From the Easy Chair

The Culture of Modernism

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 5-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AB51

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AB51, The Culture of Modernism from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 153, September 4, 1987.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss the culture of Modernism. Now Modernism is an aspect of life that we are not too prone to think about seriously. The Enlightenment followed the Reformation and counterreformation. Then Romanticism and the age of revolution. But in this century the culture has been the culture of Modernism. Modernism, as most people think of it, has reference to an aspect of biblical study, that is it refers to those who deny the infallibility and divine inspiration of Scripture, who insist on treating the Bible naturalistically and as a collection of legends, myths and various expressions of people over the generations. However, Modernism is much more than that.

So, before we get into the discussion, I would like to go back to one of the key figures in Modernism in this country. The circle around the New England Transcendentalists gives us the sources of American Modernism. One of the key figures, of course, the key figure was Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is one of the ironies of history that some 20th century conservatives have looked back to Emerson for their inspiration. Emerson is the epitome of every evil that we have in this century.

Now Octavius Brooks Frothingham, whose dates are 1822 to 1895, was a Harvard man and the son of a distinguished Unitarian clergyman. He wrote a book which set forth to a great extent the creed of Modernism. The title was The Religion of Humanity. For him humanity was God and to be separated from humanity was to have a living death. He said, and I quote, “Humanity has but one life, breathes but one atmosphere, draws sustenance from one central orb. To be reconciled with humanity, to feel the common pulse is life. To be alienated from humanity, to have no share in the common vitality is death. The slightest material separation is felt disastrously,” unquote.

Now Frothingham, while not an orthodox Christian, did believe in some of the orthodox doctrines such as infallibility. But for him infallibility was not in the Bible, but in the Spirit of the age. This is what he wrote, and I quote. “The interior spirit of any age is the spirit of God. And no faith can be living that has that spirit against it. No church can be strong except in that alliance. The life of the time appoints the creed of the time and modifies the establishment of the time,” unquote.

So truth is whatever the spirit of the age says it is. Thus, in terms of Frothingham, there is more truth to be found by far in rock and roll concerts because they represent the spirit of the age, than in the Bible or in the churches.

Now Frothingham gives us the spirit of Modernism. It is a total acceptance of the spirit of the age and an insistence that we must flow with it, become a part of the spirit of the times.

This, whether it is an education or in economics or in politics or in religion or anything else, is Modernism. It means that you do not import any standards, that God cannot provide any standard to judge the world. The spirit of the age determines the truth of the age.

Otto, what observations would you like to make at this point as to the nature of Modernism?

[Scott] Well, I am more inclined to equate Modernism with Liberalism. And Liberalism is what most of us were taught who went to American schools. It is supposed to be responsible for all of the advances of the West. For instance, on the question of the French Revolution the liberal argument was that the treatment of convicts was ameliorated. Men were no longer broken on the wheel. They were no longer flogged or hanged for stealing a purse, that sort of thing.

On the other hand, Liberalism has created new crimes which the liberals don’t like to mention. We have no serial murderers. I just recently heard Richard Speck was up for parole, murdered eight nurses and has been living at the expense of the tax payers ever since, which I consider a moral crime of considerable dimensions. And when I think about Liberalism, especially as it has developed up to today, we go from Frothingham’s day to today, we see a great expansion of these ideas that he expressed and Emerson expressed and so forth. We have inherited the execution of these abstractions. And in execution they add up to a renunciation of the use of societal force against the transgressors of society. In fact, we can even say now there is nobody who is accused of transgressing our society. Our society has no standards. Anything that anyone wants to say or do, short of murder, or open common crime is permissible. In fact, many crimes that used to be crimes are now no longer crimes. Abortion is no longer a crime. They now are selling body parts from fetuses, that is not a crime. When the Nazi medicals did that it was terrible. When our doctors do it, why, they are just being sensible. Treason is not a crime. We have traitors in high places who openly announce that they want to sit down with the enemies of the United States and negotiate our surrender. That is not a crime.

