George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf.
“The book to read is A Journey Into Rabelais' France by Albert Jay Nock; but note that the author’s naming one of Rabelais' characters John of the Funnels is a mistake. The name Jean des Entommeurs is not des Entonnoirs: substitute John the Hacker.” Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence
Sir Thomas Urquhart (1653): John of the Funnels
Samuel Putnam (1946): John Hackem
J. C. Powys (1948): John of the First Cut
J. M. Cohen (1955): John of the Hashes
Burton Raffel (1990): John Mincemeat
Donald Frame (1991): John of the Hashes
Jacques Barzun (2000): John the Hacker
M. A. Screech (2006): Jean des Entommeures
From Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence:
Ortega y Gasset died at mid-century, but in his treatment of the arts, education, psychology, and social theory, this aptest observer of his period delineated the leading features of the next. That he was not much cited or quoted after his death does not amount to a settled judgment upon him… Sooner or later he will have to be heard as a witness – and not alone. To know the whole century adequately, historians will have to listen to the words of several others who also belong to its formative time. To cite only three Americans: John Jay Chapman, Albert Jay Nock, and Leo Stein.
“‘Real progress,’ in the words of Dr. R. R. Marett, ‘is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto.’” Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means
From “The Triumph of the Gadget” (1939) by Albert Jay Nock:
During the last fifty years there has been invented almost every conceivable labor-saving device, with the consequence that the average man is in a state of utter manual incompetence. This is well-known and is often commented upon. But what is not so often observed is that these gadgets are not only labor-saving but brain-saving, thought-saving; and it seems an inescapable conclusion that a correlative mental incompetence is being induced.
A certain amount of resistance seems necessary for the proper functioning of mental and moral attributes, as it is for that of physical attributes. In any of these three departments of life, if you can get results without effort, and habitually do so, the capacity for making the effort dwindles. Whatever takes away the opportunity for effort, whatever obviates or reduces the need for making it, is therefore to some degree deleterious. It needs a bit of brains to manage a furnace-fire successfully; an automatic heater needs none; hence many householders today could not manage a furnace-fire to save their lives. It needs some brainwork to add up a column of figures; running an adding-machine needs nothing but attention; consequently there are many book-keepers and bank-clerks now who not only do not add but cannot. As we all have frequently had occasion to observe, shopkeeping now seldom requires any more strenuous mental exercise than is involved in consulting a price-list. Cooking is a great art, requiring a lot of brain-work; running the modern kitchen requires far less.
Animals having organs which, on account of changes in their environment, they no longer use, turn into a species which has only vestigial remnants or rudimentary forms of these organs, sometimes amounting to no more than mere vague suggestions, like the os coccygis in human beings, which vaguely suggests a remote ancestral tail. There is much in “the course of modern civilization” which strongly intimates that this may be happening to the mental and moral powers of Western man. The trouble with arm-chair-and-push-button Utopias like the one so attractively sketched for us by H. G. Wells, is that they carry brain-saving to the point of complete disuse. Even at present, judging by what one sees, hears, and reads, great numbers of Americans seem pretty well to have reached that point already.
Americans are the world’s foremost gadget-users, and unquestionably the leisure gained in this way is used chiefly for further brain-saving – a substitution of play-gadgets for work-gadgets; motion-pictures, automobiles, radio-music, as an alternative to adding-machines, price-lists, fireless cookers. One could make out a very reasonable case for the statement that Americans at large have given up using their brains for purposes of thought, and use them only for purposes of attention and contemplation. If this be so, then with the field of gadgetry steadily enlarging and brain-power proportionately dwindling, one might plausibly forecast a generation of American children born without any brains at all, but only with vestigial faculties of attention and contemplation, no more highly differentiated – perhaps even less highly – than those which are common to extremely low forms of animal life.
