Salvation and Godly Rule

Idleness and Revolution

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Doctrinal Studies

Lesson: Idleness and Revolution

Genre: Speech

Track: 14

Dictation Name: RR136G14

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Proverbs 19:15, and our subject: Idleness and Revolution. “Slothfulness casteth into a deep sleep; and an idle soul shall suffer hunger.”

Very often an interesting and informative way of understanding what the Old Testament text means is to check the Septuagint version as against the Hebrew. The Septuagint version was a rendering of the Old Testament into Greek in Old Testament times. Because of the dispersion of Jews after the Fall of Jerusalem, and then during the period of the Roman Empire, so many of the Jews were Greek speaking, a translation was made into Greek. Now, the importance of this translation is that, having been made in Old Testament times, it very often brings out a nuance of the meaning of the original Hebrew word that otherwise we would have lost.

The meaning of this verse is very interesting. “Slothfulness casteth into a deep sleep.” The word that is used for sleep there is the same as in Genesis 2:21, when God cast Adam into a deep sleep, and out of his side created Eve. It means a trance, a supernaturally induced sleep. Something that is not normal. Something that stops all the normal functioning of man. Then, our text goes on to say, “an idle soul shall suffer hunger.” Here, in particular, the Septuagint is very revealing. An idle soul has the connotation, we learn, of an effeminate person. It definitely means someone who is basically effeminate, unmanly, and the connotation is a very unpleasant one. Then, “shall suffer hunger,” there is a secondary meaning there of also being cowardly. Thus, what the text is telling us is that man was created in God’s image to exercise dominion by means of work, knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, to subdue the earth under God. When man forsakes God in his calling, he becomes slothful, he becomes idle, he becomes radically deformed so that he is, in effect, in a deep sleep. He is unmanned. He is effeminate. He is less than a man, because he has renounced that which characterizes a man’s calling under God to work, to have a calling, and therein, to exercise dominion.

Now it is interesting, in terms of this text, that we can find in every civilization, every society great and small that the world has know, a condemnation of idleness. No where in all the earth can you find any society in which idleness is not condemned, and yet there is the paradox. Go to all these non-Christian societies, or semi-Christian ones and you find that not only is idleness condemned, but it is envied, and men dream of attaining a state of idleness. Men hope of escaping from work into idleness, and even as they condemn the idle rich, and despise them they, at the same time, envy them.

Why is man so schizophrenic at this point? Why on the one hand does he see something unmanly about idleness and on the other hand, envies it so intensely? The key to this is, of course, in man’s inability to understand the meaning of the {?}. Idleness is the humanist’s idea of {?}. Modern man has turned his back on God’s plan, which is dominion. He finds dominion difficult because everything he does is cursed, and so because he rejects work, he also rejects the Sabbath, and the alternative to work and the Sabbath is idleness. Of course, in recent times, a very interesting word has been coined to replace idleness. Even the men who aim at being idle don’t like the idea of being called idle. So, they went to French and ultimately, it goes back to the Latin, and borrowed a word, to give prestige and distinction to idleness. The word is leisure. It was not an English word. It was borrowed.

Now, the old French meaning of leisure is very interesting. It means “it is permitted.” It comes from the Latin, in the old French it is leisir, and the Latin, liset{?}; “it is legal.” Very interesting connotation. Idleness. In the modern term, leisure, it is lawful. So that, modern man is saying that his flight from work and dominion is legal and allowable, and so you have students today in the universities dreaming of never going to work, and of course, in the triple revolution, which was “the” bible in the early 60’s of the revolutionary students across country. They began by saying that work was obsolete, that automation could eliminate all work and therefore, the universities were obsolete because they were training men for work, when they should train them for a life of leisure from the time they finish school, and all schooling should be for play, for leisure.

Now, the Sabbath involves a community rejoicing before the Lord, and whether you worship with only fifty or five hundred, there is a sense of community. It’s a corporate act, but idleness, leisure, is solitary and private. There can be 40,000 people at a baseball game or a football game, but there is no community. There is isolation.

