A review of Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1995), by Richard Weaver
Richard M. Weaver was one of the South’s finest thinkers. His Visions of Order was first published posthumously in 1964, and later republished in 1995. This edition has an excellent preface by Ted Smith III, who asks “how much relevance a critique of modernist culture in the mid-1950s can have for the postmodern world of the mid-1990s.” Indeed Smith’s question only takes on more weight when we consider our present mid-2020s. What relevance indeed?
We can perhaps approach this question by looking at some further developments of themes that Weaver addressed. In The Southern Tradition at Bay (1968), Weaver remarked that it was unfortunate that the South failed “to study its postion until it arrived at metaphysical foundations.” How right, then, that Weaver’s originally proposed subtitle for Visions of Order was “Essays Toward a Metaphysics of Culture.” It is Weaver himself who seems to be aiming to supply the missing Southern metaphysics. A welcome move! And not only welcome, but necessary. For metaphysics is, properly understood, incarnational—it is the grounded assessment of how, when, and where we stand. Given the current trivialization of our culture and the ever-weakening human intellectual and emotional cohesion that results from this, a Southern metaphysics may be just what we need.
Metaphysics depends, first of all, on one’s view of man. Darwinism, which teaches that man is just an evolving animal, pretty much put an end to metaphysics in the West. We are just beginning to awaken from the Darwinian spell. Man is not ”only” biological. Man is a being in, and of, his time–an historical being. We are inescapably involved with philosophy, world views, events and influence—these are the circumstances, the metaphysics, of culture.
The topic is more than timely in our day, for are not the globalists and their ilk arrayed against the very idea of culture? Weaver noted the “statist efforts to break up cultural cohesion and replace it with politically dictated integration.” That’s the theme song of our era. And in Visions of Order Weaver expands in luminous prose the forms that statism takes and the things that statists believe. This is uncomfortably contemporary. Weaver already saw it coming in his earlier book Ideas Have Consequences (1948). The title says it all. Man lives with the consequences of his thinking
Weaver makes a thoughtful distinction between status and function—or, more broadly speaking, ‘being’ and ‘doing.’ He remarks on the mood of aggressiveness that the preoccupation with function can engender, an unwillingness “to let anything be,” to be doing, doing, always doing. We all know people like this. The compulsion to be doing seems to block the deeper, quieter springs of being—a state more conducive to reflective inwardness.
Are we not still haunted by the dim outlines of those ghosts from our past—the Puritans? The people who came here to be pure and establish that “city on a hill,” immune from history, wrapped up in their glorious veil of self-righteousness. America has been at war for all but about 20 years of its national life. Our current sponsorship of the wars in Israel and the Ukraine is truly the culmination of this disaster mechanism of the mind—refusing to go within, refusing to acknowledge one’s own actions. In his book Time No Longer (2016) Patrick Smith describes this refusal as a result of “American exceptionalism”—the myth of American innocence. Weaver also connects this “substitution of fantasy for historicity” with gnosticism, the heretical movement condemned by the early Church. Eric Voegelin developed in particular the theme of gnosticism as “political religion.”
The South, having suffered defeat in war and its cruel aftermath, was at least able to remember. The destruction of Confederate monuments is one of the most egregious examples in our day of the attack upon memory. It is but another war on the South, exacted by the same people in a new generation. They cannot let things be, they are determined to avoid the confrontation with their own souls. They cannot create because they refuse to remember. Destruction thus becomes the substitute for real culture.
And this brings us to a closely related point: language, that is, rhetoric and dialectic. Chapter Four is a stellar discussion of “The Cultural Role of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric is persuasive speech: it inspires, commands, unites. It depends on history. It touches what is dynamic in us—the spirit. Perhaps this is why Weaver titled one of his previous books Language Is Sermonic (1970) . Rhetoric received its first low rating with Socrates, who extolled dialectic. But rhetoric has sagged even more in the polls since the rise of science, which exalts dialectic. The model here is the indicative statement: 2 + 2 = 4
Thus does Weaver anticipate the remarkable work of John Lukacs and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Lukacs wrote in his Historical Consciousness (1968) that of the two main developments in the modern age—the rise of science and historical consciousness—it is actually the latter which is far more significant. For history, as Weaver puts it, contains science. It is thus the scientific statement, the indicative, which depends upon the other forms of language—the point illustrated in Rosenstock-Huessy’s In the Cross of Reality (1956), which argues for a view of language based upon grammar. It is the Imperative (the form of command, the “You”) that touches us, awakens us to action (“I”) so that we may unite with a “We” in common projects. Only at the conclusion of these events can there be the “It”—the Indicative: the statement of fact.
And there is another person we ought to honor and remember when we consider how Weaver defends the practitioners of rhetoric, the Sophists. He would have appreciated Robert Pirsig’s improbably-titled Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for that reason. For Pirsig, in his search for Quality (the reconciliation of the scientific and the spiritual), defended the Sophists—he said they were in search of Quality, too. He thought their reputation had been unduly tarnished by the master Plato and his mentor, Socrates.
Well, I mention these names to indicate further steps in the development of culture that could be undertaken by loyal and loving Southerners in their “…creative hours, which are hours of warm blood and of feeling!”, as Weaver memorably suggests. We are not going to win wars by going to the polls or taking surveys. There is a deeper soul-movement needed. As Weaver puts it in Visions, “only a great conversion can save us from disaster.”
Yes—what kind of conversion? I believe a good place to start would be by renewing and affirming the importance of language. This would be the important first step in standing for our own honor. Truth, trustworthiness, integrity—“standing one’s ground.” It is astonishing how much in this regard we have lost. This is why we have a corrupt and predatory elite class. We are called the “deplorables” for a good reason. That reason is because we understand that the battle of good versus evil is not abstract—not theological, political, economic. It is all of these things. But it is more than these things. It is real. I am sure that Richard Weaver would have been shocked at the scale of recent events. But not, I think, surprised. He saw it coming, and Visions of Order was his warning. Language is sermonic: take heed!
