[This essay first appeared in
The Atlantic Monthly in 1936. An MP3 version of this article, read by Dr.
Floy Lilley, is
available for free
download.]
 |
| "The Prophet Isaiah" by Michelangelo (1475–1564)
|
I
One evening last autumn, I sat long hours with a European acquaintance while he expounded a political-economic
doctrine which seemed sound as a nut and in which I could find no defect. At the end, he said with great earnestness:
"I have a mission to the masses. I feel that I am called to get the ear of the people. I shall devote the rest of my
life to spreading my doctrine far and wide among the population.
What do you think?"
An embarrassing question in any case, and doubly so under the circumstances, because my acquaintance is a very
learned man, one of the three or four really first-class minds that Europe produced in his generation; and naturally I,
as one of the unlearned, was inclined to regard his lightest word with reverence amounting to awe.
Still, I reflected, even the greatest mind cannot possibly know everything, and I was pretty sure he had not had my
opportunities for observing the masses of mankind, and that therefore I probably knew them better than he did. So I
mustered courage to say that he had no such mission and would do well to get the idea out of his head at once; he would
find that the masses would not care two pins for his doctrine, and still less for himself, since in such circumstances
the popular favorite is generally some
Barabbas. I even went so far as to say (he is a Jew) that his idea seemed to
show that he was not very well up on his own native literature. He smiled at my jest, and asked what I meant by it; and
I referred him to the story of the prophet
Isaiah.
It occurred to me then that this story is much worth recalling just now when so many wise men and soothsayers appear
to be burdened with a message to the masses. Dr. Townsend has a message, Father Coughlin has one, Mr. Upton Sinclair,
Mr. Lippmann, Mr. Chase and the planned-economy brethren, Mr. Tugwell and the New Dealers, Mr. Smith and Liberty
Leaguers — the list is endless. I cannot remember a time when so many
energumens were so variously proclaiming the Word
to the multitude and telling them what they must do to be saved. This being so, it occurred to me, as I say, that the
story of Isaiah might have something in it to steady and compose the human spirit until this tyranny of windiness is
overpast. I shall paraphrase the story in our common speech, since it has to be pieced out from various sources; and
inasmuch as respectable scholars have thought fit to put out a whole new version of the Bible in the American
vernacular, I shall take shelter behind them, if need be, against the charge of dealing irreverently with the Sacred
Scriptures.
The prophet's career began at the end of
King Uzziah's reign, say about 740 B.C. This reign was uncommonly long,
almost half a century, and apparently prosperous. It was one of those prosperous reigns, however — like the reign of
Marcus Aurelius at Rome, or the administration of
Eubulus at Athens, or of Mr.
Coolidge at Washington — where at the
end the prosperity suddenly peters out and things go by the board with a resounding crash.
"The prophet of the American masses must aim consciously at the lowest common denominator of intellect, taste, and
character…"
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 even 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."
II
Apparently, then, if the Lord's word is good for anything — I do not offer any opinion about that, — the only
element in Judean society that was particularly worth bothering about was the Remnant. Isaiah seems finally to have got
it through his head that this was the case; that nothing was to be expected from the masses, but that if anything
substantial were ever to be done in Judea, the Remnant would have to do it. This is a very striking and suggestive
idea; but before going on to explore it, we need to be quite clear about our terms. What do we mean by the masses, and
what by the Remnant?
As the word
masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people,
laboring people, proletarians, and it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass man is one who
has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the
force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make
up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively
the masses. The line of
differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are
those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least
measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.
"The prophet of the present knows precisely as much and as little as the historian of the future."
The picture which Isaiah presents of the Judean masses is most unfavorable. In his view, the mass man — be he high
or be he lowly, rich or poor, prince or pauper — gets off very badly. He appears as not only weak minded and weak
willed, but as by consequence knavish, arrogant, grasping, dissipated, unprincipled, unscrupulous. The mass woman also
gets off badly, as sharing all the mass man's untoward qualities, and contributing a few of her own in the way of
vanity and laziness, extravagance and foible. The list of luxury products that she patronized is interesting; it calls
to mind the women's page of a Sunday newspaper in 1928, or the display set forth in one of our professedly "smart"
periodicals. In another place, Isaiah even recalls the affectations that we used to know by the name "flapper gait" and
the "debutante slouch." It may be fair to discount Isaiah's vivacity a little for prophetic fervor; after all, since
his real job was not to convert the masses but to brace and reassure the Remnant, he probably felt that he might lay it
on indiscriminately and as thick as he liked — in fact, that he was expected to do so. But even so, the Judean mass man
must have been a most objectionable individual, and the mass woman utterly odious.
