Ideas Have Consequences: Expanded Edition

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 age

It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence.

He has found less and less ground for authority at the same time he thought he was setting himself up as the center of authority in the universe; indeed, there seems to exist here a dialectic process which takes away his power in proportion as he demonstrates that his independence entitles him to power.

Yet the real trouble is found to lie deeper than this. It is the appalling problem, when one comes to actual cases, of getting men to distinguish between better and worse. Are people today provided with a sufficiently rational scale of values to attach these predicates with intelligence? There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a mo

Weaver is particularly harsh on what he regards as the tepid ambitions of the middle class: “Loving comfort, risking little, terrified by the thought of change, its aim is to establish a materialistic civilization which will banish threats to its complacency.”

Capitalism is an unparalleled engine of wealth. It is also an unparalleled engine of freedom, but that freedom has two faces: increased choice and increased dislocation. Weaver lamented the latter and blamed the former.

In a chapter called “Egotism in Work and Art” he launches an extraordinary, racially tinged attack on jazz, “the clearest of all signs of our age’s deep-seated predilection for barbarism.”

In the seventeenth century physical discovery paved the way for the incorporation of the sciences, although it was not until the nineteenth that these began to challenge the very continuance of the ancient intellectual disciplines. And in this period the change gained momentum, aided by two developments of overwhelming influence.

The Renaissance increasingly adapted its course of study to produce a successful man of the world, though it did not leave him without philosophy and the graces, for it was still, by heritage, at least, an ideational world and was therefore near enough transcendental conceptions to perceive the dehumanizing effects of specialization.