From the Easy Chair

Emerson; The Transcendentalist

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 83-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BS127

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BS127, Emerson; The Transcendentalist, the Rise of Environmentalism, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 231, December the third, 1990.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss the Transcendentalists, Emerson, in particular, and the rise of Environmentalism. Now Christ Hanlon of Kansas City, Missouri requested that we deal with this subject and I think it is a very good suggestion.

We fail to appreciate the extent to which the Transcendentalists did affect our thinking in a vast number of spheres. And the background of their thinking is important to understand. Otto has worked extensively in Emerson so that he can go into the background much more extensively than I can. However, let me say, by way of introduction, that far eastern thinking had a profound influence on the Transcendentalists. It also led to the very deep strain of sentimentalism, that left wing thinking in the United States has had ever since then. To illustrate, one of the high points of the Transcendentalists faith was the exaltation, in Conway and others like him, {?} and so on, of Quan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of mercy.

The myth has it that Quan Yin said that she would stand outside the gates of heaven throughout eternity until the last human being was brought into heaven and only then would she enter in. Now that story of Quan Yin was cited with tremendous awe by the Transcendentalists. And it was that kind of sentimentality that was very appealing to them. They were Universalists. But even more, they were Pantheists.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem Brahma very definitely showing the influence of Hindu thinking, was in all of the anthologies when I went to school and was one of the things that we studied in the classroom and were expected in some instances to memorize. Let me read that, Brahma, by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;

Shadow and sunlight are the same;

The vanished gods to me appear;

And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;

I am the doubter and the doubt,

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,

And pine in vain the sacred Seven;

But thou, meek lover of the good!

Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

Now this is pure Pantheism. It is the basis, this type of thinking, of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. After all, if all things are Brahma, if everything is God, then there is nothing good and evil. All is the same.

So we are to find Brahma and turn our back on heaven and turn our back on faith because both the doubter and the doubt are a part of Brahma. This kind of thinking led to the exaltation of nature and the depreciation, progressively, of man. And it is basic to the Transcendentalists, the Unitarian Universalist perspective in the United States. The intellectual establishment of this country, the university atmosphere is heavily saturated with this type of thinking.

Otto, would you like to make a general preface to the subject?

[ Scott ] Well, Emerson was one of those individuals that I was taught in school that I really didn’t cotton to. It was something about him which I didn’t care for. It was well expressed later by an Englishman who met him in London who said he was too boneless.

If they had still an established church in Massachusetts when Emerson had been ordained, I suspect that he wouldn’t have taken the fact that he had. But he had before him the example of Channing who made sort of a name for himself by imitating the English Unitarians and he had a literary reputation in England and at that time England, of course, was our great elder brother, so to speak. The United States had no intellectuals as such and the English set the tone. Boston looked at London as somebody looking in the mirror.

And Emerson later on married a very sick heiress, a woman who had advanced tuberculosis who was obviously not long for this world. She was an invalid. And then sued for her portion of her family estate although she died before she was 21. It was a very unpleasant case. The family really didn’t want to go into it at great length and great expense and they finally decided to let him have her share. And that set him, made him independently well to do, not well to do, but substantial. And after he became substantial he developed great qualms about communion and about Christianity in general and he pulled out of the church.

He reached a stage where he wouldn’t even attend services because he didn't like the preacher who, incidentally was a sort of a pastor more than a preacher. And Emerson said that the time he spent in the woods during the service period, during those hours was really much closer to God than attending the church. And, of course, as you pointed out, he moved on, not simply to Buddhism, but more to Hinduism.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And Hindu idea, which apparently is news to most Americans is that Krishna, the creator is also the god of devastation, the god of death, the god of birth, the god of death the destroyer of worlds. There is no difference in the Hindu religion between evil and good. You can get to Nirvana through evil or through good. Christianity and Judaism are unique in the fact that virtue overcomes vice. But for the Hindus, vice is just as good.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It may be one of the reasons that it has lasted so long, especially among unreflecting people and it may be one of the reasons why it has become so popular under other names in the United States. The new age movement is pure Hinduism under different names.

We have here a great many plagiarists who have plagiarized ideas and plagiarized concepts, plagiarized expressions. Now we are in the process of plagiarizing other civilizations without making any admission if, of course, people were told this is the Hindu idea, they would turn away from it. If they are told this is the new age they move toward it.

