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March 24, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:14:21
Consequences of What?
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Hello everyone, it is left, right, and white.
I am Chris Roberts, returning again.
I hope Mr. Jared Taylor did an okay job filling in for me last week, and I'm joined, of course, by Gregory Hood.
I'll say that in the early days of this podcast, about a year ago now, Greg and I went back and forth a lot as to what the intro to this podcast should be, or if we should have some fancy music, and whether that music should be, you know, Scandinavian metal or something nice and classical.
But recently I've been listening to a podcast called No Jumper, and the introduction to that podcast is simply the host saying, hey, welcome to No Jumper, coolest podcast in the world.
So I think with due respect to that host, maybe that should be our introduction of Welcome to Left, White and Right, coolest white podcast in the world.
It's just a thought, just an idea.
Let me know what you think.
Anyway, today we will be discussing Richard Weaver's very influential 1948 book, Ideas Have Consequences.
I know Greg was a lot more excited to do this than I was, so why don't you tee us off here?
Well, this is one of those books that when you're a young conservative staffer, it's on the reading list that you basically are given along with Russell Kirk and some of Buckley and everything else.
A lot of these works, frankly, have not dated very well.
A lot of the things that I think should be in a conservative canon, notably anything from James Burnham, I think is sadly neglected these days.
Weaver is interesting because ideas have consequences.
That's the kind of thing that you'll hear thrown around at conservative conferences.
But Weaver himself did not like the title.
And what he's saying is a bit more complex than just sort of a, we need to have a more critical approach to thinking about freedom or liberty or something like that.
He's going a lot broader, making the case that essentially Western civilization has been doomed since William of Ockham.
About 700 years ago.
And I actually like him because I almost see him as an American equivalent to Evola.
And what I mean by that is the heart of Weaver's case is that with the triumph of nominalism, the idea that we can't really have an absolute idea of something in words.
So basically it goes back to the dispute between Plato and Aristotle.
Is there such a thing as a platonic ideal of justice, of God, of the right society, of truth?
He argues that the West essentially got off the path where that was even a possibility, and that ultimately leads to the breakdown of God, leads to the breakdown of hierarchy, and Essentially gets you going on this never-ending quest toward egalitarianism, which ultimately destroys civilization itself.
Also, like Evola, Richard Weaver really, really, really doesn't like jazz.
He writes quite a bit about how much he hates it and how this is the indication that everything has gone horribly wrong.
And he's not wrong about that.
But I think one of the disservices that are done to a lot of young conservatives is they think ideas have consequences.
It's just a slogan.
But it's not the kind of book that if you're a modern American conservative, you can read, put down and then say, OK, this meshes with Ronald Reagan or this messes with George W. Bush or even this messes with Donald Trump or whatever, certainly not Mitt Romney or whoever else.
Because what he's saying is that Western civilization is on the wrong track It's been on the wrong track for centuries that the foundation of our entire society is completely flawed and needs to be utterly rebuilt.
And we need to go back and essentially undo everything that we've been told is progress for the last however many centuries.
And there's almost something anti-American about it.
Because what is America except the great liberal, you know, classical liberal experiment, the cult of progress, the cult of the free market, the cult of development and growth.
And even as Americans, even people who, like us, who might think a little skeptically about the American experiment, when you say, what is so great about America, you point to things like the moon landing, you point to things like the conquest of the West, you point to things like all the great Industrial wonders that this country was able to create around the turn of the century and weavers essentially saying not only Is this not what we should be defined as but this is actually a huge step in the wrong direction And it reminds me a lot of Evelyn's Quotation that there is no myth more pernicious and absurd than the idea of progress and so weaver it's an interesting inclusion in the conservative canon because I
To me, he's far more of a throwback to European throne and altar conservatism than anything that you would see even with the Founding Fathers, and certainly not with sort of the classical Whig tradition that seemed to inspire American leadership up until things completely fell apart after 1965.
I mean, this isn't a book that says, like, we were going good for a while, and then the crazy liberals took over, and if we vote Republican next time with your donations, we'll win.
He's saying, essentially, that we've been on the wrong path for longer than your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, and everybody else that you probably can even track has been alive.
That's how bad things are.
And that doesn't sound like an applause line at a CPAC speech.
Yeah, that's for sure.
I remember reading it and feeling surprised that it had been popular in its day.
It is dense, and it's not just that it's dense and abstract.
It is, there is this very just grumpy feel to the whole.
Oh yeah, it's very political.
It's not, I mean if you're looking for like a airtight case of philosophy, he's presuming an awful lot.
I mean it is, I think it's very much more a polemic than a Textbook, I guess, or like a comprehensive argument.
He really lives up, I found, to a lot of conservative cliches spouted by leftists or centrists.
The book really does feel like this old man who doesn't like jazz, he doesn't like modern art, he compares everybody, he doesn't like to spoil children.
It just kind of keeps going on and on.
Oh yeah, but he's objectively correct about all those things.
Remember at one point he chastises people for thinking, again the book was written in the 1940s, he chastises people for thinking that they're better than people from the 1890s, and it just, I don't know, it didn't, this is one of those conservative books that really just did nothing for me.
I know it's often compared with C.S.
Lewis's The Abolition of Man, and I would actually really strongly agree with that, in that both of these books are really really rather dull and just have this just inescapable, just kind of grumpy man yelling about kids being on his lawn feel to them.
I mean, he talks so much, as does Lewis in Abolition of Man, about how language has degenerated and just the way that we speak is somehow emblematic of how stupid we've all become.
And it's like, yeah, the guy was a professor of rhetoric.
He didn't like any of this.
Newfangled slang.
I mean, I don't know.
I'm certainly part of the problem, according to Weaver, but I'm so unimpressed by people invoking grand philosophical concepts to dismiss entire fields of art.
It's like, yeah, I think this might be a matter of taste.
You're just trying to develop some kind of objective set of standards for why Nobody should like things that you yourself do not like.
It just strikes me as very, well, very egotistical.
I mean, as much as he thinks that everybody else is an egomaniac, but he and his armchair is much wiser than that.
It's like, yeah, huge chunks of this book are just you complaining about things you don't like and just invoking philosophers to claim that you're right.
