13 posts tagged “education”

Dr. Charles Murray writes at Taki's Magazine on the impossibility of equality in education:

“We do not live in Lake Wobegon. In all areas of academic ability, half of the children are below average. This fact has implications for education and public policy, and yet it's something most politicians and public intellectuals would rather not talk about. It amounts to educational romanticism. At its heart is a glib presumption that every child can be anything he or she wants to be if only the schools do their job properly. No one really believes it, but we approach education's problems as if we did. We are phobic about saying out loud that children differ in their ability to learn the things schools teach. Not only do we hate to say it, we get angry with people who do. We insist that the emperor is wearing clothes, beautiful clothes, and that those who say otherwise are bad people.”

Read the Full Article: "The Bell Curve Tolls for Thee."

P.S., I just found this wonderful quote from the late Kuehnelt-Leddihn on equality (and cannot help but post it):

[This entry was typed up as a follow-up to the Nock entry on education: Sacred cows are everywhere. Albert Jay Nock saw the fallacious ideas that surround the system of education. It is a system, like so many other sacred cows, that gets opulent support by its attachment to egalitarianism and democracy. Like most things called "progressive," it is a backwards and profligate system; hardly to be looked at as a truly progressive thing.]

“One of the best ways of regarding the problem of compulsory education is to think of the almost exact analogy in the area of that other great educational medium----the newspaper. What would we think of a proposal for the government, Federal or State, to use the taxpayers' money to set up a nationwide chain of public newspapers, and compel all people, or all children, to read them? . . . Compulsory public presses would be considered an invasion of the basic freedom of press; yet is not scholastic freedom at least as important as press freedom? Aren't both vital media for public information and education, for free inquiry and the search for truth? It is clear that the suppression of free instruction should be regarded with even greater horror than suppression of free press, since here the unformed minds of children are involved.”

A Glance at the Rise of Modern State Education

Murray Rothbard's excellent monograph Education: Free and Compulsory (you can buy it at Amazon) surveys how compulsory education was not started up, either in Europe or America, as some kind of wonderful, enlightening, and altruistic thing. A compulsory and statist system was started up for far more sinister reasons. From the very start it has been an ideological and religious weapon. (How could it not?)

As I tell my fellow Catholic friends, a major impetus to compulsory and statist education was aimed against the Church.

"The first modern movement for compulsory state education," Rothbard says in Education, "stemmed directly from the Reformation." Martin Luther and John Calvin both called for compulsory state education. They saw it as a force to mold obedience to their religions and to the State.

In Germany, Luther demanded that it be used to fight against "the devil." This included, writes Rothbard, "not only Jews, Catholics, and infidels, but also all other Protestant sects." In 1524, in response, Gotha created the first public school and Thurungia in 1527 started their own. And 1559 Wurtemburg created the first compulsory system.

Calvin in Geneva, a town that previously revolted "against the Duke of Savoy and the Catholic Church," was able to create "a number of public schools, at which attendance was compulsory."

Prussia became the "first to have a national system of compulsory education." It is not surprising, Rothbard notes, because Prussia was the most "despotic State in Europe" and that its "original inspiration . . . was Luther and his doctrine of obedience to State absolutism." It was also in Prussia, with King Frederick William III, that "progressive education" came.

France, touched by the French Revolution and its egalitarianism, with Napoleon brought compulsory State education.

With this other nation-States followed along, including England, whose "tradition of voluntarism was ... strongest."

What about America?

In the majority of American colonies, education was in the English tradition, i.e., voluntary parental education, with the only public schools being those established for poor families free to make use of the facilities. . . . The crucial exception was New England, the sparkplug of the collectivist educational system in America.

This exception was due to their Calvinist ideas. Thus, in 1642 they implemented compulsory laws and then in 1647 created public schools. Massachusetts Bay Colony first governor John Winthrop expressed this ideology well. He, says Rothbard, "regarded any opposition to the policies of the governor, particularly when he was governor, as positively seditious."

To try to remain still brief in this entry, Puritans expanded the locations they lived and with them expanded their views on education. Only Rhode Island in New England was the exception.

The Prussian System, and hence not only Calvinist ideas, as well had an influence in shaping the development of statist education in America. Later, and after the Revolutionary War, special interest groups offered it as a role model to adopt. Calvin E. Stowe (using very similar tyrannical rhetoric as Luther), a major statist educational pusher, did the same.

Rothbard says that "professional educationists were the major force, assisted by the trade unions, in imposing compulsory education in America."

Two central scholars that helped shape public opinion, being preeminent in the newspapers, were Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen. Both were radical socialists. While, fortunately, their full dream was not realized, ideas of "absolute equality and uniformity" did, to a great extent, come about. Major "educationists" including Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, Calvin Wiley, and others advocated this goal of equality and uniformity. That is, to take a diverse people and "mold them into 'one people,'" and to instill with them (their) "moral values." Along with this was their ridicule of private schools.

Rothbard on Education and the Individual

First thing is first. Rothbard, in Education: Free and Compulsory, overviews that the growth of a new person in the world is chiefly of intellect. Learning is a 24-7 thing, so to speak, in which the child learns from his environment. This environment consists of the natural world, man-made things, and by observation of the interactions and associations of men. Most fundamentally, learning starts at home.

