Visions of Order by Richard Weaver

[The following is a summary of many (but not all) of the numerous insights and concepts shown in Richard Weaver's book Visions of Order. Like usual, in the summary I have added some of my own comments or reflections. You can buy it at Amazon.]

Writings on diagnosing and elucidating the decline of Occidental culture go back to World War I. But is it really in decline?

The left-liberalism of the internally optimistic minded man has much on his side to say otherwise. Things change in time and what we all are experiencing today is no different than years, centuries past. They say that things are actually improving and evolving. We as a people are experiencing the process of civilizational progress; not de-civilizational decline. The likes of the supposedly conservative Rush Limbaugh comes to mind. Many of his premises are based in such a frame of mind. Even some libertarians naively think that a process of cultural civilization has been underway, despite the continuous inroads of statism (and its ideology) everywhere in society.

Left-liberals do have rhetoric and language on their side. They are moving with the trend of culture. Therefore they have the momentum with them. Language and rhetoric is shaped with this bias. Establishment figures, furthermore, say all is well with the culture because they typically gain from it. They benefit from the current order. So the reality is that liberals do have the upper hand. But do they have logic and history on their side?

And who is to say that the culture is in atrophy? There is a way to probe this question, says the great conservative Richard Weaver (1910 - 1963) in Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time. One must understand the nature and role of man. From this we can answer the question. It allows us to answer what is worth preserving in the current culture and what is not. Man can then see what needs, and what does not, to be meliorated.

To begin with, it is true that the future is always uncertain. It is ubiquitous that there is always some worry what the future may bring. Nonetheless this does not prove the left's view. An individual man is always somewhat uneasy about the uncertain future, but he is not at all times happy in his life equally. It is in vain to deny that different points of time have had unequal productivity and cultural strength or health.

The subject that must be looked into is man before one can go any deeper. Once we do that, we can understand the nature and origin of culture. We can see that ideas do have consequences. That the "image" of a culture in the minds' of men does have an effect, for good and evil, on society.

Man, Freedom, and Culture

Richard Weaver says that man has two selves: the existential and the imaginative. Our existential self is just man's physical body. In a manner of speaking, it is the "animal" side of man. The second self, writes Weaver, is his "image which he somehow evolves from his spirit." (p 9) It brings man's wishes, dreams, hopes, imaginations, and the like. Man becomes more than beast because of it. This self gives him a picture of himself and his existence. It allows him to think of his existence, why he exists, and creationism in general. Without finding his place man feels lost, empty, and depressed. Man's "very restlessness is a sign that he is a spiritual being with intimations about his origin and destiny." (p 132) This search is looking for more than existential existence and more than "the reductionist formula of materialism." (p 10)

It is this image that brings rise of culture to mankind. The psychic need of man is fulfilled by the creation of culture. It satisfies feelings and imaginations. He wants to find meaning in his life and his surroundings. This image is the requisite to culture. One aspect of this is religion. But not the whole of culture. Culture manifests this image in man's mind to the physical world. From this symbolism is created. It provides a link between the physical world and the supra-natural.

Maybe one mistakenly thinks that someone like Richard Weaver (or me) believes that the nation-state is the essence of culture. This is not the case. As he wrote in an article called "The Importance of Cultural Freedom," we can describe "any given culture as a perfectly spontaneous and unregulated expression of the human spirit which can know no law except delight in what it creates." [In Defense of Tradition, p 406] Cultural freedom, as he explains in the essay, is of utmost importance to culture and its genesis:

In a word, cultural freedom ... starts with the acknowledgment of the right of a culture to be itself. This is a principle deduced from the nature of culture, not from the nature of state. It also offers satisfactions more intimate than those of the political state; and hence it is wrong to force it to defer to political abstractions; the very fact that it has not chosen to embody those abstractions is evidence that they are extraneous. ... That is the reason for saying that the policy of a state toward the culture or cultures within it should be laisser faire [except under extreme events]... [p 408]

And as Weaver says in Visions of Order:

Government is not the substance of a people’s life, although modern collectivism would persuade us to think so. Government in all free societies is a regulative machinery, whose task it is to provide protection and to preserve enough order for people to do what they can do for themselves as individual members of society. (p 130)

(My reaction, of course is: But who says the State should provide law and security? As Joseph Sobran says, we would be better off without the State.)

