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.

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 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.

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.

Richard M. Weaver was born on March 3, 1910 and died on April 1, 1963. He was a scholar and author whose work remains relevant today. Had he lived to the the end of the Cold War, he would not have congratulated America on its supposed victory. Communism, he knew, was part of a deeper problem; that is, a philosophical and moral problem. The West was sliding into decadence. It was spiritually disintegrating. “Every man participating in a culture has three levels of conscious reflection,” noted Weaver: “his specific ideas about things, his general beliefs or convictions, and his metaphysical dream of the world.

The Federalist authors especially were aware that simple majority rule cannot suffice because it does everything without reference; it is an expression of feeling about the moment at the moment, restrained neither by abstract idea nor by precedent.

precedent was for Burke the principle of continuity and reference. The inheritance of “rational liberty” was thus Britain’s protection against subversion.

democracy cannot exist without education. The truth concealed in this observation is that only education can be depended on to bring men to see the hierarchy of values.

education should serve the needs of the people. But all hinges on the interpretation of needs; if the primary need of man is to perfect his spiritual being and prepare for immortality, then education of the mind and the passions will take precedence over all else. The growth of materialism, however, has made this a consideration remote and even incomprehensible to the majority. Those who maintain that education should prepare one for living successfully in this world have won a practically complete victory.

in peculiar spite against the very idea of hierarchy, endeavoring to turn classes into democratic forums, where the teacher is only a moderator, and no one offends by presuming to speak with superior knowledge.

if we feel that creation does not express purpose, it is impossible to find an authorization for purpose in our lives.

you can’t turn the clock back.” By thus assuming that we are prisoners of the moment, the objection well reveals the philosophic position of modernism. The believer in truth, on the other hand, is bound to maintain that the things of highest value are not affected by the passage of time;

the return which the idealists propose is not a voyage backward through time but a return to center, which must be conceived metaphysically or theologically. They are seeking the one which endures and not the many which change and pass, and this search can be only described as looking for the truth.

there is a center of things, and they point out that every feature of modern disintegration is a flight from this toward periphery. It is expressible, also, as a movement from unity to individualism.

through its education in rhetoric and law. The South’s tradition of learning was the Ciceronian tradition of eloquent wisdom, and this circumstance explains why the major creative political figures of America, from Jefferson through Lincoln to Wilson, have come from this section. But the Civil War brought defeat to Ciceronian humanism, and thereafter the South turned to commerce and technology in its economic life and to the dialectic of New England and of Germany in its educational endeavors.

Europe, after the agony of the first World War, turned to the opposite type for leadership, to gangsters, who, though they are often good entrepreneurs, are without codes and without inhibitions.1 Such leaders in Europe have given us a preview of what the collapse of values and the reign of specialization will produce.

fatal confusion of factual particulars with wisdom.

It should be plain from the foregoing that modern man is suffering from a severe fragmentation of his world picture. This fragmentation leads directly to an obsession with isolated parts.

an innocuous idea is substituted for a painful one. The victim simply avoids recognizing the thing which will hurt.

Such obsession with fragments has grave consequences for the individual psychology, not the least of which is fanaticism. Now fanaticism has been properly described as redoubling one’s effort after one’s aim has been forgotten,

The means absorb completely, and man becomes blind to the very concept of ends; indeed, even among those who make an effort at reflection, an idea grows that ends must wait upon the discovery of means. Hence proceeds a fanatical interest in the properties of matter which is psychopathic because it involves escape, substitution, and the undercurrent of anxiety which comes of knowing that the real issue has not been met.

For the truth is that fanaticism and emotional instability, tension and flightiness, are incompatible with that seasoned maturity which we expect in a leader.

The scientist, the technician, the scholar, who have left the One for the Many are puffed up with vanity over their ability to describe precisely some minute portion of the world.

Thoughtful people today are sometimes moved to wonder why the world no longer has use for a liberally educated class. Surely the answer lies in this abandonment of generalization for specialization, which is the very process of fragmentation. The world has wilfully narrowed responsibility.

The ancient feeling of brotherhood carries obligations of which equality knows nothing. It calls for respect and protection, for brotherhood is status in family, and family is by nature hierarchical.

loss of respect for logic to which we owe so many disasters that the French Revolution made equality and fraternity co-ordinates.

Equality is a disorganizing concept in so far as human relationships mean order.

No society can rightly offer less than equality before the law; but there can be no equality of condition between youth and age or between the sexes; there cannot be equality even between friends. The rule is that each shall act where he is strong; the assignment of identical roles produces first confusion and then alienation,

Fraternity directs attention to others, equality to self; and the passion for equality is simultaneous with the growth of egotism.

If their work and authority are defined, they can proceed on fixed assumptions and conduct themselves without embarassment toward inferior and superior. When the rule of equality obtains, however, no one knows where he belongs. Because he has been assured that he is “just as good as anybody else,” he is likely to suspect that he is getting less than his deserts.

The democrats well sense that, if they allow people to divide according to abilities and preferences, soon structure will impose itself upon the mass. Hence the adulation of the regular fellow, the political seduction of the common man, and the deep distrust of intellectuals, whose grasp of principle gives them superior insight.

Since subversive activity is the taking away of degree, it is logical that conservatives should treat as enemies all those who wish to abolish the sacred and secular grounds for distinctions among men. The proposal of the subverters is, however, impossible in practice, and the quarrel turns out to be over principles of selection. History thus far indicates that when the reformers get their turn, they merely substitute a bureaucratic hierarchy—and this because they discover that they do not wish society to collapse at all, but to continue under their conception of man’s good.

Since under conditions of modern freedom the individual thinks only of his rights, he does not refer his action to the external frame of obligation.

All persons chronically diseased are egotists, whether the disease be of the mind or the body; whether it be sin, sorrow, or merely the more tolerable calamity of some endless pain, or mischief among the cords of mortal life. Such individuals are made acutely conscious of self, by the torture in which it dwells.

This egotism, which is another form of fragmentation, is a consequence of that fatal decision to make a separate self the measure of value.

The sin of egotism always takes the form of withdrawal. When personal advantage becomes paramount, the individual passes out of the community.

But he who is cognizant mainly of self suffers an actual derangement; as Plato saw: “the excessive love of self is in reality the source to each man of all offenses; for the lover is blinded about the beloved, so that he judges wrongly of the just, the good, and the honorable, and thinks that he ought always prefer his own interest to the truth.” Accordingly, self-absorption is a process of cutting one’s self off from the “real” reality and therefore from social harmony.

Thus knowledge for the medieval idealist prepared the way for self-effacement.

Under the world view possessed by medieval scholars, the path of learning was a path to self-depreciation, and the philosophiae doctor was one who had at length seen a rational ground for humilitas. Study and meditation led him to a proper perspective on self,

An opposing conception comes in with Bacon’s “knowledge is power.” If the aim of knowledge is domination, it is hardly to be supposed that the possessors of knowledge will be indifferent to their importance. On the contrary, they begin to swell; they seek triumphs in the material world (knowledge being meanwhile necessarily degraded to skills) which inflate their egotism and self-consideration.

Pride in craftsmanship is well explained by saying that to labor is to pray, for conscientious effort to realize an ideal is a kind of fidelity. The craftsman of old did not hurry, because the perfect takes no account of time and shoddy work is a reproach to character.

When utilitarianism becomes enthroned and the worker is taught that work is use and not worship, interest in quality begins to decline.

In other words, the leader may be chosen by the people, but he is guided by the right; and, in the same way, we may say that the worker may be employed by anyone, but that he is directed by the autonomous ideal in the task. Now when men cease to believe that labor is a divine ordinance, their attitude toward it becomes like their attitude toward the secularized state.

it is sufficient to note here that the ancient moral injunction to labor fades when we regard our work as cut out for us by men, who, by present dogma, are no better than ourselves.

service” is often called in to substitute for the now incomprehensible doctrine of vocation.

The egotism of work increasingly poses the problem of what source will procure sufficient discipline to hold men to production.

when man leaves the truth of reality and expresses himself in isolation? Nature does not follow where art becomes not truer than history, not ideally true, but false to the higher reality.

It is egotism which enforces the separation between nature—by which is meant here the enduring reality—and art.

the orthodox view of human nature, which acknowledged original sin and preached the necessity of education and restraint, it taught that man has a natural moral sense which can be relied on not only to recognize virtue but to delight in it.

When Rousseau wrote at the beginning of the Confessions: “I am different from all men I have seen. If I am not better, at least I am different,” he expressed directly the note of egotistic sensibility.

The Romantic deluge followed at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Foremost was the impulse of revolt against conventions and institutions.

theme of emancipation from the sentiments and forms which had brought in European culture persists. This motif was likely to be accompanied by intensive explorations of the individual consciousness, with self-laceration and self-pity.

