From the Easy Chair

Work, Play and Rest

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: X-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AH63

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AH63, Work, Play and Rest from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 167.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to deal with the subject of work and play.

Some years ago, in the early 30s, a doctor wrote a book on The Balanced Life and he described it as a combination of work, play, worship and rest. This was a very good analysis.

One of the things we often forget is the amount of rest that the Bible prescribes, one day in seven, one year in seven and the jubilee year as well. This mean that the person living in terms of a biblical culture—and some still do, like the Amish—had every seventh year to devote to all kinds of activities such as rest and play and also to works to improve the premises, to paint the house and the barn, to do wood carving and that sort of thing.

Thus, the Bible with its sabbath year and its jubilee did make provision for a great deal of rest as well as play on the part of man.

Now there is an important distinction here and a number of books have been written on the subject and I have written in one or two of my books on the subject of leisure, also pronounced as leisure. It is very different from rest, because the whole goal of leisure is not to rest from work, but to substitute leisure for work, to replace the whole of the work ethic with a play ethic.

Recently there was a flyer that reached me in the mails and the gist of it was this man was offering to tell his readers, if they would subscribe to his newsletter how they, like him, could retire at the age of 36 and spend the rest of their life in leisure activities.

Leisure, today, has become the goal of man. And it has replaced work and has warped everything else in a man’s life. So we are not concerned with leisure except in a negative sense. But work, play, worship and rest are important to the life of man.

Now work for a Christian is dominion oriented. It is to bring about the dominion of man over the world of nature, over the materials of nature and to develop his culture. And, as a result, there can be no advance, no progress without godly work. Work on any other terms becomes an urge to domination rather than dominion and is destructive.

Well, with those opening observations, Otto, do you want to follow with any observations of yours?

[Scott] Well, yes. I think that the word work has taken on some rather difficult connotations, not unlike vocation is something else. Work is, you might say, labor that isn’t involved in a calling, isn’t involved in a vocation and it can be very difficult and very unrewarding in every sense. In my estimation, people get involved in work because they don’t follow their vocation for one reason or another.

I remember talking to a fairly successful executive in the asphalt business who said, “Well...” I said something complimentary about how far he had gotten and he said, “Well, yes, but I would rather have gone into medicine.” And I said, “Why didn’t you?” “Well,” he said, “I got married.” “Well,” I said, “I don’t see where that stops you. Lots of men have been married and become physicians.” And we... the conversation went on to some other point. But I thought—and I was surprised. I thought, well, here he is. He is fairly successful in this particular industry, but he is an unhappy man. He is unsatisfied, dissatisfied, because he didn't follow his own heart. He didn’t do what he should have done. So he is paying the price. And in that sense, I think a great many people are paying the price and therefore work is something which they don’t like. They are leading a very unsatisfied life.

[Rushdoony] Well, that is a good.... very good point, an important one. There is another way to look at it, to supplement what you have said. Work has a bad connotation for many people in our culture because we have become paganized. Now if you go back to ancient Greece, the life of the mind was the only life for anyone of consequence. The person who worked with his hands, who farmed or who did anything in the way of inventions and the like, was looked down on because to work with your hands, to work with the material world was seen as degrading.

That is why, although a number of inventions go back to Greece, those inventions were the work of slaves. And the Greeks had a preference, by the way, for Hebrew slaves when they could get them, because Hebrew slaves were work oriented, a very important fact.

Now the fact that our culture has abandoned a biblical perspective, has led it to despise work and to separate work from the sense of vocation. Whereas in terms of the historic perspective of Christianity, any kind of work could be a legitimate vocation for a man. Physical, manual work was not despised. The monks under the rule of Saint Benedict were taught to see work as manual work, as a responsibility and a calling under God as well as the life of the mind.

[Scott] Well, yes, the... but the Greeks... You are talking now about the Greek aristocrats who had slaves and who didn’t have to work and therefore anyone who had to work was in the category of the slave even if he was free, because he was forced to work. That... I don’t really know how long that circumstance lasted, probably as long as slavery lasted in that part of the world or in any other part of the world.

