1

In 1948, as the West took stock of a world reshaped by war, American scholar Richard M. Weaver published Ideas Have Consequences. It was not a work of policy or politics, but of diagnosis—an attempt to trace cultural decline back to the ideas that made it possible.

I aim to revisit Weaver’s book (its arguments, its context, and its enduring relevance) through selected passages that capture his personal reflections on the state-of-play as he saw it.

Today’s entry begins with approximately 15% of Roger Kimball’s entire 2013 introductory essay to Ideas Have Consequences’ expanded edition. Here, Kimball begins to paint a portrait of Weaver himself: the man, the mind, and the posture from which his warnings were issued.

The Consequences of Richard M. Weaver
by Roger Kimball

“The past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favors, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all.”
—Richard Weaver, 1962

“The simple process of preserving our present civilization is supremely complex, and demands incalculably subtle powers.”
—Ortega y Gasset, 1930

In the great pantheon of half-forgotten conservative sages, writer Richard M. Weaver (1910–63) occupies an important, if curious, niche. I say “writer,” but that is an imprecise designation. By trade, Weaver was a professor of rhetoric. He is even the author of a textbook on the subject. One friend said that Weaver was “a rhetor doing the work of a philosopher.” It might be more accurate to say that he was a critic doing the work of a prophet. Prophets as a species tend to specialize in bad news; they rarely return from the mountain reporting that the management has concluded that everything down below is just fine.

Weaver was no exception to this rule. He made his reputation as a latter-day Isaiah, bearing admonitory tidings to an inattentive populace. Above all, perhaps, he was an acolyte of what he lovingly called “lost causes.” The fact that a cause had lost, he argued, did not necessarily rob it of nobility; it did not mean that we could not learn something from the ideals that inspired it; it did not even mean that, ultimately, it was really lost. For what is lost might also be regained. It might serve not only as a reminder but also as a model, a new goal. In the “longer run,” as Weaver put it, “what seems lost might eventually prove victorious.”

Such, anyway, were among the explicit rationales that Weaver offered about the value of lost causes. An additional attraction, I suspect, lay in the romance of defeat. “Things reveal themselves passing away”; Weaver liked to quote that Yeatsian line. I believe he cherished the passing away as much as the accompanying revelation.

…

1948, a retrospective series drawn from Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences.