it is morally defensible only if creeping collectivism is impervious to resistance. Moreover, the American people are not nearly as Neolithic as Nock believed, proof of which can be found in the slow and uneven unraveling of statism since his death, as with the still-unfinished Reagan Revolution. This, again, explains why liberals can be nostalgic for Nock while lamenting what has become of his successors: Nock was content with failure, his heirs are not.”
