From the Easy Chair
Seeds of Change
Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons
Lesson: 71-214
Genre: Speech
Track:
Dictation Name: RR161BK115
Year: 1980s and 1990s
Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BK115, Seeds of Change from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.
[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 223, August the first, 1990.
This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss a very interesting subject, seeds. And our take of point is a book published in 1985 by Harper and Row. The author is Henry Hobbhouse, the title Seeds of Change: Five Plants that Transformed Mankind.
This book was given to me by Paul Zimmerman. I passed it around among our staff and our original plan was that several of us would be discussing it together. We have delayed getting to it because there have been conflicts, one or another of us out of town and, unfortunately, the best informed person on this subject, Tim Vaughan, is away at present and Mark Rushdoony also well informed in this field is not with us. And Douglas Murray who is exceptional in every sphere is tied up this evening. So perhaps Otto and I are the least prepared, so to speak, to discuss this book on seeds.
Now before we get into this subject I would like to talk a bit generally on why I regard this subject as important. One of the problems in the modern world is that modern man is a product of a culture that especially since the early 1800s has been heavily Hellenized. Greek philosophy has had a powerful influence on our modern culture. As a result, people have concerned themselves with abstractions, not with food, not with the things that makes life possible.
We used to hold economic seminars in southern California and I gave a free pass once to a scholar who came out of a barely managed courtesy and refused to come back the next year. He felt he was above the dismal science, economics. His field was more intellectual. Of course, he expected always to be well paid, I am sure.
Another illustration of this temperament within the Church where Pietism has made people so spiritual that they are worthless. The beginning of the 60s I was in one state speaking and a young pastor there was making a major impact in the community. I was invited to his home after one speaking engagement there and at the time I spoke to him and his wife about the need to be aware of some of the economic problems the country would face in the next generation. I mentioned one that I felt was coming almost immediately, the disappearance of silver. And I advised them to save their silver coins because silver coinage could not continue very long given the rising price of silver.
Well, they immediately began to save their silver coins that they received in change, put them in some kind of container after having accumulated quite a bit and then forgot about it until silver began to sky rocket in price. And suddenly they realized that they had a fortune there in their closet or wherever they had it hid. And their reaction was to feel that they had sinned. I had led them astray. And they had become speculators.
So they did not give that silver to the church to sell to a dealer and raise a substantial sum of money for the church. They took it to the bank and traded it in at face value. I was not surprised that that pastor’s ministry began to decline thereafter, because he was denying the real world around him and concentrating on what he felt was spirituality.
I say this because I believe that we must be concerned with the very real priorities of staying alive, food. And what Hobbhouse, who was very well informed in this sphere, has done is to single out the five plants that have been responsible for changing the course of humanity.
Sometimes they have not only brought vast improvements, but had bad side effects, but, all the same, they have been very, very important. These five plants are quinine, sugar cane, tea, cotton and the potato. Well, with that introduction, before we get into the specifics, Otto, would you like to make a general statement here?
[Scott] Yes, because your comment about the unworldly attitude of a great many moderns hits home for me. As you know, I have written a number of corporate histories.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Now these are in most cases pretty long, lengthy, detailed, up close examinations of the vicissitudes of a managerial group running a large corporation. And it is a matter of interest to me that no conservative, or, for that matter, none of the ecclesiastical literature that I am aware of would pay the slightest bit of attention to any of those books.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] They all want to talk about free enterprise. They all want to talk about the work ethic. They all want to talk about man’s duty on earth to improve his community, to help the poor and so forth, but none of them seem to be interested in the specifics.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ...of how this is done. And I think that is remarkable.
[Rushdoony] And bad. I think in order to understand the tremendous advances in the past few centuries one has to appreciate two things. One is the rise of Calvinism and the other is the rise of corporate activities and the contributions the world of commerce has made to human advancement. And it is impossible to get either the academic community or the Christian community interested in this sort of thing.
[Scott] It is an amazing thing, because the historians of the future will look at my corporate books, amongst others, as prime source material.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ...on how we actually lived in this particular period in this century. It is something like the Middle Ages when you ... historians and scholars look at the Middle Ages they don’t look at the lives of the troubadours. They are not concerned with the poetry. They are concerned with both how the Church and the nobility farmed Europe, defeated the wild animals, cleared the forests, how they ... what instruments they used, what products they turned out and how they built this great civilization. It was not done by thinking.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] It was done by thinking and working.
