From the Easy Chair
The Beginnings of the Modern Age 1660 to 1991
Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons
Lesson: 92-214
Genre: Speech
Track:
Dictation Name: RR161BW136
Year: 1980s and 1990s
Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BW136, The Beginnings of the Modern Age 1660 to 1991, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.
[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 244, June the fifth, 1991.
This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss the beginnings of the modern age, some of the ideas and motives that went into producing the world as we have known it now since roughly 1660 the world which is now dying all around us.
Otto, do you want to introduce this subject?
[ Scott ] Yes. Thank you, Rush.
The modern age is generally, as you say, dated at around 1660. Columbia University some time ago dropped the study of the Middle Ages and just jumped from ancient Rome to 1660 which they call the age of reason. But there is a small group of historians, modern American historians, who are dissenting with that convention and they are placing the beginning of the modern age in the Renaissance. Now we know, generally speaking, the outlines of the... of the situation. Italy became rich. Italy became internationally minded. Italy became sectarian. Italy became corrupt. The faith declined. The decline of the faith even penetrated into the Vatican.
And there is a brilliant little book called Sacrelizing the Secular: The Renaissance Origins of Modernity by Dr. Stephen A. Mc Knight of Louisiana State University who felt that the Renaissance introduced two major concepts. The first was the concept of man as a terrestrially god, a god on earth who could shape his own destiny. And the second is the shift that transforms magic into the highest form of natural philosophy. These two concepts form the basis of what the neo Platonists call human nature and which led them into two directions, two simultaneous direction. One, an adoration of the ancient past and the other an ambition toward Utopian schemes for the future. And we are still caught in those concepts.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Francis Yates and some others preceded Dr. Mc Knight in this area. And there are some very fine scholars which are telling us that modern science is more closely related to magic than anything else, that it comes out of a hatred of God. It seeks to sacrelize the secular, as Mc Knight so tellingly says. And, as it approaches religion—to use his words—salvation seems to have little to do with every day life. In other words, the Church has shoved into a corner and salvation is separated from the workaday world. It is something purely with regard to heaven, no relationship to this world. And, of course, we would say that Antinomianism began with that attitude.
He sees the work of Voltaire and others as making man his own savior.
[ Scott ] Oh, yes. The idea was that man could control the elements, all the elements, the tides, movement of the planets, everything here on earth. The environmentalists believe that.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] They believe that we can control the cycle of animals and plants. We can control the elements and the earth. We can use them for what purpose they don't ever say. The ultimate goal is usually left unsaid, although Utopian thinking comes out of all of this. The major point is that they believe that man can control his destiny and his environment and therefore his future.
And, do you know, when you listen to them, you get the idea they believe this.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] They get very indignant at things that happen accidentally. I think, for instance, the idea of making the Exxon Valdez accident a criminal thing is based on the idea that we are fundamentally able to control the elements.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, Mc Knight says there are three characteristics of modernity. And I am quoting. “First the consciousness of an ethical break with the past; second, a conviction that this break is due to an epistemological advance; and, third, the belief that this new knowledge provides man a means overcoming his alienation and regaining his true humanity.”
So mankind must abandon any contact with God in order to overcome alienation, to become truly human. And it is interesting some of the people he sees as important in this. In the Renaissance Pico Paccino and the new god Anthropos he calls one chapter. Then he deals with Bacon, Compte and Marx.
[ Scott ] As examples.
[ Rushdoony ] As examples of this ...
[ Scott ] ... kind of thinking.
[ Rushdoony ] ...kind of thinking.
[ Scott ] Yes.
[ Rushdoony ] The sacred has to be secularized and the humanistic, the man centered sacrelized.
