Original Intentions - Preface

This book is by nature and purpose an invocation of the patrimony. The eight chapters were written as part of the bicentennial observation honoring the Constitution of the United States. In particular, they salute the Constitution as it was when first drafted and ratified by the people of the states. Though these studies sometimes complain of contemporary misunderstandings in constitutional history, their informing principle is, obviously, my still undiminished regard for those who gave us our original form of government: both for the process which brought it into being and for the details of its design and operation as they affect us from day to day. The individual chapters were written first to be heard and then to be read - as the public statements of both scholar and citizen. For it is the nature of the American regime that an act of devotion to our constitutional morality, expressing our corporate will to "preserve, protect and defend: our Constitution, is ordinarily performed in speech of the kind the ancients called epideictic: not so much for debating policy or condemning error as for the rehearsal of attitudes generally agreed upon, necessary to the preservation of the nation's character and definitive of its special standing among the peoples of the world. Though long since distorted by construction and hidden beneath the encrusted details of a thousand ad hoc solutions to practical problems - solutions drawn up without a care as to their constitutional legitimacy - the old Republic of the Fathers is still there, visible within the misshapen effulgence of the United States Constitution as we presently experience it, waiting to have the barnacles cleaned away that, as amended, it may once more shine forth among the nations. Assuming the wisdom of this well-established American practice and the truth of these opinions concerning public piety toward a fundamental law that we treat as sovereign, that we sue as a measure of all political legitimacy, these chapters have been left in the form in which they were prepared. For they are, first of all, addresses made in honor of a heritage, designed to argue a view of its content and to urge its preservation.

To be sure, many views of the enterprise under way were current among the Framers while they drafted and then, with great difficulty, agreed upon and helped to ratify the Constitution in their respective states. Furthermore, not all of these intentions could (or can) be reconciled with every alternative opinion as to what they were, collectively, attempting in the creation of a "supreme law of the land" - attempting even though they mostly agreed on the larger purposes of the Constitution and its "meaning" in the strict (operational or procedural) sense of the term. Max Farrand records from the notes of James McHenry of Maryland that on May 29, 1787, during the very first days of the Great Convention, Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, while introducing the so-called Virginia plan to his colleagues in Independence Hall, drew a contrast between the authors of the Articles of Confederation and the Framers of what he hoped would be the new United States Constitution. According to Randolph, the former company was made up of "wise and great men" whose study was "human rights" as that doctrine applied in their critique of the excesses of Great Britain. In other words, they sought to maximize rights of the sort violated by the Intolerable Acts by creating, in contrast to what came out of Whitehall, a minimal government, directly responsive at the local level to the population that it served. In the same spirit they had created the "democratic parts" of many state constitutions, especially concerning what the Fathers called "local police." As a result, "the powers of government exercised by the people swallowed up the other branches." Against such arrangements Randolph complained that "none...have provided sufficient checks against democracy." What the Framers were about to do would therefore not be about human rights or in behalf of democracy, except in a limited way(xvi).

Randolph's preview of the intentions of the Framers represented the thinking of much of that company - perhaps of a small majority. But there were clearly other views in the business, of its structural impetus if not of its particular provisions. In Massachusetts, during the ratification convention held in Boston in January 1788, Fisher Ames announced a vision of government consonant with his Puritan heritage - a view that gave to his reading of the social implications of the Constitution a twist replicated only in the thinking of those Framers who found government to be the source of their liberty, not its adversary. He saw freedom outside the social condition as a Hobbesian chaos of untrammeled appetite and unruly passions such as had recently exploded in the western part of his state and in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. In behalf of the Constitution Ames conjured up the specter of Captain Shays and his desperate crew: "Anarchy and uncertainty attend our future state...who is there that really loves liberty, that will not tremble for its safety, if the federal government should be dissolved. Can liberty be safe without government?...The Union [preserved through ratification of the Constitution] is the dike to fence out the flood...But when the inundation comes shall we stand on dry land?" The metaphor employed in this appeal explains what Connecticut Antifederalist Eliphalet Dyer meant when he reversed his position in his state's ratification convention and decided to support the Constitution as "a brave experiment to cope with the wickedness of mankind." Or what Ames himself intended when he observed, "Democracy is a volcano, which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction." For Ames believed that men "cannot live without society," and that the people of Massachusetts should be (in John Winthrop's words) "knit together in this work as one body," made free and virtuous by their incorporation in the commonwealth and the Union. Energetic government as a fountain of blessings takes us back directly to the beginnings of the Protestant Zion in the Bay Colony. Other Framers, however, would have been uncomfortable with doctrines that were axiomatic for Fisher Ames.

For those who live inside the myth of an egalitarian America, it is perhaps surprising that so few of the Framers said anything about natural or equal rights during the course of the Great Convention, that Governor Randolph's opinion of their intentions as lawgivers was a sound one, vindicated after-the-fact of his prophecy by the records of those 1787 deliberations in Philadelphia. James Wilson of Pennsylvania was an (xvii) exception to Randolph's prediction. Other Framers mentioned group rights, class rights, inherited rights, or property rights - the rights that go with membership in a society or specific rights earned by revolution, such as those a speaker sometimes invokes in the midst of a remark, though not to suggest serious philosophical generalizations concerning human nature. Furthermore, when in state ratification conventions or pamphlet literature certain Antifederalists assumed a strong position with reference to human rights, they were answered as was Major Samuel Nasson of Massachusetts - with the kind of deflating alternative explanation that John Rutledge offered in Philadelphia in response to too much lofty sentiment on the subject of slavery. With impatience toward idealists Rutledge had maintained that "interest alone is the governing principle with nations" and that only "fools" would proceed on another basis. In the same spirit Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts counseled his fellow lawgivers that they should "consult [the] rooted prejudices" of their constituents, and John Francis Mercer of Maryland insisted that all government was "by force and influence." It is a kind of evidence that none of the Framers were outraged by these recommendations for and constructions of the business at hand - that no one rose to refute them, that no one said nay to them. For all present agreed that they had been taught by experience "the danger of the leveling spirit" - the spirit which paid no attention to interests, prejudice, and influence. They were therefore also inclined to treat with suspicion lofty declarations of principle when they were employed as a prologue of self-serving propositions.

Of course, there were other theories as to the overarching purpose of the "more perfect Union" being proposed. These were either heard on the floor of Independence Hall, presented in the ratifying conventions, or developed in the literature of the controversy that swirled around the Constitution once it had been delivered to the states. These theories went beyond simple questions of the conflict between rights and interests, either natural or not. The argument for the authority of experience, John Dickinson's "better guide than reason," was probably the most powerful of these doctrines. In all likelihood it was a predicate of Edmund Randolph's plan for a government based on something other than human rights. But the idea of a union for the sake of empire or the concept of government as an engine(xviii) to promote wealth (positions advance by Alexander Hamilton of New York and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut) could sometimes be connected with a view of the lessons of experience, a notion of group interests, an appeal to tested prejudice (like that praised by Edmund Burke), a plan for employing influence, or a set of assumptions about rights that are to be protected. Hence Original Intentions, the reference to many intentions, does not necessarily involve assumptions about irreconcilable differences. Instead, what it presumes is no more than a recognition of variety - though variety of a kind that made it necessary for the Framers to take great care in drawing up the compact which is our primary political bond. For if not all of these intentions can be served simultaneously, at least some of them can be reconciled to others some of the time, and with the nation retaining a coherence as both one and many. In attempting to perform such a task the Constitutional Convention followed one path and the ratifying conventions several others. This divergence has affected the historic development of the Constitution since 1789 - both the legitimate amendments and the tendentious judicial or administrative readings of the text which have changed it without recourse to the Congress or the states.

Thus I have acknowledged multiplicity by distinguishing between various original intentions. However, though the contents of this book are eight speeches given on disparate occasions, it is by no means merely an after-the-fact collection. The subjects that these studies explore and the sequence in which they are assembled were predetermined before I began work on the series and are assumed in what is said above about the word "intentions" as it functions in my title. The book had its name and purpose before it was written - even though, by happy accident, I was invited to deliver its several chapters as separate addresses during the celebratory years. Or rather, it assumed its final shape as I completed work on its central chapter, "Such a Government as the People Will Approve: The Great Convention as Comic Action," and asked where my analysis of the Constitutional Convention as dramatic structure might point with respect to the larger subject of the constitutional origins and development of the Republic. To the literary critic who is also a rhetorician, it is natural to focus on the dynamic of the various state ratification conventions. Moreover, because of my earlier work on the status of history as authority in(xix) the political deliberations of the Framers, I was predictably interested in assessing the role of eighteenth-century American attitudes toward the British constitution in shaping particular features of our Constitution.

Vociferous contemporary discussion of the standing of organized religion under the Constitution, combined with several years of work on brief political biographies of the Framers (both Framers in Philadelphia and Framers as leaders of ratification debates), inclined me to ask those synthetic questions that issued in "Religion and the Framers: The Biographical Evidence." Here, as in the essays on constitutional theory, political dynamics, and contrasting ratification conventions, certain general truths emerge - propositions concerning what can be believed about the lengths to which so many conventional but serious Christians would go in order to convert their country into a haven for unbelief, apostasy, or religious "neutrality"; generalizations about the unresolved variety of political motives that differentiate ratification in South Carolina or North Carolina from ratification in Massachusetts. And the same can be said about the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments, the so-called Reconstruction amendments, when their impact (with some associated legislation) on a Constitution originally procedural in nature - nomocratic and modest in its purposes - is defined. For it is what these amendments have come to mean that, under a heavy layer of melioristic idees recues, hides from us how little they in fact changed the nature of the minimal, limited federal instrument to which the Founders had agreed. Misconstruction of these amendments and laws has been the formula used to transform the Constitution of the United States into a purpose-oriented (that is, teleological) blank check for redesigning American society according to the advanced opinions of our savants. Correcting that misconstruction is therefore a necessary corollary to preserving or restoring the fundamental law. Hence my recourse to the theory of Michael Oakeshott in "Changed only a Little: The Reconstruction Amendments and the Nomocratic Constitution of 1787" and my earlier comments on the relative importance of political doctrine and timing in "The Process of Ratification: A Study in Political Dynamics," a natural prologue to the readings of the several ratifying conventions.

