Remarkable. This is what progressive, technical education seems to be all about.
This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 27 Apr 2008, by Wisely.
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27 Apr 08
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Every man participating in a culture has three levels of conscious reflection: his specific ideas about things, his general beliefs or convictions, and his metaphysical dream of the world.”
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Christians frustrated with the air of self-righteous piety fall off the horse the other way, forgetting the social benefit of the concept of obscenity, which Weaver mentions means off-scene.
Propriety, like other old-fashioned anchorages was abandoned because it inhibited something.
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“Every man participating in a culture has three levels of conscious reflection: his specific ideas about things, his general beliefs or convictions, and his metaphysical dream of the world.”
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Weaver goes on to describe in detail the state we find ourselves in where every man is free to state his opinions and beliefs as long as he doesn’t actually believe them or take himself seriously. This sounds like Chesterton. No wonder! Chesterton got to watch as a world based on ‘correct sentiment’ became the world we now live in.
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“Our age provides many examples of the ravages of immediacy, the clearest of which is the failure of the modern to recognize obscenity. This failure is not connected with the decay of purtianism.”
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Christians frustrated with the air of self-righteous piety fall off the horse the other way, forgetting the social benefit of the concept of obscenity, which Weaver mentions means off-scene.
Propriety, like other old-fashioned anchorages was abandoned because it inhibited something.
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This reminds me of the Proverb that tells us not to remove the ancient landmarks.
“….to his determination to enjoy the forbidden in the name of freedom. All reserve is being sacrificed to titillation.”
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After all, there is nothing but sentiment to bind us to the very old or to the very young.”
We have lost them, our old and our young. We live amongst the middle-aged and the middle-incomed. Our sentiment is toward those old friends: personal peace and affluence, those beautifully clothed demons of destruction, the gods we worship.
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“This perversion is that in a just society there are no distinctions.”
Weaver’s book is so relevant to our time that I am blown away that he wrote it so long ago (1948). He makes the case that without distinctions we are left with only instinct. Doesn’t that describe our current situation? It reminds me of the book of Judges where everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
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Since both knowledge and virtue re1uire 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.
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Socialism is in origin a middle-class and not a proletarian concept. The middle class owes to its social location an especial fondness for security and complacency.
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In between lies the besotted middle class, grown enormous…..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. It has conventions not ideals; it is washed rather than clean.
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Equalitarianism (his word): That this concept does not make sense even in the most elementary applications has proved no deterrent to its spread, and we shall have something to say later on about modern man’s growing incapacity for logic.
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It will be found as a general rule that those parts of the world which have talked least of equality have in the solid fact of their social life exhibited the greatest fraternity.
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Add Sticky NoteThose who maintain that education should prepare one for living successfully in this world have won a practically complete victory.
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This book is not overtly Christian or biblical in the sense of quoting scripture but it will help you to do something the Bible tells us is a good thing. It will help you to understand the times. These are the times that God has placed us in. We do well to understand them and to help our children understand them. When you read a book like Ideas Have Consequences it will give you ideas and you will be able to pass them along to your children when you rise up and when you walk along the way.
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This chapter is the clearest presentation of the dangers of specialization that I have read. I have been known to decry specialization; I have had an inherent view that specialization was harmful but I have not been able to completely understand why until I read this chapter.
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I have made conscious decisions over the years to stick with the subjects where wisdom (history and literature) is found over the more specific factual subjects.
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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; other wise the very concept of truth becomes impossible
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the ancient affirmation that there is a center of things, and they point out that every feature of modern disintegration is a flight from this toward periphery
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By far the most significant phase of the theory of the gentleman is its distrust of specialization. It is an ancient belief going back to classical antiquity, that specialization of any kind is illiberal in a freeman.
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…they are expressions of contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed; and one deformed is the last person to be thought of as a ruler; so runs the irresistible logic of the position.
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Having been told by the relativists that he cannot have truth, he now has ‘facts.’ One notes that even in everyday speech the word fact has taken the place of ‘truth’…
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The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity..Yeats
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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.