[ Scott ] Well, this, indeed, this was the real formulation which gave birth to the Humanists.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] This was really the intellectual origins of the Humanists. And it is very interesting that some very modern writers—and you wouldn’t consider religious—Umberto Echo, for instance, who wrote the ... what was it? The Mystery of the Rose? I have forgotten the exact title... Has given, has written a number of essays along this same lines pointing out that real alienation began in the Renaissance when power substituted for God.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. He also sees the centrality of men like Boccaccio and Machiavelli to all of this. And Boccaccio, who was a priest, he says there is a retreat from the world of responsibility. Everything is turned into a joke. In one story he describes someone, perhaps the worst man ever born, as someone who triumphs and, as a result, instead of virtue being rewarded, vice is rewarded in Boccaccio very commonly. And this man, the worst man, perhaps, ever born, winds up being thought of as a saint, because of a deception he practices.
So what he stresses, Dr. Mc Knight, is that in the age of Modernism, of modernity, appearance replaces reality. Appearance take precedence. And that is what Castiglione the Courtier was all about, that you in battle played safe unless you saw somebody important watching you. Then you were heroic in your behavior because everything had to be done to be seen.
[ Scott ] Well, I have ... we see this today in our own life and in the activity of our own intelligentsia. The one area that is forbidden to discuss is the results of liberal experiments. I have just gotten through reading a book on... it is called ... subtitled The Invisible Victims. White male victims of affirmative action, men who have been turned down for jobs who have not been promoted because they are the wrong race, the wrong color, the wrong sex. And the individual who wrote the book, the scholar who wrote the book is a sociologist and he had to keep his research on the subject secret to himself and some very close friends, because he knew he would get into trouble if anybody knew in a position of authority that he was researching the white male victims of affirmative action, because this is a forbidden topic.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] They are supposed to be sacrifices to a greater good and to keep their mouths shut. And one of the things he points out is that they have become convinced, because of the media barrage and scholastic barrage and, for that matter, the church barrage that everyone is in favor of affirmative action at all costs when the real fact is that nobody is in favor of it excepting those that are immediately benefiting. But an illusion has been created. So in the same point that Mc Knight is talking about, the Humanists created an illusion of rationality based on impossibilities in the Renaissance which set a pattern which is continuing to this day.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, although it was ostensibly the Age of Reason, reason, Mc Knight says, was actually undervalued because nature replacing God became an area of necessity inexorable, immutability and so on and, therefore, man was a victim. And as against this power of nature, reason was nothing.
[ Scott ] Well, they hold out the hope of controlling nature. This led to the nuclear energy. This is behind these endless experiments. Long time ago the average man realized that there was enough actual mechanical knowledge in the world to create an ongoing global economy to take care of everybody in the world, but it has never been applied. It has never been applied at all, because of the power struggle.
[ Rushdoony ] Another point that Mc Knight makes which I felt was very important is to call attention to what Galileo did in all of this. And I think one of the finest things you have ever written was your essay in the Chalcedon Report some years ago on Galileo.
[ Scott ] I think it was my first, no second... second...
[ Rushdoony ] Well, it was one of the early ones.
[ Scott ] One of the early ones.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Extremely important.
[ Scott ] Well, Galileo is a very modern figure. He lied to the pope. The pope had no argument against Galileo’s observations because the Church had already accepted them Copernicus, 60 or so years earlier. In other words, the theory was not new. But Copernicus presented it as a theory. And the pope said, “By all means. If you want to present that theory again as a theory, go right ahead.”
Then Galileo presented it as a law of planetary movement, and he sent advance copies to other countries so that he couldn’t be suppressed in Italy. So what he did was he ... the pope said, “You cannot necessitate almighty God.” In other words, you cannot say this is a law that binds God, because God cannot be bound by his creatures.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And Galileo achieved what Mc Knight would call a success through sin. He became a living martyr in the hands of the humanist propagandists.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And he has served that role ever since. And he was delighted, because all he wanted was fame.
[ Rushdoony ] Let me say, before we go on, that Stephen A. Mc Knight is the author. Sacrelizing the Secular: The Renaissance Origins of Modernity, published in 1989 by Louisiana State University Press.
