I will copy out word for word all of Chapter 7, The Practical Sense, from Eric Hoffer’s book, The Ordeal of Change. The Chapter runs from Page 58 through Page 72, and I will comment where I have something to say.
Hoffer: “Nowadays we take a practical attitude for granted. We seem to think that there is in most people an inborn inclination to make use of every device and circumstance to facilitate their work and further their ends. Yet it needs but a moment’s reflection to realize that, so far from being natural, the practical sense has been throughout history a rare phenomenon. Its prevalence is a peculiarity of the Occident and here, too, it has asserted itself only during the last two hundred years.”
My response: Hoffer was a man of profound goodness, wisdom, and a near unerring instinct for what is true, right and the way to proceed. It may well be that his original emphasis in this essay, accentuating how important the practical sense is for human success, philosophically is one of his most vital contributions for human welfare. If being moderate is his ethical stance, and it is, then we must find ways to keep humans grounded, so that their passion, their radicalized idealism, their militant waving the flag of their tribal narrative in violent clashes against neighboring tribes, these destructive behaviors are curbed.
Instilling in each child a practical sense is a perfect way to ground her rational and passionate excesses in reality to give her a sense of limitation and a need to curb the self. If she is grounded, rational more than illogical, deliberate more than impulsive, calm more than hyper, then her individual-living and individuating, which she expresses in action in the everyday world of commerce and business, will keep her feet firmly planted on the ground, while she searches the stars for meaning and pattern.
Hoffer: “There was a period of superb practicalness in the Near East during the Late Neolithic Age (4000 to 3000 B.C.). It saw the harnessing of oxen and asses; the invention of the plow, wheeled cart, sailboat, calendar, and script; the discovery of metallurgy, artificial irrigation, brickmaking, fermentation, and other fundamental techniques and devices. One has the impression that the coming of civilization about 3000 B.C. tapered off a brilliant practical era.”
My response: If the sense of the practical triggered a quantum leap forward in human civilization in the ancient Near East, could I be correct in assuming the practical, capitalist, republican, Modernist, individualistic bent in the West, was another historical era of individualist self-assertion, coupled with liberty and a willingness to tinker with stuff out in the material world, a time of astounding growth and influence of technological, scientific and material variety, such that gave rise to our fabulous Western affluent culture?
The law of moderation dictates that a civilization develops when people grow and develop in the world based on reasoning, experiencing, observing, experimenting, and then making inductive inferences upon their lived research. Low culture and practical culture are just as important as high cultural and high arts, and perhaps are more critical because the masses live and work, traditionally, in that low-brow arena of worldly work and living. The masses should stay there, but simultaneously self-realize, and this is how we gain our advanced spiritual and material civilization, with millions of participants and creators driving progress forward.
Hoffer: “From their first appearance civilizations almost everywhere were preoccupied with the spectacular, the fantastic, the sublime, the absurd and the playful—with hardly a trickle of ingenuity seeping into the practical and useful. The prehistoric discoveries and inventions remained the basis of everyday life, in most countries down to our time. Technologically, the Neolithic Age lasted even in Western Europe down to the end of the eighteenth century.”
My response: It seems clear to me that there have been rare, actual, limited openings in human history, during which humans were able to leap forward culturally, technologically and artistically, then to be quickly ended, as from then on until the next time of civilized flowering, humans lived in a sort of Dark Age.
My speculation is that the standard, lengthy periods of time in which humans lived in Dark Ages, were times of tight, collectivized tribal uniformity. For creativity and invention to flourish, a society must allow individual members to live as individuals and to individuate. The young must be reared in a culture of structured liberty, not without values, but not a culture of stifling, repressive values rigorously and punitively enforced upon all.
The creators and inventors need tradition to build upon, they require passion, reasoning power, curiosity, and a willingness to imagine other things. They require intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and metaphysical problems to chew on, and a society that rewards them for making the mental and imaginative effort. If the masses were so unleashed, and yet their lived their lives, worked their jobs, and raised their children on their farms and villages, their practical, commonsense connection to reality would shape and impress itself upon all their creative impulses and undertakings.
Ayn Rand, to her credit, has hooked her metaphysical star to the axiom that the egoistic thinker and good person is also an entrepreneur in a free, free market system. Hoffer likely would agree with that general outlook, though her vision for society seems theoretical and disconnected from everyday living, while the world of Hoffer—the fruit tramping, pea-picking and unloading ships lived experience did shape his worldview; this approach seems to be me to grow organically out of his lived experience, as well as out of his prodigious reading and ruminating.
