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And Perhaps May Eat Me

From Albert Jay Nock, “The Politician’s Opinion of You,” The American Mercury, December, 1936

Edmund Burke, probably the greatest British statesman of all time, once wrote a letter to the Duke of Richmond, criticizing his political associates. He said they were good routineers, first-rate on pushing legislation, strong on winning elections, but no good whatever “on that which is the end and object of all elections, namely: the disposing our people to a better sense of their condition.”

In the language of the street, that seems to be distinctly a new one on us. We never heard that candidates and campaign-managers were supposed to do anything like that, or that elections were held for any such object. Burke’s idea was that the true purpose of an election is to make the people look themselves over and see what sort of folk they actually are, and where they actually stand; and the business of candidates and campaign-managers and politicians generally is to help them do that. His complaint was that his fellow-politicians did not seem to get that idea. He said in some bitterness on another occasion that as things stood, the main business of a politician was “still further to contract the narrowness of men’s ideas, to confirm inveterate prejudices, to inflame vulgar passions, and to abet all sorts of popular absurdities”; and as things stand with us, that is precisely the main business of a politician now.

In the light of the recent election, it might be a good thing for us to put these two sayings of Burke side by side, and think them over. Did our politicians do anything that would enable us to get a better understanding of our actual condition as a people? Not a hand’s turn; not even with regard to our economic condition. On the contrary, they did everything they could to mislead and confuse our understanding, for party purposes. Did they do or say anything to enlarge our ideas, to soften our prejudices, to allay our vulgar passions and discourage our absurdities? Nothing; on the contrary, they justified Burke’s complaint in every particular. Consequently the election has left us with our understanding of our own condition as incorrect and distorted as their best efforts could possibly make it. No wonder Henry Adams said he was going to the Fijis, “where the natives eat one another, and perhaps may eat me, but where they do not have any Presidential elections.”

(The complete series of Nock’s essays for The American Mercury can be found at IWP Books).

To Cover the Shame of Others

From The Essays of Montaigne (tr. Donald Frame)

Catalus Luctatius, in the war against the Cimbrians, after making every effort to stop his soldiers from fleeing before the enemy, himself joined the fugitives and played the coward, so that they should seem rather to be following their captain than fleeing from the enemy. That was abandoning his reputation to cover the shame of others.

The Generic Roosevelt

From Albert Jay Nock, “Progress toward Collectivism,” The American Mercury, February, 1936

An acquaintance said to me the other day that he did not believe the country could stand another four years under Mr. Roosevelt. I said I had no opinion about that; what I was sure of was that no country could stand indefinitely being ruled by the spirit and character of a people who would tolerate Mr. Roosevelt for fifteen minutes, let alone four years. I was of course speaking of the generic Roosevelt; the personal Roosevelt is a mere bit of the Oberhefe which specific gravity brings to the top of the Malebolge of politics. He does not count, and his rule does not count. What really counts is the spirit and character of a people willing under any circumstances whatever to accept the genus, whether the individual specimen who offers himself be named Roosevelt, Horthy, Hitler, Mussolini, or Richard Roe.

(The complete series of Nock’s essays for The American Mercury can be found at IWP Books).

notre jardin

from albert jay nock, memoirs of a superfluous man

I have known many persons, some quite intimately, who thought it was their duty to take “the social point of view” on mankind’s many doings and misdoings, and to support various proposals, mainly political, for the mass-improvement of society. One of them is a friend of long standing who has done distinguished service of this kind throughout a lifetime, and is directly responsible for the promulgation of more calamitous and coercive “social legislation” than one could shake a stick at. In a conversation with me not many months ago, this friend said mournfully, “My experience has cured me of one thing. I am cured of believing that society can ever be improved through political action. After this, I shall “cultivate my garden.”

Il faut cultiver notre jardin. With these words Voltaire ends his treatise called Candide, which in its few pages assays more solid worth, more informed common sense, than the entire bulk of nineteenth-century hedonist literature can show. To my mind, those few concluding words sum up the whole social responsibility of man. The only thing that the psychically-human being can do to improve society is to present society with one improved unit. In a word, ages of experience testify that the only way society can be improved is by the individualist method which Jesus apparently regarded as the only one whereby the Kingdom of Heaven can be established as a going concern; that is, the method of each one doing his very best to improve one.

In practice, however, this method is extremely difficult; there can be no question about that, for experience will prove it so. It is also clear that very few among mankind have either the force of intellect to manage this method intelligently, or the force of character to apply it constantly. Hence if one “regards mankind as being what they are,” the chances seem to be that the deceptively easier way will continue to prevail among them throughout an indefinitely long future. It is easy to prescribe improvement for others; it is easy to organise something, to institutionalise this-or-that, to pass laws, multiply bureaucratic agencies, form pressure-groups, start revolutions, change forms of government, tinker at political theory. The fact that these expedients have been tried unsuccessfully in every conceivable combination for six thousand years has not noticeably impaired a credulous unintelligent willingness to keep on trying them again and again. This being so, it seems highly probable that the hope for any significant improvement of society must be postponed, if not forever, at any rate to a future so far distant that consideration of it at the present time would be sheer idleness.