I don't know.
Well, this is why it's left, right, is I think you fundamentally come at it from my more modernist point of view, whereas I'm with Weaver.
And my problem with Weaver is, of course, that he doesn't go nearly far enough.
And, you know, it's been doomed since.
Well, what, the Kali Yuga began, what, 6,000 BC, something like that?
So it's well before William of Ockham.
Look, on that note... Yeah, is this just like an intellectual exercise in being edgy?
I mean, is that... I think that's like a valid criticism of it.
Like, what is the takeaway from this?
And if you get to his proposed solutions, they're not that impressive.
No, no.
Well, and I'm also dubious of every philosophy or history book that manages to find this, like, one point in human history where a wrong turn was taken and that since then everything has been bad.
I don't think that that kind of argument rejects the myth of progress.
I think it's really just the other side of the same coin.
You know, this idea that, I mean, so for him it's nominalism with this What's this guy's name?
William Ockham.
Just finding this one point, it's similar to the people who blame it all on Martin Luther and Protestantism.
And what I discovered when I looked at it was everything was going very well until this one guy promoted this one idea, and then everybody since then has implicitly believed that idea, and that's why everything has been bad ever since.
I don't believe in the concept of progress because I just don't view history as linear at all.
History is just much more chaotic.
But, you know, Weaver and people like Weaver sort of do believe in progress.
It's just that what they consider progress is different from what, you know, the Whigs say or Vox.com think progress is.
For him, you know, progress was true-ish until This guy William of Ockham who like no normal person has ever heard of and then that guy promoted nominalism and like it's when we've been on the wrong track ever since I just the history is not nearly that simple and I think just like the the hubris sort of required to just like declare like the wrong turn in all of human history
I think it's kind of incredible.
I mean, you compare this to, say, Paul Gottfried's book, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt.
In that book, Gottfried really convincingly argues that white guilt and wokeness and all of this is sort of a perverted form of Protestantism, and he marshals A lot of political and sociological evidence to make that case.
And I think that's, that's great.
But Gottfried doesn't take that and from there leap to say, oh, and as such, if Martin Luther had never been born, everything would be great.
Like that, that was, that was patient zero of our decline.
You know what I mean?
Because that's such a huge jump and, and Weaver, Weaver is all about that.
I think he's saying, not so much this individual particularly, but this was a big dispute among what passed for academics in the Middle Ages, because they did have to discuss these questions, and they're very important if you're thinking of it from a medieval standpoint of, if God is truth and we are imperfect, are we even capable of understanding truth?
Can we I mean, really, it goes back even beyond that to Plato and Aristotle.
And so I don't think it's so much this one guy screwed everything up.
It's this is when this philosophy became ascendant.
We've essentially been on this track ever since.
Now, the idea that everything was inevitable after that, I think you can take a lot of criticism with.
So, for example, I mean, one of the things, just as a passing example, is when studying the history of the American Civil War, of how small some of the margins of victory were at some of these battles, and how when you break down the grand ideological causes and material differences between the North and the South, and culture and everything else, It seems inevitable that the North would win now, but it's very easy to think of ways that the Confederacy could have won.
And then we would have a whole tradition of why the South has always been a nation, why it was never part of the United States, why it was this differing thing that was separate from everything else and justified.
This is relevant with Weaver, of course, because the Southern tradition at bay, Uh, just different work, but he championed the old South, not necessarily in terms of slavery, but saying that it was a kind of ruin that when we like a magnificent ruin that we can't help feel the loss of, even if we know it can't be brought back.
And there is something to the criticism that this is just almost an aesthetic.
Viewpoint we're oh, I'm a reactionary.
I'm gonna have a pipe and I'm gonna do this and that and the other thing I don't think he had a pipe or something, but I think you and I both can name tons of conservatives in DC area who when they were 19 years old had business cars and were dressing up like Anglo-saxon Business owners from 1880 and smoking pipes and talking about how the world will never see the like of us again.
But then when it comes time to actually do something, when it comes time to actually fight back, when it comes time to actually say, like, all right, well, what policies do you actually want to do?
How do we turn this around?
They're usually the first guys to crack.
Now, I actually have a bit more sympathy for Weaver himself than I guess many of his I wouldn't even say apostles, but the people who claim to have read in and quote, ideas have consequences, but like all they know is the title and the title itself isn't something he necessarily wanted.
I have thought for a very long time that ideas get taken to their logical conclusions and that once you concede certain premises, You are conceding the battle.
And I think for those of us involved in race realism, or white identitarianism, this, this is the one thing we're always trying to bring home to conservatives, right?
You've conceded the racial argument.
You've basically said that America was flawed and bad, until Martin Luther King came around.
And of course, the image of Martin Luther King they have is not the historical Martin Luther King.
And because America was always intended to actually be egalitarian and open to everyone in the world.
We have to admit that we're wrong on all these things.
And so when conservatives try to, and this is happening right now with the Supreme Court hearings, when conservatives try to defend something like the historical reputation of the founding fathers, or whether America was ever institutionally racist, or should we even talk about racism in schools and things like that?
Conservatives fall back on kind of this phony history where we basically say, no, no, no, everything was fine up until this point.
This was the true American ideology, when the reality is that, no, what we today, including conservatives, consider to be moral and good was the outcome of political struggle.
That political struggle could have gone either way, and we don't I have to accept that these ideas are correct just because a political struggle 40 years ago didn't go the way we wanted it to go.
My criticism of Weaver is less that he's wrong philosophically, because again, I think that ideas get taken to the logical conclusions.
I think that, for example, America would have been spared a lot of pain if Thomas Jefferson had never Britain, all men are created equal, you know, something that has clearly been misinterpreted.
Clearly, he didn't believe it in the way people quote it today.
But at the same time, going back to the very first person we did on this, which I think was Burnham, ideas are the mask power wears.
And so maybe instead of Looking at it from, okay, there was a debate in this university and this side won, and then this gradually picked up steam like a boulder going down a hill and it just, you couldn't stop it once you got to a certain point.
That's all true, but what are the monetary and military and cultural forces that were put behind these ideas that ensured their triumph?
Was it all inevitable?
