From the Easy Chair

How People Cope with Tragedy

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 38-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AT84

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AT84, How People Cope with Tragedy from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 201, September 2, 1989.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss a subject that really arose out of our last Easy Chair. Our subject will be how people cope with tragedy or with disaster, coping with disaster, perhaps can be the brief title.

Now when we concluded our last Easy Chair I dealt with T. D. Kendrick’s book of some years ago on the Lisbon earthquake. The Lisbon earthquake was a major event in intellectual history. According to V. S. Pritchard in The New Statesman and Nation the destruction of the city of Lisbon by earthquake in 1755 changed the mind of Europe. In our own time the comparable event is the bombing of Hiroshima. A period of optimism in both cases comes to an end. For Thomas Kendrick has gone into the immense literature of exhortation which grew out of it and the controversy that followed. The book is rich in instances of good sense and folly and the over ready moralists come out badly, end of quote.

The Lisbon earthquake was an earthquake of very considerable dimension, as Sir Thomas Kendrick says, “No one will ever know the number of people who lost their lives in the Lisbon earthquake.” The best and most careful estimates say that probably between 10 and 15,000 out of a population of perhaps 275,000 lost their lives.

But it was not the earthquake itself in the sense of a destructive act, the buildings the were destroyed and the people that died that was the real disaster, but what it did to the minds of people. The Enlightenment had prevailed until then. The Enlightenment believed in the goodness of man, in a deistic God who had created the best of all possible worlds and, in a general kind of situation in which everything favored man. And suddenly to their horror, they were confronted with a tremendous disaster. Why did God allow it to happen?

Their perspective was man centered. Instead of having the old Westminster Confession and Catechisms perspective, the chief of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever no matter what happens, they tended to believe that the chief of God was to glorify man and to enjoy man forever. So it was a great shock. And Voltaire, for example, said, “We know nothing. Nature has no message for us. God does not speak.”

So the conclusion was there was not God out there who was interested in man. There was only a cruel and blind necessity, perhaps, or a God who didn’t care.

Romanticism arose partly because instead of the Rationalism of the Enlightenment, men turned to an irrationalism as the answer, to a romantic view, to a belief that man had to be heroic in the face of adversity, heroic in a kind of ironic and for Byron it meant in a satanic sense, defying everything and saying, “I will work my will in the face of all that God or nature throws at me.” To get the flavor of that all one has to do is to read the plays of Byron.

Now the point I am making is that the Lisbon earthquake was not the worst earthquake in history. In this century there have been worse earthquakes, but it was an intellectual event because it shattered to the complacency of man, shattered the kind of false faith they had. So disasters have differing effects depending upon the mentality and the faith of people as they face those disasters.

Well, with that general statement, Otto, would you like to pick up and make a general statement or a specific one about the subject?

[Scott] Well, I think your remarks are very interesting. It is true that the Lisbon earthquake was used by Voltaire and others to argue that there is no God. And that is a sort of a reflection of a great many reactions when misfortune strikes. It amounts to a judgment to the effect that I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t create it if I were God. Any God who did such a thing to innocent people should not... is not a real good God and, therefore, there is no God. But it is very hard to generalize about the quality of faith. The intellectuals had moved out of faith before the Lisbon earthquake. They used it to continue their arguments, whether this went across the board for everybody else, I don’t know. But I do know that the reaction to disaster is almost a projection of one’s own position.

I was at lunch last Sunday with some ladies at the Field Club in Greenwich, Connecticut and the conservation got around to Central America and I mentioned the earthquake that leveled the city of Managua. You can sit in the Intercontinental Hotel, which is on a sort of a hill on the edge of the city of Managua... where the city used to be. That whole city with all those thousands of people—nobody knows how many—but may, many more than in Lisbon, was leveled in 20 minutes, completely and everybody in it was destroyed with the cafes, the restaurants, the office buildings, everything, the homes, the apartments houses, everything. Oddly enough you look out across that rubble and when I was down there in 19... I have forgotten the year now, but just in Somoza’s last season, you could look from the hotel window across all this rubble and in the farther distance was the cathedral which had been left untouched and one or two government buildings built in the old Latin style. Now Somoza was better than the Portuguese in one sense. He said, “We are not going to build on that site of disaster again.” And he inspired new areas to build, because he said, “We have been building on top of this terrible site too long too often.”

