At first I didn’t quite get this book, but I can’t recommend it highly enough.
This memoir is roughly divided into sections on Nock’s education, his politics, his views on art, his thoughts on women and sex, his thoughts on history and his beliefs about history and philosophy. I think it was initially difficult for me to get into the book because I had already read his books on politics and education.
It’s impossible to read Memoirs and not get sucked in the incredibly simple and yet profound way Nock has of expressing his beliefs. For example:
The reformers of the period put me off, in the first instance, by their careless superficial use of abstract terms. They talked about the oppressiveness of capital, the evils of the capitalist system, the iniquities of finance-capitalism, and so on, apparently with no idea of what those terms mean. To me, therefore, most of what they said was sheer nonsense. I knew that no society ever did or could exist without employing capital, and my notion was that wherever capital is at work, there of necessity is capitalism and a capitalist system. As I saw it, there was nothing in the nature o£ capital that was unjust or oppressive, but quite the contrary. I could see that injustice and oppression were likely to follow when great capitalists were in a position of State-created economic advantage, like Mr. Carnegie with his tariffs or the "railway-magnates" with their land-grants; but the same results seemed as likely to follow where small capitalists or non-capitalists were in a similarly privileged position. Spencer's Social Statics, published in 1851, had shown me that under such a government as he contemplated,—a government divested of all power to traffic in economic advantage, — injustice and oppression would tend to disappear. As long as the State stood as an approachable huckster of privilege, however, there seemed no chance but that they must persist, and that the consequent social disorder must persist also.
How can you avoid getting sucked in by that?
Nock used several near-axioms to evaluate virtually all aspects of life: the first he called Epstean’s Law, which was that "man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with
the least possible exertion”; the second was Gresham's law, which states that the bad always drives out the good (Nock applied this to everything, not just currency); the third was the law of diminishing return. These laws combined with his early realization that “ignorance exists, that people know actually very little about anything, nor are they equipped for knowing much more than they do” seemed to form the core principles of his philosophy.
The best way I can think of to review the book is to quote some choice passages:
Socialism and one or two other variants of collectivist Statism were making considerable political progress at the time. When I met some of their proponents, as I did now and then, I would put the one question to them that I always put to George's campaigners. Suppose by some miracle you have your system all installed, complete and perfect, it will still have to be administered,—very well, what kind of people can you get to administer it except the kind of people you've got? I never had an answer to that question.
I think today’s behavioral economists could learn from the above observation.
I was much impressed by France's remarkable experience; it seemed to me one of the most exhibitory experiences in history, though I did not find any one who was taking it as such. In a single century after 1789, France had tried every known kind of State-system, some two or three times over; three republics, a couple of monarchies, two empires, now and then a dictatorship, a directory, a commune—every system one could think of. Each shift brought about the same consequences to the individual, and they all alike bore testimony to the truth of Paine's saying, that "the trade of governing has always been a monopoly of the most ignorant and the most vicious of mankind." I often wondered why this sequence of systems in France had not given rise to more speculation about the actual net value of any one political system over another. If it had given rise to any, I did not hear of it.
Needless to say, Nock was not a fan of government of any kind. After all, all kinds he had heard of ignored his three laws.
I could see how "democracy" might do very well in a society of saints and sages led by an Alfred or an Antoninus Pius. Short of that, I was unable to see how it could come to anything but an ochlocracy of mass-men led by a sagacious knave.
Nock has a very aristocratic nature. Throughout the book he berates the prevailing ideology of the day, which he called economism (he means this in a way that is close to synonymous with the way we generally use materialism). He not opposed to consumption or material progress he is just criticizing the belief that progress is equivalent to prosperity. Material progress is not to be confused with increasing virture.
"I wonder how many such men in America would know that Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring.
On women:
Towards the end of my term as an editor in New York I stumbled on a statement that considerably more than half the national wealth of the United States was in the hands of women. This interested me to the point of taking measures to find out if it were true; and it was true, to my surprise. I knew that the dean of St. Paul's had described American society as an ice-water-drinking gynecocracy, but I did not imagine that his view could be borne out by anything so cogent. I immediately formed the reasonable notion that so large an amount of economic control combined with full political equality, full equality of educational and cultural opportunity, and an unprecedented liberation from traditional disabilities,—all this should be showing some distinct and salutary social effects. I not only saw no signs of any such effects being produced, however, but I also saw no signs of any disposition to produce them, still less of any sense of responsibility in the premises; and this excited my curiosity. Considering the great enlargement of opportunity for American women to do what they liked with themselves, I was curious to see what, if anything, they were actually doing; and I made this a matter of observation and inquiry for several years, whenever occasion offered. Putting the results in a word, I found that they were contenting themselves with doing exactly what men do. Their conception of their new-found liberties and the use to be made of them did not reach beyond this. All the evidence I could turn up tended with unfailing regularity to this conclusion. . . .
