From the Easy Chair

Tribal Work Ethic

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 57-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BC101

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BC101, Tribal Work Ethic from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 211, February the fifth, 1990.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss the matter of work with Tim Vaughn. A while back we were discussing certain aspects of life in Papua with Tim Vaughn and we just barely touched on the subject of work. And perhaps this interests me more than some of the other very excellent areas we explored.

When I was among the Indians, the thing I learned was that the great problem of the transition from the old ways of the Indians to the ways of white Americans was work. Some of the great chiefs of the last century when they made peace with the white man recognized that the direction they had to take was a very different one. In the old culture the function of men was hunting, fishing and especially warring and that was identified with a man’s life and a man’s work.

Some of the tribes, especially in some of the eastern areas were agricultural, but the agricultural work was the work of the woman. And even these western chiefs who told their people,

“There is no future for us in our way of life. Our way of life is a different and a barren one. Food is a problem. We have experienced all kinds of difficulties and now we have an opportunity to live a different way of life. And we have got to change our lifestyle to that of the white man.”

And they themselves called on the tribes men to adopt in some areas, for example, agriculture. And even these chiefs, however, if some stranger came up or another Indian and saw them with a shovel in their hand he would become embarrassed and put it behind the tree or behind their back, because their immediate reaction was one of shame and embarrassment to be seen doing what, for them, was a woman’s work. The only successful transition was to cattle work in those areas where cattle could be kept, because there they were riding on horses and that, to them, was the epitome of a good way to live. So cattle work they took to very successfully.

Now this problem of work, to say just a little more on the subject before we begin, has been a problem in most of the world. It is a problem in Europe going back to the days of the European tribes. Work has always been seen as the property of underlings.

Some years ago in the 50s two men, brothers-in-law, were in Europe and the one was a minor executive of a corporation. The other was a very successful farmer. In fact, the farmer was really better off than his brother-in-law. And yet everywhere they went, people who came to know what they were back here, immediately treated the farmer with disrespect and the minor executive with great respect. He was a dignitary because he was associated with a great corporation and he worked behind a desk, not with his hands.

In European culture that vein of thinking is still very, very strong. The Puritans offered that and in this country it became a matter of contempt if you were retired or did not work or lived off your wealth. And there was a great deal of respect for a long time until fairly recent years for the working man. It used to be presidents liked to say when they ran for office the kind of manual work they had done as they had worked their way up.

Less and less of that is heard these days from candidates. They are the friends of the people. They are not workers, per se.

As a result, we are shifting to the same kind of disrespect for work that our Puritan background has made us different from all cultures.

Now on the mission field this is one of the great problems. It is easy sometimes, other times very difficult, to convert the native people, but to teach them to work is another problem.

With that introduction, Tim, do you want to make a general statement about the situation in Papua? And then, Otto, perhaps you can comment on that and add a general statement of your own.

[Vaughn] Yes. What you said about an Indian hiding his shovel behind his back in shame brings back some embarrassing memories for myself. I am an avid gardener and love every form of agriculture. Otherwise I wouldn’t have spent all my life doing it and five years in college. And when I got to Papua New Guinea it wasn’t any different. And one of the first things I did was to grab a spade from somebody and go into a rather large beautiful tropical garden to start working in it. And immediately all women of the village lined up and started laughing at me. And I was so embarrassed, I never did it again the whole time I was there.

So, yes, it is true I... it is still true in Papua New Guinea as it was among the American Indian and among just about every other group of third world people I know of. But, yes, it was the woman... it was the women’s work. And getting them to convert to the western, the Christian idea of a man providing for his family was very, very difficult.

[Scott] But not impossible.

[Vaughn] But not impossible. It didn't happen quickly as we would have ... a lot of my friends back home seem to... seem to have expected it may take... it make take two or three generations at times. You don’t expect somebody to change right away.

[Scott] Two or three generations.

[Vaughn] Two or three generations.

[Scott] That is 60 to 90 years.

[Vaughn] Right. Well, the tribe I was at, the man had been there 20... 25 years, I think. And it... there had been Christians there for probably 15 and there was a difference between that tribe that was Christianized and I don’t mean that everybody in it was a Christian. I just mean that they had a tremendous amount of exposure to the gospel, plus a lot of... a lot of active churches. There was not a whole lot of difference between them and some of the other tribes. There was some, but not a whole lot.

