In consequence it is not difficult to see why the Southern gentleman looked upon religion as a great conservative agent and a bulwark of those institutions which served him. Spokesmen of the South were constantly criticizing Northerners for making religion a handmaid of social and political reform…..a writer in The Southern Literary Messenger thus described the North’s mixing of religious and secular causes: “Her priesthood prostitutes itself to the level with a blackguard and enters the secular field of politics, in the spirit of a beerhouse bully: and the politician as carelessly invades the sanctuary of the priest.”………The Evangelical sects aimed at a conversion of the inner man; the conservative ones at the exposition of a revealed ethic; both regarded themselves as custodians of the mysteries, little concerned with social agitation and out of reach of winds of political doctrine.the whole below*
And this from Weaver's Ideas of Consequences
It is curious to see how this mentality impresses those brought up under differing conditions. I recall with especial vividness a passage from Walter Hines Page’s The Autobiography of Nicholas Worth. Page, who grew up in the Reconstruction South and later went North to school, had received his earliest impressions in a society where catastrophe and privation had laid bare some of the primal realities, including the existence of evil – …It seemed to Page that his northern acquaintances had “minds of logical simplicity.” Such, I think, must be the feeling of anyone who comes out of a natural environment into one in which education, however lengthy and laborious, is based on bourgeois assumptions about the real character of the world. It is a mind which learns to play with counters and arrives at answers which work – in a bourgeois environment. If we reverse this process and send the “mind of logical simplicity” into regions where mystery and contingency are recognized, we re-enact the plot of Conrad’s Lord Jim. There is a world of terrifying reality to which the tidy moralities of an Anglican parsonage do not seem to be applicable.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/on_the_intellectual_inferiority_of_liberalism.html
The Tribal Psychology of Politics
"Liberals need to be shaken," says former liberal Jonathan Haidt. Liberals "simply misunderstand conservatives far more than the other way around."
What could have led a credentialed leftist in a profession dominated by other leftists (psychology) to turn apostate? Simple: human nature. The more Haidt learned about what motivates political choices, the more he realized that leftist theories run counter to human nature:
He first plunged into political research out of frustration with John Kerry's failure to connect with voters in 2004. A partisan liberal, the University of Virginia professor hoped a better grasp of moral psychology could help Democrats sharpen their knives. But a funny thing happened. Haidt, now a visiting professor at New York University, emerged as a centrist who believes that "conservatives have a more accurate understanding of human nature than do liberals."
Despite their proclaimed reverence for reason and science, liberals ignore facts that clash with their preconceived notions. Science continues to erode many cherished leftist articles of faith. The liberal conception of man as an autonomous, disconnected being guided by reason ignores the complexity of individual and group personalities. As I wrote on E.O. Wilson and his breakthrough work in sociobiology:
Social behavior can be explained by the biological drive to preserve one’s genetic inheritance. Parents sacrifice for their children, warriors sacrifice for their tribe, and soldiers sacrifice for their nation to ensure the survival of their kin.
Society is held together by the loyalty and affection of extended families – in other words, their blood ties and shared history. This continuity with the past not only provides the individual with identity and purpose, but maintains social order and cohesion, preserving the traditions and way of life that reflect our God-given character as a people.
That's conservatism, folks, backed by both world history and science.
Thanks to Peter for the link!
https://ontoliberty.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/truth/
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=3206
http://revisedhistory.wordpress.com/
*>>
ESSAY 7 of Richard Weaver's Southern Essays
THE OLDER RELIGIOUSNESS IN THE SOUTH
Of the many factors which have conspired to make the Southern people a distinct cultural group, so that it remains possible today to speak of the “mind of the South,” none has received so little informative discussion as their peculiar religious temper….
….Yet this religious temper is definitely a survival, whose history can be traced as successfully as that of the feudal system or the tradition of chivalry. The conservative section of the country has clung to “the old time religion.” It is the purpose of this paper to indicate some of the antecedents of that religion in our common heritage.
……There was much [in the South’s] religious attitude to recall the period before the Reformation. For although the South was heavily Protestant, its attitude toward religion was essentially the attitude of orthodoxy: It was simple acceptance of a body of belief, an innocence of protest and schism by which religion was left one of the unquestioned and unquestionable supports of the general settlement under which men live…..the average Southerner knew little and probably cared less about casuistical theology: what he recognized was the acknowledgement, the submissiveness of the will and that general respect for order, natural and institutional, which is piety. In short, there was a religious as well as political South,….Religion was a matter of profession and after one had professed, he became a member of a religious brotherhood, but this did not obligate him to examine the foundations of belief or to assail the professions of others……..In 1817 The Western Gazetteer and Emigrants’ Directory reported of the condition of religion in Kentucky: “Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and Seceders are prevailing sects; they manifest a spirit of harmony and liberality toward each other and whatever may have been said to the contrary, it is a solemn truth, that religion is nowhere more respected than in Kentucky.” Throughout the South and West there occurred the anomalous condition of an incredible flowering of sects together with the more primitive type of emotional response to religion. Travelers expressed a double amazement at the multiplicity of sects and at the lack of friction or ill will between them.
This curious circumstance is susceptible of explanation. The religious Solid South expressed itself in a determination to preserve for religion the character of divine revelation. Superficially, the difference between a backwoods convert, with his extraordinary camp-meeting exhibitionism and the restrained and mannered Episcopalian of a seaboard congregation, seems very great. Yet it must be borne in mind that despite the different ways they chose to assert religious feeling, both were inimical to the spirit of rationalism. And if the spirit of rationalism is looked upon as the foe of religion, then it must be admitted that orthodox Christianity was as safe in the hands of one as the other.
New England, on the contrary, was settled in the early years largely by people who had been embroiled in religious feuds, which they found occasion for renewing after they had set themselves up in the New World…..Such troubles arise only when egotistical and self-willed people make assent a matter of intellectual conviction. In New England the forces of dissent finally won the day……. Emerson, Channing and Transcendentalism killed insistence upon uniformity in this once most orthodox of sections. A conclusion to be drawn from these events is that New England, acting out of that intellectual pride which has always characterized her people, allowed religion to become primarily a matter for analysis and debate, if we take here the point of view of the conservative religionist. Instead of insistence upon a simple grammar of assent, which a proper regard for the mysteries would dictate, they conceived it their duty to explore principles and when they had completed the exploration, they came out, not with a secured faith, but with an ethical philosophy, which illuminated much, but which had none of the binding power of the older creed. There followed as characteristic results Unitarianism and Christian Science, two intellectual substitutes for a more rigorous religious faith. While this was going on, Southern churchmen were fiercely assailing the “Arian heresy in New England” and were declaring that when man uses reason to test Scripture “the inevitable logical result is Atheism.”
The results of the divergence did not appear at the beginning, for originally both Virginia and New England colonies conceived religion as a part of the general program of government……..As time went on, however, their paths separated; the religiousness which in Virginia had originally been supported by laws, remained as a crystallized popular sentiment; in New England, always more responsive to impulses from abroad, it weakened and virtually disappeared. New Englanders cultivated metaphysics and sharp speculation; Southerners generally, having saved their faith, as they thought, from the whole group of pryers, reformers and troublesome messiahs, settled back and regarded it as a part of their inheritance which they did not propose to have disturbed.
Such religious persecution as occurred in Virginia found its victims not among heretics in theology, but among actual or potential disturbers of the peace. The Quakers, who were considered the foremost of these, were treated with extreme hostility throughout the seventeenth century. The charge leveled against these zealots was not that of doctrinal heresy;…..[rather as evidenced by] The General Assembly of Virginia of the winter of 1659-1660 declared that their beliefs tended to “destroy religion, laws, communities and all bonds of civil society.”……..They were being punished not for the sin of theological schism, but for the sin of political non-cooperation and although these are not necessarily unrelated, the happier fate of others sects within the state suggests that the authorities were indifferent to doctrine which had only theological implications.
……….While the [New England] Puritan was attempting to make his religion conform to the canons of logic, conscience, or ethical propriety, the Southerner clung stubbornly to the belief that a certain portion of life must remain inscrutable, that religion offers our only means of meeting it and that reason cannot here be a standard of interpretation. Unitarianism…was agreeable to those who test belief by reason, but unattractive to those who long for a sustaining creed and a means of emotional fulfillment…………
Among all classes in the South an opinion obtained that religion should be sentiment. Where the people were refined, the sentiment was refined; where they were demonstrative and disorderly, it was likely to be such……….[but] All agitation was frowned upon. Restless and skeptical minds, who would dispute the grounds of the canon, were looked upon as persons inimical to a comfortable and orderly design for living. Refuting a point of doctrine brought one a reputation not so much for intellectual distinction as for perverseness and ill will. Because of her zeal for inquiry New England was contemptuously referred to as the land of “notions.” A writer in The Southern Literary Messenger, drawing a contrast between the Southern and Northern people, found the latter lacking in a sense of measure: “….having liberty which they do not appreciate, they run into anarchy, --- being devotional, they push their piety to the extremes of fanaticism, --- being contentious withal, they are led to attack the interests of others merely because those interests do not comport with their ideas of right.”
What the Southerner desired above all else in religion was a fine set of images to contemplate, as Allan Tate has shown in his Religion and the Old South. The contemplation of these images….had the effect of building up in him an inner restraint……[that sense of restraint] and a willingness to abide by the tradition were universally viewed as marks of the gentleman;…..
In consequence it is not difficult to see why the Southern gentleman looked upon religion as a great conservative agent and a bulwark of those institutions which served him. Spokesmen of the South were constantly criticizing Northerners for making religion a handmaid of social and political reform…..a writer in The Southern Literary Messenger thus described the North’s mixing of religious and secular causes: “Her priesthood prostitutes itself to the level with a blackguard and enters the secular field of politics, in the spirit of a beerhouse bully: and the politician as carelessly invades the sanctuary of the priest.”………The Evangelical sects aimed at a conversion of the inner man; the conservative ones at the exposition of a revealed ethic; both regarded themselves as custodians of the mysteries, little concerned with social agitation and out of reach of winds of political doctrine.