This is what he says in one paragraph about Galileo and I quote. “Here in concise form Galileo has set out a fundamental feature of secularization. Theology’s reign is restricted to knowledge of salvation. The other areas of inquiry that have been subjected to her rule are now autonomous fields with their own epistemological principles. By implication, Galileo is also revising the long standing view of reason and its relation to revelation. In scholastic theology reason’s function is to initiate the search for salvation. Galileo remove reason’s religious function and establishes it as an autonomous mode of inquiry whose aim is to understand the physical world, to understand how the heavens go, not how to go to heaven,” unquote.
[ Scott ] Very well said. I ... I admire that brief book. I can’t... let me... let me add something else that he said. In effect, he is describing Galileo as a pioneer of secularization.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And he says later on, “Secularization breaks apart the tension between the secular and the sacred. The route of the sacred is greatly diminished or is eliminated all together from secular affairs. The higher elements of man’s nature, supposedly derived from his divine nature, are minimized or dismissed.
“In the secular view the natural world is governed by forces that are indifferent to mankind and virtue an dignity are measured by the ability to master fortune.”
Now there is nothing more lonely than the feeling of being confronted by the forces of nature if you have the idea that they are indifferent to you.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Nothing could break the morale of the human race more than that particular philosophy.
[ Rushdoony ] Parenthetically, Otto, I think people should know that you did deal with this book in an excellent essay in your publication Compass, the second issue. Why don’t you tell them about Compass and the address and the cost of subscription? I think they ought to know.
[ Scott ] Well, I am delighted with that. Otto Scott’s Compass comes out once a month. It is rather brief. It costs 50 dollars a year. You can get a subscription by writing to me at Box 1769, Murphys, as in Mrs. Murhpys, California 95247. And I fell upon Dr. Mc Knight’s book. It is part of an essay which is called “The Conservative Ethos.” It is in the second issue of the Compass in which I start out by saying, “What do conservatives what to conserve?” They have never been able to tell me.
[ Rushdoony ] No. It is a brief... it is six pages.
[ Scott ] Yes.
[ Rushdoony ] Every issues, so...
[ Scott ] It is... it is six close ... closely typed pages.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, what I found very interesting was that both Bruno and Campanula actually saw themselves as messiahs, humanistic messiahs. Perhaps the most recent of such humanistic messiahs, according to historian Seaman was Woodrow Wilson.
[ Scott ] Well, we have had a whole long string of messiahs.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] {?} false messiahs. But the modern age, if you want to understand the Renaissance go to New York and look around.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] There it is in living color.
[ Rushdoony ] And living crime.
[ Scott ] Yes. And that is what occurred there at that time.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] The most interesting thing is that these humanists presided over the most horrible scenes of depravity and crime, murder, poison...
[ Rushdoony ] Torture.
[ Scott ] They reintroduced torture.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] It was the Humanists who introduced torture, the Humanists who sat as judges I the witch trials and blamed the Church.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Torture had been a part of Roman law and with the Renaissance all of that was revived. It did not exist in the Middle Ages.
Well, I think the subject is a very important one, because the point that both Mc Knight and other scholars have made is that appearance replaced reality. In fact, Mc Knight goes so far as to say appearance became the new reality.
Well, Theodore Letus, who has an association with us and in our recent issue of the journal about a year or so ago on the biblical texts, he authored most of the issue. But in his own bulletin of the institute for reclamation biblical studies he comments on E. Harbison’s The Christian Scholar and the Age of the Reformation.