[Scott] Well, there are some historians who believe that agriculture was developed by women, because they were blessed with children and men were out hunting or fighting and it was the women who experimented and who created agriculture. And I have a feeling that that is probably accurate, especially when you say that it is considered women’s work in various primitive societies.

But I think in our own society today the idea of work has not exactly been abandoned. It is gone through a transformation. Mr. Snapp who wrote a review of Buried Treasure that book on {?} I just finished, was very much struck in his review by the hard work that the managers did. And I know when I was a corporate executive that in a fairly small town we worked six days a week as a matter of course and we had policy meetings on Sunday. And I was in New York and somebody said, “Well, what do you?”

I said, “We work.” I said, “We even have meetings on Sunday.”

He said, “Don't tell me you enjoy that.”

I said, “Well, in comparison to sitting home watching nothing, yes. It is a lot better than sitting around.”

And that aspect of work doesn’t seen to be commented upon much, that it is a satisfaction.

[Rushdoony] Well, it is a satisfaction if there is the problem religious motivation. But if there is no faith, then everything is meaningless except enjoying. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

Years ago I recall talking with a man who had lived most of his life in Africa. He was a European. And he said one of the reasons for the lack of progress in Africa was the attitude towards work. He felt that people in the United States did not have the proper view of Africans, because, he said, the various tribes would send over the people that were regarded as no account. They would be sold by the chiefs to the slave traders. But eh said when you meet with the Africans in Africa you find a high caliber as far as intelligence and ability. But the attitude towards work is what holds them back. And he said the reason for polygamy there is that it frees the man from work. He will work long enough, and that is why so many go to South Africa to get jobs, in order to be able to get two or three wives. And then they stop working, because the wives do it all. And he said it is this attitude that holds back Africa and leads the men to a life of beer drinking and shiftlessness so that Africa is getting nowhere.

[Scott] I thought it was mainly the lack of innovation. I was, I recall, on a banana boat one time in Central America. I had flood lights on. We were unloading the bananas on a 24 hour basis. And these little brown men with no shirts each had a complete stand of bananas on his shoulder and would run at a little trot past a man in a machete who would cut the stem off with one stroke as two lines of men went and they would put the stem down on a carrier, on a conveyor and the conveyor would go up and down into the hold of the vessel and men inside the hatch would stack them up. And they were all... had perspiration running down their bodies. They glistened under the lights. And I .... it was the United Fruit Company ship and I was standing at the rail watching with one of the officers. And the United Fruit Company in those days was very proud of its fleet. The officers wore white uniforms and they were all very sharp and I said to this fellow, “Why do you think this country has never really developed? Why hasn’t it advanced?”

And looking at them working like that. He said, “They don't work.” They didn’t know how to work is what he meant.

[Rushdoony] There was a... there was a Canadian scientist who wrote a monograph about 20 years ago on African inventiveness. And I remember one thing he cited. He said, “Long before any such thing was discovered in the West, the Africans had developed a system whereby a sedan chair to carry the king form place to place was so built that they could go up and down a street in a straight slope going up at quite an angle, up and down rocks and always keep the sedan chair on even keel so that the never was tilted up or down. It was a kind of suspension system that automobile manufacturers have only invented in our lifetime. And he said that type of thing was invented in Africa only for kings and chiefs, for nobody else. It was never the property of the people. And he said the inventiveness of Africa applied only to that which benefited people at the top. And he said, “This is one of the things that has held back a people with a great deal of potential.”

Of course, we have already said work is another thing and a contempt for work.

[Vaughn] Yeah. I wonder sometimes if it isn’t foresight or the lack of foresight isn’t one of the main things, perhaps the main thing. You would often talk to a person over there and I have noticed it with the same... with some of my laborers from different states in Mexico when I was contracting along the coast that you would say to them, “Well, why don’t you buy, for instance, a case of ... of sardines in Papua New Guinea or a case of Coke in the United States to save some money. Maybe you can save two, three dollars on a case rather than buying individually one a piece every day.” And they would always say to me, “Well, that is not very much money. It will never add up to anything.”