The thing that I... the reason that I bring it up now is that the ladies that I described this to got very wide eyed and none of them were young. They were all here when that occurred, but an earthquake in Managua, Nicaragua is so minor and unimportant to the average...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...American, that they couldn’t remember it for a week after it occurred.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Any more than they remember the earthquake in Mexico City which happened just a few years ago. So it is really the reactions to disaster that is interesting.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The Voltarians of that time that you mention in the middle of the 18th century used everything against God, everything. And, of course, the people who believed them, the people who follow that line of argument were left bereft because if there is no God, then there is no meaning to anything.

[Rushdoony] Yes. One of the interesting things is that Voltaire and others had nothing to say or very little to say about the fact that when the earthquake struck and people were radically helpless, the heroic work done, the remarkable work done was by various orders of monks and by the priests. Their work to alleviate distress, hurt, hunger and so on was phenomenal. An interesting side note is that one of the buildings leveled was the building of the Inquisition and they went to work immediately to set up temporary quarters rather than to do anything. But the rest of the church in Lisbon did remarkable work.

[Scott] I think this is a good point... a good time to point out that the Inquisition never arrested anyone who didn’t claim to be a Christian.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That is a fact that is hardly ever noted.

[Rushdoony] That is right. Well...

[Scott] Well the spiritual... one would expect persons who have a spiritual vocation to react to disaster without falling apart. The priests, father Damian, I think it was, who worked with the lepers was not surprised to eventually contract leprosy. He knew that if he associated with it long enough that it was an inevitable outcome. And it is almost like going to sea. I think one of Conrad’s most interesting book about the sea was the typhoon where this particular captain had never really seen a typhoon. He had been a few gales, a few storms, but he didn’t... he couldn’t visualize a typhoon and he was totally unconcerned when he was told about them until he got in one.

Now we had a typhoon in the... there was a typhoon in the Pacific at the close of World War II which took down into the deep and all hands aboard several destroyers of the United... of the American navy. A typhoon is really it. It is the greatest of all possible storms. But there are people who, I think, Conrad’s point was that there are people who go through life almost as though God doesn't think they are important enough to give them problems. They go through life just like kids in a kindergarten or somebody who is schooled. Nothing every seems to happen to them. It hardly ever rains on their picnic or their parade and others get every kind of test imaginable. And I would say a natural disaster is a test of God.

[Rushdoony] Well, on a ... the way people react, of course, has a great deal to do with their faith. One of the most memorable books I have ever read was the book by Salvian the Presbyter, S A L V I A N, The Governance of God. It was an account of the fall of the Roman Empire. It is not well known like Augustine’s work, but in some respects it is the greater work as far as a description of what happened is concerned, because Salvian describes the horrors that ensued, the unwillingness of people to face them, how when Trier was destroyed the people were in the coliseum for the games unwilling to defend the city and the survivors petitioned the emperor to rebuild the coliseum to improve their morale.

And Salvian’s whole point was that the horrors, grim as they were—and he was an eye witness to them—were better than the alternative. Rome had to fall, he said. And the judgment on Rome was a demonstration of the grace of God. And yet Augustine, a very great man also, all the same fell apart to a degree.

[Scott] Well, he didn’t fall apart. He was grieved. He was grieved and I would say that generally speaking if you don’t feel grief when you see a great disaster that you are rather strange.

[Rushdoony] Well, perhaps my choice of words was not all together good, but the point he made which the City of God demonstrates and there is so much in the City of God that is marvelous and so much that is tiresome to read through. But essentially it turned him into a pessimist. He could see no hope in history except more and more disaster until the end so that Amillennialism owes its origin to Augustine because he said things will get worse and worse until the end of the world.

[Scott] Well, he was right for a long time. They certainly did get rather bad.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And when you use the collapse of a great civilization that is something which is not really an ordinary experience. We are going through it and it is impossible and it is for everyone of us who are descendants of small and defeated nations and races not to feel grief over those defeats and those collapse. I would... I am always a little bit reluctant to define God’s purposes. They may be very clear to Salvian, but there were Christians in Rome in the fifth century and a lot of them who suffered in that debacle.

[Rushdoony] And in Trier were {?}.

[Scott] In Trier, that is right. So this is a ... it is one of the great subjects, not easily dismissed. And when you think of all the different types of disasters you wonder or I wonder about the insouciance of the average American. I remember that at the invasion of Saipan at the end of the second.. say, the first 10 days or something like that of... I went together with several other men from my vessel to a naval vessel because they were showing the movie. And we, of course, didn’t have any of those wonderful amenities. We didn’t have any ice cream cones or anything on the merchant vessels. And we used to think that you were awful lucky to be in the navy.

But at any rate we went over to see the movie and it turned out to be a Boris Karloff movie in which Karloff was playing, I don’t know what, a grave digger or some ... some crazy thing. He had capes on and a big hat and he was in one point... he was driving a stage coach and there was a cadaver bumping against him and he was showing great terror. And everybody on the... in the audience burst into hysterical laughter because there were bodies piled up like cord wood on the beach where the trench diggers had gone to work to bury them. You know, this idea they told the people back home that everyone has an individual grave and all that. It is just nonsense. They threw them all in and they gathered up their ID and that was it.

And the idea of being afraid of a dead man in the middle of the war was ludicrous.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So disaster provokes, I think, the essence of the individual.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Now, of course, as an Armenian I know something about disasters and massacres and I heard many, many stories as a boy of what happened. And one of the things that interested me was that two kinds of people survived it easily. And when I say easily I say that deliberately, because when you are in a situation what you do is to pick them up and put them down. Afterwards the horror of it all hits you, the brutal murders, people dropping dead around you. But in the process you are picking them up and putting them down. You don’t have time to do much else than to survive.

Those that had a strong faith and those who took things who—they all were professed believers—as simple people, this is happening. There was one thing to do. And who did it, they survived. But a small handful who were intellectuals and who had a great deal to lose, who had, say, beautiful homes or a library or art objects and had to turn, walk away from that. They tended to lose their minds and never regain their sanity in some instances, because they were concentrating on what they had lost rather than picking up their feet and putting them down one by one to get to safety.

[Scott] Well, physical events, most people as far as I recall in my experience and observation—and I haven't seen this written anywhere—most people can come up to a physical event rather well. The blitz in London people did not fall apart. And lots of places were bombed and set on fire. They fled into the underground, into the subway and in some cases under the table if you couldn’t leave right away and so forth. I only saw a couple of men show fear at sea openly. And one of them was a radio operator who had a breakdown and the other was just temporarily overcome. We saw a ship going down near us and, in fact, it went through the survivors and there were people still struggling in the water. It is moral, moral courage is much more rare. And my feeling about possessions, of course, is that they are not the most important things. Perhaps they mean more to some than others. I noticed in the fires up here and in this area when people are told to vacate their homes because the blazes are coming close and all that, they take the usual things out, photographs, the bird cage, all kinds of crazy objects.

I sat down and made a list of what I should get, but I am not sure that if such an event occurs that I will ever follow the list. And it... it reminds me of the old joke to lighten the matter just a little bit. There was this fellow bragged about his dog waking up the family because there was a fire in the house. And the other one said, “Well, that is nothing. My dog did the same. The only thing is that after we were out and we were watching the blaze and the firemen were there, the dog ran back and came out again with the insurance policy wrapped in a wet towel.”

