Contemporary Cultural Ethics

God’s Central Institution

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Culture

Lesson: God’s Central Institution

Genre: Speech

Track: 10

Dictation Name: RR134A1

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our subject this afternoon is God’s Central Institution.

It is a frailty and a failing of ours that whatever is most important to us, we want to make most important to the whole of reality, to God and the world, and we regard it as the center of the universe. One of the things that interested me when I worked among the American Indians was that no tribe had a name for itself. The Shoshones did not call themselves Shoshones, nor did the Paiutes call themselves Paiutes. Those were the name given to them by some other tribe. What did each of the tribes call themselves? The People. Everyone else had a name, but they were the People. They were at the center of everything, and of course, this failing is not an unknown among men and nations. Perhaps it most clearly shows among the British. If any of you are stamp collectors, you know that every country identifies itself on its postage stamps, says U.S. Postages, or Deutsches Reich, or Nederlands, or some such thing, but Britain never puts Great Britain or England on any postage stamp. They do not feel any necessity to identify themselves.

Now this kind of failing possesses churchmen, and I’m sure that more than a few of you thought that when I was to speak on God’s central institution, I was going to talk about the church. It is a failing of churchmen that they want to see the church as at the center of God’s purpose and plan. Now, the church is very important in God’s purpose, but it is not the central institution, emphatically not. What is God’s basic institution?

One very clearly set forth in scripture. It’s the family. The family. It’s the one institution whose creation antedates the Fall in very clear and unmistakable fashion. It is an institution from whence God himself draws his typology and imagery, defining himself as the Father, and defining the second person as the Son. It is from the family that much of the imagery describing the church is drawn. The Lord’s Table commemorates a family meal, and pictures the church as a family. I don’t think it’s necessary to go any further. The point I think is obvious from one end of scripture to the other, how deeply imbedded the imagery of the family is in scripture.

Now, to analyze the significance of the family, we need to recognize that the basic powers in society are given to the family. In particular, the three basic powers, and I’m going to deal for a little while, on those basic powers. The first basic power in any society is control of children. In terms of scripture, the control of children, which is control of the future, is in the hands of the family, of the father and the mother. Now, this is a power that other institutions have sought, have tried to lay hands on, and expropriate as it were from the family, the church has tried to do this. As a matter of fact, during the Medieval period, the church was very hostile, in essence, to the family, both for neo-Platonic purposes because of its hatred of the flesh, and also because of its distrust of the family. For a long time, priests were forbidden to have any part in a marriage celebration. They were to marry the couple and get out as fast as possible from that polluted atmosphere.

Moreover, the church did everything to take over control of children. You’re all famous{?} with the old Jesuit saying that if they can have the children at a certain very young age for just a few years, they have that child for the rest of their life, and they’re right, and this is why you have had parochial schools so often in Christian history. It is the attempt by the church to control the children and to mold them in the direction the church wants them to go, but an even greater threat, of course, has been and is the state’s attempt to gain control over the children, and thereby to control and to determine the future. Statist education, our public schools, of course, is the obvious fact here, and this has been a planned program in every era in which it has been adopted, and in every country, whereby the state, recognizing the power that is inherent in the control of children wants to control children in order that it might control the future.

Today, there is increasingly a concerted program of propaganda on the part of various very liberal educators for campus schools. What do they mean by campus schools? The idea, of course, is two-fold. One, they want to take the child away from the family into a campus situation, and two, they want to take the child at a very early age, at about four. Now, of course, they make this program sound commendable by saying, “We must, in particular, concentrate on the ghetto child, the black child, because he is so disadvantaged, that the only way we can remedy that disadvantage educationally is to separate him from an environment that is not conducive to his growth.” However, we need to point out, as I have in The Messianic Character of American Education, that as far back as the 90’s, there were men at an NEA convention who emphatically, like Colonel Parker, felt that this type of campus education should be given to all children without exception, and there are many who advocate that today. The family is the roadblock. The children could be better prepared for the future, they believe, if the state had complete control of them.