[Rushdoony] Well, I think very, very symptomatic of this problem is the fact that your most recent book Buried Treasure on coal which we carry has been blocked out of the public eye. And yet we are dependent today for electricity largely on coal.
[Scott] Oh, yes.
[Rushdoony] And we now have an anti coal lobby of environmentalists building up.
[Scott] Well it is not new in a way. The ... when I began that book I asked the California library to send me all the books on coal and they sent me something like nine or 10. Every single one was from a coal union point of view. Every single one talked about the exploitation of the miners. There was not a single book on the management of a coal company in the whole library system of the state of California.
When I went into a technical book store in Washington, DC and asked for what they had on coal I had to keep repeating it until I finally wrote the word C O A L on a piece of paper and handed it to the clerk.
Oh, she said, “We haven’t anything.”
And they didn’t.
[Rushdoony] And as a result of our ignorance on the subject and the pending legislation against coal, we may very soon have increasing brown outs because of a power shortage.
[Scott] Well, of course, the Canadians have used the acid rain argument against the use of coal in generating plants and power plants. Now acid rain has never been proven. They have discovered that acid rain is found in certain areas where there are lakes and that the ... to put lime into those lakes could probably dispel the problem, a very simple solution which nobody is going to use. They would much rather close down the power plants so that then we could have to buy our power from Canada.
[Rushdoony] In a recent issue, I believe, of Natural History, there was an article on acid rain and how it is a product of local natural conditions so that one lake will often have a lot of acidity and another a few miles away will have virtually none.
[Scott] Right.
[Rushdoony] So it is not anything in the air. It is a certain type of plant, a certain type of soil, the terrain.
[Scott] It has nothing to do with man’s activities.
[Rushdoony] That is right.
[Scott] Well, it is interesting. We live in an urban area where electricity comes from a wall socket and the farther we get from the natural life, I mean, the introduction of the 24 hour day by electricity has even upset the natural rhythm of human life. We were entitled... we were not, I don’t think, designed to spend all of our time or half our time awake at night. We are daylight animals. But the whole interrelationship, the conservative press has never reviewed, with very rare exceptions—I will have to take that back. The Foundation for Economic Education reviewed a couple of my corporate books, John Chamberlain did, but none of the others and certainly no Christian publication has ever looked at one of my corporate books.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, to start in on these five plants, the first is quinine. As Hobbhouse points out it made possible the entrance of Europeans into Africa and Asia and it made life possible on a much higher level for the native peoples of those areas. But for quinine today six out of the seven people in India would not be alive and the remaining would have a very meager life.
It is interesting that we are often told how when the white man went to Africa he found it very difficult to live. In fact, in central Africa many of the missionaries had a lifespan of a few months after landing there and this is true of white traders and others. The southern part of Africa was virtually uninhabited where the South African state now exists except for a few wandering Hottentots and bushmen, a very limited number, no one had lived. In Rhodesia there were evidences of people having lived and built substantial buildings in one place, but they were all gone. And it was the white man with this quinine who brought in Colonialism, whether you think that is good or bad, but made life possible in Asia and in Africa for the people who lived there.
[Scott] Well, yes, quinine, of course, was the great cure, deterrent for malaria. And malaria kept the population in those places pretty well thinned down. I believe there was one or two areas you mentioned where sickle cell anemia enabled one tribe, one tribe, essentially, to survive under conditions that other tribes couldn’t survive.
The usual argument here is the that white man brought diseases. In this case where the white man brought the cure to a disease, it is not discussed at all.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And as he goes on in that particular chapter he talks about the fact that the Indians gave syphilis to the white man. Now that was quite a gift. And it wiped out a fair percentage of Europe within a few decades. And there is still a plague in the world.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] The whole idea, though, of affixing blame to the in... to the very innocent fact that some ... one race in one part of the world will develop a natural immunity to something that another race is vulnerable to, to turn that around and say that that is actually, you might say, a deliberate thing is to abandon reason.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Because every race has certain strengths and weaknesses and they are not all the same.
