My Druthers

While I am, for the most part, opposed to the vulgar, Americanization, of the English language, the phrase I have chosen for the title of this essay, a late nineteenth century drawled American contraction of the words “would rather”, expresses the subject of this essay perfectly.

In the unlikely event that I have my druthers and the upcoming Dominion election turns out exactly the way I want it to the following is what will happen on October 21st.

First, Captain Airhead will be turfed out on his rear end in the most decisive negative vote in the history of Canada. I am talking zero seats being given to the Grits in the next Parliament.

Second, the New Democrats will also be reduced to non-party status and be finished once and for all.

Third, the Greens will form Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and will from here on out take the place on the left made vacant by the decimation of the Liberals and NDP.

Fourth, the Conservatives will receive a minority government. Nota bene, I said minority, not majority. The Conservatives wasted the last majority government they received under Stephen Harper and I have not the least doubt that they would do the same under Andrew Scheer.

Fifthly, holding the balance of power and propping up the minority Conservative government, will be Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada. My reasons for wanting this to happen rather than for Bernier to form the next government are twofold. First, I suspect that he and his party would drift left-ward if they actually formed the government. This would inevitably be the case if they received a minority government – any other party, including the Conservatives, holding the balance of power would exert a left-ward pull. Second, I think that by exerting the leverage they would hold in this position they could accomplish more of the excellent goals in their party platform than if they formed the government.

Remember, all of this is what I would like to see happen, not what I am predicting will happen. I doubt that anyone will be able to accurately forecast the outcome of this election and I think the likelihood of it turning out exactly the way I want is extremely slim. It would require, for one thing, that the Canadian right develop overnight a capacity for strategic voting that it has given no previous indication of possessing, unlike the Canadian left which used that very method to straddle us with Captain Airhead in the last Dominion election.

It provides me with no small amount of amusement that so many of those who would share the first and second of the above set of druthers get so irate at the suggestion that anything less than an outright majority government by the Conservatives – or People’s Party depending upon which sort of partisan they happen to be – would be acceptable, much less desirable. Obviously the leaders, candidates, and campaign teams of the parties cannot make anything less than a majority government their goal, but there is no good reason why right-of-centre thinkers outside of the aforementioned groups should not prefer a different outcome. It is the job of right-wing politicians to win elections by selling a right-wing platform to the electorate. It is not the job of the right-wing portion of the electorate to put those politicians into office in an unthinking manner, without asking hard questions and making hard demands of them. The attitude that the electorate owes them their votes has always been one of the most obnoxious aspects of smug, Grit, arrogance. It ought not to be imitated on the right. It is the duty of right-wing commentators of the fourth and, like this writer, fifth estates, to constantly remind right-wing politicians of right-wing principles and hold them accountable. It irritates me that those who think otherwise regard any criticism of the leaders of their preferred parties as being akin to campaigning for the left. I have even seen such nincompoops describe Ezra Levant, the same Ezra Levant whom the mainstream media equally absurdly labels a “right-wing extremist”, as a Liberal agent because of his criticism of Scheer. These fools think of elections in terms of salvation and cannot bear to hear anything negative about their would-be Messiahs. This is the way progressives view politics and there ought to be no room for it on the right.

Of course the sort of people I have been talking about are “conservatives” of a highly Americanized type. Over the last two to three decades I have watched them jettison virtually every principle that has historically and traditionally been considered right-wing to the point that only capitalism seems to be indispensable to them. Which is ironic because capitalism is not right-wing. The true right is anti-socialist not capitalist. It is anti-socialist because it is hierarchical and socialism is egalitarian and it is anti-socialist because it is strongly pro-property – even more so than classical liberalism – and being anti-property is the very essence of socialism. The true right, while anti-socialist, has always been willing to condemn the vulgarity and Philistinism of capitalism and its erosion of social and cultural mores.

