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IDEAS, ACTIONS, AND CONSEQUENCES
By Morton C. Blackwell In my childhood I noticed the letters IES
prominently displayed in our Episcopal Church: in stained glass, on
woven altar cloths and elsewhere. Curious, I asked my father what
IHS meant and w as told it stood for Latin words*meaning "In this
sign."
Much later I learned that in 312 A.D. the Roman Emperor
Constantine crushed a rival for his throne in the Battle of -the
Milvian Bridge on the Tiber river. Before this famous battle
Constantine repl aced with the Cross the traditional Roman eagle on
the standards of his legions and painted Christian symbols on the
shields of his men. Thereafter, Constantine, and his successors who
ruled the .Eastern Roman Empire for more than a thousand years.,
flow banners including the Cross and the words In Hoc Signo
Vinces,, "In this sign you shall conquer."
In the Latin church, the letters IHS came in time also to mean
lesus Hominum Salvator, or Jesus, Savior of Man. The Jesuit order,
founded in 1540, adopted IHS as its insignia. in our time the
letters IHS are seen weekly,in church by millions of Christians in
many denominations. Many of these millions have no idea what IES
stands for although,, if presied,, they might acknowledge that IHS
has some religious significance.
But there is more to the story of IHS than this. Classical
scholars know that IHS,, as a Christian symbol, was originally from
the Greek, in which iota (1), eta (H), sigma ( ) are the first
three letters of Jesus (iota, eta, sigma, omicron, upsilon, sigma),
which abbreviation looks very much like IHS. A peculiarity of Greek
writing is that the letter sigma could be rendered in two fdrms,,
the 11sigmatall form, much like our letter 'IS." and the I'lunatell
form, much like our letter IIC.11 Thus the abbreviation of the name
of Jesus in Greek could be spelled in English IHC.
M orton C. Blackwell is President of The Leadership Institute. For
the first three years of the Reagan Administration he was Special
Assistant to the President on the White House staff and the
President's liaison to conservative organizations.
Mr. Blackwell spoke at The Heritage Foundation on September 18,
1985.
ISSN 0272-1155. Copyright 1986 by The Heritage Foundation.
In twenty-five years of conservative activism I have read or
heard reverently repeated innumerable times a short sentence,,
"Ideas Have Consequences." Cons ervative intellectuals and
would-be. intellectuals are so enamored of the words,, "Ideas Have
Consequences,,11 that by now probably each day someone at The
Heritage Foundation receives correspondence in which these words
are written. The theme "Ideas Have Consequences" so often crops up
in conservative books, speeches, and scholarly articles that I have
for several years mentally catalogued each usage I see or hear
under the heading IHC. No meeting of the Philadelphia Society or of
the Intercollegiate Stud i es Institute is complete unless someone
solemnly intones the words, "Ideas Have Consequences." The words
appear often in the-pages of National Review and in virtually every
other conservative journal, including i@any with little pretense of
intellectualit y . There are now more than sixty independent
conservative campus publications in the United States. Because I
conduct Student Publications Seminars, I see many of these campus
efforts. Virtually every one explicitly affirms that "Ideas Have
Consequences,," often stressing the point in the premier issue. For
example, the review of a Xichael Novak book in the Xay 1983 issue
of Student Xagazine, published at the University of Colorado,
included this sentence: "No one doubts the truthfulness of the
insightful t i tle of Southern Agrarian Richard Weaver's famous
essay,, 'Ideas Have Consequences."' Perhaps the law student who
wrote that review of Novak's book was also familiar with Richard X.
Weaver's 1948 book, Ideas Have C6nsecuences. But the fact that he
enclosed the title in quotation marks (proper for an assay) rather
than italicizing it (proper for a book) raises some questions as to
whether or not he knew what he was writing about. In any case,, the
reviewer made no further reference to Weaver,, having perform ed
the conservative's obligatory genuflection to the well-known symbol
IHC.
The proposition,, "Ideas Have Consequences,," has.attained
talismanic status with young conservatives. I would not be
surprised to learn that some budding conservative,, having ado pted
it as his mantra, now sits quietly several minutes each day,
contemplating this "insightful title." From time to time I venture
to question young conservatives who have quoted, in writing or in
speech, the title of Weaver's most famous work. Alas, th e great
majority of those who cite the title have never held in their hands
any book by Richard X. Weaver.