The... McCauley did quite a scathing job on that on the fact that they knew the principles of air conditioning, of many other matters and they didn’t apply them because all it does is lighten the labor of slaves. Then I think to an extent the early centuries of Christianity involved the ennobling of the individual and therefore the individual’s activities for fairly obvious reasons. But as societies become wealthy, then the whole business of manual labor falls down again to it is almost a parallel with the beasts.

I remember being considerably annoyed by a liberal friend of mine in New York some years ago who kept telling me that manual... that physical strength no longer meant anything. And I said, “If somebody punches you in the nose, you will change your mind.”

The ... the fact is that strength is always important and today we... we see the pursuit of exercise in an effort to maintain some sort of strength and that is, in my opinion, not too bad a deal. But on the other hand, it is a sort of a repaganization, because the Greek baths, the Roman baths, the Roman games, the Olympics, which were originally Greek, and so forth, were all part of the sport, the idea of physical prowess, of physical superiority not connected with any particular effort, any particular productivity. It is just the idea of physically excelling over somebody else which is a form of humiliating somebody else.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Ideally speaking, sport should be sport. So it is a very tangled subject. We do have people who actually work only mentally and their work is ... is... is work, the same as a carpenter’s work is work. I ... I write books and so do you and I think that comes pretty close to carpentering, using words or whatever. The whole question of work and play, though, right now is totally distorted. I ... I... I, for instance, find that your... your comments on leisure difficult, because there should be an area except for play. I mean, I think of play as something that children do. And I think of leisure as something that adults do. I mean, if you go to the theater, for instance, what is that? Where does that fall?

[Rushdoony] Well, a number of very interesting studies have been written on leisure, or leisure and basic to the concept as it was developed—and it is not an old idea—has not been the life of the mind such as going to the theater or going to see a Shakespearean play, but rather substituting this type of activity for work so that the leisure class is the class that does not have to work. It lives off the wealth of the others.

[Scott] Well, of course, the United States has always frowned on that.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] This is a... of all countries, of all modern countries, I don’t know about the Soviets, this is one country where that has never been accepted as an acceptable way of life. In Britain or in France or in Italy, I don’t know about Germany, but certainly in Britain the whole purpose of work to the British is to get enough money to buy a landed estate so you never again have to do anything and you live then off of your... the interest of your capital and you become a gentleman, et cetera, et cetera. They still have that idea to a very great extent, but we have not had that. I was very... I have been very surprised... I was entertained at the homes of some very highly placed businessmen and they are... they had no servants. And the wife would cook and serve the meal and I have... I have always found that particular aspect of American life to be very remarkable. Most Americans feel that you should do something. And... but when men retire now I see them going off into golf. I have lost some of my best friends to golf. I have never seen them again. There must be a well they drop into. They cease to have human connections. And so I have even known several who have dropped dead on the golf course, maybe because of the betting. That seems to be more of a game of frustration than fulfillment, from what I can gather. But I find it difficult to understand how grown men who once were productive could spend that time on the golf course. I mean, to me it is a... it doesn't fall into the category of sport or leisure or anything definable. It is a game. And a game, I think, is childish.

[Rushdoony] Well, I... I think that is very interesting. I... I knew a minister some years ago, a very able pastor who retired when he was at the prime in order to be able to devote himself to golf. He had been living for that. And it made me rethink everything he had been before. So I never though much of him after that, nor, thank God, had any further connections with him.

Some people are retired because of the laws of their organization, but he retired because he wanted to devote himself to golf.

Now something comes to mind which I think reveals the difference between America, although you had little leisure class idea among the ruling class in the South which marked them as separate from the rest of America and somehow not in the same category.

About 40 years or so ago, just after the war, I recall a farmer in California telling me about his experience and his son’s experience. He was a successful farmer. In fact, he became quite wealthy. He was thrifty, hardworking. He avoided debt. He operated his family farm and accumulated a considerable amount of money. His son, however, chose to become an airline pilot, came out of the war and went into the airlines and very quickly became an airline captain.

Now it so happened that within a year or so both of them visited relatives in Europe. The farmer had no respect from his relatives, although he could have bought and sold them. His son, because he was a captain and wore a uniform, was greatly admired by the European relatives, because he had status. And that was the key. And it seemed to the old farmer very, very ironic that the difference should be so marked in that they had no appreciation of his accomplishments and, in fact, were a bit embarrassed by him, because in terms of the old country, he was beneath their status although he was far wealthier than any of them.

