The Remnants
In Book VI of "The Republic," Plato presents a dialog between Socrates and Adeimantus, the gist of which relates to who should be considered capable of ruling a city. The tragedy is that those most capable of ruling, if they themselves are not corrupted by desire, are invariably cast aside - denigrated, despised, and attacked - by ruling coalitions of status and power seekers. Socrates characterizes this as the "corruption of the majority" and considered it unavoidable, in large part due to the power of popular opinion accepted at face value.
But all is not lost, for Socrates calls out a fractionally small slice of the population:
"[A] small remnant: perchance some noble and well-educated person, detained by exile in her service [GE: "her" being a reference to philosophy1], who in the absence of corrupting influences remains devoted to her; or some lofty soul born in a mean city, the politics of which he contemns and neglects; and there may be a gifted few who leave the arts, which they justly despise, and come to her...Those who belong to this small class have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, and have also seen enough of the madness of the multitude; and they know that no politician is honest, nor is there any champion of justice at whose side they may fight and be saved. Such a one may be compared to a man who has fallen among wild beasts— he will not join in the wickedness of his fellows, but neither is he able singly to resist all their fierce natures, and therefore seeing that he would be of no use to the State or to his friends, and reflecting that he would have to throw away his life without doing any good either to himself or others, he holds his peace, and goes his own way. He is like one who, in the storm of dust and sleet which the driving wind hurries along, retires under the shelter of a wall; and seeing the rest of mankind full of wickedness, he is content, if only he can live his own life and be pure from evil or unrighteousness, and depart in peace and good-will, with bright hopes."
In 1936, Albert Nock wrote an essay titled "Isaiah's Job," in which he set forth an idea for what the purpose of the remnants might be and how they could be supported. Isaiah's job, as it turns out, is to provide that support.
"There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it."
In a similar vein to Socrates, Nock draws several distinctions between the masses and the remnants:
"As the word masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people, laboring people, proletarians, and it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either."
Yesterday
I read "The Republic" more than 40 years ago and "Isaiah's Job" more than 20 years ago. Each have amplified the sense of affinity I have for the remnants of the world. I know them to be my tribe. We are not rebels or reactionaries or revolutionaries or preppers or agitators or any sort. We do not lead causes or cheer from the sidelines. Rather, we work to be good citizens and instinctively prepare to pick up the pieces after the mob's destructive convulsions have run their course. Then we set to work rebuilding the world, taking care to apply the lessons from the collapse. We are the misfits who are aware enough to know we need to keep the deeply felt sense of incongruity we have with the rest of society as a closely held secret, protected within our Stoic Citadel. And therein lies a vexing puzzle. Nock elaborates:
"[I]n any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them. You can be sure of those — dead sure, as our phrase is — but you will never be able to make even a respectable guess at anything else. You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness."
The "you" the remnants will find are the Isaiah's of the world, who need only work to spread their wisdom. The characteristics of an "Isaiah" and how to distinguish the genuine deal from a fraud will eventually find a way from my notes to a home on The Remnant's Way.
To be clear, I do not feel I am called to Isaiah's job. I lack the skill and the wisdom. Rather, from an early age, I've tried to live as best I could according to what I understood it meant to be one of Socrates' remnants. Occasionally, I would cross paths with a like-minded individual and for a short time - perhaps an hour or a few months - I had an ally with whom I could compare notes.
Today
I've wondered at times, how might the remnants deliberately find each other. I do not think there is an answer to that question simply because there is no need for them to find each other. Events and circumstances call them and they find each other within their cooperative actions. Not just in space, but in time as well. Circumstances and events draw them out and bring them together. It's a call for action that comes from inside themselves, not from some zealot with a self-serving agenda and a bullhorn. They live ready and don't ask for permission or otherwise wait to act. When their work is done, they merge back into the pulse of their respective lives and communities.
As I grow older, I feel a gathering sense that my time as a remnant is waning. Age is slowly claiming my physical abilities and much of my knowledge about day-to-day responsibilities is no longer relevant beyond the scope of my immediate frame. And yet, I feel there is something to offer the remnants by way of my own trail notes. They are the record of my lessons and insights wrought from successes and (mostly) failures. They have been valuable to me. Any value they have to others is not for me to determine.
The idea for collecting these notes, scribbles, and scraps on The Remnant's Way reaches back more than 30 years. Allowing a moment of nostalgic reflection, they seem like such innocent times. The facts underlying my experiences from then until now, however, break the reverie. Each moment had its unique pain or pleasure. It's only when we cast our gaze back across the arc we have been traveling - with ferocious honesty, stripped of the innumerable biases and layers of manufactured identity that cloud our lens - that we gain a sense of wisdom, however small, with which we can then cast our gaze forward and see.
I've been building my modest collection for over sixty years. At times, the lessons came from simply enduring events and reflecting on them later. Some times years later. Often the lessons came from an unwilling effort. Like clay mud sticking to boots, I cursed the labors of the moment and loathed the accumulating clumps of wisdom that replaced the fluff of innocence with the weight of responsibility, accountability, and duty. Naively, this only seemed to bog me down, hold me back, and thwart my headlong progress into the fog. I've since learned the weight has served to make me stronger, resilient, and patient. Learning from experience - actually internalizing and integrating the lessons - has grounded me in a way no book learning ever could.
So here I am today - nearing the end of my arc in this life - with the means to let go of the reins to the team that pulls a plow across the muddy fields of ambition and opportunity and reflect on where I have been. And speculate about what is to come.
Tomorrow
It's easy to be pessimistic about the future. In fact and in practice, it's always been easy to be pessimistic about the future. Our innate ability to sort for scary and potentially harmful things is what carried our ancestors across tens of thousands of years of evolution. Over the course of those years, demonstrably dangerous or stupid human beings were trimmed from the family tree by The Cruelly Indifferent Universe. Today, however, we are deliberately collecting aberrant and violent cruft in the name of "compassion" or fear-based "tolerance". And so our abilities to cooperate and genuinely tolerate, let alone accept, healthy and constructive differences are regressing to a meaner time.
All of this is so very far out of my ability to influence, let alone control. But I can observe. I can study, evaluate, compare, hypothesize, and test. After decades of work, what has emerge are a few salient guiding stars by which I keep my bearings, steer a path through each day's challenges, and find my way forward.
A Robust Grasp of History from 1900 to the Present Day
Footnotes
1 The study of "philosophy" to the ancient Greeks and Romans was something quite different from the isolated and impenetrable approach to inquiry we think of today. The word is derived from the Greek word philosophia, meaning "love of wisdom." For the ancient Greeks and Romans, philosophy was a system for exploring the nature of reality in a way that added to an individual's knowledge and wisdom for day-to-day living. Practicing any particular school of philosophy helped the student integrate their new-found knowledge and wisdom into the experience of daily living. It was a handbook, of sorts. Much more than an intellectual exercise, it was was a way of life.
"Ab Initio" last updated on 2025.05.01.
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Photo Credit: Haleakalā, Maui, Hawai'i - Gregory Engel