Carolina QuotesThe man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetite.
Richard M. Weaver Carolinian
Source
p. 112
- work
- Ideas have Consequences (1948)
- year
- 1948
- locator
- p. 112
Cite this record
“The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourge…” Richard M. Weaver. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-2A6759F7BA. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/2a6759f7ba
More from Richard M. Weaver
We 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.
To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of psychopathology. Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucination and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world.
Try to imagine a man setting out for the day without a single prejudice. … Inevitably he would be in a state of paralysis. He could not get up in the morning, or choose his necktie, or make his way to the office, … or, to come right down to the essence of the thing, even maintain his identity.