So I think when we come right down to it, that we are living in the results of Emersonian cult. We are living with the consequences. We are going to pay. We are paying in our lives today for these ideas which severed man or severed our society from its biblical roots.

[Rushdoony] Yes, very definitely, Liberalism is Modernism. Of course, the over all term that historians and sociologists are now using is Modernism.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And the culture of Modernism. I think one of the interesting aspects of Modernism came to focus in the death of God school as it surfaces, oh, around 1970. One of the points that Altizer, who was a leader in the school, made is one that is not often appreciated, but it is basic to Modernism, basic to Liberalism, basic to every aspect of this cultural force. The death of God school did not say that there is no God or that God is dead. Their point was that God is dead to us. Whoever he may be and whatever he may think, we don’t care. He is irrelevant to our lives and our interests. And this has been the very important aspect of Modernism as a whole. It was never that we have proven that there is no God or we believe there is no God. Some naïve Atheists have held that. But Modernism has not been Atheistic. It has been indifferent to the question outwardly, at least, because it has been so man centered, it does not care whether God exists or not. He is irrelevant for us, because everything is going to be in our hands.

[Scott] All right. If we take that—and I think you are right on that—the effect of this has been to discard 18 centuries of western tradition and thought. It means that all our great thinkers and almost all our great men assuming that not our great villains, but our great constructive individuals have been outmoded, obsolete, are no longer relevant. All the accumulated literature of the West is irrelevant. Everything is going to be reinvented.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now unfortunately this eliminates tragedy. This viewpoint reduces everything to a surface level. It takes away all the depth of human experience and therefore we have the liberal who is, in effect, says nothing matters. There is no reason to resist the Communists. There is no reason to be upset over the gulag. There is no reason to oppose Ortega. There is no reason for our boys to get involved in any unpleasantness anywhere in the world, because nothing is worth fighting for.

[Rushdoony] Yes. To document that, again, from Frothingham, the fact that there is an insistent sweeping away, as you said, of all the centuries of Christianity. Frothingham said that in the story of Genesis the serpent represented the supreme creative purpose that comprehends centuries and the world.

[Scott] Oh, well, he was just recognizing a... a fellow.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Then he went on. Let me quote him here. “The first sin was the first triumph of virtue. The fall was the first step forward. The advent of evil was the dawn of intelligence, discernment, enterprise, aspiration,” unquote.

In other words, no progress until you overthrow any boundary, any laws, any concept of good and evil that is external to man and imposed by God.

[Scott] All right. These were the late Victorians. These were the Victorians living in a very comfortable world in which the West was dominant, Christianity was global. The armies and the navies of the West ruled the whole globe. And they could speculate like Baudelaire, with Flowers of Evil. It sounded all very poetic and interesting...

[Rushdoony] And Darwin, too.

[Scott] And Darwin. But we are now confronted with evil.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We are now face to face. These fellows have reduced the barriers between civilization and evil and here we have it in our midst.

[Rushdoony] No...

[Scott] It is... it is... it is... it is interesting, because their unrealistic attitudes have been continued in the liberal philosophy despite the evidence of recent years of the murders of millions of people by bad governments and so forth. The liberal insists that the government shares the proper repository for all power, that there is no struggle going on today between good and evil. If you say that, they consider you a redneck, an intellectual redneck, if I can coin a cliché. And they in... they are talking on the same terms that their forbearers talked when their forbearers were secure. But we are no longer secure.

[Rushdoony] It is interesting. You call attention to Victorianism, that some of the scholars of the culture of Modernism trace it from the Enlightenment, through Romanticism, through Victorianism.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] ...to Modernism which Virginia Woolf said began its triumph in 1910.

[Scott] Yes. The world changed. Human nature changed in 1910 according to Virginia Woolf, poor, insane lunatic who drowned herself and I won... I have to really stop for a minute and reflect on a number of totems, literary totems in the United States in recent years, in the United States and Britain and ... and western Europe generally, of people who ... whose lives are absolutely devastated, tragic lives who are held up as ... as models for the young. Virginia Woolf...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... a suicide, Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locusts, another suicide. I just read a review of... of S. J. Pearlman, the humorist and his life was an absolute nightmare. Lillian Hellman was now proven to be a psychopathic liar and so on.