Mr. Emerson did an awful lot to open that gate.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And therefore he is a very significant cultural and intellectual figure and I would say that he created Thoreau. Thoreau looked up at him as a mentor, as a person to imitate and Thoreau couldn’t follow him into literary pastures, into poetry and so forth, essays, the reading. But he did pick up the worship of nature. And that is where Walden came and all the rest.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Emerson, while he maintained, I think, the pose of a philosopher and a wise counselor, was a rather immature person and Thoreau the epitome of immaturity. I think Thoreau is a significant figure because he was so popular among the college students who became a part of the movement of the 60s, the hippie and before that the beat nicks. And Thoreau was like them a drop out. His little cabin in Walden was a façade. He didn’t live there.

[ Scott ] No. It was on Emerson’s property anyway.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. He would have his meals at home with momma. He would spend his time with the no accounts at the village store talking all day, but never missing a meal that momma would put on the table. When he was out in the woods he carelessly started a fire and thought it was silly that people were so concerned about saving the woods. Like Emerson, his Hinduism meant that all things are equal. Therefore, all things are good. All things are bad. All things are meaningless. And it was a joke to get so involved in preserving the forest. He would not help fight the fire that he accidentally started.

So this vein of immaturity that we see in the new left and the Environmentalists and others, is very, very deep and it has its roots in the Transcendentalists.

[ Scott ] Well, they... of course they were important politically as well.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Thoreau put up a justification for defying the state. And he went to jail of a day or so. And everyone seems to forget that somebody else paid his time. And therefore he was released. They hold him up as a sort of a martyr and exemplar of how one... of how a good man can defy the state on a matter of principle. As I recall it, there was some kind of a piddling tax that he didn’t want to pay and actually he was a fairly acute commercially. I mean, he was part of his family’s pencil factory and as you hinted, didn’t skip any meals. He wasn’t a poverty at all cost type. He wasn’t... he didn't wear sandals.

The whole argument, though, of passive resistance that he brought to the fore was a forerunner of the actual resistance to the law that the Transcendentalists encouraged. The Abolitionist movement looked to the Transcendentalists as their intellectual inspirers, because their basic argument or their biggest argument was that goodness was above the law. They talked about the higher law.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now the higher law concept, which as Nietzsche has used, said, picked up later in his Uber mensch, super man, the higher law is anything that you want to say is the higher law. There is no code for the higher law. If you don’t like the statutes or the rules that as they are, then you can say, as a matter of principle, I believe in the higher law.

We both have a friend of ours who is now under indictment because he felt that he has a grasp of a higher law that exceeds the laws of commerce and taxation. Now everyone, of course, can claim a higher law. Hitler declared a higher law. His ideas on race, he felt, superseded all the laws on the books. So this is a very dangerous concept of the Transcendentalists opened up.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, it also led to Pharisaism because with their concept of the higher law which they were the prophet, no one else had the appreciation of truth that they did. They were ready to damn everyone around them as somehow crass, materialistic and insensitive.

I picked up the other day at a ridiculous price in mint condition six volumes of Garrison’s Letters and Papers.

[ Scott ] Oh, I hope you have a strong stomach.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, that is why I am taking it in small doses. And here the leading Abolitionist echoes the language of Thoreau and of Emerson in that he is like them a Pharisee. There isn’t eh slightest doubt that what he thinks is the truth.

Now in the Christian perspective the truth is Jesus Christ, not us, not our thinking. It is something above and beyond us. We worship the truth. We seek to follow the truth, but we can never say, “I am the truth.” And this is what these men, the Transcendentalists to the Environmentalists of our time are so insistent about. They are the walking truth so that if you want to see Pharisaism in the modern world, look at the Environmentalists.