Culture creates unity and vision. We cannot define exactly how "a culture integrates and homologizes," writes Weaver, but the interrelations between men "creates a mode of looking at the world or arrives at some imaginative visual bearing." (p 10) Every genuine culture has a "tyrannizing image," which things are drawn too. A culture has "subtle and pervasive pressures upon us to conform and to repel the unlike as disruptive." (p 11) Culture is thus exclusive because it would fade away otherwise. This allows us to tell one culture from another. If it cannot distinguish and discriminate, then its center is weak.

We thus arrive at a truth already. Multiculturalism is not culture at all:

Syncretistic cultures like syncretistic religions have always proved relatively powerless to create and influence; there is no weight of authentic history behind them.

Any culture must be inherently undemocratic. While Weaver was not as harsh of a critic of political democracy as I, he did say that it was incompatible with how man must have a structured and layered set of values. The problem with democratic values is that it treats each man as a quantitative unit, despite its "relation to the value structure of the ideal." (p 14) Thus it produces hate of any distinctions and any differences, but culture must have this. Equality of the law is a good, but this is all.

Status and Function

Our author writes that there is an ontological confusion in today's culture. If the image of culture is wrong, then society itself becomes deformed. Man, as an individual, becomes deformed.

Every culture has an aspect of status and function to it. You cannot have one without the other. The key is to have the correct balance of the two. Even a society that is bent on status must possess some function. So too a society that is bent on function must possess some status. In the present age function has become paramount and status has shrunk.

"Things both are and are becoming." (p 23) Status is the permanence of a thing. Function is change. And time is the relativistic concept of change. Man cannot say something "was" or "is becoming" without being able to say something "is."

Our existence is such that we alternate between expectation and fulfillment, and without fulfillment, expectation would cease. Therefore status, or the achieved state of things, is ontologically a necessary ground for our activity. (p 24)

Man must also function with the times. That is to say, man with status must function. He must act. He must act to live. "Too much status," Weaver says, "will obstruct function, and too much function will disrupt and destroy status." (p 26) He says that the French Revolution went underway because the current society had little function but too much status. Those with status were too static to deal with the spread of egalitarianism and democratic ideas. But, the American Revolution had the proper balance of both status and function. George Washington had both. He had status and he knew how to use his status to conduct and fight for independence from the king. Weaver also thought that in the U.S., the North had the deficit of being too functional and the South too status-driven.

Functional societies fail to bring happiness and contentment because they do not address and answer questions in regards to the nature of human existence. Without such understanding man lives more an existential existence. Social and cultural functions are meaningless without status. Pure function shuns contemplation and meditation.

Given that man's functions are not his whole worth, he must have status too. This generates respect for the old and experienced. It gives them high value and authority in a strong culture. While they cannot function as they use to, they have status. As mankind has moved away from this understanding, respect for the elderly has decreased and too much authority is then placed in the underdeveloped mind of the young.

[T]he greatest weakness of a function-oriented culture is that it sets little or no store by the kind of achievement which is comparatively timeless----the formation of character, the perfection of style, the attainment of distinction in intellect and imagination. These require for their appreciation something other than keen sense; they require an effort of the mind and spirit to grasp timeless values, to perceive the presence of things that extend through a temporal span. Mere speed of reflexes and quickness of vision are not the prime necessities for this kind of appreciation. (p 29)

Culture's status needs 'the persistence of memory.' Culture is in fact impossible without memory. Good values in a culture must be remembered in the memory of the minds of men.

A man himself cannot know who he is nor form a personality without knowing his own personal history. To live in the present requires knowledge of the past to make choices and act. Time and memory is needed to "establish a character." Memory also needs conscience. Man needs to be able to interpret memory and find relationships. It disciplines us and our present actions. It makes us know that certain actions are detrimental to our existence. We accordingly limit ourselves. As I am an anti-statist kind of conservative-libertarian, one can say that in the freedom of action one must discipline oneself with memory and conscience. Man must use the 'freedom to choose' wisely. It also makes us pay our debts to others; to keep our commitments to others.