[Rushdoony] You mentioned Virginia Woolf. That is why I laughed. Something came to mind. I haven't looked into anything by Virginia Woolf since my university days, some 50 years ago. But didn't she write the weird book in which she took something from Tristan Shandy by Laurence Stearne.

[Scott] Orlando.

[Rushdoony] The question... no... The question about whatever happened to King Charles’ head?

[Scott] Oh, that was from Dickens.

[Rushdoony] Oh, from Dickens.

[Scott] Yeah, Mr. Dick in... in Dickens could never get around... he couldn’t finish a paragraph without King Charles’ head appearing somewhere. He wondered what they did with it.

[Rushdoony] Yes, well Virginia Woolf wrote a book about that, I believe, rambling on to every subject in coming back to King Charles’ head.

[Scott] Well, of course, their great goal was after World War I and the argument there was that sacrificing millions of men had proven what Hemmingway called a hollowness of great words, honor, patriotism and so on. And Dulce Decorum Est, the poets and everybody else began to ring that. However, that generation is all now in its 80s or 90s. The remnants are all that remain. I don’t know what they think of what they have bequeathed to us, but we are coming very close in my opinion to some ... some very serious times. And here we have a governing class that is indissolubly wedded to Liberalism and Liberalism, in my opinion cannot confront reality, will not admit reality.

If you talk about any actual conditions that actually exist, if you talk about the behavior of the under class in New York City I think you would be sent into exile.

[Rushdoony] That generation that was so dominant in the 30s was described by an historian in the 50s as having grown up after plumbing and before taxes. I have never forgotten that.

[Scott] That is...

[Rushdoony] And the world was absolutely perfect for them. They never faced up to problems or to evil.

[Scott] Here we have... I will quote form James Burnham who has been resurrected in a sort of a eulogy by the National Review. Now I haven’t read anything of Burnham for many, many years.

[Rushdoony] Nor I.

[Scott] But despite... I get criticized every so often for the people that I quote as though I approve of everything they have ever done simply because I quote something that I think they have said that was sensible. He is talking about Liberalism here and I believe this is an excerpt from his book on The Suicide of the West.

“In the...” He says, “History has a remarkable way of providing visual symbols of what is really going on that tell us much more than the pretentious statistics of the sociologists. In the parks of our great city, exactly as in all jungles, honest men may no longer move at night. When the sun goes down they must stay near the fire while the beasts prowl. In those dark jungles and along the jungle paths into which the night transforms so many city streets, huge dogs now join the few hunters still on trail. What have dogs, killer dogs, moreover, have to do with men? But dogs are, of course, appropriate companions in hunting the beasts of the jungle.”

Now the fact of the matter is we are living in the midst of a shambles.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We continue to call it civilization like survivors of Rome, because we don’t know any other terms to use. But the fact of the matter is that this is a swamp.

[Rushdoony] Moreover, not many are honest enough to say that this is what they want. They want to see Christian civilization destroyed.

Remember, Henry Miller, the pornographer who wrote Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn and much more, declared that what the world needed was a modern time of the assassin, when all culture, all reading, all literacy would be destroyed, books would be destroyed. Men would return to an animal level.

[Scott] This is happening.

[Rushdoony] And he said after 200 years of living without any knowledge, any writing, even speech, then they could emerge from the crowd of Christian civilization and create a new culture.

[Scott] Well, Orwell in his 1984 talked about old speak and new speak.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In which the new speak was a primitive slice down, a pruning of old speak so that a generation or two of the new speak they couldn’t read the former old language which is what happened in China. China’s language was reduced to its basic form so the modern Chinese cannot read the literature of his forbearers or the histories of the past.

