One of the most engrossing and thought-provoking books I have come across in my life is one that visited my desk earlier this month and I have been banging my head against it ever since. Like so many of the books I read, it’s title sprang from the pages of the current book which had, in its turn, sprang from the book read before it. Before ordering it, I had read some reviews of it and was, I thought, fully prepared for the difficult reading that lay ahead. I have not been disappointed. It is well worth the slow trod through the dense writing of an English professor to find the nuggets of timeless wisdom that lay, as lions in the tall Savannah grass, throughout the intricate prose. The book is "Ideas Have Consequences" and the author is the late Richard M. Weaver.

The book, which was published in 1948, is much more than the typical tale of the woes of society and the prediction of its imminent collapse. Books of this type have been written for centuries. Typically, they are written by aging historians who fall prey to the ills of nostalgia and suffer no small measure of fear of change they do not understand or of simply becoming irrelevant. In this particular instance, one must keep in mind that the man writing the book was in his mid-thirties when he penned it. He was no relic of a long-passed time recollecting bits and pieces of his "glory years" and longing for their return. This was a relatively young professor of language and rhetoric at a prestigious academy (University of Chicago) who was in the prime of his intellectual powers.

This was also no time to be questioning our society’s health or the pillars of beliefs upon which the world power called America was standing, like a colossus, astride two great oceans. The country had just stepped proudly into the world spotlight as the savior of democracy with the defeat of Germany and Japan in World War II. Our scientific prowess had just been demonstrated in the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the awe-inspiring power of the atomic bomb. Our economy was prodigiously feeding and rebuilding Europe and Japan through the Marshall Plan. The Korean War, the rise of the Soviet Union and the Cold War were, when the book was written, still, beyond the horizon. We were Winthrop’s "shiny city on the hill" that all of the world held in certain awe.

Yet, Dr. Weaver perceived something quite disturbing in the American people and the society about him. He saw cracks in the mortar of our mighty fortress. He saw the early sprouting of weeds, slowly but inexorably, widening these tiny crevices. He saw the corroding effects of rust forming on the shiny beams that shored up our massive monuments to man’s technological genius. At the height of America’s dominance of the world of which it was but a small if gaudy part, Dr. Weaver sought to brings a cold splash of irrefutable logic to the white-hot fire of American egotism.

As one might expect, his voice was barely heard at the time above the boastful and celebratory mood of the nation. His tiny book - less than 200 pages - was principally read in the rectories of academic thought and relegated to the lonely and desolate shelves of the philosophy section of what few libraries stocked it at all. With its weighty prose, the seeds of thought and the warnings they would root in the mind of even the thoughtful reader would, largely, lay fallow.

However, as time continued to march, the Armistice parades turned into air-raid drills and the post-war exuberance fell into a Cold War hangover. And a strange thing happened. The people, themselves, began to see the cracks, the weeds and the rust. They began to search for answers to their rising discontent and unexplained restlessness. And, as moths to a flame, they were drawn to the little book on the dusty library shelves. There were answers there, though they were not what all would like to hear and what even fewer would care to implement.

Dr. Weaver speaks of the ills of society - any society - with the precision of Hippocrates in Ancient Greece. He diagnoses the causes of our decay and, in short order, prescribes what is necessary for our healing. We have given ourselves over to a flawed and decadent philosophy which, though centuries old, has not lost any of its venom. We have abandoned universal truths for hedonistic materialism and, as a result, we hover over the abyss that will hold our eventual demise. But there is - or at least, as presented by Dr. Weaver in 1948 - hope for civilization. Personally, I hasten to add that if he were to view the situation 60 years later, he might be compelled to revise that optimism.

Before I begin to address the gist of "Ideas," I want to use Dr. Weaver’s comments about an argument I, personally, am confronted with when I submit that we, as a civilization, are going along a steady path to degradation, chaos and, finally, pathos. When I bemoan (as I often do) that our society has collapsed under the weight of its own depravity, I am always told, in one form of the other: "Older generations have been saying that same thing about the younger generations for centuries. It’s never been true and is only the cynicism of old age and a feeble attempt to savor "the good old days." In short, the arguments I attempt are laughed away as simply cynical bunk. In my ultimate defense, allow me to present the pedantic yet ever-insightful Dr. Weaver:

"Those who content that things are going well enough or are improving are found to be nonserious, in the sense of refusing to look at serious things. They glean their data from the novel, or flashy, or transitory sort of development, which often does indicate a sort of vitality, but shows at at the same time a lack of direction and a purposelessness. Their data are likely to be the kind that can be quantified in the style of the social scientist or at least the publicist - so many people owning record players, so many more books circulating from public libraries, and the like. They ignore the deep sources of tendency which can very easily render nugatory any gains of the above kind. In short, their fact finding is superficial and simplistic, and their claims are made sometimes in a strident tone which is itself a demerit to their case."

I warned you Weaver was not for light, bedtime reading. But, if the admittedly stilted language of the preceding passage does not drive home the point, allow me to turn to another early 20^th century surveyor of culture, T.S. Elliot who asserted, around the same time, that "our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity." (Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, New York, 1949, p. 17)

Perhaps, since we are taking the bait and agreeing with Dr. Weaver and T.S. Elliot, we should take a stab at defining exactly what "culture" really is. Elliot thought of it as an organic, shared system of beliefs that cannot be planned or artificially induced into a society. Its chief means of transmission, he holds, is the family. I think Dr. Weaver would agree. Though "Ideas" is more about the loss of our philosophical bearings than our culture, the two are inseparable. When our eyes are diverted from the mysteries of heaven, we inevitably focus on the earthly search for creature comfort and pleasure. And, there, according to these sages, lay ruin.

