Re: God and morality
Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2026 3:13 pm
I've read both, and still have them on my shelf. They're good, so far as they go. But it's important to be precise about exactly how far each of them intended their analysis to go. Weaver is very brief. Bork is longer, but quite focused on social critique. Neither is focused on remediation.Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Oct 14, 2026 1:41 pm 2 principal influences: Robert Bork (Slouching Toward Gomorrah) and Richard Weaver (Ideas Have Consequences). The personal aspect of this is why I think that ad hominem — always holding in one’s mind that we are dealing always with men and their relationships to Ideas, which means their choices, propensities, strengths and failures as men — is really the best conversation to have.
I don't think either was trying for a comprehensive view of Western civilization, and I don't think they had as their ambition in writing to create any comprehensive strategy of forward procedure either. Both are really critical works, meaning they focus primarily on criticism rather than remedy; and this, you can see by the proportions of text they devote to those two tasks. To take them beyond the point at which they stop seems to me unfair to them, and perilous to our conclusions. For we would have to invent and add arguments that neither of them explicitly made, woven from our own speculations. We might not be as good at evaluating the entailments as they would be.
Now, I certainly would say that both Bork and Weaver were well aware that the ad hominem is a fallacy. There's all the difference in the world between critiquing the general nature of mankind (which both certainly do), and picking at the character of a particular man, as if that were some reason for dismissal of his right to speak or the possibility of his speech being truthful...if only at times. So I can't see that either Bork or Weaver backs your choice of the ad hominem method. Rather, their critiques are sociological or anthropological or historical or political or philosophical, or all of the above, however we might characterize them...but never ad hominem.
Here again, we see it. "Occidental degeneration" is a sociological-historical claim about all "occidental" people, not and ad hominem. To resort to ad hominems would simply weaken and endanger the theses of both: since it would reduce their critique from a general one to a merely personal attack on one person. I don't recall a single passage where either employs the technique you advocate.And what I mean, referring to my own case, is that by under Bork’s and Weaver’s thesis I realized the degree to which I am myself a consequence of Occidental degeneration. I embodied it, I expressed it, not so much consciously but realky as manifest habit, attitude.
Self-critique is fine, and necessary for all of us, for we can know ourselves, at least to some extent. But ad hominems don't attack ourselves, but rather others, whose motives and character we may so easily misjudge that it simply renders our critique suspect, at best, and unwarranted and misdirected, at worst.
So my suggestion would be this: why not imitate Weaver's and Bork's actual method, rather than employing a method that neither uses? Critiquing general human nature, or the behaviour of particular civilizations under the weight of certain metaphysical beliefs is perfectly reasonable. Turning to spite and personal attacks on one man or woman, on the other hand, is an incredibly weak method of critique, because even if it were not fallacious, and even in cases where it could be done successfully, it still only 'slays' one enemy, and leaves the greater mass of humanity untouched.