From the Easy Chair

Rights

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 34-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AR80

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AR80, Rights from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 186, January 3, 1989.

Otto Scott and I are going to discuss the question of rights. The very fact that it is necessary to talk about rights and that it has become so important a subject in our time tells us something. It tells us there is something wrong with us, because the whole perspective has shifted from responsibilities to rights.

This shift has been described by a number of scholrars through various terminology depending on their particular discipline. One description of it is from the shift from a face culture to a guilt culture. A face culture puts all the emphasis on appearnces, on maintaining a face, oriental style whereby a man or a woman tries to maintain a public appearance and no one mars that because everybody respects everybody’s appearances. You are what you appear to be. As against that, a guilt a culture is one that emphasizes individual responsibility. And, therefore, if you fail to meet your responsibilities you do feel guilt over them.

Reeseman and his associates in The Lonely Crowd a study at the beginning of the 50s described a shift as one from production to consumption, from being inner directed to being group directed. A number of other sociological and anthropological terms have been used to describe this shift. But what has happened is that instead of feeling a responsibly to the world, people now feel the world has a responsibility to them.

There was an old saying which was prominent in a number of cultures and was a Jewish proverb as well and the gist of it was that the world was not empty when we were born into it. We should not leave it more empty when we leave it. In other words, we have to contribute something to the ongoing culture.

This was very much stressed when Otto and I and Dorothy and others of our years were in school. One of the very, very much stressed holidays in those days was Arbor Day. You never hear of Arbor Day anymore, but we were told as children that we had a duty to plant a tree. They tell us now that environmental concerns are something new. But in those days there were many such things expressed on Arbor Day and we were taught that we had a duty to the world and to the future in a number of ways and one of them was to plant a tree once a year. And classes would do that, grade school classes.

But that is gone now to a very great extent. If people feel a responsibility to the environment, tree planting, let Washington do it through some agency. Not the individuals planting trees.

The emphasis, in other words, is that everything should be done. We are the ones who say what is needed and a statist agency provides our needs and the needs of the earth around us. Right, therefore, represents something very, very wrong with our society. Not anything such as was meant, for example, in the Declaration of Independence, when the rights were associated with freedom and responsibility.

Otto, would you like to add anything in the way of a general statement before we get into some more specific things?

[Scott] Well, it is interesting that you mention The Lonely Crowd. Inner directed and outer directed, as I remember...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... was the phrase that they used. And the obervation was that the older generation had equipped its children with a gyroscope so that they could maintain their balance as individuals throughout life as contrasted with a growing tendency for the child to be taught to get along with the group. And as I recall it, it was the same book that came out with the acronym WASP, white Anglo Saxon Protestant. Somebody later said all Anglo Saxons are white so the W is absolutely ridiculous. It is really an asp. But at any rate, that became a short hand term which has now gone into the language in which speaking as a WASP I have never partiucalryl enjoyed.

But at any rate, there were certain elements in Reeseman’s book The Lonely Crowd which said that he didn’t approve of this communal trend, but he said it was discernible. To my surprise the whole educational establishment and sociology... sociological establishment, the therapists, the spiritual doctors of our time, the psychologists, et cetera, seized upon this communal direction and promoted it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Not too long ago one of our mutual friends told me that one of his sons was classified as abnormal because he didn’t join in the games during recess and preferred to read a book. That made him something very dangerous that had to be looked into and possibly even disciplined.

[Rushdoony] A social deviate he had been called.

[Scott] A social ... ah, yes.Well, it is hard to keep up with the jargon, but I appreciate that . It is... it is... that is about it.

Now when you mentioned the Arbor Day, we were expected to plant a tree ourselves.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, today they are... students are taught to be concerned about the environment in order to get society to plant a forest.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now this is Rousseauism. This is a switch into the societal. And the whole question of rights in a society is different than rights as an individual. An individual under the Christian custom is a sovereign state, a small sovereign state with certain rights. In the 1828 reprint and the reprint of the Webster’s 1828 dictionary I looked up inanienable rights. I can’t recite them, but there were about seven. One of them was the right of physical safety. And that is a right that is being violated in this country with great abandon. And there are other rights. And that led me to the word inalienable. What is inalienable? Well, an inalienable right, according to Noah Webster, is a right that cannot be surrendered or taken away. Well, then what happens to the Fifth Amendment? Ollie North can tell you that he has no Fifth Amendment rights.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because he was forced to testify against his wish under the threat of contempt and the basis of the core of his testimony is being used as the basis for an indictment. Both of those violatiosn are something we thought had been settled 400 years ago with the English Civil War. There is no Fifth Amendment right today worthy of the name. It has been totally gutted because Congress could not give you immunity from the protection according to Noah Webster that was inalienable.