Well, of course, the ironic fact is that this was tried by the Soviet Union, and no one today is more hostile to such a program than the Soviet Union. They found that, by taking the children away from their parents at a very early age, at nursery age, and attempting to educate them, two things followed, both very serious mental and physical disabilities, retardation in both areas, and some of the finest statements indicting this type of separation of the child from the parents have come in the past few years from Soviet educators and leaders. However, this has not removed the problem that they face, since the Soviet Union is deeply concerned about controlling the mind of the child in order that it might control the future. The child now grows up in the home, and it is the grandmother who looks after the child, not the state nursery or the state campus school. The consequence is, as Jim Jordan knows, since he reads Russian, the editorials in the Soviet papers speak of the grandmother problem. This problem is simply that the grandmothers, having grown up in an era when they were taught the Christian faith, teach it to the grandchildren, so the babysitting problem is a very real one for the Soviet Union. The young children are being brought up on the word of God.

But you see the problem. Control of children is control of the future, and this is a power, one of the three great powers in society that is given by God to the family, to the family as husband and wife. “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife,” so that there has to be both an honoring of the past family, “Honor thy father and thy mother,” and a separation in order to create a new unit with eyes on the future. That child being reared in terms of the covenant and being prepared for covenant responsibilities. This is, without question, a tremendous power, and we as covenant people, are possessors of this power that church and state have fought over through the centuries, and we bypass it, and pastors do not stress the centrality of the family in God’s plan, and thereby, miss an opportunity to deal with the area of power, the family.

Now, there is a second area of tremendous power, which is the object continually of the envy of other institutions and their attempts to infringe upon the rights of the family. In terms of scripture, the family is the possessor of property. Family is a property-oriented thing in scripture. It is not individually owned nor, in terms of the modern world, corporately owned. It is owned by the family. It is the family that is the corporate body. The idea of a corporation is not bad. It is the modern concept of a corporation which is impersonal and non-familial. In the Bible, the family is a corporation so that the members of the corporation do not feel that that which they hold is simply their personal property. It is an inheritance from the past to be handed on to the future. So that when Ahab sought to take over Naboth’s vineyard, the idea horrified Naboth that he could dispossess his family of something that had been handed down and was in his care as a trustee to be passed on to the future.

Now, control of property is basic to power in any society. Control of children, control of property, and this is why throughout history, church and state have quarreled over these things, have tried to preempt certain rights and powers, to intervene, to govern, to control, and to expropriate property, because both have aimed at having the governing power in society, but God places the governing power, in scripture, in the hands of the family, and by family is meant the godly covenant family, the legal family.

We do not appreciate here the tremendous legal revolution in terms of scripture that was wrought by the Empress Theodora. I referred in passing to it the other day, and I think it is necessary at this time to deal with it briefly. In the ancient world, property belonged exclusively to the husband. We have that kind of paganization come in to America as well as throughout the Western world in the 1800’s, and there are still some states in the union in which property belongs exclusively to the husband. I believe Texas still does have such an ugly and ungodly situation, so that a wife may accumulate something and a godless husband can just expropriate it, but in the scripture, it is not so, and the property belongs to the family.

Now, the Empress Theodora has one of the most dramatic stories of almost anyone in church history. She is incidentally greatly vilified, because Procopius is our main source of information about much in her personal life, and Procopius hated her with a passion and in a secret diary, as it were, put down every kind of imaginable filth about her. A great many historians, because contemporary scholarship, humanist scholarship on the whole over the generations, has been hostile to her. It’s very difficult to find anything about Theodora that does justice to her. She was the daughter of a man who, in the Roman arena and circus, was an animal trainer. He died leaving behind three daughters, none of whom had reached their teens. They were something like 7, 9, and 11, or 5, 7, and 9, very young. As a result, the three girls were sold into prostitution at that very early age, and their life was a very ugly one. Theodora, an intelligent girl, was, by the time she was in her later teens, able to arise in the profession where others would have perished, and become a rather high-priced call girl, to put it in modern terminology. She was taken on a trip to North Africa by a businessman. She quarreled with him there and he abandoned her. She fell seriously ill and would have died, but a Presbyter took her in, nursed her back to health, and in the process taught her the faith. It did not immediately register, but it began to work in her mind. So that when she returned to Constantinople, the capitol of the eastern empire, she began then to think about it. She very shortly became involved with a young lawyer who came from a very poor family, whose uncle had much earlier gone to Rome, joined the army, and gradually gained promotion until he was a general. His uncle being childless, he had written to his sister to send her son to him, and he would adopt his nephew as his son.