The same people, I would point out, are often the ones who insist that if the Liberals win again the Western provinces, or at least Alberta, ought to separate from Canada. While they are right to believe that Ottawa has treated the Western provinces unjustly, especially whenever the Liberals headed by a Trudeau have been in government, I have no sympathy with this kind of separatism whatsoever. The separatists all talk about forming a republic, proving themselves to be liberals. Alan Clark, the military historian turned Tory statesman, best remembered for his Diaries, who served as a junior minister in the ministries of Trade and Defence under Margaret Thatcher, was a Powellite and Eurosceptic who after the vote on the Common Market told the Labour MP Dennis Skinner “I'd rather live in a socialist Britain than one ruled by a lot of f***ing foreigners.” To paraphrase the sentiment, and apply it to the matter at hand, I’d rather live in a socialist Canada with her traditional constitution than in any sort of ******* republic. (1)

This, by the way, is why I would like to see the Greens replace both the NDP and the Grits on the other side of Canada’s political spectrum. Elizabeth May, however crazy I think her climate-change alarmism is, and however annoying I find her other progressive twaddle like that nonsense about “white privilege” she was spouting at Monday’s debate, is sound on the constitution. (2) Jagmeet Singh, like most NDPers, (3) is not.

Allow me to conclude by returning to the subject of my druthers and pursuing it a bit further than the outcome of the imminent election.

First, Canada would undergo a major revival of sound Christian religion.

Second, to summarize paragraphs nine through twelve above, the Canadian right would abandon American neo-conservatism and return to genuine British/Canadian Toryism. This would mean that both the preservation of our constitution – the preservation of our constitution, mind you, and not the adoption of one more like that of the Americans - and opposition to moral, social, and cultural decay would take precedence over any economic and fiscal concerns.

Third, the Canadian right would make it a top priority to break the control of the progressive cartel over the majority of the fourth estate.

Fourth, they would make it another top priority to repeal the Canadian Human Rights Act and abolish the Canadian Human Rights Commission/Tribunals. Despite the name of the Act/Commission/Tribunal these do nothing to protect people from the arbitrary abuse of government power but rather enable that abuse by allowing the state to police the thoughts, intentions, and motives of Canadians. To demonstrate this to the public, all that needs to be done is to encourage them to actually read the Act. Then explain the difference between a non-discrimination policy – Her Majesty’s government will administer the law and justice fairly and justly without discriminating on the basis of X, Y, Z – and an anti-discrimination law in which the government unnecessarily interjects itself into private transactions and tells us that we cannot have certain thoughts or allow them to influence us in our interactions with others.

Fifth, they would work through the provincial legislatures – which have jurisdiction over the matter – to ensure that a Canadian civics in which our constitution, history, and heritage are respected becomes part of our educational system so much so that parties that want to destroy our constitution, turn the country into a republic, or break up Confederation, become completely unelectable.

Sixth, they will put Sir John A. Macdonald back on our money where he belongs, and restore any other monument to the leading Father of Confederation that has been removed for politically correct purposes.

I could probably add others but that is enough wishful thinking for now.

(1) In response to a recent post by Will S. at his Patriactionary blog about how the West should have recognized the Republic of China (Taiwan) as legitimate rather than the People’s Republic of China (Red China) I said: “Neither Republic is legitimate, as no republic is a legitimate form of government (I would allow for the possibility of two exceptions to this in all of human history – Switzerland and the defunct Confederate States of America). The West should have told all of China that until they restored the Quin dynasty and put the rightful heir of the House of Aisin Gioro back on the throne we would not recognize any Chinese government as being legitimate, with the People’s Republic being even less legitimate than the other one. Sadly, the West let the bloody Yanks do all the talking for the rest of us.”

(2) http://maplemonarchists.weebly.com/blog/monarchist-profile-elizabeth-may

(3) Tommy Douglas and Jack Layton, both deceased, are the only exceptions that really come to mind off the top of my head. Eugene Forsey, who in his heart was really a Conservative all his life regardless of which party he was nominally associated with at the time was a strong constitutionalist but he was never an NDPer. He left the CCF when it became the NDP.

The Tory and Capitalism

If you were to ask most people today whether conservatives believed in capitalism or not the answer you would receive would be yes. The neoconservatives, a species of liberal who regard liberal democracy, especially in its American form, as the crowning achievement of human civilization and wish to make it universal, through military force if necessary, would certainly agree. What about Tories, the foundation of whose classical conservatism is belief in the duty of royal and ecclesiastical authority, rooted in tradition and prescription, to work together for the common good of the society?