American language, if we can call it a language, no longer has a bona fide dictionary. The most recent unexpurgated dictionary or uncondensed was so poor that in international treaty making we now have to refer to the Oxford dictionary because we don’t have a valid American dictionary today. And I listen on the air to announcers and to people debating subjects and so forth. The average American can no longer express himself. He is reduced to body language. He is reduced to strange noises, pantomimes, pictures, everything, cartwheels. He simply cannot discuss anything of any complexity which means that the language is falling apart.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And it is falling apart on a university level.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, this is Modernism.

[Rushdoony] Yes. It is a religious fact. It began with an assault on Scripture. It made basic to its philosophy, as Frothingham said, the destruction of virtue and the advent of evil, the trial. And it says, in effect, that your inner feelings the compulsions of your being must dominate you.

[Scott] That is exactly the reverse of all our traditional thinking. Self control was always held forward as the syne qua non of maturity.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We talk young people in their teens—in fact, before their teens. They used to marry in their teens—that self control was essential. And much along the same lines that if you can’t live by yourself, you are not worthy to live with somebody else.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, our schools are the triumph of Modernism. They are religious institutions to the core of their being, because they seek to teach precisely those things that are spelled out by Frothingham in his religion of humanity. And it was the men who were associated with Frothingham in the Unitarian Universalist movement, men like Horace Mann, James G. Carter, Charles Sumner, the senator, who were the mainspring of the public school movement, state control of education so that the first area of triumph for Modernism was in state controlled education.

[Scott] Well, yes and what are they propounding in these academic temples? The argument of Burnham which happens just to have fallen in my hands today as a matter of fact, says that our attitude toward third world countries is very similar to our attitude toward the people in the slums. We think that all those millions and all those underdeveloped areas like the people in the slums will be able to get out of their situation by education. All they need is education. And here we sit with more schools than any other society has ever produced in the history of the world talking about education when the standards of all these schools keep declining.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Are we going to educate the third world? Into what? Into what we are doing and to what we think, into the idea that no country can lift itself up out of the swamp without foreign aid? Europe wasn’t given any foreign aid. It didn’t ... nobody sent professors into Europe to teach them anything. The Europeans though the ages and through Christianity improved themselves.

Well, here he goes on to say, “This is logic. The soul of Liberalism and in the western civilization that Liberalism has permeated. This logic works like a spiritual worm, corrupting the will of the West to survive as distinctive, historical entity, easing the dissolution of the West into the distinctionless human mass.”

He is talking about death. he is talking about suicide.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Interesting the spirit of the West expression was used. I was reading a journal earlier this evening and several writers in it, Europeans, were expressing their total distaste for the term the spirit of the West or European culture.

[Scott] What would they prefer?

[Rushdoony] The denied that any such thing existed.

[Scott] They are in the process of demolishing it.

[Rushdoony] Oh yes.

[Scott] That is why.

[Rushdoony] They insisted on the freedom of each to have their own culture and the peoples within that country to express what was of importance to them. In other words, they were calling for anarchy. They believe in anarchy. It is their way of life, there, here, all over the world. And that is Modernism, the spirit of the age. You live in terms of your impulses. You enthrone them.

[Scott] And yet everywhere that Liberalism has triumphed, spontaneity has been destroyed.

[Rushdoony] Yes. It leads to the triumph of mass man, the group, not the individual.

Well, I think as we go further into this subject of Modernism it is important to see how some of the champions of Modernism in our time define it.

In the spring of this year, 1987, the American Quarterly, put out by the American Studies Association, gave an entire issue to the discussion of Modernism. The first article was by Daniel Joseph Single, “Towards the Definition of American Modernism.”

Now an interesting point was made. The goal of Modernists was defined by the words of William Carlos Williams and I quote. “Man is an animal and if he forgets that, denies that, he is living a big lie and soon enough other lies get going,” unquote.

In other words, since man is an animal, there is no truth outside of himself. And therefore Dewey, of course, is greatly approved by this author. The goal of education, the goal of learning must be experience. You try to cultivate experience in every area because only by experience can you find out what is your lifestyle and what pleases you.