The Reformation was the work of scholars, something we fail to appreciate. Calvin was a scholar and Luther was a scholar, a professor. And the change that was effected as Letus and others have noted and as Harbison did, has been this, that the Middle Ages was a time earlier of scholars and the age of the great scholars of Middle Ages was remarkably young. So many of the great men like Aquinas were young men. But what happened was that about the time Aquinas died and soon thereafter, a dramatic shift took place. The medieval culture went from an emphasis on the Bible and the theology as the queen of the sciences to an emphasis on appearance. The mass replaced the thinker. Now the mass and the Church became all the more splendid and, of course, with the Renaissance and then in the post Renaissance era the churches were made to resemble a theater and the ceiling covered with paintings imitating heaven. Appearance was replacing reality.
And what happened with the reformation was that reality came back. The Bible. The real world. Dealing again with the problems of every day life. And what the age of Modernism has done is to create its own appearance, the appearance of state power, the appearance of emphasis on the arts as the Renaissance did, where the arts supplant religion rather than further it.
[ Scott ] Well, of course, the arts were used by the counter reformation to regain the ground that it lost. The arts have always been a subsidiary area.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] ... to power, because the artist are not, after all, anything else but artists. The ... the Humanists who arose in the Renaissance introduced what you might call the first Enlightenment. They secularized and they did a lot of talking about science. They did a lot of talking about the things of this world. And they broke through what they called the superstitions of their time, by which they meant the Church. They never stopped. They were never suppressed. The state became the end of all power in the Renaissance and has remained that way ever since excepting for a brief period during the first two generations of the Reformation. And then it was almost as though you couldn’t bring men away from this drive for power. They snapped back into it every time.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, that drive for power goes deep into the Middle Ages. Philip the Fair of France lived in terms of it. And Frederick II, the Hohenstaufen Holy Roman Emperor was not even Christian.
[ Scott ] Well, he was the great forerunner of them all.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Yes.
[ Scott ] But the thing that gets me, of course, is that to this day the word Humanist is used to mean somebody who is compassionate. And the fact of the matter is just the opposite.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] When we run into a liberal today he is anything but liberal. If you dissent they come at you like the mafia. All holes, no holes barred.
[ Rushdoony ] Good analogy. Well, very few historians deal honestly with the savagery of the Renaissance, the love of torture for torture’s sake, the arrogance of people in high places, the contempt for human life. One of the plays by Chapman in Elizabethan times has a Renaissance hero shocked when he is in battle, wounded, amazed that he is going to die because his belief in his god like powers had become such that while he knew other people died, somehow he was not going to.
[ Scott ] Well, this happened to Jackie Gleason when he had his first heart attack. His doctors said, “Mr. Gleason doesn’t seem to understand that he is human.”
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Chapman’s play Bussy D'Ambois is the play in which this appears. And that was not an uncommon theme. Moreover, one of the things we have now swept under the carpet and I spoke to an historian about it and he dismissed the subject, the fact that some of the Renaissance lords, nobility in one country after another felt that now that the new age had dawned, as it were, practices once considered beyond the pale such as incest became routine practices. And a great deal of that sort of thing went on that is suppressed by historians.
The Renaissance quest was, in one field after another, for power. And this is why magic and science were so appealing to them. They saw in magic and science, which at that time were almost inseparable, a means of attaining power in order to be God like.
[ Scott ] Well the white magic which they considered scientific and black magic was criminal. And the Humanists were the ones who determined which was criminal and which was not.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] But they practiced was good. What the herbalists practiced was bad, because they had no license. They had... they didn’t have the university background. They didn’t have the learning that went with being a herbalist or whatever. So this began the academic controls and the scientific controls. What is scientifically... what is scientifically acceptable and what is not? And we live among these controls today.
People actually believed that you cannot learn anything out of the school... outside of school.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] That is the only place you can learn anything. And it must be in a crowd.
[ Rushdoony ] It is the poorest place nowadays to learn anything. I had to unlearn most of what I learned at the university...