To answer this question, we must first answer another, namely, what do we mean by capitalism. This is not an easy question to answer because the word capitalism is used to denote the actual economic system that has become predominant in Western countries over the last two-and-a-half to three centuries, a theoretical system of economic organization, and an economic activity and, although it has become the habit of capitalism’s enemies and detractors to jump from one of these senses to another as if they were synonymous, they are not always in harmony with one another. The actual capitalism of history has never looked like quite like what theoretical capitalism looks like on paper, and to complicate matters further historical capitalism has not remained the same throughout history, looking very different at the beginning of the twenty-first century, than it did at the beginning of the nineteenth.

The word capitalist entered the English language in the eighteenth century with the basic meaning of someone who owns capital, in other words a property-owner or businessman. The word capitalism appeared later in the nineteenth century, at first simply meaning the condition of being a capitalist, of owning capital. By the end of the nineteenth century it had taken on its other senses through the influence of Karl Marx, although he himself used it sparingly.

The pre-Marx meaning of capitalism survives in its usage in reference to an economic activity. In this sense, capitalism is what the capitalist or businessman does. He owns productive property, which he either works himself or hires others to work for him, trades or sells the product, the profit of which, that is to say the difference between what he receives for the product and the expense of production, is his income to live off of, save, or reinvest.

Capitalism, in this sense of the word, has been around for as long as men have dwelt in towns and cities – since the dawn of civilization, in other words – and the Tory recognizes it to be an indispensable part of civilization and one which is a positive benefit to human life and society. While the Tory will condemn dishonest and dishonourable business practices, such as the cheating of customers and the underpaying and overburdening of workers, and the like, he cannot and will not join with those who condemn business, commerce, and the ownership of property as being immoral or unjust in and of themselves. Samuel Johnson, the most distinguished Tory of the eighteenth century, in his The Adventurer, No. 67 praised the booming trade of London for the way in which “by a thousand unheeded and evanescent kinds of business, are the multitudes of this city preserved from idleness, and consequently from want” (1) and is quoted by his friend and biographer James Boswell as having said that “'There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.”

The other meanings of capitalism can be traced to Karl Marx, who used it in the historical sense to denote the economic conditions brought about by the Industrial Revolution. That Marx, a progressive, atheist, revolutionary, who built his entire philosophy upon a visceral hatred of the civilization in which he flourished, in other words the embodiment of everything the Tory opposes, made himself the archenemy of capitalism, might be considered reason enough for the Tory to identify with capitalism were it not for the fact that the liberals reasoned that way first and attached the label capitalism to the system of economics they advocated. That system, however, the Tory can only endorse with many qualifications.

In 1776, Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith published his treatise An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. That which Dr. Johnson spoke of admiringly in The Adventurer, the way commerce generates an abundance of goods through numerous and diverse specialized crafts and trades that allow each person to find profitable employment in his own particular niche, Smith subjected to in-depth analysis. From this analysis he concluded that the market – not any actual marketplace but the activity that goes on there, the exchange of goods and services through the medium of currency, considered in the abstract – is a self-regulating mechanism, in which the forces of supply and demand maintain equilibrium, which takes the self-interested actions of its participants and directs the outcome for the common good. He used this conclusion to argue against mercantalism, the government practice at the time of regulating and protecting trade so as to maximize the inflow of bullion, and in favour of a government policy of allowing the market to operate on its own.

This is the doctrine of economic liberalism and, after the publication of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in the late nineteenth century, liberals began to refer to their theoretical system in which the market operates freely under a state that practices laissez-faire (2), as capitalism. Thus was born the ongoing debate between classical liberals who argue for capitalism, meaning the free market system, and the followers of Marx who argue against capitalism, meaning the post-Industrial Revolution Western economic system, with a sort of mutual agreement between the two to pretend not to notice that neither means quite the same thing that the other does by capitalism.

The Tory does not quite agree with either. The idea of the market as a self-regulating system that contains its own equilibrium is one that the Tory can accept, especially since it is so evidently true that even the socialists more or less accept it today, but not in its usual liberal formulation. The problem the Tory has with liberal economics is the same problem he has with liberalism in general – the false assumptions that the individual is prior to society and that society is an artificial construction of the individual, that freedom is the natural state of man outside of society rather than the natural state of man inside society and made possible by the social order, and that freedom involves man emancipating and following his passions and appetites rather than ruling over them.

