29 posts tagged “culture”

Even though he was not an "anarchist" or a philosophical libertarian, the great Robert Nisbet's central insight is that Civil Society, made up of the so-called intermediate institutions which persons are naturally born into and are a part of (viz., family, locality, church, etc.), and the State are inversely related to each other in terms of strength and the role they play in society.

It is consequently when the state is small and weak that social authority is vibrant. The more functions and roles the state takes on, the less civil society has to take on. A powerful managerial state always results in imposing a top-down, monolithic-coercive control, breaking down pluralistic authorities, autonomies, communities, institutions, traditional norms, and ultimately thereby isolating and detaching the individual from civil society. All that is left after this process is Leviathan and atomistic, detached, and "loose" individuals. Once this has happened the state has what it wants, i.e., control over isolated and weak individuals.

Extending and furthering this analysis, we can understand how increased democratization and centralization of state power directs man's activities increasingly at using this apparatus. This not only must be done at the expense of civil society, since the state's relationship with civil society is parasitic, but also cause conflict between those trying to use power, which is monopolistic, for their own purposes. These men will be constantly fighting to control this coercive power for their own ends and at the expense of other men. Politicalization in increased areas of life will only result in a greater amount of people joining in this infighting (with the upshot of man investing and producing less in civil society). It actually becomes a necessity, if only as a means of (pseudo) "self-defense." All of this further feeds the growth of politics. And the distinction between civil society and state will fade away. In addition, they will blend together as many former civil society institutions attach themselves or ally themselves with statism. States ultimately consume civil society.

(This will even have a major change on the culture regarding the individual character development of men. The character characteristics that man will develop will tend to be those that define a politician rather than a gentleman.)

Indeed, today every nook and cranny Leviathan has its hand in. No wonder, as Robert Nisbet says, we have moved "from a highly traditionalist, hierarchical, decentralized, and inegalitarian society to one that in our time approaches the diametrical opposite of these qualities." [Quote from The Present Age.]

Now the objective of this Paleo Blog entry is to attempt to show, using insights from Nisbet, Murray Rothbard, Russell Kirk and Robert Murphy and also going through some economic analysis (which has been greatly influenced by Hans-Hermann Hoppe), how power destroys civil society. The topics covered may be loosely organized and assumes the reader has some knowledge about the possibility and logic of a private law society, but it is my hope that it provides some insights into this important subject.

Authority versus Power

"[L]ibertarians," writes Murray N. Rothbard in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature (p 152, n 1),

accept the authority of sound values, civilization, and especially reason; it is those who refuse to accept such authority who turn instead to outside coercion and violence. On the confusion between authority and power, see the brilliant article by Robert A. Nisbet, "The Nemesis of Authority," The Intercollegiate Review (Winter-Spring, 1972): 3-13.

Happily the 1972 article is available online here [pdf].

In the article Robert Nisbet removes, as Rothbard explained, the common misperception between authority and power. Power, not authority, amounts to the usage (or threat) of physical force or coercion. It is civil society, he goes on to say, that you find a multiplicity of authorities:

Civil society, in whatever degree it may be said to exist at all, is a tissue of authorities, however loosely knit these may be in times of stress. Authority, unlike power or coercion, is not rooted in force, or threat of force. It is built into the very fabric of human association. Authority exists in the very roles and statuses of the social order. It is no more than an aspect, though a vital aspect, of the social order. . . . Freedom, in any positive, creative sense, is inseparable from a structure of authority ---- of rules, norms, roles, and statues ---- which can alone give the stamp of character to the free mind. No mistake could be greater than that of counterpoising freedom and authority. Freedom and power, freedom and coercion, yes. But not freedom and authority.

(There will be more on this specific article later.)

Children and the Family

Out of all the intermediate institutions, obviously the most essential and basic building block in society is the family institution. Individuals do not exist apart from family, which, by the way, includes even Robinson Crusoe. The atomistic individual is just a myth. And, incidentally, the reason for Rothbard's footnote was to defend parental authority, as long as it does not contravene the foundation of self-ownership and private property rights, over those who say it is (somehow) "un-libertarian."  After all, a child is under the private household rules of the father, who is the owner of the household and accordingly has patriarchal authority and control over it. Private property (which is inegalitarian, hierarchical, exclusive, undemocratic, etc.), outside of our physical body, is not a "given" to us as we are born into the world. We must earn it and therefore must work within the framework of families and authorities in civil society.

This framework is essential to society as a whole. The family, that is. As Robert Nisbet says:

[A] well-attested fact [is] that whenever there is private property there will be a strong family system. After all, the origins of private property lie in clan and kindred; and even after the conjugal family, the household, became the chief element of kinship, its relationship to property remained very close. As Joseph Schumpeter noted in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy*, it was not the isolated individual . . . but the household that was the main engine of modern capitalist development. Not economic man but, quite literally, the head of the household working for the present and future of the members of his family, and hence saving and investment. [Twilight of Authority.]

Traditional family households hence promote a low time preference. Their success and longevity depends on this fact. It brings stability to society and capital growth, which advances the capitalistic process. This is what makes genuine capitalism and family mutually reinforcing. It was what, in the past, allowed only the father to enter the job market.

However, it becomes almost unavoidable, in modern society, that both father and mother have to enter the workforce due to the taxation, regulations, and inflation that eats away at persons' wealth. Procurement of wealth has been made comparatively more costly because income used in production has been made less, as it is expropriated by way of taxation, and the opportunity cost for non-production has been lowered. The destruction and blockage of contractual relationships between parties, due to thousands of pages of regulations, lowers market transactions, and thus investments and wealth. And inflation, in particular, is a direct assault against the family institution because, by continually lowering the value of the dollar, savings and long-term planning is discouraged. Consumption, leisure, short-term thinking and planning are encouraged. All of which are to the damage of capitalism and family.

Soon a major social and cultural transformation took place with the increased socialization in society. The belief and value in the father working towards a family wage to provide for the family vanished. Home mothers became stigmatized by ideological feminism, the sexual revolution, and Cultural Marxism. The ideas in the minds of men changed and the course of history assimilated those new values. Entering the workforce became more important than becoming a wife and mother. Womens' investment in the latter areas declined. Job advertisements took on a shift as this transformation took place, and was given additional thrust by today's sacrosanctity of civil "rights"** laws. Old advertisements, with an ethos of strong family values, labeled "Men Wanted" and "Women Wanted" was deemed illegal because it was discriminatory.

Statism has alleviated, to a high degree, father and mother their function and role to raise, care for, and teach their own children. In replace of these functions and roles, that naturally reside in the family institution, has come the state. Put in another way, these functions and roles have become socialized. Children are thrown into the statist education system, where they are fed anti-family, anti-market ideas. Parents can no longer raise their children in a manner they want to and instead must accept school teachers and social workers as the ultimate judge and authority. There is thus less parental investment in children, the family structure, and the next generation and their development. Under statist conditions the internally weak family is promoted and encouraged vis-à-vis the strong family for the reason that investment is made more costly. Natural authority is zapped-away and parental irresponsibility, neglect, and abuse is encouraged because it is made less costly. The natural bond and attachment between parents and children falls. A decline and degeneration must follow.

The externalized value and cost of children also decreases the attachment and bond between mother and father. This encourages an increase in divorce rates. At the same time, divorce courts have become one-size-fits-all and "no-fault." Marriage contract and covenant has been taken away and placed into the control of the state. Mothers, moreover, have a court that is biased to them and, by default, negative to fathers. Added with numerous interventionisms into civil society, there is subsidization of single mothers at the expense of non-single mothers. This is nothing but the collective reinforcement of such lifestyles, illegitimacy, irresponsibility, divorce, and so on.

By socializing the costs of children, the incentive to act with sexual restraint declines. Continuing this socialization will push man to an animal looking to fulfill his appetite through his next "free love" conquest. The animal side and sensationalist side of man replaces the rational side.

Children, in the governmental schools, lose attachment to family, their heritage, and family values. These schools elevate and promote collectivism, uniformity, egalitarianism, "political correctness," and anti-moral values. Schools, in their raised position relative to the family, create dependency between children and the state. Permissiveness is promoted from the diminishment of parental authority. Children, who are under a collectivistic rule, are set "free" and an increase in crime, drug use, and all-around juvenility occurs. They become a lone grown-up drone in the masses attached and dependent on the government, in view of the fact that their early development was deformed (to some degree) to the state's image and its wants.

In addition, as children are forced into the educational system, child labor laws further decrease children's attachment to civil society. Their value to the family household is lowered, as they cannot contribute to it financially. Because their prospects of entering the workforce at a young age has decreased, they will be less likely to develop good work ethics, the skills of being independent or responsible, or have a respect for (non-statist) authority.