See Things as They Are by Alert Jay Nock at IWP Books
From “The Amazing Liberal Mind” (1938) by Albert Jay Nock:
A Liberal is dangerous for the same reason Amiel thought women are dangerous. A woman, Amiel says, is “sometimes fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, illogical and contradictory. A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a good deal of prudence exercised towards her, for she may bring about innumerable evils without knowing it.” This may or may not be a true bill against women – I am not entitled to an opinion about that – but I have observed Liberals closely for many years with ever-increasing wonder and amazement, and I am prepared to say that Amiel’s sentence fits them like a poultice.
See Things as They Are by Albert Jay Nock at IWP Books.
“quand le soleil est couché, toutes bestes sont à l’umbre.” seigneur de humevesne (rabelais)
New at IWP Books: Things as They Are: Essays by Albert Jay Nock.
New at IWP Books: Two Essays by Ahad Ha-Am.
Jacques Barzun on The Relation of the State to Industrial Action & Economics and Jurisprudence by Henry C. Adams, edited by Joseph Dorfman (American Panorama, 1967):
The Adams who wrote this book is not related to the Adams family represented in the preceding book or the one which follows it on this shelf of American books… He is, by comparison, relatively unknown, though his mind and work were original and the influence of his pioneering thought has been increasingly recognized.
The introduction by Professor Joseph Dorfman, himself a noted historian of economic thought, makes plain the circumstances in which Henry C. Adams (1851–1921) worked when he directed the statistical work of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the first agency designed to curb the powerful American railroads’ anarchical practices and disregard of the public interest.
In reflecting on the acts of the two great powers of modern times – the state and big business – Adams was led to formulate the first searching theory of their permanent and desirable relation. The fact that he was a liberal in the finest tradition lends special importance to his views, for it was the liberal swing away from total laisser-faire toward the end of the nineteenth century which produced the network of restraining laws and practices now in force throughout the free world. It rejects a thoroughgoing socialization, which would merge the power of the state and that of big business, believing that this merger multiplies the power of each by infinity; and it acknowledges at the same time that a complete hands-off policy is neither possible in fact nor defensible in theory. Adams’s formulation of the equilibrium to be sought has thus the importance of both a fundamental charter and a prolegomenon to future speculation in these fields…
The Relation of the State to Industrial Action by Henry C. Adams is available at IWP Books.
New at IWP Books: The Relation of the State to Industrial Action (1887) by Henry C. Adams.
Jacques Barzun’s Review of Peter F. Drucker’s The Future of Industrial Man.
New at IWP Books: The Future of Industrial Man (1942) by Peter F. Drucker.
New at IWP Books: Ends and Means (1937) by Aldous Huxley.
“Self-transcendence is through self-consciousness. A human being who spends most of his waking life either day-dreaming, or in a state of mental dissipation, or else identifying himself with whatever he happens to be sensing, feeling, thinking or doing at the moment, cannot claim to be fully a person.” Aldous Huxley, 1937, Ends and Means
From Aldous Huxley’s (1937) Ends and Means (Soon at IWP Books):
Nevertheless, artistic creation and scientific research may be, and constantly are, used as devices for escaping from the responsibilities of life. They are proclaimed to be ends absolutely good in themselves – ends so admirable that those who pursue them are excused from bothering about anything else. This is particularly true of contemporary science. The mass of accumulated knowledge is so great that it is now impossible for any individual to have a thorough grasp of more than one small field of study. Meanwhile, no attempt is made to produce a comprehensive synthesis of the general results of scientific research. Our universities possess no chair of synthesis. All endowments, moreover, go to special subjects – and almost always to subjects which have no need of further endowment, such as physics, chemistry and mechanics. In our institutions of higher learning about ten times as much is spent on the natural sciences as on the sciences of man. All our efforts are directed, as usual, to producing improved means to unimproved ends. Meanwhile intensive specialization tends to reduce each branch of science to a condition almost approaching meaninglessness. There are many men of science who are actually proud of this state of things. Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of true science. Those who attempt to relate the small particular results of specialization with human life as a whole and its relation to the universe at large are accused of being bad scientists, charlatans, self-advertisers. The people who make such accusations do so, of course, because they do not wish to take any responsibility for anything, but merely to retire to their cloistered laboratories, and there amuse themselves by performing delightfully interesting researches. Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the ‘higher life.' Up to a point, of course, this is true. The life of the scientist or the artist is a higher life. Unfortunately, when led in an irresponsible, one-sided way, the higher life is probably more harmful for the individual than the lower life of the average sensual man and certainly, in the case of the scientist, much worse for society at large.
