Richard Weaver Quotes

I have come to believe that we do not walk alone in this life. There are others, fellow sojourners, whose journeys are interwoven with ours in seemingly random patterns, yet, in the end, have been carefully placed to reveal a remarkable tapestry. I believe God is the weaver at that loom.

The scientists have given [modern man] the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, and false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have.

Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil. . . Hysterical optimism as a sin against knowledge.

The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of man.

The hero can never be a relativist.

Piety is a discipline of the will through respect. It admits the right to exist of things larger than the ego, of things different from the ego.

It will be found that every attack upon religion, or upon characteristic ideas inherited from religion, when its assumptions are laid bare, turns out to be an attack upon mind.

The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason.

Man is constantly being assured today that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness.

There is no correlation between the degree of comfort enjoyed and the achievement of a civilization. On the contrary, absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.

No society is healthy which tells its members to take no thought of the morrow because the state underwrites their future.

The typical modern has the look of the hunted.

There was a time when the elder generation was cherished because it represented the past; now it is avoided and thrust out of sight for the same reason.

[I]f we feel that creation does not express purpose, it is impossible to find an authorization for purpose in our own lives.

And still the Weaver plies his loom, whose warp and woof is wretched Man Weaving th' unpattern'd dark design, so dark we doubt it owns a plan

Civilization has been an intermittent phenomenon; to this truth we have allowed ourselves to be blinded by the insolence of material success.

Since both knowledge and virtue require the concept of transcendence, they are really obnoxious to those committed to material standards…

The more a man has to indulge in, the less disposed he is to endure the discipline of toil

You poor things. You think that learning is remembering. No wonder you find it so dull. Real learning is hunting for the truth.

As man becomes more immersed in time and material gratifications, belief in the continuum of race fades, and not all the tinkering of sociologists can put homes together again.

In that conversation with Richard, Kris did precisely what she'd done before offering her tennis quitting advice from years before. She paid attention. Instead of getting swept up in a reaction--regardless of how legitimate it would have been--she unseated herself and chose to focus on what Richard was saying. That kind of awareness is rare. It's rare in a person and even more so with a couple.

Loving comfort, risking little, terrified by the thought of change, (the middle class') aim is to establish a materialistic civilization which will banish threats to its complacency. It has conventions, not ideals; it is washed rather than clean. Thus the final degradation of the Baconian philosophy is that knowledge becomes power in the service of appetite.

The past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favors, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all. —Richard Weaver, 1962 I

Those who have not discovered that worldview is the most important thing about a man… should consider the train of circumstances which have with perfect logic proceeded from this. The denial of universals carries with it the denial of everything transcending experience. The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably… the denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is not escape from the relativism of “man the measure of all things.

Gentlemen did not always live up to their ideal, but the existence of an ideal is a matter of supreme importance.

Colleges and departments of education have developed in response to the need for preparing the tens of thousands of teachers required to staff our immense public school system. That they have a most important function to discharge is plain for all to see. But instead of seeing that their products are equipped with sound learning in the various arts and sciences, they have ignored this and have concentrated almost exclusively upon methods of education. They have erected pseudo-science called "Education," most of whose courses are made up of commonplaces expressed in pretentious jargon.

In brief, the discipline of poetry may be expected first to teach the evocative power of words, to introduce the student, if we may so put it, to the mighty power of symbolism, and then to show him that there are ways of feeling about things which are not provincial either in space or time.

It is a repeated error among intellectual historians to assume that ideas have a self-contained history of their own, and that one idea gives rise to another in something like the way one weather system gives rise to the next. Marxists, who regard ideas as by-products of economic forces, commit the opposite error, dismissing the intellectual life as entirely subservient to material causes. The vast and destructive influence of Marxist theory is a clear disproof of what it says. As the American conservative Richard Weaver put it, in the title of a famous and influential book, Ideas Have Consequences (1948), and this is as true of conservative ideas as it is of ideas propagated on the left. To understand the pre-history of conservatism, therefore, one should accept that ideas have far-reaching influence over human affairs; but one should recognise also that they do not arise only from other ideas, and often have roots in biological, social and political conditions that lie deeper than rational argument.

