The Birth of a Cliché

Titles Have Consequences

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, a 35-year-old Southern bachelor sat in his office in “Ingleside Hall at the University of Chicago.” Disturbed by the horrors he read about, he sought to “deduce, from fundamental causes, the fallacies of modern life and thinking that had produced this holocaust and would insure others.” The notes Richard Weaver sketched out over the next twenty minutes became the basis of a broadside against modernity whose core argument – and title, Ideas Have Consequences – became part of conservative cliché.

Portrait of the rhetorician as a young man

The problem, Weaver argued, was intellectual and cultural. A person – and a society’s – basic relationship with reality, he argued, was governed by their beliefs about the nature of the cosmos. Such beliefs were often unconscious, culturally imposed intuitions. And like the proverbial butterfly whose wing flaps eventually produce a tornado, a change in thinking dating back to a fourteenth-century theological debate had transformed the governing assumptions of Western society. When the English Scholastic William of Ockham denied the existence of independent, absolute universals – a position associated with “Nominalism” – he set in motion a process of intellectual decay with massive social repercussions. Modernity had reaped the whirlwind.

Weaver consciously inverted the logic of “Whig history” that saw the past as a story of progress toward liberty. Nominalism made it permissible, even desirable, to study nature on its own terms. This in turn opened up the realm of science and ultimately scientism – a mode of thinking that treated naturalist, materialist explanations as the only form of truth, in denial of metaphysical alternatives. By erasing the mystery of the universe, the secular decline Weaver described did away with original sin (a key concept of the era and especially the New Conservatives). Without the restraining assumptions of original sin and external absolutes (which imply a hierarchy with a top), Weaver suggested, Enlightenment thinkers fell into a doctrine of limitless human perfectibility.

Weaver aimed to demonstrate “that cultural decline is a historical fact” since recognition of the problem was the first step toward restoration. Weaver strung together Hobbes and Locke, the Rationalists, Secularization, Materialism, and the contemporary school of Psychological Behaviorialism in a tale of cramped human thinking edging out reference to the divine. He called the end result “abysmality.” Modernity paradoxically made human observation the measure of all things, but at the same time led humanity to abdicate its ability to morally reason and choose. “Modern man has become a moral idiot,” Weaver declared. “The word fact has taken the place of truth,” Weaver remarked. Modernity lacked a “center” around which society would flourish.

Evidence of this decline abounded: in education, in the loss of a fixed meaning of words, sensationalist media, specialization, the decline of friendship, the loss of the soldier as hero, in art, and in music. To Weaver, jazz music especially demonstrated the impact of the collapse of universals. To the white Southern Weaver, it was “the clearest of all signs of our age's deep-seated predilection for barbarism.” American culture had no defense against jazz where “something in the Negro's spontaneous manifestation of feeling linked up with Western man's declining faith in the value of culture.”

Weaver lamented the loss of a “metaphysical community” characterized by priests and soldiers, roles linked by their commitment – even unto death – to a metaphysical ideal. A society in which commerce was kept at an appropriately lower regard. Weaver’s way of conceptualizing a society’s thought-world derived from his study of Southern culture and “Southern Agrarian” mythopoetics or the creation of myths. In general, Weaver stripped out the Southernism from his argument, making a universalized point about modernity. Only at one point did he allow that “The American South not only had cherished the ideal but had given it an infusion of fresh strength, partly through its social organization but largely through its education in rhetoric and law.”

Weaver submitted his manuscript to the University of Chicago Press. The director, William Couch, a fellow North Carolinian, knew Weaver. He’d been a conservative Southern critic of the Agrarians. He’d also rejected Weaver’s dissertation manuscript when he had been at the University of North Carolina Press, despite wanting to publish it. Now, sympathetic to Weaver’s point of view on the “morals that govern our time” and impressed by his execution, Couch maneuvered to get it out over expected criticism from university leadership. Couch selected readers he knew would write gushing reports about the manuscript to ensure its publication. Weaver could scarcely believe the press’s enthusiasm for his manuscript. There was one sticking point. Couch wanted to retitle the book “Ideas Have Consequences” (working titles had included “Steps toward the Restoration of Our World’’ and ‘‘The Adverse Descent’’). Weaver was so incensed by the suggestion that he refused to shake Couch’s hand at a cocktail party during process. Nevertheless, Weaver relented; the book went forward and the two became and stayed friends.