If the modern spirit, whatever that may be, is disinclined towards taking the Lord's word at its face value (as I
hear is the case), we may observe that Isaiah's testimony to the character of the masses has strong collateral support
from respectable Gentile authority. Plato lived into the administration of Eubulus, when Athens was at the peak of its
jazz-and-paper era, and he speaks of the Athenian masses with all Isaiah's fervency, even comparing them to a herd of
ravenous wild beasts. Curiously, too, he applies Isaiah's own word
remnant to the worthier portion of Athenian
society; "there is but a very small
remnant," he says, of those who possess a saving force of intellect and
force of character — too small, preciously as to Judea, to be of any avail against the ignorant and vicious
preponderance of the masses.
But Isaiah was a preacher and
Plato a philosopher; and we tend to regard preachers and philosophers rather as
passive observers of the drama of life than as active participants. Hence in a matter of this kind their judgment might
be suspected of being a little uncompromising, a little acrid, or as the French say,
saugrenu. We may
therefore bring forward another witness who was preeminently a man of affairs, and whose judgment cannot lie under this
suspicion. Marcus Aurelius was ruler of the greatest of empires, and in that capacity he not only had the Roman mass
man under observation, but he had him on his hands 24 hours a day for 18 years. What he did not know about him was not
worth knowing and what he thought of him is abundantly attested on almost every page of the little book of jottings
which he scribbled offhand from day to day, and which he meant for no eye but his own ever to see.
"Our civilization so completely neglects and disallows the Remnant that anyone going in with an eye single to their
service might pretty well count on getting all the trade there is."
This view of the masses is the one that we find prevailing at large among the ancient authorities whose writings
have come down to us. In the 18th century, however, certain European philosophers spread the notion that the mass man,
in his natural state, is not at all the kind of person that earlier authorities made him out to be, but on the
contrary, that he is a worthy object of interest. His untowardness is the effect of environment, an effect for which
"society" is somehow responsible. If only his environment permitted him to live according to his lights, he would
undoubtedly show himself to be quite a fellow; and the best way to secure a more favorable environment for him would be
to let him arrange it for himself. The French Revolution acted powerfully as a springboard for this idea, projecting
its influence in all directions throughout Europe.
On this side of the ocean a whole new continent stood ready for a large-scale experiment with this theory. It
afforded every conceivable resource whereby the masses might develop a civilization made in their own likeness and
after their own image. There was no force of tradition to disturb them in their preponderance, or to check them in a
thoroughgoing disparagement of the Remnant. Immense natural wealth, unquestioned predominance, virtual isolation,
freedom from external interference and the fear of it, and, finally, a century and a half of time — such are the
advantages which the mass man has had in bringing forth a civilization which should set the earlier preachers and
philosophers at naught in their belief that nothing substantial can be expected from the masses, but only from the
Remnant.
His success is unimpressive. On the evidence so far presented one must say, I think, that the mass man's conception
of what life has to offer, and his choice of what to ask from life, seem now to be pretty well what they were in the
times of Isaiah and Plato; and so too seem the catastrophic social conflicts and convulsions in which his views of life
and his demands on life involve him. I do not wish to dwell on this, however, but merely to observe that the
monstrously inflated importance of the masses has apparently put all thought of a possible mission to the Remnant out
of the modern prophet's head. This is obviously quite as it should be, provided that the earlier preachers and
philosophers were actually wrong, and that all final hope of the human race is actually centered in the masses. If, on
the other hand, it should turn out that the Lord and Isaiah and Plato and Marcus Aurelius were right in their estimate
of the relative social value of the masses and the Remnant, the case is somewhat different. Moreover, since with
everything in their favor the masses have so far given such an extremely discouraging account of themselves, it would
seem that the question at issue between these two bodies of opinion might most profitably be reopened.