This is one of the characteristics of idleness and leisure, which has so deeply marked the modern world, because it is idleness, a leisure, as against the Sabbath which has created mass man. Mass man has nothing in common with those crowding around him except proximity. Mass man is a member of, The Lonely Crowd. Mass man is crowd oriented, group-directed, and yet intensely lonely. The result, of course, is that today, the world increasingly, because modern man seeks fulfillment in leisure, he asks as though life means leisure, and he wants leisure from the time he finishes his schooling. Mass man is increasingly prevalent. Mass man is a product of this solitariness, plus group directedness that is created by idleness. There are no ties. There are no areas where a person feels community in terms of a calling, belongs to a calling which he defends and which he upholds, belongs to a community in worship, belongs to a family. Significantly, the same revolutionary movement also spoke not only against work, but against religion and against the family. In other words, destroying community in every area.

Now, for authority to exist in any community or any society, there has to be a community and a harmony of interests, a common calling, a common life, a common rest, but idleness erodes authority, because it destroys those areas of life: work, rest, the family, where authority resides, and as a result, it leads{?} the distrust to isolation and to mass man.

Moreover, guilt reinforces isolation. The guilty man is marked by a flight from other men, a desire to escape detection, and therefore, he seeks to lose himself in the crowd. Even when the guilty man talks compulsively, he is still isolated and lonely because guilt isolates man from man as well as man from God. Moreover, guilt paralyzes the ability of man to work effectively and aggravates his discontent, and finally, in a world without God, the world of mass man, there is no forgiveness of sins, because as we saw last week, there is no forgiveness with a computer, and ultimately your authority is the state or it is the computer, or it is automation, there is no forgiveness of sins.

Now, the Sabbath and paradise are related ideas, and as we have seen, men seek a Sabbath and a paradise in idleness. They dream of a primitive, work-free paradise, and they believe primitive man once possessed it. One of the most common of myths is the idea that there was a time when you could simply go out into the wilderness, go West in America, and you could live off the land. This idea has been exploded more times than you could imagine by various scholars who studied the trappers, who studied the frontiersmen, who studied the settlers, and so on, and yet it persists. It was impossible to live off the land. As I have pointed out in my book, The Myth of Overpopulation, 300,000 Indians in North America, exclusive of Mexico, regularly starved to death, resorted to cannibalism, because it was impossible to live off the land, and when the settlers moved West, they had to have capital enough for two years. The trappers had to have a grub steak provided by John Jacob Aster, or some fur company. No one lived off the land, even the Indians indulged in a large number of cases, in primitive farming, and yet the myth persists that some time in the remote past, men were able tot live off the earth without work.

One witty, Italian scholar has commented, “Before being discovered, the savage was invented,” and he was so right. The idea of this primitive savage is a myth, and the myth was picked up by the savages themselves. All this nonsense about the Indians worshiping the Great Spirit and so on was picked up by the White Men. They had no such idea originally, and of course one of the interesting things that you find as you talk to the so-called savage peoples all over the world is that now they believe that once their ancestors were able to live off the land. They picked up the same folklore of humanistic man from humanistic man.

This is why the dream of a return to paradise by humanistic man means the death of history. History means struggle, conflict, work towards a goal, progress towards that end, that there is no development, no history in an anthill or in a beehive. Only economics, and as we saw last week, this is the goal of modern man increasingly, the beehive, the anthill state. This is the goal of Marxist economics. It’s a longing for paradise without responsibility. It is possible for the ants and the bees, but not for man, and yet we have it all around us.

One book just recently published, reviewed in last week’s paper, is by Dr. John H. Phlaum, and the title is Delightism. He tells us, Dr. Phlaum, that a new world is coming, a new genesis, a new age, and it’s going to come by means of group sex and liberation, as men throw off the world of work, of conscience, of religion, of responsibility, and he’s full of marvelous aphorisms such as “good is feeling good,” “sex is becoming safer than ping pong,” “pornography inspires delight,” “they way you smell is as important as what you think,” and he prescribes orgy therapy as a cure-all to usher in the age of delightism. Now, it’s very interesting that, at the same time you’re getting this dream of delightism, your suicide rate is skyrocketing precisely among the element in the population who are reaching after this world of delightism, and indeed, they go hand in hand. To live in a world of fantasy is to court suicide. It is also revolutionary. Revolutionists in every era have wanted to destroy history, causality, consequence, to usher in idleness. The revolutionists are hostile to family, to religion, to work, to revelation.

Revelation is the communication to man by God of His will and purpose. It declares God’s meaning and purpose for history. {?} revolutionists {?} God and God’s declared meaning of history as set forth in scripture. They declare that the meaning and purpose of history comes from man and the rewards of history come from man, and for them, revolution is the communication and attempted imposition by man of man’s own determined meaning on the world and time. They seek to arrest history by revolution. They seek to be like God, to have asaity, self-being.