The market, the Tory maintains, works the way liberal economists describe it, but only within the context of a stable and secure social and civil order, and especially one whose culture has been shaped and continues to be influenced by the classical and Christian moral traditions. In these traditions, patterns of moderate behaviour in which man rules over his appetites are praised as virtues, whereas habits of indulgence in the same appetites are condemned as vices. The basic appetites for sex, food, and material acquisition are not sinful or vicious in themselves, but when indulged in to excess and allowed to rule over a man, become the vices of lust, gluttony, and avarice, which are three of the Seven Deadly Sins, albeit the three least in the traditional ranking. Business is there for the production, distribution, and acquisition of material goods, and the market is there to facilitate business. Neither business nor the market are intrinsically avaricious, despite the claims of socialists whose entire system of thought, as we will see in our next essay about socialism, is built upon the greater sin of envy, but they require the restraints of the classical and Christian moral and cultural tradition to help men rule their appetite for acquisition and keep it from turning into avarice.

Without these moral and cultural restraints, the Tory insists, market capitalism becomes a force that erodes the very social and civil order that provides the context that allows the market to function. Capitalism, as it has played out in history, has frequently been that force, uprooting communities, dissolving traditions, and attacking the moral, social, and civil order and today, in its international, globalist, corporate form it is aggressively laying waste to what is left of the older traditions, as most recently evidenced by the way the large corporations intervened in the American courts against traditional marriage. Karl Marx saw the way in which capitalism uproots and dissolves the traditional order as something for which the bourgeoisie deserve praise. The Tory sees it as that for which capitalism most deserves condemnation.




(1) http://www.johnsonessays.com/the-adventurer/no-67-on-the-trades-of-london/

(2) This literally translates as “let do”. The basic idea of laissez-faire is that of a “hands off approach”, in which the government lets business operate on its own.

How We Got Here From There

Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1948, 1984, 190 pages.

The collapse of Western civilization is evident wherever we turn our eye. When living amidst ruins our thoughts often turn to the civilization that existed before the collapse and to the question of what happened to it. How did we get to where we are today from where we were back then?

Sixty-six years ago, the Second World War came to an end. Today, this conflict is widely remembered as “the Good War” and the Allied victory is regarded as the ultimate triumph of good over evil by many. Distance from the events has helped this rather uncritical perspective to spread. For while the end of the war had brought about an end to the tyranny of the Third Reich and to the aggression of Imperial Japan, it also brought about an end to the British Empire. The liberation of occupied Europe and of the concentration camps had brought to light the astonishing degree of evil that was possible in the country that had given us Mozart, Beethoven, and Goethe. An even more evil regime than Nazi Germany, Stalin’s USSR, came out of the war triumphant. Stalin held in captivity the Eastern European countries the Red Army had “liberated” from the Nazis and now posed a major threat to Western Europe. Finally, the war had been brought to an end, by the unconscionable act of dropping atomic bombs on two Japanese cities.

In the years immediately following the War, the question of “how we got here” was on many minds. In 1948, the University of Chicago Press published an answer, in a brief but deep, book by Richard M. Weaver entitled Ideas Have Consequences. Weaver was an English professor at the University of Chicago and a conservative. His book, in the words of Dr. Robert Nisbet, “launched the renaissance of philosophical conservatism in” the United States and “is one of the few authentic classics in the American political tradition”.

In the first sentence of his introduction, Weaver declared his topic to be the “dissolution of the West”. On the same page he tells us “there is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot”. If that could be written in 1948, think about what that says about man today!

In his introduction, Weaver presents a series of steps, that have taken Western man from the nominalism of William of Occam in the late 14th century and brought him to Nagasaki in the 20th century. This is a lot further back than most conservatives today would trace the decay. There is a tendency among the current generation of conservatives to see the decline of the West as a 20th century problem or, if they are more informed, to trace it back to the “Enlightenment”. When nominalism was born, the Renaissance was just in its infancy stage and the Reformation was a century away. Weaver has done a very good job of showing how the stages he writes about, proceed from the previous ones in a chain, as well as of demonstrating why that chain is a chain of descent rather than the chain of ascent that progressives would identify it as.

Ideas Have Consequences, however, should not be read as an exercise in finger pointing – “it is all Occam’s fault!”. It is a diagnosis of a culture and a civilization and to understand a diagnosis we need to have an idea of what a “healthy” culture and civilization looks like. A healthy civilization is one which is integrated around a center that is illuminated by universals.