At the same time, the emperor of the Empire, having no child, decided to avoid a war of secession and named the old general, Justin, as his adopted son and successor, so that Justin became Emperor and Justinian, the young lawyer who had been so poor that he walked to the capitol, not being able to afford transportation, was in line to be the next emperor. He and Theodora, now both thoroughly dedicated to the faith became, in due time, Emperor and Empress. That, in itself, is a dramatic story, but even more marvelous, Justinian sought a total revision of the entire law of the Empire, so that it would conform to the biblical faith. At this point, Theodora took a hand. She felt that where marriage and the family were concerned, she was going to sit on top of the lawyers, at it were, and require a biblical standard.

Now, up to that point, if a Roman, whether it was an older pagan Rome or now semi-Christian Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire, if he died and at the point of his death the family may have been totally ignorant that he might have a mistress or an illegitimate child on the side, they could, within a matter of minutes, be dispossessed if he had chosen to make that mistress or that illegitimate child his heir, or he could take and alienate that property totally and give it to a crony or a friend, and this was a regular tragedy in the Roman Empire, but under the revision and the legislation instituted by Theodora, it became the law that henceforth, the only legitimate form of sexuality permitted was marital relationships, that all other forms of sexuality and all sexuality outside of marriage was illegal, being forbidden by God, that the family was the legitimate wife, one woman, and the children of that legitimate wife, that no illegitimate child or mistress, or any other such person could share in the inheritance. Well, of course, a legitimate child could be set aside if faithless or in any way undeserving.

At point after point, the Empress Theodora and the lawyers instituted the law of God as strictly and as rigidly as possible, and made it mandatory that the family as God had ordained it in scripture was going to be the only legally recognized kind of family life and the only area of sexuality.

Now, we are in the midst today of an anti-Justinian, an anti-Theodora legal revolution. This is why they’re slandered so. Everything is being done to overthrow the centrality of the family, the sexual regulations which are biblical, the tying of property to the biblical doctrine of the family as scripture and the law of Justinian developed it, and this is why today there is so concerted a legal effort to disestablish Christianity in relationship to family law. This is being done even over the desires of parents as Picasso, who left a couple of illegitimate children and specifically stated that they were not to participate in the inheritance, and yet, over his direct testate command, they were included by the court. What the courts are doing is to overthrow the biblical doctrine. This, of course, destroys the power, you see, and that’s the goal of it, of the biblical doctrine of the family. Destroys its power in terms of its control over property. Destroys its power in terms of its legal standing, but we cannot appreciate the tremendous effect of the code of Justinian unless we realize that from that time forward, the West began to grow and to advance in a remarkable way, because property now was the stewardship of the family unit which also controlled the children, and that family unit saw the property under God as a stewardship and a responsibility.

We cannot understand the growth and development in Christendom of capitalism, and the accumulation of capital, the capitalization of society apart from this. Too often, scholars want to look in other areas, but the basic source is clearly the family. It was this law, this legislation, which made the biblical family basic, that gave such strength to the Western world, and enabled it to outpace and to outrun the rest of the world. This is why, incidentally, the Jewish family has, through the centuries, had such a remarkable capacity for survival. They have taken very seriously the kind of thing I’m talking about and have practiced the biblical laws, even when sometimes they’ve surrendered everything else. It may surprise you, but the law of the levirate has survived among Jews in this country right up to our day.

Thus, you see, first of all, control of children, and second, control of property, two great powers were placed by scripture in the hands of the family, and today, the state seeks to strike at that power, through its taxation of property. It’s an ironic fact that when the first Continental Congress met, it sent a letter to Canada asking the Canadians to join them against King George III, and they spoke of the usurpation of power by Parliament, and they made a dire prophesy that under such a regime, they would end up with having their property taxed. We didn’t escape it, did we? But, of course, they did see it as Puritans, as an ungodly power, as an assault upon the prerogative of the family, and they were right. It is an anti-biblical, an anti-godly tax.