III
But without following up this suggestion, I wish only, as I said, to remark the fact that as things now stand
Isaiah's job seems rather to go begging. Everyone with a message nowadays is, like my venerable European friend, eager
to take it to the masses. His first, last and only thought is of mass acceptance and mass approval. His great care is
to put his doctrine in such shape as will capture the masses' attention and interest. This attitude towards the masses
is so exclusive, so devout, that one is reminded of the troglodytic monster described by Plato, and the assiduous crowd
at the entrance to its cave, trying obsequiously to placate it and win its favor, trying to interpret its inarticulate
noises, trying to find out what it wants, and eagerly offering it all sorts of things that they think might strike its
fancy.
"If you are an educator, say with a college on your hands, you wish to get as many students as possible, and
you whittle down your requirements accordingly."
The main trouble with all this is its reaction upon the mission itself. It necessitates an opportunist
sophistication of one's doctrine, which profoundly alters its character and reduces it to a mere placebo. If, say, you
are a preacher, you wish to attract as large a congregation as you can, which means an appeal to the masses; and this,
in turn, means adapting the terms of your message to the order of intellect and character that the masses exhibit.
If you are an educator, say with a college on your hands, you wish to get as many
students as possible, and you whittle down your requirements accordingly. If a writer, you aim at getting many
readers; if a publisher, many purchasers; if a philosopher, many disciples; if a reformer, many converts; if a
musician, many auditors; and so on. But as we see on all sides, in the realization of these several desires, the
prophetic message is so heavily adulterated with trivialities, in every instance, that its effect on the masses is
merely to harden them in their sins. Meanwhile, the Remnant, aware of this adulteration and of the desires that prompt
it, turn their backs on the prophet and will have nothing to do with him or his message.
Isaiah, on the other hand, worked under no such disabilities. He preached to the masses only in the sense that he
preached publicly. Anyone who liked might listen; anyone who liked might pass by. He knew that the Remnant would
listen; and knowing also that nothing was to be expected of the masses under any circumstances, he made no specific
appeal to them, did not accommodate his message to their measure in any way, and did not care two straws whether they
heeded it or not. As a modern publisher might put it, he was not worrying about circulation or about advertising.
Hence, with all such obsessions quite out of the way, he was in a position to do his level best, without fear or favor,
and answerable only to his august Boss.
If a prophet were not too particular about making money out of his mission or getting a dubious sort of notoriety
out of it, the foregoing considerations would lead one to say that serving the Remnant looks like a good job. An
assignment that you can really put your back into, and do your best without thinking about results, is a real job;
whereas serving the masses is at best only half a job, considering the inexorable conditions that the masses impose
upon their servants. They ask you to give them what they want, they insist upon it, and will take nothing else; and
following their whims, their irrational changes of fancy, their hot and cold fits, is a tedious business, to say
nothing of the fact that what they want at any time makes very little call on one's resources of prophesy. The Remnant,
on the other hand, want only the best you have, whatever that may be. Give them that, and they are satisfied; you have
nothing more to worry about. The prophet of the American masses must aim consciously at the lowest common denominator
of intellect, taste, and character among 120,000,000 people; and this is a distressing task. The prophet of the
Remnant, on the contrary, is in the enviable position of
Papa
Haydn in the household of Prince
Esterhazy. All Haydn had to do was keep
forking out the very best music he knew how to produce, knowing it would be understood and appreciated by those for
whom he produced it, and caring not a button what anyone else thought of it — and that makes a good job.
In a sense, nevertheless, as I have said, it is not a rewarding job. If you can touch the fancy of the masses, and
have the sagacity to keep always one jump ahead of their vagaries and vacillations, you can get good returns in money
from serving the masses, and good returns also in a mouth-to-ear type of notoriety:
Digito monstrari et dicier, Hic est!
"Isaiah preached to the masses only in the sense that he preached publicly."
We all know innumerable politicians, journalists, dramatists, novelists and the like, who have done extremely well
by themselves in these ways. Taking care of the Remnant, on the contrary, holds little promise of any such rewards. A
prophet of the Remnant will not grow purse proud on the financial returns from his work, nor is it likely that he will
get any great renown out of it. Isaiah's case was exceptional to this second rule, and there are others, but not
many.
It may be thought, then, that while taking care of the Remnant is no doubt a good job, it is not an especially
interesting job because it is as a rule so poorly paid. I have my doubts about this. There are other compensations to
be got out of a job besides money and notoriety, and some of them seem substantial enough to be attractive. Many jobs
which do not pay well are yet profoundly interesting, as, for instance, the job of research student in the sciences is
said to be; and the job of looking after the Remnant seems to me, as I have surveyed it for many years from my seat in
the grandstand, to be as interesting as any that can be found in the world.
