There is a stock character in fiction, particularly science fiction, who might be called the Immortal. Whether he be vampire or angel, alien or just some everyman blessed — or cursed — with Methuselah-like longevity, certain traits define the Immortal. He is polite, generous, even kind, but also resigned to the fact that life is often none of these things. Sometimes he is dismissive or condescending, or perhaps bemusedly indulgent of men’s political or ideological passions, the way old professors relate to freshmen who insist upon the novelty of their ideas and the audacity of their fervor. He’s seen it all before, maybe done it himself when he was a younger man, and he knows deep in the subterranean reservoirs of his soul that there is indeed nothing new under the sun. His own passions are more like cultivated tastes, hard-learned lessons formed by trial and error over many decades. He is disgusted by harmful stupidity but reluctant to correct what can only be gleaned from firsthand experience. He understands Edmund Burke’s insight that “example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.”
This thought kept intruding on me while reading the works of Albert Jay Nock, whose elegant criticism of statism seems to grow more relevant with each passing day. Nock was born in 1870, which he believed was as good a year as any to mark the beginning of the end of civilization. Often compared to Henry Adams as a chronicler of his age, Nock was one of the great men of letters of the 20th century…
