We are a people consumed with the idea that we have courageously exceeded our ancestors’ meager attempts at freedom, honesty, and authenticity. Richard Weaver critiques such notions in Ideas Have Consequences (1948):
Every group regarding itself as emancipated is convinced that its predecessors were fearful of reality. It looks upon euphemisms and all the veils of decency with which things were previously draped as obstructions which it, with superior wisdom and praiseworthy courage, will now strip away. Imagination and indirection it identifies with obscurantism; the mediate is an enemy of freedom.
Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (1948, Reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 24.
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