Far from being any kind of supporter and up-lifting institution, the State is the enemy of the family. A weaker family is one less bulwark the state has to confront in its desire to enlarge its power vis-à-vis the individual. It is those who want to give the state more power, for whatever reason (even in the name of "saving" or "protecting" the family), that are ultimately empowering an institution that is the enemy of the family.

Sub-Notes:

*Schumpeter believes that, paradoxically, while the family is a backbone to capitalism, capitalism will ultimately hurt this backbone leading to an anti-capitalist mentality. With the analysis in this blog entry, this seems to be un-true. As Jeffrey Tucker says: "Where Schumpeter went wrong was in believing that advanced capitalism itself contributed to undermining the family (thus his pessimism regarding the future of free economies). In fact, if we look at the case of the United States, it is easy to see that it is not the market, but government policy that penalizes marriages by directly and indirectly discouraging their formation."

**Statist and managerial elite, by programs such as affirmative action, have managed to push this process via social engineering. Collective women rights were deemed to exist in which the central state has to enforce and impose on all, contra to private persons and their properties. And those critical of this are labeled as mentally ill and persons of "hate," needing therapeutic help from the establishment. Helping along feminism, of course, has been the neoconservative right; claming that it is only the new "radical" feminism that has corrupted this ideology. (This is no different than their view on civil rights. Paul Gottfried has thus said that "On almost all social issues, starting with Third World immigration, feminism, and civil rights, neoconservatives are far closer to the Left than they are to the Old Right.")

War, Culture, and Community

Centralization is always the stamping out of community and locality. Returning to Nisbet, he saw that the reason modern man has become preoccupied with community is for the very fact that community has waned. Unfortunately, this desire to restore community has not resulted in man endeavoring to reestablish genuine community, which has nothing to do with political power, but the seeking of community by the use of the central state. Yet all this has done is further the erosion of community. According to Nisbet, there is nothing more fraudulent or dangerous than a "phrase as 'national community.'"

This "quest for community" can be seen in times of war. There is probably nothing greater than war that brings out the mass mobs in modern democracy, especially today's Limbaugh-type conservatives or kiddy-con conservatives, with their nationalistic and patriotic spirit banging on the drums and labeling war skeptics as "unpatriotic" (or worse).

Ironically, this patriotic or nationalistic spirit, having everything to do with glorifying Leviathan than anything else, is in all probability the result from the loss of any genuine conservative community. This is why states like a community void. Man has become increasingly detached and atomized from others. This makes, at least at first, the masses gung-ho about war. Just remember back to the first days of the Iraq War. War for a moment brings a sense of community and connection. Certainly those in actual combat feel a sense of community with their fellow soldiers. Those at home feel a bit of that as well. A little later, nonetheless, it dries up because it is a shallow and false collectivist and statist community.

In response to those that judge military life as beneficial to the development of a young man, conservative Russell Kirk said that "there is no tyranny more onerous than that of military life." Military life does not build character, strength, or independence of mind. It does not make a man "a real one." That kind of life, due to its socialistic nature, is antagonistic towards these characters. It is "military discipline," says Kirk, that is "crushing to self-reliance."

"In military life, distant from home and most of the forces of social opinion, there is every inducement for an average young man to sink into indolence and indulgence and every reason for him to rely increasingly upon the state for very existence."

So life in the military does not resemble community at all. Not only does it distort the development of young men, life in war and military tears families apart. It discourages old taboos on morality, including sexual relationships. War encourages promiscuity. And this has been multiplied many times over by unnaturally allowing women in combat.

"War and the military are," writes Robert Nisbet,

without question, among the very worst of the earth's afflictions, responsible for the majority of the torments, oppressions, tyrannies, and suffocations of thought the West has for long been exposed to. In military or war society anything resembling true freedom of thought, true individual initiative in the intellectual and cultural and economic areas, is made impossible---not only cut off when they threaten to appear but, worse, extinguished more or less at root. ... Nothing has proved more destructive of kinship, religion, and local patriotisms than has war and the accompanying military mind. [Twilight of Authority.]

And it is in times of war, Nisbet says, that the welfare state proliferates. Around "75 percent of all national programs which have been instituted in Western countries during the past two centuries to equalize income, property, education, working conditions, and other aspects of life have been in the first instance adjuncts of the war state and of the war economy." [Twilight of Authority.] War, socialism, and "progressive" movements are bound at the hip.

The Natural Community

Natural authority is not only found in the family and its extended outgrowths. It is found in businesses, churches, firms, associations, schools, and other places. In communities you generally find natural leaders (or, if you will, aristocrats). These are families who are good at organizing community functions and resolving quarrels. The majority of the town respects their position and abilities. In community you find differentiation and distinction between individual persons who possess different levels of authority and who play different roles (occupations) in the community.

One aspect in the development of community or neighborhood is the stabilizing effect that businessmen (working within the community) have on it. For instance, Robert Murphy's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism points to how

public safety is best ensured when people voluntarily look after their own streets, and where stores, bars, and restaurants (open night and day) and public spaces are all jostled together, because it gives residents, business owners, and customers a mutual interest in ensuring safety, a complex interaction of unexpected "neighborhood watch" mutual support.

What takes this away, Dr. Murphy says, is forced and top-down planning by the government. It "breaks up this mutual support." All of this has led to is increased crime rates and the annihilation of natural community development. It cuts off the bonds between men in community.

Again, this is exactly what the state wants. Any private functions and roles communities takes on, power in the state is less. Any kind of private authority is a threat to the state. Thus to gain power, the state must crush community development. Community functions and roles the state must take over. And when this happens man increasingly turns to the state for the answers to all problems. (The more centralized this state, the worse.) It becomes the center of society and existence. Instead of seeking private solutions, state solutions are almost always sought. This unties the structure of civil society. The atomization of individuals from all cultural and social restraints takes place. Hierarchical outgrowths of pressures and competing authorities atrophy. There has been hence the development of the ferine and democratically "equal" mass of individuals with "equal" authority in relation to each other. And hence the increase in immoral, "alternative," and destructive lifestyles.

Socializing personal morality and conduct to the state can only result in a decrease in the importance of civil society's role to "regulate" these matters. It is then that the family loses authority. Churches, in the realm of personal or individual morality and conduct, get hurt as a source of authority in society. Social pressures lose their value. So it is the socialization that lowers investment of civil society's institutional and associational presence in these matters. As a consequence, statism will actually tend to increase destructive behavior all-around on net. What is defined as "good" and "bad" will be state defined. Man will increasingly depend on the state for the guide to what morality means. Morality will enter in a state of flux, ever changing, and ever relative.

Under a free society, on the other hand, and implied in the above analysis, social and cultural restraints would be restored. Families, in both the nuclear and extended sense, would regain their natural authority. Churches can gain functions and roles in communities. Without a central power, communities can be restored in vigor. A person's membership in various intermediate institutions would be reestablished (or created anew) to his natural position in its hierarchical structure. A pluralistic society would develop. There would not be any collective, systematic subsidization of harmful lifestyles or activities with the welfare state gone. Property owners would regain the right to discriminate, and implied in that would produce an increase in civil behavior by the joining increase of the ability to discriminate against uncivil behavior. And so on.

Moreover, instead of public laws there would be private laws. Laws that would arrive out of civil society; not the state.

Murray Rothbard writes that "Under total privatization, many local conflicts and 'externality' problems ... would be neatly settled.

With every locale and neighborhood owned by private firms, corporations, or contractual communities, true diversity would reign, in accordance with the preferences of each community. Some neighborhoods would be ethnically or economically diverse, while others would be ethnically or economically homogeneous. Some localities would permit pornography or prostitution or drugs or abortion, others would prohibit any or all of them. The prohibitions would not be state imposed, but would simply be requirements for residence or use of some person's or community's land area. ["Nations By Consent: Decomposing the Nation-State"]

"In a country, or a world, or totally private property,

including streets, and private contractual neighborhoods consisting of property-owners, these owners can make any sort of neighborhood-contracts they wish. In practice, then, the country would be a truly "gorgeous mosaic," ... ranging from rowdy Greenwich Village-type contractual neighborhoods, to socially conservative homogeneous WASP neighborhoods. Remember that all deeds and covenants would once again be totally legal and enforceable, with no meddling government restrictions upon them. So that considering the drug question, if a proprietary neighborhood contracted that no one would use drugs, and Jones violated the contract and used them, he fellow community-contractors could simply enforce the contract and kick him out. Or, since no advance contract can allow for all conceivable circumstances, suppose that Smith became so personally obnoxious that his fellow neighborhood-owners wanted him ejected. They would then have to buy him out----probably on terms set contractually in advance in accordance with some "obnoxious" clause. ["The 'New Fusionism': A Movement For Our Time"]

Sub-Notes:
 
1. A free libertarian society would therefore not only consist of a horizontal "convivial order" made up of natural law. Vertically on top of this would be the development of the "social order's" voluntary positive law. For more on the difference between the "convivial order" and the "social order," see these notes from the PFS.