The modernist idea of 'letting go the past' and leaping into the new is a form of self-destruction. It is even, says Weaver, a form of suicide or self-hatred. Today the past is not looked at something as valuable. Not as something really worth studying to learn from and to be used to consult in the present and the future. Looking at today we see that man tries to 'free' himself from such. He tries to 'free' himself of the past and past commitments.

We know through our power of recollection that certain attitudes exist; if we run counter to them, we meet forces which oppose us; if we avail ourselves of them, we accomplish more than we could by an isolated effort. Hence in the actual world those who have the widest consciousness of this complex of forces are best equipped for successful endeavor, and those who have little meet with checks and failures. (p 50)

Such an attitude makes man detached from, to be inline with Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk, a moral imagination and thus a cultural bond. It also helps to fuel the view that man is mere physical. That man's existence can be boiled down to physical science or materialism.

Man and Modern Science

This materialistic look into man is part of how man now looks at himself. Dissecting man in science has produced the outcome that man is like animal. That man's actions cannot be 'rational' but only sensationalist and like that of animal instincts. This is an attack on cultural development. It is also, by the way, an attack on the foundations of economics (praxeology). The very concept of freedom withers away with this view of man. If one does not really have the freedom to choose, then what is the difference if the State becomes dictatorial? He is but an animal; an animal of not much greater significance from any other. Such a view must lower the value that man places on himself.

This 'scientific' ideology of man makes man feel less in control, and thus has helped contribute to irresponsibility. (Science should do the opposite.) As an ideology it rids volition. And, after all, the earth is just a tiny speck in the universe. What importance is it in the grand universe? (Weaver challenges this by saying: "There are no standards of valuation apart from the human or the divine." [p 137] The amount of matter is irrelevant.)

In light of bringing man down to animal it is not difficult to understand placing man's existence into a purely materialistic or physical light.

Rhetoric and Dialectic

Another cultural flaw of today, says Weaver, is how dialectic has put aside rhetoric. Modern physical science as a compatible methodology in the study of social sciences is vastly mistaken. This is how dialectic has taken over in polemic. Man is a neutral instrument then. The believed neutralism in dialogue produces man to just look at implications of various propositions or syllogisms with an "indifference to truth." (p 56)

He defines rhetoric as "designed to move men’s feelings in the direction of a goal." (p 63) Rhetoric uses examples from everyday life to convince other men of the merits of a given proposition or idea. It is based on memory and history because it uses that as its basis to convey thought. Such talk is built upon the current world and what can be learned from it. Historicity is essential to rhetoric.

Dialectic "tries to discover the real syllogism in the argument," (p 63) and rhetoric tries to relate it to others and uses it to persuade others. Dialectic works on top of rhetoric.

The problem is that dialectic cannot be used as the basis of a given man's living existence. Such abstract thinking would handicap him in normal affairs. Dialectic is limited in its scientism or rationalism. You cannot, for instance, place a 'rational' value on love. For instance, the Austrian School of economics teaches that value is subjective insofar as it cannot be measured. There is no device that can measure value in economic exchanges. (One can only rank values. Hence cardinal values are of no use.) Even if there were some device that somehow measured certain signals in brainwaves, it would be of no use. Different men value different things in different ways. Even an individual person values the same thing differently at different times. No use could be made of it in the study of economic theory anyway. As a result, there are very real limits of dialectic, as there are with rhetoric. We must understand the limits to both.

Unlike dialectic, rhetoric is not neutral to emotions. It cannot be. Rhetoric feeds the spirit. It brings art and poetry. It is also the basis of language. A modern day problem with education is that it has been trying to bring a science to language.

This started with the idea that education is to be neutral in instruction, and the language of that instruction. Any persuading would be "psychological coercion," as they call it. Attempts then are to transform language to be used solely on objective facts and nothing more. Their studying of language is done through a 'scientific,' 'objective' view. This, however, Weaver replies, completely misunderstands language. It is not just about physical things that can be measured scientifically, and even those things have not only objective meaning but subjective. And it certainly cannot be broken apart like the study of chemistry. Like the painting at a museum, just try to find its meaning scientifically. Or, if you like, look at it atom-by-atom. But it will be of no use.

The point is that...

society cannot live without rhetoric. There are some things in which the group needs to believe which cannot be demonstrated to everyone rationally. (p 65)

The great power and vitality of Christianity, Weaver writes, is that it has just the right amount of dialectic and rhetoric.