Now, the third great power that is given to the family in scripture is control over inheritance. The biblical family is God’s appointed means for the capitalization of the present and of the future. The transmission of that capitalization, of that heritage, of the culture, of everything, is by inheritance, and in terms of scripture, inheritance is, in the covenant line, the legitimate line, and it is in terms of covenant responsibilities. The biblical law of inheritance specifies that the first born is to gain a double portion. This means that if there are three children, the eldest gets half and the other two get one-fourth each. The eldest, however, inherits all the debts of the parents and all the responsibility for their care throughout the remainder of their life. Now, the first born could be passed over if he were ungodly or irresponsible. We know that in Jacob’s household, there were instances of irresponsibility. For example, Reuben’s act of fornication. Then Simeon and Levi, their murder of the Shechemites, and so they were passed over, all three of them, and the fourth son, Judah, was made the first born and given the double portion.

Today, of course, the major threat to this is that the state claims to be the first born. Now, that’s legally its status in that it says, “We take the first portion out of the inheritance, and we will take care of the parents through welfare or social security, or what have you, so that the state claims to be the first born, the heir of the family, and the other heirs get the leftovers if there be any, but inheritance in terms of the family, is the biblical provision. It is the family which is the legitimate corporation in society. It is the family which is the nucleus of transmission of covenantal society. It is the family which is properly, therefore, the basic unit in church and state, and in all of society, rather than an atomistic unit, the individual, but it is also the family that makes its members, the individuals, most personal.

It is an interesting fact, and I’m going to be dealing Sunday morning at our study group in Westwood, Southern California, with the basis of citizenship. Citizenship in pagan antiquity and elsewhere was in terms of your membership in the race or in the clan, or in a caste group. So it was an impersonal thing and it created a society in which there was no personal closeness between citizen and citizen, but beginning in Medieval society when citizenship was based on participation in the mass, which made the church the mediating institution, it became personal, and of course, in terms of Puritanism, it became the law of God, which was the basis of citizenship, and hence, orthodox Jews in Colonial America could vote. Others had to affirm the Trinity, but they had a common ground in terms of the law of God. I won’t go into that, but at any rate, the covenant faith that one and the same time makes life in society, citizenship in church and state, more personal than anything else can, and yet at the same time, doesn’t fall into the trap of either individualism in an atomized society, or mass man as in much of modern society, because of socialization. Biblical society preserves the integrity of the individual, the person, in terms of the basic institution of society, the family.

Now, I’m going to stop there, and perhaps say some more as some questions open up some areas. Do you have some questions? Yes?

[Audience] Going back to possession of property.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] This is kind of a broad question, but going back to the origin of {?} and {?} the western expansion in the United States, when the Indians were run out and everything, and this type of thing, and also going to expansion in other countries, how does property get into a family’s to start with?

[Rushdoony] Yes. How does property get into a family to start with? A very good question, and it’s not an easy one to answer, because of course, you have a great many people who insist on a kind of legalism. Let me illustrate. There is a man who was a graduate of Yale Divinity School who was quite insistent that Americans had no legal title to the United States. They had seized it from the Indians, and he felt that I was a very ugly kind of missionary to the American Indians if I didn’t’ recognize their right and uphold it. Well, you know where that would lead to? To revolutionary doctrines, that’s what he, in effect, was saying I should have espoused, and my answer to him was, “Well, now, let’s examine that for a moment. Let’s give the land, hypothetically, back to the Indians. After all, the white man took it from him. We won’t go into the right and wrong of the conflict and some of the factors that were involved. But, let’s just say he didn’t have title to it. Did the Indian have title to it? Well, the Indian seized it by killing off a very much earlier people, a pigmy people. They destroyed them totally, and not too far from where I worked among the Indians, the old time Indians told me there was a cave where the last of the pygmies were holed up, they fled for refuge, and they closed up the cave and exterminated the last of those peoples. Very interestingly, that story proved to be true and it’s a matter of record, of excavation, and so on.