2. The communities that would develop would be diverse and this would allow people to live by those of like-values. Interventionists, as Rothbard said, would have no place in a libertarian society however. This would remove a major source of conflict in society. If communists want to a have voluntary communist community, then it does no harm to me (but only them).

3. Nonetheless, communities would tend to develop homogeneously. Today, even in a statist world, neighborhoods and towns that are wealthier and that have a stronger level of trust between neighbors are homogeneous versus heterogeneous. A free society would amplify that tendency. In particular, argues the great libertarian Hans-Hermann Hoppe, insurance companies would encourage this development:

"Heterogeneous" risks either cannot be insured or must be insured separately (in different pools, jointly with other homogeneous risks, and at different prices). Ethno-cultural homogeneity of neighborhoods, then, is simply a device for making insurance against external threats and interferences possible and thus lowering the cost of residential property protection. Homogeneity facilitates mutual property insurance. Capital-based insurers will charge lower premiums for clusters of homogeneous territories (while at the same time revealing the different ranks in cultural development of various ethno-cultures, as reflected in the price-spread of the premium charged at different locations.)

The process to a free society via secession, says Hoppe, "Rather than promoting a downward leveling of culture as under forced integration, ... stimulates a cooperative process of cultural selection and advancement."

The Authority of Culture, Language, and Reason

To loop back, in the first article linked-to above, the "authority of language," especially, is shown to be of great concern to Robert Nisbet, for it is language that is the most basic social and cultural bond between men. This is not only limited to verbal language but also the "silent language" of physical expressions. Language as well, as a means of communication, expresses itself in mathematics, music, paintings, et cetera. It is the essential foundation to any civilization, and therefore encompasses "nearly the whole of experience and reality."

With that in mind, there is a direct correlation, Nisbet believes, between the loss of authority in language and the increase of power and the decline of culture. Specifically, he points to George Orwell's work. Orwell said that in politics you locate "phrases tackled together" made up of meaningless abstractions and generic terms. In political discussion, for example, you find interminable phraseology that is vacuous: "human rights," "democracy," "social justice,"* "civil rights," "diversity," and so on. (With pro-empire Sen. Obama we can add the word "change," which is a political word that is as empty and lifeless as them come--------no wonder he is so liked.)

*(On "social justice," Irving Babbitt wrote: "Every form of social justice ... tends toward confiscation, and confiscation, when practiced on a large scale, undermines moral standards, and, in so far, substitutes for real justice the law of cunning and the law of force.")

"A generation," writes Nisbet, "that has formed itself linguistically around the primitivism of 'like,' 'cool,' 'man,' 'feel,' and, above all, 'you know' will not be a difficult generation to enslave politically, socially, and culturally." As a matter of fact, in the article he points to a study that reports the average Englishman and American recycles on a daily basis only "thirty-four basic words."

One author Nisbet finds loathsome is Richard Poirier and his book The Performing Self. Poirier disapproves of the "waste" of language and believes it must be personalized to the "performing self." All constraints and authority must be removed. Nisbet replies that this is not how genuine culture works. It is not how the genius develops or how the genius flourishes.

Creativity in high culture

is never the consequence of nihilistic rejection of the forms and structures which the creative mind finds around him. It is invariably a working from, and generally through, these to new forms and structures: forms and structures that may be so original indeed as to make their relation to past seem highly tenuous. That creative minds do indeed reveal capacity for liberating themselves in some degree from accepted modes of intellectual order, as a means of quickening the search for other modes, in no ways means that passion for disorder for "waste" is overriding. Least of all does it mean passion for "self-watching."

"The basis of any culture," says Nisbet, "is the presence of values which have external force in the individual's life, which reflect a power greater than anything that lies in the [single] individual alone." [Emphasis mine. This, separate quote, from Twilight of Authority. The above one, of course, is from Nisbet's essay on authority.]

Robust culture in literature rides the tides from the point of the Greeks. That is, of their techniques, forms, styles, and structures. Developing culture is the outgrowth from them. Not only is today's language untidiness caused by the denunciation of authority, the authority of reason has been waning.

In the West man finds the "acceptance of objectivity as at least a worthy goal." Our philosophical literature, says Nisbet, has looked for the objective in the order of existence, rather than the subjective or the "cult of individuality" of one's feelings. And it is this objective search that "declare[s] something of superlative nobility."

Without the authority of reason comes irrationality. It has thus been at the university where you find "feeling, through sensitivity and encounter sessions, ... exalted, in those wide spheres of the arts ... where preoccupation with self, with display or exhibition of self, takes the almost invariable form of display of the least rational, the least reason-oriented..."

In regards to the decline of the arts, for example, Murray Rothbard agreed. Rothbard saw nihilism forming in the arts:

The art-for-art's sake scam that permeates the modern liberal world-view, was launched by nineteenth-century aesthetes as a camouflage of their own morbid, nihilistic, pessimistic, and violently anti-traditional outlook: the French poets Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the Impressionists, Dadaists, and later the Bloomsbury Set and the literary and art critic Roger Fry. Since they could not get anywhere at the time by openly advocating their nihilistic values and epistemology, or their "alternative life-styles," they pushed – unfortunately with great success – the "art has its own reasons" rationale.

First, the left-liberals preached l' art pour l' art in aesthetics, and as a corollary, in ethics, trumpeted the new view that there is no such thing as revealed or objective ethics, that all ethics are "subjective," that all of life's choices are only personal, emotive "preferences." ["KULTURKAMPF!"]

This, according to Robert Nisbet, makes our age a "critical" one. Saint-Simon said that there are two types of ages: "organic" and "critical." It is in organic ages that the authority of culture, reason, and language is dominant. The age of our time is critical because these intellectual and abstract authorities are weak. We are in a "twilight of authority." And it is no quirk that with this comes the rise of Power.

[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.

Another article of note from the Journal of Libertarian Studies is "Hayek on Tradition" by Edward Feser. Download the PDF here.

It has opened a new door for me to explore. I am aware of F. A. Hayek's classic The Road to Serfdom, but have not read it or any of his other works. It turns out Hayek had some good insights in understanding the importance of traditionalism.

Despite Hayek's rejection of the term "conservative" to describe his political views, he defended traditional moral institutions. At the root of his views was a very Burkean outlook. In fact, the author of the article goes as far to say that perhaps Hayek's arguments for tradition are more powerful, systematic, and convincing than Edmund Burke's and his famous Reflection on the Revolution in France.

Here is what Edward Feser writes on tradition:

For it turns out that where rational judgment is concerned, it is precisely the traditionalist, and not his modern critic, who has the upper hand. Tradition, being nothing other than the distillation of centuries of human experience, itself provides the surest guide to determining the most rational course of action.

Also worthy to mention here, in Walter Block's article "Libertarianism and Libertinism," he mentions the role tradition plays. Read the PDF here. As the title of the article suggests, he differentiates libertinism and libertarianism. He also explains why he is personally a cultural conservative, and against the libertine. One aspect of his cultural conservatism is understanding the importance of tradition:

At one time I would have scoffed at the idea of doing something merely because it was traditional, and refraining because it was not. My every instinct would have been to do precisely the opposite of the dictates of tradition.

But that was before I fully appreciated the thought of F. A. Hayek. From reading his many works (for example, Hayek, 1973), I came to realize that traditions which are disruptive and harmful tend to disappear, whether through voluntary change, or more tragically, by the disappearance of societies that act in accordance with them. Presumably, then, if a tradition has survived, it has some positive value, even if we cannot see it. It is a “fatal conceit” (Hayek, 1989) to call into question everything for which good and sufficient reason cannot be immediately given. How else can we justify the “blindly obedient” practice of wearing ties and collars, for example?

Tradition, however, is just a presumption, not a god to be worshipped. It is still reasonable to alter and abolish those traditions which do not work. But this is best done with an attitude of respect, not hostility, for that which has worked for many years.

As the first article on Hayek and tradition says, the "educated modern" attacks tradition as irrational, obsolete, superstitious, et cetera. However, tradition should by default get the first word. It might not always be correct, but tradition should be the first answer before attempting to peer beyond it.

Not only does tradition bring a stable environment for man to interact and a sense of belonging and community, but such is what allows man to thrive. For Hayek, tradition shows some independent intrinsic value.

But, take note, some traditions are superior to others, of course. Hayek did not believe in a cultural relativism or that all cultures are "equal."

For Hayek, tradition, in a nutshell, arrives via spontaneous order. It comes about through a kind of cultural evolution, which results from a competition between traditions in a local and non-local sense. Rules and practices, writes Feser, "evolve from within, as well as compete with other traditions without, over time." As a result, bad traditions tend to die out.

In a sense, there is a market competition at work here. Just as the good companies tend to win and expand and the bad ones do not, the same is generally true with traditions. This process, furthermore, is conservative in nature versus revolutionary because tradition unfolds organically. It is not abrupt.