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The enforced irresponsibility has itself become a factor in pathology, for
A burden of responsibility is, after all, the best means of getting anyone to think straight. -
We cannot be surprised at monstrous perversions
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This is the exaltation of ‘becoming’ over ‘being.’
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When each become his own taskmaster and regards work as a curse which he endures only to gain means of subsistence, will he not constantly seek to avoid it?
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I think we have a debt-based society just as a means to keep us slaves and keep our views of work skewed.
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It also came to my mind that while my dh has slaved for 27 years at the salt mines, I have been at home learning, growing and enjoying almost every minute of what I do. Could it be that the sacred call of the homemaker is the last vestige of pure work left to modern man? No wonder she is under such an attack. Don’t let feminists fool you; you can go to the salt mines or stay at home and have fulfilling lifework. Why would anyone trade the one for the other? Like I said, I will not be running for president this year.
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But he really got me on the music stuff. I have very bad taste in music. I know this. I know that Bach is the greatest musical genuis ever,ever and I do enjoy listening to the Brandenburg Concertos
. Hey, I am reading Evening in the Palace of Reason
So Richard Weaver comes down really hard on Jazz music as if were the very worst impressionistic painting. He even talks about syncopation. It is the first lucid conversation I ever heard on the subject. The minute someone starts talking backbeat, all I can visualize is a greasy-haired preacher with a roving eye. Yes, I am jaded. I was born that way. Don’t blame my parents. They really are very nice people although my dad listens to The Four Freshman and my mom jitterbugs in public.
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“Jazz, by formally repudiating restraint by intellect, and by expressing contempt and hostility toward our traditional society and mores, has destroyed this equilibrium”
“There can be no question that, like journalism in literature, it has helped to destroy the concept of obscenity.”
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In other words, jazz makes what should be hidden and private, front and center and public.”
“And it is admitted that what man expresses in music dear to him he will most certainly express in his social practices.”
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he makes a great start in the paragraph by bringing up the conundrum: “How to persuade to communal activity people who no longer have the same ideas about the most fundamental things.”
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I connected with several of Weaver’s thoughts on movies. 1) He makes a great point about how we censor breaches of etiquette in movies while letting the real enemy, materialism, invade our souls. 2) He mentions the laugh track. The laugh track has turned us all into Pavlov’s dogs.
3) Finally he says, ” the entire globe is becoming imbued with the notion that there is something normative about the insane sort of life lived in New York and Hollywood…” -
True education is reflection. If we can regain that little tool we will have covered a multitude of sins.
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Chapter 6
The Spoiled-Child Psychology -
Dana hit the nail on the head when she said this chapter is convicting.
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“In the final analysis this society is like the spoiled child in its incapacity to think. Anyone can observe in the pampered 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.”
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It seems that Weaver’s main point simplified is that some 400 years ago philosophy separated the sacred and the secular. To that point man’s life work and purpose had one goal which encompassed all his practical and spiritual needs. At that point man’s practical needs became divorced from his spiritual needs so that now we have a situation where man’s practical needs have preeminence.
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Our degrees have lost their transcendence. We are happy to wave our papers around. We have no concept that an education should make us less satisfied not ever-so-much-more-so.
If you really want to see this in action start up a conversation about getting a liberal arts degree. The vehemence people will show towards this idea is telling. Even Christian homeschooling families reject the liberal arts for utilitarian reasons. But the beauty in the classic
liberal arts degree was its ability to illustrate that there are bigger things, better things, more permanent things. Things beyond the self, the ego. -
Matthew 6:33
“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” -
Ecclesiastes 11:1
“Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.” -
Luke 6:38
“Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.” -
Kelly begins her post with a letter to an email group describing her feelings upon reading IHC:
“I don’t know how to articulate what this book has done for me, except to say that reading it inspires me to live faithfully to my calling. It can be summed up in Weaver’s statement that “a man’s character emerges in the building and ordering of his house.”
This is precisely how I feel. The book and especially this chapter has made me more aware of how short-sighted I can be.
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Weaver builds his case that since, in his opinion, the last metaphysical right is the right to private property, that is where we must take our stand.
Weaver says,
“…especially do we need sanctuary against pagan statism.”