Learning and growing up is therefore something above and beyond just formal education. Moreover, education and the formation of personality, while developed by the impact of others of course, really comes down to the individual person. It is he that will ultimately decide upon the ideas formed in his head.

The need for formal education and schooling comes with assimilating intellectual knowledge. This knowledge requires a systematic and logical progression. The most important of this being reading since it opens the doors to other subjects of knowledge.

Because mankind is not made up of equals but persons of infinite differences, the best education is the one specialized to the given child. This is what, Rothbard says, makes individualized homeschooling superior to all other forms of formal education. It can directly target and accommodate the needs of the child. And who but the parents know this best? (Most of the basics the average parents have the ability to teach.)

The next best system would be an individual tutor. Private schools, with an instructor teaching many students at once, would be the next (but last). The problem here is that individualized education becomes less and less possible. It is for this reason that, by inevitability, it will be comparatively inferior. However, seeing that these schools work in the free market, they would allow greater specialization and individualized focus in comparison to a statist system, with its top-down approach and its collectivistic uniformity.

To Rothbard, the issue is: The Parents or the State? Who is going to have authority? We know what the socialist will say. For the freedom-lover, the answer must be the parents.

(Their authority is clearly the natural authority. Hence, giving the State the role of being father is to dismantle the family and its natural authority. It is the alleviating of investment in children by collectivizing or socializing them. How could this not produce a decline in the family? It must, like all forms of socialism. Some conservative, though, cheer on their socialism all the same. [The conservative moral socialist who thinks the State can bring about a paradise of virtue is as fanatic and deluded as the liberal economic socialist who sees the State bringing about a Garden of Eden paradise.] Mr. Sobran once said in an interview: "Americans believe in education. It is one of those strange features of American life; that we accept the principles of communism when it comes to schools.")

Rothbard vs. "Progressive" Education

The step to today's compulsory system was bad enough. But it did not end there. With an ever-expanding educational Leviathan came increased collectivization, centralization, and "progressive" ideas. (And there went the Great Tradition. "In one century we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school," Sobran once wrote, "to offering remedial English in college.") Murray Rothbard, of course, was no fan of these trends. In a nutshell, he said, there are five general things that have happened.

For one, in "progressive" education there has been a letting go of systematic thinking and learning. The emphasis increasingly has been more to let the child "do what he likes" and on "the group." The "three Rs" have been more neglected. All of this has resulted in a perversion in the development of intellect.

Secondly, there has been the idea for education to promote "equality and uniformity." Everyone is viewed as equally educable and, thus, the teaching standards have been pushed down to the lowest common denominator. Even the most uneducable of children are forced into the system. Silly ideas of "grading subjectively" versus objectively have been propagated at times. And, additionally, it is seen as a big objective to prepare children for democracy. Children, however, are not taught systematically the subjects of history, politics, or economics to have informed views on the subjects that pertain to democracy. Instead what they are given is statist slogans and propaganda.

There is also, Rothbard went on, an "emphasis on 'frills'" in school. All this has done is further lessened formal education.

Fourth, it is seen that education must educate the "whole" of a child, beyond and above formal education. This whole idea replaces the family with the State.

And, finally, there has been a surged dependency on the State from all of this. It is the natural and logical result.

Rothbard vs. Voucher Welfarism

The last thing worth going over quickly is Rothbard's views on vouchers. To this end let us turn to the essays "Vouchers: What Went Wrong?" and "Education: Rethinking 'Choice'."

As I have said before, there was a brief time I thought they were a good idea. But then, alas, I found out that they were really another welfare program based on egalitarian ideas, and something that extends governmental control to private schools. (I should have thought: Many socialists, and neocon groups like the awful Heritage Foundation, like this idea, therefore it is probably bad.)

"Vouchers," Rothbard writes,

would greatly extend the welfare system so that middle-class taxpayers would pay for private as well as public schooling for the poor. People without children, or parents who homeschool, would have to pay taxes for both public and private school. On the crucial principle that control always follows subsidy, the voucher scheme would extend government domination from public schools to the as-yet more or less independent private schools.

Especially in regard to the suburbs, the voucher scheme would wreck the fairly worthwhile existing suburban schools in order to subject them to a new form of egalitarian forced busing, in which inner city kids would be foisted upon the suburban schools. A most unwelcome "education revolution."

Not an election season goes by without the usual political rhetoric about "fixing" the education system. News from the boob tube incessantly recounts on how the system is broken. Politicians promise more and more money (and we are all stuck with the bill, if we have children going to a public school or not). They recommend one change and tinkering with the system after another. The masses crescendo cries and complaining rarely takes a holiday. All of this money spent, with the pot seemingly growing every year, and with one tinkering and another to the system the complaining and problems persist.

Just perhaps, as Albert Jay Nock (1870 - 1945) argued, there is a more fundamental problem in which no amount of readjustment, realignment, or other mechanical reconfiguration will produce anything but a vacuous effect. After all the effort in the world a machine that is based on an erroneous theory will only produce a defective machine.

This is what The Theory of Education in the United States by Albert Jay Nock is about. It is a very short book which can be read quickly. The book is based on a series of lectures he gave in 1931 at the University of Virginia.

Who was Nock? He was a man, and one of the most striking and interesting figures, of what Murray Rothbard called the Old Right; the Old Right of forgotten memory with men like Nock, Chodorov, Flynn, Garrett, Morley, and even (strangely enough) Republican politicians like Buffett and Taft.

Nock's Our Enemy, the State, his magnum opus, overturns any notion that the Constitution did anything but crush liberty. It was nothing but a coup d’état of power grabs away from the superior Articles of Confederation. Real liberty never had anything to do with the Constitution. Real liberty is the antithesis of the political state. Nock's Memoirs of a Superfluous Man is filled with insights, from a master of the pen. The great Robert Nisbet said that he "practically memorized" this work.

(Some of his other books include, but not limited to, On Doing the Right Thing, Jefferson, The State of the Union, and Snoring as a Fine Art.)

And how can any man carrying on the tradition of the Old Right not love Nock's mind and personality after reading his "Anarchist's Progress" article? He was a master of parable.

As for Nock's views of education, his views will sadly not get anywhere in an era of leftism and egalitarianism. His views would no doubt be shocking to the prosaic masses of a statist culture. And to say that he would have seen right through President George Bush's "No Child Left Behind" would be an understatement.

What is the theory behind education today? There are three basic principles, accepted without much question. The first is based on egalitarianism. It is said that everyone is educable. Who knows, maybe with just the right training or education we can turn the average streetwalker into a Sir Isaac Newton or a Ludwig von Mises. The second one works hand-in-hand with the first. It is based on the notion of democratic rights. The third is based on the idea that a literate population produces a "good" government.

Individuals who wish to become teachers today are not given education but instruction, says Nock. After a certain period, and tests based on this instructional knowledge, they then receive a certificate. However the only thing that a certificate like this really says is that they are instructed persons, not necessarily educated persons.

An educated man is one who sees things as they really are, as Plato said. Such a man is able to learn "formative" knowledge and digest it without any bias or emotional reaction. This is quite different from an instructed man. Virtually all men can be instructed, but not educated. "The ineducable are among us as the sands of the sea for multitude." (p 116) The educated man is assimilated in the classics, in what Nock calls the "Great Tradition."

The Great Tradition is a fixed and invariable education. It is not composed of any electives or vocational training. Nor is it suited to the person. The educable person must become suited to it. It takes man back to the literature and thought of Greece and Rome, "the longest and fullest continuous record available to us, of what the human mind has been busy about in practically every department of spiritual and social activity." (p 52) It is what makes a mind an experienced mind. It gives him a record that "covers twenty-five hundred consecutive years of the human mind's operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, . . ., everything."

How did this work in the old days?

After the three Rs, or rather for a time in company with them, his staples were Latin, Greek and mathematics. He took up the elements of these two languages very early, and continued at them, with arithmetic and algebra, nearly all the way through primary, and all the way through secondary schools. Whatever else he did, if anything, was inconsiderable except as related to these major subjects; usually some reading in classical history, geography and mythology. When he reached the undergraduate college at the age of sixteen or so, all his language difficulties with Greek and Latin were forever behind him; he could read anything in either tongue, and write in either, and he was thus prepared to deal with both literatures purely as literature, to bestow on them a purely literary interest. He had also in hand arithmetic, and algebra as far as quadratics. Then in four years in college he covered practically the whole range of Greek and Latin literature; mathematics as far as the differential calculus, and including the mathematics of elementary physics and astronomy; a brief course, covering about six weeks, in formal logic; and one as brief in the bare history of the formation and growth of the English language.

Those that could not do it were dropped out or were kicked out. There was no stigma about that because there was no illusion of the nature revolting ideology of equality.

Other subjects were considered vocational, for other institutions. Nock said that there was no teaching, for example, of political economy. It was expected that topics like this, educable and inquisitive minds would learn on their own, and that, no doubt, Nock did.

"The educable person, in contrast to the ineducable, (p 124)

is one who gives promise of some day being able to think; and the object of educating him, of subjecting him to the Great Tradition's discipline, is to put him in the way of right thinking, clear thinking, mature and profound thinking.

Thomas Jefferson, despite being so well known for his support of popular education, seemed to have basically the right general idea when it came to issues of equality. His idea was that all children should be given the "three Rs." And then, from primary school, only the brightest would be sent into grammar school for one to two years. Those students would then be sent away except, said Jefferson, "the best genius of the whole." (p 32) His education would go on for another six years. "By this means," wrote Jefferson, "twenty of the best geniuses shall be ranked from the rubbish annually." And at the end of these six years the ten out of twenty would be sent to William and Mary College.

As you can see, there appears no conspicuous egalitarian sentiment with Jefferson here. (Moreover, Jefferson himself was against compulsory school laws.) On the other hand, Jefferson did believe that a literate mass was needed to produce "good" government. It was this that Nock vividly disagreed.

One only has to look at what the masses do read. The things, as Nock put it, which makes up the "furniture" of their minds. He also paraphrases Joseph Butler in saying that "the majority of men are much more apt at passing things through their minds than they are at thinking about them." (p 43)

For Nock, the masses can be literate (or be instructed to be so), and all for the good, but they were not literate in the true sense of the word.