For a counter-example of tradition, think of the sexual revolution. It turns over tradition. In particular, it has hurt the family institution. The "educated modern" either has not thought about the consequences of this revolution or does not care. I hope this goes without saying, but these days you never know, family is an institution that is the fundamental building block to society. It needs to be in a healthy condition for the future of society. But the sexual revolution has attacked it. And if we look at the results, it has helped alter Western civilization into self-destruction. (Read Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West.)

Mr. Glenn Sacks is what you could call a fathers' and men's rights activist against the "feminist" ideology that prevails today. You might be interested in checking out his website here. Divorce courts, for instance, have a tremendous bias against fathers, and he is doing what he can to stop it. He has often been a semi-regulate guest on The Charles Goyette Show. That is how I learned of him.

(Looking through his website one may find disagreements, but still lots of good stuff.)

During strikes, I support scabs. But in regards to the writer strike in Hollywood, I say keep on striking as long as possible, and please no scabs.

Then again, maybe scabs are just what Hollywood needs to clean house? . . . However this is just way too optimistic to expect such replacements to be much better! That is like expecting to find a few hundred "good" replacements to replace the crooks in D.C. Not going to happen. It is very unlikely.

Or it is like praying that the National Endowment for the Arts will clean shop. Imagine a world without one. According to the left, no art would be produced. Oh, no. Or maybe there are just a few sensible people left that would not pay for their trash on the market.

Television is slowly dying down and being taken over by the Internet and its medias. As the more intelligent, or at least half-witted folks, are moving away from it, TV is left to pander to the most unfortunate of dimwits. That's where the competition is.

This is much more pronounced and prominent with news reporting and commentary. Relying on it for news is like relying on The Weekly Standard, a great source to find predictions that have turned out all wrong concerning the Iraq war in regards to WMDs or direct 9-11 ties.

While it is comparatively less true----slightly, but that might be stretching it----for the various television entertainment shows, looking at what passes as sitcoms today confirms that this does apply to the majority of these TV programs. I could hardly see one of my relatives who is a priest watching this stuff. He is not in the competition of viewers. The viewers are of a mass-democratic, mob-like mentality. There may be more of such sitcom viewers as opposed to TV news watchers (i.e., more competition in different intelligence altitudes), but they are absorbent in the high time preference, anti-culture, lifestyle of this day and age of a falling empire & civilization. With this, a sort of Gresham's Law kicks in. And it seems that this law works here because of its more ideological or intellectual nature, compared to the mass production of cameras or automobiles.

These sitcoms are almost always shallow, nihilistic, one-dimensional, hedonistic, sensationalist, and the like. Family values mean little, virtually nothing---zero, to these shows. On the statist left is where they lie in the Culture War. For example, the father is usually some inept, dumb and lazy television potato, where the mother and the children are vastly superior to him. Then you have a vast number of shows where the main star has sex with a new stranger, who he or she has only known for three days (that is the going number, they tell us), every new week. On top of this, these shows are commonly and extremely politically correct on all "sensitive issues" or when they stumble into a more philosophically or politically charged issue.

They do nothing to advance the understanding of man and his existence. They teach us nothing. They have no lessons from which we can benefit or learn from. Instead of presenting and preserving what is called a "moral imagination," it gives us a diabolic one.

This stuff does creep into the minds of the viewers. It can only have a detrimental effect, as it transforms our understanding of man and the nature of man. It gives one good reason to pull the plug.

If one just wants a circus spectacle, then real life is more interesting and funny. Heavens no, I am not taking about "reality" television shows. It is politics that tops the cake. I guess that is where my weakness lies when it comes to the "shallow, . . . hedonistic, sensationalist, and the like."

Am I being judgmental? Sure.

But what is wrong with that?

Having a moral compass develops one's mind into a discriminatory one.

I hate to do this because I am now going to use a variation on a cheap slogan that the mainstream, establishment "acceptable" conservative uses, but it fits: Temperamentally the left-liberal (and statist neocon) have not developed their facilities. This results in men who are so "open minded" and "non-judgmental" that their brains have fallen out of their skulls.

Now maybe there are exceptions, there might be one or two---who knows. It is quite possible that there is a good sitcom out there now being produced. I will not deny this possibility.

It might be important to note: No, I am not a complete "prude" or something. [And my views, politically and culturally, and preferences are more "nuanced" than one might expect. But I do have a social conservative outlook and temperament. Much of today's establishment culture defaces man, his spirit. It is immoral, and leads to destruction.] I will turn the TV on to see what's on it, but I try to keep that limited. News, for me, is the same. It is better to get it on the Internet. And if you want a good story, why not open up a time-tested novel of the ages? Okay, I am personally not a bookworm in terms of novels, but when I do read a novel it is obviously far finer than having the boob-tube on. And, yes, there are plenty of good movies. I would not deny that. The trouble is that most of those good movies are ones made a long time ago. They hide behind the shadows.

How many times have neoconservative pundits try to lull the credulous and easily galvanized grassroots of the mainstream conservative movement, into a frenzy to support the failed strategy of adding an amendment to the constitution in promotion of some social conservative agenda? You've lost count. Me too.

A couple of times when searching for "Ron Paul" on Google, there were some conservatives claiming the perfidy of Ron Paul on certain social issues because he does not accept the idea of the federal government implementing certain constitutional amendments. To say that Dr. Paul's views here conflict with "conservative" views is very questionable---at least from a more traditional conservatism. Defining conservative to mean support for the constitution and its ideals would be to support local versus national government. That would be a more traditional or "Old Right" conservative position. Correct?

There have been calls for constitutional amendments to ban abortion, homosexual "marriage" (a contradiction in terms), and flag burning. And every time the pundits got the Republican Party grassroots to delude themselves in believing that the Republican Party was actually fighting for them. The leadership of the often called "Stupid Party," despite what we sometimes may think, is not completely stupid. (I think it is more "Evil.") They know that these amendments never go anywhere. All they serve is the purpose of patting the heads of the Republican grassroots. These amendment proposals do nothing and go nowhere.

And that's exactly why the leadership supports them.

Sedulously observing (non-neo) conservative should see this. This is why these issues should be dealt at the state level, not a federal level. If it were possible, these issues should be decentralized even more. They should be decentralized all the way to local communities and family households. Being more an extremist, I would say that freedom comes from the individual. Let's put one's life into one's own hands.

Before a libertarian objects and gets angry at me, I am not saying that I agree with these ideas to ban x, y, and z...

I find the idea of banning flag burning the most ridiculous of ridiculous ideas. (See my entry on this here.) Good gosh. Thankfully the Bush administration has not pursued this. It might have been able to, right after 9-11 since the public was in its high war nationalistic spirit. Something, by the way, that is much interesting in studying how the democratic mob reacts. The State and the Bush administration failed miserably, and then Bush's poll numbers sky rocketed. . . .Hail to the chief!

In regards to homosexual "marriage," such "marriage" is a contradiction in terms. Two men cannot "marry" anymore than a father and his son. It is a "culture" of immorality and death. That is what today's Culture War brings us. So, no, I do not support government sanctioning it. We all should oppose any effort by the government to pervert the institution of marriage anymore than it has.

The State should have no authority to say that homosexuals (or whatever comes next in the minds of leftists) can "marry." All the State should do is get out of the business----entirely. This sinful and secular, Godless institution should have nothing to do with marriage. Instead, let's strengthen the Church, contract, and convent. Virtue is found in freedom. I wish more conservatives would understand that, like Mr. Pat Buchanan who I much like.

(See below for more thoughts on this subject.)*

Abortion, admittedly, is a far more difficult and emotional subject. It is a grossly immoral and sinful act, but should it be made illegal according to the rights that derive from property? Those very rights that sustain life? See the phrase “a right to life” is a misnomer. (That could justify socialism.) All you have is a right to your justly acquired property. A few things should be remembered, in my view. The first of which is that man can only truly seek virtue through freedom. The second of which is if (sadly) the majority of the public finds it acceptable morally, the thing that needs to change are ideas. Ideas do have consequences. They have consequences in a statist world and in a non-statist world. But a society without a state or a private law society does have its advantages.

[A leading libertarian scholar, Dr. Walter Block, makes the case that the libertarian view, properly understood, is in "the middle ground."]

In a free environment, unlike the present highly centralized statist environment, households could voluntarily arrange covenant relationships to discriminate against and ban abortion in their respected areas. Abortion would not go away completely, and it will sadly never go away completely (nor will it with the State), but it could at least be cut down more than it could possibly be cut down today. These types of arrangements are just not possible with Leviathan. In addition, it would not be subsidized coercively or collectively in a free society.