Culture and Corruption

Man is in harmony when he "is in accord with himself." (p 85) Equilibrium is needed for man. Man has "cognitive, aesthetic, ethical, and religious faculties or means of apprehension." One area cannot be allowed to take over another.

The cognitive gives man knowledge; aesthetic gives contemplation and the ability to see beauty; ethical "determine the order of goods" and sees right from wrong; and the religious gives "essentially intuitive, [and] gives him glimpses of his transcendental nature and his destiny."

One primary failing with many cultures through history, Weaver believes, is replacing the cognitive with the aesthetic producing idolatry and reification. "The result," he writes, "is that the individual ceases to ask, what are the forms for me? and asks instead, what can I do to subserve the forms?"

The culture that falls into despotism is subsequently and generally one which does not praise or advance culture and its image, but where its cultural institutions become an end to themselves. The image is lost. Such idolatry leads to intolerance and cruelty.

Pure "rigidity weakens the structure" (p 86) of any institution. It cannot then bend with the underlying reality of change. That is to say, it cannot have pure status, it must also have function. Any forms of culture created never reach perfection. Worshipping form destroys understanding the sources of those forms.

I ask: does this not fit to a good degree on how man looks at the State in today's age?

It has become an end to itself. Something that has been internalized and beautified. How dare someone attack it in any way.

After all, many of men have accepted the State's brutality. They worship and excuse police brutality on people, who are most of the time innocent men. Mr. Rockwell at the LRC blog recently gave an example of the television show 'Cops.' A man dying from cancer had a morphine pump. No longer was the allowed State-approved dosage strong enough to help. So he went to buy some cocaine. The police took the weeping man away to locked in one of the State's cages. And we are supposed to eulogize and put on a pedestal the State cops!

Recently there have also been lots of reports of the police using tasers and causing deaths.

To clarify, never was I anti-cop per se. They as individuals are doing their job, be it a job mostly misguided, but when I hear stories like this it makes me lose any sympathy or respect for cops and their, in reality, outlaw-ness and unconcern for real justice. It cannot be viewed as any bit a respectable job. Let them go after real criminals and provide some sense of order on public property given their monopoly privileges, but putting this occupation up high, as to be worshiped, is to become blind to their brutality and to assimilate into acceptance of their attacks on the innocent who have not aggressed (or threatened to aggress or any subset thereof) on another man.

Today men also excuse State wars and destruction on civilians. They excuse and care little about torture and brutality. That is the next topic.

Total War

Nothing, writes Weaver, "should arouse deeper alarm than total war." (p 92) The loss of a true culture harms man's conception of any kind of just theory of war or the appropriate conduct any war should have if one unfortunately takes place. The French Revolution and democratic ideals are to blame. Before they took over, despite sometimes serious abuses or violations of such conception, the public at large did understand that war must be discriminatory.

This is a first principle. Man must understand the difference between combatants and non-combatants. As Weaver says, rightfully I very much thing, democratic ideology has produced an egalitarianism where man cannot judge or discriminate. He cannot have a hierarchy of values or roles that men play. Men (and women) must be thought as equal robots. They must be equalized or brought down to their lowest common existence. (Think of government "education.")

Once a society or a nation is thought of as a homogeneous creature, this is the point where war becomes war against all.

In the American Revolution, for example, Weaver writes that scientists from America and England still corresponded to one another during war. Weaver also mentions the Crimean War, where Russia continued to pay its debts off to Britain despite being the enemy. The Napoleonic War saw some adoption of democratic 'ideals.' That was the draft, but democratic 'ideals' did not take over everything. There was still the line between combatants and noncombatants. The initial start of the misnamed 'Civil War' in America also showed some correct principles playing off. The first general of the Union did not attack the South to harm noncombatants or to destroy and burn down cities and towns. This, though, changed. Dictator Lincoln made sure of that.

This is what the leftist end of discriminatory thought led to:

Those who had insisted that certain groups, by their nature or by their vocation, had a right to be spared the sufferings of war now had nothing to appeal to. The differences on which the appeals had formerly been based were dismissed as illusory or as “undemocratic.” Naturally the closer society is moved toward a monolithic mass, the harder it becomes to plead for any kind of exception. One was considered to be like one, and one like all, and this egalitarianism was followed by many corollaries asserting the right and liability to equal treatment. (p 94)

It is not 'mere' technological advances, but ideology and the image of culture that shifted the conduct of war.