Were there times when people tried to stand against it?
Because Weaver himself talks about the South as a partial exception to this.
Not so much now, but certainly at the time he was writing.
Yeah.
And I think that the broader point that he is making is that he's saying... This is another thing that gets misinterpreted, I think, a lot by conservative movement types.
Is Weaver is where you find a lot of the grounds for, oh, liberals are moral relativists.
You hear this all the time.
I mean, that's like one of the biggest things ever.
And I can't tell you how many conferences and meetings and intellectual where somebody comes along and says, well, you know, like the real problem is they, the left is just moral relativists and they don't understand that, you know, we have God on our side or we don't have an absolute code of morality.
But of course, one, You're just claiming that your code of morality is the absolute truth, and usually people in a conservative meeting are of different faith traditions.
They may all be Christian, but they're different kinds of Christians, and so already you've fallen apart as far as what's actually true, who actually has spiritual authority, what God actually means.
And the more important point of the left doesn't act like moral relativists.
The left, in terms of what we face today, are the most morally absolute of any group in history.
I mean, on a dime, they will turn and everything becomes a war of absolute good versus absolute evil.
Even something where it's quite painful to look at, like the situation in Russia and Ukraine right now.
And so, I don't concede the point that leftists are moral relativists.
I think instead that they do have Vision of the absolute truth that is in many ways more compelling than what conservatives offer at this point they have egalitarianism as their lodestar and maybe they haven't done enough work to Explain like why this is a good idea or why it's even achievable or or how we can approach it in a realistic way But it's almost because it's impossible.
That's what gives it such power.
And that's why people pursue it with such fervor.
I And not only can people, not only are leftists so convinced of their rightness now, while conservatives are torturing themselves trying to figure out this tradition or that tradition, but leftists will tell you like who the absolute good guys and absolute bad guys were basically in any historical event ever.
I mean, if you ask them about the Roman Empire, if you ask them about, you know, some your war in medieval Europe, there's always an answer about who were the forces of repression and regression, white supremacy and whatever else.
And so I think what Weaver is saying is it's a challenge to conservatism, American conservatism as its practice, that is far more in common, I think, with radical traditionalist philosophy than anything that you'll see in the American mainstream.
And it's remarkable to me that mainstream conservative intellectuals have taken it and used it when what he's criticizing is essentially, more than anything else, the course of Anglo-American conservatism.
You know the ideas of pragmatism the ideas of pragmatism in the philosophical sense the ideas of We're going to have a separation of power from truth because we can't really fully understand truth This idea that we're not going to have if you can trust Anglo philosophy to say something like German idealism or Hegel or even the people who turn Hegel on his head like Marx and You have systems where people are putting forward an absolutist view, and you have Weaver coming along saying, here's an absolutist view of the decline, of how everything went wrong.
But then when it comes to, okay, well, what are we supposed to do about it?
And where's we supposed to start from?
There's not a lot of answers there.
I mean, I think he basically comes up with the line that the last metaphysical right remaining is personal property.
And that's why it's so important.
And You know, after building up this giant crescendo of how everything has gone so horribly wrong, which I essentially agree with, because I think Evola made the case even more powerfully, I just find his answers unsatisfactory.
And I think that this is something that you can give people, give Americans anyway, to get them thinking.
But the idea that this can be the basis of a philosophy or a platform for political action just isn't true.
And I think, you know, ideas don't matter unless you've got power behind them, which is, of course, the big thing of Burnham.
And that's another challenge, which I don't think is fully taken up here.
I mean, it's just, okay, these ideas won, and then this bad idea led to this worse idea, which led to this worse idea.
Yeah, I actually agree with that.
That is more or less how it happened.
But why did it happen that way?
Are you anti-William of Ockham?
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm anti-nominalist, I suppose.
I mean, again, I think that his, his overall, the problem we have, I mean, you and I, people of our generation, is that, well, I'm a lot older than you, but so let's say broad, 40, 50 years, but all right, really, let's, let's take on what you said right away.
The Protestant Reformation, even.
You get to the point where you say, we can no longer agree on an idea of God or even the existence of God in some sense.
And then you get this book and again, like Evola, there's this long list of how these ideas, which don't seem like such a big idea at the time, ultimately lead to communism and whatever your Ultimate nightmare scenario is, although, you know, communism might even be better than what's coming our way.
And you can trace the decline very simply and you say, okay, I'm with you on all that.
But then the problem is you can't just go back.
You can't just will yourself into the belief.
of God or a particular religious tradition, or furthermore, even if you can't, you can't somehow force the toothpaste back into the tube regarding everyone else.
Like, you're—the Pope is not—Pope Francis is not the same type of person as Pope Urban II, and you're not going to be able to transform modern Europe into Christendom with some basis in absolute truth and absolute authority and absolute chain of command in terms of how things should work.
We as moderns, we've seen all these things fall apart.
Even if we recognize the problems, we don't really have a vocabulary as far as building something new, at least not American conservatives.
And so what we end up with is essentially, as you pointed out, basically a laundry list of complaints and how things keep getting worse and worse and worse.
Well, yeah, I mean, I actually agree.
Things are getting worse and worse and worse.
That's not exactly a great program for political action, especially part of your case is that things have been screwed for centuries.
And so, you know, even if we sacrifice our entire lives and work hard and deny the left a triumph on this, that, or the other thing, you know, all we've done is stem the decline for a little while, but we're not anywhere close to where we need to be.
We're always on defense.
We're never on attack.
And then there's something in Weber's readings about the South, I mean, you could probably say this about a lot of conservatives, Bradford and people like that, too.
It's just the romance of lost causes.
But I mean, I get that.
Aesthetically, I get that.
But politically, the point is to win, not to go down fighting just because so people who are going to get marginalized 200 years from now might use you as a footnote somewhere.
I mean, that's what I just find so incredible about the influence of this book and how often it's name dropped.
I think it's name dropped even more than anything Russell Kirk wrote at this point.
But the message just does not jive with American conservatism at all.
It doesn't jive with America at all.
It really cuts, I think, the American experiment apart in many ways.
And so you've got to ask yourself, like, well, why is this in the conservative canon?
