“Egotism in work and art is the flowering, after long growth, of a heresy about human destiny. Its abhorrence of discipline and form is usually grouped with the signs of ‘progress.’ It is progress for those who neither have a sense of direction nor want responsibility. The heresy is that man’s destiny in the world is not to perfect himself but to lean back in sensual enjoyment . . . When masses of men reach a point at which egotism reigns so blandly, can their political damnation be far off? They have rejected their only guaranty against external control, which is self-discipline, taught and practiced.” Ideas and Consequences, pages 82 and 83.
A “Conservative” Book for All
Are you already shopping for a Christmas gift to satisfy and delight a “conservative” colleague or, perhaps more immediately, a Halloween gift to illuminate and horrify a “liberal” friend? Perhaps a stocking stuffer—”a good thing in a small package”? A book far ahead of its time setting readers down truth’s pathway, exposing nearly all of today’s maladies, and offering rotten tomatoes a-plenty for ammo needed in every direction?
If so, I have a worldview book for you!—the 1948 classic Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver (168 pages, republished in 2013 with a “Forward” by Roger Kimball with current context and an “Afterward” by Ted Smith with publication history and Weaver’s biography).
Ideas Have Consequences made my list of “must reads” as one of the most cited titles of philosophical books across political lines offering commentary on modernism. It’s a post-World War II classic up there with The Road to Serfdom (Friedrich Hayek, 1944), The Conservative Mind (Russell Kirk, 1953), Witness (Whitaker Chambers, 1952), and God and Man at Yale (William Buckley, 1951). Ideas fits right in with more recent works like PC Contributor Sir Roger Scruton’s Gentle Regrets (2005) and The West and the Rest (2002). See his comments on those books here.
Ideas Have Consequences is a most engaging read with strings of quotable lines, one-after-the-other, on nearly every page. Weaver’s narrative exhibits a lyrical style. Begun as a doctoral thesis, Ideas established Richard Weaver as a leader in the conservative space throughout his short life (1910 – 1963), engaged entirely as a professor at the University of Chicago.
While clearly favoring the blessings of rural over urban living, an ancient tradition, even Weaver could not have foreseen how accurate his prophecy would be with the development of cultural Marxist, postmodernist, and trans-humanist ethics, or how colossally lost many of our American cities today would become. Ideas Have Consequences’ 1948 publishing date proves that all of these trends were underway well before World War II, and that bizarre philosophy and human behavior never produce anything new under the sun.
Before proceeding, I should probably comment on what it means to be a conservative, a word often detected as one’s back is turned. In fact, as the most popular comic in the late 1970s often said, “some people come to me and they say, hey, as a cool guy, why are you a Christian, liberal, capitalist, conservative?”
My answer is that being a Christian defines all else without labels or qualification. Indeed, being a Christian is 113% (just to pick a number) of one’s identity. With that response, I often then offer Scruton’s video clip above. Since his death in 2020, Scruton has been referred to as perhaps the most significant conservative philosopher since Edmund Burke. He defines conservatism as merely supporting and defending what one loves.
I am fine with being called a classical liberal. However, my problem with words like capitalism and conservatism is what the Left does with them. Of course, my politics do not prioritize money (capital) and are certainly not about keeping it for myself. Instead of greed, conservatism relies on the grace of God and is most charitable, not selfish. It also offers the most to every community and to the common good.
Furthermore, I believe traditional, patriotic Americans are in the majority and growing in number now, and that using such terminology can place us on the defensive unnecessarily (depending on our audience). Given the strength of our political position well-proven over the last 200 years (at the very least), we should stay on the Ideas offensive in a positive way, allowing others to form their own opinions in the First Amendment’s public square.
Like using Steve Martin’s famous lines, I’ve said it before and will keep saying it: For hundreds of years, the Western, Judeo-Christian worldview has unlocked the power of the ages.
Talk about liberalism; talk about progress.
The Prophet Armed
Unlike Steve Martin, Richard Weaver was decidedly not a “wild and crazy guy.” He was born in Asheville, NC and lost his father, a small business man, at age five. The family moved to Lexington, KY after his father’s death, where he began elementary school. He remained close to his mother—an enterprising woman like her husband—throughout her life. Weaver never married. It’s said he was dedicated to his work as a scholar and teacher, to being a Southern gentleman, and to his one beer per night before retiring.