Hoffer: “In Europe as late as the seventeenth century the view still prevailed that there was something preposterous and unseemly in using sublime knowledge for practical ends. We are told that when the mechanical inventor Salomon de Caus tried to interest Richelieu in the possibility of a jet engine he was locked up as a madman in an asylum. People who came forward with practical plans for increasing output by the use of more powerful and efficient machines were considered queer. It was only in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that some sort of liaison began to be established between ‘sublime’ knowledge and practical application. Fontenelle eulogized the military engineer Vauban for bringing down mathematics from the skies and attaching it ‘to various kinds of mundane utility.’ On the eve of the Revolution the French government was welcoming proposals for increasing output even when they were advanced by obvious cranks.”
My response: Groupism, authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, social economics, altruist morality, a culture of nonidividuating and the tendency of elites to allow limited, constrained dabbling with sublime ideas only by a few cranks among elites are all debilitating shackles placed upon the inventive and creative cranks out among the civilian population.
Just imagine what a society of anarchist-individuator supercitizens could invent, conceptualize and artistically symbolize, if they were free to make money, make babies and do art all while plowing fields, and or running a string of county grocery stores?
Hoffer: “The rise of the practical sense in Europe was not only slow but uneven. Spurts of preoccupation with practical arts were followed by periods of stagnation or by a diversion of energies to other fields. During the High Middle Ages, in the wake of the Crusades, there was not only a marked expansion of commerce but also a striking increase in the use of water wheels and windmills in manufacture; an increased efficiency in the mining, extraction and working of metals; and an expansion of arable land by clearing of forests and draining of marshes. The Black Death (1349), which killed a third of the population, and the Hundred Years’ War, which drained the resources of England and France, brought to an end a period which had some earmarks of an industrial revolution. The revival came in the fifteenth century and had its center in Italy and Germany. It saw not only the introduction of printing and paper and an unprecedented advance in the art of navigation, but a venturesomeness in all crafts and industries.”
My response: It astounds me and give me hope, when there are accidental, unplanned spurts of human advancement that pop up like, this attempted flowering of an industrial revolution in Europe. It suggests that, were humans given opportunity, liberty and the skilled to maverize, human progress would be constant, sped up and wondrous to behold.
Hoffer: “This was a passionately creative age, and its practical activities consisted in more than mere adaptation of devices and practices from the Moslem world and the Far East. One has a feeling that the passionate pursuits of that age—the voyages of discovery; the pursuit of beauty, excellence, power, and pleasure; the bent for religious and social reforms, the pursuit of the practical—were all aspects of one and the same drive. The fading faith in a beyond released a fervent groping and searching for heaven on earth.”
My response: If indeed Hoffer is correct (he may well be so), and Europeans had lost faith in Dark Age’s overreliance on and overemphasis upon otherworldly piety, accompanied by disdain for life in this sullied, imperfect world, it could be that they were seeking a comforting narrative and meaningful answers in human research and investigation of life and the world, efforts centered on this-worldly interest and focus. That clash between worldly and otherworldly orientation could temporarily and modestly loosen up groupist monopoly on individual experimenting, unleashing their power to create, long enough to ignite a time of cultural blossoming development.
Hoffer: “The fading faith in a beyond released a fervent groping and searching for a heaven on earth. The explorers were looking for the lost paradise; beauty, excellence, power, and pleasure are the ingredients of an earthly paradise; the reformers were out to recast earthly life into a perfect shape; and the practical inventors tried to make the world over by work.”
My response: If creativity is aesthetically, morally, intellectually, and spiritual good and desirable (and it is), then that which seems isomorphic to a creative cultural uptick in creative expression in the high arts and in the fabrications of practical inventors, must be a social condition that is desirable and to be replicated. The law of moderation, as applied to devising artificially through planning, a social environment conducive to creative production and outburst among the liberated, individuating masses, would lead one to identify the interest in all things worldly, practical, material and natural as the missing elements critical to opening up human creative expression in the world; when the individuating private person straddles the ontological line coursing between sanctioning citizens to invent, conceptualize, create, write and produce in both the worldly and the otherworldly arenas at the same time, and the pain of doing both at the same time will spur original thinking and artistic flair.
Hoffer: “The wars in Italy between Spain and France, and the savage religious wars in Germany put a halt to this flourishing period. It was not until the eighteenth century that the practical sense finally came into its own, and the modern Occident took up where the Late Neolithic craftsmen left off.
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There is some evidence that the rise of the practical sense is linked with a diffusion of individual freedom. It is the ‘breath of democracy,’ as Bergson calls it, which urges the spirit of invention onward and gives it the necessary scope. The impulse to make use of every resource and device to facilitate and expand the world’s work is lodged in the individual who is more or less on his own and has to prove his worth by his work.”