Unlike many traditional conservatives, Nock did not criticize vocational instruction. He criticized the idea that many traditional conservatives have about the possibility of educating the masses in the Great Tradition. Once you start doing that, it will only be natural that education will have to be dumb downed to the lowest common denominator, and that the Great Tradition will be increasingly replaced with vocational instruction.

All for the good that Bob, who is ineducable, can get vocational training and work in the market place. Indeed, writes Nock, "society is better off for having its ineducables as well trained as they are capable of becoming." (p 112) It is when the State tries to educate everyone that you have problems.

Our system is based upon the assumption popularly regarded as implicit in the doctrine of equality, that everybody is educable. This has been taken without question from the beginning; it is taken without question now. The whole structure of our system, the entire arrangement of its mechanics, testifies to this. Even our truant laws testify to it, for they are constructed with exclusive reference to school-age, not to school-ability. . . . The philosophical doctrine of equality gives no more ground for the assumption that all men are educable than it does for the assumption that all men are six feet tall. (p 30)

It is then that "Gresham's Law" (p 140) kicks in. In political economy it relates to how government drives out good money and subsidizes bad money. Here it relates to how equality pushes down development to the "dreadful average"----the bad wins over the good.

Democratic values have only compounded this (p 38):

The popular idea of democracy is animated by a strong resentment of superiority. It resents the thought of an elite; the thought that there are practicable ranges of intellectual and spiritual experience, achievement and enjoyment, which by nature are open to some and not to all. It deprecates and disallows this thought, and discourages it by every available means. As the popular idea of equality postulates that in the realm of spirit everybody is able to enjoy everything that anybody can enjoy, so the popular idea of democracy postulates that there shall be nothing worth enjoying for anybody to enjoy that everybody may not enjoy; and a contrary view is at once exposed to all the evils of a dogged, unintelligent, invincibly suspicious resentment.

The whole institutional life organized under the popular idea of democracy, then, must reflect this resentment. It must aim at no ideas above those of the average man; that is to say, it must regulate itself by the lowest common denominator of intelligence, taste and character in the society which it represents.

The democratic and egalitarian age in schooling took off by the politicians feeding off of and manipulating a noble idea. Parents want what is best for their children and want them to have more than they have. They want them to have the best chance in life as they can possibly get. Politicians fed on this, says Nock. There was an ethos of urgency. And it was felt that vocational education was the answer to all the ills.

This developed the idea that schooling was "common property" to all and that all children had a "right" to it. Education became nationalistic and collectivistic. And the educable elite are lost to it.

The university today, according to Nock, is not a university at all in the traditional sense. They are primarily institutes of instruction. Even all the way back to 1931 did Nock think that there were too many in number of students and tenured professors. Bigger is not better. A large university will have to be an institution that was not of the Great Tradition for two reasons: Firstly, the many are not educable. Secondly, the law of diminishing returns.

Such talk is taboo, no question. But, really, how many average men need to go to college, even as presently configured? Certainly not everyone should, as we are told today. Even the most basic and simple of jobs require college degrees in the present age! This idea has been engrained in us.

As "Mr. Libertarian," Murray Rothbard, wrote,

America was built by citizens and leaders many of whom received little or no formal schooling, and the idea that one must have a high-school diploma----or nowadays, an A.B. degree----before he can begin to work and to live in the world is an absurdity of the current age.

Concluding----and Politically Incorrect----Thoughts. It goes without saying that the chance the Great Tradition will be upheld in the future is zero. But for you and me, we can try to educate ourselves. I am an instructed man----not an educated one. And I do not presume (as a reader might think) to say that I am an educable man and not an ineducable one, according to Nock's high standards. [One of my goals is to learn Latin so I can attempt to give myself a classical education, care to join me?]

"[T]here is no possible compromise," Nock wrote, "with an unsound theory; nature always steps in and exacts her penalty." (p 142)

This is why we all should heed Albert Jay Nock's---the Tory Anarchist's---words. Once man realizes that, if he ever does, we can leave behind the nonstop tinkering with the "educational" system which is based on false ideas.

***

And we see these false ideas everywhere in education. It is not only displayed in the attempt to try to make everyone more or less bright (or, shall we say, dull), but it is also displayed in the attempt to fight against achievement gaps between groups of people. That is, between females and males, blacks and whites, and so on. Larry Summers tells some politically incorrect truths concerning the fact that men on average fill the high-end sciences whereas women do not, and for that he got the ax. James Watson, while not directly relating to the education system nonetheless overlaps in implications, tells some politically incorrect truths about (average) racial differences in intelligence, and he gets the ax.

Fred Reed in the April 7th edition of TAC wrote about how Harvard's most difficult mathematics course, Math 55, is made up of "45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male." I doubt it is "evil" discrimination or a random anomaly.

Why, yes, we should all judge individual persons qua unique individuals and treat them as such. This should go without saying. Obviously I am all for judging people by individual merit. But then to make some kind of jump into group egalitarianism is something quite different.

***

Addendum ~ A Few Random PI (politically incorrect) Thoughts:

Above and beyond the politically incorrect thoughts above, here are a few others that I have...

