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Ideas Have Consequences

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This book is densely written and merits -- maybe requires -- multiple readings. Fortunately, it's also a compelling book, which will make you want to reread it.

The idea whose consequences Weaver entails and deplores he identifies as nominalism or relativism -- the absence of belief in any source of truth outside man, the absence of universals, the reduction of all things to formless particulars.

You might have thought that such an idea was too abstract to have any impact on your life, but Weaver argues persuasively that nominalism makes impossible the "metaphysical dream" of an organized universe, leading to social chaos, formless art, virtueless individuals suckered by newspapers, movies and radio (today I imagine he would have added television to the list) into believing that life consists only of chasing ever more creature comforts and a universal "spoiled-child psychology".

He also prescribes remedies. The ownership of property, he argues, is the sole surviving "metaphysical right" our culture recognizes, and the starting point for anyone wishing to restore other metaphysical ideas. Because language is so closely tied to thought, Weaver argues for some language-oriented educational remedies (more emphasis on poetry in education, and on foreign languages, especially Latin and Greek). He also argues the case for the dying virtue of piety, which he defines as respect for nature, respect for the substance of others, and respect for the substance of the past.

There's more than a little of the grouchy conservative in Weaver. For instance, he complains bitterly about jazz, "the clearest of all signs of our age's deep-seated predilection for barbarism." This reminds me, amusingly, of Robert Bork's similar complaints in _Slouching Towards Gomorrah_ -- except that Bork complains that rock and roll is the degenerate music of adolescence, in contrast to the serious and adult-themed music of... you guessed it... jazz.

But this is a small flaw. Weaver's diagnosis of the ills of our age is insightful and thought-provoking. I, for one, am certainly willing to take a crack at his proposed remedies.

I heard quite a lot about this book so I took my time reading it lest I miss even one pearl of wisdom. The book definitely lives up to its reputation. In a nutshell, Weaver takes on the role of doctor - identifying and prescribing a cure for the ailment that had plagued (and still does) the United States, culminating in the barbaric conclusion of World War II.

Weaver meticulously describes the ailment, including the chief causes of the crisis: (1) Replacement of transcendent sentiments with utilitarianism & pragmatism; (2) Undermining senses of order and hierarchy (from liberalism/collectivism); (3) Loss of focus and an embrace of fragmentary obsessions; (4) Exercise of raw ego and self-indulgence; (5) Dereliction of media responsibility; (6) Emergence of the spoiled-child phenomena.

Despite the rather gloomy prognosis, Weaver does not leave the reader without hope. In the final three chapters, he proposes corrective actions that he believes will get America back on track away from the path of self-destruction: (1) Preserve the sanctity of private property; (2) Use of meaningful language and rhetoric; (3) Embrace notions of piety and true justice.

After the elapse of fifty years, Weaver's estimation of the crisis as well as his proposed corrective actions are as relevant and useful today as when they were first written.

I highly recommend this book to historians of American conservative thought as well as those who wish to be inspired by one of the best authors that conservatism has been blessed to have.

The Great Stereopticon is not the latest in digital CD player technology, but the latter is a medium of the former. Prof. Weaver's book, written in the late 1940s, with a Muse of fire, is still current, because the crisis in our civilization continues, and of that he wrote. The 'Great Stereopticon' is the term that Richard Weaver uses to describe the prevading noise generated by our culture, which nearly drowns out the still, small voice of truth, goodness, and virtue. The main point of the book is that ideas, in this case bad ones, can start in motion a train of events, which as they emerge from the world of thought, produce nasty and often unintended consequences. The author traces the decline of the core vision of Western civilization to the progressive divorce of Man and Nature that began with Bacon, and which has continued, as Scientism replaced Science. The momentum of the centuries has given this set of ideas great power and unthought acceptance that is prevasive in our society. The result is the rising tide of barbarism that is engulfing us. Technological progress has done great good, but has not made us better. Without wanting to summarize the author's arguments further, this is one of the seminal works in the Conservative canon, in the Southern Agrarian tradition. The book is not long, and is arranged in stand-alone chapters, which advance Prof. Weaver's argument and form a coherent whole. It is also a quick read, and is done in a superb, flowing style that does the treasurehouse of ideas contained in it justice.

I read this book as a college freshman, and it was incredibly influential. Numerous times I paused, absorbing his words, shocked at how right he was.