My response: Where there is the social releasing, however slight, modest, and short-lived, of the individual from the totalitarian grip of group control of each private member of the community, there this increase in individual freedom sets loose the individual to make his own meaning and prove his worth by his work and original production. When this scope of freedom encompasses this-worldly access to practical expression of this private self-justifying by work and acting in the world, a creative period is sure to follow.
Hoffer: “Where the compact collective unity blurs the awareness of individual separateness, the present is seen as a mere link between the past and the future and the details of everyday life as too trivial to bother with.”
My response: The lives of every member of the group whose individual separateness is blurred by enforced collective unity which each member willingly surrenders his sense of self and independence to, there will be no creative cultural outburst. The morality of every cultural and historical Dark Age is altruism-collectivism. The claiming that brotherhood is the community’s highest priority leads to social death and stagnation.
Were each member of the community inspired to work and grow in line with egoist-individualist morality, that his dualistic ontology would entail that he the subject should see his time on earth as limited and short, that he had better get going at 17 years of age should he plan to individuate, make his mark, please the Divine Couple, and advance the culture, before he perishes. His time in this world, and his attention to tinkering with and adapting the mundane, material, and practical in ways that support cultural creativity are well spent only when he sees this time of living as critically important and significant. His worldly existence as a maverizer will be underwritten by his deep connection to and affiliation with supernatural, otherworldly, and originative inputs.
Hoffer: “This was true of the Middle Ages as it is of contemporary collectivist societies. On the other hand, to the individual on his own the present looms large, and everyday affairs the main content of life, and every undertaking a test and a trial. He is willing to use everything within reach to advance his ends.
Wherever we find a quickening of the human spirit, we are perhaps justified in tracing it back to a situation in which the individual has been released, if but for a short time, from the dominance of the group—its observations, formulas and ideas. The significant point is that where such a situation occurs, its earliest phase is as a rule marked by an alertness to practical affairs. In most cases, the practical phase is of relatively short duration; it is terminated either by stagnation or by a diversion of energies to other fields.”
My response: Where individuals are released from group dominance, creativity and cultural and economic, technological, and scientific are the pleasing results. Note that when groupists or other concerns stifle individual escape from group dominance, the time of stagnation and mini-Dark Ages reemerge, the standard historical state for most peoples in most generations.
Note that Hoffer is conflating the release of individuals to create, invent, explore, and generate new marvels is directly linked to and reinforced by an interest in and experimenting with objects patterns and connections in the practical material world. There is not creativity without the material world being a place of prime interest and as raw resource for self-realizing.
Hoffer: “There are indications that the outburst of practical ingenuity in the Near East during the Late Neolithic period was a function of individual activity.”
My response: Hoffer the implicit egoist is hinting that times of growth and cultural and technical flowering are times when individuals are given permission by rulers and elites to express their practical ingenuity and to find pleasure in work and original production to manifest what that creative self can accomplish and fabricate.
Hoffer: “In both Mesopotamia and Egypt the era was marked by a conflict of unknown origin that shattered village communities, clans, and tribes, and filled the land with their debris.”
My response: If historical accidents and events shattered the repressive rule of village communities, tribes and clans that kept their citizens from maverizing, and it is patent that then self-realizing in freedom and love of worldly practical experimenting in the here and now during this brief lifetime is regarded by each existent as a time of mortal significance and urgency to produce, invent and create, it is now obvious that reestablishing the blighting reformed groups and orthodoxies quickly shut down these Light Ages and sent the masses back into group enslavement and repression as Dark Age social living is reinforced. We see today as Western free individualist and Modernists are being stalked and destroyed by nihilistic postmodernist Marxists who want a New Dark Age. Progress is not victorious, automatic and cumulative—we can go the other way at any time.
Hoffer: “The cities which first took shape during this period, and which set the stage for the emergence of civilization, were probably to begin with places of refuge for the remnants of broken communal bodies. Such a conglomerate population was for a time without fixed traditions and customs, and during this fluid phase the individual had elbow room to follow his bents and exercise his initiative. Civilization, it evolved around the temple and royal household, was an effort to impose collective compactness on a heterogeneous multitude and herd it back into the communal corral.”
My response: I repeatedly assign to Hoffer the title, implicit egoist, but he never made such an ethical claim. He certainly is pro-individual and pro-individualist, suggesting that the time of advancement in history often is a consequence of the violent disruption of a traditional living arrangement under which people live communal, compact lives. When people break out of the communal corral, then they can culturally flower. I am only logically going one step farther. If we need free individualists to foster culturally and practical creativity, think of how rich, powerful and plentiful their discoveries will be once the masses learn to self-realize as enlightened egoists.