Conservatives, as Mr. Joe Sobran writes, see abortion as "an ugly thing, something that may not be entirely 'eliminated' but must be contained, condemned, and above all must never be accepted as normal." But looking to the State does not give us an advantage. Its one-size-fits-all bites back harshly, and almost always hurts social and cultural conservatives the most. **

In conclusion, short of ultimate privatization, politics should be decentralized as far as possible. This especially goes for public property. Prudence should help dictate how they should be run, so as they are not in a state of chaos or in a free-for-all making a bad statist world worse, when they are publicly "owned." Immigration would be an example. Or take education. Short of getting the government out of the picture entirely, it should be run and controlled at the most local level possible.

Those of the more paleoconservative view point should always fight for local control opposed to national. The Republican Party really uses amendment proposals to tell their supporters that they are doing something, while at the same time knowing that their proposals will go nowhere. They have figured out how to push the buttons of conservatives. And they know how to scare them.

One important thing to understand for this discussion, though, is that freedom allows people do do things in which you might not approve of. But that is freedom. Freedom is the ability to make wrong choices or even immoral ones. As has been said here at The Paleo Blog often, it is impossible to learn or grow otherwise. And it is impossible to truly pursue virtue.

To an outside observer, maybe I have a so-called "old fashioned view" of no sex before marriage (for example), but that does not mean it is within my right or anyone else to use the point of the gun to stop those individuals who do engage in that activity. On the other hand, such topics and discussions on social and cultural values are important and have to be thought about----even a free one. Not all choices or lifestyles are equal. Not all ideas or religions are equal.

A free and well-developed society must have the wisdom to not only recognize the importance of Liberty, but learn the best way to nourish society----to nourish civilization. With this comes a belief in a transcendent moral order; a actual structure of laws independent of man; an effort and understanding to uphold social continuity; a looking to the past to seek wisdom and to learn form the great minds of the past; an understanding (to the best of our ability) of the entire range of man's nature and existence; and so forth.

Man, for instance, still needs to learn how to brush his teeth in freedom. And a free society has to attempt to organize itself in the best way possible to promote capitalism, free markets, religion, community, family and its natural outgrowths.

------------

* Mr. Sobran also says, in the same linked-to article, this on homosexual "marriage":

Consider homosexuality. Whereas the liberal wants to impose "gay rights," by law and coercion, the conservative sees homosexuality as a defect, which to some extent can and must be tolerated, because it can't be "eradicated," but it can't rationally be exalted to the plane of normality; and he knows that all talk of "same-sex marriage" is nonsense, like trying to breed calves from a pair of bulls.

Speaking of homosexuality: It is not odd how left-liberals talk about how people are born with it? This may or may not be true. My guess is that it is partly genetic and partly environmental (e.g., a mental illness formed in a bad family environment). Both are factors or variables in different cases. But whatever the truth, the left speak of how it is genetic, but will condemn anyone---anyone who attacks their egalitarian ideology---who uses the same type of arguments in regards to genetics or inheritance when it comes to intelligence or differences between peoples (e.g., Dr. James D. Watson). Once anyone does, they will just be called a racist, bigot, and all the usual. Inquiry is not allowed in their definition of "free speech." Truthfully, I am not 100% sure what is wrong talking about differences. They are just generalizations or averages, nor do they imply the use of coercion, hate or anything of that nature. Well, my inquiring mind wants to understand the inconsistent views. They like what Darwin said in some parts, but not in other parts.

** Giuliani, by the way, was happy to support such in the past. Not only pro-abortion, but pro-pro abortion (!) because of his support of State funding. Ah, Mr. Conservative running on the Republican ticket. What a political party this is. A man who has had three marriages---the first being very peculiar. Has dressed up in drag for a gay parade... Hmmm, he really is the perfect guy for this party.

Private property is not just the building block to civilization in a directly "economic" sense (so to speak), but also in a familial sense. The great-late Robert Nisbet, a conservative sociologist and historian, realized that there is a strong connection between the institution of family and private property. Society, he said in Conservatism: Dream and Reality (see Lew Rockwell's mention of this book: "Conservatism One Can Respect"), is based on property and voluntary authority. This produces liberty and order. Liberty being the mother of order.

He wrote:

Property is more than external appendage to man, mere inanimate servant of human need. It is, above everything else, civilization, the very condition of man's humanness, his superiority over the entire natural world.

Indeed...

Much of the [traditional] conservative veneration for the family lies in its historic affinity between family and property. It is usually the rule for any family to seek as much advantage for its children and other members as possible. . . . There is no issue over which conservative has fought liberal and socialist as strenuously as on threats through law to loosen property from family grasp, by taxation or by any other form of redistribution.

In another paragraph he quoted Paul Elmer More....

"To the civilized man," wrote Paul Elmer More in 1915, "the rights of property are more important than the right of life." After all, More goes on, life is a primitive thing; that is, no more than the biological basis of the values we cherish as civilized. "Nearly all that makes it more significant to us than to the beast is associated with our possessions----with property, all the way from the food we share with the beasts, to the most refined products of the human imagination."

Family (i.e., "traditional family") is obviously the institution that sustains society, and family is sustained through property. Citadels of family should also be citadels of private property. It is property that is the tonic of family, combined with a public in possession of correct ideas of a social and cultural nature.

For those few readers of The Paleo Blog that take some kind of interest in this blog or the subjects it covers, you should go buy Richard Weaver's In Defense of Tradition. (Be sure to have Ideas Have Consequences alongside it.) This book collects his shorter writings into this magnificent whole of erudition. I have been learning a lot from it.

In this entry I will endeavor to display a few of Weaver's insights (with my feeble comments) on man and modernity, from the aforementioned book.

Humanism and Science

Weaver thought that most essential to mankind is its understanding of man. For where do we all go without understanding the nature of man? He thought it has been a grave mistake to have humanism take a back seat to scientism. Understanding nature and the physical universe is important, of course. But what good is it without that most essential backdrop? Where does man take off from? Are there limits?

Humanism studies man as expressed through his whole nature, including his motivation; and this is why it seems to some now, as it seemed to Socrates ..., to have a prior place in the course of inquiry.

It appears that mankind as a whole, says Weaver, knows less about "human nature than did the men of Socrates' day or the men of the Middle ages." I dare say Ricard Weaver was probably correct----and I dare say it is still true. Man has shifted from a more centered and grounded view of striving to understand the nature of man, to jumping straight (without grounding) to science. Science, then, becomes an end to itself.

In cerebration, does not the socialist come to one's mind as an illustration of this?

Society and the individual become a laboratory experiment. This springs the desire and the acceptability of the statist to engineer society. Social sciences then become empirically driven, and man is looked at as a sort of equation. Individuals are seen as pliant because they supposedly have no nature.

No wonder the Austrian school of economics, which Weaver supported, is not that popular in the statist left-neocon establishment. How could it with this ethos?

The great Richard Weaver thought that this attitude leads to the viewpoint that if it can be done, it must or should be done. Hence, the atomic bomb. As Weaver wrote in Ideas Have Consequences: "The bomb was an unparalleled means; was this not enough?"

Relativism

Relativism must follow this. One aspect of relativism is that one cannot make any kind of generalization. Weaver himself said that as he taught his class there would always be some negative reactions if he himself made a generalization.

(This reminds me, from what I read, of what happened to Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe a few years ago.)

All a generalization, writes Weaver, "is a standard idea or observation." Relativism, in spite, denies truths. With a relativistic frame of reference, there can no longer be any general truths or standards that transcend time or space. Everything becomes a haze. With this view, how can one learn anything from history?

An area that our late author elaborated on was how this turns many people in politics to "middle-of-the-roadism." There are several tangents we can take off from this interesting point.

But here is what Weaver thought explained the moderate:

How did the notion ever arise that the safest place is in middle of the road? I believe it arose from people who resent the very idea of logical clarity, because logical clarity always leads you to a principle. And a principle is resented because it is binding in the same way that a generalization or a standard is.

Hmmm... Now this is a great conservative (or "paleoconservative").

This leftist tendency has spread through the culture and even into language itself. He gives the example of much of the advertising language one finds. "One," he says, "finds in such language contradictory things predicated on the same article."

Relativism, says Weaver, is also very much linked to statism:

I am entirely convinced that relativism as a doctrine must eventually lead to a regime of force. The relativist has no outside authority, no constraining transcendent idea to appeal to or to be deterred by. For him "all things flow."

Individuality and Modernity

The above has a impact on the individual----if it be a man who throws self-reflection or reflection about the nature of man away; be it a man's embracing of relativism; be it a man's allegiance to a strict concept of "living in the moment"; or whatnot.

Our late author asks: Is not the man

we regard as having authentic personality ... possess a center, and everything that he does is in relation to this[?] ... When such a person performs an act, no part of his being seems uninvolved; what happens on the outer circumference is duly controlled by the integrating center. We sense, sometimes with a feeling of envy, that this individual is a unitary being and thus "in possession of himself."

I think Richard Weaver was on to something in his writings here. He is absolutely correct.