What are universals? They are ideas which transcend particulars. The material world consists of particulars. There are particular people, particular objects, particular places, particular things of all sorts, which we experience in everyday life. A universal is something which we cannot see and experience but which is essential to our understanding particulars. If we say “Bob is a man” what are we saying about Bob? To know what that predicate is saying about Bob, we need to have an idea of what “man” is. This means having an idea of something called “man” which is different from a particular man like Bob, but which applies to Bob, Joe, Bill and every other particular of whom “is a man” is a valid predicate.

Plato and Aristotle disagreed as to the nature of universals and their relationship to human knowledge. Plato, asserted that universals were Forms, that existed in the realm of pure thought, and that we obtain knowledge when particulars, which are imperfect representations of universals, awaken within us innate concepts of the universals they represent. Contemplation of those universals is the road to truth. Aristotle argued that knowledge of the universals is not innate, something to be awakened through a process of remembering, but something we arrive at by generalizing from particulars.

Weaver was a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian, and this manifests itself in his book, but a Platonic rather than Aristotelian understanding of universals is not absolutely essential to his main concept. However they may have disagreed on the nature of universals, both Plato and Aristotle insisted that true knowledge is a knowledge of universals (truth) rather than an accumulation of knowledge about particulars (facts). This is the classical perspective which was incorporated into the Christian religion and Christian theology.

It is this perspective that William of Occam, the 14th century Franciscan friar who is best remembered today for his law stating that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”, and the school of nominalism attacked. As Weaver puts it:

The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence…It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence. (p. 3)

The steps, according to Weaver, that brought Western man from nominalism to the Twentieth Century are as follows: From the denial the real existence of universals, came the necessary belief that nature (the physical world) is fully intelligible within itself, from which came the liberal rejection of Original Sin and faith in the fundamental goodness of man. From this came rationalism and modern science which uses knowledge of the physical world as a means to domination. Next came Darwinism which sought to explain man by his environment, and from that social theories which explained human action by economic factors.

To those who object, that these steps represent progress, because modern science and the technology it has created have led to an increase in material blessings, Weaver points out that:

One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today. (p. 14)

This disparity has only gotten more pronounced in the decades since those words were first written.

What nominalism robbed Western man of , Weaver explains, is the center of his knowledge and civilization, and without a center civilization must inevitably disintegrate. Man cannot rely upon reason alone because the outcome of reason is determined by man’s disposition:

If the disposition is wrong, reason increases maleficence; if it is right, reason orders and furthers the good. (p. 19)

Reason, in other words, is instrumental, it is a means to an end. But what end?

Our everyday thoughts, Weaver tells us, rest upon our beliefs, which in turn are derived from our “metaphysical dream”. Now, upon a first reading of Weaver, one might be tempted to write off Weaver’s rather singular terminology as the kind of rhetorical flourish to be expected from a university English professor, and to read “worldview” wherever Weaver writes “metaphysical dream” or “mass media” wherever he refers to “the Great Stereopticon”. This would be a mistake, however, for Weaver chooses his terminology for its precision rather than for its rhetorical effect. Worldview is a much more general term, referring to any broad outlook upon the world in general. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines questions about the world which cannot be answered through the natural sciences, such as why it exists, and what the purpose of life is. A “metaphysical dream” then, is the level of conscious thought where one’s basic understanding of the answers to such questions lies.

It should be apparent how this level of reflection depends upon universals. For if the sentence “Bob is a man” is unintelligible apart from the universal concept of “man”, in which case the universal is clearly, if imperfectly, reflected in a physical world before our eyes, then ultimate questions of the reason and purpose for existence will require universals to be understood, let alone answered, and these universals will be ones whose manifestation in the world observable through the senses is less immediately apparent than that of “man” – universals like, truth, love, justice, good, etc.

The metaphysical dream is the center which integrates and unites a “metaphysical community” which Weaver describes as being “suffused with a common feeling about the world which enables all vocations to meet without embarrassment and to enjoy the strength that comes of common tendency”. (p. 33) When the center is lost, the culture it holds together begins to fall apart. When men reject the universals, they make the mistake of defining the physical world as the “real world” and they must search for a purpose and meaning for their lives that is contained entirely within this physical world. How often have we heard someone refer to the struggle to obtain the material necessities of life as “the real world”, making the end of that struggle the purpose of existence, and dismissing the civilizing forms, structures, and conventions of culture?