The chapters of Original Intentions follow an order that, by increments(xx), reinforces the argument of the book. In other words, their effect is accumulative. As I specify in the concluding essay on the amendments of 1865-70, the question addressed by the total set is not what lawyers and legislators, professors, and judges as interested parties in the political struggles of this our era make of the document for their own objectives but what the authority is of the old Constitution itself, whose meaning (said Justice Sutherland) "is changeless" even though its "application is extensible": a Constitution that reproaches whoever would distort it to serve ends that are beyond its scope and subversive of its integrity. To that purpose it is most useful to search back before 1787 and to consider where the Framers' basic notions concerning the value of constitutions might have originated, and to recover especially their view of the British constitution - the eighteenth century American reading of that political framework, one which brought England's North American colonies all the way into and through their Revolution. This task I attempt to perform in "The Best Constitution in Existence: The Influence of the British Example on the Framers of Our Fundamental Law." This essay looks back to the opening chapter on comic action and forward to my discussion of state ratifying conventions. According to the same interactive theory, it was necessary to speak of the Great Convention as a complete action before looking closely at one of its features - and to follow that segment of my analysis of the original Constitution with readings from two of the most distinctive state ratifying conventions in "A Dike to Fence Out the Flood: The Ratification of the Constitution in Massachusetts" and "Preserving the Birthright: The Intention of South Carolina in Adopting the United States Constitution." These papers, along with the later essay on ratification in North Carolina, "A Great Refusal: The North Carolina Ratification Convention of 1788," made way for emphasis on at least one of the now fashionable and well-established misreadings of those beginnings and of the "kind" of constitution Anglo-Americans only recently independent in 1787-88 could be expected to make. Only then could I begin to explain how the Constitution has come to so little resemble what the Framers expected it to be, even after two hundred years of national growth and development. I look back in the "Epilogue" at the almost inevitable consequences of ambition in a Supreme Court subject to no restraints apart from those(xxi) that are self-imposed, called upon to restrict itself to a modest role when (obviously) all the rewards of power and fame will be offered only to such jurists as refuse any such confinement through fidelity to texts and instead invent the law.

Though I generalize from the information and analysis gathered in these pages, I try to confine my readings to certain themes and subjects within the range of my particular competence as a rhetorician. These studies point to others, and especially to a detailed examination of the assorted kinds of political rhetoric employed by eighteenth-century Americans. I focus here on the language and argument of American constitution-making because that subject has been especially neglected - the analysis of debates and of kinds of political persuasion that contributed to the finished work. But concerning the subject, I may summarize only from an overview of the various phases of the question seen as an order or chronological survey. That task I do attempt to carry out, despite the special character of my evidence. My hope is that this selection of subjects and texts confirms my argument with a reasonable economy, and without disguising or overlooking the complexity of the questions that it is bound to raise. The Constitution of the United States is a rich heritage of agreements elevated to the level of definitive act but without inflation into ideology and armed doctrine. It organizes and protects a government able to contain our multiplicity without setting out to resolve it. It does not manipulate our conflict over valued toward some extrinsic, anterior goal. Rather, it tells us all that we are obliged to settle such questions in society, minus the coercions of law and politics. And that we should do so without those excesses of rancor that might pull down the entire edifice in impatience with its silence or reticence concerning many normative issues. The beginning of such restraint contains some understanding of the history of the United States Constitution, of how we have lost control of its interpretation, of how we may regain that control, and of why our fundamental law continues to be like Solon's, not the best we could invent but the best that the people would approve(xxii).

-M.E. Bradford, Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution. University of Georgia Press: Athens and London, 1993.

Visions of Order - Chapter 2

Status and Function

The preceding chapter has suggested that although every culture is unique in substantive content, it exhibits a certain formal nature which is common to all cultures. This nature reflects basic laws, and when the tendency of a culture to follow these laws is frustrated, either by ignorant popular attitudes or by social derangements, its capacity to offer satisfactions declines. This decline leads to further skepticism regarding its value. If critical thought is to be of use in the reconstructing of a culture, we must isolate the causes that prevent its formal realization(22).

We have noted the damage that can be done when a political concept breaks loose and spreads lawlessly, imposing its demands in an area where a different principle of ordering is proper. Another serious failure is to be traced to an ontological confusion by which a certain indispensable balance is upset. This is seen today in our failure, both in intellectual outlook and in social regime, to preserve the necessary relationship of status and function. Modernism is everywhere stressing function at the expense of status, and the more the imbalance grows, the more precarious and therefore dissatisfied we feel, because we are surrendering a condition essential to the preservation of all cultural attitudes and ideas. The reason for saying this takes us to the nature of things(22-3).

Whether we turn either the natural or the introspective eye, we find objects presenting the two general aspects of status and function. By "status" we mean the feature of permanence and by "function" that of change. These properties are the two broadest headings under which we denote our conception of the world. Whatever the field we gaze upon, we see things maintaining their identity while changing. Things both are and are becoming. They are because the idea or general configuration of them persists; and they are becoming because with the flowing of time, they inevitably slough off old substance and take on new. The paradox of both being and becoming is thus continuously enacted. We say that there is a "nature of things," but this nature ever appears in a changing embodiment, so that if we attended only to the latter, we should no sooner say of a thing that "it is" than we should be obliged to say "it was" or "it is now something else." It is an ancient observation that "no man steps in the same river twice," yet we continue to conceive it as a river and to call it by one name. At one and the same moment permanence holds us enchanted and change urges us on.

The oak tree in the forest is none the less an oak tree though it passes, in a century and a quarter, from a tiny shoot to the sturdy giant of seventy feet. Through all its seasonal dormancy and growth, its interchange with water and air, it remains an oak tree, a fixed kind in nature. It possesses status in a world of change. The physicist's account of the whirl of molecules that make it up will not cause us to refer to it as anything but "that oak tree."

We look upon the individual person and see him maintaining his persona all the while he passes through the seven stages of life. Despite changes, he is the same: one man legally identifiable under one name, through all his natural and mental processes of assimilation and elimination. He grows in size, alters in appearance, and he may even change somewhat in personality, but the thread of his selfhood persists and he never undergoes amalgamation with the circumambient world. Our dealings with him are conditional upon our understanding that from year to year he is one individual, preserving a self amid the flow of materiality(23).

So it is with art styles. We have a Greek art, a Byzantine art, an art of the Italian Renaissance. They have their developments and periods, their identifiable creations of individual artists, yet they remain an art form, with typical features of perspective and emphasis. This is their character, their formative principle, which allows us to discriminate them. The individual works participate in a common idea.

The same process is visible even when we look at the political state. It persists under one name, and it may even affirm in its organic law that it is indestructible. But its old leaders pass on or are removed, and new ones appear. After a twenty-year absence, one would come back and find the leaders looking different in almost any country. But while these individual particles are being shuffled and replaced, "the state" goes on, maintaining some character and identity through all the changes. The most conservative state must yield something to the pressure of historical increment, and the most "progressive" one conserves something that it considers its special form and spirit(23).

The duality of permancence and change is the universal appearance of existing things, and it seems to express an ineluctable condition of fulfillment. It is an original provision, ubiquitous and profound, which we are compelled to respect even in maintaining our human creations. To see how they are manifested in cultures, we need to study each more closely(24).

The status of a thing is its attained nature and quality or its possession of being. It is repugnant to mind as well as to feeling to think of the world as pure becoming or as something which never is because it is forever in process. We feel intuitively that things have a being, that they show a certain definable essence which we can grasp through the intellect. The world may be constantly flowing, yet it is a world. The very idea of existence is frustrated if we imagine only a continuous stream or if we think of a thing as surrendering itself before a self can ever be established. We could never become attached to something that never is. If reality were merely a flux, "selves" and "natures" would be illusions, and we could never consciously deal with the world. Both theory and observation prove that there are perdurances. Our existence is such that we alternate between expectation and fulfillment, and without fulfillment, expectation would cease. Therefore status, or the achieved state of things, is ontologically a necessary ground for our activity. It is one half of this lawful dichotomy of existence(24).

It is this half which today needs the attention of the critical mind. But to avoid appearance of neglecting the other, let us first acknowledge that the world in which man is born to seek out his salvation is in part a world of historical process. Religious, philosophical, and literary studies of man concur in teaching that he is born to a condition of "action and liability" where he must work out the "awful experiment of time." The continual becoming of things forever confronts us with challenge, testing our quality and our sense of direction. Even while man has status, he is under the absolute necessity of functioning, as each sequent heartbeat makes plain. He is actor and creator, and indeed the mere conservation of status calls for action. The functioning of man is in his adaptation to change, his dealing with the incessant transiency of things in such a way that some line of meaning in his conduct is preserved. Function is the role of homo faber, or as this could be translated into a modern equivalent, "man the engineer."

The particular urgency with which this essay deals is an unbalancing in which man represents himself too exclusively as engineer and supposes that the finding of means to practical ends should be the whole of existence . For today function increasingly displaces status, and people can be found to say that there is no value in status or that status only clogs activity. These people are often self-styled proponents of culture and they may even give a large amount of time and energy to what they conceive to be cultural activities. But because they are mistaken in principle, there is small hope of saving such culture as we have inherited unless they can be awakened or somehow checked by others. They are the "functionalists," and they bring us to the threshold of this cultural crisis.

It will be found that every culture which creates rewarding social structures and works of the imagination has its existence through an equipoise of function and status. This is a condition of equilibrium, a delicate balancing of opposites for which, on the lower levels, there are analogies in the ways in which an organic body maintains an equilibrium of matter. In its healthy state it takes in enough to sustain and to offset; it preserves a balance. A living body must have salt, but too much salt would act as a fatal poison. On its own level of existence, culture accommodates things likewise; it utilizes things which in unmeasured quantities would prove deadly. These are the terms in which we have to think of such antithetical components as status and function(25). These can be destructive to each other, if either gets beyond measure, but held in the right proportion, they sustain the cultural body. Too much status will obstruct function, and too much function will disrupt and destroy status. Yet these hostile principles meet to advantage, and the task of the prescriptionists of our culture is to discern what changes are necessary to get them back into a proper relation. It is just this coming to terms with the round of life, this domestication of the whole range of needs that puts man in position to express and satisfy himself with cultural creations.