• Girls and boys should be separated in schools. Why? Because girls and boys learn differently; have different strong and weak points; have different aptitudes; have different personalities and require different kinds of environments and emotional support; and, obviously, for reasons of sexual distraction.
• Bring back a more stick and conservative dress code in schools. Aren't we all tired to seeing boys' underwear because of, for whatever reason it makes it "cool," unnecessarily baggy pants? (Where are the parents in this?) And have girls dress with some decency. Make them women; not sluts. The male mind, being what it is, is easy to indulge in imagination. Just dress decently and modestly. Women (and men) are not mere objects, but dressing as such invites such an image.
• As explained above in this blog entry, we must all accept the fact that not everyone is equally educable. Mankind is not made up of equal drones, ready to be programmed into robots waiting commands from the collective. So give the truly gifted elite, who are a rare and valuable group, all the encouragement possible with no constraints. To this end, as Nock and Frank Chodorov said, because the masses cannot stand differences, we must de-democratize education.
• Beyond bringing back the classics to the educable, mathematics must be learned correctly. Real learning and education is not memorizing idealized steps to solve idealized textbook problems. A parrot can parrot information but that does not necessarily mean it understands what it is parroting. Today mathematics, echoing the terms used by Nock, is instruction. One can insert a function into their graphing calculator, and that is all well and good, but that does not mean they know what they are doing. They are not learning or becoming educated in today's math.
  
• Most importantly, end government schools and compulsory attendance laws. Short of that: decentralize as far as possible.
  

Ah, well. I can dream, can't I? Were I to be somehow zapped into the distant future for a while, and wanted to find out if this future society were a free one or not, I would go find out if there were government schools in place. If it so happened that none were to be found after such a trek, I would then know that I discovered that a future free society exists.

Mr. Rockwell's dream, like mine, is to see public schools wither away.

We generally think that private schools are more expensive than the running of public schools, but the numbers go the other way:

This runs contrary to intuition, since people think of public schools as free and private schools as expensive. But once you consider the source of funding (tax dollars vs. market tuition or donation), the private alternative is much cheaper. In fact, the public schools cost as much as the most expensive and elite private schools in the country. The difference is that the cost of public schooling is spread out over the entire population, whereas the private school cost is borne only by the families with students who attend them.

In short, if we could abolish public schools and compulsory schooling laws, and replace it all with market-provided education, we would have better schools at half the price, and be freer too. We would also be a more just society, with only the customers of education bearing the costs.

Listen to this [MP3] lecture on "Roads, Education, and Waterways: The Case Against Public Services."

Walter Block Links:
---Official Website
---LRC Archives

[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.

Isabel Lyman at Taki's Top Drawer writes about how government school undermines society and family. Please take the time to read this article here. If you are a parent (or are to become one), I believe you should give serious thought about homeschooling your children.

Whenever I am hopefully blessed with children and a loving wife, there is no question in my mind that I will take all the energies that are necessary to provide a homeschooling environment. Government schools are nothing but cesspools.

Culture

According to the late Russell Kirk, T. S. Eliot said that culture is made up of, in Kirk’s words, “a mingling culture, aesthetic attainment, and intellectual attainment.” There are also three important ways to canvass the cultural state of society. To do this one must observe and make note of the average individual, “the development of a group or class or the development of a whole society.” One thing I gather from this discussion, from Kirk, is that culture is not just “democratic,” but also has ingrained the importance of cultural elites. Modern man, of course, cannot stand the idea of natural (non-governmental) elites. Man is Equal! Is the cry of the egalitarian ethic. His nature is of the robot, waiting to be programmed by the State. In this Albert Jay Nock and his disciple Frank Chodorov made the point that the mass-mind, in a democratic government, will always try to squash natural differences between men-----education being the best example (gone are the days of teaching Latin and Greek).

Culture, a healthy one, is one that is inegalitarian, but this does not mean that the public at large does not benefit from such a culture.

T. S. Eliot wrote:

Cultural disintegration is present when two or more strata so separate that these become in effect distinct cultures, and also when culture at the upper group level breaks into fragments each of which represents one culture activity alone. . . . If I am not mistaken, some disintegration of the classes in which culture is, or should be, most highly developed, has already taken place in Western Civilization----as well as some cultural separation between one level of society and another. Religious thought and private, philosophy and art, all tend to become isolated areas cultivated by groups in no communication with each other.

(Paleo)Libertarianism, in a way, is the foundation of thought. It is the foundation to which to build up from. A stronger foundation, the better the civilization develops and flourishes. That is to say, the more incline the foundation is with libertarianism: natural rights, private property, etc., the more civilization can grow and expand. A weaker foundation produces a weaker civilization to build to towering heights. You see, libertarianism is not the be-all and end-all of thinking. It is really confided to the foundation. (Libertarianism is not a philosophy of life.) Some old-time conservatives go after libertarian thought because they think it leaves out culture or religion or whatnot. However, they fail, in my view, to see that libertarianism is just a foundation. A society does build up from that foundation. Families, Church, markets, etc. arise. There is a hierarchy to families, as there is a hierarchy to the business world and Church. (Forgive me for being so bold, but a plus the Roman Catholic Church has is that it is hierarchical and undemocratic. By the way, Hans Hoppe made that point in a lecture.)