When man turns away God, the Good, and the universals, he loses his sense of higher purpose. When he loses this, he loses his vocation, i.e. the sense of higher calling which makes his activity meaningful and fulfilling. He also loses his sense of having a shared purpose with all other members of his community from the highest to the lowest. In the second through fourth chapters of his book, Weaver explores how this loss manifests itself politically, socially, and economically in ways which are harmful to the community and to society.

When a shared sense of a higher purpose is lost to a community or a society it loses its fraternity which has been replaced, in Western societies, with the notion of equality. Weaver writes:

The ancient feeling of brotherhood carries obligations of which equality knows nothing. It calls for respect and protection, for brotherhood is status in family, and family is by nature hierarchical. It demands patience with little brother, and it may sterns exact duty of big brother. (pp. 41-42).

Fraternity binds a community together, equality, other than equality before the law, tears it apart. Equality is the rejection of distinctions and hierarchy, both of which are essential to the structure of society. Modern democracy, Weaver informs us, is a lie and a contradiction. It is a lie because:

If it promises equality before the law, it does no more than empires and monarchies have done…If it promises equality of condition, it promises injustice, because one law for the ox and for the lion is tyranny. (p. 44)

It is a contradiction because it purports to be the most effective means of placing the people best suited to leadership in governing positions. This contradicts egalitarian democracy’s own rhetoric, for if one man is as good as another, there can be no people who are better suited for leadership than others, let alone any that are best suited. If egalitarian democrats truly believed what they preach they would demand that governors be chosen at random rather than through elections.

If we want our society to be led by the people best suited to be leaders, we must believe in a distinction between best, better, good, bad, worse, and worst. This distinction forms a hierarchy and the leadership of the best, is by definition, aristocracy. “Democracy” Weaver writes, “cannot exist without aristocracy.” (p. 49)

In this context that Weaver, talking about modern democracy’s celebration of the common, the mediocre, and the average and denigration of the excellent, made the following interesting remark:

The democrats well sense that, if they allow people to divide according to abilities and preferences, soon structure will impose itself upon the mass. Hence the adulation of the regular fellow, the political seduction of the common man, and the deep distrust of intellectuals, whose grasp of principle gives them superior insight. (p. 46)

Many would probably balk at Weaver’s description of intellectuals as people “whose grasp of principle gives them superior insight”. Contemporary “intellectuals” tend to be supporters of every progressive fad, revolutionary cause, and left-wing notion no matter how utterly stupid it is. Why on earth, then, would Weaver describe such people in such adulatory terms?

The answer is that he is not talking about that kind of intellectual. In his book, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, historian Paul Johnson describes people who believe that because of their intellectual accomplishments, they form a class that better deserves than the clergy to fill the clergy’s old role as the spiritual and moral leaders of society and the world. Professing their love for mankind, they are brutal to people in particular, and Johnson describes their personal tyrannies towards the people closest to them in their own lives, in great detail, to make the point that these are the people who are least suited to spiritual and moral leadership.

Author Tom Wolfe made an interesting point about such people in his commencement address to Boston University in 2000. He said:

Now, we must be careful to make a distinction between the intellectual and the person of intellectual achievement. The two are very very different animals. There are people of intellectual achievement, who increase the sum of human knowledge, the powers of human insight, and analysis. And then there are the intellectuals. An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others.

As an example of this, Wolfe pointed to Noam Chomsky, the brilliant linguist. After describing Chomsky’s contributions to our understanding of grammar and our psychological ability to learn, Wolfe said:

Did anyone call him an intellectual merely because he was one of the most brilliant people in the United States? No. When did he become an intellectual? When he finally spoke out concerning something he knew absolutely nothing about: the war in Vietnam.

Chomsky was, in other words, a specialist who was speaking outside his field.

Weaver, in the third chapter of his book, explains the phenomenon of this kind of intellectual to us. His explanation is similar to Wolfe’s but also very different. For Weaver, the problem is not that a specialist is speaking outside his field of expertise, the problem is rather specialization itself.

In the Middle Ages, Weaver tells us, “the possessor of highest learning was the philosophic doctor”. (p. 52). This was not someone who had earned the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in a university, but someone who “had mastered principles”, i.e. the universals of metaphysics and theology. Such a person ranked far above “those who had acquired only facts and skills”.