But Proverbs is right. “Slothfulness casteth into a deep sleep.” It puts people into a trance where their senses do not function, and an idle soul shall suffer hunger. An idle soul is also an effeminate soul, and he suffers hunger because, as the Septuagint implies, there is a cowardice in his being. He is effeminate. He is unable to face reality, and he tries to impose fantasy on reality. He longs for a world of leisure, work-free, responsibility-free, and this is cowardice. It is sin.

In the 17th century, an English broadside ballade entitled “An Invitation to Loverland,” satirized the dreams of paradise held by the idol. Their satirical name for these humanistic dreams of paradise was loverland, and this satirical poem said, in part,

“There’s nothing there but holidays

With music out of measure.

Who can forebear to speak

The praise of such a land of pleasure?

There you may lead a lazy life,

Free with all kinds of labor,

And he that is without a wife

May borrow of his neighbor.”

And of course, the point was well made. The idle are parasites, and in a real paradise, the human parasites have no place.

A few years ago, in the “Huntington Library Quarterly,” a scholar, Harry Levine, wrote a very interesting article on the theme of paradise, and he contrasted the effect of the Christian dream of reestablishing paradise in American history as against the humanistic dreams. Now, Levine is not a Christian, and yet he concluded the endemic impulse, that is, the Christian impulse, has been at odds with the utopian impetus. Why? The Christian goal has been one which has been intensely productive of work. It has led to the establishment of communities, to invention, to every kind of move forward in one calling after another, to exercise dominion. Whereas, the utopian impulse has been, as he points out, an escape from the world, an attempt to realize dreams by saying, “It must be so, therefore, it shall be so.” Now, it is interesting that a humanist of the last century still had enough of a Puritan in him that he saw through one of these dreams.

A German scholar, J.A. Etsler wrote a book in Thoreau’s day entitled, The Paradise Within Reach of All Men. The Industrial Revolution had begun, and America, especially the ingenuity of the Yankees was creating one new instrument after another, and so Etsler was sure that within 100 years, man would be free of work, if not much, much sooner, but all that would be necessary, and you’ve probably heard the same thing in our day, would be for someone to push a button, and when that button was pushed, everything that any man would want would be forthcoming. Now, I should correct myself in that Etsler didn’t think of a button. He said just turning a crank, one crank and you set everything in motion, and all man will have to do is to turn the crank ever so often. It’s been improved since then in the modern dreams. It’s pressing a button, so there’s been some progress in the utopian dream.

Now Thoreau, very much the Puritan at this point, in spite of his humanism, commented, “Thus is paradise to be redeemed, and that old and stern decree at length reversed. Man shall no more earn his living by the sweat of his brow. All labor shall be reduced to a short turn of some crank and taking the finished articles away,” as quoting Etzler, “but there is a crank and oh how hard to be turned. Could there not be a crank upon a crank, an infinitely small crank we would feign inquire? No, alas not, but there is a certain dim energy in every man, but sparingly employed as yet which may be called the crank within,” in other words, the urge to work, to exercise dominion is what he’s talking about. “Quite indispensible, would that we might get our hands on its handle. In fact, no work can be shirked. It may be postponed indefinitely, but not infinitely, nor can any really important work be made easier by cooperation or machinery.”

Now, Thoreau did have a point. He realized it was a myth to believe that a world of idleness would be made possible by machinery. It would only increase man’s possibility of working, of exercising dominion, and indeed, the machine has created more jobs. It has increased vastly the capacity of man to work, not to escape from work, but the utopians are in flight from work, and they are in flight from dominion because they are in flight from manhood. They are idle souls, effeminate people filled with cowardice in a deep sleep, and this is why our Lord is right. The meek shall inherit the earth, the meek being the tamed of God, those harnessed to His calling, and they shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace. Delightism and suicide go hand in hand. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who of thy grace and mercy, has made us thy people, has harnessed us to thy calling and given us so great a work to do. We thank thee that the world is ours to conquer, to exercise dominion over and to subdue unto thee. Strengthen us in this our calling, give us joy in our labors, and triumph over those who would oppose us. This we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Are there any questions now, first of all, in our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] Is there an {?} attitude of {?} people become {?} retired from the {?} world. That {?} from the world and {?} or that {?}

[Rushdoony] Retirement is different from idleness.