The sensitive individual turned inward and there discovered an appalling well of melancholy and unhappiness, which was attributed to the perverse circumstances of the world. Thus we behold in spectacular form the new familiar act of withdrawal as the individual fosters self-awareness.

Concurrent with this attempt to escape bankruptcy through brilliance of form was another which sought to escape it through imagination.

the symphonic form was repellent to Moussorgsky because its first-movement predominance signified to him aristocratic domination.

Liszt and Debussy, especially, it turned to the exploitation of color and atmosphere and even to the conjuring-up of visual images. This phase was technically a flight from the construction and balance of classical form; in effect it was a concentration upon the “emotive fragments” with which the painters had been occupying themselves.

subjects of love without aesthetic distance and subjects of comedy without law of proportion—shows how the soul of modern man craves orgiastic disorder. And it is admitted that what man expresses in music dear to him he will most certainly express in his social practices.

Impressionism brings nominalism into painting. One of the cardinal tenets of the doctrine is that outline does not exist in nature. Consequently, the main object was “the ultimate divorce of the picture from any convention, whether of arrangement, of drawing, or of a fixed palette.”5 At

If form does not exist prior to things, naturally it is realism to paint things.

Egotism in work and art is the flowering, after long growth, of a heresy about human destiny. Its abhorrence of discipline and form is usually grouped with the signs of “progress.

An ancient axiom of politics teaches that a spoiled people invite despotic control. Their failure to maintain internal discipline is followed by some rationalized organization in the service of a single powerful will.

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 the education thus separated can provide their kind of indoctrination.

But the education which best accomplishes their purpose is the systematic indoctrination from day to day of the whole citizenry through channels of information and entertainment.

He sees the events of the day refracted through a medium which colors them as effectively as the cosmology of the medieval scientist determined his view of the starry heavens. The newspaper is a man-made cosmos of the world of events around us at the time. For the average reader it is a construct with a set of significances which he no more thinks of examining than did his pious forebear of the thirteenth century—whom he pities for sitting in medieval darkness—think of questioning the cosmology. This modern man, too, lives under a dome, whose theoretical aspect has been made to harmonize with a materialistic conception of the world. And he employs its conjunctions and oppositions to explain the occurrences of his time with all the confidence of the now supplanted disciple of astrology.

has been progressively improved and added to until today it is a machine of three parts: the press, the motion picture, and the radio. Together they present a version of life quite as controlled as that taught by medieval religionists, though feeble in moral inspiration, as we shall see. It is now our object to look at the effects of each in turn.

Anyone can observe that people today are eager to know who is really entitled to authority, that they are looking wistfully for the sources of genuine value. In sum, they wish to know the truth, but they have been taught a perversion which makes their chance of obtaining it less every day. This perversion is that in a just society there are no distinctions.

If society is something which can be understood, it must have structure; if it has structure, it must have hierarchy; against this metaphysical truth the declamations of the Jacobins break in vain.

two grounds of elevation, knowledge and virtue—

Since both knowledge and virtue require the concept of transcendence, they are really obnoxious to those committed to material standards, and we have seen how insistent was the impulse to look to the lower levels for guidance. Into social thinking there now enters a statistical unit, the consumer, which has the power to destroy utterly that metaphysical structure supporting hierarchy.

traditional society was organized around king and priest, soldier and poet, peasant and artisan. Now distinctions of vocation fade out, and the new organization, if such it may be termed, is to be around capacities to consume. Underlying the shift is the theory of romanticism; if we attach more significance to feeling than to thinking, we shall soon, by a simple extension, attach more to wanting than to deserving. Even

Thus the final degradation of the Baconian philosophy is that knowledge becomes power in the service of appetite.

Upholders of tradition habitually classify the forces menacing our institutions as “subversive activity.” The description is just.

Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark what discord follows!

Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite, an universal wolf,

to maintain traditional values or to get new values set up in their place, have constructed a wonderful machine, which we shall call the Great Stereopticon. It is the function of this machine to project selected pictures of life in the hope that what is seen will be imitated.

In any case, for Plato, truth was a living thing, never wholly captured by men even in animated discourse and in its purest form, certainly, never brought to paper. In our day it would seem that a contrary presumption has grown up. The more firmly an utterance is stereotyped, the more likely it is to win credit.

There is much to indicate that modern publication wishes to minimize discussion. Despite many artful pretensions to the contrary, it does not want an exchange of views, save perhaps on academic matters. Instead, it encourages men to read in the hope that they will absorb.

stereotyping of whole phrases. These are carefully chosen not to stimulate reflection but to evoke stock responses of approbation or disapprobation.