[Rushdoony] Moreover, the definition of rights increasingly is directed against those of us who believe in Christ.

I gave you a magazine recently on animal rights.

[Scott] Yes, you did. And it is stunned me. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is called the Animal Rights magazine.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, now they are calling for the liberation of dogs and cats.

[Scott] Remember when we were in Ireland and they liberated the lobsters?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Did you know what ahppepned to them? They took the live lobsters out of a restaurant. Give them credit. They paid for them. And they had them flown all the way from Maryland to New England and released by ship into the ocean for their liberty.

[Rushdoony] Well, the idea that you have a pet cat or a dog is now regarded as enslavement.

[Scott] Oh, really?

[Rushdoony] And, therefore, there is a movement to liberate dogs and cats.

[Scott] What does... What is the poor dog going to do? They can’t feed themselves.

[Rushdoony] No. But this is what they are advocating. You also have animal and tree rights being affirmed now.

[Scott] Are they to be protected from dogs?

[Rushdoony] I think they had us in mind. But in India some of the Hindu scientists claim that their experiments have demonstrated that vegetables feel pain.

[Scott] Well, that is part of Hinduism, certain variations of Hinduism. Gandhi, I believe, belonged to one of those sects and Albert Schweitzer, although he said he was a Christian, had sacred feelings about all forms of life.

[Rushdoony] Including worms and fleas.

[Scott] Worms and... and... and ...

[Rushdoony] ...mosquitoes and the like.

[Scott] Insects and so forth. And this, of course, is pantheism.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And Animism.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] These are very old pagan religions.

[Rushdoony] I had a flyer that reached me recently and I was going not bring it tonight, but I forgot. It was about some professor who was speaking, I believe, to a LIbertaria group. And the title of this talk was the child as nigger in America.

[Scott] Oh, really?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And what are they elsewhere?

[Rushdoony] But the idea of children’s rights involves also that the federal government should give them an allowance.

[Scott] From whose taxes?

[Rushdoony] Yes, of course.

But once you begin to stress rights rather than responsibilities, there is no end to those rights.

[Scott] Well, yes. And I mentioned this once before in reading the English magazine The Spectator, where they have a little half a column 100 years ago. A hundred years ago last year some time they unearthed an item from that edition where a countess had an island. She had at least half an island and had turned it into a game preserve. And just outside the enviorns of the prserve was a village. And this was a time of uemployment and the men in the village in order to feed their families went into the game preserve and shot the deer and the countess had them brought to court for poaching. And the magazine said their defense was their necessity. And the editors went on to say we have ever reason to believe that they told the truth. And we have all the sympathy in the world for them. And if it comes to that, we think that better use could have been made of the land than to have turned it into a game preserve, but we cannot allow need to be converted into rights.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... because if that is allowed, civilization will be torn apart.

[Rushdoony] Precisely. And because today needs are being converted into rights we have a destruction precisely of the productive element of society, because if needs confer rights, the more needy you are the more rights you have and the fewer rights the person who is hard working and provident has.

[Scott] Well, the rich have rights as well as the poor. The middle class have rights as well as tehp people on welfare. A Christians has rights the same as a non Christian. Everyone has rights or nobody has rights.

[Rushdoony] Well, this is what it leads to, the destruction of all rights. When you give rights to cats and dogs and seek to liberate them and the trees, then whatyou are saying is that all things are equal and therefore all things are meaningless.

[Scott] Well, if all things are sacred we are in an entirely different civilization. We are in a civilization comparable to parts of India. India still has jungles. India has enough cattle to feed all the people of India from here on. The cattle will breed. The cattle will graze. The meat can be used. Instead, the cattle wander freely because the cattle are sacred, sacred cows. It is interesting to me that the poverty, the massacres, the prejudice, the backwardness of India all disappeared from the public print as soon as the English were driven out.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And very little was said in the 70s when we were shipping so much grain to India that the rats of India were devouring more grain than we were able to ship. And those rats were not killed, for religious reasons.