Animals, you know, seem to be brave almost always. But, on the other hand, an animal isn’t afraid to cry. It isn’t afraid to whimper and it isn’t afraid to run away. It doesn’t do things for show.

[Rushdoony] Some years ago Dorothy and I were talking with a man who had twice been in concentration camps during World War II and after World War II. And he said the people who could not escape were the ones who wanted to take things with them. And he said that the way to escape from a country was to walk out of your house as though you were going down to the corner to buy a newspaper or you and your wife were going to a film. Then you went to the railroad station and bought a ticket for the next place, got off there and bought it for the next place until you were where you could run for the border.

But he said so many people would pack a suitcase or two of their prized possessions and they never made it because it was obvious what they were doing.

[Scott] That was in Germany, I imagine.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They have very well policed country or... or France if that ever happens to France, another police state. The ... I don’t know in the future if the future turns dark and if Collectivism continues its seduction of the West, it is beginning to collapse in the East, but it is beginning... it survives in the West. I was on the air just yesterday on a debate with somebody who represents what he calls the people to people organization. He claims 32,000 members and they are agitating to stop all U S government aid to the government of El Salvador. Well, now El Salvador is a living disaster. It is a tiny little country. It has only a little over five million people. The discussion was on a radio station in Los Angeles and metropolitan Los Angeles has 18 million people and there are murders every day in Los Angeles, but this fellow was worried about the death squads, as he called it, in El Salvador. And I had to admit that both sides are probably savage fighters, because that is the tradition of the people in Central America. They are very bloody. And both sides do this.

But one side is elected and the other side is unelected. One side represents western values and the other side represents Marxism, Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama today and so forth. And there was nothing in this man’s conversation or his debate position which gave you the idea that he had any understanding of what it means to live in a country like El Salvador where there is a deliberate effort to destroy everything that makes life worth living for a purely immediate political goal.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now that is one of the greatest of disasters, because it means the deliberate destruction of civilization.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is a very telling point. The great disaster of our time is the deliberate destruction of civilization.

Otto, you made a very, very important point that the great disaster of our time is the deliberate destruction of civilization. This is being done by the churches, by the media, by the business community, by the unions, by every segment of our society. As you perhaps know, this past week someone, a very prominent man in the business world in three states and very prominent in other spheres of life was just arrested for murder and, of course, is being charged with it. And this alleged murderer apparently hired two men to commit the act, a partner who had become disillusioned with his dishonesty and had broken with him.

Now the interesting thing is that apparently a great many people in the community knew who the ostensible murderer was and kept quiet, because they did not want involved and did not have the moral courage to deal with a powerful person and to oppose him.

Now that is a very, very prevalent and a serious thing. Instances of that sort are occurring all the time. When people, whether in church or state or business or labor lacking moral courage tolerate evil and wait for somebody else to bail them out.

[Scott] Well, in large measure, it seems to be a failure of community. One of the things that is responsible for a display of courage in war time is the fact that everyone else around you is in the same situation. You don’t want to disgrace yourself by turning yellow and all that. But that means that you have a discipline underway. War time, generally speaking, there is not always true. It wasn’t true in France. It wasn’t true before Hitler or in the face of Hitler’s onslaughts in all places, but there is a sense of a larger value which binds people together during this time of pressure.

The English, of course, are very proud of their ability to rise up to physical situations of this sort. And, for that matter, I must admit that in the British Isles you get a great deal more straight answers than you will here. People are not afraid to contradict you. They are not afraid to say what they think. This is just a generality, of course. But here the sense of community has almost vanished. We have been under a constant attack by the media as a nation. Every day and every hour they drip acid into our veins. They tell us that no news is news unless it is bad news.

