Monday, August 10, 2009

The Southern Tradition at Bay 1: Introductory concepts

As Richard Weaver observed time and again, the essential South has remained, even after one hundred years of bitter experience, still too satisfied with narrowly defensive strategies. Its problem is and ever has been locating and enlisting its natural allies by exposing the gnostic posture of its enemies and by discovering the non-promethean character and roots of its own position.

His "aiming point" is indeed the South, but the "target," just over the hump, is the modern regime, both North and South, that has emerged in the mid-twentieth century and brought the Republic of the United States of America into its time of troubles.

"virtues needed to amass wealth are not the virtues needed to defend it"...Belief in tragedy is essentially un-American...If we are in for a time of darkness and trouble, the Southern philosophy, because it is not based on optimism, will have better power to console than the national dogmas.

Weaver was particularly taken with the idea that "an unorthodox defense of orthodoxy" was feasible.

He was suddenly troubled by his realization that "many traditional positions in our world had suffered not so much because of inherent defect as because of the stupidity, ineptness, and intellectual sloth of those who are presumed to have their defense in charge.

The study and appreciation of a lost cause has some effect of turning history into philosophy. In sufficient number of cases to make us humble, we discover good points in the cause which time has erased, just as one often learns more from the slain hero of a tragedy than from some brassy Fortinbras who comes in at the end to announce the victory and proclaim the future disposition of affairs.

Instead of the tortured, egocentric question "Who am I?" he could proceed to the larger, more philosophical question "Who are we?", "What are we doing?", "What ought we to do?"

...a devoted and vigorous study of some past experience of disaster - the fall of Rome, the overthrow of Napoleon, the destruction of the Old South - "will compel any honest seeker to see that the lines of social and political force are far more secret than the modern world has any mind to recognize; and that if it does not lead him to some kind of faith, it will lead him away from the easy constructions of those who do not wish to understand, beyond grasping what can be seized for a practical purpose.

That is it! Richard Weaver's book leads away from "easy constructions" and toward faith. It is not about the events of Civil War, Reconstruction, and the long aftermath of Populism, farm and labor trouble, the new industrialism. "Things reveal themselves passing away," Weaver writes, quoting Yeats. He is intent to discover what the postbellum Southerners, defeated, all but ruined, yet not really convinced, may consciously or unconsciously reveal about the great American experiment, from Jamestown and Plymouth to date.

"though failing, hardly expiring"

The South is the last non-materialist civilization in the Western world.

The South is in the curious position of having been right without realizing the grounds of its rightness. I am conscious that this reverses the common judgment, but it may yet appear that the North, by its ready embrace of science and rationalism, impoverished itself, and that the South, by clinging more or less unashamedly to the primitive way of life prepared itself for the longer run. But the South failed "to study its position until it arrived at metaphysical foundations." This book, with much of Weaver's subsequent writing, is a large step toward supplying foundations.

No comments:

Post a Comment