[ Scott ] Well, they are better than other people. Now it is interesting that the commercial is never too far away from these people in terms of their dislikes. One of the things hat Emerson and company didn’t like was the growth of industrialization in New England. For one thing, it was bringing up new people. It was bringing up people who hadn't been there for seven generations who weren’t part of the ruling class. Railroads were coming in. Textile mills were coming in. Emerson resented this. This was a cultural clash. He resented the changes that were coming, although he used the railroads himself to go around and lecture. The fact was he and his group were no longer the preeminent individuals in New England. New England was changing. New people were coming in. New people were rising up. And to be purer than the manufacturers, the textile mill operators and so forth, one had to be above crass commercial interests. And this is from the man who sued his wife’s family.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And we find this strange combination running all like a red thread through our Environmentalists also. We find that they are very often are fairly well to do people who have inherited their money and who don’t want to be stained by having a development come into the area. They are against growth. But, of course, after their own home has been created and situated. They don’t want a bunch of smaller houses to appear and sully the landscape.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So you have then and now an interesting combination of commercial, cultural and semi religious arguments coming up. There is something holy about nature. I don’t know if they have ever seen a {?}. I don’t know if they have ever seen some of the parasites that infest fish or if they have ever been bitten by a rattlesnake like Dorothy, but nature has ... is at long far from benign. I mean, I long ago noticed that God’s creation has got some very fearsome things in it.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, when I was in seminary I ... in fact I wrote a paper for {?} on Emerson. And I had another professor who thought highly of Emerson. And I would like to, before I comment about a little bit of trouble I got myself into, quote Emerson in his book on nature.

“In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God,” unquote.

[ Scott ] Well, glad there is no mosquitoes there.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, mosquitoes would have to be part and parcel of God if he were logical.

[ Scott ] Of course and they are.

[ Rushdoony ] But...

[ Scott ] They are certainly his creation.

[ Rushdoony ] My problem came about...

[ Scott ] ...or of his curse.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Came about when I remarked of one of these Emersonian characters that I ... I was asked didn’t I like him. And didn’t I respect his moral stature? And I said, “I think he is a very humble man for one who believes he is God.” I think it got back to him because he really ripped into me when I turned in my next paper.

But Emersonianism, Transcendentalism, Unitarianism has led to American Pharisaism and it is very much with us.

[ Scott ] Well, it led to a whole school of art. Now some of the paintings are, of course, magnificent and there is no question that we have some beautiful, beautiful places of the country. But it led to more than just the art. It led to the whole idea of the wilderness being good in itself...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now you... you recall when... when the pilgrimage... pilgrims landed and, in fact, in Christian literature traditionally, the wilderness has always been considered one of the great trials, an area of great suffering.

[ Rushdoony ] The term commonly used in the Puritan literature was this howling wilderness.

[ Scott ] Right. And the Transcendentalists turned it around into something else.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And into edenic sort of thing, a wonderful experience. I mean, you would think they had never really been up against... never been in the woods, because anyone who has doesn't really have that kind of view. And this worship of the great outdoors which resembles, to some extent the English worship of the countryside. When a man gets some money in England the first thing he does is to buy a house in the country and then, of course, there is much about gardening. I happen to be one of these terrible people who look like ... I prefer someone else to do my gardening. I am not ever going to be out there in a sun bonnet pruning the roses. Not my thing.

[ Rushdoony ] Not even without a sun bonnet.

[ Scott ] No, but the... the English go pretty heavily on that sort of thing. And I don't think American men have ever gone in for gardening too much either, except as a commercial enterprise. But lots about the country, a home in the country and a summer retreat in a more semi rustic area away from the city. And I can see that. We are living in a rustic area ourselves at this point. But we are living here. It isn’t something that we are visiting as a pilgrimage.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, I love the countryside, having grown up on a farm. But I know that life here is a struggle as it is everywhere. All you have to do is to plant a garden and some fruit trees, as I have, and Mark also and see what the gophers do and the squirrels and the deer and so on and on to realize that nature is anything but beneficent and friendly.

[ Scott ] No. Nature is something one has to struggle with. One’s own nature as well as the nature outside one’s self. It has to be subdued. It has to be put under control. The ... this is exactly what the Environmentalists claim they are talking about. They want to control nature, however, by controlling man.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They think that we are the aberrant, so to speak. We do not belong in this world, in God’s world. Of course, I don’t know whether they include themselves. We haven’t reached that stage, but there is a sort of a death wish involved.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Recently in Insight one Environmentalist is quoted... was quoted as saying the goal was an environment freed of all human influence.