They didn’t have any understanding that it does add up to things. And they wouldn’t apply it to the rest of their life. And I noticed that some of the Chinese when I was in Papua New Guinea and some of the Japanese that I was around on the coast, they would do that, they would buy it by the case, for instance, and of course, that applied to the rest of their life as well. And within a few years of getting out of prisoner of war camps and withy the end of World War II the Japanese were to most... to mostly successful in the Mexican, did not progress at all.

Perhaps it just a lack of understanding of the basic premise of Capitalism. I am not sure.

[Scott] That is what the sociologists call the present oriented and the future oriented. The future oriented will sacrifice in the present for a future goal and it is generally speaking true of working class people around the world is that if they have a good week, they drink it up. And not particularly confined to Mexicans or anyone else. Mexico is very hard working country. In fact, Latin America in general is filled with people who work very hard, but they work inside a very poor system which is what you were referring to in Africa, Rush.

[Rushdoony] And a present orientation, as you cited earlier.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Not a future orientation.

[Scott] Right. As well as when you are very poor it is like Russell DeYoung’s father. His father was the janitor and Russell’s first job was carrying water to the brick layers. And then he got up to being a hod carrier which is a... a pretty heavy job. It made him muscular. His father used to shake him down for most of his salary.

I said, “How do you feel about that?”

And as the old man used to drink beer with it.

Well, he said, he had a pretty sad life, you know. He said, “I really didn’t... didn’t... didn’t hold it against him.”

[Rushdoony] One of the interesting aspects... I am glad you brought up this matter of present and future orientation. When I was on the Indian reservation we had one Indian judge who accomplished more than any other judge. Her name was Mary Smith.

[Scott] A woman judge?

[Rushdoony] Yes. A woman judge. Her husband had been the judge for years and became stone deaf. And he was a very superior man, judicious. But Mary was an even better judge, because she applied the premise of child training to all criminals. And Mary had been a church member, but she had dropped out with a great deal of bitterness, really. She had six or seven children, as I recall it and all but one died of TB. And she became recluse after that.

But as judge and she had learned something that none of the Indians had except in very rare cases of Christians, disciplining a child because the Indians never disciplined their children. It was totally alien to them. And Mary believed in that. And her premise was if a child misbehaves, clobber him immediately, because the longer you put it off the less the connection between what they have done wrong and the punishment. And she applied that in the court. So if somebody were brought in, she didn’t wait until a week later to try them. She would spend all day if there were a great many of them and have them brought out one by one from the jail and read them the riot act and hit them hard with her sentence. And it had a very salutary effect.

[Scott] Well, it would have, yes.

[Rushdoony] Did you find that in Papua, for example?

[Vaughn] Well, I found the same problem, but I didn’t find the same solution. That... yeah, they... they don't... as we talked before, they ... they never spank their kids and, of course, that has a lot to do with the lack of discipline which maybe is the underlying cause of the lack of work ethic rather than... rather than a delayed gratification or the lack thereof.

One time a little kid was getting very obnoxious at a Bible study that the old missionary was putting on and he grabbed the kid and turned him over to me and spanked him and everybody {?} before, but that child from then on was the best behaved child of the {?} tribe. That one act of discipline really mended him.

[Scott] It depends upon the kid.

[Vaughn] That is true, too. Some take more than others, like mine.

[Scott] I... it didn’t work for me. And it doesn’t work for everybody. I never found it necessary for one thing.

[Vaughn] Well, the Scriptures are clear that if you... if you do spare the rod you hate your child. And so, you know, when you apply that on a... on a cultural basis, it is... you are going to reap a... reap the rewards of it.

[Rushdoony] And it depends on how you spank a child.

[Scott] I think it... I think it depends on the culture. I can intimidate without necessarily hitting. I never had any problem on that score.

[Rushdoony] Well, a lot depends on the parents attitude as they chastise the child. They can do it in the wrong way. But one of the things that was very difficult for some missionaries on Indian reservations was this matter of child training, because if they were seen publicly spanking their child, they could be permanently damaged in the eyes of the Indians. You never frustrated a child. As a result, the children grew up without any ambition, so to speak, without any inner discipline and frustration to them created major problems. This is why by the time they were in the fourth or fifth grade they were alcoholics, because life was full of frustrations.

[Scott] Well, we are getting that now.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Here. And we are not Indians.

[Rushdoony] But because we are also seeing the disappearance of any kind of chastisement of children.

