Richard M. Weaver -- Ideas Have Consequences

I have been chiefly impressed by  the difficulty of getting certain initial facts admitted. This difficulty is due in part to the  widely prevailing Whig theory of history, with its belief that the most advanced point in time  represents the point of highest development, aided no doubt by theories of evolution which suggest  to the uncritical a kind of necessary passage from simple to complex.

Yet the real trouble is found  to lie deeper than this. It is the appalling problem, when one comes to actual cases, of getting  men to distinguish between better and worse.

There is ground for declaring that  modern man has become a moral idiot. So few are those who care to examine their lives, or to accept  the rebuke which comes of admitting that our present state may be a fallen state, that one  questions whether people now understand what is meant by the superiority of an ideal.

We have for many years moved with a brash confidence that man had  achieved a position of independence which rendered the ancient restraints needless. Now, in the  first half of the twentieth century, at the height of modern progress, we behold unprecedented  outbreaks of hatred and violence; we have seen whole nations desolated by war and turned into penal  camps by their conquerors; we find half of mankind looking upon the other half as criminal.  Everywhere occur symptoms of mass psychosis.

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.

It was William of Occam who propounded  the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence.

The practical result of  nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as  reality that which is perceived by the senses. With this change in the affirmation of what is real,  the whole orientation of culture takes a turn, and we are on the road to modern empiricism.

The denial of universals carries with it the denial of  everything transcending experience. 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 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.  One comes thus by clear deduction to the corollary of the natural goodness of man.

There followed references to "nature and nature's God," and the  anomaly of a "humanized" religion.

After it has been granted that man is molded entirely by environmental pressures, one is  obligated to extend the same theory of causality to his institutions. The social philosophers of  the nineteenth century found in Darwin powerful support for their thesis that human beings act  always out of economic incentives, and it was they who completed the abolishment of freedom of the  will. The great pageant of history thus became reducible to the economic endeavors of individuals  and classes; and elaborate prognoses were constructed on the theory of economic conflict and  resolution. 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.

There is no term proper to describe the condition in which he is now left unless it be  "abysmality." He is in the deep and dark abysm, and he has nothing with which to raise  himself. His life is practice without theory. As problems crowded upon him, he deepens confusion by  meeting them with ad hoc policies. Secretly he hungers for truth but consoles himself with  the thought that life should be experimental. He sees his institutions crumbling and rationalizes  with talk of emancipation. Wars have to be fought, seemingly with increased frequency; therefore he  revives the old ideals-ideals which his present assumptions actually render meaningless-and, by the  machinery of state, forces them again to do service. He struggles with the paradox that total  immersion in matter unfits him to deal with the problems of matter.

if words no longer  correspond to objective realities, it seems no great wrong to take liberties with words.

The Renaissance

it was still, by heritage, at least, an ideational world and was therefore near  enough transcendental conceptions to perceive the dehumanizing effects of specialization.

a patent increase in man's dominion over  nature which dazzled all but the most thoughtful

popular education. The latter might have proved a good in itself, but it was wrecked on equalitarian democracy's unsolvable problem of authority: none was in a position to say what the hungering multitudes were to be fed.

The problem of authority in popular education.

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might have proved a good in itself, but it was wrecked on equalitarian democracy's unsolvable problem of authority: none was in a position to say what the hungering multitudes were to be fed.

The problem of authority in education.

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in an abdication of the authority of knowledge, came the elective system.

This was followed by a carnival  of specialism, professionalism, and vocationalism, often fostered and protected by strange  bureaucratic devices, so that on the honored name of university there traded a weird con genes of  interests, not a few of which were anti-intellectual even in their pretensions. Institutions of  learning did not check but rather contributed to the decline by losing interest in Homo sapiens  to develop Homo faber.

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. Yet to establish the fact of decadence is the most pressing duty of our time because, until we have demonstrated that cultural decline is a historical fact-which can be established-and that modern man has about squandered his estate, we cannot combat those who have fallen prey to hysterical optimism.

