From the Easy Chair

Masculinity

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 93-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BX137

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BX137, Masculinity from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 247, August the fifth, 1991.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss the subject of masculinity. Now the subject is a very important one because there have been dramatic shifts in this century in the character and outlook of the male sex.

First of all to begin with a... an historical background. With the Enlightenment some very far reaching changes came into the western world. Prior to that time there were no legal discriminations against women such as began to prevail after about 1660. But you had a strange circumstance whereby women were at one and the same time legally robbed of their rights—including the right to their own property which fell into the hands of the husband—and at the same time began to be treated as less intelligence... intelligent. The enlightenment had decided that that reason was the supreme factor in all things and that men represented reason whereas women represented emotions.

Well, this is nonsense. The studies of Dr. Stephen Goldberg have indicated that men excel at abstract reasoning, but women far surpass men at practical reasoning.

At any rate, it was, you might say, the men’s liberation movement that came into being after 1660 headed up by Charles II and his corrupt court including a number of degenerates, homosexuals and the like.

After about two centuries of that the Feminists movement arose and in this century, especially since World War II, has become very powerful. At the same time men have lost a great deal of the attributes of masculinity. And in its place the macho bit has come in which is pseudo masculinity.

Now one of the things that marked men in the early age of this century and in the last century, particularly in this country was the pioneering spirit so that I do believe the United States had a unique history in this respect. It has been fashionable in recent years to downplay the pioneering spirit. But anyone with a background in farming knows that farming is not easy and ranching is not easy.

Now imagine the problem if you being farming by clearing the land. The idea the virgin soil as somehow superior is except in rare areas nonsense. Soil is built up by careful husbandry. And the work of the American male from the early years until World War I and even II in many of the areas of this country was very hard work. It fostered masculinity. A man had to work hard. He had to subdue the earth in a very strong and physical sense. And we must remember that during most of our history we have been a predominantly rural people. It has been in my lifetime that the shift has taken place and Americans have become urban rather than small town and country.

Now this has changed the image of men quite a bit. At the same time you have had the rise of Feminism which has further been a shock, as it were, to the historical scene and to the image of the man.

As a result, some feel that today one of the problems of our time is that men no longer know what masculinity is, what it means to be a man.

Now I am going not stoop here and let Otto make a general statement and then I am going to go into some of the biblical aspects of this. Otto?

[ Scott ] Well, we are living in a period when men are distinctly unfashionable, as you know.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] In fact, you might say they are in... they have... they are in bad stead... standing right now. There are interludes, of course, where temporarily they are ... their reputation is ... improves. In the case of the recent Gulf War there was a... the whole business of Schwarzkopf and the treatment of the troops and so forth and so forth was the best it has been since World War II. We won’t go into the reasons, but it was an interlude.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...in which temporarily... because in emergencies men are very desirable. They have their uses.

The ... but the relationship or ... or what constitutes manhood varies from culture to culture, but there are certain very definite overlaps between all cultures, because, after all, we are dealing here with a gender... with half the human race and the characteristics of men have been recorded throughout the centuries and I doubt if fashion or reputation or magazines or lectures or anything else is going to change the fundamental nature of either gender.

What happens, though, is that cultural forces do shape what is acceptable behavior in men and what is not acceptable.

Now the Latin culture, which my father was raised in was... is very clear. And there is a great deal of satisfaction in that clarity. There was men and women and children and when I repeat the Latin idea doesn’t... don’t... doesn’t mean that I agree with it. But their idea is that the woman is between the man and the child. And in practice I notice with interest it doesn't seem to work out that way. The Latin women are very dominant and very influential and very strong and highly respected. So it is really a partnership as it always has been throughout the centuries.

But theoretically in the abstract, it is men, women... the woman between the child and the man. And certain things are not manly. Faggotry being one of them and I don’t care whether the word is considered a bad word or to. I am used to using it.

[ Rushdoony ] I can think of worse words.

