I expect to speak of the South therefore as a minority within the nation, whose claim to attention lies not in its success in impressing its ideals upon the nation or the world, but in something I shall insist is higher - an ethical claim which can be described only in terms of the 'mandate of civilization.' In its battle for survival the South has lost ground, but it has kept from extinction some things whose value is emphasized by the disintegration of the modern world.
This work concerns itself with a tradition, which means a recognizable pattern of belief and behavior transmitted from one generation to the next.
To say that Southerners have differed in point of view from Yankees does not speak for every single Southerner, but it does express a substantial truth.
If asked to tell why in these days Southern history is entitled to thoughtful consideration, I should list first of all the fact that the South, alone among the sections, has persisted in regarding science as a false messiah. This by itself indicates that the Southern tradition has a center of resistance to the most powerful force of corruption in our age.
We have been led to believe that man's chief task is the conquest of nature, including of course space and time. Mere advances in mechanical power, and especially in superior mobility, have been greeted as steps in an automatic progress...
It is easy, while occupied with technics and under the influence of robot-like labor, to forget that the most difficult task is to train and govern men for their own good.
We must see first of all that the kingdom of civilization is within. We must confess that the highest sources of value in life are the ethical and aesthetic conceptions with which our imagination invests the world. We must admit that man is to be judged by the quality of his actions rather than by the extent of his dominion. Civilization is a discipline, an achievement in self-culture and self-control, and the only civilizing agent is a spirit manifesting itself through reason, imagination, and religious inspiration, and giving a sort of mintage to acts which would otherwise be without meaning.
A civilized tradition implies a center, from which control is exerted, and it is through this control that we give quality to actions. Civilized man carries a sense of restraint into his behavior both toward nature and his fellow beings. The first of these is piety; the second ethics.
The attitude of science has become impious to the fullest degree...But nature is not an opponent, as ancient systems of belief could have instructed us, it is the matrix of our being...Piety is a realization that beyond a certain point victories over nature are pyrrhic. The thought is implicit in the legend of Prometheus, and I have no doubt that the deep suspicion with which medieval theologians viewed early explorations of the physical world was intuition. They sensed, apparently, the peril in these conquests, a hubris leading to vainglory, egotism, impatience, a feeling that man can dispense with all restraints. Every legend of man's fall is a caution against presuming to know everything, and an indirect exhortation to piety; and the disappearance of belief in original sin has done more than anything else to prepare the way for sophistical theories of human nature and society. Man has lost piety toward nature in proportion as he has left her and shut himself up in cities with rationalism for his philosophy.
[The modern world demonstrates] a "spoiled child" psychology - they have lived so long in an artificial environment that they have lost a sense of the difficulty of things.
The acceptance of nature, with an awareness of the persistence of tragedy, is the first element of spirituality, and a first lesson for the poor bewildered modern who, amid the wreckage of systems, confesses an inability to understand the world.
-Richard Weaver
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