Notes for Book Review of Albert Jay Nock's Memoirs of a Superfluous Man
review for Youtube channel, romansbookreport
Introduction
Imagine living in a world without internet, without the mises institute, or Rothbard or lewrockwell. Imagine that you were smart enough to arrive at libertarian conclusion all by yourself but didn't have any way to find kindred spirits.
Also, imagine that you lived in a world that just witnessed the first mass mobilization of entire societies and the mass slaughter and hypocracy and stupidity that went with it, and now you saw the world about to return for a second round of total war.
Think how pessimistic and intellectually isolated you would feel. I think that describes AJ Nock.
Memoirs of a superfluous man is probably is second most famous book. It's a sort of memoir of his views of the world published in 1943 toward the end of his life. His most famous book is Our Enemy The State, a critic of Roosevelt's New Deal.
The title -- superfluous man -- refers to how he's really not able to fit in to the world. He repeats this over and over. It's very pessimistic. He'll identify the truth of a situation, very much in the spirit of Plato, and then explain why he thinks the best he can do is simply turn his back on it.
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man is not an easy read because it's sort of half a conversation. He's probably one of the best read men who has ever lived -- both in terms of the classics and the contemporary writing of his time.
So in the book you get almost constant references to history, literature, philosophy, journalism, the public discourse of his day. And you get it without warning or explanation. In other words, he'll reply to writers or public figures or ideas taking for granted that his reader knows the conversation. I assure you, most of us don't.
One example of an obscure reference is:
[The childhood revelation that ignorance exists] has paid me Golconda's dividends regularly ever since.
Golkonda is an ancient city in south india in an area famous for gemstoned.
2 Big Questions are what to think about the masses of the population. Is libertarianism an aristocratic philosophy?
Epsteans & Gresham's Law & the law of diminishing returns
Mr. [Edward] Epstean’s -- Man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion, should bear the name of Epstean’s law.
the current value of literature is determined by the worst type of literature in circulation— Gresham’s law.
Something like republicanism or “democracy” will work after a fashion in a village or even a township, where everybody knows everybody and keeps an eye on what goes on. Why not, then, in a county, a state, a nation? Simply because the law of diminishing returns is against it.
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process as yet unexplained, but no doubt catastrophic in character, certainly not progressive. 4 Hence, inasmuch as they are the raw material of humanity, they are inestimably precious.
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faggots - the raw material of ideas gradually got itself together in rough shapes, like a scattered mess of fagots, which I seldom took the trouble to put in order. In such circumstances, one of the most animating experiences one can have is to come suddenly on something which acts as a binder, putting an armful of these fagots together and tying them in a neat, tight, orderly bundle. One is exhilarated beyond measure at seeing how big the bundle is, how beautifully the fagots are matched and fitted.
Narrative, Autobiographical Sections
Early childhood
He discusses his EARLY CHILDHOOD in Brooklyn with a so much attention to the various ethnicities of his friends -- English, French, Dutch -- that I think most modern readers would be uncomfortable.
He discusses the dominant traits of each of these ethnic groups, and his own identity -- throughout the book, he identifies French and English impulses within himself..
I found myself projected into a society which was riotously pretentious, forever congratulating itself at the top of its voice on its achievements and abilities, its virtues and excellences, its resources and prospects, and calling on all the world to admire them; and yet a society byand large “too ignorant to know that there is such a thing as ignorance”!
"invincible ignorance"
snow ball fight etiquette & norms
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scandal of affair
among some well bred couple
The eye of common sense would see simply that the courts of law, religion and morals were not courts of competent jurisdiction. . . .The court of undebatably competent jurisdiction would be the court of taste and manners. . . and a properly enlightened social resentment . . .
. . . when I was still quite young I did see, that in our society the purview of legal, religious and ethical sanctions was monstrously over-extended. They had usurped control over an area of conduct much larger than right reason would assign them. On the other hand, I saw that the area of conduct properly answerable to the sanctions of taste and manners was correspondingly attenuated.
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the great lake
No matter at what time of day her whistle blew, everyone would let go all holds and rush for the wharf; and if she came in at night, she would find the whole population awake and on hand. If the county court were in session, it would adjourn; and if the churches were in session, as happened once at least to my knowledge, the congregations, choirs, janitors, probably the parsons also, though I did not wait to notice, all promptly quit the way of salvation and joined dogs with the ungodly in a joyous stampede.