Prof. Weaver's critique of modern culture was as relevant then as it is now. His attack on jazz music might startle the modern reader, but just consider that this music influenced early rock and roll, and while I enjoy a lot of popular music, this has ultimately given us some pretty vile music that can and does influence the way kids think. Think "gangta rap" and the sexually explicit stuff on the radio. Prof. Weaver could hear the appeal to basic urges in the rhythms of jazz music.

This type of conservatism is unfamiliar to modern political junkies. This is not capitalist, semi-libertarian Reagan conservatism. His attacks on finance capitalism, industry, technology, and comfort as the basic goal of life might almost sound like the mantra of IMF protestors and people with socialist leanings. But make no mistake: Weaver extends an olive branch (probably unintentionally) to the other side of conservatism with his focus on private property as the last surviving link to a metaphysical foundation of ethics. He didn't mean this in a materialist sense, but in the sense of being tied to a home, a family, a community.

After reading this, I highly recommend "Steps Toward Restoration: The Consequences of Richard Weaver's Ideas" to get some more perspective on the man, and how some of his ideas changed towards the end of his life. (During the height of the Cold War, his stance on individualism and capitalism softened a bit.)

Since its initial publication in 1948, Richard M. Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences has been has been one of the most heralded and misunderstood books among contemporary conservatives. Weaver's insightful critique of the ethos of modern liberalism is often cited by contemporary conservative thinkers as a profound influence on their thinking. The truly odd thing here is that he would have as little to praise about their views as their opponents. Indeed it could be said that his points are just as devastating to the corporate capitalism of the right as the statist collectivism of the left. Like Tolkien, Weaver is a hero to those with whom he would find himself at complete odds.

Weaver's analysis of Western society is that the culture suffers from an abandonment of concern for the permanent things - the ideals of truth, beauty, and the good that are eternal and not subject to the whims of public fashion. This is opposed to the modernist idea of "progress" as the ultimate good. Since both liberalism and conservatism as we understand it in our society have roots in modernism, neither would find sympathy here.

Instead of calling for a return to "traditional American values", Weaver seeks a reappropiation of the classical values found in the best of the ancient thinkers and that served in the flowering of Christendom. In the modern world, each area of cultural endeavor is separated from that which is its natural end - politics no longer strives for virtue, art for beauty, philosophy for truth. Modern education seeks the practical development for political and economic ends and separates it from its origin in the teaching of eternal things. It is a world whose priorities have been skewed to serve the basest of motivations.

Weaver traces the beginnings of the problem to the loss of belief in universals resulting from the rise of nominalist philosophy associated with William of Occam. In this shift from apprehending the eteranal universals to classifying the passing singulars, man subtly shifted his focus from heaven to earth. From this point onward, the development of a completely secularized society was an inevitability as the decay of interest in the permanent things crept into all cultural endeavors. Similarly, a recovery from the modern predicamemt can only result from a reappropriation of concern for that which is eternal.

While his analysis of what ails the modern culture is both eloquent and profound, his placing the blame on nominalism is less convincing. In retrospect, the nominalist position is as much an outgrowth of the earlier medieval scholasticism as anything that followed is from nominalism. While it is certainly a step in the wrong direction, nominalism was hardly the first such step. More likely the cause was rooted in the methodology of the West as it tentatively stepped from centuries of cultural darkness.

In their use of classical philosophy, the patristic writers had always been judicious in preserving what was good and using it to serve to explain the Christian faith. Philosophic terminology was adopted to add precision to Christian theology and philosophical explanations of eternal things were "Christianized" by placing their focus on God, but the truths of the faith and the exegesis of Scripture was done using methods handed down from the earliest Christians. Also the culture in which Christianity took root had long digested Plato, Aristotle, and other classical thinkers and could appropriate their wisdom in an organic manner and not fall prey to the "system building" that developed within medieval scholasticism.

In the West, the exposure to classical manuscripts apart from Holy Scripture was far more limited and consisted primarily of some logical treatises of Aristotle, and the writings of St. Augustine and other Latin fathers. A logical developments of Augustinian theology was a natural choice in such an envrironment and the early scholastics set the tone for what followed. When Aristotle's philosophical writings reached the West, it caused an uproar but brilliant men like St. Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus succeeded in systematizing it to fit Christian theology. In all these things, it was the logical system building that was at the core of intellectual endeavor. With the array of competing and contradictory systems, a more skeptical mind like Occam was bound to throw cold water on the endeavor and wonder aloud whether the much lauded "universals" were linguistic constructions of the system without an independant existence.

