I remember as a freshman at Mount Vernon Nazarene College in 1977 reading a book for my introduction to philosophy class called, Ideas have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver. It deeply impacted me, though I soon forgot that I had read it. Nor was Richard Weaver nor his influence mentioned to me again in my education. The book was originally published by the University of Chicago Press in 1948.

About two years ago I discovered that a substantial academic discourse among the American conservative intellectual movement and that Weaver was regarded as an iconic founder by some in this movement. It did not accord with my memory and what I had experienced as "conservative politics" from the '80s onward. So two years ago I picked up the book, Steps toward Restoration: The Consequences of Richard Weaver's Ideas edited by Ted J. Smith III and published by ISI Books of the Intercollegiate Institute, an organization to sustain conservative cultural and political causes. I wanted some "down time" reading this weekend, and read some of the essays. It has been very interesting.

Most interesting, it recalled that the book did an intellectual/genealogical criticism of modernity and liberalism. It gives a certain declensionist view. Weaver criticizes in it the notion of progress and replaces it with a notion of degeneration. What struck me as really interesting, however, as an essay by Robert A. Preston. He described Weaver's commitment to transcendence, and its lost due to the cultural/intellectual commitments of medieval nominalism. According to Preston (and seemingly corresponding to my memory by and large),

"It is also the realm of the universal that is htat basis of truth. Weaer accepts the traditional definition of metaphysical truthyas that which cannot be otherwise than it is, and truth in this sense in unchanging and always and everywhere the same . . . .

The doctrine of nominalism . . . holds that only the individual is real. The universal is seen as a mental fiction useful in organizing the disparate aspects of reality so that they may be more easily studies or categorized. Nominalism explicity denies any such reality as human nature being grounded outside the knowning mind. . . . Reality is not intelligible, it is sensible only. . . .

The implications of this doctrine are fearful. There is no order of truth in the traditional sense, there are only facts; there are no universally valid moral principles, but only relative moral standards . . . the denial of the intelligibility of the universe entails the denial of undersatnding and wisdom as the basis of authority and law, and substitutesw ealth and power; the purpose of each individual human life within the created order loses its meaning, and the purpose of human life is not discovered by analysis of the real, but chosen by each individual to be whatever he or she wants it to be . . . .

Weaver traces the rise of nominalism in the 14th century with William of Ockham, through its development by the British Empiricists inthe 18th century to its popular acceptance inthe 20th century. For its rapid spread from the end of World War I until the time of his writing of Ideas, Weaver credits what he calls 'the great stereopticon." That is, the movies, the press and the radio. Television had not achieved the status that it has today, but if Weaver had revised Ideas he certainly would have included television as even a greater force for cultural and social dissolution" (pp. 48-50).

As I read this, I discovered a similar story to that told by Etienne Gilson, Michael Allan Gillespie (Nihilism before Nietzsche), Benedict XVI, and Conor Cunningham and others within so-called "radical orthodoxy". The times coming out of the WWII were interesting intellectual years as the world struggled with what it had wrought; however the Cold War seems to have diverted these thoughts into other veins radically redefined what "conservative" was to be many things that Weaver initially criticized and that seem "leftist" today.

More about these shifts later. Yet it does show that what contemporary culture calls conservative and liberal are two wings within a common framework, far distant from the intellectual traditions that produced the terms in the first place.