A couple of days ago I was speaking with one of my aunts. The topic centered on culture, God, sex, and social pressures. We talked about how society is so sex crazed. I had two general comments. One of which was from Albert Jay Nock. I said that Nock, once I explained who he was, believed that the mass-mind can only express itself on sex at its lowest levels. It does not know how to do anything else. Give it the environment to spread and it will spread at these levels. The second comment was that social pressures and constrains have disappeared. In a free society there are hierarchical outgrowths of pressures and competing authorities. These have been all lost because of statism. No longer do these social pressures have much effect. We have become atomized and isolated as individuals, detached from any tradition or norms. As Robert Nisbet said, we now have the “loose individual.” This is the necessary result of statism.

Chapter one out of Chodorov’s Out of Step, for instance, very briefly had a sentence or two about how social pressures helped “regulate” the business world. Although, not of culture, it applies just the same.

Restoring and Protecting Organic Culture

As Tom Woods said in his book The Church and the Market, traditional conservatives should understand that private property is a “major bulwark against leftist assault.” The foundation (private property) and its outgrowth give something solid for traditional conservatives. Looking to the State for answers to social or cultural problems, Dr. Woods says, is naiveté.

Fred Foldvary has done considerable work demonstrating the viability of purely private communities, and how they make provision for those things that mainstream economists have historically labeled “public goods” whose nature allegedly requires that they be provided by the state. There is in fact an enormous literature on this subject. It turns out that the reasons typically cited to justify taxation on behalf of the “common good” are entirely specious, since the goods and services in question can be provided by the private sector, without the disadvantages of a public sector monopoly . . . . .As for such property-related issues as pollution, noise, and the like, Rothbard showed . . . how such issues can be resolved within a common-law, property-rights framework. Such a framework possesses an overwhelming advantage over one that would decide such questions on the basis of the “common good,” such a vague concept could never provide the predictability, fixed rules, and peaceful social interaction that a property-rights regime makes possible.

During such times, far from looking around for excuses to curtail the right to private property, Catholics [and traditional conservatives in general] should want to have recourse to all the protections that private property can afford. If the rights of private property were respected across the board, without exception, we would have reason to expect a substantial improvement in the cultural and moral health of the American people.

To be clear, this is not to say that complete uniformity or utopia would arise. A free society, however, would allow man to develop as far as humanly possible. Man is different vis-à-vis another man, of course. Different societies and cultures would develop. And man, being human, will still engage in foolish activity. (How can he learn and grow otherwise?) One of the many problems with coercion, that violate human and private property rights, is that it brings about unintended consequences and will typically increase the very problem it is supposedly trying to cure. As Dr. Woods says, private property provides a "bulwark" against cultural leftism, which statist interventions increase and subsidize by the welfare state, and to the way it destroys social pressure and intermediate institutions (and then therefore detaches the individual from any cultural or social norms).

But beyond that, it is not possible for man to truly pursue virtue without the freedom to choose nor does the current institutional setting of today's statist society allow the flourishment, for the limited freedom man does have, of that to be the norm (i.e., values compatible with traditional conservatism and family)---the incentive structure is just the opposite. And, again, the State has destroyed all of the normal social pressures that curve man to activity that is more wise. As Lew Rockwell writes: "It is no accident that the rise of free love in the U.S. accompanied the rise of the fully developed welfare state. The goals of liberation from work (and saving and investment) and the liberation from our sexual natures stems from a similar ideological impulse: to overcome fixed realities in nature. The family has suffered as a result, just as Mises predicted it would."

To go back to Woods and his excellent book, he partially quotes Hans Hoppe on how Catholics (and traditional conservatives) should embrace libertarian anti-statism, and therefore, the rights that go with private property. Here is Hoppe, using his usually very sharp edged language and acidic style:

one would be on the right path toward restoring the freedom of association and exclusion implied in the institution of private property, if only towns and villages could and would do what they did as a matter of course until well into the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States. There would be signs regarding entrance requirements to the town, and, once in town, requirements for entering specific pieces of property . . . and those who did not meet these entrance requirements would be kicked out as trespassers. Almost instantly, cultural and moral normalcy would reassert itself.

The more decentralized and privatized, the greater the ability for various private communities to uphold norms. Society can be built up from the solid foundation. Private Catholic communities (and others) can develop. Here is Woods:

This is how Catholics faced with the collapse of civilized order should be thinking, rather than concocting rationales for state aggression against and expropriation of private property owners. Apart from the injustice involved, such misguided policy would only empower the state, the very institution that has done so much to undermine the kind of normal community life on which living out the Faith in practice has traditionally depended.

Hans Hoppe says that "to exclude other people from one's own property is the very means by which an owner can avoid 'bads' from happening: events that will lower the value of one's property. . .

In not being permitted to freely exclude, the incidence of bads----ill-behaved, lazy, unreliable, rotten students, employees, customers----will increase and property values will fall. In fact, forced integration (the result of all nondiscrimination policies) breeds ill behavior and bad character. . . . [I]f one is prevented from expelling others from one's property whenever their presence is deemed undesirable, ill behavior, misconduct, and outright rotten characters are encouraged (rendered less costly). . . . [T]he "bums"----in every conceivable area of incompetency (bumhood)---are permitted to perpetrate their unpleasantries everywhere, so bum-like behavior and bums will proliferate. The results of forced integration are only too visible. All social relations----whether in private or business life----have become increasingly egalitarian . . . and uncivilized.