Things have independent meaning. Man and man-created things cannot just be boiled down to physics. An atomistic-viewpoint makes war seen as an "engineering problem." (p 95) However, Weaver says that "Distinctions among human beings stand above these in the old case, but in the new scale they stand beneath because the primary being is assigned to the physical."

The more one side of a war can do, the more they then think they should be able to do. Drop some bombs from high above the city? What is the difference then? It is mere engineering issue. The whole area is 'the enemy' with no distinctions. The sickening displays during the beginning of the Iraq War come to my mind. During the 'shock and awe'  the media reported it and shown it on TV as it were just some kind of Star Wars firework show where family could gather to watch.

The World Wars drastically changed things, especially the second. Weaver said the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "evidence that the war of unlimited objectives has swallowed up all discrimination, comparison, humanity, and, we would have to add, enlightened self-interest." "Such things," he continued, "are so inimical to the foundations on which civilization is built that they cast into doubt the very possibility of recovery." (p 98)

Your declaration of war is a declaration that another government (or another people, to infer from the present trend) has no right to exist and that any means whatever may be used to destroy them. (p 100; emphasis mine)

The part emphasized above shows another trend of democratic ideology, as shown above. It blends 'the people' and 'the State' as one and the same. Wars will then manifest that ideology to produce total war. What an 'enlightened' idea democracy is.

Weaver counters the idea that if one side believes they are in the "absolute right," this then allows them to use all means necessary to win war as quickly as possible. They believe because they are in the right this will give them strength to win. But this strength is looking "outside the war itself." (p 102) So, the author says, "It is not that the war-maker makes his right; it is that right warrants the war and enables his side to carry it..." Total war advocates do not see this and consequently look at the other side as "altogether evil."

Argumentation that total war (supposedly) saves life is incorrect. He replies that it is based on a "fatal internal contradiction." (p 103) That is, that a war's goal is to save lives. If that were the purpose, then war would not be taking place. Hence this does not delimit the moral constraints of war. "The self-contradiction," Weaver says, "of total war is that it destroys the very things for which one is supposed to be sacrificing."

How should war, given the fallen nature of man, be fought? He answers that fought with chivalry, like the Middle Ages. A man must see the man he is fighting as another man of equal value, not of lower value or no value. Even a guilty criminal in society must have rights. They are under the orderly law. They must be. It would undermine society. Likewise, war cannot be lawless.

Weaver also notes:

No more disturbing symptom of this new mentality has been seen than the demand for "unconditional surrender' recently introduced into warfare. A conception of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the most secular and superficial of all American presidents, it strikes deep at those restrains which in the past kept warfare within bounds. (p 110)

Education and Its Shift

Richard Weaver rejects the philosophy of John Dewey, which has become largely the model of the current system.

Weaver says that without an educated populace freedom and its culture is not possible. The methods and philosophy of education shape a people.

Today, he writes; "The mind, which has always been regarded as the distinguishing possession of the human race, is now viewed as a tyrant which has been denying the rights of the body as a whole." Therefore "It is to be ‘democratized’ or reduced to an equality with the rest." (p 117)

Weaver believes paralleling today's 'progressive' education is to be found in Gnosticism. The act of creation, to Gnostics, was through a Demiurge that created a world incomplete. Man, though, was complete and whole. He was superior to the creation. Symmetry is present in modern education which leaves the explanation of the universe in the here-and-now. It lacks "anterior suppositions." (p 121) Evolution thus is what will propel man solely. Science is also looked as the sole means to comfort and advance man. This leaves history aside. And again, man leaving history aside is a man who loses his focus and cannot work in the present by learning from the past. It produces a hand-to-mouth society living day-by-day. It puts man and the understanding of man to secondary importance, if that. Furthermore, materialism becomes the essence of life. As Dr. Clyde Wilson recently wrote at Chronicles, the "peculiar people" of America come to think "that the primary goal of human life is shopping."