The politicians and businessmen are not interested in saving souls, but they are interested in preserving a minimum of organization, for upon that depend their posts and their incomes. These leaders adopted the liberal's solution to their problem. That was to let religion go but to replace it with education, which supposedly would exercise the same efficacy. The separation of education from religion, one of the proudest achievements of modernism, is but an extension of the separation of knowledge from metaphysics.

And, substantially they hope to supplant the “disciplining of the higher faculty of the imagination” by what they call “education for democracy.” ... The very banality of the expression helps to ensure its triumph. Who could be against education? Who could be against democracy? Yet the phrase begs two questions: What do you mean by “education”? And what do you mean by “democracy”? The school of Dewey has long been fond of capturing words and turning them to their own purposes: they tried hard to capture “humanism”, and even laid siege to “religion” Now I am convinced that if, by “education,” the champions of this slogan mean merely recreation, socialization, and a kind of custodial jurisdiction over young people, then they are deliberately perverting a word with a reasonably distinct historical meaning and making it into what Mr. Richard Weaver, in his book, "Ethics of Rhetoric”, calls a "god-term"—that is, a charismatic expression drained dry of any objective significance, but remaining an empty symbol intended to win unthinking applause

In the same way, we have to inform the multitude that restoration comes at a price. Suppose we give them an intimation of the cost through a series of questions. Are you ready, we must ask them, to grant that the law of reward is inflexible and that one cannot, by cunning or through complaints, obtain more than he puts in? Are you prepared to see that comfort may be a seduction and that the fetish of material prosperity will have to be pushed aside in favor of some sterner ideal? Do you see the necessity of accepting duties before you begin to talk of freedoms?

If we examine Lee first upon the art at which he surpassed, we find a curiously dispassionate understanding not just of the technique, but of the place of war in the life of civilized man. Napoleon too was a philosopher of battle, but his utterances are marred by cynicism. Those of Lee have always the saving grace of affirmation. Let us mount with the general the heights above Fredericksburg and hear from him one of the most searching observations ever made. It is contained in a brief remark, so innocent-seeming, yet so disturbing, expressed as he gazed upon the field of slain on that December day. "It is well this is terrible; otherwise we should grow fond of it." What is the meaning? It is richer than a Delphic saying. Here is a poignant confession of mankind’s historic ambivalence toward the institution of war, its moral revulsion against the immense destructiveness, accompanied by a fascination with the “greatest of all games.” As long as people relish the idea of domination, there will be those who love this game. It is fatuous to say, as is being said now, that all men want peace. Men want peace part of the time, and part of the time they want war. Or, if we may shift to the single individual, part of him wants peace and another part wants war, and it is upon the resolution of this inner struggle that our prospect of general peace depends, as MacArthur so wisely observed upon the decks of the Missouri. The cliches of modern thought have virtually obscured this commonplace of human psychology, and world peace programs take into account everything but this tragic flaw in the natural man—the temptation to appeal to physical superiority. There is no political structure which knaves cannot defeat, and subtle analyses of the psyche may prove of more avail than schemes for world parliament. In contrast with the empty formulations of propagandists, Lee’s saying suggests the concrete wisdom of a parable.

In other words, it is precisely because we have lost our grasp of the nature of knowledge that we have nothing to educate with for the salvation of our order.

It is easy to be blind to the significance of a change because it is remote in time and abstract in character.

And here enters one of the alarming facts of our cultural condition. It is the “spoiled child” psychology which appears in all urban populations. This malady, described by Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses, afflicts any people who have lived so long in an artificial environment that they have lost a sense of the difficulty of things. Their institutionalized world is a product of toil and discipline: of this they are no longer aware. Like the children of rich parents, they have been pampered by the labor and self-denial of those who went before; they begin to think that luxuries, though unearned, are rightfully theirs.

A tendência geral do pensamento moderno (alguém poderia dizer: todo o seu impulso moral) é manter o indivíduo ocupado com induções intermináveis. Desde a época de Bacon, o mundo tem se afastado, e não se aproximado, dos primeiros princípios, de modo que no plano verbal vemos 'verdade' ser substituída por 'fato', e no plano filosófico testemunhamos ataques contra as ideias abstratas e a investigação especulativa. A hipótese não expressa do empirismo é que a experiência nos dirá o que experimentamos. Na arena popular é possível afirmar, a partir de certas colunas de jornal e programas de rádio, que o homem comum está impregnado dessa noção e imagina que uma aquisição diligente de particulares fará dele um homem erudito. Com que confiança patética ele relata seus fatos! Disseram-lhe que conhecimento é poder e que o conhecimento constitui-se de muitas coisas pequenas.