Contact, Verb

From Wilson Follett (1966), Modern American Usage (ed. Jacques Barzun)

Persons old enough to have been repelled by the verb contact when it was still a crude neologism may as well make up their minds that there is no way to arrest or reverse the tide of its popularity. Persons young enough to have picked up the word without knowing that anyone had reservations about it may as well make up their minds that a considerable body of their elders abominate it and would despise themselves if they succumbed to the temptation to use it. In this converted noun we have the perfect example of a coinage that has thirty or forty more years of intolerance to face from a dwindling minority of conservatives while enjoying the full approval — and, more important, the increasing use — of a growing majority that will eventually be unanimous. This clash of generations — a forlorn cultural resistance or a healthy disposition to make the most of linguistic growth, according to how you look at it — is one of the standard phenomena of change.

If in doubt, contact your physician — this locution is as natural to the American of thirty as it is grotesque to the American of sixty, for whom the idea of surfaces touching is the essence of contact. The elderly can therefore see no fitness and no use for the word in its new sense, when the vocabulary already provides consult, ask, approach, get in touch with, confer with, and simply see. Their juniors can perceive no point in forgoing so plainly useful an invention.

The conservative retains one advantage: no one insists that he must use contact, and if he sticks to consult and other inconspicuous synonyms no one will even notice his abstention. But this argument is unlikely to persuade the addicts of contact, who exploit the word because it sounds brisk and comprehensive.

Two other ‘vogue words’ in the same category of nouns converted into verbs for ‘dynamic’ reasons are implement and process. A plan or program is implemented when supplied with the practical apparatus — appropriations, staff, schedule, or what not — needed to carry it out. The word is perhaps a shade less harsh than contact, very likely because of its analogy with tool and retool, standard words for a factory’s preparing to undertake new or increased production. With implement the layman can sound technical. As for the second word, an application, request, memorandum, or some other document is processed when it goes through the usual sequence of consideration, approval, and execution. The word sounds as if it should mean something more exact than considered, appraised, weighed, handled, studied, dealt with, etc., but does it?

It is to be noted that all three of these currently fashionable verbs — contact, implement, process — belong to the proliferating vocabulary of bureaucratic organization, the patter of officialdom. This is a linguistic medium that practically everyone not immersed in it systematically mocks, but meanwhile its toxic properties undermine our resistance, and in the end contemporary speech becomes, regardless of the occasion, more and more bureaucratic.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

From Scholia to an Implicit Text

Democratic parliaments are not sites for debate but places where the people’s absolutism records its edicts.

The authenticity of the feeling depends on the clarity of the idea.

Refusing to admire is the token of the beast.

The more serious the problems, the greater the number of incompetents democracy summons to solve them.

For a democrat, freedom does not entail being able to say all he thinks but not having to think all he says.

As the waters of this century rise, delicate and noble feelings, voluptuous and fine pleasures, discreet and profound ideas take shelter in certain unique souls, like the survivors of the Flood upon a few silent summits.

Boundless tolerance is nothing but a hypocritical form of surrender.

Human warmth diminishes in a society as its legislation is perfected.

For fools, obsolete opinion and wrong opinion are synonymous.

Modern man is certain that he lives amidst a pluralism of opinions, whereas what prevails today is an asphyxiating unanimity.

Public political debate is not intellectually adult in any country.

A politician never says what he believes to be true, but what he deems to be effective.

Not one of the summit historical ages has been planned. Reformers can only be credited with mistakes.

The secret yearning of every civilised society is not to abolish inequality but to educate it.

The problem of increasing economic inflation would have a solution if modern mentality did not oppose an invincible resistance to any attempt to restrict human greed.

Modern mentality is a child of human pride inflated by commercial advertising.

Modern machines are every day more complicated, and modern man is every day more elementary.

What proves most striking about modern enterprises is the incongruity between the hugeness and intricacy of the technological paraphernalia and the almost nothingness of the end products.

When the populace awakes, first they shriek, then get drunk, plunder, murder, and finally go back to sleep.

A limitless naivety is required to be able to believe that the improvement of any social condition may be otherwise than slow, gradual, and unprompted.

Where Christianity disappears, greed, envy, and lust contrive a thousand ideologies to justify themselves.

Nothing is so important that it does not matter how 1t is written.

Writing is the only way of putting some distance between oneself and the century one had no choice but to be born in.

E. M. Forster on Desmond MacCarthy

Published as a Pamphlet in 1952, by the Mill House Press

I have not many recollections of the early Desmond MacCarthy, but fortunately I can clearly remember the first time we met. It was about fifty years ago, in Cambridge, and at one of those little discussion-societies which are constantly being born and dying inside the framework of the university. They still continue, I am glad to say, and I know that he too would be glad.

