Carolina QuotesWe have confined ourselves thus far to the kind of obsession which results from attention to peripheral matter and to specialization of labor, but there is another way in which science and its metaphysical handmaiden, progress, discourage sanity. This is its exaltation of "becoming" over "being." The domination of becoming produces another sort of fragmentation, which may be called “presentism.” Allen Tate has made the point that many modern people to whom the word “provincial” is anathema are themselves provincials in time to an extreme degree. Indeed, modernism is in essence a provincialism, since it declines to look beyond the horizon of the moment, just as a countryman may view with suspicion whatever lies beyond his country.
Richard M. Weaver Carolinian
Source
p. 67
- work
- Ideas have Consequences (1948)
- year
- 1948
- locator
- p. 67
Cite this record
“We have confined ourselves thus far to the kind of obsession…” Richard M. Weaver. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-05C6C9B6F5. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/05c6c9b6f5
More from Richard M. Weaver
Man is constantly being assured that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness. … If he is with a business organization, the odds are great that he has sacrificed every other kind of independence in return for that dubious one known as financial.
One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today. Charles Péguy has referred to modern man’s feeling of “slow economic strangulation,” his sense of never having enough to meet the requirement which his pattern of life imposes on him. Standards of consumption which he cannot meet, and which he does not need to meet, come virtually in the guise of duties.
It is not that things give meaning to words; it is that meaning makes things “things.” It does not make things in their subsistence; but it does make things in their discreteness for the understanding.