However, Weaver is not a theologian. He does not write about man’s loss of faith - at least, not directly. He does posit that the clash of two ancient schools of philosophical thought - the realists and the nominists - is the root and branch of the cultural problems in our country today. Weaver, as a Platonic scholar, clearly holds the view of the realist. Further, he views nominalism (which he traces back to William of Occam in the 13^th century) as the dominant view of modern man. It is this centuries-old conflict of "world views" - along with Weaver’s argument that the wrong side won - that lies at the crux of "Ideas." And, through meticulous logic, Weaver shows that by this path lay ruin.

What we have lost with our abandonment of T.S. Elliot’s "permanent things" and Dr. Weaver’s "universals" are evident throughout our society and our culture. We have become as the barbarians who felt compelled to lay bare everything to see what made them "tick." Now, instead of opening the entrails of animals, we are stripping away, layer by layer, all the basic components of our culture. As Edmund Burke wrote in "Reflections on the French Revolution:"

"All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments that beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by the new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is rudely torn off."

We have given ourselves over to science, which "promises there is nothing we cannot know," and to "false propaganda" which "have told us there is nothing we cannot have." We have, in the view of Weaver, lost much in the trade. We, as a culture have been transformed into "spoiled children" who have "not been made to see that the relationship between effort and reward." We have lost the ability to distinguish beauty from obscenity and truth from propaganda.

The disintegration Dr. Weaver dissected in 1948 holds startling lessons for our times. For, rather than serving as an illuminating alarm flare that showed mankind the deep fissures and crumbling foundations of our culture so that we might mend our ways, his warnings went unread and unheeded. Let me just attempt to name a few, through the words of "Ideas" of the cultural ills that were laid bare by Dr. Weaver in 1948:

The Rise of the Litiginous Society: Because modern man have been thoroughly propagandized, "he conceives the world to be a fairly simple machine, which, with a bit of intelligent tinkering, can be made to go. And going, it turns out comforts and whatever satisfactions his demagogic leaders have told him he is entitled to. But the mysteries are always intruding, so that even the best designed machine has been unable to effect a continuous operation. No less than his ancestors, he finds himself up against toil and trouble. Since this was not nominated in the bond, he suspects evildoers and takes the childish course of blaming others for things inseparable from the human condition. The truth is that he has never been brought to see what it is to be a man."

Failure of the Welfare State: "The notion that the state somehow bears responsibility for the indigence of the aged is not far removed from that demoralizing supposition that the state is somehow responsible for the criminality of the criminal [See Judge David Bazelon] ...The point here is that no society is healthful which tells its members to take no thought of the morrow because the state underwrites their future. The ability to cultivate providence, which I would interpret literally as foresight, is an opportunity to develop personal worth."

The Rise of the "Politically Correct": "It is in such instances that the semanticists seems to react hysterically to the fear of words. Realizing that today human beings are in disagreement as never before and that words serve to polarize the conflicting positions, they propose an ending of polarity. I have mentioned, earlier, people who are so frightened over the existence of prejudice that they are at war with simple predication. The semanticists see in every epithet a prejudice."

The Obscuring of Language: "Drift and circumstance have been permitted to change language so that the father has difficulty speaking to the son; he endeavors to speak but he cannot make the realness of his experience evident to the child. This circumstance, as much as any other, lies behind the defeat of tradition. Progress makes father and child live in different worlds, and speech fails to provide a means to bridge them. The word is almost in limbo..."

Rise of Terrorism: "There appear to be two types to whom this kind of charity [accepting the worth and substance of other cultures] is unthinkable: the barbarian, who would destroy what is different because it is different, and the neurotic, who always reaches out for control of others, probably because his own integration has been lost...The hope of diminishing that spirit of fanaticism which threatens to rend [destroy] our world depends of concessions to the nonself. I find no sign that these earnest souls who are today pleading for understanding see this connection between tolerance and piety. Not until we have admitted that personality, like nature, has an origin that we cannot account for are we likely to desist from parricide and fratricide."

Finally, my personal favorite, the growing perception of the irrelevance of history.

History is the Only Guide A Society Has: " One would think from the frantic attempts made to cut ourselves off from history, that we aspire to a condition of collective amnesia. Let us pause long enough to remember that in so far as we are creatures of reflection, we have only our past. The present is a line, without width; the future only a screen in our minds on which we project combinations of memory. In the interest of knowledge, then, we have every reason to remember the past as fully as we can and to realize that its continued existence in mind is positively a determinant of present action. It has well been said that the chief trouble, with the contemporary generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting."

I will end, mercifully, here. However, it strikes me as thoroughly amazing that (a) such a relevant book that directly speaks to our society (or lack thereof) was written almost 60 years ago and (b) that the book remains, largely, unheard of and unread. I have never read a book that said so very much with so very few words. I found myself tempted to underline or otherwise highlight every sentence as each one seemed to reveal or explain a cosmic truth. "Ideas Have Consequences" has so much to teach us. Perhaps, more so today than in 1948.

I recently commented to a friend that one of the greatest services someone could provide for Western Civilization would be to take Dr. Weaver’s tiny but excruciatingly academic writings and break the prose down into simpler language in the hopes of expanding its readership. In its original form, it is strictly for academic philosophers and those, like me, who are willing to read it with dictionary in hand and encyclopedia nearby. But, for me, while the reading was slow, the rewards were immense. If it were simplified to, say, a college-level treatise, perhaps more people would attempt the Sisyphean task of attacking the formidable vault protecting the gems buried in its pages.

For now, if the motivated and the hearty among you will but try, Dr. Weaver’s insights make the effort most rewarding.