Many cultures of the past have come to suffer from an excess of status which leads to petrifaction. They have done this through too much reliance upon forms and styles as achieved and as not needing the alert attention that is required for a living continuance. Status has to prove continually that it has meaning to avoid over formalization. It is thus not excused from responsibility. It has to meet new conditions, to absorb into itself something of changed conditions while maintaining that identity which is its stuff. This necessity can be illustrated in the following way. We are at liberty to think of a title in itself as an empty thing, a mere cipher. Like ciphers, no number of titles can really dignify where active worth is absent. But if the cipher is placed after a digit, it has the power of multiplying that by ten. So in a manner with status. If it is in conjunction with genuine worth, ability, or achievement, it tends to raise these. It changes the man's representation in his own eyes and in that of others; it lifts him and braces him for still greater achievement. Title is a sign of status; when it combines with function, it produces a value which either alone is incapable of producing. The reference here is not to titles of nobility, although in real aristocracies these have served in the same way. The very fact that in the traditional societies of the West we retain civil and professional titles shows a continuing sense that they have some positive value as indicators of achieved status. Those sans-culottes and egalitarians who are incensed by the very idea of titles and badges, insisting that everyone be merely "Mister" or "Comrade" or "Joe," are failing to see one of the chief incentives to self-direction and self-discipline. This is the very human desire to have one's achievement recognized, classified, and represented to the world.

Those aristocracies of the past, whether bearing titles or merely surrounded by some deference to status, justified their role by both being and doing. They enjoyed status, but when emergencies arose,(26) they took the field and showed that they were not afraid to meet a test. Most importantly of all, their recognized status provided a kind of sanctuary from which they could defy public opinion when they thought that opinion wrong, and the willingness to do this is essential to the idea of leadership. Men like George Washington and most of the other leaders of the American Revolution were not afraid to step into perilous circumstances. They risked their extensive property holdings and they acted counter to a strong and perhaps majority opinion in conducting a revolutionary movement. Washington is our finest example of the type which combines consciousness of status with capacity for action. He was a patrician and an heir to status. Yet we see him surveying the western wilderness at sixteen, fighting with Braddock against the French and Indians, and finally leading American arms to success in a seven year struggle against Britain. We may assume that Washington in his latter years felt no embarrassment over being addressed as "Your Excellency." He had elevated himself through character and action. This type of role, with its subsequent self-representation, gave this nation the purest and ablest group of patriots it has ever known.

To be contrasted with this is the kind of aristocracy which does not keep itself alive by function. In his discussion of the social condition of France in the years before the French Revolution, De Tocqueville emphasizes the fact that the French nobility had degenerated from an aristocracy into a caste. The truth of this appeared in two circumstances: the nobility no longer performed any type of service, and it was isolated from the communal life of the nation. Thus it was functionless and it was out of organic relationship with the society which supported it. This nobility possessed only status, and therefore its days were numbered. Caste may well serve as a name for a condition of mere status, a condition in which half of existence is given up in blind engrossment with the other half. Thus caste is always an evidence of imbalance and a sign that the human situation has been misconceived somewhere along the line of development. De Tocqueville goes on to contrast with this the British nobility, which, for all its selfishness, maintained a role of leadership and service. That it survived the French nobility and kept the respect of the world into present times proves that its combination of status and function preserved it as a part of organic society and of a viable culture(27).These are some of the dangers of status. But the society which tries to put forward function as the sole criterion runs equally grave dangers, and these are the dangers we are faced with today.

To understand the defect of a society which tries to insist upon function as the single standard of measure, we must note that it seeks to base itself upon instrumentalism. There is no way, however, in which instrumentalism can provide an ideological basis for society. Its one test for any individual or any institution is success, but we cannot judge how well a thing works in the absence of goals of working. Activity is not the judge of its own appropriateness and achievement. There must always be something against which the activity is measured, and this can be provided only by intuition and philosophical reasoning. Basically, the failure of the purely functional society lies in its unwillingness to ask, "What is man?" Unless man has some definite idea of what he ought to be, no amount of activity can serve him for the simple reason that the activity cannot be organized. Just as it is logically impossible to have practice without theory, so it is impossible to have social and cultural activity in the meaningful sense without some idea of a valued state of being. The functionalist refuses to bring consciousness and mind to bear upon the state of things because these imply criteria that direct function, encouraging it here but checking it there. This is a position which recognizes the independency of thought.

A purely functionalist or activist society is likely to pride itself upon judging people solely by "what they can do." This seems appealing, and it is true that no man should be exempt throughout life from some real testing of his capacity for function. But function is simply too partial to serve as the sole criterion, and it probably never would have gained such acceptance as it has now if our times had not done so much to discourage reflective thinking. Even so, it does not require a great deal of reflection to discover as a starting point that there are two categories of persons who cannot be judged simply by "what they can do": these are children and the elderly. Neither can justify themselves in competition with people who are in their prime, and therefore they have to be protected by acknowledgment of their status as human beings.

You cannot kill a child because he is weaker than you, and you cannot turn an elderly person out to starve because he is no longer capable physically or mentally of the work expected of a vigorous adult. Both have rights which do not depend upon a purely instrumental view of their natures. Society in general has admitted this without even raising the question, which is evidence that the principle is basic. But modern (28) society in its practice is doing many things which obscure or weaken the principle of status.

One of the most obvious of the imbalances thus created is the modern deification of youth. The whole trend of our commercial, political, and social world is toward giving youth the primacy. The rhetoric of advertising, the cult of political "liberalism," and the preference of activity over contemplation are manifest products of this trend. By youth I mean of course those who are in the health and strength of young manhood and womanhood - let us say eighteen to thirty-five. Now this virile group has its status too and its special virtues, but it is not the thoughtful part of mankind. Its physical senses are at their most acute, but it has not acquired the wisdom which comes from watching this passing show for several decades. It is characterized by exuberance, appetite, keen passions, and sanguinity. It has not had time to generalize its experiences and to learn that the panaceas of the hour are often very ancient things in some newly got up dress. But if we do judge people by "what they can do" and understand by "doing" the kind of outward and physical thing which is most easily measured, this group will inevitably get too large a share of attention.

In summation, the greatest weakness of a function-oriented culture is that it sets little or no store by the kind of achievement which is comparatively timeless - the formation of character, the perfection of style, the attainment of distinction in intellect and imagination. These require for their appreciation something other than keen senses; they require an effort of the mind and the spirit to grasp timeless values, to perceive the presence of things that extend through a temporal span. Mere speed of reflexes and quickness of vision are not the prime necessities for this kind of appreciation. A society which tends to hand its leadership over to those who perform best on the functional scale inclines naturally to make physical measure a more decisive factor than it ought. This is an emphasis that discourages intellectual attainments in the culture(29).

It will be instructive to turn to a historical example of these two cultural imbalances we have described. We have had in the United States during the latter half of our history convincing illustrations of what happens when this principle of equilibrium is ignored. The North-South polarity of our American culture must be understood in these terms. North and South have consistently opposed one another; each has charged the other with unreasonableness and perversity in its attitudes and institutions. Moreover, each is puzzled and indignant over what it regards as the groundlessness of the other's charges. This opposition can be referred to the cause we are now considering.

The South has attached too much weight to status. The North, or in general that part of the country to which the sobriquet "Yankee" is applied, has attached too much importance to function.

From early times the Southerner enjoyed a condition of life which gave him an awareness of status. The owner of lands and the inheritor of the medieval idea of station felt conscious of rank. For a considerable period he was somebody in the functional sense, as is shown by his part in our Revolution and in the expansion of the nation down through the presidency of James K. Polk. Even in highly aristocratic Charleston, there were men who took pride in being self-made and who urged the value of practical experience as a part of education. At some point, however, status seems to have passed beyond the line of equilibrium. It began to be thought of as something sufficient in itself. To be born into the owning class was supposed to confer all that one needed. Social status came almost to play the part of royal blood in other societies, and out of this there developed a dangerous kind of presumption, blinding to those who held it and irritating to most who encountered it.

This disposition to rely upon what one was supposed to be, rather(30) than upon what one could be effectively, had undeniably a weakening influence upon Southern manhood of this class. This truth became evident following the Civil War, when many Southern men turned over the struggle even to make a living to their more valiant mates and lived idle and pointless lives, while the political power they had once wielded was seized by the poor white leaders and the demagogues. The loss of initiative following enemy domination had much to do with the fact, but the truth remains that a more rigorous kind of ideal might have enabled them to fashion more than they did out of the prevaling chaos.

There is, of course, another side to this picture, for belief in status contributed a great deal that was admirable in Southern society. It contributed the valuable element of stability, without which happiness is but doubtfully secured. It contributed much to the freedom and independence of the individual, because the man who "knows where he stands" is always more confident in approaching others and in declaring his opinions than the man who neither knows who he is nor where he is from. It kept the individual from being intimidated by public opinion. Like the judge portrayed in Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (which is unerring in its knowledge of Southern psychologies), this type of man did not care what people thought about him, for "he knew that he was a great man." This attitude can issue in an insufferable conceit, but this should not be allowed to blind us to the element of noble self-confidence which is its proper origin. Finally, it imparted a spirit to society which rebuked slothfulness of manner and thought and encouraged emulation. Carl Bridenbaugh, not a particularly sympathetic student of Southern society, has remarked that "the very fact of status, accepted as a yard-stick, regulated their [the Southerners'] behavior and gave it tone." The fact that Southern culture has reminded European visitors of European culture more than any other in the United States seems definitely related to this belief in status. More than any other section, the South tended to be a culture of estates. In this way it was a conservative order, in some degree comparable to the European establishment(31).

But if the South put too much weight on this side to maintain the proper balance, its great opponent the North put too much on the other.