[ Scott ] Well, I read years ago something by World Watch which is an institute in Washington, DC about the kind of world that they would have if they could have what they want. It would be world in which no concentration of human beings would be more than 1000. Everyone would... travel would no longer be necessary, because the entire world would live the same way. There would be no automobiles or internal combustion engines. There would be bicycles, although they didn’t explain how they were going to manufacture them. there would be foot paths. There would be no use of oil, coal or wood. They would use biomass. They would use the wind for windmills. They would have air ships with sails instead of with engines and they would go back to sailing vessels at sea and everyone would have the same income and the same level of living. All homes would be the same size and are gathered at all clothing—although how they were going to make it they didn’t say—would be very similar. It would be a vast, you might say, pagan... pre Christian civilization. It would be a return to Mesopotamia without the temples and without the wars of, say, 5000 years ago.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, in England these people have already gained for themselves legally the right to cross anybody’s property, any farmer. They can make paths thought here and it ha become a problem because they leave gates open and are generally a nuisance.

[ Scott ] Well, they are allied, they are first cousins to the animal rights people.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because the environmental issue here is that the snail darter and the owl and all other forms of life are just as sacred as man, as humanity. So you are back to Animism.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And allied... part of Animism is that we are animals. The theory is we are animals. We are kin to the animals as the primitives, the aborigines call themselves the fox people or the lion people or whatever. We are descended according to Darwin, from animals and according to some of the anthropologists we are animals in terms of our earthly body and so forth. So here you have a retreat not only to Hinduism, but a retreat to Animism, a retreat to the earliest civilizations.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And one American Environmentalist has said that the habitation of man should be restricted to the coastal areas and the center of the United States restored to its natural state.

[ Scott ] Well, then the Middle West would become a desert again.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, of course.

The environmental movement, of course, is leading to a great deal of insanity and a destructiveness as far as the economy is concerned. For example, the Sacramento Union, for Tuesday, November 27, 1990 on the front page has a story about the proposed new 100 million dollar terminal at Sacramento Metropolitan Airport. The whole area is growing and there is a very urgent need for another terminal. However, the proposed 270 acre east terminal development project which has been on the drawing board since the mid 1970s could disturb the western pond turtle and such birds as Swanson’s hawks, other reptiles, the western fence lizard, southern alligator lizard, racer, gopher snake and common garden variety garden snake... garter snake could be in deep trouble if the terminal is constructed. The giant garter snake which once thrived in the great valley is deemed a threatened species by the California fish and game department. And so on and on.

Now last year four million passengers flew out of the metro airport. And they are desperately in need of more facilities, another terminal. They expect seven million passengers in not too many years, early in the next decade. So here this approved project is being held up just because people are saying these species are threatened and one of them is a threatened species.

Of course, this classification as threatened is an arbitrary one.

[ Scott ] Threatened by whom?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Threatened where?

[ Rushdoony ] The... the spotted owl of Oregon which supposedly can only exist in virgin stands of forest and so all logging has been stopped and countless numbers of men thrown out of work, thousands of them, is now found to be plentiful in second growth forests and young forests. And yet the same old story is repeated about the threatened spotted owl.

[ Scott ] Maybe we should start introducing intelligence for our elected officials and refuse to allow anyone to run for a public office that doesn’t have superior intelligence, because we are obviously in the hands of imbeciles.

[ Rushdoony ] And we need a moral test of some {?}, too.

[ Scott ] Yes, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] I was glad of one thing that appeared in the Stockton Record for Friday, November 30, 1990 and it means that some sense is being shown. Front page story. “Count Ignores Kit fox Request. Despite warnings from their attorney that they face civil and criminal penalties, county planning commissioners Thursday night told the federal government to shove the kit fox and approved a hundred million dollar safe way distribution center. In its nearly unanimous vote for the 1.6 million square foot center, the planners intentionally left out a requirement by the US Fish and Wildlife Survey that safe way obtain federal permission before proceeding with construction. Commissioner R. W. Gillespie abstained from the vote because he did not attend the meeting.”

Now to skip down in the article. “There was a request by a federal wildlife officials that safe way set aside more than 500 acres of land to replace potential kit fox hunting ground being taken by the project.”

Now the interesting thing here, apart from the fact that somebody has finally stood up to these people, is that there was no evidence that the safe way project was threatening any kit fox. It was a potential threat.

[ Scott ] Anything is potential.

[ Rushdoony ] Of course. And for that they were going to have to buy 500 high priced acres and dedicate them, give them to the federal government as a sanctuary.

