The Vision of Richard Weaver. - book reviews

National Review, Jan 29, 1996 by Ben C. Toledano

The Vision of Richard Weaver, edited by Joseph Scotchie (Transaction, 239 pp., $39.95)

I am one of those people who cleans his house only when friends are coming over. That's the same fix conservatives are in today, except for one important difference. It has been so many years since they've had company that they don't know how their house should look. In more eloquent terms, A. J. Bacevich writes that "the omnium-gatherum of values currently passing for 'conservative' is laced with inconsistencies and contradictions -- contradictions most evident to the observer perched on the seam where tradition meets modernity, or where culture collides with grand prescriptions for economic growth and the transforming potential of new technologies." To illustrate simply, a Republican state senator in Georgia had this to say about the recent election of Floyd Adams Jr. as Savannah's first black mayor: "If Floyd immediately reaches out and shows he's pro-business, then there will be a big sigh of relief."

Yet, some Southerners, though in smaller numbers than in the past, understand the basic problem, for as Eugene Genovese has written, "Southern Conservatism has always traced the evils of the modern world to the ascendancy of the profit motive and material acquisitiveness . . . [and] to an idolatrous cult of economic growth and scientific and technological progress." He further states that we cannot expect "to live as civilized human beings in a society that makes the market the arbiter of our moral, spiritual, and political life." Yet that is what we have been attempting to do. Now, for the first time in many decades, we seem willing to come to terms with these debilitating contradictions, to consider at least the possibility of changing course, of accommodating the secular and the temporal to the spiritual and the eternal. We are beginning to acknowledge that the brotherhood of man is no more than a meaningless, secular cult of right-mindedness in the absence of the fatherhood of God.

Sixty years ago, Cleanth Brooks declared that even the Christian Right did not understand "the hiatus existing between the dominant interests of modern America and specifically religious interests" -- that is, "discrepancies between a Christian civilization and . . . enlightened American capitalism." In my opinion, such is still the case. It must be noted that Brooks "roughly defined" religion as "that system of basic values which underlies a civilization," values that are affirmed as eternal.

Richard M. Weaver, a Southerner born and raised on the soils of North Carolina and Kentucky, received his AB degree from the University of Kentucky (1932), his MA from Vanderbilt (1934), where he studied under John Crowe Ransom; and his PhD from LSU (1943), where he worked closely with Cleanth Brooks. Almost fifty years ago, his first book, Ideas Have Consequences (1948), described by Weaver as "a rigorous cause-and-effect analysis of the decline of belief in standards and values," was published by the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1944 until his untimely death in 1963. He was a regular contributor to NR from its founding onward.

Only three of Weaver's books appeared during his short lifetime. The other two were the The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953) and Composition: A Course in Reading and Writing (1957). Following his death, several more volumes of his writings were published: Visions of Order, The Cultural Crisis of Our Time, Life without Prejudice and Other Essays, The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought, Language Is Sermonic: Richard M. Weaver on the Nature of Rhetoric, and The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver.

Recently, interest in Weaver's work has increased, as witnessed by Fred Douglas Young's intellectual biography, an in-depth study of Weaver's books, and by a collection of previously published essays about Weaver's writings, edited by Joseph Scotchie. Other works in progress are a biography of Weaver by Professor Ted J. Smith III and a comprehensive collection of Weaver's essays edited by Smith to be published by the Liberty Fund Press. Apparently the time has come for an overdue appreciation of an important American thinker. Yet the timing may be right, because from Weaver we can learn how and why our culture and its moral and ethical principles deteriorated and decayed. He explains not only how we came to be "moral idiots" and "ethical eunuchs," but also what we can possibly do to improve the situation.

There is a central overriding theme to be found in all of Weaver's writings, his belief that the worship of science, equality, materialism, and self has caused "the loss of those things which are essential to the life of civility and culture." It is the "denial of standards, and ultimately of knowledge, which lies at the source of our degradation . . . we have allowed ourselves to be blinded by the insolence of material success." We have forgotten that "life means discipline and sacrifice," and are overcome by "the animal desire to consume." To bring harmony back into the world, "we shall have to regard with the spirit of piety three things: nature, our neighbors -- by which I mean all other people -- and the past."