[Vaughn] Right.

[Rushdoony] It doesn't give them the discipline that leads to good work habits and to recognizing that this world is going to frustrate you. You can’t live without having various frustrations. And the child that has never been frustrated is going to run into major problems.

[Scott] Well, we run into this. There is a difference in cultures. The Jewish culture is a very soft regarding their children, especially the boys. Jewish mothers are famous for doting on their sons. Irish culture is not that... that way. An Irish mother would eat up three Jewish mothers before breakfast. They don’t... they don’t... coddle you at all.

On the other hand, physical chastisements are not particularly wise, I think, of very young children.

[Rushdoony] Well, I would say that is debatable.

[Vaughn] I can’t....

[Rushdoony] It depends on the child.

[Scott] It depends on the child.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And, of course, it depends on the atmosphere and...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Vaughn] It still doesn’t... there is at least four verses in Proverbs alone that say... that talk specifically about spanking, about using a rod or ... or something to get physical, to give corporal punishment to a child. And there are all kinds of warnings about the neglect thereof and you can’t just... in my opinion you can’t just say, “Well, one closer would excuse you from ... from having that law applied to you or for having that principle applied to you.”

[Rushdoony] I think...

[Scott] I said there were cultures were different. I didn't say anything about being forgiven. I simply said culture were different.

[Vaughn] Oh, I... I heard you saying that in... in some cases it may not be necessary for...

[Scott] Well, that’s true. It isn’t. Corporal punishment is not always necessary. I could discipline a man, for that matter, without hitting him.

[Rushdoony] I think one of the interesting things I heard some years back was a Jewish radio station program in Los Angeles and it was a discussion of what is happening to their children. Once when they had very strict standards in chastisement, they had rarely any problems, and they said, “Now our children are no different than any others.” So there is a breakdown there and a number of groups that have migrated to this country with very, very strong standards and close knit families have tended to break down here.

[Scott] That is true, mainly because the role of the men in the immigrant families, not in all cultures... again we have to make a distinction. When the Irish families came over here, the men were mostly illiterate, mostly laborers. It was their wives who were able to go out and earn a living. The men lost authority inside the family, lost authority with their wives...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...and with their children and the Irish families were famous for several generations for absolute terrible behavior, total lack of discipline.

On the other hand, the Jewish families came over here and remained quite tight and the men...

[Rushdoony] Because they were orthodox.

[Scott] As long as they were orthodox. Well, there were a... there was a Hasidic and there are others. Generally speaking they were able to stay on their feet rather ... rather well....

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And... and fairly soon the men reestablished themselves as their bread winners and so forth. The black family, on the other hand, a black male did not really exercise the same sort of authority in recent generations that they did earlier. I think up until the New Deal the black male was unquestionably in charge of his family.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But with the introduction of the dole or the government, he lost authority. So then it didn’t matter how many blows were exchanged, the basic structure was weak.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, I think the problem on the mission field is now becoming a world wide problem.

[Scott] It could be.

[Rushdoony] Because we are under the influence of Rousseau, self consciously adopting a primitive standard of child rearing and are hostile to a disciplined social order and society and under the influence of Rousseau we are seeing with each passing decade a dramatic decline in the discipline of children, in their ability to function and their ability to learn.

One of the things I learned when I was young and living on a farm was that life has a lot of frustrations. You plant something and the weather is contrary and you plant again and again. In more recent years they have planted a great deal of cotton in the area where I grew up and sometimes they have had to plant five and six times because bad weather destroys their planting. In the area of vegetables a good many farmers may do well to get a marketable harvest at a reasonable price one year out of three because there are some things that are very weather sensitive.

[Vaughn] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And the wholesalers will not buy anything except quality stuff and it could be that in one year in the San Joaquin Valley the weather is perverse whereas in the Coachella Valley, it will be ideal. So that farming, historically, has a close association with the development of civilization and of high cultures, because farming is a frustrating work. You plant an orchard, as I can vividly remember, and you may plant 500 trees and gophers or rabbits if there are a lot of jackrabbits in the area can destroy 50 or 100 of them the first year. You are continually replanting for one reason or another. It develops patience. It teaches you to live with frustration and not allow it to deflect you from your purposes. And this is precisely what on the mission field among these tribes that is lacking and, of course, in our urban culture today is lacking in the life of the child, frustration.