The one thing which I think is everyone will read it.
Again, it's more of a polemic, I think, than a comprehensive philosophy, but the one thing where everyone will read it and be like, yep, called it, was his portrayal of media and how that absolutely commands the direction of society.
The great stereopticon, I think he calls it.
Yeah, that's right.
Listen, I don't think Richard Weir was wrong about everything, but A lot of the things he was right about, he was not the first to notice a lot of these problems, nor was he the most articulate man talking about them.
In terms of media influence and this rather clumsy concept of the great stereopticon, I mean, you don't need to read Richard Weaver's, like, one chapter on this to learn about this.
There are way better people you can read to learn about this, including not a few leftists.
And even just, like, a lot of the pioneers of propaganda wrote about what they were doing in the 1920s.
I mean, this is not an original observation.
And again, I don't think that his observation about this, like, Needed all of this weird philosophical Flourish right like it would have like I'm sure he thinks it's you know, I'm sure he firmly believes that rejecting William of Ockham and Noticing the great stereopticon go together like like hand and glove, but I just I just don't buy it Similar media critiques who have no idea who William Ockham was and
Well, he's trying to say that this is an outgrowth because of truth just becomes essentially a consensus among various people.
And it's not that we even agree on the truth.
We just sort of say, all right, this is what we're going to go with.
Then the question becomes, well, who determines it and who determines it is whoever controls this vast machine that he describes.
I mean, I love the quote that he begins the chapter with from Nietzsche, sick are they always, they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper.
I mean, that's journalism.
And that's journalism back then.
So I mean, this kind of, as an aside, there was never a point where journalism was good, you know?
Listen, you're sort of, you're sort of giving the game away here, actually.
No, but I want to go even further.
I mean, this is always the thing.
He goes so far as to say, is writing, knowledge of writing, an unmixed blessing.
And what he means by that is, You're always trying to approximate something.
You're never, you're never grasping like an absolute truth.
It's always a negotiation.
It's always about power.
It's always about bringing the debates that should be about important things.
And it just becomes a contest of money and access essentially.
And that ends up degrading everything and makes not only any real political argumentation, but arguments about anything essentially worthless.
I agree with him on that.
I just don't think that he has a response to it other than to just kind of throw his hands up and say, well, isn't this terrible?
But I mean, how do you think I give the game away?
So talking about media influence and the great stereopticon, you yourself, as you were just speaking now, talk about how What the great stereopticon is telling people is determined by money and who controls it, and that is exactly correct.
However, that is not something that Richard Weaver talks about at all.
His whole book, Ideas of Consequences, makes essentially no note of the existence of the material.
It's so philosophical that it It operates on this basis of assuming every actor in society is as philosophically oriented as the author, which isn't in any way true.
I mean, the emergence of the great stereopticon, again, it doesn't have a great deal to do with—I mean, if William of Ockham had never lived, the idea that now, today, media would be better because we would have a firmer grasp of truth or we would all agree with each other more as to what truth is.
I mean, this is preposterous.
This is just impossible.
This is just impossible to take seriously.
I think he actually does take this on head on because he says that as institutions, because of the culture we're in now, everything is essentially public relations.
And I quote here, We see this silently arising in the appearance of the press agent and public relations officer.
More institutions of every kind are coming to feel that they cannot permit an unrestricted access to news about themselves.
What they do is simply set up an office of publicity in which writers skilled in propaganda prepare the kinds of stories those institutions wish to see circulated.
Inevitably, this organization serves at the same time as an office of censorship, de-emphasizing or withholding entirely news which would be damaging to prestige.
Now, I think we can say we See this not just with the way institutions behave, but the way certain narratives are put forward, especially the part about certain things being de-emphasized.
They may not cover it up per se, but it doesn't become a story the same way like George Floyd became a story, and you had to have an opinion on it one way or the other, and you had to know about it.
He goes further and then says, OK, well, because of the cultural path we're on, If you're a moral conservative and you're trying to censor say the movies.
It's gotten so far.
We're so far gone that it's not just a question of oh, we need to ban.
I don't know sexual promiscuity or something like that, but we need to go further and and talk about like how a hero is set up.
So he says.
The thing that needs to be censored is not the length of the kisses, but the egotistic, selfish, and self-flaunting hero.
Not the relative proportion of undraped breasts, but the flippant, vacuous-minded, and also egotistic heroine.
Let us not worry about the jokes of dubious propriety.
Let us rather object to the whole story, with its complacent assertion of the virtues of materialist society.
And then I like the line at the end where he says, The entire globe is becoming imbued with the notion that there is something normative about the insane sort of life lived in New York and Hollywood, even after that life has been exaggerated to suit the morbid appetite of the thrill seeker.
This, I think, sounds very modern, particularly because when people think of America, they don't think of the way people actually live.
They think of America as it's been portrayed to them through the entertainment.
Industry and this has gotten even inside our own heads like we as Americans when we think of our own lives.
It's always interpreted as if we're in a movie everything is always cinematic and that's the most common thing whenever you see anything happen that's even slightly.
Exciting what is the first thing eyewitnesses always say like oh, it was like a movie.
It was like this movie It was like that movie.
We don't we don't even have a language to talk about things in their own terms anymore we always have to refer it to something else and I Think that point is important I think you're right that he obviously was not the first to point that out nor was he the best not even close to the best in terms of describing how it operates and why it operates that way but The fact that these things are ostensibly being discussed by the American conservative movement is interesting, because what he's saying is, I don't want to
Totally misinterpreted here, but it's essentially freedom failed that like once you're on this path I mean you have to basically be wrenched off it by force because otherwise you're just gonna keep going down this road that just think where things get worse and worse and worse and if you're a Conservative and you claim to believe in God or certain moral values or a certain tradition all of those things are gonna go away Because of the system that you yourself are defending Maybe what he's really doing, unintentionally, is Weaver is describing this case, but it comes off as so backwards looking and so impractical that maybe we should dismiss the entire idea of traditionalism and just approach politics purely from a modernist point of view, like James Burnham and Sam Francis did.
Well, so, good name dropping there.
Sam Francis's, probably his best book is Beautiful Losers, which is a collection of his essays that was published in the early 90s.