Now a diet of bad news conducted all your life, what is wrong with the country, what is wrong with its leaders, what is wrong with its working class, what is wrong with its groups and you have a loss of morale. You have a loss of feeling for other people because the constant litany of crime and vice hardens the softest heart. Plus what we see in the television, the Sadism of Hollywood and so forth. We have the ... we have the psyche, you might say of the Romans and their games who saw actual murders and deaths all the time. And you recall that in the end the Roman theater actually killed slaves in the play.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The murder... well, what is a snuff film? What are these simulated murders here? So how much feeling there is ordinarily speaking in the community when somebody who is prominent like this particular suspect was, is prominent who has money and connections is not going to come forward. Nobody is... dares to enter an American court. You don’t know what is going to happen to the witness. There is no witness protection program excepting for criminals who turn traitor on their associates. They are the ones who get the protection. Other witnesses don’t get protected.

[Rushdoony] And that is breaking down now, too. That is creating further problems for law enforcement.

[Scott] All right.

[Rushdoony] The criminal protection program is faltering.

[Scott] It is faltering. And the feeling of brotherhood, the feeling of concern for fellow Americans, the very fact that we are all in this great national boat together seems to have almost vanished from sight.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So therefore you are not going to get people to come forward in a matter that might involve them in something quite unpleasant. Suppose they do come forward. Then they are witnesses. They are treated as though they are criminals. They are subpoenaed. If they don’t answer the subpoena they will be dragged out by the scruff of the neck. They will have to go up against a rapier tongued lawyer.

[Rushdoony] And a witness can be impugned and treated in a way in which the accused man cannot be.

[Scott] Well the ... the witness doesn’t have the protections of an accused man. If there is something in the background of the witness that he doesn’t want exposed, well, then is he going to come forward? We have somehow or another begun to lose the national ethos, this sense of national community, the idea that you should do something simply because it is worth doing in its own right. And morality and morale go together. Faith and morals, of course, is a subject, you know, of some ridicule. It is a matter of interest to me that people like Jim Bakker was headlined on Nightline for six nights and running, his disgrace, by people whose lives are totally disgraceful.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You have to be remarkably unselfconscious to take part in these sort of lynchings. And, of course, in a way this is a great disaster that we are involved in.

[Rushdoony] Well, there is another disaster we are involved in. It is the disaster that is in the making. Economically and in other ways we are moving into a crises. President Bush can be in the same position as Herbert Hoover as in 1929. But more important than that is of how some people were jumping out of windows in 29, how many are there now who will be able to take it? Most people then were able to take the disaster in their stride.

[Scott] That is true, because they came out of a hard period.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] No one in those days ever expected the government to intervene. That was the last thing in anyone’s mind. And if you consider that in 1929 people who had been born around the turn of the century or earlier who were brought up in, relatively speaking, austere circumstances compared to the soft way we live today. So there are a great many things which they didn’t have and they didn’t miss. Today there has been a great explosion of luxuries and games and that sort of thing, sort of an extended childhood. I would... I would anticipate that if we have a really deep crisis, economic, financial crisis, we will have a social, political and religious crisis to go with it that the major reason... reaction will be one of anger against the government which has, in effect, told everyone you needn’t worry. We will always take care of you. And when the government proves unable to take care of people then we can see the rise of the demagogues.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I shall never forget the statement I heard in 1971 in a supermarket after the San Fernando Valley earthquake when people were discussing in the next day or two everywhere and, in this instance, at a checkout line at a supermarket and someone remarked and nobody laughed: Why doesn’t the government do something about it? About an earthquake.

[Scott] Well, you know, do you remember the ... the first big blackout in New York?

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes.

[Scott] Well, I was on my... I was in a plane sitting at the airport when the blackout occurred. And my first reaction was that the Russians have moved. Fortunately there was someone on the plane that had a transistor radio and we discovered that it was just an electrical blackout. Nevertheless I felt terrible when the plane went up into the air and I looked down at that black hole and there was my wife and daughter down there left alone. And I thought, I am going to have to leave New York. I can’t put up with this.