So I said, “Should we than look around for some pygmy peoples, and pick up some in Africa and tell them, ‘Look folks, you now have possession of the United States of America. It’s yours by title,’” and I said, “We may have a problem there. From whom did the pygmies take it? Maybe they killed off somebody before them, and what are we going to do, you see, with Europe? After all, we know that the Anglo-Saxon seized it from the Celtic peoples, Britain. In fact, the Celts once covered most of Europe and there are just a handful of them left on Continental Europe. The Britons of France, who are related to the Welsh and Irish and Scots, and then the Scots, Welsh and Irish. So, should we hand Europe back to them and say, ‘Alright all you of Norman French, German, etc. ancestry, you Anglo-Saxons of England, get out?’ But then we have a problem, because the Celts drove out the Basks{?}, and they drove the last of the Basks, who were the peoples of Europe before them, the survivors, into the Pyrenees Mountains where they still are, still fighting, too. So shall we turn in over to the Basks{?}? Well, the interesting thing is the Basks{?} took over much of that land from the little peoples, again a very small people, almost like a pygmy, from whence the Irish tales of the fairies, the little people, are derived, and you can find into the early Middle Ages traces of survivals of the little people and indications that so and so of the little people was married so and so, so they gradually were absorbed, the survivors of the little people.”

Do you see the problem if you follow a humanistic legalism? It’s an impossibility, and it’s a trap whereby people try to give us a bad conscience for something that somebody did a hundred years ago, about which we could do nothing, and in which, in many cases, the stories that we get are highly prejudicial. Highly prejudicial. I know that the old line Indians, because when I went to the reservation, remember the West is very young, the textbooks tell you the Battle of Wounded Knee was the last Indian battle fought in which the whites did such a great injustice to Sitting Bull, it wasn’t the whites. That’s a myth. It was the Indian troops that the U.S. Army had that could not be restrained. They wanted to get Sitting Bull. They regarded him as a fraud and a phony. You see, Sitting Bull was not a legitimate chief. He was a medicine man, and he had made himself a chief, and this, all the Indian warriors who had now become soldiers of the army bitterly resented, and so they went after him. They really did, and it was the army that got the blame. Of course, they were part of the army, but they fired as quickly as they could. They butchered them, and it was a mass butchering.

But the last battle with Indians was in what was home country to me when I was on the reservation, close by. 1915, was Shoshones that were involved under Shoshone Mike, and I can remember talking to a lot of the old Indians, in fact, old Jenny Why Hee{?} who used to come in for breakfast a few times a week. She hadn’t given up her independent life and come onto a reservation until a little after the mid-1940’s, when she was over 120. Her life, incidentally, was one of great primitivism. She liked being with me more than anybody else, and she was very good to me and I was very good to her, but the old Indian superstitions were still basic to her being, if I may digress awhile, and to give you an example of what they were like, she had, this was before the coming of the white man, I believe, two or three girls in a row. That meant bad luck, that evil spirits were preventing the birth of a son, so there was only one way to stop it. When she gave birth to the third girl, or maybe it was the fourth, her husband picked it up by the heels and brained it on a rock, killed it, threw it aside, and Jenny’s attitude was, when she told about it, “Well, the next one was a boy,” and that proved she was right, you see. I could tell you more, but you see, you’re in another world when you go back to the Indian culture.

Alright, more than once, those old Indians, and my elders were old time Indians who could tell you about the technique of scalping, and they told me exactly how it was done, and they had hunted with bow and arrow across Nevada, and they could remember seeing their first white man, that sort of thing, and they’d laugh at the young hot heads who talked about the white man having robbed their land, and they had a different perspective. I recall this one old Indian. I once asked him, “Well, what was the attitude in your time in all the conflict?” “Very simply,” he said. “The white man wanted what we had and he didn’t want us. We wanted what the white man had but we didn’t want him. So we fought and we lost,” you see. There is no sentimentalism about the old Indians. They were hard-headed realists, and they wanted guns, they wanted horses. They wanted those things but they didn’t want the white man, and they figured it was just logical. When you had a situation like that, you fought, you took your chances, you lost, and they liked the life that there was now. So, when some of these young rabble-rousers who now are commanding a major movement among Indians came around, I can remember them as one of them was spouting in front of the trading post, ridiculing him, and all the old Indians laughing. They said, “Yes, if you like the old ways so much, and if you want the old life, let’s see you take off your white man’s clothes and run around in a breach cloth.” He said, “You wouldn’t do very well.” And he said, “As for us, we prefer it this way,” you see.