[ Scott ] And a great many others. I talked to Ellsworth Mc Intire not too long ago who went through ... he sent me a copy of a talk. It took him 31 years to get his doctorate because, of course, it was broken up by forays into the world of work, interruptions and so forth. But 31 years after he graduated from high school he had his doctorate. And he looks at it now as part of his insanity, because he says the only good it has done him is that it gets him a certain amount of dignified respect from strangers. But the Renaissance is when the scholars really broke out from the control of the Church. And that is when science began what Dr. White later called the warfare between science and religion. Remember those two volumes?
[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes.
[ Scott ] ...which... in which...
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] ... science finally succeeded in throwing the clergy out of practically all the universities and colleges by the turn of this century. So we are now living in this shambles that we are living in today, these ruins, intellectual ruins in which we live as a result of the Humanist triumph.
[ Rushdoony ] We hear a great deal about the so-called medieval witchcraft trials which is nonsense. They were non existent in the Middle Ages. They were a part of the Renaissance.
[ Scott ] That is right.
[ Rushdoony ] And it was Renaissance men who were interested in persecuting witches.
[ Scott ] The Renaissance began the inquisition.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Now the interesting thing is that the Renaissance man, the scholar or politician was interested in power. And on the lowest levels of society there was a similar quest for power by a great many helpless people, elderly women who were all alone and they sought it through magical practices. And, as a result, they were persecuted.
After all, the Renaissance leaders and their followers felt that power should be a monopoly at the top.
[ Scott ] Oh, of course. Always.
[ Rushdoony ] And any old woman who practiced herbal powers or anything like that was obviously a terrible person and had to be killed.
[ Scott ] As bad as a modern midwife.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. We are persecuting mid wives right now.
[ Scott ] Or chiropractors.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Or nutritionists.
[ Scott ] People who are selling vitamin tablets.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] They don’t have the proper credentials. It is a... it is a wonderful game.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] But in the process a lot of people get hurt. We have witch hunts now only we call it anti Racism.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, today we see the quest for power in various areas, the political sphere, of course, primarily. And modern politics and the globalism, the new world order are quest for total power. But then we see on the popular level and popular culture the activities o the rock and roll groups. They are Satanists.
[ Scott ] They are interesting. Every photograph that I see of a rock musical group shows the most evil looking people.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] The dour expressions, scowls, black clothes, belligerent stances. And you wonder what this has to do with music.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, they are cultivating power. And they indulge in practices on the side and there are authenticated reports by some scholars that human sacrifice is, again, a part of the world, the western world as well as the world outside of the west, because there is a hunger for the ability to destroy, the ultimate exercise of power.
[ Scott ] Well, there is an awful lot of frustration and hatred walking around. I talked to a young man here in Murphys just the other day who said he went to what he calls the valley. Now I don’t really know what part of the valley he was in. It might have been Stockton or Sacramento or Oakland or San Francisco. I don’t know which. But at any rate he took a girl out to a movie or something like that and when he came out he said there were a bunch of skin heads around in the area. And they were jousting each other, obviously all looking for trouble. He and his girl crossed the street. He saw another man come by with another young woman and he said one of these skin heads went over and without any warning knocked him to the ... to the street, knocked him to the ground. Not total stranger.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] It comes up and hits you for no reason whatever.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] That is... that is hatred in action. Aimless hatred. And this has been fostered by the wave of Sadism which runs through...
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] ... our public institutions and so forth. On the top of all of this, presiding over it, if you remember I once wrote an essay called new crimes about the professionals who play games with innocent people. They tell... they pull them. They tell them lies. They experiment with them and all kinds of ways which were once considered criminal, but they have the credentials and they can say this is part of research or this is part of therapy.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, the interesting thing to me is that more than a few people who are anti Christian to the core were champions of modernity have singled out as the key figure in the modern age the Marquis de Sade.
[ Scott ] Well, he is... he is.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] He has admirers. I am amazed at the number of female scholars that deliver long monographs on de Sade’s horrible writings.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] ...which consist almost entirely of sadistic behavior to women.
[ Rushdoony ] He has been called the...’
[ Scott ] Astonishing.