From Aldous Huxley’s (1937) Ends and Means (Soon at IWP Books):
In the democratic countries, intelligence is still free to ask whatever questions it chooses. This freedom, it is almost certain, will not survive another war. Educationists should therefore do all they can, while there is yet time, to build up in the minds of their charges a habit of resistance to suggestion. If such resistance is not built up, the men and women of the next generation will be at the mercy of any skilful propagandist who contrives to seize the instruments of information and persuasion. Resistance to suggestion can be built up in two ways. First, children can be taught to rely on their own internal resources and not to depend on incessant stimulation from without. This is doubly important. Reliance on external stimulation is bad for the character. Moreover, such stimulation is the stuff with which propagandists bait their hooks, the jam in which dictators conceal their ideological pills. An individual who relies on external stimulations thereby exposes himself to the full force of whatever propaganda is being made in his neighbourhood. For a majority of people in the West, purposeless reading, purposeless listening-in, purposeless looking at films have become addictions, psychological equivalents of alcoholism and morphinism. Things have come to such a pitch that there are many millions of men and women who suffer real distress if they are cut off for a few days or even a few hours from newspapers, radio music, moving pictures. Like the addict to a drug, they have to indulge their vice, not because the indulgence gives them any active pleasure, but because, unless they indulge, they feel painfully subnormal and incomplete. Without papers, films and wireless they live a diminished existence; they are fully themselves only when bathing in sports news and murder trials, in radio music and talk, in the vicarious terrors, triumphs and eroticisms of the films. Even by intelligent people, it is now taken for granted that such psychological addictions are inevitable and even desirable, that there is nothing to be alarmed at in the fact that the majority of civilized men and women are now incapable of living on their own spiritual resources, but have become abjectly dependent on incessant stimulation from without. Recently, for example, I read a little book in which an eminent American biologist gives his view about the Future. Science, he prophesies, will enormously increase human happiness and intelligence – will do so, among other ways, by providing people with micro-cinematographs which they can slip on like spectacles whenever they are bored. Science will also, no doubt, be able very soon to supply us with micro-pocket-flasks and micro-hypodermic-syringes, micro-alcohol, micro-cigarettes and micro-cocaine. Long live science!
W. H. Auden was nominated 19 times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1966 by Lionel Trilling. Aldous Huxley was nominated 9 times, in 1961 by Jacques Barzun.
New at IWP Books: The End of Economic Man (1939) by Peter Drucker.
New Issue of Comment Magazine, on Charting Social Change.
Theodore Dalrymple on Lying to Ourseleves.
One of the peculiarities of our age is the ferocity with which intellectuals and politicians defend propositions that they do not—because they cannot—believe to be true, so outrageous are they, such violence do they do to the most obvious and evident truth. Agatha Christie (a far greater psychologist than Sigmund Freud), drew attention almost a century ago to the phenomenon when she had Dr. Sheppard, the protagonist and culprit of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd say, “It is odd how, when you have a secret belief of your own which you do not wish to acknowledge, the voicing of it by someone else will rouse you to a fury of denial. I burst immediately into indignant speech.”
Dorothy Sayers on The End of Economic Man by Peter Drucker:
A rather difficult book, that needs and deserves to be read attentively – turn off the Wireless Announcer before getting down to it – but it is the most interesting and original book I have read recently. It deals with the failure of the economic state to provide man with a satisfactory and reasonable world to live in. Incidentally, it offers a really intelligible explanation of that very puzzling thing, the working of totalitarian economics.
Soon at IWP Books: The End of Economic Man (1939) by Peter F. Drucker.
