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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 can
not 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 favourite 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 can not 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
insasmuch 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.
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, labouring 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 picture which Isaiah presents of the Judean masses is most
unfavorable, In his view, the mass-man -- be he high of 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 fervour; 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 can not 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 twenty-four hours a day for eighteen 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.
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 eighteenth
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 favourable 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 centred 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 favour 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 favour, 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.
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 favour, 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 tedius 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
tough 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:
So far, so good.
BUMP
For digestion later. Going to sleep now.
Jeeez, Paul..."Isaiah's Job" is among my favourite bedtime reading, but brother have you had a long sleep!
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