ideas and consequences
I have never read the book "Ideas have Consequences." I like the title - it's catchy and suggests enough that we can guess what the book will be about. Here's Amazon's summary:
"In what has become a classic work, Richard M. Weaver unsparingly diagnoses the ills of our age and offers a realistic remedy. He asserts that the world is intelligible, and that man is free. The catastrophes of our age are the product not of necessity but of unintelligent choice. A cure, he submits, is possible. It lies in the right use of man's reason, in the renewed acceptance of an absolute reality, and in the recognition that ideas--like actions--have consequences."
Welcome to the enlightenment. I am Mr. Weaver, and I'll be your host for the evening. Please sit back and enjoy yourself while I ignore the past 200 years of philosophy and try to make you believe that existentialism, relativism, pragmatism and nihilism don't exist or, at the very least, aren't important.
It sounds to me like Weaver is answering the question, "how should we live?" His answer? Responsibly; as if it (life) matters. Thanks a million, Rich - we appreciate you taking the time to figure that out for us. But here's the bigger question: why? The problems in the 20th century have not resulted from a lack of optimism in Man's ability to reason - rather they started from it. The philosophies, most noteably nihilism, the belief that nothing matters, arose out of a fundamental failure to answer this "why" question by modernism. We find ourselves mired in this nihilistic decoupage specifically because we've spent the last 200 years knowing we can do "anything we set our minds to", and suddenly finding no reason to set our minds to anything. Ideas have consequences, but why should we care? Progress turns into fashion, which becomes tedious against the forgotten backdrop of survival. War and love become pendantic.
The question that needs answering is, why should we care? And if we should, how can we? It doesn't take much to convince someone that they can make a difference if they put in the effort. The hard part is helping them learn to care about the reason they should. I don't think this happens easily or regularly - it takes a little shock to break the malaise of everyday living. The shock leads to an encounter with danger, frustration, beauty, love, loss, or fear, but some sort of emotion that stirs a person to action, and can't be ignored. Weirdly esoteric existentialists sometimes called this a "singular experience", and spent their entire lives searching for one. Self-help programs encourage a person to fake it through self-actualization and obsessive nihilism. Religion and Art claim such experience as their exclusive domains. In the west, our answer to the malaise has most recently been to beat the crap out of each other, and our idea of a "singular experience" finding out that your boring pedestrian house-wife spouse is actually an assassin.
I don't know if Weaver addresses this at all in his book. He might do a good job of it, and it might be a really good book. All I know is that "the cure" to our problems is absolutely not another obsession with reason, and this sort of pathetically blind optimism goes against everything history's telling us about the failing world view we call Modernism.
So what is the answer? Voltaire says to tend your garden. Pascal says to bet on God and hope it works (sort of.) Locke says to invest in the free exchange for mutual benefit that arises from living justly in pursuit of heavenly riches. Eliot says, "Give Sympathize, Control" ('Datta, dayadhvam, damyata'.) I'm in favor of living justly, loving mercy, walking humbly, and more or less forgetting about the rest of it. What do you think?
posted by RJ @ 8:40 AM
7 comments
7 Comments:
Too long, clanky!
You've been waiting for this day for a while now, haven't you.....
....but at 640 words, it still falls quite short of your 1000+ tomes that earned the mark of the clank.
absolutely! You're out of your mind moron!
I thought that this
"The problems in the 20th century have not resulted from a lack of optimism in Man's ability to reason - rather they started from it."
Was a great insight, and I can't think of anyone who has formulated the issue as succinctly and incisively as that.
I think one of the things that shaped the intellectual climate, and that you'd probably agree with me about, is that the 20th century saw genocide and fascism and mass murder not in the name of religion. (All of those things happened before the 20th century, and they happened for both religious and non-religious reasons. It was just that the 20th century, in some people's thinking, was supposed to be the end of both.)
Weaver is reacting to this as well--IHQ was published in 1948, just after the end of WWII. Weaver was always defending the virtues of the old south--feudalism, chivalry, honor, being bound to your land, faith, mint juleps. So while he holds up the sweet citizen farmer who works hard and reads harder as his ideal, I don't know if I agree with his assessment of everything.
"He asserts that the world is intelligible, and that man is free. The catastrophes of our age are the product not of necessity but of unintelligent choice."
So I think you're right: it's not only that Marxists and Nazis and Nancy Pelosi are unreasonable; it's that they're wrong. In the 21st century maelstrom of ideas, we need to use every tool at our disposal to make the world a better place. Maybe to the paleo-cons we become Weaver--I don't know.
1948? Wow - I should've looked. That makes the book much less pretentious sounding.....after WWII, I'd want people to start acting reasonable again too.
No one has anything? j. morgan? The title of this post could have been "A post custom-tailored for j. morgan to regulate on," and yet there's no regulation.
Redhurt, I think this post was incredibly poignant. You ask the startling question:
“…why should we care? And if we should, how can we? It doesn't take much to convince someone that they can make a difference if they put in the effort. The hard part is helping them learn to care about the reason they should.”
In many ways, Weaver – a defender of the old guard – understood the same things that others – attackers of the old guard – understood. Maybe the most thoughtful American to whom Weaver was opposed was the poet Wallace Stevens (I don’t know if they even knew each other’s work, but it was strikingly oppositional).
Yet, Weaver and Stevens both adamantly agreed on one point that Stevens so succinctly wrote: “The death of one god is the death of all.”
In the last few lines of Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” he writes:
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night.IT is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down.It is a war that never ends.
Stevens – like Weaver - clear saw advanced Modernity as a war; a struggle to finally push away all that was and replace it with all that will be (in his case, the poet replaces the priest). Elsewhere in “Notes,” Stevens extols the “heroic children whom time breeds/Against the first idea.” Of course, Stevens means the God of Abraham when he says “the first idea.” Whereas Steven’s saw the poet/intellectual as those children, however, Weaver saw Hitler and Mao and Rockefeller as those children.
I bring all of this up to help situate Weaver. This is what he saw in the 20th century and what he was trying to combat with his work. Neither Weaver nor his opponents would have admitted a middle ground in their age. Your questions, then, are the same as theirs; their answers are pushed to the extremities. That extremity, I think, gave him reason enough to care and suspect that, if others only knew, they would care also.
In some ways, then, I think Weaver would view your questions as symptomatic of what he was trying to address. He would probably see these questions as confirmation that Stevens won their little war.
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