IV
What chiefly makes it so, I think, is that in any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown
quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them. You can be sure of those — dead sure,
as our phrase is — but you will never be able to make even a respectable guess at anything else. You do not know, and
will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you do know, and no more: First,
that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means
working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique
the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight and intellectual curiosity necessary
to a successful pursuit of his trade.
"An assignment that you can really put your back into, and do your best without thinking about results, is a real
job; whereas serving the masses is at best only half a job…"
The fascination and the despair of the historian, as he looks back upon Isaiah's Jewry, upon Plato's Athens, or upon
Rome of the
Antonines, is the hope of discovering and laying bare the "substratum of right thinking and well doing"
which he knows must have existed somewhere in those societies because no kind of collective life can possibly go on
without it. He finds tantalizing intimations of it here and there in many places, as in the
Greek Anthology, in the
scrapbook of
Aulus Gellius, in the poems of
Ausonius, and in the brief and touching tribute,
Bene merenti,
bestowed upon the unknown occupants of Roman tombs. But these are vague and fragmentary; they lead him nowhere in his
search for some kind of measure on this substratum, but merely testify to what he already knew a priori — that the
substratum did somewhere exist. Where it was, how substantial it was, what its power of self-assertion and resistance
was — of all this they tell him nothing.
Similarly, when the historian of 2,000 years hence, or 200 years, looks over the available testimony to the quality
of our civilization and tries to get any kind of clear, competent evidence concerning the substratum of right thinking
and well doing which he knows must have been here, he will have a devil of a time finding it. When he has assembled all
he can and has made even a minimum allowance for speciousness, vagueness, and confusion of motive, he will sadly
acknowledge that his net result is simply nothing. A Remnant were here, building a substratum like coral insects; so
much he knows, but he will find nothing to put him on the track of who and where and how many they were and what their
work was like.
 |
"Prophet Elijah in the Desert"
Dieric Bouts the Elder (c. 1410–1475)
|
Concerning all this, too, the prophet of the present knows precisely as much and as little as the historian of the
future; and that, I repeat, is what makes his job seem to me so profoundly interesting. One of the most suggestive
episodes recounted in the Bible is that of a prophet's attempt — the only attempt of the kind on the record, I believe
— to count up the Remnant.
Elijah had fled from persecution into the desert, where the Lord presently overhauled him
and asked what he was doing so far away from his job.
He said that he was running away, not because he was a coward, but because all the Remnant had been killed off
except himself. He had got away only by the skin of his teeth, and, he being now all the Remnant there was, if he were
killed the True Faith would go flat. The Lord replied that he need not worry about that, for even without him the True
Faith could probably manage to squeeze along somehow if it had to.
"And as for your figures on the Remnant," He said, "I don't mind telling you that there are 7,000 of them back there
in Israel whom it seems you have not heard of, but you may take My word for it that there they are."
At that time, probably the population of Israel could not run to much more than a million or so; and a Remnant of
7,000 out of a million is a highly encouraging percentage for any prophet. With 7,000 of the boys on his side, there
was no great reason for Elijah to feel lonesome; and incidentally, that would be something for the modern prophet of
the Remnant to think of when he has a touch of the blues. But the main point is that if Elijah the Prophet could not
make a closer guess on the number of the Remnant than he made when he missed it by 7,000, anyone else who tackled the
problem would only waste his time.
"Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two
certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness."
The other certainty which the prophet of the Remnant may always have is that the Remnant will find him. He may rely
on that with absolute assurance. They will find him without his doing anything about it; in fact, if he tries to do
anything about it, he is pretty sure to put them off. He does not need to advertise for them nor resort to any schemes
of publicity to get their attention. If he is a preacher or a public speaker, for example, he may be quite indifferent
to going on show at receptions, getting his picture printed in the newspapers, or furnishing autobiographical material
for publication on the side of "human interest." If a writer, he need not make a point of attending any pink teas,
autographing books at wholesale, nor entering into any specious freemasonry with reviewers. All this and much more of
the same order lies in the regular and necessary routine laid down for the prophet of the masses; it is, and must be,
part of the great general technique of getting the mass man's ear — or as our vigorous and excellent publicist, Mr.