Estão de fato mortos aqueles que padecem de mortes dignas de heróis e mártires? Essa não é uma pergunta supérflua. De certa forma, eles permanecem vivos, como forças, ajudando a moldar o mundo com o qual sonhamos. Mas o espírito da impiedade moderna quer enterrar sua memória com seus ossos, na esperança - cheia de boa vontade e ignorância - de criar um mundo novo.

Out of the surfeit of falsity born of technology and commercialism, we rejoice in returning to primary data and to assurance that the world is a world of enduring forms which in themselves are neither brutal nor sentimental.

In any case, it has been left to the world of science and rationalism to make a business of purveying of the private and the offensive. Picture magazines and tabloid newspapers place before the millions scenes and facts which violate every definition of humanity. How common is it today to see upon the front page of some organ destined for a hundred thousand homes the agonized face of a child run over in the street, the dying expression of a woman crushed by a subway train, tableaux of execution, scenes of intense private grief. These are the obscenities… The extremes of passion and suffering are served up to enliven the breakfast table or to lighten the boredom of an evening at home. The area of privacy has been abandoned because the definition of person has been lost; there is no longer a standard by which to judge what belongs to the individual man.

The company claimed to have interviewed some 2,210 “experts,” of whom it said 1,184 were exclusive Luckies smokers. Of these, federal investigators tracked down 440 and discovered that more than 100 denied smoking Luckies exclusively, 50 did not smoke at all, and some smoked other brands exclusively, some did not recall having ever been interviewed on the subject by American Tobacco, and some had no connection with the tobacco industry. Such details aside, the campaign and the company’s new media-buying strategy were hugely successful, and by 1941 Lucky Strike would narrowly reclaim the market share lead from Camel and widen it dramatically in ensuing years. “He was a dictator, of course,” Pat Weaver recalled of the newly triumphant George Hill of this period, but now he invited the input of others. “His strength,” said Weaver, “was his tremendous conviction about the importance of the business he was in. His weakness was tunnel vision—he was really obsessed with Lucky Strike, I’m afraid.” But not to such a degree that he failed to recognize the danger of his company’s dependence on a single brand amid the vicissitudes of a fickle marketplace. “One day, I came into his office,” Weaver remembered, “and I said, ‘Mr. Hill, I have a good idea.’ He said, ‘Great, what is it?’—he loved ideas.” Weaver’s was a not entirely harebrained scheme to get around the federal excise tax of six cents per pack of twenty cigarettes by putting out a brand in which each smoke was twice the normal length and the package would include a razor blade for slicing each one in two, thereby saving the customer the equivalent of three cents a pack. Hill listened and nodded,

To discover what a thing is “called” according to some system is the essential step in knowing, and to say that all education is learning to name rightly, as Adam named the animals, would assert an underlying truth. The sentence passed upon Babel confounded the learning of its builders.

The feeling that to have power of language is to have control over things is deeply imbedded in the human mind. We see this in the way men gifted in speech are feared or admired; we see it in the potency ascribed to incantations, interdictions, and curses. We see it in the legal force given to oath or word.

knowledge of the prime reality comes to man through the word; the word is a sort of deliverance from the shifting world of appearances. The central teaching of the New Testament is that those who accept the word acquire wisdom and at the same time some identification with the eternal, usually figured as everlasting life.

The problem of the word was argued with great acuteness by the Middle Ages, and one of the first major steps in the direction of modern skepticism came through the victory of Occam over Aquinas in a controversy about language.

From Occam to Bacon, from Bacon to Hobbes, and from Hobbes to contemporary semanticists, the progression is clear: ideas become psychological figments, and words become useful signs.

Semantics, which I shall treat as an extreme outgrowth of nominalism, seems inspired by two things: a feeling that language does not take into account the infinite particularity of the world and a phobia in the face of the autonomous power of words.