[ Scott ] I can think of worse and more descriptive ones.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] At any rate, I recall that my father introduced me to one man in Caracas some years back. We are talking now what? Thirty years ago. And he told me later that that particular man had killed his brother because he found out that he was faggot. And called the police and the police came and he gave them the gun and said, “I shot him because he had dishonored the family,” and told them why. And they didn't arrest him.

Now I am not sure that that is the same case today. But at least that was the rule. Now, as you know, there is an old historical theory to the effect that when faggotry is countenanced by a culture, when it is accepted and even more than accepted, when it becomes fashionable that that is a sign of deep societal illness.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now we are in that position. And as part of the process of being in that position, because it puts us back into the pagan era, very definitely we have returned to the pagan attitude towards sex and toward male behavior. The Romans, of course, made a distinction between the passive and the active. A Roman citizen who took a passive role in a homosexual relationship even in the worst days of the empire was stripped and punished. We have gone beyond that. We now say consenting adults are ok.

So in the process of moving into this position, which has been done with ... within one generation, because, as you know, in... by 1945 homosexuality was illegal in every state and forbidden in all polite society and so forth, although it existed. It didn’t... it wasn’t out of the closet. From 1945 until now or the year... a generation and a half, it is not only out of the closet, but it is now demanding special privileges. And in the course of this transition the profile, the masculine profile has become almost invisible.

I doubt very much if the average father today is able to explain to his children, to his sons what is manly and what is not. My father had absolutely no doubt of what was manly, what was not and managed to convey most of it to me with hardly a word, mainly by example. There were certain things which you couldn’t allow other people to do or to say to you or you would betray yourself. You would not be a proper individual. And the essence was not bullying. It wasn’t macho, as you said before. I mean, he used to say, “Don’t pull out a gun in the living room.” I mean there is no need to have an argument or to prove how tough you are when there is no issue involved. But very definitely there are the qualities of courage, the qualities of honesty, qualities of character which no proper man forgets. And yet I doubt very much if you took a group of young people in the United States today and brought this subject up they would be able to give you any sort of listing of what masculine characteristics are.

[ Rushdoony ] It is interesting that what we have today in modern education brings about a confusion of gender. They educate both boys and girls as if though there were no difference between the two.

[ Scott ] The same rules for both.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And as though it were invidious to mention the fact of sexual differences. Now that sort of thing warps boys and girls from their earliest years. They are not taught to be respectful. The old attitude did not demean women. Rather it treated them with respect and every boy was taught that it was his duty to be protective of girls.

[ Scott ] Oh, definitely. I mean the language around girls was different as it would be around your mother or your sister. You didn’t treat them the same because they weren’t the same. I mean, girls could say things to you that would get a boy a bloody nose very quickly. But now I understand they talk to each other in uninhibited terms.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I couldn’t describe to you what a conversations I have heard between men and women and girls and boys.

One of the things that... to get back to the Enlightenment that they did in saying man represented reason and women emotion was to turn away from the education of women to treat them as incapable of learning on the same level and also to pamper them, the pampering of women began with their legal deprivation.

[ Scott ] Women as pets.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And they were told they were more sensitive which is something I thoroughly doubt. Women are not more sensitive than men. That is, I think, a myth. In fact, in some respects women have greater toughness. I am not talking about the physical sense, but in their ability to take things.

[ Scott ] Well, blood doesn’t surprise them.

[ Rushdoony ] No. And as some woman who said her husbands cringe with horror at any kind of close examination by a doctor, such as for prostrate problems, whereas women go to a gynecologist and submit to far more. There is a toughness about women when it comes to dealing with the difficulties of life, wiping diapers. I have done a great deal of that in my time, but women and ... can take things in that stride much more easily than men can.