Hoffer: “We come upon a somewhat similar situation toward the end of the second millennium B.C. This was a time of tumult and trouble on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. Invasions and migrations churned and heaved whole populations in Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, and even in the Delta region of Egypt. Out of this turbulence eventually crystallized the city states of Greece, the Ionian settlements in Asia Minor, the Philistine towns on the coast of Palestine, Greek and Etruscan settlements in Italy, and the Phoenician colonies in North Africa and Spain. The practical phase of this period saw the introduction of and spread of the phonetic alphabet, the diffusion of the technique of iron smelting, and the invention of coined money.”
My response: I have several reactions to this paragraph. First, people are born evil and struggle to get better because their natural selflessness or self-loathing is reinforced socially by collective living arrangements and governance, undergirded by altruist-collectivist morality. Still, where history allowed temporary collapse of debilitating communal collectivist suppression of personal individuality, personal identity, and private personality development among the masses of a community, there were brief periods of cultural flowering that occurred.
Second, very heterogenous populations soon were brought under collectivist control and ruled by elites or aspiring elites ambitious to gain power over the local masses by reinstating oppressive group-living arrangements and communal power structures once more.
Third, progress can be made—despite all the genetic and cultural factors holding humanity back and down. Human nature is wicked and does not ever change and get better, but there is enough natural, residual goodness abiding in each human heart that, if the person choose to individualize his personhood, or better yet, is determined to self-realize no matter the price paid, then we can construct a social arrangement that promotes and rewards cultural growth, practical advancement, scientific and technological gain, and moral progress. This would be accelerated and made systematic under Mavellonialism: a generation of individuating supercitizens would bring culture forward farther and faster than anyone could have imagined, and the gains would be solid and sustainable.
Hoffer: “A peculiar variant of the situation is to be found in the emergence of a Moslem civilization in the wake of the Arab conquest. Here we have a release of individual by conversion—a conversion that is more convenient than heartfelt. Millions of people found themselves, almost overnight, stripped of age-old traditions and practices without as yet being encased by a new orthodoxy. For the talented individual in particular, the conversion to Islam was the opening of the door to opportunity. Almost all of the outstanding personalities of the Moslem renaissance were non-Arabs. They were Persians, Turks, Jews, Greeks, Berbers, and Spaniards. The bearers of the new culture, know as ‘the people of the pen,’ were so notoriously impious that orthodox Muslims refused to break bread with them.* (* S. D. Goitein, Jews and Arabs (New York: Shocken Books, 1955 p. 104)”
My response: When these talented individuals—non-Arabs—were pulled involuntarily from their own religion and culture and forced to convert by the sword or die, they converted and contributed to the Muslim renaissance. It was not that the orthodox Muslims were not talented or bright, but their extremely passionate, group-oriented faith, especially in its mass movement phase, did not allow for individual Arabs to be able to express their individuality or demonstrate their originality, so understandably change and flourishing would occur more naturally among the non-Arabs force converted to Islam.
Hoffer: “In its early phase, lasting two or three centuries, the Moslem civilization displayed a remarkable ingenuity in putting to practical use theories and processes borrowed from near and far. Paper factories, sugar refineries, manufactories of textiles, leather, glazed tile, steel, and chemicals dotted the Moslem world from Spain to central Asia. For the first time, there was systematic employment of the waterwheel and windmill. Artesian wells were bored into North Africa and other semiarid regions and there was a development of vast irrigation projects. The magnetic compass, the astrolabe and Indian arithmetic were put to practical use. All crafts were in a flourishing state. Stagnation set in with the hardening of orthodoxy, and finally disintegration in the wake of the Mongol incursion in the East and the Christian reconquest of Spain.
The impulse toward practical application given by the Crusades was also the product of the individual’s release from constraints and ties. The sight of the sun-drenched world of the Near East with its fabulous cities, its exotic fashions in dress and food, and its flamboyant everyday life must have stirred the feeling of many of the crusaders that the present was not the vale of tears and place of exile that the Church had made it out to be.”
My response: Atheist and secular humanist Ayn Rand denies that life here is a vale of tears or that it is not for its own sake; practical, enjoyment of this-worldliness orientation is important, even for all religious believers.
Hoffer: “The observation that a thriving Moslem civilization in action could not but give birth to the realization that Europe too, had possibilities.”
My response: The Good Spirits are Individuators and they are Moderates too. They want humans to have their cake and eat it too. The Law of Moderation is a kind of Divine Law of the Included Middle. Religious individuators practicing their rational religion today would express their faith more as a rational exercise, but it would have a rich emotional component added in for spice. The daily life of the living angel or saint-in-the-making would be idealistic and down-to-earth, ethereal, and whimsical, but also practical and lived in the world. The otherworldly individuators would very much be of this world and build a fine world—heaven on earth—here and now, and that is as the Good Spirits would command humans to do and how to live.
