Ideas Have Consequences: Expanded Edition

Media culture—Weaver cites newspapers, the movies, and radio (imagine what he would have said about television!)—is a primary instrument employed by the Great Stereopticon for keeping the populace on the surface of life and not “breaking through to deeper significances.”

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 was “a

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.

In an autobiographical essay called “Up From Liberalism” (1958), Weaver recalls that in his undergraduate years at the University of Kentucky earnest professors had him “persuaded entirely that the future was with science, liberalism, and equalitarianism.”

Finally, in an abject surrender to the situation, in an abdication of the authority of knowledge, came the elective system. This was followed by a carnival of specialism, professionalism, and vocationalism, often fostered and protected by strange bureaucratic devices, so that on the honored name of university there traded a weird congeries of inter

Weaver was a professor of rhetoric.

Weaver’s book The Ethics of Rhetoric

The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses.