RICHARD M. WEAVER: 40 YEARS IN RETROSPECT — 02

"In the great pantheon of half-forgotten conservative sages, writer Richard M. Weaver (1910-1963) occupies an important, if curious, niche. I say 'writer,' but that is an imprecise designation. By trade, Weaver was a professor of rhetoric. He is even the author of a textbook on the subject. One friend said that Weaver was 'a rhetor doing the work of a philosopher.' It might be more accurate to say that he was a critic doing the work of a prophet. Prophets as a species tend to specialize in bad news; they rarely return from the mountain reporting that Management has concluded that everything down below is just fine. 

Weaver was no exception to this rule. He made his reputation as a latter-day Isaiah, bearing admonitory tidings to an inattentive populace. Above all, perhaps, he was an acolyte of what he lovingly called 'lost causes.' The fact that a cause had lost, he argued, did not necessarily rob it of nobility; it did not mean that we could not learn something from the ideals that inspired it; it did not even mean that, ultimately, it was really lost. For what is lost might also be regained. It might serve not only as a reminder but also as a model, a new goal. In the 'longer run,' as Weaver put it, what seemed lost might eventually prove victorious.

Such, anyway, were among the explicit rationales that Weaver offered about the value of lost causes. An additional attraction, I suspect, lay in the romance of defeat: 'Things reveal themselves passing away'; Weaver liked to quote that Yeatsian line. I believe he cherished the passing away as much as the accompanying revelation."