Northern society has been described by those who admire it as dynamic and by those inclined to question it as restless and overly aggressive. Both descriptions suggest that its lack of equilibrium comes from an overemphasis of function. Much of the criticism leveled at this section concerns the dominance of the businessman type. The North has in general taken the view that it is the duty of man to carry on an unceasing work of exploitation, which is variously denominated "business," "development," and "progress." It may be recalled here that Calvin Coolidge, that narrowest and least imaginative of all American Presidents, who was in many ways representative of this outlook, once declared from the White House that "the business of America is business." The winning of the West was largely a northern enterprise, and the industrialization of the country was almost exclusively such. Almost everything in the North, including social alignments, has been geared to an expanding business "civilization." The stories of young men who started out with only their bare hands and became immensely wealthy have been the most approved American sagas. There occurred, consequently, an extraordinary adulation of function or capacity to show results, and with it the creation of a class of "functionalists" called "businessmen." A few years ago Professor Elijah Jordan pointed out in his original book entitled Business Be Damned that never before in history had this type of person formed a class enjoying social prestige. There have always been activists and gain-getters, but it was reserved for the modern age, under American leadership, to give the successful gain-getter an honorific in the form of "businessman." Professor Jordan has characterized the mentality of this new class, whose status is all function, in these terms:

"In business intelligent and serious interpretation of facts is never called for; intelligence is not involved at all. Only the individual with the strongest motives, motives least checked by moral sensitiveness, can survive. The psychological make-up of the business "mind" is therefore a mere collection of disconnected motives, impulses entirely without conscious direction or moral unity of purpose, hence without intelligence. A "decision" of such a mind is merely the triumph of one motive, the worst, over the rest, particularly over any impulse to sympathetic appreciation of another's stake in the situation. The latter impulse is "inefficiency.(32)"

The description is bitter, but the author states an essential truth. If it is taken as a picture of the mind which develops when all the virtues are subordinated to successful gain-getting, it is historically authentic. For a long period, industrial and plutocratic society elevated this narrow and undeveloped type of mind to positions of social and intellectual leadership. Indeed, it has often been mentioned that the Civil War, which secured for the North hegemony over the Union, put an end to the leadership of the minister and the lawyer, whose status involved some degree of cultural attainment, and replaced it with that of the business entrepreneur.

It is true that men of this class in many instances tried to atone for their partialness by lavishly endowing universitites, art galleries, museums, and other such institutions for the propagation of culture. But these things are externals. They are useful vehicles and receptacles, but in themselves, they cannot engender the spirit which creates culture. Meanwhile, the adulation of function does constant damage to that spirit. It cultivates a mood of aggressiveness which is unwilling to let anything be, perhaps out of a subconscious fear of its enemy, status. It inaugurates the infinite series of progress, which is fatal to stability. It is hostile to the mood of contemplation, which nourishes both the aesthetic and the religious life. Finally, it accompanies all of these things with material distractions which only the most self directed can overcome. Those Americans who went to Europe in great numbers during the final quarter of the last century and the first quarter of this one, and whose exodus has often been satirized, were fleeing from a very real danger. They were fleeing a society so dedicated to function that it left little opportunity for those quieter moments which a man must have to create or to ponder what living is for. A disequilibrium had been set up and institutionalized. It was called the life of progress and success.

That the North attached excessive importance to function and the South to status is a basic diagnosis of American culture. It was a cultural tragedy that after the Civil War the two sides hardened in their attitudes. Border states like Maryland and Kentucky have given a taste, if only a taste, of what an attractive and genial culture could spring up on American soil when the two conditions of status and function are kept in relative balance. If this had prevailed generally and if there had been a development of the theoretic and literary sides, the United States as a whole might have produced a culture of the first rank by now. But the majority of the nation succumbed to the imbalance of function, and if this discussion is to be more (33)than academic, we must examine the possible means of getting back to an equilibrium.

This directs our inquiry to the ultimate source of status, the offsetting concept to the incessant change of the world.

The idea of status is created by the mythopoeic consciousness of man; and in the decay of myth, which has been recognized by many social critics as a major feature of modernity, one can identify the forces that are working against status.

Myths are great symbolic structures which hold together the imaginations of a people and provide bases of harmonious thought and action. They posit a supersensible world of meaning and value from which the least member of a culture can borrow something to dignify and give coherence to his life. Obviously the myth is not born of calculation, nor can its "function" ever be measured. As Ernst Cassirer points out, myth defies the analytic process which is used with empirical data. Most important of all, mythical time has no definite structure; it is always "eternal time." From the point of view of the mythical consciusness, then, the past has never passed away; it is always here and now. Therefore myth is the greatest of all conservators of the significance of things against forces which would make significance contingent upon a present, topical urgency. Whatever has become myth has acquired a status invulnerable to two things: the positive point by point corrrespondence of empirical testing, and the likewise empirical testing of present function.

The mythopoeic faculty of man, like his ability to create symbols, is a distinctively human attribute, and its exercise is a satisfying of one of his deepest psychic hungers. Man creates myths because he feels that, in the language of Goethe, "all before us that is passing, sign and symbol is alone." His myths are the distillation of this meaning, a humanized quintessence of the great pageant. In myth, which is timeless, which expresses some idea of value, and which cannot be dealt with or destroyed by the method of analysis, man expresses a reality which is subjective but which is nevertheless part of the totality. It is his highest response to the insistent question of his own significance. Thus the truth of myth, like the quality of status, is something that must be seized intuitively. Either it is seen in its persuasiveness as one of humanity's archetypal ideas or it is not grasped at all.

All idea of status, it can now be said, depends on the presence of this overriding mythic consciousness(34). For cultures always attach value to what they wish to attach value to. If this seems meaningless, we must remember that there are ways of "demonstrating" that some attachments are "unreasonable." That is to say, one can step outside the lines of desire and say that this or that thing would be a better object of desire than the particular one in question. But this is like saying that men ought to value a quantity of iron above a quantity of gold, which leaves out of account the fact that affinity goes where it will in obedience to some paralogic of value. In similar fashion culture has its own ways of valuing status, which is not always apart from function, but is never a simple exponent of it. This does not mean that it is completely irresponsible, as I propose to show in the chapter on "Forms and Social Cruelty." Our subjective world is part of the whole world and is linked up with the remainder of the totality. This imposes certain obligations which preclude a pure autonomy. The point here is that a merely ponderable measurement always endangers status, and there is ground for saying, by way of a general observation, that an individual's position in society is higher in proportion to his belief in imponderables.

Now the creation and preservation of myth itself are linked up with an acceptance of the poetic nature of all language. Language is poetry in a valid sense because it isolates and defines out of the variety of our perceptions the things that have human importance. It is the essence of the mystery of naming that to name a thing is somehow to domesticate it and to give it a place and a rank in our humanized world. But to do this with belief in what we are doing calls for a confidence in language which some contemporary theorists are seeking to undermine.

In the past few years there has developed a great self-consciousness about language, which seems to proceed from a feeling of discomfort in the presence of it. The feeling itself comes in turn from a notion that man is a prisoner of language. This has prompted students imbued with the scientific temper to try to put language through the same mill that is used to reduce other things to scientific manipulatability. Their work takes the form of studying language from the outside and drawing up a behavioral report. The process actually fractionates language by breaking it down into its ultimate physical constituents, whereafter the recurrence of these is tabulated and correlated. Normative and prescriptive ideas are rigidly excluded, with the result that there is no explanation of why the elements of language leap together into meaningful configurations(35). The Gestalten of language thus become as irrelevant as the compulsive figurations of the myth.

This has an important effect upon the idea of status for the reason that language, once created, is a great indicator and conservator of value. The names of things for one generation are by and large the names of things of the next generation and those following. Names themselves do not share, except to a slight extent, in physical evolution. We know this has induced some to declare that language therefore falsifies or that it imprisons the dynamic world in a fixity which is an illusion. For these people language becomes a source of error the moment it imposes the stasis which all names carry upon the phenomena of the world. The extreme of this theory would make impossible language in the conventional sense; there would be in its stead something registering and transmitting like a photoelectric cell.

It is clear that this theory stands in the way of axiological realism. It offers no account of how language can give insight into the enduring value of things. If language is sometimes partial in its description of referents, it is also additive in the respect that it contributes to our perception of their value. There is no basis for insisting that it be a physical replica of the thing symbolized, but there is basis for insisting that it be expressive of our "imagination" of the thing, which will carry some element of feeling. The theoretical aim of the functionalist is to make language special for every situation; the desire of the traditionalists is to have it carry a tradition of meaning which make the thing named intelligible in the framework of culture.

This case needs to be urged because words are the designations of status. Any view which reduces them to mere exponents of special situations takes away the power they have as a specifically human means of expression to confer something that has its origin in the imagination. For words are relative to thoughts, not to things; it is impossible to show that a word has the same kind of connection with the thing it is standing for that it has with the mind of the user. In fact it is impossible to show at all that a word has connection with the thing for which it stands. The only connection that can be demonstrated is with other words in the vocabulary, and this must be done through a poetical operation. Language is peculiarly intimate with mythpoeic value, and scientistic attempts to view it as only a part of behavior would deprive it of its capacity to serve the myth(36). An axiolgocial view of language is, therefore, necessary to recover the source of status.

The very fact that language has a metaphorical function , and indeed, metaphorical orgina, is a further illustration of the necessity. For the perception of likeness is essentially an imaginative tnerprise, and the likeness of that is perceived is a first step toward generalization. To say that something is like something else is to affirm a certain basis of continuity. The conservatizing and stabilizing function of language is thus being utilized whever we make the transference of meaning which is embodied in a metaphor. The tendency of metaphor is plainly toward a unity of conception whereas that of simple denotation is toward diversity. In order to have meaningful status we must have something ascending up toward an ultimate source of good. Otherwise status is random and singular, and the various statuses which a society recognizes would not be capable of offering resistance in depth to whatever would collapse them. Consequently culture's "mythic cover" and its power to create status are aspects of the same feature.

The decline of myth in modern societies and the ensuing decay of status are related also to the disappearance of "place." This is a truth at once obvious in its occurrence and difficult for analysis. It must be evident to all, however, that certain facts of technological development have worked to diminsh the separateness of places. Modern man has acquired an excessive mobility, so that it means nothing, as compared with yesterday, for him to be in one place or to go to another. The automobile and the airplane whirl him about with such velocity that it now has little significance to be in or from a place: one's situation can soon be altered. In the book of modern progress this is, it hardly needs saying, listed as a credit, yet there is much to make us feel that it is a debit when all things are considered. There is something protective about "place"; it means isolation, privacy, and finally identity. We cannot rationally wish to be nowhere or everwhere at once. To be somehwere is necessary to our standing - to our status.