[ Scott ] Well, you remember the BBC film that I had shown you called The Greenhouse Hoax.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. That was excellent.

[ Scott ] Now that was done in England. It was started by a man who believed in the environmental movement and who went around to interview scientists regarding the greenhouse effect. And he discovered to his amazement that there is none that, in fact, the earth has been cooling, but it has been growing through for thousands of years alternating periods of coolness and heat. And he interviewed one or two scientists who made fools of themselves or revealed themselves to be fools, rather. And then towards the end he interviewed a scientists who was going around talking about the reality of the environmental situation in which he said that acid rain is not a problem. There is no heating. There is no greenhouse effect and so forth. He is... Warren Brooks, the columnist had first heard this because of his scientist delivered a speech to a group of other scientists who gave him a standing ovation at the conclusion of his talk. And Brooks, who is a very good reporter, went over and said, “Well, if this is the case, if all of the real scientists are agreed that this is the case, why don't we hear more about it?”

Well, the man said, “This is a matter of one’s career.”

To come forward and to label all the quacks and all the lies that are being promoted about the environment means that we would lose our research grants and we would lose our jobs and universities and with companies, because to go against the media and the environmental lobby means that we would be politically given punishment.

So here we have a situation, unprecedented as far as I know in civilized world in any time any where, where solid information is considered beside the point, because what is involved are votes and influence. Now the question that next arose in my mind was why do the media go... does the media go along with this?

And Juan Brooks said, “Well, the more environmental studies are made the more departments the government creates, the more activity the government engages in, the more the government enlarges, the more newspaper jobs there are, the more communications jobs there are. The media is expanding at the same rate as the government. They are in partnership.” And that is why.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, there are so many excellent scientists who are calling attention to the fallacies of Environmentalism and it is a futile exercise. If they are heard, they are very much attacked and are made to look like quacks or stooges for big business and so on. And in one field after another the media goes to the worst sources.

This week I have noticed two things. It is December, Christmas season and the current Life magazine on its cover features the major article, “Who is God?”

[ Scott ] Who is God?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And they go through...

[ Scott ] Is that someone on Life’s staff? Somebody they might reach?

[ Rushdoony ] Well, they have gone to the most unlikely people to get an answer to that question.

[ Scott ] Oh?

[ Rushdoony ] I believe an eight year old was one, some off beat characters including a minister, a Presbyterian minister who is dying of AIDS. He is a homosexual and he knows what God is.

[ Scott ] Well, he soon will, at any rate.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And in the new U S News and World Report they have something for the Christmas season on God, again, and on Christ and the gospels and, of course...

[ Scott ] Are they pouring acid over it as usual?

[ Rushdoony ] As usual. And I believe the concluding paragraph has this profound statement that God is our very breath, which sounds more like Emerson than the Bible.

[ Scott ] Well, it is Emerson.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] You know, he... what was it? He wanted to be a transparent eyeball and wound up with aphasia so that he could walk around and he could see. He could look, but he couldn’t remember anything at all. His memory was totally destroyed. So he became... God made him what he said he wanted to be. It was one of the most eerie endings of any man’s life I have ever looked at.

[ Rushdoony ] About, oh, 30 years ago, 20, 30 years ago, I think it was 30, I am fuzzy on it not, but at the time I was very much struck by the parallels. Some American who was supposedly now a Buddhist monk wrote a book on seeing with a third eye.

[ Scott ] Oh, that was a Theodore Reich, I believe. I am sorry... I can’t think of his name. That is not the name. It is another name. Seeing with a third eye. I thought it was a psychiatric... a psychiatrist book. I didn't realize that it was a religious book also.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, a number of things were then written about the subject.

[ Scott ] Yes. There were.

[ Rushdoony ] But at the time I read one of the books and browsed in the others and I was very much struck by the resemblance to Emerson. So a lot of the hogwash we have today, the Neo Orientalism, the worship of eastern ideas.

[ Scott ] And the worship of animals.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now there has always been a certain anthropomorphism involved in discussions of animals. I mean, not just br’er rabbit stories and Aesop’s fables and so forth. Through the centuries there... we have as sort of a kinship, but there are limits to it. We are in charge here. And animals are not people.

[ Rushdoony ] And yet it is amazing how many animals are now protected. The rattlesnake is protected in some states. Florida is one of them. Briefly California was one such state, but Bill Richardson got that law repealed.

