Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Social media Miscellaneous Other Ideas Have Consequences is a philosophical work by Richard M. Weaver, published in 1948 by the University of Chicago Press.
The book is largely a treatise on the harmful effects of nominalism on Western civilization since this doctrine gained prominence in the Late Middle Ages, followed by a prescription of a course of action through which Weaver believes the West might be rescued from its decline.
Accordingly, Weaver attacks nominalism using historical analogy and the teleological implications, or "consequences" of such a world view.
Weaver emphasizes his position that the cause of apparent patterns in the decline of civilizations is the recurring replacement of "an ontological division [of the cosmos] by categories" with "a study of signification ... [in which the] words no longer correspond to objective realities."
Weaver attributes the beginning of the Western decline to the adoption of nominalism (or the rejection of the notion of absolute truth) in the late Scholastic period.
The consequences of this revolution, Weaver contends, were the gradual erosion of the notions of distinction and hierarchy, and the subsequent enfeebling of the Western mind's capacity to reason.
These effects in turn produced all manner of societal ills, decimating Western art, education and morality.
As examples of the most recent and extreme consequences of this revolution, Weaver offers the cruelty of the Hiroshima bombing, the meaninglessness of modern art, America's cynicism and apathy in the face of the just war against Nazism, and the rise of what he terms "The Great Stereopticon".
Weaver gives the name "The Great Stereopticon" to what he perceives as a rising, emergent construct which serves to manipulate the beliefs and emotions of the populace, and ultimately to separate them from their humanity via "the commodification of truth".
Here, notably, Weaver echoes the sentiments of C. S. Lewis in his book The Abolition of Man (which was written nearly contemporaneously with Ideas Have Consequences), and anticipates the modern critique of consumerism.
Chapter 1: The Unsentimental Sentiment Every man in a culture has three levels of conscious reflection: his specific ideas about things, his general beliefs, and his metaphysical dream.
The first constitutes his worldliness, the second is applied to certain choices as they present themselves and the third which is the most important is his intuitive feeling about the immanent nature of reality.
Disintegration brings about, for our leaders, a problem of how to persuade to communal activity people who no longer have the same ideas about the most fundamental things.
The solution these leaders chose was to replace religion with education which was a systematic indoctrination through channels of information and entertainment.
"The Great Stereopticon keeps the ordinary citizen from perceiving ’the vanity of his bookkeeping and the emptiness of his domestic felicities.’" Chapter 6: The Spoiled-Child Psychology The author realizes, "HAVING been taught for four centuries, more or less, that his redemption lies through the conquest of nature, man expects his heaven to be spatial and temporal, and, beholding all things through the Great Stereopticon, he expects redemption to be easy of attainment.
And then he warns against the gravity of the situation, "It is not a little disquieting to realize that in private property there survives the last domain of privacy of any kind."
These take the form of independent farms, of local businesses, of homes owned by the occupants, where individual responsibility gives significance to prerogative over property.
He observes, "In recognizing that words have power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation."
And then he goes on to identify two dangerous phenomena: The attack upon the symbolic operations of language and the decay of honorifics (in forms of address!)
The author declares that he is "ready to assert that we can never break out of the circle of language and seize the object barehanded, as it were, or without some ideational operation."
In conclusion, the author suggests, "Since man necessarily uses both the poetical and the logical resources of speech, he needs a twofold training.
Regarding neighbors, "Knowledge disciplines egotism so that one credits the reality of other selves… But to have enough imagination to see into other lives and enough piety to realize that their existence is a part of beneficent creation is the very foundation of human community."