Again, a second article by Malcolm Bradbury, an English scholar is, in essence, a commentary on the book by Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World. And, of course, this is what Modernism was. And it is at war against a non homemade world, that is, a God created world. So the goal of Modernism is a homemade world. It has to be a human product.

[Scott] Well, they are totally dependent upon an incredibly complex structure, infrastructure, the economists call it in order to keep themselves clothed, fed and housed. And they are talking about departing from society intellectually and emotionally and culturally. Now, it takes different forms. I think when I look at modern art, they call it modern. It is now almost 100 years old. And I notice that Hilton Kramer is very upset because he hasn’t been able to reconcile his conservative politics with this... with his defense of avant garde art. Well, of course, we know it is because his cousins are involved in it. And he is protecting them as part of the ... his crowd. Whatever his crowd produces is bound to be good whether anyone else likes it or not. Modern music, which is no minimalist, composer Glass has composed an entire symphony using only four notes. We have modern dance which has lost all form and all pattern and which is embarrassing to watch. The German... the Germans are sending over a ballet group which is performing in the nude and I don’t know how the police have managed to look away on this one, but, of course, they don’t pay attention to that anymore.

Well, here you have an absence of form. Yet if you treated these people in reality the way they are treating society, they would be the first to scream if you said, “Never mind the forms. I will kick you,” instead of saying, “Hello.” They wouldn’t see the correlation. If you take away the forms, everything falls.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And this was the grim aspect of the Russian Revolution, because he avant garde writers were the ones who were saying precisely what the Modernists have been saying every since. They were saying that the forms were worthless. Artsybashev in the novel Sanin ridicules the idea that there is something wrong with incest. And yet with revolution these men were among the victims...

[Scott] The first to go.

[Rushdoony] They welcomed it and they suffered from it.

[Scott] Because you cannot create a new society with men like that. You couldn’t create any kind of society. These are destructive individuals.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is interesting that the revolution clamped down, every time. The French Revolution under Robespierre and the committee of public safety clamped down on all these aberrations and made it an absolute... the journalists who gloried in dumping on everything suddenly under Robespierre fell very quiet, because otherwise they knew they would lose their head, like the journalists of Havana, Cuba today or Nicaragua.

It is interesting that the Chamorro family in Nicaragua which used to own {?} which was finally put out of business by Ortega, one of the new Chamorros is editor of the Ortega institutionalized newspaper. The other members of the family got out of the country.

[Rushdoony] Yes. You mentioned dancing and Singal on his article on Modernism speaks of that. And I quote, “The scores of dances introduced after 1912, most of which had originated in black culture featured heightened bodily expression and far more intimacy between partners. The very names of the dances, bunny hug, monkey glide, grizzly bear and lame duck suggested a delectable surrender to animality and rebellion against the older sexual mores. Ornatorius was the shimmy, a black torso shaking dance that became the rage just after the war. It was accompanied by a new form of music called jazz, also black origins, which featured still wide... wilder rhythms, frequent improvisation and recurrent attempts by early bands to make their instruments duplicate animal sounds. Moral reformers, ministers and members of the older generation were predictably aghast at this outbreak of impulse. Jazz and modern dancing in their eyes writes{?}, seemed to herald the collapse of civilized life. It is clear in retrospect that viewed from a Victorian perspective such forebodings were not without justification for the behavior of middle class youth during the 1920s, demonstrated just how widely modernist values had spread within the nation and how quickly they were approaching dominance,” unquote.

[Scott] Well, look at the sequence since then.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now we have the rock music. We had Woodstock. We had the rock festival up here in the mountains only a couple of weeks back in which 73 were arrested and the sheriff said 10,000 could have been arrested, but he didn’t have any place to put them. There... there is a whole group, I understand, not groupies, of particular followers who follow the rock bands from one concert to the next. They don’t follow them because they admire the musicians or the music so much, but because the crowds, they... they... they sell drugs to the crowds that the rock people attract. So in the train of the rock band is a whole bunch of drug dealers and negotiators. And often these, you might say, emotional orgies create violence, create riots. People can kill at them.

