The Bookshelf: Nostalgia Has Consequences
Recently, in writing a book review for another publication, I was struck by the author’s description of “Ideas First” conservatives—her reference being to Richard M. Weaver’s book Ideas Have Consequences. Aha, thought I, another classic of conservatism that I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. Since its publication in 1948 by the University of Chicago Press, the book has never been out of print, and is often invoked as a seminal influence on the modern conservative movement.
Now, having read it—as well as some of Weaver’s other work—I must report that the best thing about Ideas Have Consequences is its title. Indeed they do, and Weaver’s idea for this book was not a very good one. (I confess to wondering, in fact, how many people who invoke his title have read the book.) There is a certain conservative mood one sometimes encounters—the world has declined from a golden age long past to its present sorry state because of this One Bad Idea that people adopted—and Weaver gives that mood eloquent voice.
A little about Weaver is in order, for his biography is perhaps relevant to his argument. Born in North Carolina and reared in Kentucky, he graduated from the University of Kentucky, earned a master’s in English at Vanderbilt and, after a few years of teaching in the South, earned his PhD at Louisiana State University. At Vanderbilt his mentor was John Crowe Ransom, and at LSU, Cleanth Brooks. Soon after earning his doctorate he joined the English department at the University of Chicago, where he taught for nearly twenty years, until his untimely death in 1963 at age fifty-three. It’s fair to say that this son of the South’s translation to what was then the second largest city in the United States, a metropolis in the Land of Lincoln, colors the argument of his most famous work.
There is no denying Weaver’s forceful talent as a writer. On the first page of Ideas he declares, “There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot.” Every curmudgeonly bone in any conservative’s body will immediately begin to vibrate in sympathy with the author. And there will be plenty more where that came from. But first Weaver devotes several pages of his introduction to constructing an entirely deductive case for the decline of Western man into moral idiocy. In his view, it is all the fault of a fourteenth-century philosopher:
It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence. His triumph tended to leave universal terms mere names serving our convenience. The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of humankind.
Weaver then asks the reader to “consider the train of circumstances which have with perfect logic proceeded from this.” In a few inexorable steps, he avers, we proceed to “the denial of truth,” hence to “relativism,” thence to “a new doctrine of nature,” proceeding then in lockstep to “abandonment of the doctrine of original sin” and then “by clear deduction to the corollary of the natural goodness of man,” the death of religion altogether, and the triumph of materialism as “implicit in what had already been framed.”
The compactness of the argument is breathtaking. But is it sound? I am no metaphysician, but to my amateur eye, it appears that Weaver’s deductive logic leaps from conclusion to conclusion without an adequate supply of intervening premises. Does it simply follow, from Ockham’s nominalism—the view that universals (man, chair, good) have no “extramental” existence, are not “out there” exterior to our understanding—that there is no truth independent of ourselves? Do all the rest of Weaver’s conclusions simply follow as well, all the way to atheism and materialism, of necessity?
The philosopher Marilyn McCord Adams, in a massive two-volume work on Ockham, analyzes his ontology for some 300 pages, concluding that “he does not make metaphysics arbitrary and subjective,” and that “he joins his ‘realist’ opponents in affirming that certain things exist … prior to and independently of their being signified by anyone or anything.” The intellectual historian Larry Siedentop credits “Ockham and his nominalist followers” with having “laid the foundations for what we now call ‘liberal secularism’ as well as for what we call experimental or ‘empirical’ science.” (Weaver would lay blame rather than credit for these developments.) Yet Siedentop, calling Ockham “no materialist,” says he “would have been dismayed to see how, a few centuries later, his analysis of causation became joined to materialist assumptions directed against theism, a combination he would have dismissed as a new form of rationalist arrogance.”
It is possible that Adams and Siedentop do not see the matter as clearly as Weaver does. It is possible that Ockham’s metaphysical arguments, to the extent they were adopted, simply could not but have moved the world in the direction Weaver describes, no matter what Ockham (foolishly? inconsistently?) thought to the contrary. But my qualifier, “to the extent they were adopted,” points up the second problem with Weaver’s argument—his evident belief that deduction, not induction, can explain historical changes in the human condition as lived by human beings.
Weaver repeatedly, for instance, refers to the “triumph” of Ockham’s nominalism. Yet it can hardly be said that the realism of Thomas Aquinas, against which Ockham set himself, was simply vanquished as a historical matter. The arguments have been joined and rejoined continually in the intellectual history of the West. That history must be approached inductively, by the patient gathering and weighing of facts about people’s beliefs, motives, actions; their material, religious, political, and social circumstances; and the repercussions of those circumstances for what they are able to think and do, as well as for what they in fact think and do. Ideas and their logical relations are part of that human story. But in our fallen state we are literally mixed-up creatures: mixed and inconsistent and partial in our thoughts, our impulses, our desires, and our deeds. Deduction cannot explain us, certainly not by itself.