For essentially the same reason, this terrible mobility is fatal to mythical constructs. Myths have always developed among a people occupying one region for a long period of time and developing a strong provincial consciousness. The heroes and demigods of these great crations are always dwellers somewhere (as the gods of Greece on Olympus), and the idea of a cosmopolitan (37)mobility and interchangeability is foreign to them. To take away place is to take away the locus of myth. I am convinced that nothing has done as much to weaken the myth-making faculty of man as this modern pressure against the idea of place, epxressing itself even overtly in a desire to "annihilate" space.

It may indeed seem the height of futile protest to argue against anything as highly prized by modern man as his mobility. But this is not the place to be gingerly practical; the purpose of this writing is to isolate the real cause of modern disintegration and to see whether the effort that would be required to halt it is within our civilization's capacity for renewal.

To summarize the situation: the hope of bringing status back into the intellectual and moral life of our time depends upon an expansion of consciousness. We must admit again to full standing the kind of knowledge that mythical representation embodies. This calls for giving up the false notion that we can find the meaning of life by searching out the composition of the material world. (Of course when a trend becomes as powerful as this none of us are likely to avoid being trapped into some of its false position.) The modernistic searcher after meaning may be likened to a man furiously beating the earth and imagining that the finer he pulverizeds it, the nearer he will get to the riddle of existence. But no synthesizing truths lie in that direction. It is in the opposite direction that the path must be followed, toward those broad, speculative, coherent, and heuristic ideas which tell us indeed nothing of the structure of the atom, but cause us to see that these images, feelings, events, intuitions, and dreams which fill our lives have some meaning beyond their mere presence. This will be knowledge of transcendental ideas, and it will bring with it the now largely lost conviction that man is somebody.

Then we must again become sensitive enough to realized that "place" means privacy and dignity, and that it is against the interests of our highest feelings to destroy the idea of station.

Man is not created to live without space or place any more than he is designed to stand on the point of a needle, and the confusion of categories which permitted this notion to arise is one of the problems for the student of intellectual culture. The recovery of the principle of status involves a series of retrievals. The reiver of knowledge must sometimes turn back on itself; now it needs to return to show us that myth and language are joint sources of expressing and conserving value, and that the value of a place to stand, which was hardly questioned until the present, has its analogical expression in the world of cultural consciousness(39).

Richard Weaver, Visions of Order, Chapter 2 - Status and Function
Louisiana State University Press. Baton Rouge: 1964

The Prince - Chapter 2

HEREDITARY PRINCIPALITIES

I shall exclude any discussion of republics, having discussed them at length elsewhere. I shall consider principalities alone and, following the indicated plan, shall discuss how they may be governed and preserved.

I say, then, that hereditary states accustomed to the family of their ruler are more easily kept than new ones, because it is sufficient if the prince does not abandon the methods of his ancestors and proves adaptable when unforeseen events occur. In this way a prince of ordinary capability will always keep his state unless he is deprived of it by an exceptional or exceedingly powerful force. If he is once deprived of it, however, he will nevertheless regain it at the slightest adversity that the conqueror encounters.

In Italy we have the example of the Duke of Ferrara, who was able to sustain the assaults of the Venetians in 1484 and those of Pope Julius in 1510 for no other reason than that he had been long established in that dominion. The hereditary prince has less cause and less need to offend than a new one. Hence it follows that he is more readily loved. If unusual vices do not make him hated, it is reasonable to suppose that his subjects will feel a natural affection for him. Furthermore, one change always leaves dentations upon which to build another, but in a long and continuous rule the recollection of changes and of their causes tend to be forgotten.

-Machiavelli

The Double Condition

While on the one hand, the Titan represents one who does not accept the human condition and who wants to steal the divine fire, on the other hand, only a small difference separates the hero from the Titan. Thus Pindar exhorted people not to "yearn to become like gods"; also, in the Hebrew mythology, the symbol of Adam's curse acted as an analogous warning and indicated a fundamental danger. The titanic type - or, in another respect, the warrior type - is, after all, the prime matter of which heroes are made. But in order to implement a positive solution to the dilemma, that is, to attain an Olympian transformation as the reintegration of the primordial state, it is necessary to fulfill a double condition.

First of all, it is necessary to show the proof and the confirmation of the virile qualification; thus in the epic and knightly symbolism we find a series of adventures, feats, and fights. This qualification should not become a limitation, a hubris, a closure of the "I," and it should not paralyze the capability of opening oneself up to a transcendent force, in function of which alone can the fire really become light and free itself.

Second, such liberation should not signify a cessation of the inner tension; thus a further test consists in adequately reaffirming the virile quality on the supersensible plane. The consequence of this is the Olympian transformation or the achievement of that dignity which in iniatory traditions has always been designated as "regal." This is the decisive point that differentiates the heroic experience from every mystical evasion and from every pantheistic confusion; among the various symbols that may refer to this point is the symbolism of the woman.

...a very widespread symbolism has seen in the woman a vivifying and transfiguring power, through which it is possible to overcome the human condition...

-Julius Evola, The Mystery of the Grail - pg 20-23

The Secret of the Super Eye

Tristram - Book 8 - Chapter 2

HOW THE STEPMOTHER OF SIR TRISTRAM HAD ORDAINED POISON FOR TO HAVE POISONED SIR TRISTRAM.

Then certain of them would have slain the child, by cause they would have been lords of the country of Liones. But then through the fair speech of the gentlewoman, and by the means that she made, the most part of the barons would not assent thereto. And then they let carry home the dead queen, and much dole was made for her. Then this meanwhile Merlin delivered King Meliodas out of prison on the morn after his queen was dead. And so when the king was come home, the most part of the barons made great joy. But the sorrow that the king made for his queen that might no tongue tell. So then the king let inter her richly, and after he let christen his child as his wife had commanded afore her death. And then he let call him Tristram, the sorrowful born child. Then the King Meliodas endured seven years without a wife, and all this time Tristram was nourished well. Then it befel that King Meliodas wedded King Howell's daughter of Brittany, and anon she had children of King Meliodas: then was she heavy and wroth that her children should not rejoice the country of Liones; werefore this queen ordained for to posion young Tristram. So she let poison be put in a piece of silver in the chamber where as Tristram and her children were together, unto that intent that when Tristram were thirsty he should drink that drink. And so it fell upon a day, the queen's son as he was in that chamber espied the piece with poison, and he weened it had been good drink, and by cause the child was thirsty he took the piece with posion and drank freely; and therewithal suddenly the child brast and was dead. When the queen of Meliodas wist of the death of her son, wit ye well that she was heavy. But yet the king understood nothing of her treason. Notwithstanding the queen would not leave this, but efte she let ordain more poison, and put it in a piece. And by fortune King Meliodas, her husband, found the piece with wine where was the poson, and he that was much thirsty took the piece for to drink thereout. And as he would have drunken therof, the queen espied him, and then she ran unto him, and pulled the piece from him suddenly. The king marvelled why she did so, and remembered him how her son was suddenly slain with poison. And then he took her by the hand, and said, Thou false traitress, thous shalt tell me what manner of drink this is, or else I shall slay thee. And therewith he pulled out his sword, and sware a great oath that he should slay her but if she told him truth. Ah! mercy, my lord, said she, and I shall tell you all. And then she told him why she would have slain Tristram, by cause her children should rejoice his land. Well, said King Meliodas, and therefore shall ye have the law. And so she was condemned by the assent of the barons to be burnt; and then was there made a great fire, and right as she was at the fire to take her execution, young Tristram kneeled afore King Meliodas, and besought him to give him a boon. I will well, said the king again. Then said young Tristram, Give me the life of they queen, my stepmother. That is unrightfully asked, said King Meliodas, for thou ought of right to hate ther, for she would have slain thee with that posion an she might have had her will; and for thy sake most is my cause that she should ide. Sir, said Tristram, as for that, I beseech you of your mercy that you will forgive it her, and as for my part, God forgive it her, and I do; and so much it liked your highness to grant me my boon, for God's love I require you hold your promise. Sythen it is so, said the king, I will that ye have her life. Then, said the king, I give her to you, and go ye to the fire and take her, and do with her what ye will. So Sir Tristram went to the fire, and by the commandment of the king delivered her from the death. But after that King Meliodas would never have ado with her as at bed and board. But by the good means of young Tristram he made the king and her accorded. But then the king would not suffer young Tristram to abide no longer in his court.

-Sir Thomas Malory - Le Morte D'Arthur

Visions of Order - Chapter 1

THE IMAGE OF CULTURE

However much opinions of the realities involved may differ, no one can deny that there is widespread discussion of the decline of Western culture. This has been present in philosophical works for more than half a century; the shock of the First World War brought it into more popular organs of discussion, and today one may encounter it, though usually in frivolous forms, in the columns of daily newspapers. That the idea has not merely persisted but has seeped increasingly into the modern consciousness is itself a cultural and social fact of great importance which cannot be overlooked among the signs of the times.

Attempts to dismiss the idea often take the easy route of attributing it to temperamental pessimism or some other condition of the critic. It is alleged that those who say our culture is decaying are those who regularly take an apprehensive view of the future, or they are those who have lost their nerve amid the complexities of an age of transition, or they are those who suffer from nostalgia. The presence of such persons, it is argued, is not peculiar to this age, and hence their warnings are not to be taken as a serious sign that our way of life is deteriorating. The properly constituted man shuns the red-blooded attitude toward things; he goes along with changes because he realizes that change and progress are the law of life and that, although some valued institutions may be disappearing, they will more than be made up for by new ones that are in process of creation. The upholders of this view retort, in brief, that the world instead of growing worse is growing better and that it is really one's civic duty to believe this and to proclaim it(3).

Thus two largely antithetical views are regularly placed before the public. It is well to see that both of these views are capable of support. One can argue that our culture is in serious decline, and one can argue that it is flourishing and improving. But both arguments cannot be equally valid. Whenever large-scale tendencies are being examined, facts taken from a superficial level and facts taken from a profound one may conflict or point in opposite directions. Like two air masses, one moving at ground level and one moving at a high altitude, they can for awhile pursue opposite courses. If one reads from the top level of phenomena, one may get many signs of assurance which will be contradicted by a look lower down. The real issue in this controversy, then, is one of depth of implication. Yet there can be no implication at all unless one is willing to contemplate an order of human values. The nature and proper end of man are central to any discussion not only of whether a certain culture is weakening, but also of whether such a culture is worth preserving. It is when we look at the depth of implication that we see the real difference between the parties to this argument.