In addition to shepherding Weaver’s manuscript through publication, Couch succeeded wildly in securing blurbs for the book. Two of America’s leading theologians, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, as well as the sociologist Robert Nisbet endorsed Ideas Have Consequences. So did one of Weaver’s mentors, the Agrarian thinker and editor of the Sewanee Review, John Crowe Ransom.

“Whatever else may be said about the book,” Weaver noted shortly after it appeared in early 1948, “it carries a whip lash.” It was a “succès de scandale.” The Southern Agrarian set championed Ideas Have Consequences. Allen Tate called it “persuasive and eloquent.” Cleanth Brooks dubbed it “a brilliant and sustained attack.” For Weaver, the “kind of opposition it aroused too seemed a confirmation.” So did the letters he received affirming his diagnosis of modernity. An English professor, Melvin Rader, admired “the eloquence and profundity of his argument for conservatism.”

Despite this praise, Ideas Have Consequences did not generally galvanize consciously conservative intellectuals right away. Weaver isn’t mentioned in either Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind or A Program for Conservatives. Nor in Peter Viereck’s Conservatism Revisited or The Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals. Nor was Weaver discussed in the individualist magazine The Freeman until 1955. Clinton Rossiter interviewed Weaver for The Conservative Persuasion, published in 1955, and cites his books in a bibliography of conservatism, but did not discuss him at length. One exception, though, was the right-wing Yale political scientist Willmoore Kendall. Kendall had been undergoing a period of radicalization against liberals and liberalism. He detected in Weaver a companion, but reckoned Weaver had not fully identified his “real enemy” – “the more or less typical American Liberal” – or his friends, those who “deny that all questions are open questions.” Weaver, Kendall thought, had developed a “vocabulary” to attack liberalism. He had his vote “for the captaincy of the anti-Liberal team.”

The Chicago Tribune’s reviewer called it “one of the classics of the 20th century.” Meanwhile, the Chicago Sun-Times derided Weaver’s book as “flatly self-contradictory.” In the New York Times, the historian Howard Mumford Jones called it “sincere, fanatical, and, for my money, irresponsible.” Despite Weaver’s commitment to deductive reasoning, he had written a book full of “sweeping assertions” that “the reader cannot check” in support of a “predetermined” premise. It also, Jones argued, had a basically elitist view of humanity that held only a tiny portion of people in human history had ever lived a full life. The Texas Spectator rebuked Weaver’s thesis in a two-page review. To capitalize on the controversy, the University of Chicago Press bought advertisements in major magazines contrasting the polarized reviews. Vic Walter, the leftist former student of the New Conservative John Hallowell told his old teacher that “So much of this ‘revolt against reason’ is nonsense.” Where he had once admired Weaver, the book seemed “strident and ludicrous to me now.” Must we “get our epistemology and metaphysics straight first before we can try to be good”? he asked Hallowell.

Later, Couch acknowledged the philosophical problems in Ideas Have Consequences. Weaver gave no “grounds for his attack on nominalism other than the effects of this doctrine. “He simply labels it as disaster-laden doctrine and then proceeds on this basis,” wrote in 1976. A logical thinker, Weaver knew better, he suggested.

Did Weaver mean his just-so story about William of Ockham seriously, or was it a rhetorical device to personify the secular trend he decried? In the foreword to Ideas Have Consequences’ paperback edition – the existence of which demonstrated the book’s enduring sales – Weaver reflected on his text more than a decade after its initial publication. He called the book a “work of philosophy” that sought a first cause of the crisis of modernity – in this case the emergence of nominalism. But at the same time, he recognized that it was “not primarily a work of philosophy” but “an intuition of a situation.” Weaver had perhaps come to recognize the shrillness of tone he had affected, or what he called in a letter to the Agrarian Donald Davidson some “over-generalizing,” had led to a rhetorical fusillade against modernity as much as a reasoned analysis. He had been animated by the “feeling that the important thing was to hit and hit hard,” he admitted. Here was the truth “in words as hard as cannon balls.” Like the jazz musicians Weaver despised, the performance had mattered.