Ideas Have Consequences

by Richard M. Weaver

Weaver acknowledged at the beginning of Ideas that lamentation about “the decadence of a present age is one of the permanent illusions of mankind.” But that was a pro forma rider. At the center of his analysis was the insistence that modern man, “like Macbeth,” had made an evil decision to trade allegiance to transcendent principles for present gain. From this Faustian bargain all manner of bad things flow. Weaver warns about “the insolence of material success,” the “technification of the world,” the obliteration of distinctions that make living “strenuously, or romantically” possible. “Presentism,” the effort to begin each day, as Allen Tate put it, as if there were no yesterday, has robbed man of his history and therefore his identity as a moral agent.