[Vaughn] The reserves... the... the... the... the reserves that farming gives free up time to do other things. And in Papua New Guinea, the women didn’t have anything else to do but farm. They had to keep farming and farming. Their husbands wouldn’t help and all they could do was farm. They had no free time, none at all. The men had too much free time. If they would have got together and done a lot of work then they could have freed the whole family up to move on to other things.

[Rushdoony] How much food would they store? That is the problem in such cultures.

[Vaughn] Yeah, they didn't store any food. They didn't store any food. And they are... I mentioned in one of the articles that there was a 37 percent mortality rate for kids under five in a tropical paradise with papayas that were two and a half feet long sitting on trees and...

[Rushdoony] Two and a half feet long.

[Vaughn] Huge papayas. Just...

[Scott] Yeah. They run as big as watermelons.

[Vaughn] Yeah, they get big. And then ...

[Rushdoony] And why was there the mortality? Lack of {?}

[Vaughn] Oh, yeah, starvation.

[Rushdoony] Starvation... no food storage?

[Vaughn] Starvation, yeah. They didn’t actually wither away and... and die of... of starvation like you would lock a person in a room for two weeks without food. It was just chronic malnutrition. They ... they could have stored it. They could have dried it. They could have ... they have beautiful brass lamps. When they cut down the rainforests that they could have raised meat that kept, sheep, goat and cow or anything like that. They just wouldn’t do it. They wouldn’t... they didn’t work hard enough to have reserves.

[Scott] Well, you could say the same thing about all sorts of areas of the world, not just Papua.

[Vaughn] Yes.

[Scott] I mean, the interior of Latin America, South America has never been explored. White man has never come out alive, but has untold treasure. The heart of black Africa is probably the most mineral rich area in the... in the globe, but you have to have the knowledge to be able to extract those resources and to process them into useful products, either agriculturally or industrially.

So it really comes down the management of resources and it comes down to the quality of leadership. Western Europe did not begin with cities and nobody sent large commissions and translators and experts from around the world to tell the Europeans how to do it.

[Vaughn] Right.

[Scott] They had to do it and they did it. And, of course, every one of these areas, fundamentally, will have to do it on their own because, as you know from your own life, very few of us accept the other man’s experience for ourselves.

[Vaughn] Right. That is... that is an excellent point.

[Rushdoony] Your point about Europe is very... important. I was reading a study not too long ago and I think we ought to discuss it sometime on the five basic seeds that have made civilization.

[Vaughn] Yes, right.

[Rushdoony] I think I will pass that book around.

[Vaughn] Yeah.

[Rushdoony] It is so important. We ought to discuss it. But cities did not develop in Europe until, under the influence of the monks and the better pastors they learned how to produce better. And then it was possible to have surplus food to sell to people in an urban context. And then Europe blossomed.

[Vaughn] Right.

[Rushdoony] One of the things I remember vividly from my very early school days—and I don’t think anyone except you, Otto, and Dorothy over there, would recall this, stories... and one of them, I believe, which was typical of them was the story ... was that the ant and the grasshopper.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] Yes. How the ant worked all the time and the grasshopper mocked the ant while the grasshopper played and sang and stored no food. And then the cold weather came and the grasshopper died and the ant lived snugly and warmly.

Our readers in the early grades were full of stories like that.

[Scott] That is true. Aesop’s fables were taught to all of us.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And we grew up in a context where we assumed that you had a future orientation. Everything in the school book taught us that.

[Scott] That is true. And there is also one other point which occurred to me on the business of Europe. The Europeans could not start from the ground one. They had an inheritance from the former civilizations in terms of engineering, in terms of agriculture and in terms of writing, in terms of history. They could refer to what preceding generations had done and they could improve upon them. Not an illiterate civilization in which everything is limited to the individual memory and where the ruling class dies early as in Papua, you don’t have any old people. You don’t have anybody to tell you what it was like.

Did they have teachers? What did they do?

[Vaughn] They weren’t... No. I ... I agree with ... with what you are getting at. No, they didn’t even have the ... the bards that some of the pre literature European groups had. They had witch doctors. They had old stories that old ladies knew and would pass on around the campfire at night and things like that, but they were ... they were of an inferior quality to some of the old fables that... that come down to us from other civilizations. So, no, they were even a step below some of the pre literate Europeans, I think, in that area.