Hoffer: “Still, the mere contact with the Moslem world probably was not decisive. Byzantium and Spain had such a contact for centuries, yet it did not release in them an impulse towards experimentation and innovation. What counted more was the fact of movement—the pulling out of thousands of individuals from the familiar routine of a parochial world. The emergence of the autonomous individual is rarely the end result of a long process of social growth and maturing. Most often it is the result of chance or even catastrophe. The individual is separated from the group—he either emigrates or is cast out, left behind, or carried off. It would be difficult to exaggerate the role played by emigrants, exiles, and refugees in the awakening of the Western world. It is plausible for instance that if the Reformation was a crucial factor in the rise of the modern Occident it was due less to the effect of its doctrines than to the fact that the religious persecutions it set in motion filled Western Europe with refugees and voluntary emigrants—both Protestant and Catholic—from Spain, Portugal, France, and The Netherlands. America is a classical example of energy released by the influx of emigrants from the Old World, and the ceaseless movement of population inside the continent.”
My response: We need to construct a culture for the young to maverize, and to enjoy individual-living and some group-living while ever awake as a people not to go back to a lifestyle and social order based on group-living and nonindividuating.
Hoffer: “ 3
The question is: Why did not classical Greece, with its considerable individual differentiation and its appreciation of the present, canalize its intelligence and ingenuity into practical pursuits? Despite its breath-taking uniqueness, Greek civilization shared a contempt for the practicalness with other civilizations. It believed that a preoccupation with practical affairs ‘renders the body, soul and intellect of free persons unfit for the exercise of virtue.’”
My response: It is not enough to allow citizens individual differentiation and to appreciate the present: the law of moderation must be at work in a people: the this-worldly concerns and practical applications of theories and processes must be honored. Also, the Greek elites were aristocratic and elitist: it is not likely that the commoners and slaves were regarded as individualists, discouraged from establishing practical crafts and what not, let alone disallowed to participate in individual self-expression in the fine arts and high arts.
Hoffer: “The first answer to suggest itself is that what counts most in the rise of the practical sense is the extent of individualism. Where individualism is exclusive, as it was in Greece, the individual can prove his worth by leadership or by cultivating his talents rather than by work.”
My response: Hoffer here has instructed me that a society of individuating supercitizens—that strange and wonderful category of upper middle-class achievers would be a hybrid human: individualist and individuators more than joiner and mediocrity; part exclusive individualist that proves his worth through leadership and cultivating his talents, and part individualist as a common person that as a voter, follower, consumer, worker, burgher and entrepreneur that proves his worth by practical enterprising and acting and working in the world in the present.
Hoffer: “The 30,000 autonomous individuals who set the tone in Athens did not have to spend their energies on the mechanics of everyday life because most of the work was done by 200,000 slaves. On the other hand, in the Occident, where individualism is diffused in the mass, there is inevitably an intimate contact between the individual and the world’s work, and he will use everything on earth to advance his undertakings.”
My response: The world requires both kinds of individualism: aristocratic intellectualism focused on ruminating and abstract interests, and working person individualism where the individual’s creativity and originality are applied in practical applications in daily life, and the individuating supercitizen should be both and do both all the time.
Hoffer: “Still, this does not tell the whole story. The neglect of the practical in Greece was also due to the fact that it was a society in which the influence of the intellectual was paramount. There is considerable evidence of the intellectual’s age-long hostility to the utilitarian point of view. The antagonism made itself felt at a very early stage in history—almost with the invention of writing. Writing was first developed in the Near East for a practical purpose: namely, to facilitate accounting in storerooms and treasuries. The earliest examples we have of writing are inventories and tallies. Writing was one of the crafts attached to the temple and the royal household; but from the very beginning the men who practiced the craft of writing were in a category by themselves. The scribe, unlike the potter, weaver, carpenter, etc., did not produce anything tangible and of unquestioned usefulness. Furthermore, the scribe was from the beginning an adjunct of management rather than a member of the labor force. Inevitably, this special position induced in the scribe an attitudes and biases which could not but have a profound effect on the outlook of any society in which he played a paramount role. His lack of an unequivocal sense of usefulness set his face against practicalness and usefulness as tests of worth.”
My response: I have often suggested that all college-educated professionals master some skill with their hands so they have some interaction with the world and oof the practical, and once they become proficient doers, it could keep them grounded and more original because creative practicalness helps release intellectual creative output.