Although I think his placing the blame squarely on William of Occam's shoulders unwarranted, it is clear that Weaver is definitely on to soemthing. Given the propaganda for neo-scholasticism within the Catholic Church (a movement that would dissipate after Vatican II) and the poor understanding of the Christian East at the time, things look differently now than then and his view is quite understandable. Even as it stands, Weaver was one of the first to diagnose what was ailing modern society as not a matter that can be cured with further progress or a retreat a few decades back but within a radical recovery of what has been lost centuries ago and for this alone Ideas Have Consequences is essential reading.

Weaver was a professor of rhetoric at the University of Chicago. Ideas Have Consequences, like Weaver's other books, is small but deep. It brilliantly diagnoses what ails modern man, tracing the illness to its root, the flight from faith.

        According to Weaver's friend Russell Kirk, the publisher imposed the title, which Weaver hated, on this book.

        My one problem with the book is that its title is used as an incantation by some conservative intellectuals who insist that being right, in the sense of being correct, is sufficient to win. To support their position, they utter the words: "Ideas have consequences," thinking that by so doing they have enlisted Richard Weaver on their side and thereby obsolved themselves of any obligation to take effective actions.

        Once you have read the book, you will know that Weaver didn't believe that ideas in and of themselves have consequences. He believed that skillful actions, when based on good ideas, have good consequences.

In 'Ideas Have Consequences' Professor Richard M. Weaver exposes the many pitfalls of modern liberalism and moral relativism. The book was originally written in 1948, and clearly shows the influence of then recent World War 2. All of the chapters have powerful arguments, especially "The Great Stereopticon," which exposes the propagandistic humanistic left-wing bent of the media (print, film, radio, and television) and the destruction laden on contemporary society by the different media outlets. Other important chapters are "The Spoiled-Child Psychology" (a discourse on materialism and sloth), and "The Power of the Word," a chapter on changing word usage through time and foreshadowing the destructive effects of modern 'politically correct' terminology.

This is an extremely weighty, dense book. I generally liked the contentions found within it, but found the stilted language somewhat annoying. As an example, consider this passage from the opening of the chapter titled "Piety and Justice", which is all too typical: "I would maintain that modern man is a parricide. He has taken up arms against, and has effectually slain, what former men have regarded as filial veneration." Until going to the dictionary I was unaware that a parricide was "one that murders his or her father, mother, or a close relative." Perhaps I should have known that, but my complaint is clear, reading this otherwise wonderful and informative book can be extremely tedious.

Having said that, I do recommend this book with the reservation that passages will need to be read and reread several times, and you will need to be prepared to consult a dictionary for words in English, French, German, Latin and Greek that you may not know. There are several amusing portions of the book, my favorite being the chapter in which he assaults Jazz as the music that will oversee the downfall of civilization. I only wish he could have lived to see Rap. The book as a whole is an amazingly accurate predictor of societal ills, amazing in their scope considering that it was written nearly 55 years ago.

Without question, Ideas Have Consequences ranks among the classics of conservatism--along with such others as Kirk's The Conservative Mind and Nisbet's Quest for Community--and is required reading for modern conservatives, who owe much to the ideas of Richard Weaver and many of whom have, sadly, strayed from the path of conservatism properly understood. Weaver, writing here in the late 1940s, perceived a culture that was declining, and one can only wonder what he would have thought about modern society, in which traditional values and order have so eroded that they bear no resemblance even to the "diseased" culture of the 1940s. A restoration of piety, tradition, values, honor, and chivalry would surely serve us well today, if only modern man would heed Weaver's warnings, which resonate as loudly now as they did in 1948.

The conservative Russell Kirk recommends this book to all who seek answers as to why western civilization is suffering a 'cultural breakdown'in our present day. This is an excellent read for those who seek answers to those questions. Weaver's comments on the decline of western culture are as insightful as they are interesting.

Professor Weaver, writing in the late 1940's, clearly analyzes the cultural trends of his day. Furthermore, he translates the form of those trends into the logical consequences they would embody if left unchecked. Read this book;you will find yourself pausing ever so often to ponder the current state of our culture, as it mirrors these words written over 50 years ago. His writing and style are clear and profound. I often would find myself trying to strectch my reading times because the ideas expressed were so compelling.