Remarkable quotation.
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22 Apr 08
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His new doctoral dissertation, titled: The Confederate South, 1865—1910: A Study in the Survival of a Mind and a Culture, was begun under H. Arlin Turner but completed under Cleanth Brooks.
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His dissertation would reveal a particular American culture that essentially was feudal, chivalrous, hierarchical, stable, and harmonious. A culture that educated its “gentlemen” to understand virtue, morals, and a “humanism” that defines “the classic qualities of magnificence, magnanimity, and liberality” and one, in which, its people practiced an “older religiousness” that was conscientious in its rituals and obedient to doctrine.
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So we come to the crux of Weaver's argument. The South, rejecting materialism as an end in itself, believed in those things of higher value: in metaphysical absolutism, in an acceptance of universals, in the transcendent, and revealed Truth. Weaver understood the pernicious effects of Original Sin, that man's nature, while created good, is now corrupted, disposed more toward doing evil than doing good, and that this condition could not be relieved until man became subservient to God's Will and abandoned man's will. Then a society could perpetuate a “moral order.” All of these themes were writ large in Southern Christendom, rooted in the reality of the soil, in agrarianism. Her people conducted themselves with an eye toward God, and moral rectitude, with an understanding of the importance of the family, and the special relationship of the land and community. The South sought to re-create a non-materialist, moral, society and Weaver opined that, “Only this can save us from a future of nihilism, urged on by the demoniacal force of technology and by our own moral defeatism.”
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Mark G. Malvasi, writes that, “The Southern tradition, in Weaver's analysis, offered a core of resistance to the most powerfully corrupting forces of the modern age: rationalism, positivism, materialism, egalitarianism, individualism, and science.” Malvasi argues that modernity had successfully “abolished both the past and the transcendent as dimensions of meaning.” Man may become materially rich and physically comfortable, Malvasi explains, but there is a dysphoria expressed by “the deep psychic anxiety” and dramatic increases in mental illness. A society does not attain greatness merely by achieving wealth, abundance, and power but rather through the “resilience, magnanimity, and piety of its people.”
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Weaver was required to explain in Ideas Have Consequences that America in 1948 was in cultural decline. A decline began four hundred years earlier—in Weaver's opinion—when William of Occam espoused the “fateful doctrine of nominalism.” A doctrine that superseded medieval logical realism and in so doing was “the crucial event of the history of Western culture.” It was the virulent philosophical offspring of nominalism, relativism, empiricism, “the hubris of technology,” that Weaver so assiduously critiques.
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Weaver postulated that the primary component, that moving force in the reality of societies, was ideas. Nash explains that this theme provided encouragement to conservatives who may have felt overwhelmed by the stunning rise of American statism, and the corresponding cultural decline brought about by materialism and nihilism.
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Add Sticky NoteNash refers to Weaver as “eerily prescient” when he wrote; “We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent.”
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Public Stiky Notes
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