Now this, of course, is a... is a total outbreak of anarchy. And yet the liberal government of the United States refuses to recognize the existence of anarchistic orgies, refuses to recognize that there are whole cities that are unsafe. I recall in ... in one of McCauley’s histories there was a quote... there was an area in London that was unsafe for honest people. Eventually the authorities had it surrounded by the army. They drove out all the denizens and they set fire to it and they burned it to the ground. And that was that.

We don’t have with all the panopoly of American power that we keep hearing so much about, all the nuclear bombs and the bombers and the ships, the navy without mine sweepers and so forth.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We don’t seem to have the nerve of an adolescent. This is Modernism.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Both... both sides. The ... the Anarchism and the weakness of the intellectuals. I think the weakness is probably a worse sign for our culture than anything else.

[Rushdoony] Well, it is interesting that in this study of Modernism in the American Quarterly, some speak of Postmodernism. They feel that Modernism hasn’t gone far enough so they are going to push it further.

[Scott] What are we going to do for an encore?

[Rushdoony] Yes. And one of the articles is by Daniel Bell Carver.

[Scott] Oh, yes. The post Christian writer.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] He was the one who gave John F. Kennedy the idea that we are now living beyond morality. All our problems are merely technological.

[Scott] Well John certainly was.

[Rushdoony] Yes. He writes on Modernism, “{?}.” So he speaks of Postmodernism. And he quotes with approval those who speak of the agenda now as the deconstruction of man.

[Scott] Oh, oh.

[Rushdoony] And... and... and the end of the Enlightenment credo of reason also the epistemological break with {?}.

[Scott] Gee.

[Rushdoony] And the dissolution of sexuality into the polymorph perversity of oral and anal pleasures. For them this was the liberation of the body as Modernism had been the liberation of the imagination.

[Scott] I don’t think I would like to meet him.

[Rushdoony] The sexual revolution that followed broke into the gay and lesbian movements as one current and a somewhat overlapping rock, drug culture as another. Imagination have come out of the closet and lived out its impulses differently,” unquote.

Now that is the triumph. That is what they believe in. And the rawest kind of sexuality and antisocial anger and expression.

[Scott] But suppose this were to be adopted by the surrounding community of Boston and suppose they suddenly said to these savants at Harvard, “Why don’t you scrape up your own food. We are busy having a good time.” What do you suppose Mr. Bell, Dr. Bell would say?

Dr. Bell, I remember, because he wrote on the post Christian era. He buried all the millions of Christians as ... as obsolete. Just about 10 or 15 years ago , wasn’t it?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, you remember during the 60s the student rioting at the University of Santa Barbara or the University of California at Santa Barbara they burned down, you remember, the Bank of America. And the president of the bank was trying to tell the students it was all a misunderstanding. He was a liberal.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Why were they burning down their own friends.

[Scott] And he was, I am sure.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because you can’t really get very far in the United States today unless you are a liberal. Everyone else is outlawed, intellectually outlawed. They don’t put your picture up with a poster for a reward, but they certainly excommunicate you from the communications industry.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, their objection to Modernism, those like Daniel Bell and two or three others...

[Scott] It doesn't go far enough.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And it has been trapped by Capitalism, because modern art has become the darling of the corporations.

[Scott] Yes. The corporations... businessmen, of course, are always somewhat pathetic when it comes to art. They are buying modern art collections now that all the people in the United States have turned their back on them.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because they ... the businessmen are trying to get along always with the powers that be. This you can’t do business unless you can get along with the powers that be. And if you read the newspapers and believe the newspapers, we all love modern art.

And you know, of course, this is nonsense. Ninety-five percent of the America people wouldn’t use it to... for a bonfire.

[Rushdoony] Well, it is the museums controlled by liberals and the corporations controlled by literals bought no modern art,...