Now I do believe that represents something unique about America. The Puritan work ethic has accomplished things here that you don't’ see anywhere else in the world.

[Scott] That is true. And we probably have the greatest number of highly skilled people of any civilization that has ever been created. On the other hand we may be falling into the Roman pit. The Romans were so practical and they were very efficient. They were marvelous engineers and marvelous builders, constructors. And everything they did, they did with great efficiency, but they had no respect for ideas. They had no ... after they lost their faith, of course, they had no sense of the transcendent and they fell apart quite simply because they were so short sighted.

Now we have something similar at work here. Now I remember that Hannah Arendt and I still ... I think it was one of her most brilliant observations said, “The work that the average man does is very similar to housework done by women in the sense that it consists of a number of essential and necessary tasks which are totally undramatic, which leave no trace, no record, which are not lost, not noticed and yet if left undone would bring everything down.”

[Rushdoony] Very good.

[Scott] It is a very good observation...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...because the argument of the Feminist that men had been living in a more exciting world than women is basically ridiculous. Lots of them, I think, are discovering it by entering the male world and carrying coffee in to the boss is not much better than being a chamber maid in my opinion. But that is beside the point. The real thing here is that work to no point beyond one’s own appetite is a death to the spirit. And unless there is a sense of vocation or a calling there is no worship involved. It is simply going through motions.

Now when we switch and economically speaking from the basic industries into the service industries, we are switching from what is important and basic and honorable to what is not. A nation of servants doesn't do anybody any good. You can look at Italy. You can look at any other country that is living on the tourist trade and you can see what happens. You can even see that in cities in the United States. I have seen the city of San Diego lose its character and ... and... in honor of the tourist trade. We can see it in Great Britain on a larger scale, which is turning into another Spain, living on the glories of its past, waiting for tourists to come and fill the hotels and the bed and breakfasts and the restaurants and so forth and so on. And this means that all kinds of people are living in servitude, servants, modern equivalents of slaves, because they have to, you know, come here, waiter, come here, boy, and so forth. No matter how you disguise it, this is what servants used to do. The fact that you are being a servant to the public doesn’t alter the condition.

[Rushdoony] Well, let’s go back to something you said at the beginning about the Romans. The very remarkable practicality of the Romans was also their downfall, because they did not respect the world of ideas.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And you need the thinker as well as the doer in any society. And the role of the thinker is not an easy one, because you are working at a desk, day after day, as you and I do, writing without any feedback. You don’t have an audience.

[Scott] That is true. I often ..

[Rushdoony] You don’t...

[Scott] ...I often feel as though the book has gone out the window and into a well.

[Rushdoony] Yes. You write books. You write articles and except for an occasional letter, you don’t know of the impact it is having. You don’t have the satisfaction of seeing people sit at a table and eat a meal and enjoy it, relish it.

[Scott] Well, that is...

[Rushdoony] You are removed from the audience. But the world of ideas is very important, because it is the world of complexity. Now that was the Roman failure. William Carroll Bark, a very fine historian, in writing on Rome said that one of the great failures of Rome was its urge to simplify everything. And as a result it led to an oversimplification of every area of life, a concentration of all powers in one person, the emperor and a bureaucracy that was totally under him so that it destroyed Rome. It brought things to a standstill, because the more a culture develops, the more complex it becomes and therefore the more, logically, it should be decentralized.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] Well, we are making that same error in the modern world. We are seeking to simplify everything, The Marxists have done it to their own ruin in the Soviet Union as far as their economic life is concerned. We are doing it progressively here. We are concentrating. We are simplifying everything as though once we control everything from one city, Washington, DC, our problems will be resolved. But the more we simplify, the more we destroy.

[Scott] Well, of course, the Soviets began with the worst of errors and that was to sit on everybody and restrict the ability to think and to propose and to recommend and to order for that matter to a small group, which meant that they put a ceiling on the creativity of the entire Soviet society and a very low ceiling at that. And so, therefore, they have to live by stealing ideas from the West. And we are achieving the same abortion, you might say, by regulation.