H.L. Mencken, puts it, the technique of boob bumping. The prophet of the Remnant is not bound to this technique. He may
be quite sure that the Remnant will make their own way to him without any adventitious aids; and not only so, but if
they find him employing any such aids, as I said, it is ten to one that they will smell a rat in them and will sheer
off.
The certainty that the Remnant will find him, however, leaves the prophet as much in the dark as ever, as helpless
as ever in the matter of putting any estimate of any kind upon the Remnant; for, as appears in the case of Elijah, he
remains ignorant of who they are that have found him or where they are or how many. They did not write in and tell him
about it, after the manner of those who admire the vedettes of Hollywood, nor yet do they seek him out and attach
themselves to his person. They are not that kind. They take his message much as drivers take the directions on a
roadside signboard — that is, with very little thought about the signboard, beyond being gratefully glad that it
happened to be there, but with every thought about the directions.
This impersonal attitude of the Remnant wonderfully enhances the interest of the imaginative prophet's job. Once in
a while, just about often enough to keep his intellectual curiosity in good working order, he will quite accidentally
come upon some distinct reflection of his own message in an unsuspected quarter. This enables him to entertain himself
in his leisure moments with agreeable speculations about the course his message may have taken in reaching that
particular quarter, and about what came of it after it got there. Most interesting of all are those instances, if one
could only run them down (but one may always speculate about them), where the recipient himself no longer knows where
nor when nor from whom he got the message — or even where, as sometimes happens, he has forgotten that he got it
anywhere and imagines that it is all a self-sprung idea of his own.
Such instances as these are probably not infrequent, for, without presuming to enroll ourselves among the Remnant,
we can all no doubt remember having found ourselves suddenly under the influence of an idea, the source of which we
cannot possibly identify. "It came to us afterward," as we say; that is, we are aware of it only after it has shot up
fullgrown in our minds, leaving us quite ignorant of how and when and by what agency it was planted there and left to
germinate. It seems highly probable that the prophet's message often takes some such course with the Remnant.
If, for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea which lodges in the
Unbewußtsein of a casual member of the Remnant and
sticks fast there. For some time it is inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades the man's
conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the
first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of
all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do.
For these reasons it appears to me that Isaiah's job is not only good but also extremely interesting; and especially
so at the present time when nobody is doing it. If I were young and had the notion of embarking in the prophetical
line, I would certainly take up this branch of the business; and therefore I have no hesitation about recommending it
as a career for anyone in that position. It offers an open field, with no competition; our civilization so completely
neglects and disallows the Remnant that anyone going in with an eye single to their service might pretty well count on
getting all the trade there is.
Even assuming that there is some social salvage to be screened out of the masses, even assuming that the testimony
of history to their social value is a little too sweeping, that it depresses hopelessness a little too far, one must
yet perceive, I think, that the masses have prophets enough and to spare. Even admitting that in the teeth of history
that hope of the human race may not be quite exclusively centered in the Remnant, one must perceive that they have
social value enough to entitle them to some measure of prophetic encouragement and consolation, and that our
civilization allows them none whatever. Every prophetic voice is addressed to the masses, and to them alone; the voice
of the pulpit, the voice of education, the voice of politics, of literature, drama, journalism — all these are directed
towards the masses exclusively, and they marshal the masses in the way that they are going.
One might suggest, therefore, that aspiring prophetical talent may well turn to another field.
Sat patriae Priamoque datum — whatever obligation of the kind may be due the masses is already monstrously overpaid. So long
as the masses are taking up the tabernacle of
Moloch and
Chiun, their images,
and following the star of their god
Buncombe, they will have no lack
of prophets to point the way that leadeth to the More Abundant Life; and hence a few of those who feel the prophetic
afflatus might do better to apply themselves to serving the Remnant. It is a good job, an interesting job, much more
interesting than serving the masses; and moreover it is the only job in our whole civilization, as far as I know, that
offers a virgin field.
Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) was an influential American libertarian author, educational theorist, and social
critic. Murray Rothbard was deeply influenced by him, and so was that whole generation of free-market thinkers.
Comment on the blog.
This essay first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1936. An MP3 version of this article, read by Dr.
Floy Lilley, is
available for free
download.
Source:
Mises Daily