This particular society was called the Apennines. Its invitation-card displayed a range of mountains, and there was also a pun involved, upon which I will not expatiate. I had to read a paper to the Apennines, then I was pulled to pieces, and among my critics was a quiet, dark young man with a charming voice and manner, who sat rather far back in the room, and who for all his gentleness knew exactly what he wanted to say, and in the end how to say it. That was my first impression of him, and I may say it is my last impression also. The young man became an old one and a famous one, but he remained charming and gentle, he always knew his own mind, and he always sat rather far back in the room. Compare him in this respect with that trenchant critic Mr. So-and-So, or with that chatty columnist Sir Somebody Everything, who always manage to sit well in front. I do not think it was modesty on Desmond’s part that made him retiring. He just knew where he wanted to be. Some years after the Apennines, when he was doing literary journalism, he chose for a pseudonym the name “Affable Hawk.” Nothing could have been more apt. He was affable to his fellow writers, whenever possible. But if a book was shallow or bumptious or brutal, then down pounced the hawk, and the victim’s feathers flew.

He and I were always friendly and I stayed with him in Suffolk in those far-off days, and elsewhere later on, but all my vivid memories of him are in a group with other people. So let us now move from Cambridge to London. There, in the early years of this century, I remember a peculiar organisation which had been formed for the purpose of making Desmond write his novel. He wanted to write his novel. He could talk his novel – character, plot, incidents, all were fascinating; I recall a green valley in Wales where a famous picture had got hidden: but he could not get his novel on to paper. So some of his friends thought that if a society was formed at which we all wrote novels and read a fresh chapter aloud at each meeting, Desmond would be reluctantly dragged down the path of creation. Needless to say, he eluded so crude a device. Other people wrote their novels – which usually began well and fell to bits in the second chapter. He – he had forgotten, he had mislaid the manuscript, he had not the time. And he did not write his novel. And after the first world war the group was reconstituted: not to write novels but to write reminiscences.

Here Desmond was supreme. “Memory,” he often said, “is an excellent compositor.” And in the midst of a group which included Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes, he stood out in his command of the past, and in his power to rearrange it. I remember one paper of his in particular – if it can be called a paper. Perched away in a corner of Duncan Grant’s studio, he had a suit-case open before him. The lid of the case, which he propped up, would be useful to rest his manuscript upon, he told us. On he read, delighting us as usual, with his brilliancy, and humanity, and wisdom, until – owing to a slight wave of his hand – the suit-case unfortunately fell over. Nothing was inside it. There was no paper, no manuscript. He had been improvising.

and/or

From Wilson Follett (1966), Modern American Usage (ed. Jacques Barzun)

Whether a lawyer can or cannot make out a case for the necessity of this ungraceful expression in legal documents only a lawyer is competent to say; but anyone else is entitled to the view that it has no right to intrude in ordinary prose. One such intrusion may stand for all: A majority of the tourists come here with camping and/or fishing on their minds. Suppose this to be written with camping or fishing on their minds. How will any sensible reader interpret it? He will presume that some camp without fishing, some fish without camping, and some do both, nothing being said or implied to prevent the three equal possibilities. Note, besides, that these possibilities would be the same if and alone had been used.

We see in this example one of the usual effects of borrowing phraseology from the professions: it kills the plain sense of the words formerly deemed adequate by the layman. That plain sense in the sentence under review is that and can sometimes suggest or, and that generally or includes and. The weatherman’s Snow or sleet tomorrow is no guarantee that we shall have only the one or the other. For generations the chairman has asked Are there corrections or additions to the minutes? well knowing that there may be both. The phrase either… or was invented for situations in which it is important to exclude one of a pair. To be sure, in casual speech you or I must go carries the meaning either you or I; but If he tries that stunt he will be hurt or killed makes it clear that the inclusion of and in or arises naturally from the facts and is habitual for most readers.

Indeed, if the users of and/or were as logical as they pretend to be when they insist on the legalism, they would have to say and or or, since their assumption is that the two cannot co-exist. That assumption is not made better by the punctuation in well, then, there’s Mackenzie and, or, his associates. And if a writer thinks his readers have been so corrupted by the abuse of and/or as to misunderstand his simple or, he should courageously repudiate the hybrid and write – using our first example – tourists come here to camp or fish or both. Let him remember that, except for lawyers, English speakers and writers have managed to express this simple relationship without and/or for over six centuries. This truth is commemorated in the couplet:

Had he foreseen the modern use of and/оr,

It would have sickened Walter Savage Landor.

The Blessing of an Orderly Mind

From Wilson Follett (1966), Modern American Usage (ed. Jacques Barzun)

Wherever we can make twenty-five words do the work of fifty, we halve the area in which looseness and disorganization can flourish, and by reducing the span of attention required we increase the force of the thought. To make our words count for as much as possible is surely the simplest as well as the hardest secret of style. Its difficulty consists in the ceaseless pursuit of the thousand ways of rectifying our mistakes, eliminating our inaccuracies, and replacing our falsities — in a word, editing our prose. When we can do this habitually (even though it never becomes easy) we shall find ourselves honoring the faculty that can do more toward this end than a mastery of prescriptive grammar, more than the study of etymology and semantics, more than an observance of idiom and the maxims of rhetoric. And what is this faculty? It is the blessing of an orderly mind.