[Scott] Well, when we have crypto Hindus.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We have people who don't even know the origin of their arguments, which is, of course, another definition of true ignorance. At least you should know what your argument is based upon. Well, we have a welfare lobby. The welfare lobby has masterminded, though, in my opinion, not by the hpeople on welfare, but by the people who live off the people on welfare.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I was reading today something that John Whitehead wrote, published this month and I think it is interesting because it does deal with this loss of responsibility. I would like to read it. And I quote.

“Secretary of Health and Human Services Otis Bowen recently delayed implementing President Reagan’s draft order to stop such practices, that is harvesting tissue parts from aborted babies. Inasmuch as abortions are legal, it would result in the waste of a resource, not to use their tissues.”

[Scott] They are already there.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Why don’t we use all the cadavers?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

“The National Institute of Health panel reviewing this subject argued that the use of fetal tissue was acceptable. The panel tried to strike an objective note by couching its blessing in the phrase, without taking a position on the morality of abortion. Avoiding the morality question nullified the central point of their alleged ethical debate. Incidentally, Dr. Joseph Mangela used the same rationale to justify his medical experiments on Jews bound for the gas chambers. But mankind is not by nature attuned to recognizing the teeth of tyranny until we are well clenched in its jaws. Unfortunately, we have largely handed over the... to the government our individual authority and responsibility on issues ranging from education to health and welfare. The government’s method of addressing parental problems is to exercise what it views as its ultimate ownership of children leaving parents with mere custodial rights.”

And then he goes on to deal with what is being done in the state school clinics with regard to sex education, under the guise of helping deal with problems of teen pregnancy and abortions. But as he stresses, we have largely handed over to the government our individual authority and responslibilty. And that is what the rights movement is about. It is a denial of individual responsibility. The poor in the slums are not there because they are throwing money on numbers rackets or on drugs or on ...

[Scott] {?}

[Rushdoony] ...clothes or junk food.

[Scott] Or on the fact that the licensing laws and various and sundry other regulations prevent them from moving out of their position legally.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Why you have to go to school, before you can earn a living. There was an argument—and I am not sure if it is city. I am not sure that it is not Washington, DC, of a black man who has been forbidden by law to open up shoe shine stands. Why? Because somebody in the city government decides that it is just not a proper business. And he had a shoe shine stand and he wanted to franchise others. He wanted to emnploy others to shine shoes and give him part of the money and so forth.

Well, forbidden.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So there are two sides to this. But you began with, I think the proper emphasis when you point out the difference between the inner and the outer directed. As soon as it becomes communal, as soon as it becomes societal, then it becomes the government’s province and is taken out of the individual’s hand.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now abortion. Can you imagine the court decided after all these centuries that abortion is perfectly all right all the way up to the day before birth, all the way up to the day before delivery. There is no limit to when a woman can have an abortion legally in the United States.

Then suddenly the court has determined morals. Well, if the government determines morals, what do you need churches for? What do you need a clergy or religion for?

[Rushdoony] That is a very important point, because people are not aware of the fact that the courts have become the moral determiners, that Congress, state legislators now feel that they can do what the Church historically has done.

Now in the Scriptures, the law requires that a civil judge have alongside of him someone who was an expert in God’s law, not to determine the guilt or innocence of the person on trial, but to determine how the law applies to that particular type of case so that the moral implications are to be developed by such a person.

[Scott] That is interesting, because in the Weimar Republic that individual was a psychiatrist. And it was not his job to determine guilt or innocence. That was up to the court, but the psychiatrist determined the treatment, end quote. Now I recently got hold of some of the literature from the Weimar Republic period. Unforuatnely it is all written by the left. The right had not bothered to investigate that very interesting period. But I know that I have one book which is called The Film and Politics in the Weimar Republic. And it is subtitled The Role of Artists in Politics.