[ Scott ] Well, at the same time we are slaughtering more animals that are being kept needlessly. The household pet thing is way out of hand. There are people who just release the dog, take him out and dump him on the road somewhere.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...which is the cruelest thing I have ever heard of.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And there are others who go crazy and have 1800 cats in the house and have to... you know, cats have be gathered up and... and put away. The human society keeps telling these people to watch over their animals and take care of them and they have not because they don’t... it seems to me that we have developed a generation that doesn’t know as much about animals as we used to.

[ Scott ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] They don’t know how to handle a dog. They don’t know how to make... they don’t know how to handle themselves. It reminds me of the told joke about the fellow that from the city who climbed over the fence and started to and there was a bull in the yard, in the... behind the fence. And the fellow said to the farmer, “Is this bull safe?”

He said, “Yes, but you are not.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, the adoration , which is what it amounts to with some, of animals is very selective. I don’t find any group fro the protection of skunks.

[ Scott ] You are looking for one, though. I know, because you have got a... you have got a skunk plague...

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] And yet you are thinking of the other direction.

[ Rushdoony ] We... I am glad to say we are getting rid of them. Of course, skunks are a very prolific, you know.

[ Scott ] So it is...

[ Rushdoony ] Since the litter, several litters a year. But since the, oh, first of October Isaac has trapped 12 of them.

[ Scott ] Goodness.

[ Rushdoony ] And other things as well. So I am glad that there is no society for their protection. They are a real plague.

[ Scott ] Well, it is not... if you listen or watch the environmental groups in action you are watching something that is pretty scary.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] When I was on the ... when I was writing the history of Raytheon one of its subsidiaries was a very large engineering company headquartered somewhere in the Pittsburgh area and they had a contract to put up a nuclear plant in the Baltimore area, Forest Point or somewhere around there, I think. At any rate, the man took me into a room about as large as the room in which we are now seated and it had shelves on all way from the floor to the ceiling, everywhere except the door, all filled with bound volumes. And he said, “These volumes are the environmental and impact statement studies that we have had to make about this camp.” He said, “The plant originally was going to cost, I have forgotten, several hundred million, but it ran into the billions.” A billion is a thousand million.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And the hearings, he said, were endless. Finally, he said, “We had, we thought, we answered all objections. We had a final hearing which the inspectors said had to be by law made public and in came the hysterical housewives and the rest and who have this feeling about nuclear energy that their forebears used to have about electricity that will kill you just by being there. And the hearing seemed to go pretty well, because all the objections had been answered until somebody said, “Suppose a plane falls on it.”

Well, the... the engineers said, “It is not in the plane pattern. We don’t expect a plane to fall on the plant.”

Well, they said, “Suppose a plane strays off the pattern and has a problem and falls on the plant? Have you made provisions against that eventuality?”

Well, he said, “No, we haven’t.”

Well, the whole thing was stalled again until they reinforced against the eventuality of a plane falling on the plant at cost of many more millions of dollars. Now what the environmentalists and the newspaper people and others don’t seem to understand is that all this money has to be paid and that the people who pay it are the idiots who live in the community who let the environmentalists run this {?}.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And what people are not aware of is that one of the contributing factors to the recession we are moving into is the environmental movement.

[ Scott ] A big factor.

[ Rushdoony ] The cost to industry, the cost to business to operate is becoming prohibitive.

[ Scott ] Well, whenever you locate a plant, you have to first check out the available energy sources. You check out where you want to get the energy to operate the plant. Where are you going to get your power? That is a big, big point. Mayor... or Governor Cuomo in New York stopped the operations of a nuclear plant on Long Island that had passed all qualifications. He stopped it from ever going into operation and forgave them multi millions of dollars at enormous expense to the people of Long Island, New York City and its environs and, for that matter, the state of New York and the United States. Now I read in the paper that industry in New York is fleeing.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because of the high taxes and the high cost of all services and all equipment. Now the people in Long Island may not have a nuclear functioning plant, but they won’t have jobs in a little while.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And so it won’t matter. Now this is the death of the civilization. When they decide that innovations and change must stop in a civilization has gone against creativity. We can’t function.