[Scott] There wouldn’t be any sold.

[Rushdoony] The market would be non existence... existent outside of New York City.

[Scott] Well, one of the reasons that the liberals will no longer debate, one of the reasons that they now jump up and shout dirty words and drive people off the stage is that they cannot debate. They have no arguments.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The arguments are now coming from the Christian community. I received a newsletter just the other day, a Christian newsletter. I think you get it, too. I can’t think of the name of it right now. But it lists 2000 correspondents. Now I don't think Associated Press has any more than that.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] If that many.

[Rushdoony] Very true. Well, what is happening is that as these academicians concentrate on their own thinking they become less and less related to reality. I have been appalled at reading some of the scholarly journals to find them discussing things very solemnly that are matters I am concerned with like the church and state battles in the courts. And they haven’t the foggiest awareness of what is happening.

[Scott] No, they don’t.

[Rushdoony] They are never in the courtrooms. I am sure they don’t read the transcripts. They approach the subject with their own preconceived ideas.

[Scott] Well, this is true in literature. They have now the... the critics have something called Structuralism, which, quite frankly, makes no sense. But the.... they have developed a vocabulary in which they talk to one another and the great mass of literature comes boiling out and they are unaware of it. We have no... no longer do we have writers. You recall when you were young. Writers were big in the United States. Our leading novelists were ... were considered very important figures.

Well, since Liberalism cannot face reality, since Liberalism prefers to assume a worship of the abstract instead of the concrete, we can no longer produce an acceptable literature, because novels in the old school used to portray American society they way they are, the way it is. Well, we can no longer do that, because we can not recognize reality. We cannot discuss it. We can’t be open about it.

[Rushdoony] Yes. One of the things that I learned when I left the university it was this. I subscribe to a number of things to continue ostensibly to be well educated. And I quickly came to realize as I met people and traveled a bit that the two things I was reading in order to keep up with the world of books, The New York Times book reviews and the Saturday Review did not reach a literate public. They reached people who wanted to know what books were being talked about. They were not readers.

[Scott] No. They were readers of reviews.

[Rushdoony] Readers of reviews.

[Scott] They weren’t readers of ... not readers of books.

[Rushdoony] That is right.

[Scott] And more and more I find university presses diverging in terms of level from common literature. Pat Knopf, the chief executive of Athenian Publishing was supposed to be... and it is well known as a literary house. Once said to me, “Otto,” he said, “The trouble with your writing,” he said, “is that it isn’t professorial and it isn’t average. It falls in between.”

I said, “Well, that is where I fall.” I said, “That is where most people fall who read books. I should think that would be a plus.”

[Rushdoony] It isn’t, though.

[Scott] It isn’t.

[Rushdoony] No. Not in a culture that...

[Scott] You have to be either a pedant or a pornographer.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] No in between. But most people are in between.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now how long can we live with a ... a culture which on the surface is portraying a world that doesn’t exist, with newspapers that constantly report bulletins from the government, regulations, a few scandals here and there and lots of entertainment features and nothing about the actual activities or nature of the people? A theater which is similarly living in a world of its own and so forth.

De Tocqueville, you know, at one point writing in the 1830s said that he knew of no country where freedom of expression was so limited as in the United States. And he went on to talk about the pressure of conformity in which he said that it was possible that if that developed, that continued, if the country without an aristocracy where the mediocre was keeping the talented in line, the worst tyranny the world had ever seen could result. By a fluke of fate or a decision of God, whichever you prefer, the Soviets reached that point before we did. But don’t forget they were led into it by their liberals. They liberals opened the gates of the Bolsheviks. Just as there are liberals here are opening the gates for the Communists.

And in the meantime the conformity of American society now the liberals were one of the first to say, well, they were against conformity. But they are not. They are for conformity. They are intolerant.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] If you ever have the misfortune to disagree with a liberal, you will soon... soon discover how intolerant they are. They immediately assume that you are a racist, a Nazi, everything evil.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is coming in now in that one or two people who are fighting cases involving First Amendment rights, religious liberty...