One thing he points out, and I think it is worth going aside a little by pointing out this here, is that we all must never disregard or dismiss a man. A casual glance or a casual conversation or two (in fact, the number could be much larger than two) can be highly misleading. Secondly, different individuals can have extremely strong points as well as weak points. IQ, while generally very useful--accurate---and so forth, is not the whole of a man. One can test much more highly in one area (e.g., reading) and less on another (e.g., mathematics), for example. (To clarify, there is nothing wrong with generalizations or group generalizations and things of this nature. But this is clearly not the point or subject here. See above.)

To focus the conversation back to the main subject, Richard Weaver says that for personality to form it needs independence free of "social coercion" and "complacence." We cannot treat man as a machine. Nor can society be treated that way. This means that we cannot have a mechanalism of man. He is an "organism!"

One of the popular sayings these days is that man must "live in the moment." This is faulty advice. It is true that man lives in the present. Man flows with time. However, with that comes the accumulation of one's individual history. We must all use that, to the best of our finite abilities. To quote Weaver:

The human being must live in a present that is enriched and sustained by a past; it is his experience stored up in the form of memory which enables him to be something more than an automation responding to sensory impingements.

Conscience gathers our history of our past. This memory is carried with us in the present. Action of man is with his conscience. It holds (be it very finite) together man's understanding of himself, the world "outside" him, and the structure or binding of himself, the world and his ideas.

It is thus nonsense to say to oneself to "live in the moment," as a philosophy, so to speak. Richard Weaver says that this idea leads to a deformed personality.

In other words, "Don't think about it." Let the present trend of society experience determine the attitude and the decision. Today's mass journalism, with its lively propagation, its weak reflection, and its addiction to sensational data, lends powerful encouragement to the habit.

Weaver quotes T.S. Eliot in his saying that "the presence of the past in the present" has much meaning to the personality of man. Man cannot "live in the moment." (Do you see how this ties into the above sections? They are all very connected.) As our late author says, man is more than "functional." He has also an "historicity." This is his status as a man----as an individual. He needs status and function.

The man of old age, for example, cannot function or perform as he once could. But one does not address him based on his current ability. People address him based on his complete self: i.e., his past accomplishments. We honor those.

Modernism, however, and leftism destroys this. This produces a loss, says Weaver, of the "sense of belonging." We feel detached and depressed with anxiety. Society needs social layers and hierarchy, as this is bonded as a requisite to such a society. Society, though it must be pointed out, he says needs "many different centers of authority, influence, and opinion, competing with one another..."

Another aspect of this is man's inner and outer life, and knowing how to balance the two. There is a difference between "public" and "private" life. One should know the difference and know how to act appropriately in both respected distinctions.

Democratic ideology blends the two and produces confusion. It has trickled down, says Weaver, even in architecture. How many of us have a place of private meditation (which is isolated, closed, and has no windows)?

Richard Weaver even says that, although one might dismiss at first without reasoning it out, that the income tax blends "public" and "private." More privacy is lost with it. The income tax produces a State in which we are all "under surveillance."

The decline of privacy, our late author reasons, makes man more "one-dimensional." (For an aside: that is almost always my reaction in watching the various television sitcoms. Imagine what these programs do to man's understanding of humanity!) Scientific abstraction, based on a false view of man, has also added to this.

Restoring the Health of Society

This is me speaking not Richard Weaver, but he would probably agree with a good portion-----since Weaver was very much an anti-statist figure (wanting to get rid of the income tax is a clear sign of that.....he was even for taken away the power of the federal reserve, among other things).

All of us have to return to the basics. We must do our best to have reborn a "moral imagination." But this is not just some war between cultural elites. As Dr. Paul Gottfried says in his book Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt (see this entry for quote), the government itself pushes the buttons in education to impose values contrary to what is being typed about in this entry.

To go back to Weaver. Today's

pressure against the habit of contemplation and the displacement of the humanities from a central role in our eduction has worked against what are probably the two best means of getting to know the nature of the human being.

Education starts with us as individuals. We should all therefore attempt to educate ourselves, be it a lifetime task, to principles that Weaver spoke about. This goes double for our children.

Government----in particular the federal government----must be dismantled. For how else will men get a proper education? It is a common for one to say that "All politics is local." This is false. Today All politics is national. At the very least, it would seem to me, politics should be decentralized as much as possible. Leviathan must be caged, or better still killed. With this push, we all should not accept or be content with "middle-of-the-roadism." How about we take an anti-statist view to its full conclusion?

It also means restoring private property, what Weaver called the "last metaphysical right." The more decentralized power is, the more it goes into the hands of local communities. And the more decentralized it is, the more it goes into the hands, ultimately, to private property owners themselves. Natural outgrowths of private law can occur. Covenant relationships can occur. These covenants, versus any government, can actually fulfill the wants of a conservative or traditionalist community.

The first term, the moral imagination, comes from Edmund Burke and his book Reflections on the French Revolution (1790). It represents man's ability, unlike lower creatures of the earth, to perceive above and beyond the merely physical; beyond the mere present moment of temporal existence; out of the cage of animal-like emotions and pure sensation; truths that transcend the spatial and the temporal. The moral imagination carries "the permanent things."

The moral imagination provides a place of understanding one's existence in the physical world, and spiritual and religious world as well.

As the late Russell Kirk, author of such popular works as The Conservative Mind, says we would be nothing but "naked apes" without a moral imagination. Our life gets some order and meaning with it. We reach out for something more with it. To find "virtue and wisdom and redemption."

But the moral imagination can be corrupted. Irving Babbit called what Jean Jacques Rousseau, and the French Revolution, brought the "idyllic imagination." This can lead to the “diabolic imagination,” which T.S. Eliot spoke of. It is at the polar opposite of the moral imagination. A diabolic imagination, wrote Kirk, "delights in the perverse and subhuman."

The literary art, said Kirk, is to express and teach truths about what it means "to be genuinely human." In our time it has moved to a "literature of nihilism, of pornography and of sensationalism." Not too long after that spreads through the culture, it will "warp our nature."

As written previously here at The Paleo Blog, Russell Kirk believed that bringing literature back on the right track means to bring literature back to its center core or expressing norms. Norms, he says, carry laws of nature that one cannot overturn or be made-up. When man tries to run in the opposite direction of these norms, there will always be negative consequences. While man cannot achieve perfection according to these norms, he must always try to embrace them in his life.

Modern man, unfortunately, by and large has lost the moral imagination. He has little sense of any such notions. He is lost in the modern age of Leviathan with smaller and smaller attachments to family, church, or tradition. It is difficult to see how this has happened outside of the centralization of statism. The more authority we, as an accepting or passively accepting public, give to the centralized state, the less other areas of life will have in meaning and authority. All the State can do is warp our natures; to destroy organic culture that exists outside and apart from government; and to detach individuals into dependence with the State and away from society. Instead of searching for law, under God, the search is for legislation to impose on society.

Modern man has no place in history and knows little to nothing about his family's place----that is, his family's tree. (And yes, I admit my own lacks, and failures, in this department, as well in many others. It is something I must try to correct, as best as I can.) He is ungrounded and lost, therefore. A time machine he may as well enter because he has no sense of time anyhow. He does not look for the transcended principles. Modern man is just, simply, lost.

Part and parcel is the corrupted education of today. Not only have democratic and egalitarian principles undermined education to not excel the best and brightest, but education is now a propaganda machine to teach the wonders of statism and to promote multiculturalism as superior to the degraded and ridiculed Western Culture. How could this trend not move into the direction it has today, since we look to the State as the controller of education?

I am not sure if it was Rothbard, or Nock, or perhaps Chodorov (although, they all said this in their own unique way), but it is true when they say that the State destroys everything that is true---noble---deceit---beautiful---and moral.

Well, society will keep moving "forward" in time, but not necessarily, as the liberal Whig theory of history tells us, towards progress and advancement of man's spirit. But there might be light at the end of the tunnel...

See Also The Paleo Blog's Government’s Brutal Attack on the Family

I.

The decline or degeneration of social and cultural values in society has not happened in a vacuum. This decline has come about part and parcel with the rise of the Almighty Leviathan State. Through the State's meddling in society, the institution of the family has systematically eroded. It perverts the natural inclinations of men and women, their bond together, and familial relations in general.

Today we observe high rates of divorce, illegitimacy, abortion, and all-around family dysfunction. Birthrates of Western peoples have sunken below even the bare minimum of replacement level, as contrast to other peoples. (At the same time floods of third world peoples are moving in, without the need to assimilate.) The intergenerational bond of the extended family has also become increasingly weak. Single parent households are becoming increasingly common. Alternative lifestyles are also higher than ever. Atomization of individuals from all social and cultural restraints has taken place. We are increasingly detached and isolated from family and community. Indeed, we barely even know the name of our next-door neighbors. Family, community, church, and other institutions are no longer looked to-------instead man looks to the centralized State for the answers or solutions to various problems.