Reverence for the “word of God” has been a highly important aspect of Southern religious orthodoxy……..The necessity of having some form of knowledge which will stand above the welter of earthly change and bear witness that God is superior to accident led Thomas Aquinas to establish his famous dichotomy, which says briefly, that whereas some things may be learned through investigation and the exercise of the reasoning powers, others must be given or “revealed” by God……Nature is a vast unknown; in the science of nature there constantly appearing emergents which, if allowed to affect spiritual and moral verities, would destroy them by rendering them dubious, tentative and conflicting. It is therefore imperative in the eyes of the older religionists that man have for guidance in this life a body of knowledge to which the “facts” of natural discovery are either subordinate or irrelevant. This body is the “rock of ages,” firm in the vast sea of human passion and error. Moral truth is not something which can be altered every time science widens its field of induction. If moral philosophy must wait upon natural philosophy, all moral judgments are temporary, relative and lacking in those sanctions which alone make them effective. And though no probably no people were more ignorant of the Summa Theologica than the inarticulate and little-read rural Southern population, this Thomist dualism lies implicit in the opposition to scientific monism, the most persistent of the South’s medieval heritages. Then, as now, it explains their dogged adherence to what is taught “in the Book” and their indifference to empirical disproofs.
Emerson and his colleagues founded their revolt against New England orthodoxy on the principle of the continuity of knowledge and the prerogative of the individual mind to judge and determine. They were successful and the country concluded that the victory was won everywhere; but in the South the battle has not yet been fought. In the present century, when publicity attending the theory of evolution forced the issue, there was widespread amazement that legislatures representing sovereign states were prepared to vote revealed knowledge precedence over natural, for such, in a broad way of viewing the matter, is the significance of the anti-evolution laws. This could not have surprised anyone who knew the tradition, for in the South there had never been any impeachment of “the Word,” and science had not usurped the seats of the prophets……….The South was striving to preserve a centuries-old distinction, which the North was condemning as error. Indeed, it has been a settled practice with Southern spokesmen to describe the differences between the North and the South in religious language. When the period of sectional separation came, more than one Southern churchman could be found placing the blame for the sins of New England, the most notable of which was Abolitionism, upon “the great Socinian heresy.” This was an open attack upon the whole movement of deism and rationalism, which by the middle of the eighteenth century had captured the cultivated orders of Europe and by the middle of the next, much of New England and the North……….and fundamentalist leaders today regard the purely scientific view of man as only the modern pose of godlessness.
It cannot be denied that during the period of the French Revolution there was much religious skepticism in certain Southern education centers and among elements of the Southern upper class…….Skepticism is always an achievement of an intellectual aristocracy, who by education and through access to libraries become accustomed to the critical handling of ideas……..It remained, however, distinctly an upper-class attitude, sharply localized and without power to affect the essential religiousness of the Southern populace. After 1830,….it declined to the point of extinction.
Some notice must be taken of the influence of nineteenth century science upon the religious temper of the Old South…..The truth seems clear that the Southern scientist did not carry his scientific speculation to the point at which it becomes an interpretation of the whole of life……..but it appears nearer the truth to say that the traditional mind of the South, although it recognized in science a fascinating technology, refused to become absorbed in it to the extent of making it either a philosophy of life or a religion. It thus clung to its inherited religious humanism. Unlike the technician, the average Southerner did not feel that he must do a thing because he found that he could do it. It is highly significant that neither the Jacobinism of the French Revolution nor the scientific materialism of the century which followed was able to draw him from the view that man holds a central position in the universe under divine guidance.
So the Southern people reached the eve of the Civil War one of the few religious people left in the Western World. Into the strange personnel of the Confederate Army, out of “regions that sat in darkness,” poured fighting bishops and prayer-holding generals and through it swept waves of intense religious enthusiasm long lost to history….And when that army went down to defeat, the last barrier to the secular spirit of science, materialism and pragmatism [aka efficiency] was swept away.
It seems an inescapable inference that in the sphere of religion the Southerner has always been hostile to the spirit of inquiry. He felt that a religion which is intellectual only is no religion. His was a natural piety, expressing itself in uncritical belief and in the experience of conversion, not in an ambition to perfect a system, or to tidy up a world doomed to remain forever deceptive, changeful and evil. For him a moral science made up of postulates and deductions and taking no cognizance of the inscrutable designs of Providence and the ineluctable tragedies of private lives was no substitute. Whether he was a Virginia Episcopalian, dozing in comfortable dogmatic slumber, or a Celt, transplanted to the Appalachian wilderness and responding to the intense emotionalism of the religious rally, he wanted the older religion of dreams and drunkenness---something akin to the rituals of the Medieval Church and the Eleusinian mysteries of the ancients.
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