But, again, understanding the nature of man requires something else than the study of the physical characteristics of the atom and its subatomic particles or the chemistry study of the bonding of multiple atoms. Such a view explains the mentality that accepts atomic weapons as justly existing. It goes back to the first topic of this blog entry.

Ultimately this type of view leads to this:

The real evil in the universe cannot be imputed to him; his impulses are good, and there is no ground for restraining him from anything which he wants to do. The mere supposal of such a ground would man invoking an arbiter which Gnostic thinking does not recognize. By divinizing man, Gnostic thinking says that what he wants to do, he should do. Restraints upon human nature now become blasphemous; whereas in the older thinking it was action of human nature which was blasphemous when it contravened law and ethics. (p 123)

What Weaver is saying helps, for me, to explain why so many men today have such a view as they do when it comes to the welfare-warfare state. I'll take this a step further and say today's frame of mind undermines the quest to find a nature of man which implies that violence is wrong (except in self-defense and its inferences).

A cause of this move was through the literature on Transcendentalism. It viewed man as a "divine" self-sufficient being where "evil is illusory." It was out of reaction from the opposite extreme, Calvinism. Original Sin has been left aside in education as a result. And "Because human nature is so good that it is not constrainable, laws and traditions are not to be respected." (p 124)

From here I will have to depart a bit from Weaver. He believes this view of "evil is illusory" fits into the "anarchism" of Thoreau. Giving the fact that I have not read much of all of Thoreau (beyond one essay for school), I cannot comment on him directly. However, an anti-state view-point does not imply a belief in Transcendentalism as Weaver describes it, something of which I am in general (if not complete) agreement. It does not seem to fit Murray Rothbard or especially Albert Jay Nock. They did not believe in any kind of "anarchism" where everyone holds hands and men are infinitely pure and wise.

Evil is not illusory and Original Sin is a fact of man’s existence. There also should be constrains with law and many traditions should be respected. Men are not 'equally good' or have 'equal' authority. Interestingly enough, he thinks this fits with Marxists as well. (This, I think, correctly so.) But the truth is, many of them really do believe that man's nature & his goodness and authority is egalitarian in nature.

He goes on to criticize the Marxists by saying this: "Their position is, however, that no external moral absolute exists by which degrees of rightness and wrongness may be determined." (p 125) Something, should be of no surprise, I am in complete agreement with Weaver. (So would Rothbard with that quote.) And such moral grounding does bring authority. The man who owns his business has an authority over it. Authority of which is not egalitarian and which implies that someone trying to take that authority away (by force) is engaged in a wrongful and evil activity.

Today people take the "average" man and make him as the high ideal to what someone should be like. On the other hand, Christianity takes Christ as the high standard. Modern man takes the position that man is already "saved" and "pure." That he needs no discipline to reach for higher ideals. This view pulls down man's existence. The man that does reach for something higher and nobler is pressured to come down to the mentality of the democratic mob. "The saint," then, "is but an eccentric." (p 125)

So the decline in education can be seen in its transformation to a denial of "a body of knowledge which reflects the structure of reality." (p 115) Knowledge cannot be deduced or does not present any constant. Teaching then becomes de-configured and bids away with any objective standards or goals. It becomes filled with nihilism.

Today education is "the mastery of a methodology." (p 126) Experience is all that a man needs, according to this logic. That it is "more rewarding than knowledge in the abstract." Experience is good and all, but "if the principle of learning solely by doing were applied exclusively, it would cut the learner off from the great body of traditional knowledge and wisdom of the race." (pp 126-7) Man cannot learn this from experience unaccompanied. Conceptual understanding via "symbols like language and figures" is taken back to hands-on learning. (p 115)

Education becomes to idolize the child. He becomes thus before proper educational methods. Methods to teach of the permanent things or the laws of nature and man. A problem of this is that it assumes "that the child can be depended on to develop serious interests without pressure from outside." (p 128) Weaver says that if this were true, then man really would be "in a state of grace." Real education also requires the child to concentrate on a given subject and not to fall into distraction. It requires the pressure to keep them in concentration.