To discriminate is an essential part of life. We "discriminate" as we pick our friends, allow and disallow visitors in our homes, we discriminate in the food we eat, and so on. It is part of life. It should be not be a "dirty" word. It should be a complement when one tells you "You have a discriminating mind!"

Imagine if we were not allowed to "discriminate;" boiling it down to its bones we could not even act because action itself implies discrimination as we pick one goal over another to aim for. Man, after all, acts because of uneasiness of his current state of being. If this were not true, then there would be no reasons for him to act. He would be in bliss. Action would just upset that bliss. To act implies to prefer X to Y and to discriminate against what is unwanted (at least, relatively speaking in one's preference of X to Y).

Culture and Literature

Turning back to Russell Kirk... How does a general culture express itself and how does it hold itself together?

T. S. Elito’s argument [is that] any healthy culture is represented at its higher levels by a class or body of persons of remarkable intelligence and taste, leaders in minds and conscience. Often such persons inherit their positions as guardians of culture; to borrow a phrase from Edmund Burke, these are the men and women who have been reared in “the unbought grace of life.”

Kirk says that the “culture of the crowd, then, is dependent . . . of the man of genius and the culture of the educated classes.” The egalitarian ethic would smash, for example, Shakespeare. How dare genius define the moral imagination! Subscribers to this ethic, while maybe not going that far, must only push down development.

While there are things, as I read the late Kirk, I think he is off, the one major lesson to learn from him is the importance of culture and how the moral imagination expresses itself through, very importantly, literature. It is in literature that we can and should find truths of human nature and existence. It brings life to culture----to society; i.e., the individuals who compose society. At least, this is what proper literature does. Eliot said that it ought to display “the permanent things.” That is to say, as Kirk put it, “enduring truths of human nature and society.” According to Kirk, modern literature treats life with no meaning. It does not give us “enduring truths.”

To quote him at more length:

Genuine relevance in literature, on the contrary, is relatedness to what Eliot described as “the permanent things”: to the splendor and tragedy of the human condition, to constant moral insights, to the spectacle of human history, to love of community and country, to the achievements of right reason. Such a literary relevance confers upon the rising generation a sense of what it is to be fully human, and a knowledge of what great men and women of imagination have imparted to our civilization over the centuries.

An important cause, it seems to me then, is the home schooling movement. It is here that these things can be truly taught because they are not taught well in public schools. Nor will they because they go against the agendas of statism. We as individuals should do our best to educate ourselves. To learn from classical literature. To avoid, says Kirk, today's “literature of nihilism, or pornography and of sensationalism.” We need to bring back norms of “an enduring standard” and ones of the “law of nature.”

“Normality,” say Kirk, “is not with the average sensual man ordinarily possesses: it is with he ought to try to possess.” [emphasis mine]

[Thoughts and quotes of Russell Kirk are pulled from various essays of The Essential Russell Kirk edited by George A. Panichas.]

See Also:

• Rejection of Ideology
• Apostasy of Modern Conservatism from Real Conservatives, like founder Russell Kirk
  

The climate of opinions, if one were to canvass the public, would lean to say that the study of religion and the study of other academic subjects, like literature and mathematics, be sundered, whereas theology is left out altogether of public schools. This view that no religion should be studied in school has always been puzzling to me. Is an educated child (or man) one who somnambulates through a dark room of ignorance? As I type this entry, this is not now, at least at this very moment, a post on theism versus atheism, which would completely miss the whole point, or having government impose religious values, which I find somewhat a silly topic because government schools will be imposing values one way or another. The topic is on becoming an educated man. To become an educated man requires an understanding of theology. Religion gives such a strong cultural bond in society that walking in ignorance of it is intellectual sloth. It has played such a essential role, for good or evil, in Western Civilization. Even atheist parents could recognize this and send their children to a private school that instructs accordingly so as to not leave their children in ignorance.

Well, as I reflect, maybe it is best that government schools do not touch religion. (Although, as I say this, this does not relieve the moral responsibility of the parents to give their children the necessary education, if their children are educable.) The State will only use it to their aims, and that the State did in the past. But it is best that they, the government schools, touch....nothing. Short of the day that government schools do not exist, and if that day comes I know a freedom spirit is blowing in the winds, the answer to education is to decentralize it as much as possible. It is in decentralization and secession that brings us closer to society based on private property and private law.

But I'll go further, as society continues moving towards statism and multiculturalism. As this social bond, the social bond of Christianity, keeps lessening in the West to be replaced by today's decadent and chaotic culture, one wonders if Western Civilization can survive or ever, shall we say, be born again. This transcendent and spiritual bond and connection in the minds of individuals gives rise, to what Edmund Burke called the "moral imagination." (This moral imagination expresses itself through the high arts.) Community and religion today have been replaced by nationalism and statism. As Russell Kirk wrote in the essay "Civilization Without Religion?" [PDF], those are no substitutes. You destroy the foundation and the whole thing collapses. Unity evaporates.