Now if you ever talk to anybody who is involved in providing materials for the department of defense, you get some idea of the nightmare that has been created in terms of qualifications and specifications and routines that have been created for the defense industry. It takes us now years and years to develop a system. And this goes back for quite a distance.

I remember when the first space vehicle was sent up. You remember it just penetrated and made a curve and came back again.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...with a... with a monkey or whatever in it.

Well, one of the technical problems was how to prevent the thing from burning up upon reentry into the space orbit. So all our metallurgists went to work and they put together the most elaborate and complex alloys to fulfill this task. The Russians, on the other hand used Oak which charred and then went out, ding. On that... in that case they had beat us to the punch by their simplification. But their real problem has been their control and that is becoming our problem.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is control that you are talking about.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Control from a central source.

[Rushdoony] Right. There was an interesting article in one of the journals I read this past week about the Russian ballet. And the Russian ballet was, according to the author, as it appeared recently in our cultural exchanges, painful to watch.

[Scott] Recently.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And the author said, in effect, that what had once been the glory of the ballet world, the inheritance it had received from the reign of the czars and their over of ballet, now becomes so controlled and so stiff and wooden, unchanging it had deteriorated.

[Scott] No innovations were allowed.

[Rushdoony] No. And as a result, even in the performance of the classical ballets, the critic found it painful to watch and he was being very careful in what he wrote, because he knew it was almost heretical to be critical of Soviet arts.

[Scott] Well, the political.... to politicize everything in a culture destroys spontaneity and introduces another level of judgment. In which the artist isn’t judged by ability, but by political position and political trustworthiness. But what do you get then? You get an obedient servant instead of somebody creative and, of course, the classical ballets were beautiful, but modification has to come in. Nothing can remain fixed, not even religious ceremonies. In fact, one of the reasons that so many churches become behind the times and become irrelevant is because they freeze themselves. They don't change.

[Rushdoony] You mentioned the ... that about regulations and relationships in sport just in passing. You probably played baseball as a boy.

[Scott] Yes, sure.

[Rushdoony] As I did. In fact, I could hardly wait to get out every day to play baseball, day after day.

[Scott] We played on the brick yards. It was wonderful.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And it was a lot more fun when a group of us boys got together, chose up sides and played, than it was at school on the playground where a teacher supervised it and...

[Scott] I didn’t play.

[Rushdoony] And provided an umpire.

[Scott] On... on those occasions I was absent.

[Rushdoony] That ... that took a lot out of the game.

[Scott] It sure did.

[Rushdoony] Now sometimes we would get into some arguments about whether someone was safe or not when we were playing by ourselves, but we settled those arguments.

[Scott] Oh, sure.

[Rushdoony] And it was fun.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] The whole thing was marvelous.

[Scott] Yes. Well, could you imagine being in the little league today with the parents sitting in the... in the grandstand and wearing a uniform?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...and all those regulations? Those poor kids. They are never free.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They never... they don’t have a childhood.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] They don't have a chance to grow up testing one another.

[Rushdoony] It isn’t play then in the same way...

[Scott] No, it is not. It is not the same.

[Rushdoony] ...that it was when we were playing.

[Scott] No, it is... it is... it is... play is play.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Play is play. Yes. Yes, I remember and marbles also. We played for keeps when I was a boy. And that was that.

There has been a great many things that have been taken out of the category. I can’t get over the fact that kids today have to send a valentine to everybody in the class. That ... that destroys the entire purpose of the valentine.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, it is strange what has happened to play, because there were dozens upon dozens of games that we played when I was a boy that are now forgotten.

[Scott] Oh...

[Rushdoony] They have disappeared.

[Scott] They don’t play mumbly peg, because a knife is too dangerous for a kid to have.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And you could go down the list.

[Rushdoony] There were games where we would invent or rather whittle and make everything that was going to be used. You didn't buy anything.

[Scott] Well, you didn’t have any money, for one thing.

[Rushdoony] That is for sure.

[Scott] It wasn’t out of virtue.

[Rushdoony] But it became a virtue that has consequences.