The point of my essays was that while admittedly women can do pretty much anything that men can do, and do it pretty much as well, they can also do something which men do not show, and have never shown, any appreciable aptitude for doing; they can civilise a society. In view of this I ventured to suggest that in their peculiarly privileged position American women might do well to get a really competent understanding of what civilisation is and what its terms are, and then apply themselves to quickening the extremely stodgy dough of American society with the leaven of civilisation. If one were addressing an aggregation of psychically-human beings, this would be all very well. But when Mr. Cram showed that Neolithic society is not one whit more truly civilised now than it was six thousand years ago, and in the nature of things will be no more truly civilised six thousand years hence, he reduced all I had been saying to sheer nonsense. . . .
Regarding marriage as essentially a quasi-industrial partnership, a business enterprise, and then looking over the persons of one's acquaintance who are engaged in it, one must see, I think, that the distribution of natural aptitude for it is about what it is for other occupations. There are many misfits, many who through no great fault of theirs have obviously mistaken their calling. Society's tacit assumption is that all normal persons are qualified for matrimony, and this is not so.
Here’s more on the State, Nock takes the nature of state as given, seeking not change it, but merely to understand it precisely:
In a spirit of sheer conscious fraud, the State will at any time offer its people "four freedoms," or six, or any number; but it will never let them have economic freedom. If it did, it would be signing its own death-warrant, for as Lenin pointed out, "it is nonsense to make any pretence of reconciling the State and liberty." Our economic system being what it is, and the State being what it is, all the mass of verbiage about "the free peoples" and "the free democracies" is merely so much obscene buffoonery.
He takes the same matter-of-fact approach to history:
Even among the more experienced peoples of Europe I found few who understood that because the nineteenth century was what it was the twentieth century must be what it is, and that there is no way of cutting in between cause and effect to make it something different from what it must be.
Here’s some wisdom:
I know, however, that the problem of no minority anywhere can be settled unless and until two preliminaries are established. First, that the principle of equality before the law be maintained without subterfuge and with the utmost vigour. Second, that this principle be definitively understood as carrying no social implications of any kind whatever. "I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following," said Shylock; "but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you."
More;
"Man will become more clever and sagacious," said Goethe, "but not better, happier or showing more resolute wisdom; or at least, only at periods." Inevitably so.
More:
"Thus a system of State-controlled compulsory popular instruction is a great aid in making Homo sapiens an easy mark for whatever deleterious nonsense may be presented to him under the appearance of authority.
More:
II faut cultiver notre javelin. 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.
More:
If mankind really have an unquenchable love for freedom, I thought it strange that I saw so little evidence of it; and as a matter of fact, from that day to this I have seen none worth noticing. . . .
According to my observations, mankind are among the most easily tamable and domesticable of all creatures in the animal world. They are readily reducible to submission, so readily conditionable (to coin a word) as to exhibit an almost incredibly enduring patience under restraint and oppression of the most flagrant character. So far are they from displaying any overweening love of freedom that they show a singular contentment with a condition of servitorship, often showing a curious canine pride in it, and again often simply unaware that they are existing in that condition.
Nock divided humanity is those domesticable in this manner and those who were not – a division made by many people well versed in German philosophy, it seems. His membership in the latter sect condemned him to superfluity – a concept which cropped up throughout the wor:
All I ever asked of life was the freedom to think and say exactly what I pleased, when I pleased, and as I pleased. I have always bad that freedom, with an immense amount of uncovenanted lagniappe thrown in; and having had it, I always felt I could well afford to let all else alone. It is true that one can never get something for nothing; it is true that in a society like ours one who takes the course which I have taken must reconcile himself to the status of a superfluous man; but the price seems to me by no means exorbitant and I have paid it gladly, without a shadow of doubt that I was getting all the best of the bargain.
Foseti 