But they actually did. There were several editorials after that to the effect that an industrial accident of the sort should not be permitted to occur. And right now they are very... the environmentalist movement and the courts and the government is working very seriously together to criminalize industrial accidents and to find not only an accident and the company responsible for the accident and the damage that the accident occurs, but the individuals involved, the plant manager, for instance and the chairman and so forth individually responsible of the results of an accident. So an accident has ceased to mean what we always thought it meant.

[Rushdoony] Meanwhile the major area of disasters looming up is in the federally, state and city owned facilities, utilities, infrastructure, bridges, roads, water lines. I learned this week that in one city because the gas lines are so old there are explosions regularly.

[Scott] New York.

[Rushdoony] Is that happening in New York?

[Scott] Oh, indeed.

[Rushdoony] This was a western city.

[Scott] There was a... there was a tremendous gas explosion in Gramercy Park which, as you probably know, is one of the more elegant enclaves of the city. The apartment houses in the rectangle that surround Gramercy Park, Gramercy Park is a private park. You have to have a key to get into it. And the ownership is divided among the people who live around the park. Well now these individuals have been evicted from their homes because it says it is unsafe and they have not been able to go back in even to pick up an item of clothing. And, of course, these are apartments which are long ago made cooperative which are extremely expensive. So their property is in a ... a very bad financial state and they are living with friends or whatever and it is in the heart of downtown Manhattan, a very elegant place.

And the gas thing... the gas main blew up, blew up, broke the sidewalk and so forth. New York is having these kind of catastrophes all along, all the time. Nothing is said about it once the event makes the headlines in one or two follow up stories. Then everything settles back.

[Rushdoony] Is the gas company there now a part of the city? Does the city own it?

[Scott] I am not sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because you know that liberals have been running New York for a long time. They have been sitting in garbage up to their waist telling the rest of the country how stupid it is.

[Rushdoony] Well, especially where utilities are municipally owned, the disintegration is reaching the disaster stage.

[Scott] That is no joke.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] That is no joke at all. Now with all of the unemployed we have had through the years what could have been done with the amount of money that has been spent to take care of the physical infrastructure of the nation? You know that in the Ancion regime days men used to be drafted to take care of the infrastructure of the country a certain number of weeks or months of the year, because even then they knew that somebody had to keep the roads up. Somebody had to build the bridges. Somebody had to do all this essential work.

[Rushdoony] They would meet in the rural areas in the church on a given Sunday and the men would be assigned by the community leaders. This was not by a mayor or public officials. It was some of the leaders and it would follow after church. They would get up. They would say a bridge needs rebuilding or a road needs mending. We will have a detail and we will expect you men to be there and notify such and such a man. And this is the way it was done.

[Scott] Well, now it is going on. It is discussed. Roads take some very strange paths through some lucrative property. Practically nothing in this area can be trusted to be accomplished on its merits. And if certain areas have wealthier homes it is... they have better paved roads than other areas will just have dirt roads and so forth. That sort of thing just goes on.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But overall the 19th century was a great engineering century. Most of what we inherited in the 20th century was accomplished for us by our predecessors in the 19th.

[Rushdoony] And by the immigrant working men who built the subways, built the pipelines, everything that makes...

[Scott] Well, it provided... it provided... they provided the labor.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The subways in New York for an awfully long time were maintained by Irish immigrants. Now that the United States has decided the Irish are not proper people to allow into the country along several years back, a couple of decades ago the Irish grew out of that and now they are having a great deal of trouble finding maintenance workers for the subway in New York.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Now the immigrants that are preferred seem to be from non Christian countries.

[Scott] Well, very definitely, it is a majority and not a minority. I have recently read about it. the majority of people entering the country today come from non Caucasian races and non Christian areas. That, of course, is a deliberate policy on the part of nameless bureaucrats in the United States government. None of these immigration rules and even the numbers of people who come in are ever seen to be published by the press or covered by these tireless photographers. The same is true in ... in... throughout Europe.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The complexion of Europe is changing. The complexion of Britain... Britain, of course, is the first country to put the world... the door down. And they have said they will not encourage any further immigration of that sort because it is proving to be socially and culturally destructive.