This entry to The Paleo Blog will outline the natural development of the family institution under a free market; discuss how the State perverts the family institution away from its natural tendencies; and look at what the Sweden welfare state has done to the family institution there, and how the United States is moving in that direction. The only way to stop the deterioration of the family and morals is to drastically cut government's interference. This may be wishful thinking, but short of that, to steal the title of a book, the death of the West is certain.

II.

As Ludwig von Mises recognized, the family institution is naturally nourished under capitalism. Von Mises did not come about or derive his principles in understanding the importance of the family institution based on "tradition" as a guide, but by his powerful and genius understanding of the economic reality and limitations the world and mankind possess. Mises reasoned that there is a division of labor for sex. It is marriage that harnesses the natural flows.

Society exists because of the inegalitarian nature of mankind and of the world. No division of labor is speakable if this were not true; that men are different and unequal to each other is a requisite. It is by comparative advantage that allows social cooperation between men that are different, men that are truly and fully human as unique individuals unlike the Brave New World of the fantasies of extreme egalitarian leftists, to all socially and economically gain in cooperation. The setting that makes this most possible is one where there is equality of the law; this is the only equality in which Mises supported. Mises reasoned that when one tries to socially engineer all men to be "equal" automatons, then it becomes impossible to enforce equality under the law. You cannot have both.

Man, unlike mere animals, must learn how to control sexual desires and instincts. There are clear differences between the male and female genders. Sex is much more important for the female than that of the male. To quote Mises in his book Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis: "Satisfaction brings him relaxation and mental peace. But for the woman the burden of motherhood begins here. Her destiny is completely circumscribed by sex; in man's life it is but an accident. . . . For woman . . . sex is the greatest obstacle." There is, of course, great inequality or dependence of the woman to the man. This makes her more sexually conservative and cautious. She will have to weigh what she is doing to a greater extent. Under a complete free market men could not be forced into providing support, in case of birth. Trying to remove market conditions will only weaken the traditional bond and will encourage out-of-wedlock births and single parenting. In a free market, naturally then there will also arrive great stigmas of social and cultural pressure that will be more inclined to respect and encourage traditional norms.

Unfortunately, today the State, through such programs as TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), take away responsibility and encourage destructive behavior. Women no longer need to be as worried in sexual relationships. Since TANF gives large amounts of money to single mothers, women can now more easily get rid of the man. This type of government program subsidizes this type of behavior. As the welfare system looks for a fault or deficiency in the family (or quasi-"family" or individual) in which to give welfare, society will by inevitability enlarge that deficiency or irrationality. As stated in a previous entry, as one gets sucked into dependency by way of government and loses his (or her) independence of freewill, all of the things seeking to be eliminated by government intervention will only amplify in the long-run, and man's actions will become distorted into a confused haze of lowered morals and economic good judgment. Indeed, as Murray Rothbard wrote about, the welfare state in New York has dramatically increased single welfare mothers. By providing incentives for this behavior, it puts a disincentive and punishes good behavior. People will then move into increasingly bad behavior. Present-orientation becomes the norm and long-term thinking is no longer encouraged.

Jeffrey Tucker and Lew Rockwell wrote a magnificent essay explaining the insights that Mises had in cultural questions called "The Cultural Thought of Ludwig von Mises." [PDF] To quote them, as it relates to the subject now being covered:

It was the “ideal of capitalism” [quote from Mises] that contributed to producing the “demand for man’s abstinence outside marriage” by insisting on “equal moral rights for man and woman.” Thus capitalism, argues Mises, discourages prostitution. Here he applies his model that whatever is in accord with man’s nature----such as sexual fidelity within marriage----is fostered by the only economic system, capitalism, that is also in accord with man’s nature.

. . . Mises viewed marriage as an inescapable social institution, part of “an adjustment of the individual to the social order by which a certain field of activity, with all its tasks and requirements is assigned to him.” Marriage, said Mises, reins in the sexual instincts of man and allows woman to achieve what nature and biology tell us is her primary occupation, bearing children and caring for the family.

It was before capitalism where women were thought as objects to be possessed of or to be slaves to men. This type of affair cannot stay for long as long as capitalism develops. Marriage develops into a form of contract, with both man and woman of equal rights. In capitalism, the sex drive is calmed and diverted for the good.

Under a free market environment, marriage would be completely privatized. The State in history is a relatively new invention in the area of marriage. It was the social intermediate institutions that defended marriage, for the majority of history. (Traditional conservatives, of all people, should know that the State could only corrupt marriage! Marriage is not to be put up to a vote. It is of no business of the sinful and secular State.) In freedom, marriage would, as Steven LaTulippe puts it, "reinvigorate those institutions of organic culture which have traditionally administered it."

LaTulippe says that

As should be no surprise, marriage has weakened in direct proportion to the advancing interference of the state. In addition, those institutions of organic culture which have historically functioned to define and enshrine marriage are withering in the face of this assault (yet another example of the maxim that statist “culture” drives out authentic culture). [emphasis his]

III.

The family institution, as Hans Hoppe says in Democracy - The God That Failed, "testifies to the enormous productivity of the family-household that no other institution has proven more durable or capable of producing such emotions!" Family brings children. They depend on their parents for support and guidance, both financially and emotionally. As the children depend on their parents, in old age the parents often depend on their now grownup children. It thus pays; there is an incentive, to instill good values and judgments. It pays to have children-----many children. Parents thus attempt to build a good relationship. They teach their children about responsibility and convey to them a good work ethic. They want them both physically and mentally strong. The more the parents be in charge of this, the more incentive and the more developed experience they have to do this successfully. It is here, with both a mother and father, that children are best taken care of. Both roles (father and mother) fill different needs of their children. It is futile to argue that the natural family is inferior (or equal) to other household arrangements. Children developing emotional or mental problems are more common outside of the traditional household. Insofar as the State subsidizes that development, it contributes to the decline of emotional strength and maturity to society.

The family system is also strongly connected with property and capitalistic production. Civilizations with strong families look to the future for preservation and continuation of their families. They thus adopt future-oriented attitudes. It is under this environment that enormous capital growth and economic advancement can take place [pdf], since the time preferences of people will tend to be low. In addition, since growth of civilizations is heavily dependent on time preference, the vitality of the family institution in society is bond to the rise and fall of society. Therefore, a good way to "measure" a society's place is to look at the family institution and the state of the culture at large.

Children provide labor potential. They not only have the potential to become independent self-sufficient adults, but also have potential to labor as children. This increases their value as children. Laws that forbid child labor weakens the family by gutting some value children have. No longer can they work to preserve the family, especially in the case of hardship. Compulsory laws of government-approved school attendance for children likewise "socialize their time." Under this statist environment children's loyalty and their education and guidance turns away from their parents and their family and instead to the government bureaucrats.

And today mothers can no longer even be mothers! Taxation and various regulations have made all of us one-half of a person. It is no wonder that both parents today have to go into the workforce. Economically the State has made it much more difficult for the mother to take her natural role to raise her children. This not only creates family dysfunction between parents and children, but also makes it more difficult to have children or to have as many children as in the past. While both parents must now be in the workforce, the children are sent off to the secular bureaucrats, to be "taught" by them, away from family.

Family life does not just consist of the nuclear family, but also consists of the extended family. It provides a framework and bond in the family to provide support between each other. It is similar to an "insurance policy." The old and elderly depend on the young and strong in the extended family. The sick and troubled on the strong and firm. There is great incentive, in a free market, to preserve a strong and healthy extended family. However, Social Security has helped shatter and cut this bond. No longer does the extended family have to be strong and healthy. The incentive to maintain this bond has decreased. To quote Allan Carlson:

The underlying act here was the socializing of another dependency function, this time, the dependency of the "very old" and the "weak" on mature adults. For eons, the care of the elderly had been a family matter. Henceforward, it would be the state's concern. Taking all of these reforms together, the net effect was to socialize the economic value of children. The natural economy of the household, and the value that children had brought their parents----be it as workers in the family enterprise or as an "insurance policy" for old age----was stripped away. Parents were still left with the costs of raising the children, but the economic gain they would eventually represent had been seized by "society," meaning the bureaucratic state.

"The end result," says Carlson, "of state intervention . . . is progressively diminished fertility, with living individuals left alone in a dependent relationship with the government." [emphasis mine] As Oskari Juurikkala writes in his "Making Kids Worthless: Social Security's Contribution to the Fertility Crisis," there is a direct correlation between birthrate declines and the destruction "Social Security" has caused the family. It no longer pays to have children because the government takes away the economic rewards. No longer, as in "traditional societies" are " family values and mutual altruism" "deeply held values."