Such men work laboriously to show by categories of referents all the things a single term can mean, and, at the same time, they take into account the circumstances of the user, apparently in an effort to correlate him with the world of becoming. (This should recall the earlier tendency of Romanticism to regard a work of art as expressive of the artist’s emotional condition at the moment of its execution.) They desire language to reflect not conceptions of verities but qualities of perceptions, so that man may, by

The thing we have never heard of is defined for us by the things we know; putting these together, we discover, or unbury, the concept which was there all the while.

Words, because of their common currency, acquire a significance greater than can be imparted to them by a single user and greater than can be applied to a single situation. In this way the word is evocative of ideal aspects, which by our premises are the only aspects constituting knowledge.

To find a word is to find a meaning; to create a word is to find a single term for a meaning partially distributed in other words. Whoever may doubt that language has this power to evoke should try the experiment of thinking without words.

The power of symbolism is greatly feared by those who wish to expel from life all that is nonrational in the sense of being nonutilitarian, as witness the attack of Jacobins upon crowns, cassocks, and flags.

universities have found that with few exceptions students who display the greatest mastery of words, as evidenced by vocabulary tests and exercises in writing, make the best scholastic records regardless of the department of study they enter. For physics, for chemistry, for engineering—it matters not how superficially unrelated to language the branch of study may be—command of language will prognosticate aptitude. Facility with words bespeaks a capacity to learn relations and grasp concepts; it is a means of access to the complex reality.

We live in an age that is frightened by the very idea of certitude, and one of its really disturbing outgrowths is the easy divorce between words and the conceptual realities which our right minds know they must stand for.

Thucydides tells us in a vivid sentence that “the ordinary acceptation of words in their relation to things was changed as men thought fit.

Or consider the number of contradictory things which have been denominated Fascist. What has happened to the one world of meaning? It has been lost for want of definers. Teachers of the present order have not enough courage to be definers; lawmakers have not enough insight.

that the people of the Western world “do not know the meaning of certain words, which had been assumed to belong to the permanent vocabulary of mankind, certain ideals which, if ignored in practice under pressure, were accepted in theory. The least important of these words is Freedom. The most important are Justice, Mercy, and Truth.

And it is entirely certain that if we leave them to the sort of education obtainable today from extra-scholastic sources, the great majority will be schooled in the two vices of sentimentality and brutality. Now great poetry, rightly interpreted, is the surest antidote to both of these. In contrast with journalists and others, the great poets relate the events of history to a pure or noble metaphysical dream, which our students will have all their lives as a protecting arch over their system of values. Of course, a great deal will depend on the character and quality of the instruction.

This part of his study should include, too, the foreign languages, and, if we really intend business, this will mean Latin and Greek.

Nothing so successfully discourages slovenliness in the use of language as the practice of translation. Focusing upon what a word means and then finding its just equivalent in another language compels one to look and to think before he commits himself to any expression. It is a discipline of exactness

Journalism charms the public as it mesmerizes the popular mind. Talk descends into formula, into stock phrases and knee-jerk reactions. Weaver thought the mass media was designed to minimize discussion. “Despite many artful pretensions to the contrary,” noted Weaver, “it does not want an exchange of views, save perhaps on academic matters. Instead, it encourages men to read in the hope they will absorb.

Our age provides many examples of the ravages of immediacy, the clearest of which is the failure of the modern mind to recognize obscenity. This failure is not connected with the decay of puritanism. The word is employed here in its original sense to describe that which should be enacted off-stage because it is unfit for public exhibition. Such actions, it must be emphasized, may have no relation to gross animal functions; they include intense suffering and humiliation, which the Greeks, with habitual perspicacity and humanity, banned from their theater.

Some form of sentiment, deriving from our orientation toward the world, lies at the base of all congeniality. Vanishing, it leaves cities and nations mere empirical communities, which are but people living together in one place, without friendship or common understanding, and without capacity, when the test comes, to pull together for survival.

The terrible brutalities of democratic war have demonstrated how little the mass mind is capable of seeing the virtue of selection and restraint. The refusal to see distinction between babe and adult, between the sexes, between combatant and noncombatant—distinctions which lay at the core of chivalry—the determination to weld all into a formless unit of mass and weight—this is the destruction of society through brutality. The roar of the machine is followed by the chorus of violence; and the accumulation of riches, to which states dedicated themselves, is lost in a blind fanaticism of destruction.