What then accounts for the frequency of.the references? It is, I
believe.'a manifestation of hubris. The young person of
conservative inclination, po ssessed of a growing vocabulary and
having gained some familiarity with conservative writings, readily
concludes he is now capable of elevated thoughts beyond the reach
of all but a tiny elite.
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Perhaps he finds, as I first did twenty-five years ago, t he
praise of Richard M. Weaver in The Conservative Mind by Russell
Kirk. But more likely he reads the magical book title in a
conservative journal. "Ideas Have Conseauences.. Eurskal With this
I will conquerill How satisfying it is to be one of those who
really make things happen by thinking great thoughts and
formulating great ideas.
If this common inculcation with the symbol I call IHC merely
increased the sense of.self-worth among young conservatives, the
fascination with IHC would do little harm to the conservative
cause. Unfortunately, the temptation is often overpowering to take
IHC: literally.
If ideas. in and of themselves, really do-have consequences,
then being right, in the sense of being correct, is sufficient. If
you know you are right, particularly if you believe you can prove
you are right, then your ideas inevitably will prevail.
For a young person.with intellectual aspirations, this is heady
stuff. Entranced by the implications of IHC, he concludes he need
no longer work in society with me re mortals in their ordinary
plans of existence. He feels himself elevated above them. The logic
of IHC requires that they conform eventually to his ideas.
Thousands of young conservatives,, caught up in the romance of IHC,
fancy themselves young Platos. In a way-they are, as shall be
explained below. But the world does not treat them as they expect
and as they believe they deserve. Public policy battles, for
example, do not often turn an the question of who is provably
right.
Confronted with the failure of his ideas to have their merited
consequences, many a young conservative becomes embittered. Some,
in the words'of the late Warren Nutter, "retreat to the citadel to
save the books." others become opportunists and quiet cynic s. With
great inner agony, some resign themselves to impotence in a world
that does not function as it "should." Too few discover how to make
their ideas effective.
For a number of reasons, it would not be fair to blame Richard
Weaver for the problems asso ciated vith-his magically titled book.
He was a professor of rhetoric, which can be defined as ideas
Artfully presented. A master rhetorician, Weaver knew full well
that ideas do not necessarily have consequences.
Although it is dangerous to suggest how-d eceased persons would
respond to current questions, I am confident Weaver would affirm
that "Ideas Have Consequences" is a rhetorically contracted
enthymeme, an enthymeme being a syllogism with one of the elements
missing but understood.
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Expanding Weaver's enthymeme, we can got the following
syllogism.:
\u239\'95 Ideas can motivate people to act.
\u239\'95 Actions have consequences.
\u239\'95 Therefore ideas can have consequences.
without understanding Weaver's true meaning,, some
conservatives, mostly young, often give t he symbol IHC a
dangerously misplaced, almost religious devotion. A noble
confidence in the truth of their ideas makes them-prideful and
vulnerable to the temptations of IEC, which can lure them into the
voluntary paralysis of a life of contemplation.
For anyone who makes the effort to read the difficult but highly
rewarding Richard Weaver, his meaning is brilliantly clear. In
Ideas Have ConseGMences, he actually wrote: "The youth is an
intellectual only, a believer in ideas, who thinks that ideas can
ove rwhelm the world. The mature man passes beyond intellectuality
to wisdom.... Does this sound like a man who believes that ideas
are efficacious without something-more?
Elsewhere in Ideas Have Consequences., he wrote:'"Orqanization
always makes imperative counterorqanization. A force in being is a
threat to the unorganized,, who must answer by becoming organized
themselves."
Weaver warned powerfully against rootless, mechanistic
manipulation, against knowledge "of techniques rather than of
ends." His deserv ing target was the destructive tendency of
modern'men to lose our sense of purpose as we rapidly accumulate
knowledge of how to do things. But it is a gross misreading to
suggest he argued against action' It would be fair to say he held
that actions based on the right ideas will have desirable
consequences. He quite correctly gave absolute priority to ideals,
but recognized the duty of philosophically sound people to take
actions.