[Rushdoony] Yes and the high of ... ratio of sickle cell anemia among the blacks is due to the fact that they somehow survived malaria.
[Scott] Yes. And, of course, as we know the blacks in the United States lost tribal identity so they intermarried with each other and some of the characteristics now are quite confused.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, quinine has eliminated major problems, malaria in particular and malaria made life next to impossible in many areas. A great many natural resources were opened up because of quinine. Mining in some areas was not possible until quinine came in. And vast areas of the world where it was impossible to farm or to ranch, life today is on a very high level simply because of quinine.
[Scott] You don’t hear much about it anymore. I remember when I was a boy and my father took us to Latin American that practically everything drinkable was flavored with quinine.
[Rushdoony] Well, it is a victory we have forgotten about.
[Scott] Yes.
[Rushdoony] It was...
[Scott] Malaria has been fairly well vanquished.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] I believe.
[Rushdoony] When we were young malaria was still prevalent, but gradually it was being pushed back. The amount of Humanitarianism that colonial empires introduced in various parts of the world is now forgotten.
[Scott] Well, the whole idea... it is really remarkable. The entire world believed in Colonialism from ancient times onward. Imperial powers, long before Babylon and Persia, Egypt... Egypt was an exception, would expand and colonize various other areas and impose their law and their culture upon subjugated peoples and eventually they would all become a large, relatively harmonious empire. This was the way civilization advanced around the world for all the period that we know about. And Colonialism by the white man, by the Europeans was more benign than Colonialism or the subjugations of other races.
For instance, we look at what Genghis Kahn did. Surrender or everyone was murdered.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And similar sorts of things occurred. The Asiatics did never ... were never benign in their rule, nor were, for that matter, the black tribes of Africa with each other. The Zulus as they came down central Africa enslaved and murdered as they traveled.
[Rushdoony] Well, just since World War II the Arab countries which before had a very high death rate, a great deal of blindness because of diseases, tuberculosis, you name it, one ailment after another. Today those historic ailments of that part of the world have been virtually wiped out by the oil companies and their doctors.
[Scott] Imagine.
[Rushdoony] And nobody gives them credit for that.
[Scott] Well, nobody gives Europe credit anymore for anything, not even Europeans, not even Americans. Americans don’t give themselves credit anymore. To even talk about it...’
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ... is to start an argument.
[Rushdoony] Well, you remember in 87 how everybody in England virtually that we met was a damning their own country for its Colonialism and either damning it or apologizing for their past.
[Scott] Yeah. I ... I recall you remember we both came to the conclusion that they were violating a commandment.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] They were dishonoring their own parents.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And their own heritage.
[Rushdoony] You were the one who called attention to that.
[Scott] I mean honor thy father and thy mother. What sort of person is it that denigrates his heritage?
[Rushdoony] Well, to go on to the second plant, sugar cane. Now according to ... I am laughing, dentists, perhaps might feel that sugar has not been the greatest boon, but sugar has been very important to civilization and without sugar, well, dentists might be out of work.
[Scott] Even Hobbhouse calls it an addiction which is a phrase I had never seen applied to sugar before. He calls it an addiction. He sees nothing good in it at all. And I don’t know. He is a very careful scholar, but he is also a man of very pungent opinions and in some cases I think a little to pungent, because pretty strong. But in any event, his connecting the growth of the sugar industry in the Caribbean with the growth of the enslavement of the blacks and the implication of the blacks into the Caribbean and into the southern part of the United States is a very interesting connection.
[Rushdoony] Yes. The first, I think, in recent years the menace of sugar has been greatly over done. And, of late, there are some contrary opinions, which is not to say that some people don’t over use sugar, but it is not in moderation and, as bad as has been said and can be very good, I think. But the sugar cane production has, indeed, required in some aspects of its growth, slave labor. However, that in itself has not been entirely bad, because what we need to realize—and I think there is an unwillingness to face up to this—slavery was evil up to a point, but it also meant that people who had been killed as surplus slaves in Africa were sold to white traders to be shipped overseas.
[Scott] Well I think that is true, but I think it is a second observation. The first observation really should be that slavery was endemic in Africa itself.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] The white man took from the black man what commerce in human beings that the black man had been practicing for a millennia or more.
