By Richard M. Weaver
Buy it from Amazon
I hate exercise. Fortunately, I have been blessed with a petite frame, and I do not have a problem with harboring excess poundage, but I have discovered that age and ten pregnancies tend to work against my natural ability to stay slim. Thus, I need to exercise a bit more self-discipline in this area than I did twenty years ago, for the sake of my physique and my health.
The ravages of time have done damage to my brain cells, too. Perhaps it's the constant interruptions from my dear ones who, gratefully, like nothing better than to be where I am and confide every stray thought that crosses their collective consciousness. Maybe it's the inevitable stresses of the busy life of a large family. Whatever the cause of my occasional mental malaise, it's tempting to put my brain on autopilot with reading material no more difficult than a light mystery. The mind is willing, but the brain is weak.
So why did I choose to read (and review) a book as challenging as Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver? A cross between social commentary and philosophy, Rick Saenz called it the most difficult-to-read offering in the Draught Horse Press catalog. If I were to transfer my aversion to exercise from the physical realm to the cerebral, philosophy would certainly be the subject I would want to most avoid to avoid a mental strain. But there is something I cannot avoid.
Exercise is good for me.
Weaver's book is not difficult because of complicated syntax or big words (although I had to look up a few|AMP|mdash;i.e., parvenu), but its 190 pages are full of big ideas that make you think, and we are not used to thinking. My flabby brain had to reread many passages just to scratch the surface of the rich veins of insight throughout this book. It helped to have a pencil in hand to underline things I wanted to ponder at greater length.
Written after World War II, this book is an analysis of how "modern" society left its moorings and replaced the important "center" with peripheral trivialities. It makes observations on a wide-ranging variety of cultural pursuits, including journalism, education, technology, entertainment, art and language. Underlying all is the author's religious worldview: that there is a "source of truth higher than, and independent of man." He also understands that the problem is "man is not making himself like a god but is taking himself as he is and putting himself in the place of God."
A seer, Weaver had a remarkable grasp of the issues which are still so very pertinent in the "culture wars" of today. I experienced a bit of deja vu as I read, recalling similar themes in Lewis's books The Abolition of Man and one of my favorite novels, That Hideous Strength. The three books would be a great study for an older student who needs to understand the apostasy of thought and faith at all levels of society, in order to withstand the onslaughts against the principles Christian parents hope to cultivate. Epistemological self-consciousness has never been more important (Kevin Craig says, "A person who is thus 'epistemologically self-conscious' is thus a person who is aware of what his faith leads to, and is working to implement it in his life.")
Consider entertainment and other media, the source of much of modern man's information, on which he bases his worldview. Weaver called the cultural orchestration of information "the Great Stereopticon." Remember that his book was penned after the horrors of World War II, when people had become cynical but sought to escape their cynicism in the theater and through the soothing voices of the social commentators who told them what to think. How much more in our time is relief from cynicism and despair vainly sought by immersion in these comfortless gods? Weaver says:
It is the function of this machine to project selected pictures of life in the hope that what is seen will be imitated. All of us of the West who are within the long reach of technology are sitting in the audience. We are told the time to laugh and the time to cry, and signs are not wanting that the audience grows ever more responsive to its cues.
Noting that the Stereoptican creates an unstable status quo, and that information is served up in such a way that the consumers of it become dependent upon the commentators for interpreting what it all means, Weaver says, "The constant stream of sensation, eulogized as lively propagation of what the public wants to hear, discourages the pulling-together of events from past time into a whole for contemplation." Isn't this evident in the political realm, where politicians have carte blanche to say anything they want this week, because the public's memory for last week's promises or proclamations has already faded?
There are those of us who are trying to shake ourselves awake and drown out the soporific thrumming in order to remember the "real world," like Puddleglum in The Silver Chair, when he resisted the witch's spell. It's an uphill battle. Weaver again:
...it cannot be said too emphatically that the operators of the Great Stereopticon have an interest in keeping people from breaking through to deeper significances. Not only is the philopsopher a notoriously poor consumer; he is also an unsettling influence on societies careless of justice. That there are abysses of meaning beneath his daily routine, the common man occasionally supects; to have him realize them in some apocalyptic revelation might well threaten the foundations of materialist civilization.
There we go, back to that philosophy stuff again. There's no escaping it: being an escapist is bad for you, it's bad for your posterity, it's bad for society. We need to start exercising some self-discipline, and this time I'm talking about brains, not brawn. We need to read harder books and we need to think deeper thoughts, because ideas do have consequences, they affect how we live each day.
I've imperfectly applied my atrophied brain to the review of this challenging book. I tried to do better than just tell you, "Read this book...I liked it." I hope my efforts will inspire you to stretch and strengthen your own metal muscles with some more challenging reading of your own. Maybe we need a new additon to the Manifesto: "Prairie Muffins are against brain drain." Even Oprah has her afternoon acolytes picking up Anna Karenina this summer. We can do better than that...we can pick it up and read it, too.
Note: You can find the introduction and the first two chapters of Weaver's book at this site.