I would like to touch on the relationship between work and play or rather work and rest, because rest is important to sound work. Without rest the mind and the body weary, productivity, whether in the mental or the physical sphere decreases so that rest is important. And in terms of the biblical doctrine of rest, it means stepping outside of our lives and outside of our planning to rest in God knowing that he is the one who makes all things work together for good so that our work is never in vain if we are in Christ. So reset in the biblical sense is very, very productive.

I would like to touch on something else in connection with that. A few days ago one of our Chalcedon friends, Dr. Gerhardt W. Ditz, a sociologist, sent me his paper on Smith and Keynes, which was published in a German periodical. And the point he makes here is an important one. There is a great deal that could be said about this paper, but basically Keynes was leisure oriented. He hated work. He never produced anything that was a systematic study. He lived to play.

[Scott] I think that is a good description.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Whereas Adam Smith was virtually a workaholic. He was at the other extreme. And as a result each produced a different kind of culture. And we now have the culture of Keynesianism. We have gravitated to it because it satisfied everything else, because Keynes destroyed the idea of consequence.

[Scott] Well, Keynes... I wouldn’t... I think Keynes has been adopted by a group, by a certain sector...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Let’s put it that way.

[Rushdoony] A ruling elite.

[Scott] Or, well, at this point, yes.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the worst part of our elite, because Keynes, for one thing, didn't care about the future, for a very good reason. He was a faggot. And there was no future for him. When he died that was it. He wasn’t going to have any children or any family or any wife. And the future meant nothing to Keynes and it reflected in his outlook. Whereas Smith was a Christian who was future oriented. And that had a great deal to do, I think, with the way they both functioned.

Now, of course, when you say Keynes worked to play, he worked to sin.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He really did. And Smith worked in order to help the world.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You might, you know, to say, to... to the Christian duty, to make the world better than it was when you came in, to leave it better.

[Rushdoony] Smith was probably a mild Deist, but his entire framework was Christian and Calvinistic. Now this is what Keynes said describing himself and his friends and circles in school and afterwards. I quote, “We were immoralists, recognized no moral obligation, no inner sanction to conform or obey. The prime objects in life are love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience in the pursuit of knowledge. Morals are unnecessary,” unquote.

[Scott] Well, that ... that is a very fancy language for what he and {?} called the greater sodomy.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

He made no pretense of covering up the fact of his homosexuality. He spoke about it very openly, matter-of-factly. He didn’t see anything wrong with anything that he did. And he married late in life, probably in order to gain status.

[Scott] It was a pro forma...

[Rushdoony] An advance.

[Scott] Pro forma marriage to a lesbian ballerina.

[Rushdoony] Yes. So as Dr. Ditz notes, and I quote, “It is Keynes humanistic, hedonistic, sensualistic philosophy which assured his enormous popularity, not his economic theories,” unquote.

[Scott] Well, just... just a minute now. Keynes was promoted. He was promoted.

[Rushdoony] Yeah.

[Scott] He was taught. There were all sorts of books and spinoffs and programs and discussions and prizes and awards and professorships and everything else for Keynes. And Smith has been ignored.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So to say that Keynes became popular is to underrate the vast machinery which went to work.

I have sent away for a book on the operatus behind the popularity of William Faulkner, the novelist.

[Rushdoony] Ah, that would be interesting.

[Scott] Now it hasn’t appeared yet, but I have already put in an order for it, because I understand that is written and it is being printed. And when William Faulkner was picked up at the end of World War II he had 14 out of print books, period. And most Americans had never heard of him. All the books had died in the market place. And a group got together to create a popular figure, a big literary lion out of Faulkner and they succeeded.

Now I can’t read him. He is a pain in the neck. He can’t conclude a sentence. He winds around with these serpentine phrases and so forth and so on and... and repellent to me.

However, the same thing you might say is true of Keynes. If you have read Keynes—and I have read, struggled through some of Keynes...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] .... he ... he has flashes of wit, a great deal of sarcasm, but economically speaking he leaves a lot to be desired, as we all know, because we have lived with the results of his errors. But there was a machinery at work and the people should not be blamed.

[Rushdoony] No. Ditz doesn’t. He is speaking of the cultural element that tends to play the role of promoters and to them everything that Keynes said fitted in with the world they wanted.

Smith’s thinking is very much with us. But not on the upper levels of our culture.

