The philosopher and teacher of rhetoric Richard Weaver is best known today for his book Ideas Have Consequences, which was one of the founding works of post-World War II American conservatism. Weaver argued in the book that the nominalism of the medieval philosopher William of Ockham produced a decline in Western civilization that has continued until the present day, and he called for a spiritual revival to stop the decline and, if possible, to reverse it.
How did Ockham accomplish this feat? As Weaver saw it, he did so through his doctrine of nominalism, and this in two ways. Nominalism takes words to be arbitrary signs: they do not designate essences but instead refer to bare particulars. Human beings, for example, don’t share the defining property of being rational animals, but are nothing but assortments that we find convenient to group together. The transcendentals, i.e., being, truth, goodness, and beauty fare no better. They too are arbitrary signs.
As you can well imagine, nominalism plays havoc with religion, albeit that Ockham was a Franciscan friar whom we might expect to defend it. God reduces to pure power, and natural law to choices by a despot. In the actual world, killing babies is wrong, but Ockham’s God could have said it was right, and had he done so, it would have been.
Some have seen in nominalism, whatever its failings, the foundation of modern science. No longer limited by efforts to discover how the sensory world instantiated essences, scientists were free to investigate the regularities of nature, and the result has been the enormous growth of technology on which the modern world depends.
Weaver disagreed with this view as well. Empiricism can by itself teach nothing: it is just one damn thing after another. The proper method of science cannot dispense with universals and essences; and, as for technology, Weaver was less than fully convinced of its benefits, to say the least. We cannot return to the Middle Ages, before Ockham reared his ugly head, but things were far better then.
Weaver didn’t like the eighteenth century much, but it at least offers us some possibility to restore our spiritual life. The American and French Revolutions took rights to be fixed principles: the Declaration of Independence says that “all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”; and if the deistic Creator invoked by Jefferson was less than the Christian God and the bourgeois values of the American republic inferior to those of the High Middle Ages, the American Revolution was not for all that to be despised. At least its values were far to be preferred to those of the following Romantic period, which gave free rein for impulse. By the way, Weaver saw his own century as even worse in its surrender to the irrational, and jazz brought to the full his powers of invective. One shudders to think of what he would have said about heavy metal and rap music. In his condemnation of jazz, he resembled the Frankfurt School Marxist Theodor Adorno, and there are significant parallels between Weaver’s assault on modern advertising and that of the Frankfurt School as well. We may speculate that this led the German theologian Paul Tillich, closely tied to the School, to give Ideas Have Consequences his enthusiastic endorsement.
What are we to make of all of this? Though it would take us too far afield to prove this, Weaver had a highly inaccurate notion of Ockham’s philosophy. More generally, despite his praise for deduction and his deprecation of unsupported intuition, Weaver argued by appeal to direct insight rather than to rigorous deduction.
But he was insightful, and in the space remaining, I’d like to concentrate on his defense of property rights. The state is guided by utilitarian calculation, he argued. In its efforts to promote efficiency, it sees human beings as equivalent to machines who can be substituted for each other and discarded when worn out. Those who reason in this way are by no means limited to socialists and others who support the state direction of the economy. Chicago School economists like Milton Friedman who endeavored to show that the free market, not government, best promotes efficiency, were no more to Weaver’s liking than the socialists.
What Weaver values in property rights is that they express attachment to an ideal; it is in this sense that property rights are metaphysical. A property owner can say to the state, “I don’t care if my property can be put to more ‘efficient’ use by transferring it to someone else. It is mine, to do with as I wish.”
That said, Weaver did not regard all uses of private property as equivalent in value, so long as they were freely chosen by the property owner. He saw the careful accumulation of wealth and income from property as an expression of prudential wisdom. Prudence is a form of belief in providence, particularly so when it results from the owners’ efforts to pass on what he has gained from his ancestors to his descendants. The urban masses were another matter, and Weaver, greatly attracted to the Southern Agrarians, favored the wide distribution of rural property as a means to counter the “massification” induced by living in a megalopolis.
Weaver was also a keen critic of the welfare state, which he saw as a means to disrupt the traditional family. Given the possibility of fobbing off care for parents on payments from Social Security, comparatively few could resist the temptations of avarice to do so. Unemployment benefits were condemned because they encouraged workers to spend their income rather than save it for a rainy day, and Keynesian praise for consumer spending aroused his suspicion. He also rejected inflation for breaking faith with creditors and thought that schools, especially universities, should be private rather than run by the government. He also had good words to say for Friedrich Hayek. It is quite understandable that conservatives and classical liberals who lack his concern for the intellectual sins of William of Ockham have been influenced by him. As you will see if you read him, he was a rhetorician of great power.
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