Albert Jay Nock's Metaphorical Hemlock
Many people criticize Albert Jay Nock for not being a man of action, but he couldn’t have been a man of action any more than Socrates could have declined to drink the hemlock
In the cacophonous mess that has always been the United States, there lived a man named Albert Jay Nock, a soul so fiercely private he might’ve outdone Thoreau in his woodland reverie or Kaczynski in his lonesome Montana shack.
This fortress of solitude was a one-man rebellion against the clamor of a nation hell-bent on collectivizing its spirit into a gray, bureaucratic sludge in the 1930s. His was a solitary voice crying in America’s growing urban wilderness.
His ideas and very existence were as useless to churning America as a horse-drawn plow in a factory town, and he knew it.
Most folks can stomach the idea of a man craving privacy. Who among us hasn’t fantasized about fleeing this neon-lit carnival to hole up in a cave, like Plato’s just man squinting through a blizzard? We all get that.
But Nock’s other sin—his refusal to dive into the muddy trenches of activism—sticks in the craw of the chattering classes. They call him lazy, a quitter, a man who should’ve rolled up his sleeves and fought the good fight. Take Jonah Goldberg, who in 2009 penned a piece, “Mortal Remains,” lauding Nock’s anti-statist wisdom while scolding his fatalism. Nock, Goldberg reckoned, saw collectivism as the “wave of the future” and surrendered to it, a coward who dissented bravely but refused to man the barricades.
These folks are like drunks flinging darts in a windstorm.
They fail to grasp the marrow of Nock’s soul.
He wasn’t dodging the fight. He was fighting in the only way he could, the only way that didn’t betray his essence.
To understand Nock, you need to understand Socrates, that Athenian gadfly who was condemned for corrupting youth and mocking the gods. When the court demanded that he name his punishment, he suggested free meals and honors. The jury wasn’t amused. They sentenced him to death.
While awaiting the hemlock, Socrates’ pal Crito arranged for him to escape and go into exile. No one would’ve cared, and a sane man would’ve done it.
But Socrates refused.
To flee, he argued, would be to repay evil with evil, to undermine every lesson he’d spent his life teaching. Escape would’ve made him a tunic-wearing contradiction. So he stayed, drank the poison, and died true to his principles.
Nock was cut from the same burlap. He couldn’t wield activism to fight activism any more than Socrates could’ve fled Athens.
Early in his career, years before he had concluded he was superfluous, Nock said that, in “refraining strictly from any direct political activity, [Socrates] and his disciples were the only real politicians of the time.”
Late in his career, well after he had come to appreciate his irrelevance, he wrote Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, which, as near as I can tell after two readings, is nothing less than a beautiful, sustained middle finger to any sort of activism. Heck, it’s arguably a rebuke to any sort of activity, period, a book that frequently had me asking while reading it, “What the f_____ am I reading here? What’s the point?”
Nock had no point, except one: No one should have a point. A point is directed at others, and Nock wanted to leave others alone, just as he wanted others—and especially the government—to leave him alone.
The best way to demonstrate this?
Declare himself obscure . . . worthless . . . superfluous and suggest, without saying it, we’d all be a lot happier if everyone did the same. The superfluous person doesn’t obtrude on others.
Folks who complain that Nock didn’t engage in activism are like folks who complain that Gandhi didn’t kick enough ass. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day: they faced a violent world but knew they couldn’t fight fire with fire. Violence would’ve betrayed their gospel.
Nock’s path runs parallel: a non-violent defiance against the steamroller of Statism. Critics like Goldberg cheer Nock for laying the groundwork for conservatism’s rise, for inspiring Chodorov and Buckley to tilt at the collectivist windmill. Yet they wag their fingers at Nock for not joining the fray himself, blind to the fact that he did fight—by sacrificing himself.
Nock had more tools than Batman’s utility belt. Mencken called him one of the finest writers of his day, in an era when words still carried weight. He was erudite, connected, handsome. He could’ve climbed the greasy pole to fame and fortune. Heck, his talents nearly dragged him there despite himself. But he turned his back. He died relatively obscure, convinced his words hadn’t shifted the world one iota and pretty sure they never would.
So did Socrates, I reckon. He probably sipped his hemlock, figuring he hadn’t shifted the world one iota.
Neither man could’ve done otherwise.
In a world gone mad with power and progress, Nock’s superfluousness was his hemlock.
And if that ain’t fightin’, then I don’t know what is.