So journalism becomes a monstrous discourse of Protagoras, which charms by hypnotizing and thwarts that participation without which one is not a thinking man.

Newspapers are under strong pressure to distort in the interest of holding attention.

Conflict, after all, is the essence of drama, and it is a truism that newspapers deliberately start and prolong quarrels; by allegation, by artful quotation, by the accentuation of unimportant differences, they create antagonism where none was felt to exist before. And this is profitable practically, for the opportunity to dramatize a fight is an opportunity for news.

By the attention it gives their misdeeds it makes criminals heroic and politicians larger than life.

Fundamental to the dream, of course, is the dogma of progress, with its postulate of the endlessness of becoming. The habit of judging all things by their departure from the things of yesterday is reflected in most journalistic interpretation.

Somewhere, moreover, the metaphysicians of publicity have absorbed the idea that the goal of life is happiness through comfort. It is a state of complacency supposed to ensue when the physical appetites have been well satisfied. Advertising fosters the concept, social democracy approves it, and the acceptance is so wide that it is virtually impossible today, except from the religious rostrum, to teach that life means discipline and sacrifice.

as lively propagation of what the public wants to hear, discourages the pulling-together of events from past time into a whole for contemplation. Thus, absence of reflection keeps the individual from being aware of his former selves, and it is highly questionable whether anyone can be a member of a metaphysical community who does not preserve such memory.

Henry Ford’s statement that history is bunk is a perfectly proper observation for a bourgeois industrialist, and it was followed with equal propriety by another: “Creeds must go.” Technology emancipates not only from memory but also from faith.

Having been taught for four centuries, more or less, that his redemption lies through the conquest of nature, man expects his heaven to be spatial and temporal, and, beholding all things through the Great Stereopticon, he expects redemption to be easy of attainment.

The scientists have given him the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, and false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have. Since the prime object of the latter is to appease, he has received concessions at enough points to think that he may obtain what he wishes through complaints and demands.

more readily for being told in a roundabout way, which is that science owes him a living. The city will shelter him, and science will support him;

let us rather see the problem in its essence and ask whether the worship of comfort does not follow necessarily from loss of belief in ideas and thereby induce social demoralization.

Since he who longs to achieve does not ask whether the seat is soft or the weather at a pleasant temperature, it is obvious that hardness is a condition of heroism. Exertion, self-denial, endurance, these make the hero, but to the spoiled child they connote the evil of nature and the malice of man.

children of the rich a kind of irresponsibility of the mental process. It occurs simply because they do not have to think to survive. They never have to feel that definition must be clear and deduction correct if they are to escape the sharp penalties of deprivation. Therefore the typical thinking of such people is fragmentary, discursive, and expressive of a sort of contempt for realities.

Without work to do, especially without work that is related to our dearest aims, the mental sinews atrophy, as do the physical.

we discover one institution, shaken somewhat, but still strong and perfectly clear in its implications. This is the right of private property, which is, in fact, the last metaphysical right remaining to us. The ordinances of religion, the prerogatives of sex and of vocation, all have been swept away by materialism, but the relationship of a man to his own has until the present largely escaped attack.

For the abstract property of stocks and bonds, the legal ownership of enterprises never seen, actually destroy the connection between man and his substance without which metaphysical right becomes meaningless. Property in this sense becomes a fiction useful for exploitation and makes impossible the sanctification of work.

The moral solution is the distributive ownership of small properties. These take the form of independent farms, of local businesses, of homes owned by the occupants, where individual responsibility gives significance to prerogative over property. Such ownership provides a range of volition through which one can be a complete person, and it is the abridgment of this volition for which monopoly capitalism must be condemned along with communism.

It is not a little disquieting to realize that in private property there survives the last domain of privacy of any kind. Every other wall has been overthrown. Here a unique privacy remains because property has not been compelled to give a justification of the kind demanded by rationalists and calculators.

Private right defending noble preference is what we wish to make possible by insisting that not all shall be dependents of the state.

Private property cannot without considerable perversion of present laws be taken from the dissenter,

The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason. Once you credit man with the power of reason and with inviolable rights, you set bounds beyond which the will of majorities may not go.

For liberty and right reason go hand in hand, and it is impossible

It is, on the contrary, important to keep substance in life, for a man’s character emerges in the building and ordering of his house; it does not emerge in complaisance with state arrangement, and it is likely to be totally effaced by communistic organization.

The issue involves, finally, the question of freedom of the will, for private property is essential in any scheme which assumes that man has choice between better and worse.