-honest hard-working people and spontaneous order wo/ authority
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university
We devised our own relaxations and extra-curricular activities with no encouragement from the authorities and no discouragement; We took care of our own living-quarters, with no supervision; if we chose to tidy up, we might do so; but if we preferred to live in squalor, we might also do that. In this way the slacktwisted among us soon learned that neatness paid, and the tidy ones got into habits that were almost old-maidish.
In my four years there I never heard of any one getting a word of commendation for a piece of good work, though I saw a great deal of good work, even distinguished work, being done. The motto of the college might well have been taken from St. Luke’s words, “When ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants.”
We were made to understand that the burden of education was on us and no one else, least of all on our instructors; they were not there to help us carry it or to praise our efforts, but to see that we shouldered it in proper style and got on with it.
snakes
. . . he controlled more temper every fifteen minutes than most men control in a lifetime.
“What an extraordinary taste!— I can’t imagine such a thing,— most revolting!— abominable!” With that he paused a moment, and then snapped out, “However, I can’t see but that he is within his rights, and he shall have them.”
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Elective courses, majors and minors, “courses in English,” vocational courses, and all that sort of thing, were unknown to us; we had never heard of them. Ours was the last institution in America, I think, except probably some managed by the Jesuits, to stick uncompromisingly by “the grand old fortifying classical curriculum.” Readings and expositions of Greek and Roman literature; mathematics up to the differential calculus; logic; metaphysics; a little work on the sources and history of the English language; these made up the lot. If you were good for it, you were given a bachelor’s degree at the end of four years, and you were then expected to get out promptly and not come back. The incursions of alumni were most distasteful to the authorities, and were firmly disallowed. If, on the other hand, you were not good enough to stand the appointed strain, it was presumably a matter of God’s will, and nothing could be done about it.
. . . The college shortly expired; it was “reorganised” off the face of the earth. [St. Stephen's College (now known as Bard College)]
Education
first discourse on education (returns to the topic later)
If preparation for life means accumulating instrumental knowledge as a means of getting a living, our equipment was defective. If it means laying a foundation of formative knowledge on which to build a structure of instrumental knowledge, our equipment was as complete, I believe, as could be devised.
If education be a preparation for living, rather than for getting a living; a preparation for getting the most and best out of this gift of existence which has been dealt out to us unasked, undesired, and which at times seems speciousspecious,— if this be so, our equipment gave us two advantages which could hardly have been come at by any other means.
The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest, most complete and most nearly continuous record we have of what the strange creature known as Homo sapiens has been busy about in virtually every department of spiritual, intellectual and social activity. That record covers nearly twenty-five hundred years in an unbroken stretch of this animated oddity’s operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, logic, politics, botany, zoölogy, medicine, geography, theology,— everything, I believe, that lies in the range of human knowledge or speculation. Hence the mind which has attentively canvassed this record is much more than a disciplined mind, it is an experienced mind. . . .it instinctively views contemporary man and his doings in the perspective set by this profound and weighty experience. Our studies were properly called formative, because beyond all others their effect was powerfully maturing.
This, then, was the first advantage, usually overlooked, which our régime gave us; it was the means of our absorbing a vast deal of vicarious experience which ripened our minds;
The second advantage usually overlooked is that, somewhat on the principle of lucus a non lucendo, our equipment was as valuable to us for what it did not equip us with as for what it did. We left college ignorant of practically everything but what came within the lines of study which I have mentioned. We knew nothing of the natural sciences this side of Aristotle, Theophrastus, Pliny; nothing of any history since A.D. 1500, not even the history of our own country.
Therefore when subsequently a new idea or a new set of circumstances presented itself to us, it had free entrance to an unpreoccupied mind. . . . Plato made it the mark of an educated man that he should be able, and above all that he should always be willing, to “see things as they are.” [He returns to this idea often]
-- after looking at things honestly, you develop an insatiable appetite for reality
[Later] When in my mid-twenties my eyes first opened on the American scene, I surveyed it with the naïve astonishment of Rip van Winkle. One would hardly believe that a boy could grow up to manhood in such complete unconsciousness of the social and political movements going on around him.