One of the first things that I ran across was the campaign for abortion in 1923 and 24 and 25 and 26 in Germany arguing that women were condemned to be butchered by amateur abortionists and quacks and also condemned to have children they couldn’t afford and so forth and so on, the whole thing. And it was printed as cruelty against women, oppression of women to force them to have children. All the arguments that Mr. Dukakis gave. Would you criminalize the woman? Were presented in that period in Germany. And one of the ... and you mentioned Mengele or rather John Whitehead mentioned Mengele. Step by step by step the state in Germany took over the morality of the people so that in the end the death camps were all right because the state said so.

[Rushdoony] You remember, Otto, speaking of the fact that our side doesn’t produce this kind of scholarship...

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] ...about those things. We had dinner a month ago, less than a month ago with a graduate student who was kicked out, although he was the outstanding student in his department, history.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] ...beuase they discovered he was a Christian.

[Scott] Yes, yes.

[Rushdoony] Now that is what ... one reason why we don’t have that kind of scholrship.

[Scott] Well, his story was even worse. They turned him down. He was a PhD candidate. They turned down his dissertation by one vote out of seven. And the man who cast the one vote which had him knocked out told him that if he had known he was a Christians he would not have admitted him in the program in the first place and he would never again admit a Christian.

[Rushdoony] Yes. All right. Now that is one aspect of it. The second is that neither Christians nor conservatives will give much to help finance the world of ideas and that is why we are always struggling.

[Scott] Well, you mentioned, for instance, Reeseman’s book which everyone in the country knows except the Christian community.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] A very important book. It set an intellectual term with which are now struggling.

[Rushdoony] And my reaction to it, Otto was similar to yours. I felt, well, these men have presented a devastating picture of what our culture has become.

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] So everyone will now unite having seen the problem to deal with it. But instead there was virtually happy acceptance of it.

[Scott] They rushed to accept it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is like Adorno. Adorno is one of the most important international figures in the West. The average Christian has never heard of him. Where are we when all these intellectuals types swirl all around us and we are totally unaware of them?

[Rushdoony] It is curious, too, how these intellectual types are created almost in advance. In a somewhat prestigious magazine on the newsstands now we are told that the 90s will be the age of compulsion.

[Scott] Oh really?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Who is going to do the compelling?

[Rushdoony] Oh, psychological compulsion. We will be compulsive personalities.

[Scott] Oh. Oh. I see.

[Rushdoony] Well, the mandarins in New York tell us what we are and what we should be. But...

[Scott] Well, of course, they are having problems in New York.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is just as in Los Angeles. It is interesting. I read recently that there were supposedly 80,000 gang members in the streets of Los Angeles involved in these turf wars. I don’t know what that does to the intellectuals of Hollywood, because they don't seem really to be too concerned. And New York City streets have been unsafe for a long time and the New York Times has yet to discover it.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And as a police officer told me years ago, he said when the hoodlums outnumber the police there is nothing you can do about it except bandage the cancer.

[Scott] Well, 80,000 gang members. How many police are there in Los Angeles?

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes.

[Scott] Now what does this do to the whole system of rights?

[Rushdoony] Yes. They are a product of the rights revolution. And it is going to destroy all real freedom on the part of the rest of the people.

I would like to turn briefly to a very fine book by Thomas Sowell Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality, published in 1984. And Sowell said, and I quote, “It is now estimated that 70 percent of the American population is entitled to preferential treatment under affirmative action. The civil rights vision has even been extended internationally to the plight of the third world and to racial policies in other nations such as South Africa,” unquote.

Then he goes on to deal with some of the premises of the civil rights vision. The first, one of the most central and most controversial premises of the civil rights vision is that statistical disparities in incomes, occupations, education, et cetera represent moral inequities and are caused by society so that if {?} you have more education or better income or a better house than somebody else, that represents some kind of societal discrimination on your part. Then second, he says, “Another central premise of the civil rights vision is that belief in innate inferiority explains policies and practices of differential treatment, whether expressed in overt hostility or an institutional policies or individual decisions that result in statistical disparities. Moral defenses are causal explanations of these statistical differences in any other terms tend themselves to fall under suspicion of denunciation as racism, sexism, et cetera,” so that if you call attention to the realiies of differences in people, you are violating somebody’s civil rights. You cannot turn to a moral explanation.

Then, third, he says, “A major premise of the civil rights vision is that political activity is the key to improving the lot of those on the short end of differences in income.”