[Scott] Had you experience with any intermediate group, I mean, besides our own and Mexico and those primitives?

[Vaughn] In my personal experience?

[Scott] Yes.

[Vaughn] Yeah, well, I have been to Europe and before that and ...

[Scott] Well, that is not an intermediate.

[Vaughn] That is not intermediate. No, is it... what is an intermediate? I guess the second world is Communist, right?

[Scott] Well, I guess Mexico would be intermediate.

[Vaughn] Yeah, I used to do... go down with a mission group to Mexico. In fact, that is where I learned my Spanish. I used to spend a lot of time in a... in an orphanage down there, the {?} the door of faith down there. So the answer is yes. What...

[Rushdoony] We have a complicating factor now. The modern groups in the third world, as it is called, have even more an example than the people of Europe. But what is complicating it is a gospel of envy and hatred against our civilization.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] So that instead of emulating us, they feel that we have some how robbed them.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] That we have what we do by fraud and so on. And we are routinely told by some people in our country how much of the world’s goods we consume as against the rest.

[Scott] Without any reference to how many we produce.

[Rushdoony] Yes. So today people from our culture are teaching hatred of us to these third world peoples. And for ... thereby preventing their growth.

[Scott] Well, of course, Mexico is mainly Indian.

[Rushdoony] Yes, it is.

[Scott] There is 90... over 90 percent Indian. A very, very small group of Europeans and most of the Europeans that live in Mexico for any length of time are intermingled with the Indians.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the Indians in Mexico, as you remember, from Phil Coddles’ book ran all the way from the naked savages....

[Rushdoony] {?}

[Scott] The {?}... to the Aztecs and the Mayans.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And they were literature. The others, of course, were way down the scale. Literacy seems to be a very important key in this. Even if your intellectuals are teaching hatred of their own culture to these other people, the great treasury of knowledge that they have amassed in the form of literature is going to, in the long run, prevail.

[Rushdoony] Let’s go backward in Papua in history, not too far back, but before World War I and the German days.

[Vaughn] Right.

[Rushdoony] Now were the Germans still remembered and how effective were the Germans and how did they rule? Because the Germans, they have a highly...

[Vaughn] That have a... Right. They were... had one half of the country and they... it is ... the... the Germans were very much respected for their methods, their military methods, their punitive methods because they were understood by the people. the Germans did it their way. One incident I remember vividly from my studies about the island before I went over there involved a case of some natives that had murdered a white man. They simply ate him. And so the Germans put a bunch of trinkets on the shore. This tribe, fortunately for them, happened to be on the edge of the... on the edge of the ocean there. And they put some trinkets on the shore and waited of the people to come up and pick them up and then open fire with grape shot and kill the whole group of people who were standing on shore and then went ashore and butchered the whole tribe. And the... and the... people from the {?} love that. They loved it.

[Scott] They can understand it.

[Vaughn] They can understand it completely.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Vaughn] Well, I will tell you one story about how one huge area of Papua New Guinea was pacified by one German man and some native policemen. For instance, if there was a murderer, not necessarily a black man that had murdered a white man, but a black man that had murdered another black man. The German would go in there and say, “Give this man up to me for justice.”

And the people would say, “Of course not.” A tribal person would never do that if he had his way.

And so the German would go and he would burn down every hut and uproot every garden in the whole area and then retreat and wait for the people to build new huts, new fences and new gardens. And as soon as they had done that, he would come in again and burn down every hut and rip up every garden and tear down every fence and destroy everything again. And pretty soon whatever that man wanted was his. They would come down out of the hill holding the murderer by the hand and then they by himself with just a few examples of authority ended up in imposing law and order on the whole area.

[Scott] What did they... did they emulate it?

[Vaughn] Did they emulate it? No, they did not emulate it. They would... I think the situation that they expected... and I have seen this in other tribal {?}. They expect somebody to have authority over them and the Germans were better. They were more fair than their own chiefs and so they didn’t emulate it. They just accepted them as the new form of authority.

[Scott] What was the other half of the island?

[Vaughn] Australian.

[Scott] Australian.

[Vaughn] Australian, yeah.