In 1958 Weaver wrote an essay entitled "Up from Liberalism,," a
title he gra ciously later authorized William P. Buckley, Jr., to
use also for his delightful book. Russell Kirk calls that 1958
essay Weaver's intellectual autobiography. In it Weaver wrote,,
"Somehow our education will have to recover the lost vision of the
person a s a creature of both intellect and will. It will have to
bring together into one through its training the thinker and the
doer, the dialectician and the rhetorician." This statement should
enlighten those who take IHC only at its simplistic, literal
value.
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The intellectual's dismay at the untidy nature of political
life' is by no means new. Very late in life the philosopher Plato
wrote in his Seventh Epistle: For both the written laws and the
unwritten laws of good conduct were gradually destroyed,, and the
state of things became worse and worse at an astonishing pace, so
that 1, who at first had been very eager to go into politics',,
finally felt dizzy when I looked at it and when I saw things
carried in all directions in utter-confusion. I did still not gi v
e up watching for a possible improvement of .these conditions and
of the whole government; but, waiting all the time for an
opportunity to do something, I finally had to realize that all the
states of our time without exception are badly administered.' If
Plato was dizzied by politics and withdrew almost entirely from
personal participation, we should not be surprised that so many
conservative intellectuals and aspiring intellectuals now find
comfort in the proposition that Ideas Have Consequences. They ca n
believe themselves thereby absolved of the awkward responsibility
for personal actions.
The world of politics is invariably imperfect and replete with
compromises. How tempting it is to shield our principles from
degenerating contact with such untidiness . Never mind that we
simultaneously insulate the real world from the ennobling effect of
practical contact with our principles. Now, however, we should know
better. Our conservative political and intellectual mentor Edmund
Burke did not teach us: "All tha t is necessary to triumph over
evil is for man to have enough good ideas." Quite the contrary,,
Burke's most famous words were: "All that is necessary for the
triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Leonardo da Vinci
had marvelous ideas, many of wh i ch had no consequences. For 130
years after his death his famous notebooks were hidden. only when
made available through wide publication did his speculative
drawings of worm gears, iins grinders, submarines, and airplanes
cause man to act, to try to buil d working models based on his
ideas. By the 20th century we had actually built successful
machines Leonardo only imagined. For Leonardo, though, the classic
case is the bicycle. Late in the 19th century,, just after the
modern bicycle had been invented,, s o meone in the Spanish
National Library in Madrid peeled from its backing paper (to which
it had been glued for hundreds of years) one of the pages of
Leonardo's original notebook. On the reverse of the sheet was
Leonardo's drawing of a pedal-and-chain-driv en bicycle
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almost identical to recently "invented" models then in use all
over the world.
In one of his too few surviving lette3es, Whittaker Chambers
told how he had just burned several hundred pages of a book
manuscript he had been working on. For t hose of us who consider
Chambers one of the great masters of our English language, the loss
is tragic and irreparable. Those ideas are lost and will not have
consequences. Intellectual giant Ludwig von Mises,, in the chapter
on "The Role of Ideas" in Huma n Action,, said,, "Thinking is to
deliberate beforehand over future action and to reflect afterwards
upon past action. Thinking and acting are inseparable."
Particularly in our day we cannot afford to concentrate on either
ideas or actions to the neglect o f the other. The prideful
conservative intellectual who avoids association with less elegant
men of action may doom his cause.- Chambers understood this and
wrote:
I do not ask of the man who lets me slip into his foxhole
whether he believes in the ontolog ical proof of God,, whether he
likes me personally, or even whether, in another part of the
forest, at another time, he lobbed a grenade at me. I am interested
only that for the duration of the war, he keep his rifle clean and
his trigger finger nerveless against a common'enezy. I understand
that that is all he wants of me.
The reason for the increasing success of conservative ideas in
recent years is not that our ideals are much more correct now than
those we held, say, in the Goldwater era. We prosper in many ways
because we have begun to study the political process and to work
together to implement our new knowledge. In our day we need still
more conservatives who are first philosophically sound and then
technologically proficient and movement oriented. We must teach
young intellectuals that a flattering and seductive talisman which
they do not fully understand will not guarantee them success. They
must not rely on victory falling into their deserving hands like
rips fruit off'a tree. They have to earn i t.
Good ideas have desirable consequences only if we act
intelligently for them. We owe it to our philosophy to study how to
win.
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