Hoffer: “His penchant for exclusiveness, too, reinforced his anticipated bias. Since the realm of the practical is the only one in which the common run of humanity have as much chance of attaining excellence as the educated, it was natural for the scribe to limit the proof of individual worth to fields inaccessible to the mass.
On the whole it seems true that where the equivalents of the intellectual constitute a dominant class there is little likelihood of ingenuity finding wide application in practical affairs. The inventiveness which now and then breaks through in such social orders is diverted into the fanciful, magical, and playful. Hero’s steam engine was used to work tricks in temples and divert people at banquets. According to Plutarch, Archimedes considered the work of an engineer as ignoble and vulgar, and looked on his ingenious mechanical inventions as playthings. In Mandarin-dominated China the potent inventions of the magnetic compass, gunpowder, and printing hardly affected daily life. The compass was used to find a desirable orientation for graves; gunpowder was used to frighten off evil spirits; and printing was used to multiply amulets, playing cards and paper money. The exceptional arithmetical achievements of the Brahmin intellectuals did not have the slightest effect on the management of practical affairs, nor did it occur the Buddhist intellectuals to use their ingenuity to lighten the burden of daily tasks. They invented the water wheel not to mill grain but to grind out prayers. In the Occident too, the elite of clerks during the Middle Ages, and the early humanists of the Renaissance, decried revolutionary innovations in the way of doing things. The humanists were hostile to the invention of printing and ignored the great geographical discoveries.”
My response: It almost seems as if the worldwide bias and suppression against rewarding the masses trying to express their individuality in practical affairs occurred because elites sense that such prevention kept the mass down, subdued and dependent upon the preferences of their rulers. If most the masses were individuators, expressing their individuality intellectually as well as practically, their personal individuating would be enriched beyond measure.
Hoffer: “It is of interest that the intellectual’s disdain of the practical seems to persist even when he is up to his neck in purely practical affairs. In the Communist countries, the dominant intelligentsia is preoccupied with the highly practical task of industrializing a vast expanse of the globe’s surface. Yet despite their fervor for factories, mines, powerhouses, etc., they are permeated with disdain for the practical aspects of these works. Their predilection is for the monumental, grandiose, spectacular, and miraculous. They have no interest in the merely useful, and it is not at all strange that they should have left the details of housing, food, clothing, and other components of everyday life in a relatively primitive state. Harrison E, Salisbury* (*To Moscow and Beyond—New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960, p. 136.) was struck on his recent travels through Soviet Russia by the almost total absence of liaison between research and practical application. He found hardly one example of the close integration between research and industry so Common in America. He saw only one great agricultural experiment station on the American model, and it was in Rumania. There professors were self-consciously in the fields. They told Salisbury: ‘People call us Americans.’”
My response: The intellectual cannot be practical even when he tries unless he loves the practical and tinkers with it a no-nonsense, humble way, not riven by ideological presupposition.
Hoffer: “The exceptional prominence given the practical in America stems partly from the fact that we have here, for the first time in history, a civilization that operates its economy and government, and satisfies most of its cultural needs without the aid of the typical intellectual. Perhaps the most recent demonstration of the country’s dependence for its defense and progress on pure science and the performance of scientific theoreticians might presage a lessening of the cult of the practical. Almost all recent pronouncements in praise of science and scientists have an undertone of deprecation of the merely practical. Here as in other things in our world is now coming full circle. In the seventeenth century the military engineer Vauban was euologized for bringing mathematics down from the stars and applying it to mundane affairs. Now, with the orbiting of man-made stars, our intelligence and ingenuity are being diverted from practical affairs and directed back to the skies.”
My response: I suspect that Hoffer was accurate in criticizing elites in America at that time for moving away from a primary emphasis for diverting purely speculative and theoretical enquiries, and then reinstalling the medieval and ancient Greek emphasis of the theoretical over the practical, because so many millions of modern Americans are now college-educated, the a society run by the masses without aid from bossy intellectuals, is a society which seems vulgar and backwards to these new educated elites.
Again, the moral law of moderation dictates that we need society, research, the government, culture, and the economy to be run by individuating individuals, not be governing elites. These anarchist individuators, that are the new masses, would need to lead productive, inventive lives in which each creator could engage in speculation for its own sake, and apply all existing laws, theories and opinions to practical experimenting and unique gadget-making. This is how we advance our high culture.
Hoffer: “ 4
The anti-practical bias of the intellectual has been most strikingly displayed in the development of the art of writing.
As already mentioned, writing was invented to keep track of the income and outgo of wares. It originated not in houses of learning but in warehouses, and there is evidence that it was the trader who first conceived the idea of script. Tags and marks of ownership preceded clay tablets and papyrus rolls. But once writing came into the keeping of the scribe he set his face against any simplification and practical perfection of the art.”