[ Scott ] Well, the... it is true, I think, the men tend to the abstract. They can be caught by words. And I am pretty sure with William James and his definition of the tender minded and the tough minded.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...in which he said men can be caught by words and, therefore, can be tricked into stupid positions. But a woman will try to visualize the effect of those words in a human situation.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] No, of course, this is only in general abstract reasoning. The fact... In actual life men fool women and women fool men because the other sex is always somewhat mysterious to us. We cannot anticipate their reactions. But I have thought for a long time and I haven’t read this anywhere that you could gauge masculinity by the attitudes towards femininity. And I have gone into that before where the homosexual competes with a woman and a week man will abuse a woman and genuine men will respect women just as you respect your mother. You respect your wife. You respect the other sex. And when it comes to the whole business of respect to take advantage of women is an unmasculine sort of thing to do, because you cannot use your full strength against a woman physically and one shouldn’t do it intellectually either, because that is an abandonment the restrictions which every man has to put upon himself. He has to learn to control his temper and he has to learn to control his speech. He has to learn the essence of self government which is himself and then, of course, he can steer a ship and most relationships I have seen that have been happy, have been satisfactory have been when the men chart... man charts a course and steers a ship towards certain goals and his wife becomes his first mate. That works.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And it seems to work better than any other kind of relationship.

[ Rushdoony ] And that is biblical. You referred earlier to homosexuality and its manifestation in prominent form as the end of a culture. Saint Paul in the first chapter of Romans tells us precisely that. He describes homosexuality and says that these people are haters of all natural affections, enemies of mankind and more. But the text there in the English versions is usually faulty, because when we are told that they burned with lust one for another the literal reading of the Greek is they burned out.

[ Scott ] They burned out.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. It portrays homosexuality as the burning out of man.

[ Scott ] Interesting.

[ Rushdoony ] It is the end of man. It is his...’

[ Scott ] ...embers.

[ Rushdoony ] Degradation.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Embers. Yes.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] He has in effect destroyed himself and he is burned out. Now that is the biblical description of homosexuality...

[ Scott ] Well, that is very apt.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That is very apt. They go, you know, into successive stages of degradation. They move from the sexual into the sadistic. That this where the whip and the leather crowd comes in.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And then they move into serial killings, torture and murder. That is the end of the road. These are very dangerous people. And to have this entire country sentimentalized over them is to mislead the people and to lead them in the proper sense into temptation.

The whole business here is, as far as I think, on the... in terms of masculinity is that a man has to be master of himself. I think I talked once before about Hugh Walpole’s book Fortitude in which the protagonist... it was a book that Somerset Maugham stole from. He used part of it as the ... Of Human Bondage. The protagonist in this particular novel was afraid of his father and his father apparently had sadistic tendencies and the boy imitated those and got some satisfaction out of hurting his fellow school mates in rugby which is a rough game. Then his father began to weaken and he observed this and he finally realized that his father as not a strong man, but a weak man and that by imitating his father he was imitating his father’s weakness and that Sadism is a weakness.

Well, Sadism is a masculine trap. It is very easy for a man to fall into it because if you are physically fit and you are active and you have a quick temper, there is nothing better than to beat up the other guy. And you have to learn that you can’t beat up the other guy even if you don’t like him or he says things that you don't agree with. I mean it is one of the lessons of my early manhood.

And with the idea that Sadism is a weakness that has to be governed and controlled and not given into. There are all sorts of weaknesses which comprise tests of character and masculinity is the ability to confront those weaknesses and to overcome them. Just the opposite of what we are now being told.

And I understand that young men today get married today with the expectation that their wife is going to work and that they even make property agreements, some of these people. And there have been a few years ago there were talks about drawing up a contract on how they will share the household duties. You know, the proper young man now has to wash the dishes and this and that. Well, I mean, you do if you want... when my wife was ill I was a butler. My wife isn’t ill anymore and so I stopped buttling.

The strange things are happening here in this society. People are being told how to be human beings.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And they are being told how to be men and women or how to be hermaphrodites.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] In a psychological sense.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, when you have the prevalence of homosexuality you have a burning out of a culture. And you have, of course, the destruction of masculinity. And since God has ordained that men should be the head of households, that they should bear the responsibilities of a culture, it means the death of a culture. We are increasingly seeing an advance case of cultural decay. Today to pick up paper is a horrifying fact.

I can recall, as you can also, I am sure, Otto, how, for example, rape, a case appearing anywhere in the country was headline news from coast to coast when we were children. And now it is no longer news there is so much of it occurring. It is a common place routine thing.