revolution in education
The theory of the revolution was based on a flagrant popular perversion of the doctrines of equality and democracy. Above all things the mass-mind is most bitterly resentful of superiority. It will not tolerate the thought of an élite; and under a political system of universal suffrage, the mass-mind is enabled to make its antipathies prevail by sheer force of numbers. Under this system, as John Stuart Mill said, the test of a great mind is its power of agreement with the opinions of small minds; hence the intellectual tone of a society thus hamstrung is inevitably set by such opinions. In the prevalent popular view, therefore,— the view insisted upon and as far as possible enforced by the mass-men whom the masses instinctively cleave to and choose as leaders,— in this view the prime postulate of equality is that in the realm of the spirit as well as of the flesh, everybody is able to enjoy anything that anybody can enjoy; and the prime postulate of democracy is that there shall be nothing for anybody to enjoy that is not open for everybody to enjoy. An equalitarian and democratic régime must by consequence assume, tacitly or avowedly, that everybody is educable.
The theory of our régime was directly contrary to this. Our preceptors did not see that doctrines of equality and democracy had any footing in the premises. They did not pretend to believe that everybody is educable, for they knew, on the contrary, that very few are educable,very few indeed. . . . They accepted the fact that there are practicable ranges of intellectual and spiritual experience which nature has opened to some and closed to others. They may or may not have wished that nature had managed otherwise, but saw quite clearly that she had not done so. There the fact was, and all that could be done about it was to take it as it stood. If any irrelevant doctrine of equality or democracy chose to set itself against the fact, so much the worse for the doctrine.
The worst result of this was a complete effacement of the line which sets off education from training, and the line which sets off formative knowledge from instrumental knowledge. This obliteration was done deliberately to meet the popular perversions of equality and democracy. The régime perceived that while very few can be educated, everyone who is not actually imbecile or idiotic can be trained in one way or another, as soldiers are trained in military routine, or as monkeys are trained to pick fruit. Very well then, it said in effect, let us agree to call training education, convert our schools, colleges, universities into training-schools as far as need be, but continue to call them educational institutions and to call our general system an educational system. We will insist that the discipline of instrumental studies is as formative as any other. . . .
institutions were loaded up with great masses of ineducable persons, and it was necessary to find something for them to do which they could do; and in a cultural way they could do nothing. Presumably, however, they were literate; that is, they could make their way more or less ignorantly and uncertainly down a printed page; and therefore innumerable “courses in English” were devised for them. 4 To me, this was the most amusing démarche in the whole revolutionary programme, for as I said somewhere back in these memoirs, we would not have known what courses in English were. Nobody taught English in our day; or rather, everybody taught it all the time. If we expressed ourselves in slipshod English, unidiomatic English, we heard about it on the spot, so we made a point of being careful.
I encountered a steady succession of persons who had “majored in English,” “specialised in English,” . . . I got into the way of telling them I would take their word for all they knew about English, since obviously the one thing they did not know was what to do with it, and that was the only thing that interested me.
the only chance to make myself useful that my country ever offered me came when the president of a huge sprawling mid-Western state university asked me (I am by no means sure how seriously,— still, he did ask me) to go out and be the head of his department of English literature. I was no end delighted by the compliment, but the mere thought of such an undertaking made me shiver. I told him I had not the faintest idea of how to set about it; I should be utterly helpless. All I could do would be to point to the university’s library, and say, There it is,— wade in and help yourselves.
None of us had the ambition to spend his life on the dative case. If we found what looked like a false quantity in Statius, we did not theorise over it; we concluded that the old boy had probably made a mistake, and let it go at that. If we came on unfamiliar terms and neologisms in Lucian, we were not tempted to make any of them the subject of a learned thesis.
I am by no means sure that a return to the classics, even if it were practicable, would be desirable. . . . The question at issue, obviously, is whether the educable person can any longer be regarded as a social asset; or, indeed, whether in time past his value as a social asset has not been overestimated. As I came to understand much later, the final answer must be referable to the previous question, What is man?
In a society essentially neolithic, as ours unquestionably is at the moment,— whatever one may hold its evolutionary possibilities to be,— there can be no place found for an educable person but such as a trainable person could fill quite as well or even better; he becomes a superfluous man; [he often concludes on such hopelessness].
As the process of general barbarisation goes on, as its speed accelerates, as its calamitous consequences recur with ever-increasing frequency and violence, the educable person can only take shelter against his insensate fellow-beings, as Plato says, like a man crouching behind a wall against a whirlwind.