My response: Hoffer is identifying something terribly important about intellectuals, that they tend to take theories, arts, and knowledge, and deliberately render it obscure, unintelligible, and rarefied, so that the average, nonindividuating citizen is excluded from participation in discussing, utilizing, or experimenting with what was formerly accessible to the masses, but is now made exclusive, sacred, and off limits to the masses.
The masses as individuating supercitizens would be wise to live in the abstract world of theory and speculation, and then regard nothing as vulgar and off limits, as they do commerce, experiments, and work with their hands just to keep themselves centered in reality, for the world of metaphysical realism is what connects each person to what is true and actual, be that internal or external object spiritual or material.
Hoffer: “For two millennia after its invention writing remained a cumbersome, complex affair the mastery of which required a lifetime of application. Indeed, where the influence of the scribe remained unchallenged, as it was in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, there is evidence of a retrograde evolution: a tendency to overburden writing with all manner of artificial inflections. In short, the scribe was not interested in the elaboration of a practical script but in keep writing the prerogative of a privileged few. He had a vested interest in complexity and difficulty. The simplification of writing by the introduction of a phonetic alphabet was the work of outsiders—the Phoenician traders.”
My response: No matter how brilliant or original one is, one’s God-directed obligation is to make this new insight, skill, or procedure as demystified, clearly expressed and simply stated, so that others can replicate one’s experiments or successes. This might be the most egalitarian thing that one can do—to bring millions of people forward in skill and technique. And it would be anticipated and desirable, if they, if they maverize, would share what they know in a simple, straightforward fashion. Only elitists obfuscate to keep knowledge as the excuse for their wielding power.
Hoffer: “It is often stated that it was the economic background of Mesopotamia and Egypt—payment of tribute to the temple, and the management of a vast irrigation system—which gave rise to the invention of writing. Actually, the economic background by itself does not seem to be enough. The empire of the Incas had no writing although its economic situation was not unlike that of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Where a preliterate society succeeds at perfecting an all-embracing bureaucratic system there is little likelihood that it will hit upon the idea of script. The preliterate equivalent of the scribe neither looks for nor welcomes practical devices such as writing and coinage which would enormously simplify his task. He, too, has a vested interest in complexity and difficulty. What seems decisive for the appearance of writing is the presence of the free trader.”
My response: Both Eric Hoffer and Ayn Rand would agree that the free trader is a bringer of innovation, advancement, and civilization.
Hoffer: “We are told that ‘beyond local barter there was no trade in Inca times, since the movement and distribution of food and other commodities was controlled by the state.’* (*G. H. S. Bushnell, Peru (New York: Praeger, 1957), p. 128.) By the same token we are justified in assuming the widespread presence of the free trader in Mesopotamia and the Delta region of Egypt during the late Neolithic.
In scribe-dominated Egypt the free trader was as rare as in the Inca Empire.”
My response: This is amazing; apparently in totalitarian monopolies like in Inca and Egypt, the free trader, the practical innovator, was nonexistent.
Hoffer: “’We do not meet the word ‘merchant’ until the second millennium B. C., when it designates the official of a temple privileged to trade abroad.’** (**Henri Frankfort, The Birth of Civilization in the Near East (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956, p. 118. See also J. E. Manchip White, Ancient Egypt (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1955) p. 124: ‘Coined money did not appear in Egypt until the Persians introduced the silver shekel of Darius.’
Similarly in Mesopotamia the trade routes for centuries were the concern of the central government, and at all times the state had a tight control on trade. The Mesopotamian merchant, no matter how much he prospered, did not see himself as an independent agent and would not assert himself against the central power. In China, the free trader could assert himself only during the breakdown of the bureaucratic apparatus toward the end of the Chou dynasty.
We know less about the origins of the trader than we do about the origins of the scribe. But as we watch the present goings on inside the Communist world, the realization is forced upon us that trading is a form of self-assertion congenial to the common people—a sort of subversive activity; undoctrinaire, unheroic and uncoordinated, yet ceaselessly undermining and frustrating totalitarian domination. The trader probably didn’t initiate the downfall of the ancient totalitarian systems, but he was quick to lodge himself in any cracks which appeared in the monolithic walls, and did all he could do to widen them.”
My response: It tickles me that both Ayn Rand and Hoffer come down on the side of capitalism and free trading as civilizing and liberating historical influences. That free trading was a form of self-assertion congenial to the common people may explain why elites everywhere, and their ruling intellectuals, instinctively and vocally despise tradespeople, and strive mightily to regulate them out of existence, or at least to leash them severely.
