If asked whether the South has any genuine claim to be considered aristocratic, I would say yes, and this is it. The South has kept something of the attitude of the soldier: aware of the battle, he has only contempt for the tender, querulous, agitated creature of modern artifice, sighing for the comforts he is "entitled to," and protesting that the world cannot really be like this. I am sure that Lee, so reserved in expression, so wise in thought, had this in mind when he called self-denial the greatest lesson to be learned. If part of our happiness comes through transformation of the outward world, another part comes through the pruning of desire, and we return to the original proposition that civilization is a matter of inner conditioning and adaptation.
As piety respects the mystery of nature, so ethics, the restraining sentiment which we carry into the world of our fellow beings, respects the reality of personality. It is well if our code of ethics has a religious origin, so that its power to impress derives from some myth or some noble parable. Its purpose, in any case, is to lead everyone to a relatively selfless point of view, and to make him realize the plurality of personalities in the world. Above all, it must insist upon the rightness of right and keep in abeyance the crude standard of what will pay.
The South has maintained an astonishing resistance to the insidious doctrine of relativism and empiricism.
Personality can develop only in a humane environment, and nowhere in America has this distillation of life flourished as in the South. Its love of heroes, its affection for eccentric leaders, its interest in personal anecdote, in the colorful and the dramatic, discounted elsewher as charming weaknesses, are signs that it reveres the spiritual part of man. It has instinctively disliked, though it has by now partially succumbed to, the dehumanizing influence of governments and factories. Individualism and personality are making a stand - perhaps a Custer's last stand in the South.
Civilization is measured by its power to create and enforce distinctions. Consequently there must be some source of discrimination, from which we bring ideas of order to bear on a fortuitous world. Knowledge and virtue constitute this source, and these two things, it must be said to the vexation of the sentimental optimists, are in their nature aristocracies. Participation in them is open to all: this much of the doctrine; but the participation will never occur in equal manner or degree, so that however we allow men to start in the world, we may be sure that as long as standards of quality exist, there will be a sorting out. Indeed, we are entitled to say categorically that unless such standards are operative, civilization does not exist, or that it has fallen into decay. That no man was ever born free and no two men have ever been equal, is a more sensible saying than its contrary. To the extent that the South has preserved social structure and avoided the creation of masses, it has maintained the only kind of world in which values can long survive.
A society in the true sense must have exclusive minorities of the wise and good who will bear responsibility and enjoy prestige. Otherwise, it will be leaderless, or its leadership will rest on forces of darkness; for there is little difference between the tribal chieftain who wins his place by brute force and the demagogue of the mass state who wins his by appeal to mass appetite. The man of a civilized tradition, therefore, will find nothing strange in the idea of hierarchy. Out of the natural reverence for intellect and virtue there arises an impulse to segregation, which broadly results in coarser natures, that is, those of duller mental and moral sensibility, being lodged at the bottom and those of more refined at the top.
The notion that all ideas of rank are inimical to liberty is found only among those who have not analyzed the relationship between freedom and organization. It is the process of leveling which distorts reality and leaves us with a situation that is, literally, impossible to conceive. The most assured way to undermine civilization is to surrender to criteria of uniformity and objectivity, losing sight of the fact that the objective cannot be prescriptive and failing to make these distinctions which have their basis in human ambition.
True, it requires a degree of tough-mindedness to accept the fact of civilization, just as it requires sternness to execute moral laws, for both are discriminatory; and many forces which would destroy it have been abetted by men of good will, and have come creeping in among us, appealing to blind appetite, to special interest, and capitalizing on a partial awareness of what is at stake.
They [southerners] could not understand how anyone, looking at the face of society and cherishing values, which must always appear tyrranous in the divisions they enforce among men, could preach equality and ridicule the veneration of age and eminence.
They who seek to evade this dilemma by declaring that ability alone should count, a natural plea in our age of specialization, one often disingenuous, for they narrow down "ability" to mean some special skill, aptitude, or ingenuity at an isolated task. But in the political community ability must take account of the whole man: his special competence plus his personality and his moral disposition, even his history. It is well that people are not ranked for measureable efficiency as engines are for horsepower, but rather for the total idea we have of them. Thus again we face the topic of the whole man and the evil of reducing him to an abstraction to insure his political qualification.
Southern political theory was a rationale of society: the Northern theory it was designed to confute was largely a set of aspirations unrealizable even logically. It was a political romanticism...Every old and settled society comes to terms with the physical world and the psychic world, and it forms a judgment that efforts to change either beyond a certain point will cost more than they will yield. The South was in the position of Europe or even Asia; it felt that it had discovered some necessary limitations of existence; the North felt that the South was compounding with ancient evils...The North had Tom Paine and his postulates assuming the virtuous inclinations of man; the South had Burke and his doctrine of human fallibility and of the organic nature of society.
A culture defines itself by crystallizing around what I should call "unsentimental sentiments." These are feelings which determine a common attitude toward large phases of experience; they impel us, on critical occasions of life, to sense more than we would sense and do more than we would do if we were only economic man. There is no demonstrable connection between them and our physical survival; and therefore from the standpoint of materialism or nihilism they are excessive in the same way as any sentimental display. They originate in our world view, in our ultimate vision of what is proper for men as higher beings; and they are kept from being sentimental in fact by a metaphysic or a theology which assigns them a function through imagination.
The propriety of any given sentiment will rest on our profoundest view of life: our attitude toward the dead, toward traditional institutions, toward the symbols of community life - all come from a metaphysical dream of the world which we have created, or have been taught. It is the loss of this view, and the determination of matters in a narrow context of material interest - let us recall the horror with which the direct, practical judgments of a successful moneymaker are greeted in a family of inherited refinement.
Southerners apply the term "Yankee" as the Greeks did "barbarian". The kinship of ideas cannot be overlooked. The Greeks knew that the barbarian could not participate in his luminous world of myth and actuality. The sentiments of a culture may indeed be "delicate arabesques of convention," the appreciation of which demands a state of grace. Their value will lie in their non-utility, in their remoteness, from practical concerns, which keeps us from immersion in the material world. So the Southerners who belonged to the tradition thought they saw in the levelling spirit of the North, in its criteria of utility, in its plebeian distrust of forms, in its spirit of irreverence - and all of these must be mentioned with apologies to Northern people whom they do not characterize - a kind of barbarian destructiveness, not willed perhaps, but certain in its effect.
The destruction of sentiment leaves us not animals, who have their own nobility, but ruined men. Considerable importance must therefore be attached to the Southern fondness for pleasing illusions.
The South has a deep suspicion of all theory, perhaps of intellect. It has always been on the side of blood and soil, of instinct, of vitalism. Something in its climate, in its social life predisposes it to feel that "gray is all theory, and green is life's golden tree."
Society is a product of organic growth.
And today, when the South pleads to be allowed "to work out its own problems in its own way," it more often than not has no plans for working them out. Its "way" is not to work them out, but to let some mechanism of adjustment achieve a balance. It is this which has clashed with the North's impulse to toil, "to help the world go around," to have a national accounting of everything. Undoubtedly, it has relation to the attitude of piety, which would respect the "course of things" and frowns on a busy human interference with what nature seems to have planned or providence ordained.
Despite sins which are as scarlet, the South has remained a Christian country in that it has persisted in describing the relationship of man to the universe in religious symbols...
-Richard Weaver
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