[Scott] And what were their methods?

[Vaughn] They are a tough people. As you... as you know. They are a very tough people. They weren’t quite as harsh as the Germans, but they were... they were tough. I have heard some... In fact, one of the missionaries used to be a gold miner before he was converted and his whole side of his hands and both fists are all covered with scars because they would have to enforce a certain amount of discipline on their labor gangs. And they did it. They did it the only way the people could understand and it involved a lot of beating up.

[Rushdoony] I recall a man, a friend of my father’s who worked for the French government in French equatorial Africa. And he could foresee a war coming and he thought there could be upheavals in Africa. That is all he would say. And he said, “No one is kinder to the Africans than the English. They send them to Oxford. They do everything to help them and they are despised behind their backs.”

[Vaughn] Totally despised.

[Rushdoony] ... because it is seen as weakness.

[Vaughn] Exactly, yeah.

[Rushdoony] The French have a little more respect, but the Portuguese are the ones who are hated and feared, but respected. So this, he submitted, he was one of the problems of Christianization, because the native sees authority as brute force. And he does not respect anything else. He said that the British would only gain contempt for everything that they did to advance the natives. And the... he talked at great length of how much they had done for the Africans...

[Vaughn] Well...

[Rushdoony] How many had an advanced education.

[Vaughn] Yeah.

[Rushdoony] And were used in the administration.

[Scott] Well, both the Spaniards and the English created the largest empires...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... in history, after the Romans. And, in fact, they exceeded the Romans.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Both of them did. Now the Spaniards created universities. They married the Indian women. They put up churches and cathedrals. They had a cathedral in South America 100 years before the pilgrims arrived.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the English, of course, didn’t put up universities in native areas. They sent their leaders to English universities.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But the general idea was to teach. And it ... I often wondered why none of the sociologists or historians or, for that matter, even ordinary writers in the United States have ever undertaken a study of the various European efforts at colonization to compare the French and the English and the German and the Dutch and the Portuguese and the Italian and the English with what happened after independence and why the people who are so intent upon assisting the black people in South Africa have no thoughts in this area or no thoughts, for that matter, on dealing with black people in the United States. They have been left, more or less, to the ... the assumption here is that everybody is the same.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That there is... there is no difference in any culture. There is no difference in ethnic groups.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is... it is considered almost a sin to recognize cultural differences. And yet they are very deep.

[Rushdoony] And we hear so many horror stories about British and Spanish colonialism. And yet no one worked harder than those two peoples to advance the peoples they worked with.

[Scott] In their different ways.

[Rushdoony] Or... yes.

[Vaughn] But it is still ironic. If you look at the First World War, {?} in German West Africa and a handful of native troops, the starries, were the best fighting troops in that whole war.

[Scott] Well, yes...

[Vaughn] ... at least in the area.

[Scott] ... because the German leader, the warrior woos the black warrior...

[Vaughn] Was exactly right.

[Scott] And they... they...

[Vaughn] {?}

[Scott] ... to use them as warriors was very effective.

[Vaughn] It was very effective. And they respected the Germans. And no troops were more faithful to any government than those West Africans under the Germans.

[Scott] Well, it is possible that if Germany had won World War I, let us say, by 1915, which was their hope and had obtained colonial land which was their goal, that they might have exceeded their predecessors, that the world might have been better off. Certainly they did a lot... a lot to educate all central Europe once they got civilized themselves.

[Vaughn] Yeah. And to turn to Namibia today to the Congo, the Belgian Congo or some of the French... former French possessions, compare Namibia today to them, or compare Namibia to the former Portuguese possessions and... and that is a... that is a pretty bad comparison to Namibians are far superior in a lot of...

[Scott] Well, the Portuguese inter married, which, of course, is neither here nor there. It is interesting, though...

[Vaughn] Yeah.

[Scott] ... that they were treated... although they inter married, they were treated as just as much oppressors as those who did not. And before they left Portuguese East Africa they ripped out every telephone. They burned every car that they couldn’t ship.

[Vaughn] Yeah.

[Scott] They destroyed every typewriter. They said, “We will leave, but we will not leave the fruits of our labor behind us.” And they left a ruin.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That was very short sighted.

[Vaughn] It happened in the Belgian Congo also.

[Rushdoony] I think the problem, again, gets back to the evil influence of Rousseau which has made people see the third world countries as somehow innocent and superior to ourselves. And as a result of that we have had no common sense in dealing with them either on the individual basis or in terms of foreign aid.

[Scott] Well, it is even worse. We have instilled a guilt complex.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...into people who were not alive during the colonial period who knew nothing about it and so forth. And it is really pretty ridiculous. There is a recent article that I read about the Berkeley campus which I will bring to you. I know you will be interested. The Caucasian pupils now are down to a third and the minority pupils represent the other two thirds. And the minorities are all organized on the basis of color. But the Caucasian pupils are forbidden to organize under penalty of expulsion.

[Rushdoony] And they are reduced in their numbers by a quota system.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And this is the top university in the world according to so-called rating experts.

[Scott] Well, the experts in this case we can take with a grain of salt.

[Vaughn] Yes. And the different groups that are favored in third world countries, too, are so arbitrarily chosen at least on... on the outside. You look at the ANC, for instance. We were talking about recently that is their one tribe. The ANC is composed of...

[Scott] {?}

[Vaughn] The {?}. But, you know, there is two million more Zulu.

[Scott] Yes.

[Vaughn] ...than there are {?}.

[Scott] Yes.

[Vaughn] And how often do you hear a person from {?} interviewed?

[Scott] But the... the Zulus have an unfashionable position.

[Vaughn] It is called Capitalism and Christianity and that is what is unfashionable about it exactly. So the person... the majority of ... the biggest tribe in all of South Africa is the Zulu. They are nominally Christian, at least, and they are pro Capitalism, at least free market, modified free market. And the {?} are totally socialistic, atheistic in their leadership. And yet for every one time you hear a Zulu interviewed, you hear 100 {?}...

[Scott] I have never heard a Zulu interviewed.

[Vaughn] Well, {?}

[Scott] {?}

[Vaughn] Once in a while, right.

[Scott] Who is the... he has a position that Mandela has in the {?} tribe. There is a king of the Zulus, you know.

[Vaughn] But he is the big prince.

[Scott] But he is the... I guess you would call it...

[Rushdoony] He is the prime minister, right.

[Scott] ...the prime minister, yes.

[Vaughn] Yeah.

[Rushdoony] Well, the question of work is an important one because according to sociologists here in this country we have shifted from a work oriented to a play oriented culture. However, the good news is that while the shift has taken place since World War II and is increasing dramatically among the public school population, we are producing, through the Christian schools a work oriented population and increasingly the people who are appearing to be the wave of the future, the younger executives, the innovators are Christians. The Wall Street Journal had an article recently about the rise of the Christian entrepreneur to positions of leadership.

[Scott] Well, I will go along with that to a point, but I can’t forget reading recently where a junior partner in large, metropolitan law firm was let go because he had to go home to join his family on some very important occasion. And the senior partner said, “You could have slept on the floor like the rest of us.”

And so we have a strange dichotomy going on here. We have both husbands and wives working around the clock. We have people in this country that are working harder and harder to keep up with inflation. And I think that this idea of a country dedicated to pleasure is planted by the communications media, by such things as People magazine and what not, television which keeps showing us parasitic people enjoying themselves with a great deal of the money when the average American is working awfully hard to keep up with the landscape that is racing past him.

[Rushdoony] I think there is a great deal of truth in that, Otto, but one reason why the people at the top are having to work harder is that it is more difficult to find someone to delegate things.

[Scott] Touché. Very good.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That is quite true. That was true in the company I worked at. Everything was {?} upstairs. That was a two way error. In the first place the middle management would not take responsibility because they were afraid of these post mortem that might occur if it didn't work. And the second error was on the top which was afraid to delegate. The fact of the matter is that the old timers that I broke in under would delegate until they broke your back. They weren’t at all afraid of you.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And that is how we developed up the ladder.

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is almost over. Do you have a last comment to make?

[Vaughn] Well, I would say that the most significant thing that I see in this whole aspect of tribalism and the work ethic is that we are being reduced to that same level right now. And something drastic is going to have to change. And I think Chalcedon is at the... at the forefront of ... of at least providing intellectual leadership for that change, though it is necessary. Otherwise we are going to be no different than Papua New Guinea in 300 years.

[Rushdoony] Thank you and 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.