[ Scott ] Well, the women are correct when they say rape is an act of hatred.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It I a deliberate act of humiliation. And it is interesting. I think we have gone over this once before on so-called wild west that there were no sex crimes...

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] ...during the days of the wild west, none whatever.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] And yet every one of our western movies show rape as a central theme. These people are trashing our histories. They are distorting our history. And in that way making what is contemporary seem normal instead of a decline.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, when we were boys there was crime in a certain number of big cities, notably Chicago. But in most of the country you still had the prevalence of an old fashioned Christian culture. Even to 1950 you could walk the streets of New York at any time of the day or night and any part of the city including the slums and you were safe.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes. People used to sleep on fire escapes to escape the summer heat, poor people.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Slipped and set in Central Park. My grandparents used to put a note on the door saying, “Key under doormat.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. That was routine. Thefts were rare in most places.

[ Scott ] That is true. The crime that was headlined was crime between criminals.’

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It was the bootleg wars, the gangs that were involved in the bootlegging business. That was what gave Chicago its terrible reputation. But today the crime in Detroit and other places out rival anything we ever imagined could happen.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Over 23,000 murders a year we have right now.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, that is far more than in the Gulf War...

[ Scott ] Oh, indeed.

[ Rushdoony ] ...by a country mile.

[ Scott ] Well, that brings up the question with when we were boys. We used to have fist fights. Now it is pretty hard to hurt the other guy seriously in a fist fight. Black eye, bloody nose and maybe a tooth got loosened or something. I don't think... I don’t recall anything worse. I got a terrible beating once. Both eyes were black. The fellow caught me with a Sunday punch and never let up. But we had fist fights and they were fair.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] If the other fellow fell then we would wait until he got up and we waited until he hollered enough and that was the end of it and the onlookers saw to it that it was a fair fight. Today they have knives and guns. And we considered those, at least I did in my crowd, the earmarks of cowardice.

[ Rushdoony ] By the mid 60s the old fashioned fight that we knew as boys, two boys with a circle around them...

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] ...watching.

[ Scott ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] Fighting it out and if anyone of the two tried to be unfair...

[ Scott ] He was stopped.

[ Rushdoony ] He was stopped. He was stopped. Or if he were going too far in beating up the other it was stopped.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] But by the mid 60s the shift began. You could no longer take on another boy by yourself because his friends would gang up on you and it become dangerous. Now it is murder.

[ Scott ] Well now that used to be confined to the slums and to other races.

[ Rushdoony ] Well in those days even black crime was exceptional. It occurred, but no one then would have imagined the kind of crime that goes on now in black neighborhoods.

[ Scott ] No, because they had their own community. And they didn't consider it segregation.

[ Rushdoony ] And their churches were stronger.

[ Scott ] They had their own churches, their own ... not just their own clergy, but their own physicians, their own dentists, their own lawyers, their own pharmacists, their own stores and shop keepers and so forth. And they had all the role models in the world.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Whereas now the black bourgeoisie who get successful moves away from the black community and moves all over has a clientele which goes across the board. The black community lost a lot with desegregation.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, to shift now to the biblical view, we are told in the Shorter Catechism that man made... God made man in his own image in knowledge, righteousness and holiness and with dominion. And we can only truly understand what man is if we look at that definition, God’s.

First of all, knowledge. Man has a duty to know, to understand and to grow in knowledge. Then holiness. To be holy because god requires that he be holy. And then righteousness or justice, to use a more modern word. Man was created to represent God’s justice on earth and dominion, not domination, but dominion, to exercise dominion under God and to subdue the earth.

Well, man has been busy trying to redefine himself. One statist educator who is not a Christian said a few years ago that... and this was early in the 70s he saw nothing good ahead, because a very popular book of the time was being used in the schools extensively, The Naked Ape.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And he said, “If this is the role model we give to our students, we are in trouble, because we stripped them of all morality, of all meaning and purpose and we tell them: Do your own thing. Become the animal you have been taught that you are.” And, of course, he was right. We have seen that fulfilled very clearly.