Here is another Hofferian paradox at work: It is the money-grubbing burghers with their lowbrow profit motive that nudge the masses towards individualism, individuation, and freedom, while the clerisy and elites, with their highfalutin, noble, lofty, grandiose, doctrinaire motives, backed by stifling centralization of power arrangement, that foster collectivism, injustice, oppression, and slavery. Babbitts are revolutionary, and revolutionary intelligentsia are counterrevolutionary and oppressors, when in office or hoping to revolt and take over the task of ruling a people.
Hoffer: “Thus despite his trivial motivation and questionable practices the trader has been a chief agent in the emergence of individual freedom and, what concerns us here, the canalization of ingenuity and energies in practical application.
It is true that where the trader feels himself supreme he may become as ruthless as any other ruling class. The institution of slavery which rotted the fiber of the ancient world was promoted and perpetuated by the trader as much as the king, priest, and scribe. It is also true that in the past commerce settled into a traditional stagnant routine over long periods of time. But, on the whole, trade has been a catalyst of movement and change, and of government by persuasion rather than by coercion.”
My response: Hoffer is a capitalist and a republican and an individualist: he favors the trader over the scribe, because, overall, the trader is a catalyst for movement, change and government by persuasion, all social conditions undergirding moral and civilizing advancement.
Hoffer: “The trader has neither the words or the venom to transmute his grievances into an absolute truth and impose it upon the world. In a trade-dominated society, the scribe is usually kept out of the management of affairs, but it given a more or less free hand in the cultural field.”
My response: The trader is more individualistic than is a scribe, so on average his self-esteem is higher than the low self-esteeming but vainglorious, strutting scribe or bureaucrat ensconced in his bureaucratic niche as a member of its ruling class. As one become more individualistic and self-loving, Hoffer implies, than one becomes more nuanced and moderate. He has not the motivation, power-lust nor the temperament to universalize his frustrated sense of life and grievance into an absolute truth, an ideology to be wielded as a weapon to conquer or destroy the world. The scribe as a fanatical idealist has both the words and the rage to go after all and everything, burning it all down.
Hoffer: “By frustrating the scribe’s craving for commanding action, the trader draws upon himself the scribe’s wrath and scorn, but unintentionally he also releases the scribe’s creative powers. It was not a mere accident that the prophets, the Ionian philosophers, Confucius and Buddha made their appearance in a period in which traders were conspicuous and often dominant. The same was of course true of the birth of the Renaissance, and the growth of science, literature, and art in modern times.”
My response: Hoffer is suggesting that a free market economic system, and a free society, where the trader not the scribe/intellectual rules, in which the masses as individuals, can release their own creative powers both intellectually, creatively and practically, that is when a cultural Renaissance can come forward once more, and we might well want to introduce a dispensation under which the Babbitts and blue collar workers rule, where the size of government is limited, where cultural flowering, in all aspects, is unleashed to flourish.
Hoffer: “In a scribe-dominated society, the trader is regulated and regimented off the face of the earth. When the scribe comes into power he derives a rare satisfaction from tearing tangible things out of the hands of practical people and harnessing these people to the task of achieving the impossible, and often killing them off in the process.”
My response. This reminds me of the all the Joseph Stalins amassed and gathered inside the cultural Marxist mass movement out to take over America and kill its people off—especially whites, individualists and Christians—all in the name of DEI wokeness.
Hoffer: “The toleration of the scribe in a trader-dominated society means of course the toleration of an articulate opposition capable of giving voice to grievances, and breeding disaffection and revolt. Thus, until recently, the antagonism between the trader and the scribe has led to beneficent results—they cracked each other’s monopoly.”
My response: Hoffer the social and moral critic intuitively rejects monopolies of centralized power in any sort of social order, its bureaucracies to vast and rife, its elites so entrenched and corrupt, its masses so beaten down, collectivized and group-living. He desires no monopolies which are fanatical, evil, out-of-balance. This is where my introduction of the individuating supercitizen as the standard member of the American masses comes in: if each citizen is one-half practical, materialistic trader or blue-collar workers, and one-half scribe/intellectual/artist and she is a maverizer, then the healthy tensions between scribe and trader remains eternally non-monopolistic and power is kept decentralized and liberty and room to self-realized are perpetuated and standardized (standard in that each citizen is free to self-realize, not that the outcome will all be the same).
Hoffer: “The trader cracks the scribe’s monopoly of learning by introducing the simplified alphabet and printing, and by promoting popular education. On the other hand, the scribe has been at the forefront of every movement which set out to separate the trader from his wealth. In the process, both knowledge and riches leaked out to wider sections of the population.”
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