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“In the monolithic police state which is the invention of our age, assisted as it is by technology, surveillance becomes complete. And when we add to these political fanaticism, which seems an outgrowth of our level of development, the picture grows terrifying.”
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“Facility with words bespeaks a capacity to learn relations and grasp concepts; it is a means of access to the complex reality.”
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The truth is, as we have already seen, that our surrender to irrationality has been in progress for a long time, and w witness today a breakdown of communication not only between nations and groups within nations but also between successive generations. Sir Richard Livingstone has pointed out that 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.”
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“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.”
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“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. Poetry offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind.”
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And this my friends is how to raise boys, not by sentiment, not by computer games that stir up all the worst in their natures, not by Victorian moralism. I am no expert. I don’t mean to speak with authority but I want to see homeschooled boys who can quote Shakespeare and hit home runs, boys who can plow the field while reciting Frost, boys who can face terrorists and cross the bar. We ask a lot of our young men these days. We ask them to be men and demand that they behave like women. This may sound like some trite twist on words but it is almost entirely the state in which our young men find themselves.
Poetry is a way to build meaning and chivalry into their souls while letting them maintain their masculinity. Poetry is not about daisy chains but rather about the depths and the heights of meaning.Pick a poem. Read it out loud everyday this week. Try a little Homer, Shakespeare, Yeats. You sons will need it for the days ahead.
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Let parents,then, bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.-Plato, Laws
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First of all, I would maintain that modern man is a parricide. He has taken up arms against , and he has effectually slain, what former men have regarded with filial veneration. Richard Weaver, pg 170
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The West Point Cadet’s Prayer says:
“Guard us against flippancy and irreverence in the sacred things of life.”
I have not guarded myself nor my children from those things. I am often shocked at the things my children mock and yet I know they learned it from my husban….Well, they learned it somewhere!
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In this chapter Weaver tears down the walls of irreverence and shows us what piety and justice actually look like. I never knew.
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The mature man passes beyond intellectuality to wisdom. He believes in ideas, too, but life has taught him to be content to see them embodied, which is to see them under a sort of limitation.
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It has been mentioned that the spoiled-child psychology is encountered almost solely in those people who have abandoned nature and who have signalized this abandonment by taking flight from country to city. Turn where we will, we find that the countryman has a superior philosophic resignation to the order of things. He is less agitated by the cycle of birth and death; he frets less; he is more stable in time of crisis.
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It is a matter of everyday observation that people of cultivation and intellectual perceptiveness are quickest to admit a law of rightness in ways of living different from their own; they have mastered the principle that being has a right qua being. Knowledge disciplines egotism so that one credits the reality of other selves. The virtue of the splendid tradition of chivalry was that it took formal cognizance of the right to existence not only of inferiors but also of enemies.
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Add Sticky Note
It has been well said that the chief trouble with the contemporary generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting.
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Remarkable quote.
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What is needed at center now drifts toward the outer edge. A social seduction of the female sex has occurred on a vast scale. And the men responsible for this seduction have been the white-slavers of business who traffic in the low wages of these creatures, the executives, the specialists in ‘reduction of labor costs’- the very economists and calculators whose emergence Burke predicted for us.
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With her superior closeness to nature, her intuitive realism, her unfailing ability to detect the sophistry in mere intellectuality, how was she ever cozened into the mistake of going modern? Perhaps it was the decay of chivalry in men that proved too much. After the gentlemen went, the lady had to go too. No longer protected, the woman now has her career, in which she makes a drab pilgrimage from two-room apartment to job to divorce court.
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Individualism, with its connotation of irresponsibility, is a direct invitations to selfishness, and all that this treatise has censured can be traced in some way to individualist mentality.
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We must not overlook the fact that in the vocabulary of modernism, ‘pious’ is a term of reproach or ridicule.
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With ignorance virtually institutionalized, how can we get man to see?…he is unable to prescribe for himself, for he imagines that what he needs is more of the disease.
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…if there is no hell there is no justice.
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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 being to talk of freedom?
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Read the book, don’t wait for the movie.
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Public Stiky Notes
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