Visions of Order
Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time
by Richard M. Weaver.
First published in March of 1964, more than nine years after it was proposed and eleven months after Weaver’s untimely death of heart failure at the age of 53, this book had little immediate impact. In ten years, only 3,000 copies were sold and it went out of print. It has been published again by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Wilmington, Delaware.
In the Preface of the current edition, Ted J. Smith III writes, “Weaver’s purpose in Visions of Order is to show that the restoration of Western culture is both possible and desirable.”
In eight chapters, Weaver surveys the vital elements of a culture, the causes for the disintegration of Western culture, and the actions necessary to reestablish a viable cultural vision for American society.
One chapter deals with “The Cultural Role of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric as a subject and practice was already (in 1961) falling into disfavour. Weaver writes, Rhetoric is designed to move men’s feelings in the direction of a goal. He continues, Rhetoric begins with the assumption that man is born into history. If he is to be moved, the arguments addressed to him must have historicity as well as logicality.
Today, it is difficult to find any school (secondary or collegiate) which provides Rhetoric as a course in their core curriculum. We are all the poorer for it, yet with today’s reduced standards for what constitutes an education (even among Christian home educators), to introduce it into a high school core curriculum would be cause for a public lynching.
The seventh chapter, “Gnostics of Education” shows that even fifty years ago, there were honest men who saw the destruction being wrought in the name of “progressive” education.
Comparing current academicians with the ancient Greek Gnostics, Weaver states, The ancient Gnostics denied the need of salvation because they considered man to be already in a state of blessedness. Today this translates itself into the doctrine that human beings do not stand in need of correction, to say nothing of conversion….If you believe that man is already in a “saved” condition, you of course base your ideal on what he generally has been. Then extremes, even of goodness, become “deviants,” and need to be pulled back toward the average.
After dismantling the course which statist education has continued on for the fifty years since his death, Weaver concludes, I have spoken of the progressive movement in education as an apostasy...An apostate is properly defined as one who, after making profession of a belief, falls away from or abandons it...They [the elite of educators] profess before society a belief in education...In reality, they are attackers and saboteurs of education… the apostates do not have faith in the existence of knowledge, and their real aim is the educationally illicit one of conditioning the young for political purposes.
Weaver is one of my favorite thinkers. To read his work is challenging but rewarding. Visions of Order provides fresh insight into the manner of sin and its steady erosion of the Christian standards we know as Western Culture. Fifty years after its writing, the book which was shunned by the self-proclaimed leftist protectors of society is in print again. Truth will always be truth, no matter how viciously it is screamed against. Visions of Order provides a truthful vision of man and thus deserves to be read.
(Reviewed February 2009)