[ Rushdoony ] ... the greatest psychologist of the modern age.
[ Scott ] Well, in that case, Lucifer has a rival.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] It is astonishing how twisted things have become...
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] ...in the hands of Humanists. But when I read about the Humanists sitting over in... in judgment over the witch trials, I was astonished to run into the fact that according to recent researches the records have been altered and forgeries have been placed in the... in the records, purportedly ancient parchments have been carefully created and stuck...
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] ...in places where scholars could find them.
On the other hand, if you go in to look at some more recent developments, like, for instance, some of things that happened in World War II you find that the records have been stolen and they are not available at all.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] History has become a punching bag.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, we have allowed, for example, Turkey to come into our national archives and destroy material that calls attention to their massacre of Armenians and Greeks.
[ Scott ] They have been given access to American archives.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] So they could winnow out what they don’t like.
[ Rushdoony ] And they have also subsidized chairs in universities to make sure their lies are propagated.
[ Scott ] Well, this is what happens when the Church lost a competitive position with the university. Once the competition is over, the monopoly goes berserk. This is a very old phenomenon and it operates in the field of scholarship and education. I consider American... the American educational establishment the most fragrant and scandalous, corrupt institution and most corrupt network in the country. It makes the Pentagon look like choir boys.
[ Rushdoony ] I think it is interesting that a recent issue of the Spectator from England, the London Spectator, carried an article on how education was far superior when the Church handled it and it cost the tax payer for nothing produced a better society and how even today those who have the benefit of a church controlled education go further than those who do not.
At the same time, within the past week in this country amazingly enough George Will in a column wrote against public education and called the public schools public enemy number one.
[ Scott ] Amazing.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Amazing.
[ Rushdoony ] One of the last people I would have expected to say something like that. It is a very, very biting essay.
[ Scott ] Well, he is talented. And the politically correct business that is going on in the universities now is beginning to create a reaction. It is not as much of a reaction as there should be. I am inclined to think now that they are creating obedience schools instead of universities, because the students and the professors alike know that they will be punished if they don’t tow the party line. And the most sinister thing about this is that there is no party. There is simply a set of assumptions which you are supposed to accept without question.
[ Rushdoony ] I like your description of them as obedience schools because that reminds me of the schools we take our dogs to.
[ Scott ] I... I had that in mind. Well, we... we both know an number of people who were ruined by speaking out in school.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And was it Stanford that wouldn’t give Moser his doctorate?
[ Rushdoony ] That is right.
[ Scott ] ... because he wrote about abortions in China?
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And you notice that the subject of abortions in China has been buried every since.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Nothing more said about tit.
[ Scott ] Nothing more said about it. And they are forced. They are forced abortions. Now they...
[ Rushdoony ] And the fact that we have been financing them in China is also surprising. Howard Philips brought that to public attention a few years ago.
[ Scott ] Howard just came back, you know, with Pat Buchanan from the Baltic.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] He said that there are Soviet soldiers everywhere in the Baltic states. He said there is no question about the control. He said they took part of the things from his luggage and confiscated them as anti Soviet material. And the KGB arrested him at one point and marched him down to the border station and he was there for several hours. He said the army and the KGB are just as much in control as they were under Stalin.
[ Rushdoony ] A little better so, because we are turning the food over to the KGB directly, giving them greater power. So we are the ally of the KGB and the CIA is working with the KGB now.
[ Scott ] Yes. On the same program Crossfire that Howie spoke the Colby spoke. Mr. Colby used to be head of the CIA as you know. And he was very upset with Howie and he disputed what Howie had to say. Colby’s argument was that we spend 300 billion a year on a military and if we can assist the Soviet and reduce the threat and bring about peace, we can save all this money. And the amount of money that we give the Soviet was miniscule compared to what we could save by cutting back on our military here.
And Howie looked at him very calmly and said, “Well, you are the one who persistently underestimated the strength of the Soviet military all the years you were in office.”