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] ...are being accused of being that. And they never mention the subject of race. They have never mentioned the subject of Anti-Semitism. But suddenly because they are out of line, they are fighting for freedom for Christian groups, every kind of name is thrown at them.

[Scott] Well, every kind of name is permitted. We are supposed to be very careful of the sensibilities of non Christians. We are supposed to be very tactful. We are not supposed to offend. We are not supposed to say anything to injure their delicate feelings. In the meantime we are told also that we should swallow any insult to Christianity or to Christians. Nothing is too bad to be said.

[Rushdoony] In one of the first books I wrote it came out maybe 25 years ago. I had a reference to Islam which was mildly, very, very mildly unfavorable in that I was contrasting it with Christendom and the Christian culture. And you would have thought I had committed some crime. It was the one thing that was picked up by some people in the book. How dare I speak ever so lightly, slightingly of Mohamedanism.

[Scott] Well, this is, I suppose, Modernism, Liberalism which respects every religion except the dominant religion of the West. It respects every religion except the religion of its own forbearers.

[Rushdoony] Well, it is looking ahead ala Henry Miller to the time of the assassins. It wants to destroy Christian... Christian civilization so that there is no memory, so that no one can remember that there was a Bible, that there was a Christ. This is the kind of world that people like Henry Miller have imagined. And I believe that Henry Miller was simply more forthright and honest about some of these things than some of the more sophisticated writers.

[Scott] Well, that is proven by the fact that he was picked up. He was expressing what many wanted to say.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the... the fact that he was picked up...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...proves that. But if we... if we... if we correlate Modernism and Liberalism, I mean, as Machen did, the liberal clergy is probably the cutting edge of the anti Christian movement.

[Rushdoony] Yes. It began in the Church and this is the heart of the matter.

[Scott] And if the liberal clergy is what has gutted the Christian community of the will to fight.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The will to defend itself. The idea that no force should ever be used. We actually have people now out in the streets saying that we should never at any time, anywhere in the world, for any reason use force.

[Rushdoony] Well, we have a major movement of the animal rights association and it is becoming a problem. They are bombing universities where there are animal experiments as they are bedeviling legislatures so that it is costing farmers a great deal of money because some very attractive Hollywood female stars button hole the state legislators and persuade them to vote for their animal rights measure. And then the farmers have to pour out a lot of money into fighting legislation that has been introduced.

[Scott] Well, Sidney Hook, another individual whom I am not too fond of who occasionally has hit the mark very well, defined Liberalism as an ideology. He said, “The average liberal doesn’t seem to realize that it is an ideology, but it is an ideology.” He said one of his main planks is no enemies on the left. And if you notice, the liberal enemy is always the same as the Communist enemy.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Pinochet of Chile, et cetera, et cetera.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now there are no airdromes being built in Chile. There are no Soviet troops in Chile. Why should we be upset about Chile when we are not upset about the Nicaragua?

[Rushdoony] And the murders in Ethiopia are legion.

[Scott] Oh.

[Rushdoony] But do we hear the outcry about Ethiopia that we do about South Africa?

[Scott] Oh, no. Well, Liberalism is an ideology and a clergyman who is liberal has embraced an ideology that is ab... it is base, anti Christian.

[Rushdoony] Exactly.

[Scott] And I think if enough Christians were to understand the liberal ideology, they could begin to recognize the enemies of Christendom, not by their name or their appearance, but by the arguments they present.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Our time is just about up. And I think you have put your finger on it, Otto. We have to recognize that while we love a particular church and our grand parents and great grand parents were members of that particular church, if the pastor or priest is a modernist, it is anti Christian. It is working to destroy everything that church ever stood for in the past. And we cannot be a party to it. It is an enemy to God and is an enemy to man. It looks for the time of the assassins, whether consciously or otherwise.

Well, thank you all for listening. We enjoy these discussions with you and we trust that they are rewarding for you to listen to.

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.