Then he goes into a number of other things, but I think these are sufficient to indicate how very, very serious the problem is. Sowell, of course, as you know, is black. I was delighted to hear Walter Williams say that if the civil rights people were honest they would go after professional basketball.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Because there is a high percentage of blacks in it and that is discrimination in terms of their reasoning.

[Scott] No question. Sowell is a man who said there will always be a program to help the blacks as long as such a program provided a job for a white liberal.

[Rushdoony] Yes. He also says I this same book—and I quote, “In reality, the crusade for civil rights ended years ago. The scramble for special privilege for turf and for image is what continues on the today under that banner and with that rhetoric,” unquote.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] Privilege instead of rihts.

[Scott] You know, the old definition of the word discrimination was choice.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It was never expected that the right of choice would become illegal in the private sector. What we have moved into in the name of civil rights, of course, is to fragment the population, to divide the population along racial and ethnic levels and to set up quota systems in which the majority has less of a quota than the minorities.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So that white children are turned away from colleges in much greater proportions than minorities. Now this was tried once before in the Autro-Hungarian Empire.

[Rushdoony] And the Russian Empire.

[Scott] The Russian, too.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, the Austro-Hungarian is one that I seem to have run across more frequently and, as you recall, every subdivision so many jobs of Hungarians, so many jobs of Slovenes, so many jobs for Jews, so many jobs for Germans and so forth. And it wound up in a seething mess of hatred. It also destroyed meritocracy because no one could move just by merit alone. He had to move on the basis of his background, over which, of course, we have no control. We did not select our parents. This is not, you might say, a voluntary skin that I am wearing. It was given to me and that is it. So to treat me on the basis of my skin or my parentage is, of course, to fly in the face of everything upon which this country was once founded. Nobody is more aware of this than the minoirities.

[Rushdoony] Well, I mentioned Russia and that is a very important example of this problem. In imperial Russia there were two minorities that exercised a great deal of leadership, Jews and Germans. The Gremans had been brought in Catherine the Great. Well, both these groups who were miniorities within the empire were a very pro education. And they were also the responsible people. They ran the states where the nobilities and some of the estates were equal to Rhode Island and bigger states in the United States. They also were the people who went to the unifersities. And some of the early liberals began to say that all this was wrong. They should have equality. And there were too many Jews and too many Germans in the universities and they were getting the majority of the civil service jobs. So they established a quota system of the universities. And this over night radicalized the Jews who were the more important group and after that the Germans.

And that is why there was a link with Germany and Karl Marx because they were looking eastward then, from being very conservative, pro imperial, over night they were anti imperial and were looking for radical doctrines and found them in Karl Marx, because now the Germans and the Jews wo produced most of the potential university students were outnumbered in the quota by Tartars in some instances who only once in a generation at most had a student go to the university.

[Scott] Well, do you suppose that the quota system would radicalize the majority in the United States?

[Rushdoony] Well, I ...

[Scott] Because it is not the Jews or the minorities that tare the victims of the quota system today.

[Rushdoony] It is the white majority.

[Scott] That is right.

[Rushdoony] The old line Americans.

[Scott] That is right.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, I don’t know, but it has been disastrous wherever it has been applied as in Astro-Hungary and...

[Scott] Yes, that is why ...

[Rushdoony] And Russia.

[Scott] That is why I think Austria Hungary is probably closer to our situation, because it was the majority in Austria Hungary that had to make room and then found itself fixed in the quota. And it was the majority that turned against the empire there, not the minorities. The minority...

[Rushdoony] That is important.

[Scott] ... the minorities had it all the own way.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In Vienna. They did very well. And in the end, of course, the majority ate them up.

[Rushdoony] Well, in...

[Scott] In both... in both instances the quotas did...

[Rushdoony] destroyed the empire...

[Scott] ...exaclty what... that is right. They did exactly what they are not supposed to do.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because if you allow the best to rise all society benefits.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] No matter what they come from or who they are.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now, of course, we have moved into something else. Education has become a passport to advancement in the United States to an unrealistic extent.

[Rushdoony] Well.

[Scott] That is schoolig.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Schooling.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now, you know, I keep getting this business from my youngest daughter that she wasn’t taught something. And, of course, I am the last man in the world that will listen to that because no one taught me most of the things that I know. It was always assumed in our generation that it was up to you to continue your education.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] This classroom could only tell you a little bit. There was a much bigger world out there that you had to learn all about. But we are now reaching the place where unless you get a certificate from the classroom you are not considered entitled to prmotion.