A noteworthy quotation.

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Such is the task, and our most serious obstacle is that people traveling this downward path  develop an insensibility which increases with their degradation. Loss is perceived most clearly at  the beginning; after habit becomes implanted, one beholds the anomalous situation of apathy  mounting as the moral crisis deepens. It is when the first faint warnings come that one has the  best chance to save himself; and this, I suspect, explains why medieval thinkers were extremely  agitated over questions which seem to us today without point or relevance. 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. Thus in the face of the enormous brutality of our age we seem unable to  make appropriate response to perversions of truth and acts of bestiality. Multiplying instances  show complacency in the presence of contradiction which denies the heritage of Greece, and a  callousness to suffering which denies the spirit of Christianity. Particularly since the great wars  do we observe this insentience. We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the  capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent.

when we reflect upon the cataclysms of the age, we are chiefly impressed with the  failure of men to rise to the challenge of them.

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.

For, as the course goes on, the movement turns  centrifugal; we rejoice in our abandon and are never so full of the sense of accomplishment as when  we have struck some bulwark of our culture a deadly blow.

In view of these circumstances, it is no matter for surprise that, when we ask people even to  consider the possibility of decadence, we meet incredulity and resentment. We must consider that we  are in effect asking for a confession of guilt and an acceptance of sterner obligation; we are  making demands in the name of the ideal or the suprapersonal, and we cannot expect a more cordial  welcome than disturbers of complacency have received in any other age.

Added to this is the egotism of modern man, fed by  many springs, which will scarcely permit the humility needed for self-criticism.

The apostles of modernism usually begin their retort with catalogues of modern achievement, not  realizing that here they bear witness to their immersion in particulars.

Whoever desires to praise some modern  achievement should wait until he has related it to the professed aims of our civilization as  rigorously as the Schoolmen related a corollary to their doctrine of the nature of God. All  demonstrations lacking this are pointless.

If it can be agreed, however, that we are to talk about ends before means, we may begin by  asking some perfectly commonplace questions about the condition of modern man. Let us, first of  all, inquire whether he knows more or is, on the whole, wiser than his predecessors.

The whole tendency of modern thought, one might say its whole moral impulse, is to keep the  individual busy with endless induction. Since the time of Bacon the world has been running away  from, rather than toward, first principles, so that, on the verbal level, we see "fact"  substituted for "truth," and on the philosophic level, we witness attack upon abstract  ideas and speculative inquiry.

the average man has become imbued with this notion and imagines that an  industrious acquisition of particulars will render him a man of knowledge. With what pathetic trust  does he recite his facts! He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists of a  great many small things.

If our contemporary  belongs to a profession, he may be able to describe some tiny bit of the world with minute  fidelity, but still he lacks understanding.

It may be doubted whether one person in three draws what may be correctly termed knowledge from his freely chosen reading matter. 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 perils of infomation-overload? The peril of neglecting God -- neglecting virtue?

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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.

Standards of  consumption which he cannot meet, and which he does not need to meet, come virtually in the guise  of duties.

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.

A great material establishment, by its very temptation to  luxuriousness, unfits the owner for the labor necessary to maintain it, as has been observed  countless times in the histories of individuals and of nations.

Man is constantly being assured today that he has more  power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness. Look at him  today somewhere in the warren of a great city.

Modern social and corporate organization makes independence an expensive thing; in  fact, it may make common integrity a prohibitive luxury for the ordinary man, as Stuart Chase has  shown

that some cultures have passed from a high state of organization to  dissolution can be demonstrated as objectively as anything in history. One has only to think of  Greece, of Venice, of Germany.

The assertion that changes from generation to generation are  illusory and that there exist only cycles of biological reproduction is another form of that denial  of standards, and ultimately of knowledge, which lies at the source of our degradation.

Richard M. Weaver -- Ideas Have Consequences - The Diigo Meta page

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