Those who contend that things are going well enough or are improving are found to be nonserious, in the sense of refusing to look at serious things. They glean their data from the novel, or flashy, or transitory sort of development, which often does indicate a sort of vitality, but shows at the same time a lack of direction and a purposelessness. Their data il likely to be the kind that can be quantified in the style of the social scientists or at least of the publicist - so many more people owning record players, so many more books circulating from public libraries, and the like. They ignore the deep sources of tendency which can very easitly render nugatory any gains of the above kind. In short, their fact finding is superficial and simplistic, and their claims are made sometimes in strident tone which is itself a demerit to their case(4).

Moreover, it is certain that some if not many of the defenders of this optimistic position have a vested interest in "progress," or the present trend of things. A continuation of this trend means for them reputation and money, and they fall in with it as supporters who expect to be rewarded. There are many distintegrative process which are immediately profitable to those engaged in promoting them, and it is human weakness to covet even such ill-gotten rewards. Therefore it is not hypercritical to look closely at the situation of those who argue for the excellence of modernism to see whether they stand to profit in practical ways from these developments. Not only advertising and journalism but considerable areas of education now invite this kind of scrutiny.

When we turn to the other view, we find that it is made up predominantly of persons who are concerned with the nature of man and the problem of value. They are people with definite ideas of right and wrong, possessing the faculty of taste and consciences which can be offended. Furthermore, they usually will be historically informed, with the result that to them novelty is not always originality nor a fresh departure toward a new horizon. If they are conservative, it is because they have learned the truth of the maxim, "The good is hard," and they know how tempting it is to try and circumvent this. It is my observation that these people suffer a great deal, and their suffering is sometimes used to condemn them, as if failure to achieve complacency were an indictable thing. But it is only those who are capable of discrimination and of feelings against things who can be the custodians of culture. Accordingly, I am satisfied that T.S. Eliot made a true appraisal of our times in asserting that "our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity.

Another way of understanding this conflict of opinion is to recognize that the "optimists" have the current rhetoric on their side even while the "pessimists" have the proof. The modern world has a terrific momentum in the direction in which it is going, and many of the words of our everyday vocabulary are terms implicit with approval of modern tendencies. To describe these tendencies in the language that is used most widely is to endorse them, whereas to oppose them is to bring in words that connote half-forgotten beliefs and carry disturbing resonances. Thus the signs and probabilities are with the optimists, and their task of expression is an easy one, since they have so many ready-made terms at hand. They have the rhetorician's advantage of a language in circulation and a set of "prejudices" in the mind of the majority. It is the object of this writing to bring a rhetoric along with a proof to show that the present course of our culture is not occasion for complacency but for criticism and for possible reconstruction. This requires meeting a rhetoric derived from circumstances with one based more on definition and causal analysis.

I anticipate the further objection that all ages are ages of anxiety just because all ages are in some respect ages of transition. Since transition is a passage to the unknown, a degree of apprehnsiveness over what is tentative, unformed, and uncertain is natural. There is some truth in this generalization, yet it would be as absurd to say that every period in the history of a culture is equally healthy and fruitful as to say that every period in the life of an individual is equally happy. It would in fact be intellectual and moral skepticism to deny that soem periods are distinct as crises, and the troubled consciousness of modern man gives ample ground for believeing that ours is such a period.

The need then is great for a revisionist view of what is known as modernism. The mindless approval of everything modern - indeed, of each dissolution of an old pattern - as something better than what preceded it, or acceptance of the Spenglerian thesis of inevitable decay, massive and intellectually serious as this is, does not constitute a true dilemma for the man who wishes to orient himself with reference to the culture of our time. There is the answer of some third alternative, involving basic principles and leading through free will and effort to some creative result. The imagination of the time cannot, at least, leave this possibility unexamined.

One more thing needs to be said about the relation of a critic to his culture. There is an opinio, by no means easy to refute, that culture is like a brotherhood: either you are of it or you are not. If you are of it, you can do something about it to the extent of carrying it on by living according to its prescriptions. If you are not of it, there is nothing you can do about it, except perhaps describe it from a distance while missing the real Innigkeit. On this assumption there is no such thing as aiding a culture from the outside or of aiding it consciously in any way. If you belong to it, you live in and by it; if you are outside it, you find the gulf impassable, exept to certain superficial contacts. "Culture is culturing," and when a culture has lost its will to live, outside ministrations are of no use.

But in a further view, there is more than one way of being outside a culture. One can be outside it simply in the sense of having been born outside its pale and of having received no nurture through it. People in this position constitute the kind of "foreigners" the Greeks called barbaroi - "those speaking a different language." Certainly not to speak the language of a culture, in the figurative sense, is to suffer effective disbarment. These persons are alien, even when they belong to another culture of high development. The man of a different culture has different intellectual and moral bearings, and except in the case of gifted individuals having long periods to assimilate, there is no crossing over, nor any real desire for it. The men of another culture are outsiders, and one expects no more from them than from a friendly stranger, although there is sometimes critical value in an outside view.

There is another type of outsider, however, who may entertain hope of doing something about a culture that is weakening. He is a member of the culture who has to some degree estranged himself from it through study and reflection. He is like the savant in society; though in it, he is not wholly of it; he has acquired knowledge and developed habits of thought which enable him to see it in perspective and to gauge it. He has not lost the intuitive understanding which belongs to him as a member, but he has added something to that. A temporary alienation from his culture may be followed by an intense preoccupation with it, but on a more reflective level than that of the typical member. He has become sufficiently aware of what is outside it to see it as a system or an entity. This person may be a kind of doctor of culture; in one way he is crippled by his objectivity, but in another way he is helped to what he must have, a point of view and a consciousness of freedom of movement(7).

It has been observed, to cite a kind of parallel, that nearly all of the leaders of strong nationalistic movements in the present age were men who had some type of "outside" experience in their rearing or their education. They were men who knew their nations from the inside, but who had also seen them from a vantage point elsewhere. Thus it was with Parnell and Ireland, with Sun Yat-sen and China, with Hitler and Germany, with Gandhi and India. Even Franco is a "Gallego" - not a Spaniard in the true sense. These men had all at one time been far enough removed from their future nations to see what these were, and what they saw engendered in them an urge to define the reality and the consciousness of that nationhood. Although they were "doctors" of nationalism rather than "doctors" of culture, their case shows enough analogy to provide guiding points here. The man who is simply a carrier of his culture may not be armed in the same way to do something about it when it flags. His role may be too much that of simply acting; he can keep in stride, but he cannot coach. For diagnostic and remedial work we may have to turn to those who have in a way mutilated themselves by withdrawal, by a special kind of mental discipline, and by the kind of fixation upon a task which even impedes free cultural participation. We may therefore regard it as no anomaly, but rather as an understandable event, if a person not conspicuously cultured himself should discern what is impairing the health of a culture. Thus it is not the person who has contributed most to a culture who will necessarily have the most useful things to say when the culture shows signs of dissolution.

But what can this person, who is not a paragon of the culture, but who finds himself profoundly stirred by its uneasy situation, actually contribute? From his mixed position he probably can recognize the hostile or disruptive forces. Like the doctor again, he cannot make the object of his attention live, but he can combat those things which would keep it from living. He can point out: this is a disease, this is a poison, this is bad diet. If the inimical conditions are removed and if there is a true vitality, the sufferer should recover. There are, of course, limits of the analogy of a human culture to an organism, yet culture is a creation in the world, and it must obey certain fundamental conditions of existence.

A radical perspective on the subject may even start with the question of whether culture as such is something we ought to cherish and defend. It would be uncritical to assume that the answer has always been affirmative. Now and in the past, culture in the sense meant here has had to meet open and covert hostility. Certain religions have been largely hostile to it; moralists have condemned it as a frivolity or an indulgence; men of business have been impatient with its demands and its "extravagance"; statesmen of a certain type have opposed it as producing "effeminacy." At present there is a fairly widespread feeling that culture "costs too much" in the sense of gratifying certain educated appetities at considerable expense while the masses are deprived. If the friends of culture were to allow the matter to be put to a popular vote, they might still win, but I do not think that the size of the majority would be reassuring. The public of today does not understand clearly either the nature of the role of culture, and general literacy has not helped the situation.

The claim of culture as such to exist is best explained through its genesis. Man is a special creature in the respect that he has to live with two selves. One of these is his existential part, his simple animal being, which breathes and moves and nourishes itself. This is man without qualification or adornment, an organism living in an environment. In this existence he is a very predictable animal - or would be except that the second self can have effects upon his somatic appearance and behavior.

The second self is an image which he somehow evolves from his spirit. It is made up of wishes and hopes, of things transfigured, of imaginations and value ascriptions. It is a picture to which the subjective part of our being necessarily gives a great deal, and hence the danger of trying to read it literally from external facts. A culture expresses itself very extensively through artistic creation, and, as Suzanne Langer has pointed out in her Problems of Art, we cannot infer artistic visiosn from a symptom. That is to say, a mere noting of details without insight and some constructive use of the imagination will not produce an understanding of a culture(9).

It appears that even the most primitive people have this urge to depict themselves in some fashion. Without the picturization, man feels an unendurable nakedness in the face of his environment and before the questions of life. From such poverty he rescues himself through projections that include the natural environment and whatever is suggested by his spirit regarding the mystery that broods over creation. Look beneath the surface of the most brilliant cultures of history, and you find a hunger and a wonderment, reaching even to a kind of melancholia. Nietzsche has shown ho this impelled the Greeks to create their splendid world of illusion in myth and art. Impulses of like kind can be found beneath the efflorescence of Elizabethan England. The more man is impressed with the tragic nature of his lot, the more he dramatizes his relation with the world. A strain of artist in the race causes it to reach out in proportion as its awareness deepens and to throw up great protective creations.