Weaver’s thesis, in short, is too tidy. But it conveniently excuses him from marshaling evidence for almost any other claim he makes in the remainder of Ideas Have Consequences. It all just follows, you see. Rather oddly, for all that, he barely mentions his “Ockham blew up everything” thesis after the introduction, other than in random ipse dixits offered here and there as though he suddenly recalled what he began by claiming. At one point he even relocates the thesis, blaming Aquinas for turning medieval thought toward Aristotle and away from Plato! But for the most part, the balance of Ideas is the catalogue of a grump’s grievances against modernity, and the reader will nod or shake his head at each such grievance just to the extent to which he shares Weaver’s prejudices.
Weaver execrates cities, and commerce, and “bourgeois capitalism.” (There is the voice of the homesick southern boy marooned in Chicago.) He despises egalitarianism, the decline in our attraction to heroism, the dominance of America’s middle class, democracy itself; he celebrates hierarchy, aristocracy—feudalism begad! In the arts and media he holds all recent developments in contempt: not just jazz but all modern music starting with Beethoven; not just the latest in visual or plastic arts but the impressionists too; not just radio and cinema but newspapers as well. Any idea of the equality of the sexes repels him (his lifelong bachelorhood needing no further comment). He clings tightly to the right of private property as an anchor against the yawning ebb tide of civilization, a bulwark of freedom. But in his insistence on “distributive ownership of real property” (i.e., land) and his recoiling from “finance capitalism,” Weaver betrays his ignorance of economics and an implicit faith in political control of the marketplace.
Again, this litany of denunciations, offered less for historical confirmation than for moral approbation, will be accepted in whole or in substantial part by many readers of conservative temperament who have found the remembered (or imagined) graces of life worn away by the abrasions of modernity. As an exercise in the higher nostalgia, Weaver’s book found a ready audience in 1948, and its continued availability suggests a curmudgeonly staying power. But as an argument about how those abrasions came about, it is disappointingly weak. And as a prescription to remedy the ills of modern life, Weaver offers a vague paean to piety regarding nature, our fellow men, and inherited tradition. That’s fine—but it’s scant sustenance after he has worked so hard to make us hungry.
Weaver’s teaching and scholarship were in the study of rhetoric, and I had the mischievous thought as I read Ideas that he was essaying an experiment in how far, and with what success, he might take a rhetorical blunderbuss approach to his subject. For the book is almost a parody of rhetorical excess—all wild, ill-constructed enthymemes, the demagogue’s sweat visible on his brow.
But no, I think he means every bit of it. After Weaver’s death, his LSU doctoral dissertation was at last published, under the title The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought. Here we can see, in full, what Weaver only glancingly reveals in Ideas Have Consequences: his belief that something wondrous and refined, something noble and just, was lost in the destruction of southern culture wrought by the Civil War and Reconstruction. As a cultural commentary, analyzing a wide array of nineteenth-century southern political, historical, and literary works, The Southern Tradition at Bay is a sensitive study, honest in its assessments and instructive for anyone who wishes to know about southern thought in that century. But Weaver has a palpable nostalgia for what he admires in the plantation class’s “feudalism,” its code of the gentleman, its rootedness in the land, and its contempt for the Yankee and his grubby urbanism. His South is emphatically the white South, and Weaver cannot quite shake his inherited sympathy for the “Lost Cause”—nor a habitual attitude toward black Americans as beings of a lesser breed.
This is rather a shame, for at his best, Weaver could show a more capacious generosity of spirit toward fellow Americans of other regions and other views. In a 1953 study, The Ethics of Rhetoric, Weaver devoted a sizable chapter to the rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln. It is one of the finest, most perceptive and astute analyses ever written of the way in which Lincoln crafted his arguments throughout his political career, from the Lyceum Address of 1838 to the Second Inaugural of 1865. Of a man whom a decade earlier he had accused, in The Southern Tradition, of “at least tacit endorsement” of “unlimited aggression” in the Civil War, heedless of the difference between combatants and noncombatants, Weaver’s praise in The Ethics of Rhetoric is unstinting. He says of Lincoln, “His name is now immune against partisan rancor, and he has long ceased to be a mere sectional hero.”
I would venture to say, of Weaver’s just assessment in 1953, that no finer study of Lincoln’s rhetoric was available than these thirty pages until Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided was published six years later. Yet Weaver’s Lincoln, like Jaffa’s, is plainly the dogged adversary of the “feudal aristocracy”—in truth the slavocracy of the lash and the chain—that loomed large in Weaver’s nostalgic dream of a golden age in both Ideas and Southern Tradition. We are, as I said, mixed-up creatures. It turns out that Richard Weaver’s bestselling work, Ideas Have Consequences, is his worst book. But an author with his contempt for mass democracy would probably appreciate that irony.