[Rushdoony] One man who was in Africa about a century and a half to two centuries ago said that the money of Africa was slaves.
[Scott] Like the ancient Greeks and Romans.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] An extent.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Thomas Sole has some very interesting things to say about the black slavery circumstances of the Caribbean. He pointed out that the sugar industry sold it... that the sugar industry involved all kinds of infrastructure and that because there was a shortage of white people, you know, originally the slaves in Barbados and other islands were all white. They were prisoners of war or...
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ...debtors or criminals. And then there were a certain number of merchants and managers. But the whites did not last long in that area. They didn’t live long and the work was arduous. Eventually it was discovered that Indians did not live long and the work was too much for them, but the blacks could do it. And, of course, if you brought in enough of them, the work could be spread around.
Sole points out that through necessity the plantation owners in the Caribbean, in the West Indies had to teach the slaves to read and write and cipher and handle all the clerical activities and all the supervisorial activities and so forth that the industry needed as it expanded. Therefore, he said, the West Indian black, when they finally came to the United States as free men sliced through everybody like a knife through butter and became one of the highest income groups in the United States.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And that, he said, in itself proves that color alone is not the reason why other blacks in the United States should not progress. It was a question of skills through generations.
[Rushdoony] Yes. You mentioned the white men being the first plantation works in the Indies. Scarcely anyone has written about the shipment of Scottish slaves there.
[Scott] Scottish and Irish.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] By the boat loads.
[Rushdoony] By the boat load by the British.
[Scott] Yes.
[Rushdoony] One of the grimmest aspects of the whole story...
[Scott] Half the Irish population was done to death.
[Rushdoony] Well, apparently our modern historians seem to believe that slavery is only bad if it is a non European who is enslaved.
[Scott] By a European.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Slavery was extant in Russia until the 1860s. And nobody seems to mention that.
[Rushdoony] No.
[Scott] And, you know, I have never seen an article describing the neurotic nature or the guilt of the Russian people for this.
[Rushdoony] No. We have a very selective history. Evils are done by one race to all the other races. And you don’t dare say anything to the contrary as far as some scholars are concerned. They have a selective field of research and they suppress what does not jive with their idea of the past. So the past, to a great many historians, is a reconstruction of things in terms of their purposes.
The third seed that Hobbhouse mentions is tea. And it is amazing how much tea has influenced world trade and civilization and how important it is today. More tea is consumed, for example, in the United States, by far, than coffee.
[Scott] Well, that is because, remember, some years back the coffee traders suddenly jumped up the price.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Something like... it was almost like a coffee OPEC thing.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ...by a multiple of four or more. Suddenly coffee became very expensive here. And it... a nickel for a cup of coffee in the 30s was... you really could get a cup of coffee and it was better coffee than we are getting now.
I... I switched to tea for economic reasons.
[Rushdoony] Yes. On top of that iced tea made tea available the year round. They tried to imitate it with iced coffee, but it has never caught on.
[Scott] No, no, it doesn’t taste the same. But he gives us almost a capsule history of at least a large chunk of China.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ... in the process. And I must say that he is a lot kinder to the Chinese than he is to the Europeans, because he doesn't tell us any of their vices. He doesn’t tell us of any of their difficulties or their stupidity in political senses, but he gives them credit for all kinds of inventions.
[Rushdoony] Well, the sad fact is that Mr. Hobbhouse, an Englishman, is hard on his own people in this book.
Well, the popularity of tea very early when it hit Europe was enormous.
[Scott] How did you like his explanation of that, the reason for it? That water was ... was not drinkable, you had to boil it and something that would flavor the hot water was perfect.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Also I think an intellectual history related to tea could be written, because the tea houses became centers for the intellectuals who would sit around and discuss ideas and endlessly debate issues. So tea became a great stimulus to conversation. It led ultimately to the French salons. The origin was tea drinking, a time when people came together to discuss things. You still have tea time...
[Scott] Yes.
[Rushdoony] But it has no longer the same intellectual connotation.
[Scott] Well, we don’t have salons anymore.
[Rushdoony] No.