This great yearning of man to be something in the imaginative sense, that is, to be something more than he is in the simple existential way or in the reductionist formula of materialism is both universal and proper to him. The latter may be asserted because he is the only creature who asks the question why he is here and who feels thwarted in his self-realization until some kind of answer is produced. This urge to be representative of something higher is an active ingredient of his specific humanity; it has created everything from the necklace of animal teeth with which the primitive adorns his body to the elaborate constructions which the men of high cultures have made to interpret the meaning of life and their mission in it. This is the point at which he departs from the purely utilitarian course and makes of himself a being with significance. It is a refutation of all simplistic histories and psychologies, but it is one of the most verifiable facts about man(10).

No one has been able to define exactly how a culture integrates and homologizes the ideas and actions of many men over a long period of time any more than how the consciousness gives a thematic continuity to the life of an individual. As far as one can tell, the collective consciousness of the group creates a mode of looking at the world or arrives at some imaginative visual bearing. It "sees" the world metaphorically according to some felt need of the group, and this entails an ordering which denotes dissatisfaction with "things as they are." Of course cultures do respond to differences in what nature has provided, such as the sea, or a kind of terrain, or a hot or cold climate, these having the power to initiate imaginative reactions. But man meets the given part way, and then proceeds with something of his own. So cultures refect different regions and varying kinds of historical endowment. But the decisive thing is the work of the spirit, which always operates positively by transfiguring and excluding. It is of the essence of culture to feel its own imperative and to believe in uniqueness of its worth. In doing so, it has to reject others which are "objectively" just as good, yet for it irrelevant. Syncretistic cultures like syncretistic religions have always proved relatively powerless to create and to influence; there is no weight of authentic history behind them. The very concept of eclectic religion and eclectic culture derives from an inappropriatte analogy which suggests that a plurality can be greater than one. Culture derives its very desire to continue from its unitariness. Perhaps some deep force which explains our liking for figures of repetition is here involved; we feel confirmed through seeing things repeated in the same way, and departures from the form are viewed as laxity or ignorance.

Evidently this is the reason that every culture in the course of its formation sets up directions from which the members are constrained not to depart. Penalties for violation may be no more than cultural, although sometimes they have been moral and legal. The truth is that if the culture is to assume form and to bring the satisfactions for which cultures are created, it is not culturally feasible for everyone to do everything "any way he wants to." There is at the heart of every culture a center of authority from which there proceed subtle and pervasive pressures upon us to conform and to repel the unlike as disruptive. So culture too is faced with the metaphysical problem of freedom and organization. which rules out the possibility of uncircumscribed liberty. Like all forces which shape and direct, it must insist on a pattern of inclusion and exclusion. This is a necessity of integral being and a fundamental fact to deal with in any plan for its protection(11).

At this center there lies a "tyrannizing image," which draws everything toward itself. This image is the ideal of its excellence. The forms that it can take and the particular manifestations that it can find are various. In some instances it has been a religious ritual; in others a sacred scripture; in others a literature which everyone is expected to know; codes of conduct (and even of warfare) may be the highest embodied form. But examine them as we will, we find this inward facing toward some high representation. This is the sacred well of the culture from which inspiring waters like magnetic lines of force flow out and hold the various activities in a subservience of acknowledgment. Not to feel this magnetic pull toward identification and assimilation is to be outside of culture.

Such centripetalism is the essence of culture's power to cohere and to endure. There is a center which commands all things, and this center is open to imaginative but not logical discovery. It is a focus of value, a law of relationships, an inspiriting vision. by its very nature it sets up rankings and orders; to be near it is to be higher; to be far from it in the sense of not feeling its attraction is to be lower. Culture is thus by nature aristocratic, for it is a means of discriminating between what counts for much and what counts for little; this no doubt explains the necessity man feels to create it. It is his protest against the uniformity and dead level of simple succession. He will establish a center of value and see to it that the group is oriented toward it. This is his rejection of any merely naturalistic ordering of his life, his declaration of independence from mere environment. Discrimination, selection, and preference with regard to the tyrannizing image are its constitutives.

For this reason it is the very nature of culture to be exclusive. Without the power to reject that which does not understand or acknoweldge its center of force, it would disintegrate. We mifht say that a culture continues by attracting and attracts by continuing. In this way it maintains its identity. There can be no such thing as a "democratic" culture in the sense of one open to everybody at all times on equal terms. To know the right thing, without meditating thoughts as to what and when, is to be native born to the culture. An individual absorbs his native culture as he acquires his native tongue,with themos6t subtle shades of intonation; again, like the idioms of a language, the ways of a culture are rooted too deep in immemorial bias and feeling to be analyzed. If a culture appears arbitrary in the preferences it makes and the lines it draws, this is because it is a willed creation(12).

The truth most important for us to recognize in our present crisis is this principle of integration and exclusiveness. There is for all things, as Aristotle pointed out, an entelechy, a ginding, type-determining factor, which gives to a thing its specific form and property of coherence. The fact that a culture is a spiritual and imaginative creation does not mean that it is any less bound by this pervading law. Just as the skin of a sound fruit protects it from dispersion or evaporation, so the form of a culture keeps it from ceasing to exist through a miscellaneous commingling. Form is intellectual and negative; it sets boundaries which affirm in the very process of denying. The form of a culture is its style, which it asserts against the world of meaningless "democratic" existence. In a highly developed culture this sense of style permeates everything; it is in dress and manners, in art and institutions, in architecture and cookery. It imparts tone to the whole of society by keeping before its members a standard of the right and not right. But this form depends upon the centripetal image of an ideal of perfection and goodness and upon confidence in ruling out what is unlike or fortuitous.

The task in our time of the conservative is to defedn this concentration and to expose as erroeneous attempts to break down the discriminations of a culture. For once the inward-looking vision and the impulse to resist the alien are lost, disruption must ensue. What was a whole ceases to feel its reason for being a whole, and the different parts may suffer a random distortion -random just because there is no longer a unifying idea to prescribe fitness and size. Parts then get out of line and begin to usurp the places and roles belonging to other parts. This is the chaos that the true friend of culture beholds with deepest apprehension, not only because it deprives him of so much but because in the masses it can induce monstrous outbursts of irrationality. All men, and not merely the sensitive and gifted, need the integrating service of this vision, although not all realize that they need it. Lancelot Law Whyte in his Next Development in Man has vividly expressed the power of this urge:

"Man abhors the absence of integration. He demands integration, and will create religions, achieve heroic self-sacrifice, pursue mad ambitions, or follow the ecstasy of danger rather than live without. If society refuses him this satisfaction in constructive form, he will seize a destructive principle to which he can devote himself and will take revenge on the society which thought his only demand was pleasure. Vice, in this sense, shows the integrating power of virtue, of which it is merely the negative form. The mass-man readily rejected the utilitarian philosophy which had created him and accepted in its place the new mass religion of national suicide."

The final sentence, written with reference to the fascist movements of Europe, reminds us that if no reasonable cultural unification is offered, an unreasonable one may be invented and carried to frightful lengths(13,14).

The greatest perversion of culture in our time is a misconception of the role of democracy. As the preceding definition makes clear, a culture integrates a people qualitatively. Under the widely current misconception, it is supposed that democracy can integrate them as quantitiative units - that is, as units without relation to the value structure of the ideal. The most pressing duty of the believer in culture today is to define democracy and keep it within its place, in doing which he not only will preserve it as a viable form but also will protect those other areas of activity which are essential to supply a different kind of need.

Democracy is not a pattern for all existence any more than a form of economic activity is a substitue for the whole of living. Truly considered, democracy is nothing more than an ideal of equity among men in their political relationships. Its roots are in the truth that every individual has an inviolable personality, a private experience, and an authentic voice. Every individual is a reporter of what affects him, and he offers motions, as it were, concerning the general political welfare. To make this possible , a democratic state decrees a certain limited equality among its citizens. Even so, this equality is more theoretical than actual. But theories of this kind may have their practical usefulness as well as their noble objects. Thus in a parliamentary assembly we might give each speaker ten minutes to express his views, although we know that one man can say more in ten minutes than another can in an hour. Still, the equality serves the larger prupose. And so with democracy in its consulting of opinions and its counting of votes.

But democracy has to do with citizenship, and as Ortega has pointed out in one of his trenchant essays, our citizenship is the most insipid of our qualities. It concerns the things we have to get done in order to be in position to do things higher in the scale. It is account keeping or household management, an essentially low order of practicial activity. It is better to do this well than ill, and it should be done with equity to the individuals involved. But it is senseless to say that dutiful household management is the highest commission of man and that whatever proves instrumental in this must be our principle of ordering all social and cultural life. In our present confusion over the role of culture, this is what is being done with the limited concept "democracy."

When democracy is taken from its proper place and is allowed to fill the entire horizon, it produces an envious hatred not only of all distinction but even of all difference. The ensuing distortion conceals its very purpose, which is to keep natural inequalities from obtruding in the one area where equality has intelligible function. The reason we consent to treat men as equals in this area of activity is that we know they are not equals in other areas. The fanatical democrat insists upon making them equal in all departments, regardless of the type of activity and vocation. It is of course the essence of fanaticism to seize upon some fragment of truth or value and regard it as the exclusive object of man's striving. So democracy, a valuable but limited political concept, has been elevated by some into a creed as comprehensive as a religion or a philosophy, already at the cost of widespread subversion.

Ortega has wisely pointed out that this is not the spirit of true democracy, but of plebeianism. It exalts the very things that democracy was hopefully inaugurated to combat in the ranks of the people.

"The intital result is the wounding of the very sentiment which gave rise to democracy: for the concept of democracy springs from the desire to save the plebs from their low condition. But the doctrinaire democrat, who has converted a technique, democracy, into an end, soon finds himself sympathizing with the plebs precisely because of their plebeianism - their customs, manners, and intellectual tone. An example of this is the socialist creed (for we are dealing here with a creed, a secular religion) which has for one article of faith the dogma that only a proletarian head is fit for true science and reformed morality."