Keynes was promoted at every step. He became a lord, an English lord.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] ... which is a part of the same establishment, as it were, an operation. And he was recognized by the pundits in this country. You mentioned Faulkner. I knew of Faulkner when I was a student in the 30s, because the intellectual establishment at the universities felt that he was far better than those writers who were popular with the public. As a result, Faulkner was regarded as a great thinker.

Now Faulkner was as irresponsible and degenerate as they come. And that was precisely his appeal for the same reason that Keynes appealed to the establishment.

Their kind of thinking, of course, is the destruction of everything that makes for society and, hence, on more than one occasion in more than one context, Keynes’ reply with regard to the future and to the consequences of it, his economics, or the consequences of everything connected with him and his circle was, in the long run, we are all dead.

[Scott] Well, yes, without progeny.

[Rushdoony] So that what Keynes represented in his own way was the Roman and Greek saying of degenerate Greeks and Romans, “Let us eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.”

[Scott] Well, of course, that was a sigh of despair and I wonder at the ... at the great furor today by Keynes’ soul brothers and the question of AIDS. They seem to be treated as victims, as I say, victims of syphilis, victims of pneumonia, victims of tuberculosis. I suppose in a way every person that gets sick is a victim, but they are kind of stretching the point. And, in any event, what are we talking about? We are talking about a class that has decided to embark upon suicide.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...in any event.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] These are people who have decided to kill themselves as people, as human beings, as part of the human race. Keynes, of course, was promoting extravagance on the part of governments, without responsibility to the people. So, of course, the politicians thought it was a wonderful proposal.

I wonder on the whole question of play, the Bloomsbury Group didn’t seem to me... they... to be a very playful group. They were a dreary group.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They thought they would break all the rules and get away with it and I think the average person is apt to believe in periods like the ones we are in now that justice, the principles of justice have been suspended, because they don’t... you can’t see them in operation. But the fact is that justice is inexorable. It always works. The Romans paid a terrible price of their dissipation, long protracted agony. The Russian aristocracy paid a heavy price, so did the Ansian regime in France, so are the elite of the Americans paying a heavy price of the pleasures that they presumably enjoy.

Do you realize that we don’t even have ordinary parties on the top level in the United States anymore. They have fund raisers. And everybody is invited who has enough money to write the check. So there is no such thing as society. There is no such thing as a real party by real people who are real friends of one another or associates of one another. They are just simply the Seventh Avenue subway in tuxedos.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] This is the death of civilization.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And, of course, Shafarevich, the Russian scientist has said that Socialism has a will to death and it wants the death of marriage, the death of society the death of mankind.

[Scott] Well, he is... he is ... he was wonderful. He boiled down the theory of Socialism that {?} had done at great length and... and made it very readable. But we are destroying private clubs. We are destroying private parties. We are destroying party for no purpose excepting just to have a party without being able to placate the rabble by saying let’s... we are going to donate all this to some cause or another. And you know the cause gets the fag end, the short end of the sums that are raised, because most of the money goes for the hotel, the caterer and this, that and the other thing.

But we have... we are losing in this the whole idea of private play, that the little league, I think, is a glaring example of this where the boys are not going to play. In fact, they have boys and girls play baseball together, because, you know, can you imagine. Now I am not saying that girls at a certain age aren’t capable of it, because I remember once a girl of a certain age beat me up when I was about 10. And we had a fight and she won and hands down, too. She was taller, I will say that, but strong.

So it is not unknown. But we didn’t have them on the team.

[Rushdoony] Well, going back again to Dr. Ditz’ very interesting paper, he calls attention to Adam Smith’s Calvinistic perspectives. But he says of the two men, Smith and Keynes, there are far more references to religion in Keynes than in Smith.

[Scott] Really?

[Rushdoony] And he says that Keynes is busy in his writings rejecting the premise, the rationale and inferences of the Calvinistic ethic. And he goes on to quote from Keynes to give an example of a kind of concern with religion.

I quote, “The world is not governed from above. The higher states of mind are unattached to the before and the after. It is the here and now. In the long run, we are dead. Enlightened self interest does not operate in the public interest. The economic problem is not the permanent problem of the human race. We have been trained far too long to strive not to enjoy. The day is not far off when the economic problem will take a back seat and that the arena of the heart will be reoccupied by human relations, created behavior, religions, a religion without a theology,” unquote.