Now, what I am trying to say is that that type of thing, that type of thinking is hypothetical. Christians are realists. We can’t change the past. We can do something about the present and the future, and the godless are constantly telling you, “Look what happened yesterday,” and “We’ve got to do something,” and they’re past-oriented. We are future-oriented. We offer the Indian far more. We offer him the grace of God. We tell him that he can join us in a covenant life, that we welcome him, that he has a great and glorious future together with us, and that whether it be the Indian or the white man, apart from God they’re under judgment and they’re going to be done away with. There’s no future for them, you see. So, we keep a future-oriented perspective. We don’t become past-bound and endlessly deal with dead horses. Yes?

[Audience] {?} that you would feel that compulsory education needs more {?}

[Rushdoony] I do not favor compulsory education because I don’t think it accomplishes anything. Now, until recently, when I understood they were going to pass such a law, the State of Virginia did not have a compulsory education law, had never had one passed from the early days to the present. Mississippi had one, I understand, and repealed it ten years ago for political purposes. That’s a different situation, but you didn’t have any problem, in Virginia, of non-attendance. You see, what a compulsory education law assumes is that parents are not concerned about their children, and that’s a fallacy. Parents are more concerned about their children than any other agency, and therefore, parents want the best for their children no matter how selfish the reasons, because they want their children to advance. It’s to their advantage. They want them to be able to compete favorably, and compulsory education laws, by and large, came in this country after you already had universal education. So they haven’t appreciably altered facts. They’ve only created problems.

As a matter of fact, a few years ago, a man who was not, in any sense, in favor of private of Christian education, admitted that the state with the lowest rate of juvenile delinquency is new Mexico, which has the lowest compulsory age for education. In other words, the compulsory attendance law terminates at an earlier age in New Mexico. As a result, you don’t keep children in school who would prefer to be out learning a trade. So, I don’t favor compulsory education laws. Yes?

[Audience] When you say property, do you mean things other than land. Do you mean also wealth, and income?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] Well, would you then say that, well, would you {?} like income tax for biblical reasons?

[Rushdoony] Yes. I would, on biblical grounds, say that an income tax is wrong.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, but I’ll use every legal means to avoid paying it, and I’m exploring some highly legal means.

[laughter]

Because, for one thing, the income tax is one of the biggest hoax ever perpetrated. What it does is to penalize the middle classes and the rich pay next to nothing, because they are able to take advantage of the law. Whenever you create big power in a central government, big power gains power by appealing to the little people, but it allies itself with big power elsewhere, so that you have big labor, big capital, and big government in an alliance together. They are working hand-in-glove and you had better believe it.

Not too long ago, President Ford helped the economy recover, threw out a very sensible suggestion. He said let’s stimulate the economy by taking off the controls in trucking and in air travel. We’ll have more competition there and people will be able to travel more readily, and be able to ship more readily, and it will stimulate industry. It will stimulate everything. Well, the truckers associations, the Teamsters, the airlines, the airline pilots, everybody got in the act saying, “We don’t want freedom,” and the net result is that I just bought a ticket for a flight from Los Angeles to Washington DC in early April, I’m paying, I think it’s about $125 more than I paid a year ago. Now, that’s inflation, and that’s the kind of thing you get when big power is in union. So, never think that big government is thinking of you. Big Brother is lining up with big labor and big labor, at all times against us. Yes?

[Audience] Would you comment on the attack on nepotism and on overpopulation {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Nepotism. Well, Parkinson has written some very delightful things on this, and he has pointed out in Britain when nepotism prevailed, and you will point at your relatives, your nephew and your son, and so on, to a job, surely some of them were incompetent, but you could tick them off and you had more control over them than you did when you had the classical examination which followed. You took an examination in the classics and this was supposedly something designed to make you a better civil servant. Then it became a civil service test of another sort, and a civil service such as we have today, and he said we went a step further in degenerating, and our civil service has become progressively more incompetent. You’re never going to eliminate incompetence, but under nepotism, you have a better control of the situation, a far better control. It’s a relative who’s working for you. You can tick him off in a way that you can’t tick off anyone else. You know, I talk to people I know the way I talk to my wife sometime, and the way my wife sometimes, not too often, talks to me, I’d lose them as friends, but my wife and I love each other more and more each year. You see, that’s what a family tie does. You have the freedom of expression, which gives you a greater control. So nepotism is a very healthy thing. I’m all for it.