Instead of relying on the extended family for support, individuals look to the all centralized State. The old, in a family, no longer need to look to the young for support or vice versa. The extended family loses meaning. Economically it is wise to have a large extended and nuclear family, but this is no longer true. Indeed, as just mentioned, fertility rates have fallen dramatically in those nations with a Social Security system. It is no wonder that people will thus adopt a lifestyle that is oriented to the present (i.e., time preferences will rise).

To quote Hans Hoppe:

In conjunction with the even older compulsory system of public education, these institutions and practices amount to a massive attack on the institution of the family and personal responsibility. By relieving individuals of the obligation to provide for their own income, health, safety, old age, and children's education, the range and temporal horizon of private provision is reduced, the value of marriage, family, children, and kinship relations is lowered. Irresponsibility, shortsightedness, negligence, illness and even destructionism (bads) is promoted, and responsibility, farsightedness, diligence, health and conservatism (goods) are punished. The compulsory old age insurance system in particular, by which retirees (the old) are subsidized from taxes imposed on current income earners (the young), has systematically weakened the natural intergenerational bond between parents, grandparents, and children. The old need no longer rely on the assistance of their children if they have made no provision for their own old age; and the young (with typically less accumulated wealth) must support the old (with typically more accumulated wealth) rather than the other way around, as is typical within families. Consequently, not only do people want to have fewer children----and indeed, birthrates have fallen in half since the onset of modern social security (welfare) policies----but also the respect which the young traditionally accorded to their elders is diminished, and all indicators of family disintegration and malfunctioning, such as rates of divorce, illegitimacy, child abuse, single parenting, singledom, alternative lifestyles, and abortion, have increased.

To continue with Hoppe:

At the same time, as should be clear as well but has not been sufficiently noted, from the point of view of the government's rulers, their ability to interfere in internal family matters must be regarded as the ultimate prize and the pinnacle of their own power. To exploit tribal or racial resentments or class envy to one's personal advantage is one thing. It is quite another accomplishment to use the quarrels arising within families to break up the entire----generally harmonious----system of autonomous families: to uproot individuals from their families to isolate and atomize them, thereby increasing the state's power over them. Accordingly, as the government's family policy is implemented, divorce, singledom, . . . [see above] and the variety and frequency of . . . homosexuality, lesbianism, communism, and occultism [lifestyles] . . . increase as well.

Looking at the numbers is always shocking. For example, in The Death of the West by Pat Buchanan, Buchanan documents that "nuclear families account for fewer than one in four households, while single Americans who live alone are now 26 percent of all households." "Marriage," Buchanan says, "is out of fashion." Today the culture places the joy of sex higher than motherhood for women. "One in four children born to white women are out of wedlock. In 1960, it was 2 percent." Abortions, he reports, are about 1.2-1.4 million per year. And births "to married women in the United States, [were] 4 million in 1960, fell to 2.7 million in 1996." The divorce rate "is up 350 percent since 1962, and one-third of all American children now live in single-parent homes." The signs of family dysfunction is all too evident.

As Mark Owens says: "Government programs have not only created dependency [between individuals and the State], but have allowed people to escape the social norms that were the result of centuries of successful social behavior."

When the government steps in and subsidizes behaviors that in previous generations would have resulted in great hardship or even death, a sort of social Gresham’s Law takes place where bad behavior chases out the good. Why have a father and husband around when the state will assure your financial situation? Why find a new job when you can collect unemployment for some time? The changes in societal incentives have resulted in a change in societal rules. . . . . A high school girl could get pregnant and the state would provide her with her own apartment. It would be difficult to argue that this did not exert a powerful influence on social norms.

We see that social pressures and stigmas have virtually disappeared. It is no wonder that this is so, as the State takes the functions of social intermediate institutions, there is little standing in the way to encourage people out of destructive behavior. On top of that, the State by its very interventions subsidizes these activities. The individual is no longer connected with any social norms or pressures. Interestingly or maybe ironically, one becomes like an atom-----a (false) criticism that some have against genuine hard-core libertarianism. [Robert Nisbet is right on the triangle of authority.]

IV.

The damage that statism has on the family is vividly illustrated in Sweden. To not go down the same road calls for drastic change in the operations of government here in the United States. The entire welfare system (which includes Social Security) must be gotten rid of. As Allan Carlson writes in his important essay called "What Has Government Done to Our Families?," the natural dependency and bond between members of both the nuclear and extended family have been cut off and replaced by statist interventionism in Sweden. The individual there is cut off and isolated.

The ball started rolling in the 1840s with compulsory school attendance laws. Next came laws banning child labor in 1912. Government then implemented a system of "old-age or retirement pensions." With their massive welfare state, a population crisis developed. By 1935 the "Swedish fertility went into free-fall," says Carlson, and "had the lowest birthrate in the world, below the zero-growth level where a generation just managed to replace itself."

Given the incentives set up by the state, the very persons who contributed the most to the nation's survival by having children were dragged down into poverty, shoddy housing, poor nutrition, and limited recreational opportunities. A voluntary choice between poverty with children or a higher living standard without them was what young couples now faced. Young adults were forced to support the retired and the needy through the state's welfare system, and also the children to which they have life. Under this multiple burden, they had chosen to reduce their number of children as the only facto over which they had control.

In the essay Carlson writes that the situation is a good example of what Mises meant when he said that there is no "third way" or "middle ground" between socialism and capitalism. It is either one or the other. As this crisis came into a forefront, Gunnar Myrdal and Alva Myrdal came into the spotlight with a bestselling book called Crisis in the Population Question.

The Myrdals said that there were two alternatives: one was to get rid of the welfare state or to complete the welfare state dominion over society. The first option they said was (their words) "not even worthy of being discussed." They called the family "pathological" and that these "old ideals must die out with the generations which supported them." They also said that "we must free children more from ourselves" to turn (Carlson's words) "them over to state certified experts for care and training. The collective day nursery run by state-controlled experts, rather than the pathological little family, was more in line with the proper goals of eliminating social classes and building a society based on economic democracy"

What were the specific results? With the family stripped, by state fiat, of all productive functions, of all insurance and welfare functions, and of most consumption functions, it should cause little surprise that ever fewer Swedes chose to live in families. The marriage rate fell to a record low among modern nations, while the proportion of adults living alone soared. In central Stockholm, for example, fully two-thirds of the population lived in single-person households by the mid-1980s. With the costs and benefits of children fully socialized, and with the natural economic gains from marriage intentionally eliminated by law, the bearing of children was also severed from marriage: by 1990, well over half of Swedish births were outside of marriage.

William Anderson in "Liberty and the Atomistic Welfare State," speaks of how left-liberal Tyler Cowen praises this atomized individualism in Sweden, knowing perfectly well that the welfare state brought it about. This society, however, goes "hand-in-hand with an all-powerful state that enforced political correctness with an iron hand," so correctly says Anderson. Sadly, the signs that we are moving closer to Sweden in the U.S. is all too clear. Further socialization of areas where family dominates (or use to dominate) will reap more havoc on the family.

Carlson reports that the "pre-eminent neo-conservative publishing house" book called When the Bough Breaks, uses much the same language as the Myrdals used. For example, take this: "relying on irrational parental attachment to underwrite the child-rearing enterprise is a risky, foolhardy, and cruel business. It is time we learned to share the costs and burdens of raising our children. It is time to take some collective responsibility for the next generation."

V.

Restoring the health of the family requires a freer society, one based on voluntarism and the naturally or organically arising institutions that come about through that. To end this entry, here is a good way to sum this up by Hans Hoppe:

Combining cultural conservatism and welfare-statism is impossible, and hence, economic nonsense. Welfare-statism—social security in any way, shape or form—breeds moral and cultural decline and degeneration. Thus, if one is indeed concerned about America's moral decay and wants to restore normalcy to society and culture, one must oppose all aspects of the modern social-welfare state. A return to normalcy requires no less than the complete elimination of the present social security system: of unemployment insurance, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, etc.—and thus the near complete dissolution and deconstruction of the current state apparatus and government power. If one is ever to restore normalcy, government funds and power must dwindle to or even fall below their nineteenth century levels. Hence, true conservatives must be hard-line libertarians (antistatists). . . . In order to restore social and cultural norms, true conservatives can only be radical libertarians, and they must demand the demolition—as a moral and economic distortion—of the entire structure of the interventionist state

Articles to Read:

• The Cultural Thought of Ludwig von Mises by Jeffrey Tucker and Lew Rockwell
  
• What Has Government Done to Our Families? by Allan Carlson
• Making Kids Worthless: Social Security's Contribution to the Fertility Crisis by Oskari Juurikkala
• Old-age Security Without the State by Oskari Juurikkala
• The Welfare State's Attack on the Family by Vedran Vuk
• The Welfare State: Shredding Society by Mark Owen
• Liberty and the Atomistic Welfare State by William Anderson
  
• Statism, Post-Modernism, and the Death of the Western World by Steven LaTulippe
• Post-Modernism by Steven LaTulippe
• Four Steps To Restoring the Culture by Steven LaTulippe