Following the above, another area of decline is that instructors are no longer looked as authority but group leaders. Liberals reject the authority of the teacher because they believe such authority produces fear. Fear is not always bad, though. Man needs a good sense of fear so as to not fall into evil or bad habits. It helps protect him from these things. It also produces unity, and "protection, support, and confirmation." (p 129)

Competition and differences are slowly stamped out of education with left ideology. One child should not be seen as superior to another in his ability to learn because it would be (oh, no!) 'undemocratic.' This same reasoning is to be used not to excel the individual with his ability to learn but to push down education standards to the lowest of standards so everyone can become 'educated.'

The instructor's authority and "advantage of knowledge or wisdom" is looked as a bad. (p 130) "This," Weaver writes, "would be a recognition of inequality, and equality must reign, ruat caelum!"

That one is admitted to be master and the other learner is a circumstance of good effect because it works to tone up the performance of both----the teacher stays on his toes trying to justify by superior knowledge and skill the office that is vested in him; the learner tries to earn the good opinion of the teacher by matching his performance as nearly as he can. In this way a vital tension is set up, and the powerful force of emulation is brought into play. The teacher is going to give the best that he has, the he is going to ask the ordinary mortal sitting there in row three to rise above his ordinary mortality and to excel. A healthful rivalry thus creates standards of criticism. (p 130)

Educators have been replaced with political ideologues, he says. "They are determined to destroy the organic society which we have inherited by postulating an egalitarian natural man as the grand end of all endeavor." (p 131) "The fact that they do not believe in knowledge [i.e., general truths] makes them manipulators or trainers rather than teachers, and this is the light in which we should understand their instrumentalist philosophy." (p 132)

He calls the transformation of education to statist-democratic ideas the biggest threat to our culture. Education is now to prepare one for life in a democracy.

Some Closing Comments

It is true when they say: they don't make them like this anymore. If only more men were exposed to Richard Weaver! As is to be expected I cannot say I necessarily endorse everything in the book as full-proof or without error or possible gaps, nevertheless it has added to my understanding of culture and, causes and signs of cultural and societal decline.

His analysis on culture was superb. The chapter on education was exhilarating. On war he was brilliant.

While it is possible that not all my currently formed views/understandings completely overlapped in his discussion on dialectic, it much was more in-line and nuanced corresponding to my thinking than I originally thought. When first reading the given chapter on this subject, a reader might get the impression that he throws off dialectic.

One area that Weaver might have been off the boat a little is on functionalism as it relates to capitalism. Although, it depends on how you put what he wrote in context. A society with a faulty image of culture will produce a faulty capitalist system. But what might be worth adding is this:

Capitalists, in a free market, think about the long-term. They do not just think about the mere moment of activity, which Weaver seems to suggest. By doing this they also discourage others out of a high-time preference attitude of living moment-to-moment in a functionalist manner. It becomes not a about the now-now. Many of the modern ideas of just thinking about 'the next quarter and its earnings' are the direct result of statism. It is a statist invention in economic statistics. The goal of economic capitalists is to do just the opposite. I'm not saying that getting swept up in pure materialism (or anything of that nature) is a good (it is not --- see above!), but the State can only increase man's time preference. It is not the State that can implant 'good' culture, but the culture itself (by itself), so to speak.

By the way, one area, which will be shocking to us 'moderns,' was his writing on the automobile. He believed man has not thought about some of the consequences of introducing it. That embracing it so fully was a consequence of an uncultured look into the matter. One of the consequences he mentions of introducing it is the rate of car-related fatalities. My reply would be that to a certain degree he is right. However, being the libertarian extremist that I am, I would reply that experts on the subject of the privatization of roads and highways, like Dr. Water Block, are correct. Right now there is such high fatality numbers because of road socialism. The State has, in addition, subsidized certain trends when it comes to automobile usage and expansion & movement of people, and so forth. So in Weaver's discussion, one might also want to think about statist interventions.

In Conclusion: The course of history, the course of the actions of men, is based on ideas. Be they correct or incorrect. Mankind must understand the nature of man and also the laws or limits of the world. The present decay of society and culture can be fixed, but it is through education and a re-awaking of a moral imagination or tyrannizing image of culture. Any institutional development of this must be seen to subserve the image otherwise culture falls into corruption and brutality. Man must bring into place a correct balance of status and function. He must understand the limits of democratic ideology. The importance of this must not be lost in war-making. Neither must the importance of traditional education on the young be lost to modernism.