You probably disagree and think Leviathan is his best.
That's not true.
Eh, it wasn't.
Beautiful Losers is his best.
It wasn't finished.
Yeah, Beautiful Losers is awesome.
Yeah, and he writes, Francis wrote in the introduction to that book, which is, and the introduction is titled Ideas with No Consequences, he writes this great, he has this great passage that is essentially a rejoinder to Weaver.
You know, read it here.
My conclusion that conservatism has transformed itself into virtual extinction will surprise and perhaps even anger those who favor the formalistic and normative approach, which does not easily stoop to considerations of social change and historical fluctuation, and is reluctant to admit that some things, even ideas, fail.
Regarding political events as the earthly manifestations of timeless abstractions, the intellectual mainstream of the Old Right from the end of World War II developed a highly sophisticated body of ideas and a highly articulate body of spokesmen to express them.
Perhaps because they were too exoriously wedded to Weaver's principle that ideas have consequences, most of the conservative intellectuals who subscribed to this body of thought always seemed to assume that it was only a matter of time before their own beliefs would creep up on the ideas of the left, slit their throats in the dark, and stage an intellectual and cultural coup d'etat, after which truth would reign.
I have never thought so, in part because I have less faith in the power of intellectual abstractions than most of my conservative colleagues.
The historian Louis Nammer remarked that new ideas are not nearly as potent as broken habits.
And Burnham, describing Vilfredo Pareto's view of human rationality, wrote that rational, deliberate, conscious belief does not, then, in general at any rate, determine what is going to happen to society.
Social man is not, as he has been defined for so many centuries, a primarily rational animal.
In the tradition of Nehmer, who briefly studied under Peretto, and Burnham, I place more emphasis on the concrete forces of elites, organization, and psychic and social forces, such as class and regional and ethnic identity, than on formal intellectual abstractions and their logical extrapolations as the determining force of history.
Ideas do have consequences, but some ideas have more consequences than others, and which consequences ensue from which ideas is settled not simply because the ideas serve human reason through their logical implications, but also because some ideas serve human interests and emotions through their attachment to drives for political, economic, and social power, while other ideas do not.
I think this is really just perfect.
I really think I just, yeah, it's such a reminder of what a genius Sam Francis was.
And I remember reading this for the first time.
I was probably like 19 or And I just loved this explicit call of, I place more emphasis on concrete forces of elites, organizations, etc, etc, etc, than on formal intellectual abstractions.
And he puts the word logical in quotes, and their logical extrapolations.
Because again, when I read books like Ideas Have Consequences, I just have such a hard time agreeing that this sort of This sort of linear argumentation that we can get from William of Ockham, that William of Ockham directly leads to the Great Stereopticon, you know, hundreds upon hundreds of years later, it's just way too neat.
And again, maybe in some way this follows logically, again, with that word in quote, I mean, who cares?
All kinds of people think that their philosophical ideas follow logically.
It's just not a matter of logic.
And again, yeah, man is not a rational animal.
I mean, it's like arguing about the philosophical logic of student loan, student debt, like forgiveness.
That policy proposal is not one that is born of philosophical logic, one way or the other.
This is a very concrete material interest that a lot of people would stand to benefit from, and a lot of other people would not.
And that's sort of the basis of the whole presence of that discourse in our society.
And to look at something like that, And to sort of use this kind of Richard Weaver autism of like, oh, well, listen, I read the philosophy books and logically speaking, you're wrong.
I just find, at best, very limited.
Well, I think it's not ideas have consequences that I think Francis is really taking the task there.
I think it's The conservative movement's use of ideas of consequence is really just ideas of consequences as a slogan.
I mean, in the subject itself, he says, ideas do have consequences.
Some have more than others.
So we should be thinking to ourselves, OK, well, why do some have more than others?
And that gets us into real politics, as you said.
And we stop fixating on the philosophy books and start thinking about, all right, who's funding this?
Who's behind this?
But we should remember that social forces and elites When they put forward certain ideas, when they put forward justifications for their own power, it does tend to perpetuate itself and create new forces.
So, I'm not getting this from Weaver, but just to give an example we might think of here.
Very few, probably none, of the people who were outlining the early affirmative action programs thought that it would get to the point where it is now.
Where diversity professionals at universities or at major corporations make more and have more job opportunities than the people who actually do something.
But once you have an idea out there, and this is especially important in the American judicial system that's built on precedent, where once they come up with something, future judges cite it and use it to justify even more rulings.
Once you set this precedent that, like, diversity in itself is a social good, it follows that you have to discriminate against whites and Asians, that you have to set up these bodies that are going to protect these groups' feelings, that you're going to have to have these programs to do all this other stuff.
And you could say, OK, this is really just about social forces and the ideas aren't important, but it's not there's not really a separation between the two.
The one can fuel the other.
And one thing I want to just quote real quick, too, is that, and again, this is the heart of the problem, what Weaver is talking about in Ideas Have Consequences, and maybe it would just be better if we just scrapped that title altogether and just say, this book, because that slogan has just become so overused within conservatism that it's become meaningless.
Ideas by themselves, in and of themselves, just put out there, are basically meaningless.
Like, unless you have money and organization and interests that stand to benefit from them, it's not going to get anywhere.
But that said, the fact that what he would call traditional ideas about hierarchy were torn down leads to this kind of self-perpetuating process where every generation after that has to keep the degeneration going.
So, for example, he says, he's talking about When man starts thinking about metaphysics and the idea of knowledge or virtue or something like that, the takeaway that's important is in proportion to the contributions to the spiritual idea which the creation expresses, men have found lodgment on the various levels with the essential feeling that since this structure is the logos,
Their stations were not arbitrary, but natural and right.
This is society in which a human being has a sense of direction.
Literally, it might be said, he knows up from down, because he knows where the higher goods are to be looked for.
It is possible for him to live on the plane of spirit and intelligence, because some points of reference are fixed.
This is what he says was taken away.
And that ultimately led to, and this is where you could be like, okay, now he's getting ridiculous in terms of how far back he's reading, because he says, same page, but a little bit farther down.