The only redemption lies in restraint imposed by idea; but our ideas, if they are not to worsen the confusion, must be harmonized by some vision. Our task is much like finding the relationship between faith and reason for an age that does not know the meaning of faith.

if one “is with a business organization, the odds are great that he has sacrificed every other kind of independence in return for that dubious one known as financial. Modern social and corporate organization makes independence an expensive thing; in fact, it may make common integrity a prohibitive luxury for the ordinary man.

Weaver is particularly harsh on what he regards as the tepid ambitions of the middle class: “Loving comfort, risking little, terrified by the thought of change, its aim is to establish a materialistic civilization which will banish threats to its complacency.

We are told the time to laugh and the time to cry, and signs are not wanting that the audience grows ever more responsive to its cues.

For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state.

Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.

It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence. His triumph tended to leave universal terms mere names serving our convenience. The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of humankind.

The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably—though ways are found to hedge on this—the denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is no escape from the relativism of “man the measure of all things.” The witches spoke with the habitual equivocation of oracles when they told man that by this easy choice he might realize himself more fully, for they were actually initiating a course which cuts one off from reality. Thus began the “abomination of desolation” appearing today as a feeling of alienation from all fixed truth.

The expulsion of the element of unintelligibility in nature was followed by the abandonment of the doctrine of original sin. If physical nature is the totality and if man is of nature, it is impossible to think of him as suffering from constitutional evil; his defections must now be attributed to his simple ignorance or to some kind of social deprivation.

Man created in the divine image, the protagonist of a great drama in which his soul was at stake, was replaced by man the wealth-seeking and-consuming animal. Finally came

This story is eloquently reflected in changes that have come over education. The shift from the truth of the intellect to the facts of experience followed hard upon the meeting with the witches. A little sign appears, “a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand,” in a change that came over the study of logic in the fourteenth century—the century of Occam.

The world of “modern” knowledge is like the universe of Eddington, expanding by diffusion until it approaches the point of nullity. What the defenders of present civilization usually mean when they say that modern man is better educated than his forebears is that he is literate in larger numbers.

It is not what people can read; it is what they do read, and what they can be made, by any imaginable means, to learn from what they read, that determine the issue of this noble experiment. We have given them a technique of acquisition; how much comfort can we take in the way they employ it? In a society where expression is free and popularity is rewarded they read mostly that which debauches them

The staggering number of facts to which he today has access serves only to draw him away from consideration of first principles, so that his orientation becomes peripheral. And looming above all as a reminder of this fatuity is the tragedy of modern Germany, the one totally literate nation.

the question of how many angels can stand on the point of a needle, so often cited as examples of Scholastic futility, had incalculable ramifications, so that, unless there was agreement upon these questions, unity in practical matters was impossible. For the answer supplied that with which they bound up their world; the ground of this answer was the fount of understanding and of evaluation; it gave the heuristic principle by which societies and arts could be approved and regulated. It made one’s sentiment toward the world rational, with the result that it could be applied to situations without plunging man into sentimentality on the one hand or brutality on the other.

When a man chooses to follow something which is arbitrary as far as the uses of the world go, he is performing a feat of abstraction; he is recognizing the noumenal, and it is this, and not that self-flattery which takes the form of a study of his own achievements, that dignifies him.

In the same way that our cognition passes from a report of particular details to a knowledge of universals, so our sentiments pass from a welter of feeling to an illumined concept of what one ought to feel. This is what is known as refinement. Man is in the world to suffer his passion; but wisdom comes to his relief with an offer of conventions, which shape and elevate that passion.

The frontiersman was seeking a solvent of forms, and he found his spokesmen in such writers as Mark Twain, a large part of whose work is simply a satire upon the more formal European way of doing things. As the impulse moved eastward, it encouraged a belief that the formal was the outmoded or at least the un-American. A plebeian distrust of forms, flowering in eulogies of plainness, became the characteristic American mentality.

Europe long ago began the expenditure of its great inheritance of medieval forms, so that Burke, in the late eighteenth century, was sharply aware that the “unbought grace of life” was disappearing.

how the man of today looks with derision upon the prohibitions of the 1890’s and supposes that the violation of them has been without penalty! He would suffer poignant disillusion had he a clear enough pattern in his soul to be able to measure differences; but one consequence of this debauchery, as we shall see, is that man loses discrimination.

the agonized face of a child run over in the street, the dying expression of a woman crushed by a subway train, tableaux of execution, scenes of intense private grief. These are the obscenities. The rise of sensational journalism everywhere testifies to man’s loss of points of reference, to his determination to enjoy the forbidden in the name of freedom. All reserve is being sacrificed to titillation. The extremes of passion and suffering are served up to enliven the breakfast table or to lighten the boredom of an evening at home. The area of privacy has been abandoned because the definition of person has been lost; there is no longer a standard by which to judge what belongs to the individual man.

transition to Hobbes and Locke and the eighteenth-century rationalists, who taught that man needed only to reason correctly upon evidence from nature. The question of what the world was made for now becomes meaningless because the asking of it presupposes something prior to nature in the order of existents. Thus it is not the mysterious fact of the world’s existence which interests the new man but explanations of how the world works.

This story of man’s passage from religious or philosophical transcendentalism has been told many times, and, since it has usually been told as a story of progress, it is extremely difficult today to get people in any number to see contrary implications.

If one goes on, the monitory voices fade out, and it is not impossible for him to reach a state in which his entire moral orientation is lost.

We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent.

One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today.

Certainly the case of the Baconians is not won until it has been proved that the substitution of covetousness for wantlessness, of an ascending spiral of desires for a stable requirement of necessities, leads to the happier condition.

This very circumstance sets up a conflict, for it is a constant law of human nature that the more a man has to indulge in, the less disposed he is to endure the discipline of toil—that is to say, the less willing he is to produce that which is to be consumed. Labor ceases to be functional in life; it becomes something that is grudgingly traded for that competence, or that superfluity, which everyone has a “right” to.

A great material establishment, by its very temptation to luxuriousness, unfits the owner for the labor necessary to maintain it,

We begin our other affirmations after a categorical statement that life and the world are to be cherished.

How can men who disagree about what the world is for agree about any of the minutiae of daily conduct? The statement really means that it does not matter what a man believes so long as he does not take his beliefs seriously. Anyone can observe that this is the status to which religious belief has been reduced for many years. But suppose he does take his beliefs seriously? Then what he believes places a stamp upon his experience, and he belongs to a culture, which is a league founded on exclusive principles.

one must be a man of correct sentiments. This phrase, so dear to the eighteenth century, carries us back to the last age that saw sentiment and reason in a proper partnership.

Burke saw this point when he said that those who have no concern for their ancestors will, by simple application of the same rule, have none for their descendants. The decision of modern man to live in the here and now is reflected in the neglect of aging parents, whom proper sentiment once kept in positions of honor and authority. There was a time when the elder generation was cherished because it represented the past; now it is avoided and thrust out of sight for the same reason. Children are liabilities. As

A creature designed to look before and after finds that to do the latter has gone out of fashion and that to do the former is becoming impossible.

Furthermore, when conservatives attack the left, they now usually frame their arguments in the language of equality—for example, they often argue that affirmative action is at odds with the goal of a truly color-blind society or discuss their liberal opponents as elitists who are out of touch with ordinary Americans. Although one might question the sincerity of their egalitarianism, it is undeniable that many conservatives have lately eschewed elitist rhetoric. With the possible exception of the gay marriage issue, today’s conservatives rarely defend tradition for its own sake. Rather, when defending traditional institutions and values, conservatives typically rely on utilitarian arguments rather than a defense of tradition per se. We furthermore rarely hear anything akin to Richard Weaver’s radical assault on modernity from leading conservative publications or institutions.

Before the days of factories and machinery, all forms of work were literally manual labour, and all the world over the labourer, obeying a primitive instinct, sang at his toil: the harvester with his sickle, the weaver at the loom, the spinner at the wheel. Long after machinery had driven the labour-song from the land it survived at sea in the form of shanties, since all work aboard a sailing vessel was performed by hand.

The trouble with humanity is that it forgets to read the minutes of the last meeting.