[ Rushdoony ] And their policy is like subsidizing rapists because they rape.
[ Scott ] Well, what this is is a policy of fear.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] This is... they used to call it appeasement when it was Hitler. This is a policy of supine surrender. This is paying ransom. This is Byzantium distributing gifts to the Mongols and the others. This is cowardice.
[ Rushdoony ] And I read just today that our president is pleased that things have settled down somewhat in the Soviet Union so a summit meeting now is more likely. That settling down is simply that we are hearing less about their depredations.
[ Scott ] We hear less and less about more and more. The free press is free not to tell you what it doesn’t want you to know. Most people have the strange idea that it is the duty of the media to tell you everything that is important. The media has no such duty. The media only has a living to make and profits to earn and careers to forward and the media does not have any obligation to tell anything about anything to anybody. It is very strange. It is a sort of a childish assumption throughout this country that the world will always do right by you.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, I have been interested, of late, in following the case of Bill Honig the California state superintendent of public instruction and this came to mind when you spoke of the media. He, though his wife, has set up a separate corporation providing educational aids which supposedly is totally independent and Honig has been telling schools to use this material.
[ Scott ] It could be like the sucker for your defense having his wife manufacture tanks.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. So it has been a very lucrative thing. And the recommendations have gone from coast to coast, by the way. One paper and one paper alone blew the whistle on that. It was the Sacramento Union. The story is an old one by now. The committee dealing with political corruption refused to touch it. It is in the hands of the attorney general of the state now. Whether he will do anything is questionable. Every newspaper in the state has killed the story.
[ Scott ] They have ignored it.
[ Rushdoony ] They have ignored it.
[ Scott ] Well, certainly.
[ Rushdoony ] And the California magazine which has had some prestige came out with an attack on the Sacramento Union in the newest issue.
[ Scott ] Well, I...
[ Rushdoony ] A ridicule of it.
[ Scott ] I understand the San Diego Union is researching the San Diego Union so... Sacramento Union, so it can attack it. There was one interesting incident that came up that {?} told me about. He is the editor, as you know. He said a movie came out. I have forgotten the name of the movie right now.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I know the one.
[ Scott ] Do you? What was it?
[ Rushdoony ] It was about the trial of the Hollywood six.
[ Scott ] Oh yes, yes. That was.,.
[ Rushdoony ] ...who were Communists.
[ Scott ] That’s it. Guilt by... Innocent, you know, built by association or something to that sort.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Well, as we know, the record is nobody except Communists were pulled up before that committee.
[ Rushdoony ] That is right.
[ Scott ] But in any event a young man movie reviewer at the Sacramento Union, liberal, wrote a very fulsome, flattering review of this false movie. And the following day Joe Farrah, the editor sat down and wrote a review pointing out that it was a fantasy and that no such things ever occurred and giving his opinion of the movie. And he got calls from the New York Times, the Washington Post and all over the country wanting to know how he could do such a thing to his own movie reviewer.
In other words, the idea of having two views of a single movie both out in the open was just considered a violation of the code.’
[ Rushdoony ] And that was the take off point for the California monthly.
[ Scott ] Is that so?
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] They considered that an outrage?
[ Rushdoony ] An outrage.
[ Scott ] I mean, he printed the man’s review, even though he didn’t agree with it.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Yes.
[ Scott ] But nevertheless, to have an alternate view was an outrage.
[ Rushdoony ] Not many other newspapers will do that.
[ Scott ] Well how many other editors would have printed a review they didn’t agree with?
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Not... not any that I know. Not any that I know. There is one of the things about newspaper work is that it is an unlimited monarchy.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And I have seen some very hard men crawling before the city desk. Most journalists are not brave inside the city room.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, of course, it is an inquisition and the right of the Sacramento Union, the oldest daily in the United... in California, its right to exist is being questioned...