Then, of course, the whole idea of overpopulation is a myth. They talked about overpopulation in ancient Greece. Overpopulation is a relative thing. It is an inappropriate relationship between the food supply and the number of people. Well, in my Myth of Overpopulation, I point out that when North America, exclusive of Mexico, had 300,000 Indians, some will put it at 500,000 or 600,000, which is stretching it, there was famine every winter. Cannibalism, the very word cannibalism, which originally was caribalism and came from Caribbean, was routine, because of the food shortage, for food reasons, and one of the major problems of conflict between the white man and the Indian was that there was so little game in the United States. There’s far more deer and most animals today than there was with a few exceptions, when the white man landed here. Far more, and it’s a good thing that the buffalo is one of those that are gone. Civilization and the buffalo cannot coexist.

[laughter]

That’s a fact, because when the buffalo went over, say, a frontier town, there was nothing left of it, because the buffalo would move, well, there’d be herds of millions. There wouldn’t be as much as a toothpick size stake left. If you found traces of any of the people, it was perhaps a little red smear. They had to eliminate the buffalo, and I’m glad they did.

[laughter]

As a matter of fact, we have some buffalo ranches out in the West, and every now and then, the surplus buffalo are sold by the government, or in some cases, by private people. Well, it’s the hardest thing in the world for them, to get those buffalo they’re going to cut out of the herd, because a buffalo is one of the most dangerous animals to be around. Buffalo meat, incidentally, is good.

Well now, overpopulation exists where you have this bad relationship between food and people. You have overpopulation in the Soviet Union today, and you never did under the Czars. At that time, Russia was the breadbasket of Europe. You have overpopulation in Algeria, but under the French, and I’m not going into the right or the wrong of their being there, but under the French, Algeria was shipping food all over Europe. Now, the control of agriculture, the debasing of currency, are the basic reason for food shortages, and these are acts of state, and then the state says we have a problem. Too many people. Not, we have blundered. Yes?

[Audience] What do you see as the ideal government on a national scale?

[Rushdoony] Well, of course, that’s a very big question. I hardly know where to start without leaving a misapprehension, but one of the things that happened when Rome fell was that you didn’t have the kind of urban life that came into being later, because people didn’t want it, and feudalism arose, which has nothing to do with serfdom. Serfdom originated under Augustus Caesar. It survived in the Middle Ages, but it was not a part of the development of Christian culture and there were Christians who, throughout the Medieval period, opposed it.

What was feudalism? In a sense, the United States is a feudal country, and there are scholars who say ours is a most Medieval country in the world. Feudalism and federalism are the same words, really. Different forms of the same word. Feudalism meant a radical decentralization of society so that basic power was located in the locality and in the family, and the further away you got, the weaker the power became. As a result, the feudal character of the United States is still apparent in the fact that your basic law is county law. Your criminal law is county law. Your civil law is county law. So that almost any crime you commit or any kind of suit you enter into, you go before a county court. Now, of course, federal courts are beginning to intervene, and the state is entering into the act and trying to control the superior courts and appoint the judges in many cases, so there’s been a progressive erosion of that, but the basic thesis in feudalism and federalism was and is that there is no such thing as sovereignty except in God. No sovereign state. This is a very important fact. It rests on a theological premise. It does not say that the local unit is going to be good. You can live in an area where, because people are covenant breakers, or hypocrites if they’re supposedly in the covenant, you have a very ugly situation, but the answer to that is not an outsider stepping in, because you haven’t dealt with the basic problem: the moral character of the people. The answer is there has to be a change in the lives of the people so that you have to have regeneration, but you have a basically local orientation.

Now, this kind of thing was very much a part, a life of this country and very much a part of the thinking of some of the old Reformed theologians here, like Dabney. Dabney’s thinking in this area is condemned as being just a reactionary agrarianism, as though he were anti-urban, anti-industrial. That was not the point. What he saw was the creation of monolithic entities in the state and in industrial life, and in labor which were hostile to the individual and to the locality, which became laws unto themselves.

Now, of course, our time is up, but it would be very interesting some time to trace what has happened in those areas and how deadly that consequences have become. For one thing, you didn’t’ have the possibility under the old laws of property in the United States, of creating pollution. That’s quite an interesting story and if you’re interested, tomorrow afternoon ask me about it, but I do want to terminate things now, on time. Thank you.

End of tape