Weaver distinguished himself early as a gifted student and remained focused on a life in education during his career at the University of Chicago. He pursued scholarship grants and teaching positions through an extended academic training period: the University of Kentucky (BA), Vanderbilt University (MA), Auburn University, Texas A&M University, and Louisiana State University (PHD). Through teaching and publication efforts, he also developed extensive contacts at North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina, the University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University. Weaver studied under some of the most notable scholars in his space, and his PHD dissertation is entitled “The Confederate South, 1865 to 1910: A Study in the Survival of a Mind and a Culture.”
Without question, Weaver came of age in the later stage of the “New South.” He had tremendous pride in being a Southerner when that still meant something. He was raised in a society dominated by elders who were Civil War veterans and younger adults his parents’ age, who were sons and daughters of the same. They remembered the extreme glories and evils of the antebellum South and the Civil War, loving the region and its heritage intensely—a love shared within and across communities. While understanding the obvious role of slavery as the root cause of division between the North and South, Weaver’s generation viewed the War as a desperate struggle to the death for sovereignty among those in power.
As noted in the Afterword to Ideas Have Consequences, however, Weaver was by no means your average Southern apologist. He became a dedicated Christian and anti-war advocate in high school and a socialist in college, experienced an academic metamorphosis in graduate school, then rediscovered his classical Judeo-Christian roots and remained there for the rest of his life.
Ideas is often cited for its unoriginal insight presented in the “Introduction” that the West’s road to perdition began with William of Occam (1287 – 1347) and the nominalist versus rationalist controversy of the 14th century.
As a Franciscan friar, Occam gets credit for the nominalist view that ideas, like sensible qualities (say, “redness” or music) and transcendentals (“truth, goodness, and beauty”), exist only in the head and not in the objective real world of nature. At the time, most medievals followed Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and the rationalist view that offered continuity between what’s in our heads and what’s “out there” in time and space—a controversy that involves the fact/value distinction.
If Weaver were alive today, he would probably note how humorous it is that the nominalist versus rationalist debate involved a bitter argument among dedicated Christians (perhaps having had more to do with politics than theology) that advanced the West in early stage science, but that also laid the foundation for radical secularism and materialism, and thus its potential destruction.
Well, fortunately, if almost 700 years since William of Occam tells us anything: It’s never too late for the good guys.
Content Overview
Ideas Have Consequences is so delightfully short and pointed that only a few brief comments are necessary here. The book’s first six chapters explain the concept of worldview itself and describe modernity’s illnesses, and its last three suggest remedies. His second to last chapter, “The Power of the Word” or language, is particularly powerful. To summarize in my own words, Weaver believes man needs religion, social hierarchy based on merit, chivalry emphasizing duty and honor, and the ancient social grace of men being gentlemen.
What Richard Weaver dislikes is materialism, pragmatism, utilitarianism, individualism, relativism, presentism, scientism, empiricism, “finance capitalism,” Whiggism, and even and especially consumerist “bourgeois values.”
In my opinion, there is much Weaver gets absolutely wrong. Unlike Weaver, I believe that: (1) ultimately, Christian, middle class values have created the West and are on track to eliminate poverty worldwide in George and Mary Bailey fashion—a topic we’ve covered extensively here; (2) World War II was a necessary war that saved the West; (3) American “capitalism” would ultimately defeat the Soviet Union without a fight and redirect some other Communist nations toward free enterprise; and (4) women proved more than capable as equals in every way outside the home in the educational and private sectors.
And yet, everyone can learn from this brilliant mind and economical presentation. I will end with a long quote from Weaver’s Introduction about the importance of worldview and truth, since therein lies our pathway forward to a better America.
Do Ideas Have Consequences?
Praxis Circle stakes its mission on that simple phrase.
In referring to William of Occam’s nominalism:
“It is easy to be blind to the significance of change because it is remote in time and abstract in character. Those who have not discovered that world view is the most important thing about a man, as about the men composing a culture, should consider the train of circumstances which have with perfect logic proceeded from this. The denial of universals carries with it the detail of everything transcending experience. The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably—though ways are found to hedge on this—the denial of truthfulness. With the denial of truth there is no escape from the relativism of ‘man the measure of all things.’ The witches spoke with the habitual equivocation of oracles when they told man that by his easy choice he might realize himself more fully, for they were actually initiating a course which cuts off one from reality. Thus began the ‘abomination of desolation’ appearing today as a feeling of alienation from all fixed truth.” (pages 3 and 4)
So, Happy Halloween and Merry Christmas (a bit early) to all Americans who are strengthening our nation as the leader of the free world. Richard Weaver’s Ideas are still making a significant contribution to a better way forward and with good potential consequences.