[Rushdoony] We in World War II transferred that principle into the military service. Prior to World War II a man could join the army as a buck private and rise to the rank of general.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And some of our greatest men were without university educations and without a West Point training. They rose up in the ranks.

Dorothy and I knew a very, very fine man who because he was big for his age when his father died he was 14 and he joined the army. This was in the 1890s. Thereby he could support his mother. And the next younger brother took over the work on the little farm. And Joseph Denton was in the Spanish American War. He was in World War I. He also was with Pershing in Mexico prior to World War I and he trained troops in World War II, a very remarkable man. I told you about him before.

[Scott] Yes, you have. A very interesting.

[Rushdoony] And how he said in his day he knew every man in the army and if you had a problem with anyone in the ranks you took off your coat and went behind the barracks and fought him man to man. You had to know the family and backround of every man under you, know his character, because the life and death of dependability under fire. And so you assigned him a position accordingly.

But Colonel Denton never had more than, oh, just four or five years of schooling, a very well read man, very intelligent, very superior.

[Scott] Now we have turned education into a right and education therefore the educated man today, let’s say the schooled man feels that he has a right to a certain position in the world. Now up until recently that position in the world was only attained through effort.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But this we now have a group and a very numerous group... I mean, I can certainly understand the value of a university trained individual in a period when, say, 0.5 percent went to the university. But when you have 40 percent going you are in a Eurasian situation that the English were confronted with. They had educated all these hybrid individuals beyond the needs of that particular society. So what you had then was an over shcoold seething mass of resentful and rebellious individuals. I had run into a young man who had said to me with great bitterness, “I have got my degree and nobody will give me a job.”

Well, I don’t feel any more sympathy there than I would for the fellow who said, “I don’t have a degree and nobody will give me a job.” What is the difference? The point is there aren’t that many jobs for that many degrees. So we have people who expect certain rights. Now I ran into this argument in a very interesting book on the Masonic movement. One of the Masonic lodges created in Germany in the late 18th century formed with a German nobleman and a Jewish individual who came together to set up a lodge. Only they came together to set up a lodge as a profit making institution and it was a club. They charged people to join and so forth and so on. And, as usual, what happens when two swindlers get together, they got into a fight over the division of the funds. And the nobleman pulled rank and said, “I, after all, am a nobleman.”

And the Jewish fellow said, “Well, I happen to be a scholar and my education entitles me to be an equal to your patent of nobility.”

And I thought, well, that is interesting, because this was obviously a very old argumet and that is that education entitles you. It doesn’t entitle you to anything.

[Rushdoony] No. That is very true.

[Scott] But the rights and the entitlements and now they use the word entitlement. The government says certain programs are entitlements. Well, at one time the word entitlement meant a patent of nobility. You were entitled. You received a title. And with that title you had a certain position.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, there were two things that marked the university degees before World War I. First, only a limited number of people had them and therefore, second, they meant something.

[Scott] Yes, of course.

[Rushdoony] They meant a high standard of achievement. In fact, I am here today because of that fact in that during the massacres and all when my parents escaped the thing that kept my father and mother live was that he had two degrees from a Scottish university and college and he had a professorial rank so that in the seething mass of refugees and there they were having walked for their lives until there was nothing left to the bottom of their feet in the way of a soul to their shoes. They were walking on raw, bleeding feet. But when it was learned there was a professor with two English degrees in the ranks of the British counsel made a point of coming to see if he could be of help and various other officials of this or that country were immediately concerned.

That is a world that is now gone.

[Scott] Yes, indeed. I recall. That is interesting. My father went to the university in Caracas and took part in the rebellion.

[Rushdoony] It was very modern then for that day.

[Scott] Yes. And they... they had a ship. They rented a ship. They filled with guns and they proceeded. They were going to land and they though the peasants would rally to their standard. They were met by the troops of Juan van Sane Gomez, a very cruel man who had every one of these students shot to death except my dad and one other, because my dad’s father was a British subject. So he was allowed to be exiled out of the country.

And it is... there... but there... you are right. It was a great distinction and in Germany it is still a serious crime to claim a degree that you do not, in fact, possess.

