Ideas Have Consequences

by Richard M. Weaver

Plato saw: “the excessive love of self is in reality the source to each man of all offenses; for the lover is blinded about the beloved, so that he judges wrongly of the just, the good, and the honorable, and thinks that he ought always prefer his own interest to the truth.”

In Greek fable, as in Christian, it is asserted that there is a forbidden knowledge which brings nothing into the world but woe. Our generation has had ample demonstration of what that knowledge is. It is knowledge of the useful rather than of the true and the good, of techniques rather than of ends.

When utilitarianism becomes enthroned and the worker is taught that work is use and not worship, interest in quality begins to decline.

The bourgeoisie first betrayed society through capitalism and finance, and now labor betrays it by embracing a scheme of things which sees profit only, not duty and honor, in work.

It would be an unpopular man who should suggest to the present generation that work is a divine ordinance.

That curious modern hypostatization “service” is often called in to substitute for the now incomprehensible doctrine of vocation.

sentimental humanitarianism, ignorant of fundamental realities but ever attentive to desires, wrecks society.

Symbolism is a reaction against the deification of the material world, because the symbol is always a sign of things that are not compresent in time and space. The symbol by its nature transcends and thus points to the world beyond the world.

Here we discover a decline which extends from the fugues of Bach to the cacophonous arrangements of modern jazz.

The portents of change came with Beethoven, whose sympathy with the French Revolution must not be overlooked.

Thus three broad stages may be recognized in the decline of music in the West. In its highest form this music was architectural; it then became thematic; and, finally, before the incidence of certain present-day reactions, textural.

It is understandable, therefore, that jazz should have a great appeal to civilization’s fifth column, to the barbarians within the gates.

The symbolizing of perception through representation was being dropped in favor of an immediate contact with the flux of reality.

Egotism in work and art is the flowering, after long growth, of a heresy about human destiny.

Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. —NIETZSCHE

The problem which disintegration places in the lap of practical men, those in charge of states, of institutions, of businesses, is how to persuade to communal activity people who no longer have the same ideas about the most fundamental things.

The politicians and businessmen are not interested in saving souls, but they are interested in preserving a minimum of organization, for upon that depend their posts and their incomes.

No one is prepared to understand the influence of journalism on the public mind until he appreciates the fact that the newspaper is a spawn of the machine.

“no intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated, especially not into a form that is unalterable,—which must be the case with what is expressed in written symbols.”

Wow. Wise antique rebuke of sola scriptura. Anti-writing in general; truth is more incarnated, living between peoples.

I have felt that the way in which newspapers raked over every aspect of Adolf Hitler’s life and personality since the end of the war shows that they really have missed him; they now have no one to play anti-Christ against the bourgeois righteousness they represent.

“As the press of this country now exists, it would seem to be expressly devised by the great agent of mischief, to depress and destroy all that is good, and to elevate and advance all that is evil in the nation.

How, in the light of these facts, can one hesitate to conclude that we would live in greater peace and enjoy sounder moral health if the institution of the newspaper were abolished entirely?

the beliefs which underlie virtually every movie story are precisely the ones which are hurrying us on to perdition.

The entire globe is becoming imbued with the notion that there is something normative about the insane sort of life lived in New York and Hollywood—even after that life has been exaggerated to suit the morbid appetite of the thrill-seeker.

It has been said that tragedy is for aristocrats, comedy is for bourgeoisie, and farce is for peasants. What percentage of the output of motion-picture factories can qualify as tragedy?

The radio, more than press or screen, is the cheerful liar.

the closer man stands to ruin, the duller grows his realization; the annihilation of spiritual being precedes the destruction of temple walls.

What person taking the affirmative view of life can deny that the world served up daily by press, movie, and radio is a world of evil and negation?

the operators of the Great Stereopticon have an interest in keeping people from breaking through to deeper significances. Not only is the philosopher a notoriously poor consumer; he is also an unsettling influence on societies careless of justice. That there are abysses of meaning beneath his daily routine, the common man occasionally suspects; to have him realize them in some apocalyptic revelation might well threaten the foundations of materialist civilization.

We have seen in this country politicians elected in the face of almost unanimous press opposition;

saints and drunkards are never Whigs.

The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetites.

No one can be excused for moral degradation, but we are tempted to say of the urban dweller, as of the heathen, that he never had an opportunity for salvation.

That man is the product of discipline and of forging, that he really owes thanks for the pulling and tugging that enable him to grow—this concept left the manuals of education with the advent of Romanticism.

where everything ministers to desire, there can be no rebuke to comfort.

absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.

In Thomism, based as it is on Aristotle, even the Catholic church turned away from the asceticism and the rigorous morality of the patristic fathers to accept a degree of pragmatic acquiescence in the world. This difference has prompted someone to say that, whereas Plato built the cathedrals of England, Aristotle built the manor houses.

Exertion, self-denial, endurance, these make the hero, but to the spoiled child they connote the evil of nature and the malice of man.

sacrifice means not investment but giving up something to the transcendental.

How they must chuckle over this fatuity of liberalism.

Here man is in a peculiar dilemma: the more he has of liberty, the less he can have of the fruits of productive work.

In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. —TROTSKY

Respecters of private property are really obligated to oppose much that is done today in the name of private enterprise, for corporate organization and monopoly are the very means whereby property is casting aside its privacy.

whatever has to court public favor for its support will sooner or later be prostituted to utilitarian ends.

It seems fair to say that the opposite of the private is the prostitute.

It came to be assumed that politics was a mere handmaiden of economics, and books describing the ancillary role of political belief were received as revelations. This was the supreme falsification by the bourgeois mentality.

So long as there is a single breach in monism or pragmatism, the cause of values is not lost.

It is likely—though this is not a question to be resolved by babes and sucklings—that human society cannot exist without some resource of sacredness. Those states which have sought openly to remove it have tended in the end to assume divinity themselves.

a liberal is one who doubts his premises even when he is proceeding on them. This seems the very prescription for demoralization if not for insanity.

There is some ultimate identification of goodness and truth, so that he who ignores or loses faith in the former can by no possible means save the latter.