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.
2
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.”