[Scott] We don’t have people who get together for a conversation. I have a book, a book of the great conversations. And I have looked at it. I haven't read it page to page because it is rather heavy going, but I was astonished at the level of the conversations and our conversations today are very quick. They are filled with clues and very little exposition. And, you remember, that in the last century and the centuries before, conversations went on forever.
[Rushdoony] I have read the book also, Otto. But while it is in a very interesting book. I don’t think it will come up to the level of our weekly staff readings. I think you get more humor, more ideas and more general stimulus from our weekly breakfasts.
[Scott] Well, I think they are mad hatter breakfasts on occasion.
[Rushdoony] Well, tea, all the same, has had a remarkable history and I don’t think the history of tea is over, because the consumption of tea is increasing and its importance in international trade is very real.
[Scott] Well, the big point that I got out of that chapter was that China along somewhere along the line decided to turn inward. It decided that it was a perfect society, it didn’t need any foreigners.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] It didn’t need the rest of the world. It looked down its nose at everybody else and it was ahead of everybody else.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And then it grew static and tea was the key that unlocked China to the West. Eventually the exportation... he said for 200 years the Europeans didn’t know how... what tea was, where it was grown, how it was made or any thing else, but they bought it in increasing quantities and the Chinese got... took in response, in return silver. And, of course, eventually it led to the Opium War, because the West began to realize the extent of the Chinese market.
[Rushdoony] Yes. And opium, originally, in China was a tea.
[Scott] Was it a tea?
[Rushdoony] Yes. It was drunk. It was brewed and ... and it was taken like tea. So Opium is a part of the tea trade originally.
[Scott] Well, that is... yes... he had them allied, but I didn’t quite understand that point.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Yeah.
[Rushdoony] So the history of tea has many, many ramifications.
[Scott] Well, it ... it led to opium and, of course, the opium led to the destruction of China.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Now since we are in the same position, we are watching the destruction of our civilization through drugs, it is amazing that so little attention has been paid by Mr. Bennett or anybody else to the manner in which the orient has broken the narcotic addiction in Singapore, for instance, where the possession of any kind of drug is a capital offence.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Well, obviously they are not going... they have not gone out and executed hundreds upon hundreds of people. What happened is that once they proved that they were serious about this....
[Rushdoony] And it was quick.
[Scott] And it was quickly done with no appeals and so forth, that everybody stopped using it. So for a relatively few number of executions they got rid of an enormous problem.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, then the next plant, of course, or seed is cotton. And one of the remarkable things that cotton has done is to make it possible for ordinary people to dress well. Before the use of cotton to clothe yourself was a major problem financially. And you try to have garments that lasted for life, because you could not afford a change of garment whether it was linen or wool or anything else. But cotton was a great liberator for the common man. It enabled him to have a good appearance, respectability, had to put money somewhere except on his back.
[Scott] That is an interesting point, a very interesting point.
[Rushdoony] So cotton has not been appreciated in its importance and I think it is significant that cotton has had a comeback in the past few years as they have found that synthetic materials have very, very serious handicaps.
[Scott] Oh, indeed they do.
[Rushdoony] Side effects.
[Scott] Yes. There are all these miracle fibers, man made fibers...
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ...turned out to be, well, something like foam rubber. It turns into... it turns into dust after a while.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, now you can find in your mailbox catalogs advertising natural materials, cotton and wool, nothing synthetic.
[Scott] It is interesting that as clothing became more readily available in the United States than it was when we were young... I remember when I was a boy taking me shopping was a major thing and my opinion as to what was purchased was not even allowed. I wore what my parents selected and that was that and usually with room to grow in.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Oh, that was a nightmare of our youth, Otto. In those days everything parents got had room to grow in.
[Scott] You couldn’t see your fingertips when you came out.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] But now that they can get all kinds of clothes, they don't wear them.
[Rushdoony] No.
[Scott] They go around in rags. I don’t know who buys all these wonderful things that you see in the windows.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the importance of cotton to the United States has been very great. In fact, tea started the American War of Independence.
[Scott] It helped. It helped, yes.
[Rushdoony] But cotton created the South. It was an area that had very little economic basis until cotton began to be produced and could be, because of a cotton gin, prepared {?} and cheaply for the market.