The history of our social disintegration began with the unfixing of relationships in the 14th century, but the effort to do away with society entirely did not become programmatic until the 19th, when it appeared as a culmination of the prevailing nature philosophy.
Ultimately, this leads to, he continues, the idea of the consumer and Socialism, which itself was created by the materialistic ethos of capitalism.
You could say, okay, there's no reason why ideas had to go in that way.
If a certain war had been won by a different side, if a certain natural event had happened differently, if this person had lived and that person had died, we could be on a totally different trajectory.
But it makes sense to me that the main problem that, and we still call it the West, has right now is that it does not have the ability to know up from down.
It doesn't have a conception of what's good and what's not.
What instead is we fall back on these ideas and these slogans, much like conservatives fall back on ideas of consequences, we fall back on slogans like, oh, our democracy.
But then when you look at how our democracy actually works, it doesn't work all that differently from states around the world.
If we say, oh, equality, freedom, liberty, and then we see what these things actually mean, we realize we're not actually talking about anything real.
These are just words that roughly get lumped with whoever is in power doing what they want to do anyway.
And I think it is fair to say that, look, once you deny the idea that these concepts actually have a real meaning, And once you deny the idea that there is something called the good, there is something called, for lack of a better word, sacred authority that people can aspire to, you're going to end up in this mess.
Because how else is it going to end up?
There's no source of authority other than whoever has control of the great stereopticon.
That's the big challenge.
Answers for myself, and I could try to say what they are for the world, but I don't think a lot of people are going to buy it because we're so disintegrated that we almost don't have a collective response to this.
We don't have a way of telling up from down, spiritually.
And without that, there is no civilization.
There is no society.
There is no West.
There's just Lump of land with a bunch of people trying to screw each other over in economic transactions, and that's the West I Know okay, I I think you're I think you're drinking the Kool-Aid a bit of it here The West does know like up up from down.
It's just wrong about what is up, and what is down?
I mean the values of The left that controls both culturally and politically the West, they're very firm and ingrained.
And I mean, they do know that, you know, diversity is good.
And, you know, a good in itself, right?
Whites are bad.
I mean, they have a very clear moral codex, which you were saying earlier.
Now, it's certainly possible, like you can take You can examine these values that are spat out by our elites and their affirmative action pets, etc., and you can kind of dig into them philosophically and logically, and you can say, your concept of democracy is really malleable, it changes with time, it's revamped and repackaged as you see fit.
And that all well might be true, and I think, you know, Weaver would approach lots of left-wing ideas like that as well.
But what I'm saying, and what I think, you know, Francis and Burnham would say, or maybe that's too hubristic.
No, I will go with this.
What I am saying, drawing heavily from Burnham and Francis, is that you can go ahead and do that, and you can, you know, use your logic and your philosophy to explain that the slogan, diversity is great, makes no sense.
But, you know, maybe 90% of the people who are saying diversity is strength could not possibly care less that it doesn't hold up to certain logical stress tests.
And moreover, I don't think you can really say that You know, sort of a political philosophy is invalid because it's not backed up by a mountain of philosophical texts.
I mean, something that's interesting about contemporary liberalism is that there actually aren't really big philosophical books about it.
The closest you can kind of get to is some of the stuff written by John Rawls and some of the stuff written by John Dewey.
But even then, it's still a big leap from those guys to so much of what we have now.
John Rawls would be considered an immigration restrictionist by today's standard.
I mean, he wrote explicitly about that, for example.
We're not going down that route.
Yeah, I'm agreeing with you.
I'm just saying in passing.
And I know you're no longer crazy about using the title of this book, but my point is that for so much of contemporary liberalism, The ideas that they've instituted have had consequences, but their ideas have not come from a huge, long-standing philosophical tradition.
And in that sense, ideas didn't have a big consequence in getting us to the dominant liberalism that we have now.
And I think generally the better way of combating this contemporary liberalism is not by assaulting it with logic and philosophy, but simply by noticing, by noting how destructive it is and how many losers there are in the system, you know, how much, how much, you know, men stand to lose in it, whites, I mean, and at this point, even, you know, white homosexuals, etc.
And I think, I think that Weaver and his book, which were very influential, really The influence was for the worse, because I think a lot of the legacy of Weaver is these
These very sort of superficial kind of like philosophical gotchas like, well, if leftists don't believe in God, how can they truly know what is right and what is wrong?
It's like, well, they do know what is right and what is wrong by their own moral calculus.
They make that very, very clear.
And they do not in any way care that there is not a God that says that they are right because they don't believe in God.
I mean, this is just, you know, Weaver and all of this stuff is just kind of autistic.
Give an example of kind of what I'm talking about.
There is this right wing intellectual named Donald Devine.
Yeah, that is his real name.
And he's been around since forever.
He's done stuff with the Heritage Foundation.
He worked in the Ronald Reagan administration, etc, etc.
That kind of guy.
I remember talking to him in Like late 2015 or early 2016.
And this guy Devine, he's a big proponent of the fusionism that Frank Meyer, who was like Richard Weaver.
That's really wrong.
Hold on now.
Hold on.
Hold on now.
Frank Meyer, who was a contemporary of Richard Weaver, another heavyweight at National Review.
Meyer was obsessed with finding the perfect way of logically combining conservatism and libertarianism.
He called it fusionism.
And again, Maier is kind of like Weaver in that he really meticulously tinkered with the abstract to sort of get this thing, to make this thing work, to make conservatarianism work.
And Devine, Donald Devine, is sort of the new Frank Maier.
He really continues on in the tradition of Frank Maier.
And when I ran into Donald Devine in the Beltway while Trump was on the rise, I asked him, You know, what he thought of Trump and what was happening.
And Donald Devine expressed just complete contempt for the whole phenomenon.
He made it clear that he hated Trump.
He hated people who supported Trump, all of the stuff.
Mildly kind of pushing back against it of like, oh, you know, people have the right to be angry.
I mean, you know, Trump's talking about issues that, you know, everybody else should have been talking about.
You know, he's an imperfect vessel and sort of a blunt instrument, but seems to be right about a lot of things.
We'll see what happens.
