From IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES
- Richard M. Weaver
This story of man's passage from religious or philosophical transcendentalism has been told many times, and, since it has usually been told as a story of progress, it is extremely difficult today to get people in any number to see contrary implications. Yet to establish the fact of decadence is the most pressing duty of our time, because until we have demonstrated that cultural decline is a historical fact - which can be established - and that modern man has about squandered his estate, we cannot combat those who have fallen prey to hysterical optimism.
Such is the task, and our most serious obstacle is that people traveling this downward path develop an insensibility which increases with their degradation. Loss is perceived most clearly at the beginning; after habit becomes implanted, one beholds the anomalous situation of apathy mounting as the moral crisis deepens........ Thus in the face of the enormous brutality of our age we seem unable to make appropriate response to perversions of truth and acts of bestiality. ......We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent.
(Mariah speaking) This reminds me of a great tune by Supertramp - The Fool's Overture. "They called the man a fool, stripped him of his pride - Everyone was laughing until the day he died - And thought the wound went deep - Still he's calling us out of our sleep." .......... It also reminds me of an old rhyme that we discussed at Spoken Word the other night:
Evil is of such awful mein
That to be hated needs but to be seen.
But seen too oft, familiar of face,
We first abhor, then endure...then embrace.
- Richard M. Weaver
This story of man's passage from religious or philosophical transcendentalism has been told many times, and, since it has usually been told as a story of progress, it is extremely difficult today to get people in any number to see contrary implications. Yet to establish the fact of decadence is the most pressing duty of our time, because until we have demonstrated that cultural decline is a historical fact - which can be established - and that modern man has about squandered his estate, we cannot combat those who have fallen prey to hysterical optimism.
Such is the task, and our most serious obstacle is that people traveling this downward path develop an insensibility which increases with their degradation. Loss is perceived most clearly at the beginning; after habit becomes implanted, one beholds the anomalous situation of apathy mounting as the moral crisis deepens........ Thus in the face of the enormous brutality of our age we seem unable to make appropriate response to perversions of truth and acts of bestiality. ......We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent.
(Mariah speaking) This reminds me of a great tune by Supertramp - The Fool's Overture. "They called the man a fool, stripped him of his pride - Everyone was laughing until the day he died - And thought the wound went deep - Still he's calling us out of our sleep." .......... It also reminds me of an old rhyme that we discussed at Spoken Word the other night:
Evil is of such awful mein
That to be hated needs but to be seen.
But seen too oft, familiar of face,
We first abhor, then endure...then embrace.
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