In other words, religion without God.

[Scott] Well, I think that is very...

[Rushdoony] … {?} sodomy.

[Scott] ...very ironic in view of what I was just saying about the destruction of sociability and... and of play, for that matter. Play has become ... let me put it this way. Politics has permeated all our games. Politics has permeated the school room, the classroom. I this permeated the Church. It has permeated all areas of social relationships.

Now this is exactly the opposite of what Keynes was promising indirectly to the people who had abandoned religion and the higher power.

[Rushdoony] Well, if the state is God, the politics, not Christianity, becomes the major concern in the classroom, in the... on the playing fields, everywhere.

[Scott] Oh, that is what it is.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, we today have a divided culture, because we have a very sizable percentage of the American population that professes Christianity. And yet you have an element that controls the media and the world of entertainment, the world of politics. Almost every upper level which is militantly and aggressively anti Christian.

[Scott] That is true. Well, as you know, where you and I are working on together with Mark this book on Arminianism and Calvinism. And I have ... we have just gone though that Tynack work.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In which the Church of England was taken over by the Arminian element directed by the king. And certainly they had control of the religious establishment of Britain. And under Archbishop of Canterbury Laud they proceeded to apply mandates against anyone that differed with them. In fact, they English today still call anyone who isn’t with the Church of England a non conformist. They still carry in their vocabulary the idea that conformity is the Church of England and the nonconformists or a dissenter is somebody who is not a member of the Church of England.

I regard the present cultural control by anti Christians of all across the board and, of course, they have... consist of all sorts of people, all sorts of backgrounds. They are not any single group, to be a mile wide and an inch deep. Their numbers are relatively few in comparison to the vast number of Christians in this country. And they are in the process of making us all acquainted with the fact that anti Christianity is alive and virulent in our midst. And, in my opinion, they will organize the Christian community.

[Rushdoony] I certainly hope so. I do believe it is beginning to happen, because they are so aggressively pushing for the death of Christianity. I see this in the courtrooms all the time. And they are pushing for the death of Christianity because thy are fearful of its revival and, hence, they have heightened the intensity of their assault.

[Scott] Well, they are waking us up. They are waking the Christians up.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] IF they had... if they had left Christianity alone, it might have slumbered away all together.

Do you know that it is curious to me? And you are reading there of that quote from Keynes brings it forward again. How these people find themselves unable to leave Christianity alone. They are...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...constantly bringing the subject up in a critical way when the Christians have said nothing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Nobody ever went out of their way to force Lord Keynes into believing anything. Nobody gave a damn what he believed. And yet he has to sit down and write in indignation about the beliefs of somebody else.

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes.

[Scott] And nobody seems to bring this strange card out to bear.

[Rushdoony] They are seething with hatred and cannot contain themselves.

[Scott] Do you know, I have talked to a couple who had come back from Spain about 10 years or so ago. They were in Spain during Easter week which is always... used to be quite a ... an experience. And they also went into some of the big cathedrals. They were non Christians, by the way, totally non Christian. Their background as non Christian. And they said.... I said, “Were there many people in the cathedral?” as sort of a joke. And they said, “Oh, yes, packed. But, of course,” they said, “they don’t believe.”

Then I said, “Why do you suppose they were in the cathedral, just to impress one another?”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And they didn't answer. But they had convinced themselves that Christians go to church and don’t believe.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Why would millions of people do that?

[Rushdoony] Yes. And you can see the consequences when the faith is destroyed and certain mainline churches. People stop going. There is no point in going.

[Scott] Of course they don't go.

[Rushdoony] It is the elderly who are going in the main to the mainline churches because the rest have left.

[Scott] Well, this bring sup the aspect that you mentioned in the very beginning in which you divided this topic into work, into leisure, into play and into worship.

[Rushdoony] Worship has to be basic. I this to motivate the work and the play and the rest. I this to give a focus to a person’s life or else there is distortion then in every aspect of its being.

[Scott] Somebody said something rather similar about the brand new towns in California, these cities that have ... that have sprung developer paradise, so to speak, where everything is brand new.

[Rushdoony] And Levittown was the first one after the war.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Back east.

[Scott] Right. Everything is brand new. The shops are brand hew. The houses are brand new, the streets, the lampposts, everything else. And he said, “Somehow or another,” he said, “people can be ridiculous in front of this brand new backdrop and almost get away with it. But,” he said, “if you put them in the midst of an older context their same sort of behavior is too ridiculous to be endured,” because there is something about a street upon which other generations have passed which contains its own message.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And in the same sense, I would say that a life that is lived without he sense of the transcendent is ridiculous, because nothing else will enable you to endure the sufferings involved in being alive and in being sincere and in working and so forth. And that is, I suppose, where the worship comes in.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes. Well, one of the problems with worship today is that it is not worship and that is why the churches are weak. Worship has to be God centered. You go there to grow in your knowledge of God and in your experience of him rather than to find what you need. And we have given a man centered emphasis to worship and have destroyed it. I believe it was just yesterday when Grace and Dorothy were discussing certain forms of church life. Grace referred to the modern trinity, me, myself and I. And that emphasis carries off... over in too many churches. They become pleasers of men and that destroys worship, because, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism declared, man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.

[Scott] Well, of course, worship without respect, worship without a proper sense of awe is not really worship. It is a form.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is a form. I mean, the... the Romans had temples, you know, to virtues, to chastity, to loyalty, to courage and various and sundry other virtues, just virtues. These virtues in the abstract, now I can’t imagine anybody going into one and coming out with any of that virtue, because... but they were by that time they were desperate and they were scrabbling to find unifying concepts, having lost their faith in the old gods and in the legends. And that left them with nothing but the hear and now. That left them with the fact that the just didn’t seem to prosper anymore than the unjust, that you had to, no matter how pious you were, use the right navigation to keep from going on to the rocks with a vessel and so forth. And if you were ... if you were... area of observation is limited to the world and to society, it is very difficult to retain a sense of the transcendent. In fact, you can’t. If you limit your observation to the world, you will inevitably lose your faith.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And one of the disasters of Rome was that when they saw what was happening to themselves and the degeneracy that was setting in, the collapse of the family, of public morality and all things else, they tried to go back to the old time Roman religion and it was dead.

[Scott] It was dead. Yes.

[Rushdoony] And as a result, they turned to persecuting the Christians.

Well, Christians today who will not develop the faith n terms of applying the Word of God to the problems of the times and who are content to enjoin the faith as they did when they were children, are going to be irrelevant, totally irrelevant to the future, because they are not developing the implications of Scripture in terms of every day life. It was one of the Puritan leaders, pastor Robinson, I believe, who made the statement there was more light to break forth from the Word of God, that continually they must seek new life from it, because as they faced a problem, as they faced a crisis, a development in history, it would renew and extend their vision of God’s Word in terms of its application to the times. And that is what is missing in too many areas of the Church today.

[Scott] Well, when the Church of England began to collapse under Archbishop Laud, under Charles II, when they tried to force the people into these empty churches and to go through rituals that they didn’t believe in, you had, I don’t think, a great number of reformers or Puritans. They were not numerous.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] But they were so sincere and so courageous that they managed to unhinge that entire edifice of control.

Now we are up against the same sort of thing. There is a sort of an empty series of ... a series of empty structures around us. You know, to drop from the sublime to the ridiculous it is like the eminence of Time magazine and Newsweek. Both of them are of no.... a waste of time, poorly written. They have been there forever and you think they are going to be there forever. The first group that comes along with a real news magazine will wipe them both out.

The Christians that are now coming to life in this country are probably almost as big a percentage as the Puritans were.

[Rushdoony] Oh, far more.

[Scott] Or far more.

[Rushdoony] Four percent of England was Puritan. Now when we develop four percent of the population that is not only Christian, but Reconstructionist, we will exert a tremendous power, because society always follows leaders.

[Scott] It follows the live ones.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is not going to follow the dead.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is not going to follow the imitators. It follows what is original, what is fresh, what is brave.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...what is articulate.

[Rushdoony] Well our time is about up. Is there a final statement you would like to make, Otto?

[Scott] No, I... No, that is it.

[Rushdoony] Very good. Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you.

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