Well, we have never taken that position. We have always taken the position and always believed that we could welcome people form anywhere in the world and if they would benefit our society. In the main I think that particular believe has bee fairly well verified. But we could run into a problem on the cultural level and on a religious level that we had not anticipated.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I was amused this week to find in my reading that Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in speaking of the barbarian invasions said that Europe would not suffer such an indignity again. A very poor prophet he was.

[Scott] Well, he was a product of the Enlightenment.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He absolutely... he... he defended hereditary royalty, because he said it ... it... it ended the possibility of arguments over who was to head the government. He was very much a man of his time.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He felt that both Judaism and Christianity were responsible for the decline of Paganism, which is rather remarkable. He doesn’t hold the pagans responsible of their own decline. That thought is pretty weird.

[Rushdoony] Well I think one of the things that we have to recognize, as I said earlier, we are living in a disaster prone century. And we are likely to see the worst of the disasters ahead of us before the ground is cleared for a new civilization. And there are a great many who will not be able to survive because psychologically they will have no firm ground to stand upon, having no faith.

[Scott] Well, of course, faith is the ultimate. If you have a disaster, a personal disaster and I think the doctors are finally coming around to something that people have always known that personal disasters that affect you life affect your health and constitute tremendous challenges, a divorce, a death in the family, a serious illness, all these things, test you to the last millimeter. But if you are allowed to live through the disaster, then, of course, you have a different life and a new life ahead of you. And losing a job...

I recall having this discussion when I was running a magazine with a man that I wanted to leave the magazine. And everyone said, “Well, he has been here a good period of time. He is a good family man. He has a nice wife an children. Otto, don’t you think that is too hard?”

And I said, “Well, he is out of place. He is doing a lousy job. He is standing in the way of progress. If we get rid of him, I think we can improve our circulation and our revenues to the point where we might be able to hire two or three other people who will probably also have nice wives and children.”

And finally in desperation in order to get rid of this fellow I had to line up secretly another job for him and they called and offered it to him and so he came in and told me off and he left. But it really was about the only way I could do it, because they... we have here a very curious combination of callousness and feminine arguments. At one and the same time we know that there is less real compassion in the country than there ever has been and yet there is more talk...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... about caring than we have ever done.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is a strange paradox.

[Rushdoony] And people in print, at least, pride themselves on the fact that mankind has finally learned to care.

[Scott] Oh. It makes me sick to listen to it. My teeth ache.

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is virtually over. Is there a concluding statement that you have, Otto? We have two, three minutes in which you can develop it.

[Scott] Well, I can only say this, that in most instances—not all—but in a great many instances the worst thing that can happen to us is that we die. We are going to die anyway. I mean, if we don’t know that, we are going to find out. And for a Christian death is not the end.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And this is a very important point which we don't hear about too often. Death is not the end. Dying is not difficult. People die all the time and we will and we try to do it. Let’s leave properly, as they say, as my father used to put it. It is much more difficult.

I had a conversation with a man in Los Angeles who has his own business who is paralyzed from the neck down and he was in his office. He was dressed. He was wearing a business suit and he was on a sort of a gourd that could be moved up and down that was on wheels. His secretary would feed him and he was running a business and he was doing very well at it and he was a very bright man. I didn’t ask him how he came to be paralyzed, but he was living through something that most people would say would be sufficient reason to fight with God. He showed no signs of it whatever. And I do believe that what you said is that faith... God will take care of you. And if he doesn’t, if he decides that it is time to call you home, well, then that that is that. Disaster is not something that should be feared.

[Rushdoony] No. Well, thank you all for listening and we pray that as we face the disasters that are going to come, you realize that these disasters are the prelude to God accomplishing his work in history for his kingdom. And if you see them as God’s opportunity and our opportunity. Thanks for listening.

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