Today we are being asked to accept "democratic living." The eulogistic tone with which this phrase is pronounced invites the question of whether this could be the "tyrannizing image" of some new culture. The answer is "no," if by democracy one means simple communism. Now there are in fact some places where a large measure of equality is in effect among the members without prejudice to the cultural life which they support. Such is true of the communities of some religious orders, where, for example, no outward discrimination is made between those who carry on the work of teaching and those who look after maintenance(15). It is true also of some educational institutions where the students do a large part of the work; no real distinction is made between those who hold "white collar" jobs and those who labor in the cow barns. Anyone who has visited such a community knows that the social atmosphere there is most agreeable and relaxing. But when one studies the impulse that sustains them, one realizes that the democracy is made possible by a consecration to and a hierarchy of purpose. In the religious communities it is of course the service of the religion; in the schools it is the furtherance of education. Nobody pretends that in these areas all are equal. There is selection according to ability, vocation, and dedication. This structure of purpose and calling is really the insurer of the democracy that exists; equality is maintained where it is useful because there is an overriding aim to be served. If this overriding aim were conceivably withdrawn, it is easy to pcture even such communities breaking up into competitive pressure groups among "unequals." It is the authority of the mission which they carry on that keeps inequalities of service in a manageable and pleasing order. Thus the cohesiveness of such communities lies in the idea that informs and possesses them.

What I have here spoken of as true of small associations bears analogy with peoples and nations: a culture is a means of uniting society by making provision for differences. Differences do not create resentment unless the seed of resentment has been otherwise planted. A just man finds satisfaction in the knowledge that society has various roles for various kinds of people and that they in the performance of these roles create a kind of symphony of labor, play, and social life. There arises in fact a distinct pleasure from knowing that society is structure, diversified, balanced, and complex. Blind levelers do not realize that people can enjoy seeing things above them as well as on a plane with them. Societies with differentiation afford pleasure to the moral imagination as an aesthetic design affords rest to the eye. The propaganda of egalitarianism encourages belief that any society embodying distinctions must necessarily be torn with envy and hatred. But theory does not show and empirical observation does not discover that societies having a proper internal differentiation are unhappy. On the contrary, they may be reposeful and content. Of a number of examples which could be used to support this, I choose one described by Goethe in Poetry and Truth. Commenting on the Germany in which he had grown up, this great poet and philospher of life - "Europe's wisest head" had this to say:

"The tranquilized condition of Germany, of which my native town had formed a part for more than a century, had remained intact in spite of many wars and convulsions. The existence of the most varied social grades, including as they did the highest as well as the lowest, the Emperor as well as the Jew, instead of separating the various members, seemed rather to unite them; and this condition of things was conducive to a feeling of contentment."

Goethe, whose insight told him the true nature of the French Revolution, while many of the romantics and rationalists were still befooled, was not deceived by the effect of classes.

"In Germany it had hardly occurred to anyone yet to look with envy on this vast privileged class, or to grudge its obviously worldly advantages. The middle classes had quietly devoted themselves to commerce and the sciences, and by these pursuits, as well as by the practice of the mechanical arts, had raised themselves to a postion of importance which fully compensated their political inferiority; the free or partially free cities encouraged their activities, so that members of these classes were able to lead lives of peace and comfort. The man who increased his wealth or enhanced his intellectual influence, especially in matters of law or state, could always be sure of both respect and authority. In the Supreme Court of the Empire and elsewhere, the bench of nobles was faced by one of learned lawyers; the freer, less restricted outlook of the one worked in friendly harmony with the other, and not a trace of rivalry could be detected between them in everyday life. The noble felt secure in his exclusive and time-hallowed privileges, and the burgher felt it beneath his dignity to pretend to their possession by adding a prefix to his name."

This was the Germany of poets, musicians, and philosophers. The classes thrived on a mutual dependence, and the principle of distinction, far from being felt as invidious, was the cement that held the whole together. One senses the kind of satisfaction that was felt in seeing different kinds of people to the right and left of one and, since it is in the nature of things, above and below. Not to be overlooked is the fact that a "lowest class often finds satisfaction in knowing itself "superior" to other classes in certain respects - in hardihood, in industry, or in religiousness.

A society which is cohesive in this way through classes which have developed naturally out of civic and cultural vocation is in point of fact stronger than one which is undifferentiated. The latter tends to be inflexible and brittle; it does not have the internal give and take of the former. The inner organizations of a structural society act as struts and braces and enable it to withstand a blow which would shatter the other. The whole is sustained by its parts, which afford, as it were, a protection in depth. Nations composed of such societies have proved themselves very tough in international encounters. English society , desptie a high degree of classness, has displayed intense patriotism and great power of endurance in crises. The society of the American South, which is formed somewhat upon the English model, has stood up under strong attacks and pressures from the outside through its sense of being organized. All the evidence shows that differentiation which is not fragmentation is a source of strength. But such differentiation is possible only if there is a center toward which the parts look for their meaning and validation. One of the functions of cultural activity is to objectify this center so that it will exist as an ever-present reminder of one's place and one's vocation. A high degree of cultural orientation is, accordingly, a symptom of a healthy society.

In brief, culture is an exclusive, which is to say, self-defining creation, which satisfies needs arising from man's feeling and imagination. Every culture has a kind of ontological basis in social life, and this social life does not express itself in equality, but in a common participation from different levels and through different vocations.

Because of these facts and because of the political contentiousness of our time the question has actually been raised as to whether culture is "reactionary." The question itself reveals a confusion of categories which should never have been permitted. But we know from the words and deeds of Communists and their sympathizers that they make much of this subject and that they are prone to condemn artistic or cultural expression which deviates from their harsh political line. Now it is true, if one takes a very narrow and false view of progress, that much which the world has valued as culture could be condemned as "reactionary." For one thing, the very concept of culture runs counter to blind progressivism, by which I mean that state of mind which cannot measure anything except by number and and linear extension. Since culture operates in the realm of quality and offers not greater magnitutdes but more refined and intense sentiments, it is an engagement of the spirit lying beyond the thinking of those who have allowed their minds to be dominated by material categories. Speed and mass, virtually the slogans of contemporary Western civilization, are the antithesis of culture. The pointless series of "new developments" and expansions which the modern barbarian delights in look poor and hollow when placed beside authentic creations of the spirit. Since the two impulses move in opposite directions, the one does recede from the other. The barbarian, were he capable of a critical vocabulary, might brand what frustrates his kind of pleasure as "reaction." The possession of culture by historical elites gives some edge to this as a political weapon.

Under another aspect culture can be viewed as "reactionary" because it involves a good deal of ceremonial waste, which cannot be explained to those whose vision of life is merely economic and sensate.

This brings up the supremely important matter of style. All culture incorporates the idea of style, which is an homage to an intangible but felt need of the spirit. We hear references to "the modern style" in buildings and other creations where man customarily expresses his desire to impose order and design, yet this seems really to be a negation of style, relieved a little perhaps by imaginative attempts to suggest mass.

True style displays itself in elaboration, rhythm, and distance, which demand activity of the imagination and play of the spirit. Elaboration means going beyond what is useful to produce what is engaging to contemplation. Rhythm is a marking of beginnings and endings. In place of a meaningless continuum, rhythm provides intelligibility and the sense that the material has been handled in a subjective interest. It is human to dislike mere lapse. When one sees things in rhythmical configuration, he feels that they have been brought into the realm of the spirit. Rhythm is thus a way of breaking up nihilistic monotony and of proclaiming that there is a world of value. Distance is what preserves us from the vulgarity of immediacy. Extension and proportion in space, as in architecture, and extension in time, as in manners and deportment, help to give gratifying form to these creations. All style has in it an element of ritual, which signifies steps which cannot be passed over(19).

Today these factors of style, which is of the essence of culture, are regarded as if they were mere persiflage. Elaboration is suspected of spending too much on nonutilitarian needs, and the limited ends of engineering efficiency take precedence. Rhythm suffers because one cannot wait for the period to come around. In regard to distance, it is felt that there should be nothing between man and what he wants; distance is a kind of prohibition; and the new man sees no sanction in arrangements that stand in the way of immediate gratification. He has not been taught the subtlety to perceive that what one gains by immediate seizure one pays for by more serious losses. Impatience with space and time seems to be driving the modern to an increasing surrender of all ideas of order. Everywhere there is reversion to the plain and the casual, and style itself takes on an obsolescent look, as if it belonged to some era destined never again to appear.

It may be thought negligent that in this exposition I have made no reference to the now extensive studies of various cultures by anthropologists. The reason is that anthropological relativism is the chief quandary to be avoided in the kind of search that is undertaken here. The method of the anthropologists is descriptive, as everyone who has looked at their type of study knows. Essentially geographers and cataloguers of cultures, they are interested in a wide collection of particulars, so that their object could be summed up as polymathein rather than polynoein: to know much rather than to understand much. I may do some of them less than justice by this charge, yet it is by and large true. What I am certain of is that their practice constitutes a distraction for the one whose interest is in the value of culture and especially of his own culture.

For him the main object is to seize the formal Innigkeit of cultural expression and then to decide in what way his own is being menaced or vitiated. Thereafter he is in position to be both doctor and preacher and indeed it is hard to conceive of a man's being thus interested in culture without feeling moved to proceed against its enemies.

I have pointed to the fact that a culture comes into being under the influence of a "tyrannizing" image or vision. I use the word "tyrannizing" hoping that it will be excused its sinister connotations and understood as meaning unifying and compelling. A culture then is a complex of values polarized by an image or idea. It cannot be pefectly tolerant or even tolerant to any large extent because it lives by homogeneity. It therefore has to exclude on grounds which are cultural and not "rational" what does not comport with its driving impulse.

A grave danger arises when this principle is challenged by rationalistic thinkers, as is happening today. In speaking of a culture's power to influence and to bind I have more than once used the word "integrate," since a culture is something unitary gathered about the dominating idea. But "integration" and "segregation" are two sides of the same operation. A culture integrates by segregating its forms of activity and its members from those not belonging. The right to self-segregate then is an indispensable ground of its being. Enough has been said to show that our culture today is faced with very serious threats in the form of rationalistic drives to prohibit in the name of equality cultural segregation. The effect of this would be to break up the natural cultural cohesion and to try to replace it with artificial politically dictated integration. Such "integration" would of course be a failure because where deep inner impulse is lacking cohesiveness for any length of time is impossible. This crisis has been brought to our attention most spectacularly in the attempt to "integrate" culturally distinct elements by court action. It is, however, only the most publicized of the moves; others are taking place in areas not in the spotlight, but all originate in ignorance, if not in a suciidal determination to write an end to the heritage of Western culture.

-Richard Weaver, Chapter 1 from Visions of Order. Louisiana State University Press. Baton Rouge: 1964