Heritage History Month Day Seventeen: Richard Weaver
Happy Richard Weaver Day!
Day seventeen of Heritage History Month, and we are celebrating the great social rhetorician and historian of Southern thought, Richard Weaver.
Weaver holds a foundational place in the development of my own understanding of the world and social theory; his Ideas book on the decline of the West was the catalyst that brought me out of my libertarian slumber and forced me to understand the world in a way at odds with the individualist-nominalist framework. Some on the right (such as Paul Gottfried) doubt the well-told tale of the collapse of classical philosophy as the ultimate cause of civilizational dissolution. But there is, in my mind, important significance to it.
In any case, since this isn’t about me and should be about Weaver, his Ideas book is an elegant defense for the pre-modern mind, defending the traditional West in an age hysteric over Progress. Such an understanding of history motivated him as well to look inward and contemplate the character and nature of his own American tradition in the Old South. His landmark study “The Southern Tradition at Bay” (recently, finally, republished) is a stirring praise of the South as an outpost—perhaps the last—of Western Civilization in a world fallen prey to rationalism, industrialism, and materialism.
For Weaver, the Antebellum South had four characteristics that made it a more traditional Western society as opposed to the burgeoning modern one that would conquer the Western world: “a feudal theory of society, a code of chivalry, the ancient concept of the gentleman, and a noncreedal faith". Southern society was built around the traditional view of family roots, generational continuity, and the property (land) on which a people’s memories are made and instilled.
Weaver’s expertise was in the area of rhetoric, writing essays and books on the ethics of rhetoric in light of the classical western tradition. He reflects on the role of rhetoric, how it persuades, and the consequences of its abuse. One of the more fascinating aspects of his rhetorical insights are his comments on Abraham Lincoln. Socio-politically critical of Lincoln for his destruction of the Federal system and the Southern way of life, he also praised Lincoln in the context of his speech-giving and approach to political rhetoric. On the flip side, while perhaps more dispositionally at home with Burkean politics, he is critical of Burke’s rhetorical historicism.
Richard Weaver was an advocate of the Platonic political tradition: rooted in ideals, dismissive of egalitarianism, and a defender of High Order. In a world of cultural anarchy and market-based production of cultural artifacts, Weaver was a counter-force that sought to remind the West that there was an underlying order of things that culture must reflect and be pious toward; the abandonment of the natural Order of Things was a recipe for despair and nihilism. Modern man, on his long trajectory of emancipation and individual autonomy, will find at the end of his long journey not tendencies toward utopia, but the emptying ravages of spiritual death.