In one sentence in this essay, the late Kirk hits on something that I have thought about recently:

Faith no longer works wonder among us: one has but to glance at the typical church built nowadays, ugly and shoddy, to discern how architecture no longer nurtured by the religious imagination.

This exemplifies a civilization that has lost its way. When I look at the newer Roman Catholic Churches built, they so sadly fit Kirk's description.

An empty imagination of a people does not stay a vacuum, but instead fills with nihilism and hedonism of moral relativism. All objective judgments are lost and soon such a culture will loose any notion of natural rights or natural norms. One which also sees no limits to State power. In fact, Christianity was the start of the cerebration that even the State was under moral laws. Exactly why I am a anarcho-capitalist. The State is wholly a immoral institution in every way. As I recently quoted Lew Rockwell; "It skews the culture toward decadence and trash." He was referring to the presidency, but it fits with all of government. It also skews the engine of civilization, that is capitalism... Whereas religion, which the State also skews, is the "soul" of civilization, so to speak.

Hmm. Actually, we have not lost "religion," it is just warped into this pseudo-"religion" of today. This fake religion is the religion of Statism. It is at the center mind of so many do gooders who want to implement various government programs to turn earth into their form of Heaven. Reality will always bite back, though. There will be "blowback" because there is an actual economic reality (there are laws of economics) of how the world works-------a world of scarcity. I am not only picking on left-liberals and their economic socialism ------- this applies just as well to right-statists with their moral socialism (which results in worsening conditions and the detachment of the individual from intermediating social institutions, that Robert Nisbet understood all too well) or the fake right who worship democracy, Wilsonism, Bush, and the nightstick.

The Death of the West by Pat Buchanan is one of the most important books in recent times, and fits into this topic very well. He starts the book by quoting T. S. Eliot, which I will do here, to conclude this entry of thoughts.

See Also:

• Christianity and State Archive at LRC
• The Menace of the Religious Left by Rothbard
• Saint Hillary and the Religious Left

Friday (July 7th) on the PBS television show The McLaughlin Group, Mr. Patrick J. Buchanan was exceptionally excellent, even with the limited time and trimmed down comments. Go, Pat, Go! Buchanan confronted the central topic of the show and scored a goal, while refusing to pay attention to the politically correct taboos of the day on the subject of feminism, feminist egalitarianism, and the “culture” it produces. Not many other commentators would have the fortitude that Pat Buchanan had. Most would shy away, but Buchanan did not. He brought sanity to the debate.

Sanity is a very scarce resource today, especially on television. Right here is the reason I watch so little TV. (One of these days I may just pull a Russell Kirk and throw the TV out the window.) Beyond the basic package that the homeowners association gives us, which includes just local channels, C-SPAN, and one or two extras; no FOX news or CNN enters this household.

Anyways, Buchanan brought some sanity to the tube. That is why, trying not to use too much hyperbole here to this blog entry, it was refreshing and why my initial reaction to watching it was consequently high. To see the response of left-liberal Eleanor Clift was reward enough in itself. (Interesting, did not Murray Rothbard say that Ms. Clif was his least favorite panelist on the show? But, I think, he would have changed his mind under the current climate of politics. In fact, agreement between Pat Buchanan and Eleanor Clift is at an all time high due to this monstrous administration.)

Watch here [MP4]. I downloaded the audio [MP3] version. It seems to be a cut version because it did not include everything I saw on television, like the topic of public education. I am not sure if this is the case for the video too. But here is the transcript, which seems to have everything.

A couple of general comments on the show: Ms. Clift was not connecting the dots of what Buchanan was saying. Using Arab nations as an example as evidence is off the mark. Basic natural rights are inherited in both men and women. No question as far as that goes. Equality of the law is essential to a free society. But this does not imply that both sexes are equal in terms of general ability, personality, or roles in society. There are actual differences and more natural roles. We can say this both “physically” and “spiritually.” Treating them as “equal” is example of a civilization of decline. Matriarchy or one based on equality or equal distribution (like in the government), is sign of all fallen past civilizations. And we moving toward that, and it is a overall sign of decline and part of the West's slow death.

For example, a mother and a father have very different roles in a family. They have different functions. They provide different important things to their children. (Patriarchy, for instance, is completely natural, good, and healthy.) It is the natural state to provide the love, guidance, emotional balance, and discipline that is needed. (Compare this with the thinking that it is “natural” for a child to be raised with one parent or two “parents” of the same sex. Thinking that provides the same atmosphere, versus a natural one is perverted.)

Second comment: The always politically incorrect, which helps to cut through the bull, Fred Reed has a great article here on the feminization of boys in government schools, another area Buchanan was right on the mark. Reed, in his article, also touches on some truths in intelligence. For example, while females are more uniform in intelligence, males are more scattered. Hence, you will find more truly stupid men than truly stupid women. (Is that a shock!?) It also means that you will find more men that are geniuses than women. (Shocker, eh!?)

(Note: a similar article appears by Reed in the latest issue of The American Conservative.)

Some Pat Buchanan Links:

• Buchanan.org
• Pat Buchanan’s Syndicated Column
• Buchanan’s LRC Archive
  
• Buchanan’s Anti-War Articles
  
• Wikipedia Entry