[Audience] {?} long time {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, of course, that’s a real question and I’m not sure I have the answer. It is true that these retirement communities are aiming, in some cases, the philosophers behind them, that is, the sociologists, at establishing a pattern for society, and in this respect, they are unhealthy, and in this respect, they have chosen some of their names deliberately, and with that we cannot agree. On top of that, retirement is, in our day, more or less mandatory in many professions, so we have no choice about it in some cases, and of course, I feel that that’s a violation of one’s civil liberties. I think that somebody some day who is facing compulsory retirement should take it to court, because I regard it as a very immoral kind of legislation, and it’s a part of the general cowardice of our day. Their unwilling to say, “Well, maybe one man in ten who reaches 65 or 70 is not capable of handling his job. We don’t have the gumption to fire him. Therefore, we’ll welcome these retirement laws,” and actually, industry today is not willing to let labor take over the job tenure problem because they’ve lost the ability to be decisive, to fire, and that, of course, is entirely immoral.

I think I mentioned a few weeks ago how, in Japan, their tremendous surge industrially in recent years has been because of a new twist in their legislation. Everybody loses job tenure at the age of 55, so that they are then on a month-to-month basis as far as their employment is concerned. They have no job security. Up until that time, they do. Then, they’re on the job only as long as they are effective. Well, the result is that the most mature men are the most adventurous and the industrial advance of Japan has been made possible because of the pioneering work, the foresight, the initiative of men from 55 right on up to 90. They know that to stay on the job, they have to produce, and they have become the most amazing, productive element in the world today. They’re not on the shelf, you see.

Well, we have, therefore, very tangled situation. Then on top of that, in many professions, the older you get, the more restrictions there are legally, insurance-wise, and in other ways which make it very difficult for you to work. I heard not too long ago of a radiologist who, in his early 50’s, had to retire because the insurance premium had become so prohibitive that he would have been working most of the time to pay his insurance policy. Now, this is the ugly situation in our world today, and I do believe it is immoral, and it begins with legislation that is aimed deliberately against the older person, and I think it would be worthwhile if the situation in Japan were publicized so that we could wake up. Japan has realized that as men grow older, they may also be very much the wiser, and if they are put on their metal{?}, as it were, the whole of society can be more productive. So, in Japan today, when you get a job, you have all kinds of tenure and security from the time you are accepted after a probation period until 55, and the interesting this is those under 55 are not too productive by comparison.

[Audience] {?} {?} skilled people, {?} I just read {?} newspaper yesterday about this new {?} 67 year old {?} retired {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, I said earlier that the revolution against the world of work and dominion attacks the idea of the Sabbath, of God, of religion and it attacks work, and it attacks the family. It was very interesting in the paper this morning to read an article which is a part of this attack on the family, and it comes from Sacramento.

“George Lee Stewart, who has spent about 500 hours in a brothel, says prostitutes should demand better working conditions and a greater degree of professionalism in the trade. He contends this would be an important step towards removing the stigma from women who perform the job of prostitution, which he says is similar in many ways to a job of a housewife or an office worker, but he says the most pressing need now is to elevate the status of ladies of the evening by the legalization of prostitution. Stewart, 34, spent between 16 and 36 hours a week for seven months observing life in a bordello near Reno, Nevada while working on a doctorate degree. He is completing his thesis while working as a teaching assistant in sociology at the University of California at Davis. He plans to publish the thesis later this year under the title, “The Women of Paradise.” “I was much more ambivalent about the project than my wife,” he said in an interview. She saw it as purely a research project and that the pay off would come in knowledge and the degree. He said the tasks of prostitutes, housewives, and office workers are alike in that each occupation involves a degree of degradation. It requires a uniform of sorts and often results in existential boredom.”

Now, of course, this is more than a joke in that there is a move in Europe, in Sweden and in Britain, not only to legalize prostitution but to unionize them, and it has been seriously discussed by unions as to just how they’re going to effect it, and one of the problems being discussed by British union leaders now is how to work out a seniority system which will give the advantage to the older women. Now, this is the insanity in which they are indulging, but this is part of the whole idea of striking at the world of community; the family, work, religion, the areas of community life, to destroy it. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] They are as bad as anyone they have inside now days. Well, if there are no further comments, or questions, let’s bow our heads for the benediction.

And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

End of tape