And I remember what, um, what Donald Devine told me was that the rise of Trump, uh, was the end result of the fact that conservatives no longer read books, and how when he first joined the conservative movement, the conservative movement was just all about reading these important books by people like Frank Meyer, and how that had really stopped at some point, and that as a consequence, Donald Trump was on the rise.
And I just thought, and this is very, again, I know that Donald Devine was more of an understudy of Frank Meyer than of Richard Weaver, but there is still this there's still this just smack of this ideas have consequences.
Again, Frank Meyer's, you know, idea of fusionism did not have an enormous number of consequences.
And the idea that like the rise of Trump represents some kind of illiteracy is also just a It's also just ludicrous and so irritatingly condescending, and also it's like, begs the question, it's like, okay, so did George W. Bush represent literacy in the GOP?
I mean, like, what, what is this?
I mean, and— You never said even writing in literacy might not be great, so.
Well, and it reminded me of another, of another great observation— You should have said that to him.
—by, by Sam Francis.
I was, you know, when I— It would have been like, if you had read your books, you would know reading books is bad.
But this interaction really reminded me of another great passage by Sam Francis.
She wrote in Revolution from the Middle in 1991, Never in recent history has the now largely defunct conservative movement produced a serious national political leader or accomplished much of anything on the national political scene.
The most electrifying leaders of the American right, Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, and Ronald Reagan, emerged into prominence not because of the Latinate magazines and recondite philosophizing of organized American conservatism, but due to their own innate ability their own innate ability to capture and express the aspirations of a repressed political class.
That repressed political class being, of course, middle American radicals, you know, working in middle class white people, not from the coasts.
And per usual, San Francis is right on the money, and obviously Donald Trump became another one of these figures.
You know, for all of the Latin magazines and all of the recondite philosophizing, it's just really It just really didn't get anybody anywhere.
I don't know.
I mean, the most influential ideas of the American right since the end of World War II have been economic ones, like lowering taxes and lessening regulations.
And those ideas were more influential than any of the other ones because there was a lot of money to be made by implementing them.
I mean, those ideas were promoted by extremely wealthy people who got to be even more wealthy once they were implemented.
I mean, there's a huge material interest in Ronald Reagan.
Just collapsing the top marginal income bracket, right?
And again, this, you know, anyway, to me that conversation with Donald Devine is like Well, you know, that's it's like this is this is sort of what Richard Weaver wanted.
This is just people like like Donald Devine being like, well, I don't like this really popular candidate that talks about issues people care about because he makes me feel illiterate.
I wish people would read my books.
Well, that's that's kind of my point is not so much that.
Weaver, I agree with you entirely that I think If anything, the conservative intellectual movement has been mostly destructive because it mostly consists of lecturing the constituency about, like, why you're not allowed to defend your own interests.
You can't do that because that would be statist.
You can't do that because we're individualist, blah, blah, blah.
But.
I think that has more idea that has more to do with the concept of taking ideas have consequences as a slogan, seriously, as opposed to what Weaver is actually saying, which is a lot more serious.
And I'd go so far as to say that a lot of the conservative intellectuals who go around citing Weaver about like why Donald Trump shouldn't be taken seriously.
I mean, Weaver is making the case for.
Undoing the Renaissance and defending the Old South so It's not that that Weaver is actually putting a brake on or saying.
Oh, you can't explore these Politically incorrect ideas.
I mean because he kind of takes some of those on right away, but it's the way he's been interpreted which is entirely wrong and clearly I'm entirely in agreement with you that Burnham Francis is the way to look at things in terms of why I Certain figures triumph why certain ideas triumph and others don't but we should ask ourselves this and and this was arguably The the tragedy of San Francis because I'm in my mind Leviathan was never really completed He was trying to work.
Yeah, he was trying to work out a system of analysis that didn't have its roots in a Reactionary wishes for a divine order.
I don't mean to insult people believe in that because obviously I do but Not everyone's going to agree with it So you have to look at it from a modernist perspective in terms of practical political action, and he was trying to figure out a Way to say okay.
This is how power works in the society These are the social classes we can appeal to ie the middle American radicals.
This is why race matters to all of this and This is how we go forward because in all the figures you quoted Wallace Defeat, I mean he got elected Governor and his wife and everything else even after the segregation battles, but as far as what he was known for Defeated Joe McCarthy defeated Reagan Arguably won the Cold War but when Chinese historians write the
History of the fall of the United States, I think his immigration amnesty will be the most important thing he ever did.
And Trump defeated.
And I think the reason why they were defeated, at least part of the reason why, is they were tapping into this kind of in cocaine.
Feeling of resentment that people had and this knowledge in their their blood and their bones that like something had gone wrong and they were right to feel that way and that's actually something that shouldn't be put into words that To try to express that in words almost makes it not true.
It's just something, you know I mean, this is this is kind of why I'm I'm saying Weaver is right because the real truth can never really be expressed in just words because words are just an approximation and You got to be able... great communicators is the way they said Reagan was a great communicator.
It's an emotional attachment to the audience, not just reading his speech.
It doesn't have the same effect.
But to get to the next level, to really win, you do have to have some kind of a doctrine behind it.
You do have to have some side of a way of figuring out the way the world works.
The closest we've had to anybody on our side do that was Francis.
And the closest coherent work we have is Leviathan, but I think you and I are in agreement that it was just kind of incomplete.
I mean, basically, they found a draft and published it.
Yeah, it was published posthumously.
Right.
He had not finished it.
I mean, it's it's objectively the case that it is an unfinished work.
Right, right.
I mean, if he had lived another decade, maybe we'd have it.
But I think the reason why we're obviously coming at it from Two very different perspectives, but I think where we can agree, and I think this is the most important thing for people to get, is that ideas have consequences as a slogan, and as something that conservatives say to themselves to try to be taken seriously, has been tremendously destructive.
And I think it's an excuse for inaction and cowardice.
Okay, great.
We do agree on that.
And I mean, to the extent that we do need a body of ideas, I think that the one put together here by Weaver, as far as conservative philosophies go, or right-wing philosophies go, This is really not what I would pick.
I don't think this book and its ideals are what I would want to give to the next George Wallace or the next Donald Trump.
I would give them Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil first, just for one example.