[Rushdoony] Your father’s experience reminds me of what happened in Russia in the beginning of the last century, the Decembrist revolt, because it was student and young cadet type of operation and it was the first expression of the liberal intellectual mind. And yet it didn’t kill it. Here they were, a group of young men, young officers who had the liberal agenda in mind. And so they started a revolution for the constitution, a Russian constitution.

And because the ideas they were promulgating, western liberal ideas, seemed to them, inescapable truths, they thought that the masses would immediately respond because this is what all men would really demand.

[Scott] Exactly the same.

[Rushdoony] And the masses outside of the military and the masses in the military didn’t know what they were talking about.

[Scott] Couldn’t see what was wrong.

[Rushdoony] In fact, they assumed when they were talking about the constitution in terms of the Russian word for it, that it was a woman. So they were rioting in favor of a new empress or some such thing.

[Scott] Well, the Africans, some of the black Africans thought independence meant you would all be rich and you wouldn’t have to work anymore.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And this brings us around to the old situation, the business of rights and revolution, the argument that Knox raised in Scotland against Mary Stuart, first of all, that she had no right to murder her husbaqnd and therefore should go on trial. And that shocked all Europe, because the sovereign was the law. And he said the sovereign is under the law.

[Rushdoony] There is still hostitily to John Knox in terms of that.

[Scott] Because there is no law in the United States higher than the sovereign, higher than the state. I see where it is considered ulikely that President Reagan will answer that deposition, that subpoena that Ollie North’s lawyers serve dupon him and President Bush will probably not either.

Now here Mr. Reagan said he wanted to see the process of justice take place. Well, why doesn’t he assist it?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Especially when North protected him at every point. He is unwilling to do a single thing in North’s defnse.

[Scott] Well, the whole question of whether it is proper to rebel against a tyrant, a very old question. I was settled in the Old Testament in which they said it is your duty to do so.

[Rushdoony] Under certain...

[Scott] Under certain...

[Rushdoony] ...God ordained circumstances.

[Scott] Certain circumstances.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It has to be a tyranny.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It has to be anti Christian. It has to be anti biblical. It has to be anti God.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, today rights are ideas which are anti Christian. We have rights to human tissue. We have those now...

[Scott] You have a legal right to abort.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And you have the increasing belief that if you are an older person and are not regarded as socially useful, which we would not be.

[Scott] By question of age we would not be.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And by question of position.

[Rushdoony] Then you are not entitled to live so that murder is becoming common place in many hospitals.

[Scott] They don’t use the term.

[Rushdoony] No, no.

[Scott] There is Orwellian language has come into being. The phenomenon that Hannah Arendt noted about Eichmann and about Nazis, she said they had developed an entire language, an entire vocabulary to hide the essence of what they were doing. And we don’t talk about murder. We talk about euthanasia. We talk about the right to die. Isn't that an interesting right?

[Rushdoony] Well, the Wall Street Journal recently had a very interesting article on gangs of gypsies. This was December 15 and their readiness to steal and to feel morally justified in stealing from the rest of us. Their attitude is my culture is superior to all others. Whatever we do is right.

Now that is the attitude of elitists all through the centuries. Therefore, you have the kind of definition of rights today, the right to kill unborn babies, the right to kill the elderly, the right to kill the mentally defective. I read recently that a particular type of child, I think enancephalic, not hydroscephalic, they are eager to find now and to take for human experimentation.

[Scott] Really?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] A living child?

[Rushdoony] Yes. After all, he is going to die.

[Scott] We are all going to die.

[Rushdoony] Of course.

[Scott] That argument could be used against any of us.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] At any time.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And will be. Give them time, unless we by the grace of God reverse this as I believe we shall. The Lord shall.

[Scott] Well, of course. The fact of the matter is and I have quoting myself in something I have just written and given to you and you haven’t yet had the chance to look at is that all of these programs have actually worsened our situation and diminished our rights.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the programs which were... we were told were going to improve our society have actually been based on immoral grounds.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And therefore the American people are deeply unhappy, just as any person becomes unhappy who is forced into living an immoral life.

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is about up. I would like to conclude just by saying this. What we need to do is to stress in our own thinking and with our children and those around us our godly responslibities, rather than rights.

Only then can we turn this increasing destruction of civilization around and become constructive peoples.

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.