[ Scott ] Because it has a different view.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes, because it breaks stories that no one else will cover because they are unfriendly to the establishment.
[ Scott ] So much for the free press and the First Amendment.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] They are... this First Amendment of ours is a great legend, a great myth, you know. It is the part about the free exercise of religion somehow or another never seems to get mentioned.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, I thought it was interesting that one of the supreme court justices admitted that they have probably endangered freedom of religion.
[ Scott ] That was O’Connor, wasn’t it?
[ Rushdoony ] Yes, O’Connor.
[ Scott ] Yes. Yes. Belatedly.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Belatedly. They are now ... they are beginning to... they should wear pajamas instead of robes on that bench because they are ... they are beginning to strike me as men who have been sleeping too long and have just gotten out of bed.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Here they are making rulings at all sixes and sevens.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, a few years back—and I do not recall which justice it was—was awakened at night by someone important who came to his door.
[ Scott ] Oh, I remember that. That was Warren Burger himself.
[ Rushdoony ] Ah, yes, you are right.
[ Scott ] He... he... they rang his doorbell at midnight and he came to the door and he had a pistol in his hand.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. So the benevolent kind of world he imagined in his opinions in the court...
[ Scott ] He knew better.
[ Rushdoony ] He knew better.
[ Scott ] He knew better.
[ Rushdoony ] They are hypocrites.
[ Scott ] Yes, they are. Yes, they are. When I was on the San Diego Union I read an article came over the board tape that Mr. Burger took a plane from Washington to New York when he was chief justice and people were smoking on the plane and he complained about it and they didn’t pay any attention to him so when he got back into his office in Washington on his official stationery he wrote a letter of complaint and he got a fulsome apology and something would be done about it. And the executive editor of the Union gave it to me and said, “Maybe that deserves an editorial comment.”
I said, “I would love to do it.” And I said, “Any man who could get off a plane in New York City in that sewer and still be indignant about smoking a cigarette is an ass.”
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I agree.
[ Scott ] Of course, they didn’t print the editorial, needless to say, but it was a great pleasure to write.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, we have wandered a bit from...
[ Scott ] ...from modernity.
[ Rushdoony ] ...from modernity, but, then, perhaps we haven’t.
[ Scott ] I don’t think we have.
[ Rushdoony ] We are dealing with...
[ Scott ] We are talking about modernity.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] We could bring a man from the Renaissance, Guno or one of the others, Vico, from the Renaissance and put him here today and he would feel at home.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But the homosexuals...
[ Scott ] Everything...
[ Rushdoony ] Clean as they {?}
[multiple voices]
[ Scott ] Which they did then.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Which they did.
[ Rushdoony ] They exalted them then.
[ Scott ] Yes. And they had astrologers and here you pick up the newspaper and there is a horoscope in every paper.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And...
[ Rushdoony ] Well...
[ Scott ] And Nancy Reagan can tell you all about it. I mean, they had a court astrologer.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] The popes had astrologers.
[ Rushdoony ] And that came with the Renaissance they did not have them earlier.
[ Scott ] Oh, no. Of course not. But, you know, the Church is just as much an instrument of the age as anything else. It is astonishing in some ways, I think, humbling to realize how much we are affected by the age in which we live.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, our time is almost up, Otto. But I want to get back to the point that Harbison and others and Letus made that appearance replaces reality when an age is on the skids.
[ Scott ] That is true. We need a new reformation...
[ Rushdoony ] And reformations take place when scholars begin to work. And that is what we are doing. This age is dying all around us. And we have a new age to create. And I don’t like the term new age because of the connotations, but a Christian era that has to be ushered in. And it isn’t going to come about because of fearful men or half heard men.
As Dorothy was observing today if half the people who read our report tithe it would create several forces in our country today.
[ Scott ] That is true.
[ Rushdoony ] If they tithed it intelligently.
[ Scott ] No question.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you. I
[ Voice ] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.