And again, I think we've been talking a lot about Weaver's ideas in the abstract, but a lot of the concrete things that Weaver talks about, I think, I think he's wrong and he's kind of just like a fuddy-duddy about, I don't think that jazz is, you know, a sign of our decline.
I think that's reading way too much into it.
I don't think all modern art is garbage by any means, and I think it's absurd to posit that all modern art is meaningless or shallow or hollow.
I mean, the idea that somehow artists after the year, what, like 1935 or something, Stopped putting, you know, emotion or social commentary into what they were putting together is, again, it's just preposterous.
Listen, I don't care that Richard Weaver doesn't like it.
That's fine.
That's his business.
But again, this sort of like, oh, I have the moral codex and that's why all modern art is bad and we should only look at old art, I think is really just so silly.
And also, Weaver talks about America's use of the atomic bombs during World War II as an example of the cruel immorality of modernity, and I think he's wrong about that, too.
I think the use of the atomic bombs were totally justified and saved.
I think even if you just started looking at numbers of deaths, They saved a ton of lives because they killed less people than the carpet bombing with firebombs.
And they also made it so that there did not have to be an infamous invasion of Japan, which would have been just so, so barbaric.
I mean, the Japanese were training kids and old ladies how to use sharpened bamboo sticks to attack American soldiers and stuff.
So, you know, again, even, you know, you're Your issue with a lot of my issues with Weaver are sort of abstract ones, but again, even drilling into the concrete, I think Weaver was just kind of wrong about a lot of these things.
Not everything new in art or music or expression is bad just because it's not Like medieval and Catholic, you know, there's a lot of cool medieval and Catholic stuff as well.
It's just, again, I just can't get behind this weird sort of conservative thing of just like, I have figured out what art is degenerate and what art is good.
And I mean, and a lot of really wise voices on the right never, never really delved into that.
Again, like somebody like Friedrich Nietzsche, you know, his eye on the prize in a much more serious way.
Of course, we were quoted, Nietzsche, when dealing with the press, so that's got to count for something.
It counts for something, sure.
I guess the real question is whether this kind of backward-looking approach of—and he begins the book by, and says it like many others have said, this idea of the decline of the West, which people have been writing about for at least since I mean 1850?
I mean like that's when this even that like the the Victorian age which you might argue was like the height people were already seeing signs of decline and I think that we've we've gotten to a point where intellectually I think he makes a good case for how these ideas, taken to their logical conclusions, led us to bad places.
I think you're right in that he neglects the social forces that made these ideas triumphant.
But also, none of this really matters without a program of what we are supposed to do now.
And that means talking to real people about their real concerns now in the ways like Trump or Reagan or McCarthy or Wallace did.
Maybe if there is to be more intellectual work to be done, it should be on completing Francis's project, as opposed to yet another deconstruction of why modernism ultimately led to why gas prices are so expensive, or whatever stupid chain of logic you want to have.
Right.
The only thing that I will say, though, where I think he is absolutely right, and I just won't compromise on this point, is that I do think that There's a spiritual vacuum in Western man, and that is at the root of so many of our problems.
I was really struck by how many people with no military experience, with the same safety-obsessed people a couple months before would have been screaming about three masks for COVID and stuff, were ready to fight and die for Ukraine because they saw stuff on the television.
Now, I'm not like Mocking them and I'm not saying like, oh, they're just trying to do it for clout on social media or something like that.
I think that like people are looking for a cause and you're allowed, you're given Black Lives Matter and egalitarianism and whatever weird sexual politics, like you're allowed to have those causes.
And we've seen how militant and crazy people can be with them because it gives them a sense of meaning.
But I also think those people are on the fringe, and most normal people just sense in their gut that something is missing.
And Weaver gives a good description of how that came to be.
And the next step was, how do we solve that problem?
And there, I don't think the conservative movement has any answers for us, because by its very nature, it's looking backwards and telling us why we're not allowed to look forward and do anything productive.
Okay.
I will concede that Weaver is maybe onto some aspects of spiritual vacuity, but I would again say that there are other people who wrote about these issues with more clairvoyance.
I mean, Nietzsche even on the death of God and the possible consequences of that.
And again, as far as ways to make the American right more effective and more serious, I think the American right needs more James Carvilles and Niccolo Machiavelli's, or even a Rasputin, more than they need, you know, yet more philosophers or political scientists.
Because again, it's like, I mean, this is what Francis was writing about in Beautiful Losers in the 90s, of like, this just didn't really do anybody a lot of good.
So yeah, yeah, no, I think for me, I would, you know, To whatever extent our great listeners take these podcasts as book recommendations or not, I mean, I do actually think this book is worth entirely skipping.
I don't know, it just really doesn't... Yeah, well, I've already said a lot.
No, I think it's a fair point.
I think that it's not worth skipping, but only if you're really interested in Going pretty far down the rabbit hole as far as where things went wrong.
If you're a right-leaning person operating in the here and now, this doesn't really have a lot to tell you.
I mean, and again, you know, arguing about nominalism is great and all, but it's... It's not great.
Arguing about nominalism is like the most boring thing you can possibly do.
I actually don't find it boring, but I do find it...
Almost as a luxury activity.
I mean, even if it is important, the very fact that you're in the situation you're in, in terms of being a white American in this country now.
And, you know, imagine you're, you're having a meeting or a sort of like what is to be done in all capital letters.
And somebody gets to the podium and says, now to begin with William of Ockham, like you would just leave.
Yeah.
So we have to be future oriented and we have to be.
Giving people something they can fight for and something concrete that they can want, but the thing that is hard to capture, and maybe this is all just postscript to Nietzsche, is you have to have some burning vision of absolute truth and absolute good that you're willing to give everything for to get anywhere.
Sure, but Weaver doesn't provide that at all.
I'm just saying, Weaver shows how that was taken, but he doesn't give us an answer.
Which is why I wouldn't say that it's worthless, but I'd say reading it might give you some interesting thoughts, but there are more important things to be read now, i.e.
Francis and Burnham.
Yeah, i.e.
Francis and Burnham.
All right, well I think that might be a wrap, huh?
Yeah, I think that was good.
All right, guys, well thanks for joining us, and we will catch you next week.
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