[Scott] Well, I thought he was very hard on the southerners. He describes them as a dirty, filthy, reckless, licentious group. And I think he over paints that picture. Actually we have an American historian who points out that it was very much a Scotch Irish civilization.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] That they had enormous numbers of animals. They were not farmers, really. They were animals people. They had armies of cattle and sheep and swine and they also made whiskey and there was a transplantation of the Celtic civilization to the South. The cotton, of course, changed it all. And the cotton changed the rest of the world, too.
[Rushdoony] The fact that people are not appreciative now is how animals were once not only useful, but a matter of status and in much of the South the possession of good horses was much more than utilitarian. Among the American Indians you were wealthy in terms of the number of horses you had so that 40 and 50 horses owned by one Indian was not unusual. That was routine.
[Scott] Well, you can go back to the Old Testament. The number of sheep that Job had and some of the other were rewarded with, that was their wealth.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Of course, sheep have a practical value. Horses you can only use so many. An Indian family in my day might have half a dozen horses they used and 40 or 50 others that were never broken in, but which they prized.
[Scott] The Europeans were more practical. They ate them.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the cotton gin, of course is one of the most important inventions in American history and the role of cotton in the United States has been a powerful one. The other great cotton country in the world is Egypt.
[Scott] That is true and also linen.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] It is interesting that the southerners never went ahead and put up textile mills. The New Englanders made textile mills and, of course, they stole the plans from the English, but the English had the big textile mills, Liverpool, Manchester and what not. And the South sent its cotton in the form of bales, the raw material, in other words, and let the English manufacture and sell around, in fact, sold it back to the South.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And the Southerners, for some reason or another, had a—and still do—how do we say? Intellectual Southerners. The ... the ... and here I stand crowd looked down their nose at manufacturing and I could never understand why. When they had the raw material right there, why didn’t they do ahead and put up the... the mills?
[Rushdoony] Well, Jefferson Davis and others like him saw themselves primarily as aristocratic gentlemen and commerce was beneath them.
Now Davis’ older brother was a different... a very different kind of man. He managed Jefferson Davis’ affairs. But it was that element of an aristocratic impracticality that prevented the South from achieving its full power.
[Scott] Well, also it could be a fall out from the slave owner mentality.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Where work becomes associated with slaves and physical work...
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ...is beneath the gentleman.
[Rushdoony] Well, our fifth seed is the potato. And, of course, the potato has had a powerful impact. It came from the high Andes. At first it caught on with great difficulty. There was a hostility to it and a fear of it, partly because it belongs to the deadly night shade family, very poisonous plant, the night shade. But then let’s see, what else? Peppers and tomatoes and one or two other things belong to the same family. But the potato when it caught on revolutionized life because it made cheap food available to the poor. And it was in that respect like cotton a great boon to the ordinary man, to the poor man and the role of potatoes in western history is a very, very important one.
[Scott] Well, of course, he brings in the Irish.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And their calamity and the fact that it shoved the Irish over here which changed the United States, that is the emigration from 1840 onward. I think it is very hard on the Irish. He says some things about them which I haven't seen said about other nations or groups that have gone through similar circumstances. I don’t dispute what he says. He says that life under subjugation, under the English turned the Irish into a sly and conspiratorial and politically minded group of people. And I think there is a certain amount of truth to that. But I would expand that point to say that that is true of almost any group that has lived under long subjugation.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes.
[Scott] And that it is not unique to the Irish. The English created it, so to speak. It is ... if you put anybody in a state of captivity... I remember my Irish grandmother who died in her 90s learned Gaelic as a child and the Gaelic teacher had to come to the house in the evening because Gaelic language was forbidden by law. It was illegal to speak it or to teach it. That is subjugation.
[Rushdoony] He makes a very interesting point when he says that the Irish in the North were responsible to a great degree for electing Lincoln. They were intensely anti English rather than anti slavery.
[Scott] Yes.
[Rushdoony] And the links of the South were very close to the English.
[Scott] That is right.
[Rushdoony] And the Southerners, in a sense, regarded themselves as Britishers.
[Scott] Yes. That is true. They considered themselves descended from the peerage and some f them were.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] But not the majority.
[Rushdoony] No. And because of that southern claim, the Irish of the North were enthusiastically pro Lincoln. They wanted to do in the South.