[ Rushdoony ] The epitome of the Hindu approach was set forth by Gandhi, the idea small is beautiful. And that now is the thesis of many of the people in this country. I know some years ago was asked to speak in a class on economics and the students were being required to read Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. And I had just read the book and I analyzed it. And I pointed out its fallacies, how destructive it was of an economy, how it was not Christian. This was supposed to be a Christian college, evangelical, Bible believing. And so on and on. It is very presupposition was based on eastern religions. And the only comment of the professor was, “Well, I am going to have to do a great deal of teaching the rest of this week to undo what you have said.”

[ Scott ] Oh, my. Oh, my. Oh, what a terrible thing. Well, the Indian analogy is right on target. I referred, if you recall, recently, to B. S. Nightfall’s book on India: A Wounded Civilization in which he placed an awful lot of the blame onto Gandhi, who, in a modern time was trying to put people back to the spinning wheel, back to earning diapers or whatever it was he went around in.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And permanently confused those people and they are caught now in a paradoxical position which the environmentalists are also caught in of using telephones, of using electric lights, of using television, of watching films, of accepting all the productions of this advanced civilization as though they all fell like manna upon the people in the desert, as though through this civilization is not to be coveted for what it has produced and what it has given to the world. They don’t seem to understand that every other civilization that ever developed anything kept it to itself. The Chinese hid the secret of silk. And the ... you can go through all the other civilizations, Islam and the rest. The reason they haven’t written books and histories of other countries and other peoples is that they don’t... they are not interested. Only the Christians have not only developed things, but given those developments and the fruits of how to create them to the... all the world on the whole theory that it is our Christian duty to help everybody...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... as much as we can. And the Environmentalists drive to the demonstration. They are ... their poets plug in the electric guitar. They wear shoes. The animal rights people wear shoes. Do you remember when Roman Garry wrote about the terrible fascist treatment of animals in which he said we shouldn’t use leather? We... we shouldn’t make briefcases out of hides. We shouldn’t... the elephant... save the elephants, I think, was his idea. And but he wore shoes. He had a brief case.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, these people are dangerous, because they are so destructive of civilization. And it will be the capitalists and the Christians and the law abiding element that will be blamed as this recession deepens, not the clean air act, not the Environmentalists. They won’t get the blame.

[ Scott ] Well I remember the other depression where businessmen were blamed for going broke.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And even as a boy it seemed to me a pretty stupid kind of reaction.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I mean certainly the factory owner didn't want to close the factory.

[ Rushdoony ] There was one factory owner who talked to his staff and his employees and he said, “If you are willing to go along with me, I think if you will forego half or more of your pay each month and all of us take home enough to meet a few necessities we can survive and I will promise you, you will be paid everything that you forego.” He kept his promise. The factory survived. They all got paid and he went to jail for doing that.

[ Scott ] He went to jail for doing that?

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes.

[ Scott ] He broke the wages and hours law.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Yes. It is not a question of what, you know. It is a question of the regulations.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. This was in Massachusetts. They were still persecuting him in the 50s.

[ Scott ] Well, the clean air act is coming down the road. It has been enacted and it is signed into law there were , of course, pages and pages of exceptions for those who were able to reach their congressmen or their senators. But the estimates that I received estimate that at least 50,000 factories will close down. My friends in industry tell me that the big effect will be that those who can afford to will move their operations out of the United States into other areas where they don’t have a clean air act and they don’t have to worry about the inspectors and the {?}.

I said, “Well, if enough of them do that and ship their goods back into this country we won’t have the money to pay for them to buy them.” But at any rate, each guy for himself.

The dry cleaner, the baker, all kinds of people are going to have to come up to the standards of the Clean Air Act. The estimates on the cost of the clean air act run anywhere between 50 and 150 billion dollars a year and this is at a time of recession.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And higher taxes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now the environment is a word that means everything around us. The political environment, I would say, has made the rest of us an endangered species.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, our time is almost over. Is there a last statement you want to make to sum this up?

[ Scott ] No. I wish I could say something hopeful and optimistic, but I guess the best I can say is that excess creates its own reaction. Eventually these people will pay the penalty for their folly.

[ Rushdoony ] I have noticed in three comic strips in the past month the Environmentalists ridiculed. So this is a hopeful sign. If they are now the subject of humor, it means that people are fed up.

Well, our time is up. Thank you all for listening.

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