In the initial stage of modernism the philosophic doctor was replaced by a secular equivalent – the gentleman, Castiglione’s courtier, the “renaissance man”. The gentleman was in some ways similar to what we would call a polymath today but there is also a key difference. A polymath is someone with expertise in several areas, Weaver’s gentleman is characterized by “a general view of the relationship of things”. The original meaning of “liberal education” was education designed to impart such a general (“broad” or “liberal”) view to a person.

The philosophic doctor, the renaissance gentleman, and their North American descendant the antebellum Southern gentleman raised in the “Ciceronian tradition of eloquent wisdom” (p. 55) are the intellectuals Weaver spoke of “whose grasp of principle gives them superior insight”. What happened to them? When nominalism rejected universals, it started a process whereby truth, which is at the center of knowledge and was the subject of the learning of the philosophic doctor and gentleman, was replaced with facts, the subject matter of the specialist. The modern scientist is a specialist. He spends his life amassing a huge amount of information about the aspect of the physical world that he has chosen as his subject of expertise. This may lead to amazing breakthroughs within the context of his own field. In the broader view of human knowledge, however, he has focused on the peripherals (facts) and ignored the center (truth).

When the importance of truth and fact are inverted, in this way, Weaver tells us, the result is the fragmentation of human knowledge, and the specialist “ceases to be a doctor of philosophy since he is no longer capable of philosophy” (p. 57) He focuses on the kind of knowledge that increases man’s power, man’s domination of the world, but neglects the knowledge that essential to man’s relationship with other men and with God. This focus on physical facts and neglect of the more important areas of human knowledge is an obsession and “Civilization must be saved from some who profess to be its chief lights and glories” (p. 62).

The example that Weaver points to, of what this process of elevating the study of the physical world for the purpose of dominating nature over knowledge of God and truth, was the development of the atomic bomb in World War II. From a scientific point of view it was an amazing development. From a moral perspective it was a disaster.

In the decades since Ideas Have Consequences was first written the triumph of science over morality has continued unabated. Today, scientists are able to help infertile couples conceive artificially. In and of itself that would be considered a blessing, but to do so they must create human lives that the know beforehand will never be able to grow into human adults. That should be a major ethical roadblock in the way of such processes. Modern man has abandoned true ethics for utilitarianism, pragmatism, and consequentialism, however, and the solution the scientist offers is to put the “unused” embryos created by this process to the service of mankind by doing research on the development of stem cells in such embryos. “Modern man” as Richard Weaver wrote “has become a moral idiot”.

Weaver’s book was written in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These same years saw the beginning of the Cold War and this also is reflected in many of the themes Weaver chose for this book. The Cold War would come to be seen by many as a conflict between two sides that embodied opposite ideas, those of capitalism and socialism. Weaver’s perspective is quite different. He writes that socialism is “itself the materialist offspring of bourgeois capitalism” (p. 37). This is an insight that Weaver derives from the Vanderbilt Agrarians, some of whom were his mentors, and within whose tradition he writes. Weaver is very critical of capitalism, attributing the growth of commercialism to the loss of heroism and saying that “the man of commerce is by nature of things a relativist”.

This might seem odd to someone who thinks of conservatism primarily as “neoconservatism”, which in the last decades of the Cold War preached capitalism and democracy as the source of all blessings in the Western world and which in the decades since the Cold War has elevated capitalism and democracy into universals themselves, insisting that for the good of the world the United States should militarily bring these things to all countries. Weaver’s is the more authentic conservative tradition and there are many parallels between his critique of capitalism and technology and that made by his fellow Platonist and conservative, George P. Grant. Weaver, however, understood the nature of socialism better than Grant and points out how it makes all the same mistakes of capitalism because it is itself an outgrowth of capitalism.

Ultimately, the error that both capitalists and socialists have bought into, is one of materialism, the substitution of material ends for a higher calling as the goal and motivation of human activity. Men have lost their sense of vocation – the sense that the work they do they are called to do, and that there is meaning and purpose to it, other than as an unpleasant necessity in order to obtain a paycheck. They have also lost their spirit of heroism whereby they are willing to endure hardships to achieve ends that are not motivated by mercantile factors. They have developed the mentality of a spoiled child, who rejects all authority on the part of his superiors and sees no higher goal than the fulfillment of his every material whim.

If Richard Weaver could write such a diagnosis in 1948 – imagine what he would say if he were living today.

ALSO RECOMMENDED

George P. Grant, Technology and Justice, Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1991. (originally published in 1986)

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001 (originally published in 1943).