[Scott] Well, he also brings up the corollary point that the Irish antipathy to the English distorted our foreign policy. But, again, it is a point that could be expanded. Every group of any size in the United States has had an influence on our foreign policy, not always for the better of destiny of the United States overall.
[Rushdoony] While we are on this subject, I would like to call attention to a very, very important series of books written in the 20s, still in print in the 30s and one or two in the ... up into the 50s. The author was E. Parmely Prentice, P R E N T I C E. And he was fairly close to Herbert Hoover in a common concern with food. And Prentice made the point empathically in his studies that it takes more than weather disasters and that sort of thing to bring about famine, world wide famine. It takes state interference with agriculture. The abuse of money, the degradation of money and so on. And the title of one of his books was Hunger and History. He wrote theses books as a warning both to historians and to scholars. He was a brilliant scholar himself. Not much was done in the way of a follow up. However, one writer in the early 70s in a book published by Western Islands, Ill Fares the Land.
[Scott] Oh, yes. I remember that.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Yes.
[Rushdoony] ...predicted that we would have a food problem given the growing control of farming by the federal government.
Well, now we have a situation where Ivan Browning, perhaps the world’s top meteorologist is saying that we may see famine fairly soon even in the United States and certainly the world over. He has predicted that by 2050, in 60 years, through famine and AIDS the world population will have dropped 50 percent, 50 percent. And not enough attention is paid because our leaders have intellectual and abstract concerns.
[Scott] Well, look at the way they behave when there is a temporary oil shortage.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] They exacerbated the situation. They punished the oil industry. And they did all sorts of insane reactions which, in fact, are still continuing. It ... oil, which is one of the main ingredients of modern life is treated as an outlaw substance.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Now people that far removed from reality are certainly not going to be able to handle a problem area that involves more than one substance, that involves a whole variety of foods or resources. We started out talking about coal. There is an anti coal lobby. There is an anti oil lobby.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] There is an anti nuclear energy lobby.
[Rushdoony] Anti life lobby.
[Scott] Anti life. What is left?
[Rushdoony] Yes. Tim Vaughan who cannot be with us tonight has told me—and this is an area where he is very knowledgeable—that in the world today there are only six net exporters of food, only six countries...
[Scott] Yes.
[Rushdoony] ... that are net exporters of food. Five of them are English speaking, one of which is South Africa and the sixth, which is not English speaking is France.
Well, this is a grim fact.
[Scott] Well, Nicaragua was an exporter under Somoza.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] It was the most prosperous country in Central America and it is now, of course, starving.
[Rushdoony] Before World War II Argentina was the 10th most important country in the world economically.
[Scott] Yes. Its beef was famous.
[Rushdoony] Yes and today it is in a shambles.
[Scott] Right.
[Rushdoony] And its production is down.
[Scott] Yes. And the land is still there and the people.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes. So we are facing serious problems. It would...
[Scott] Well, our biggest problem, of course, is a parasitic, trivial, limited, extravagant governing class.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the reason why five of the six net producers of food are English speaking is that a little more freedom has survived in those countries that in every one of them it is now endangered.
[Scott] It is very difficult to bring these subjects to general attention. You are dealing with journalists who have absolutely no relation to the farm belt. And one of the problems in communications in all these issues is the growth and special communications. You yourself write for a farm journal and there are lots of... there is lots of literature dealing with the various aspects of the agricultural sector, in dealing with the energy sector and so forth, but none of this filters through to the general media.
[Rushdoony] No.
[Scott] So what we have... we have... we have belts of specialists who cannot bring the general population to an awareness of their situation.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Because the transmission belt in the form of television and congress and the appointed officials... the appointed officials no longer talk to the people. They don’t describe anything.
[Rushdoony] They talk to the press only.
[Scott] They talk to the press. The press is substituted for the people and the press is not interested. They are only interested in the dramatic, the demagogic, the crime, the ephemera of the moment.
[Rushdoony] Well, our time is running out. I would like to add that while this situation looks grim, actually it is good in that God is doing some house cleaning. And if we are careful to be faithful we are going to come out on top, because the bankruptcy of the forces of Humanism becomes more evident every day.
[Scott] Well, it will ... will tell you the equivalent of the monks of the Middle Ages.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Exactly. Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you.
[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.