[ Scott ] Well, the ... the rules of the game have been swept away and nothing remains but the game. Now a game without rules turns into something pretty messy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And this is where we are. Everybody that came here in this country came as a part, you might say, of a culture in Europe. And the cultures of Europe were not synonymous, but they were all Christian. And even Latin America has a Christian culture which held it together throughout all the rest of its turbulent history. And, as I say, the Latins and the Mediterranean people who came here have managed to hold together the family structure much longer and much more cohesively than have northern Europeans. You might almost say the Protestant culture has not done as well in holding the family together as the Catholic culture. And I think that is very interesting. It is something that is never mentioned in the sociology books that I have seen in the United States. The sociologists here attempt to describe society without religion which, of course, means like describing algebra without the x. A society without a religion and a society with a religion is the difference between night and day. And we are still aware of the fact that Italian families, for instance, and Latin families have every strong extended family situations. It is not necessarily true of those of English or Irish or German descent, because the families have disintegrated to a very great extent. This was a very difficult country for the Irish I particular, because the men came over in Ireland itself was a man’s country. But the Irish that came over were uneducated and unskilled. And therefore the men were at a disadvantage. Their wives had to go to work as maids and cooks and so forth. And they had the same sort of displacement of the male female relationship that happened to the black families. And it took the Irish a long time to adjust the balance.

Now you are no longer aware of an Irish community in the United States. They have integrated into the American community at large and their family relationships reflect the family as a whole.

[ Rushdoony ] The historian Ozment wrote a book just a few years ago When Fathers Ruled. And the thesis was the tremendous revolution which the protestant reformation wrought. It created a strong family structure. According to Eugen Rosenstock Huessey, this was so powerful that Catholicism imitated it and the cult of Joseph, Saint Joseph arose, the holy family and so on.

The sad fact is that while that has survived longer than any other in Latin America in particular, the stronger Protestant family structure has broken down. I think there is a revival underway. I think we are seeing now—and the Christian and home school movements are important aspects of this—a remarkable rejuvenation of the family.

I want to shift gears a little bit here to deal with the influence of Hegel. Hegel posited the continual and radical conflict of interest that is basic to history. Prior to that the basic thesis of western civilization was the harmony of interests.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] But Hegel’s position meant that the whole world was at war, the sexes were at war. Men were at war with each other.

[ Scott ] Well, there is almost an anticipation of Darwinian struggle for survival.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Darwin’s theory...

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ... is Darwinism is Hegelianism applied to biology.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And he knew that.

Now, one of the conduits of Hegelian thinking in the United States was, of course, Emerson.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And so the idea of the war of the sexes was promoted here. And Feminism was one consequences of that.

[ Scott ] Well, you are anticipating....

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...our next topic.

[ Rushdoony ] I... I am. But the devastation that Hegel’s thesis brought in family life throughout the western world and now because of our universities, throughout the world, is incredible.

[ Scott ] Well, in a way it was also a trickle down philosophy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The aristocracy always lived differently and one of the ... one of the attributes of the aristocrat was that he was not bound by fashion or by rules. He could do what he chose. He couldn’t lose his status by misbehavior. That was one of the... and it did, of course, produce great individuals and also terrible individuals in its hey day.

But when that philosophy moved down to the middle class ala Hegel and through the universities, it was devastating, because the middle class is what held society together.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, one of the followers of Hegel who rebelled against him in superficial points, but basically developed his ideas was Nietzsche and Nietzsche saw war as the basic function of man. His superman was the killer.

[ Scott ] Oh, sure. The transcendental hero.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And Samuel Warner described Nietzsche’s philosophy as the urge to mass destruction. And that philosophy, he said, has penetrated all of society the world over and has become a part of the image men have of themselves, a suicidal one.

[ Scott ] Well, it is interesting. The only search that is always successful, without exception is the search for trouble.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Any many who looks for trouble will always find it. He is never disappointed. And these ideas were floating among the intelligentsia as they call themselves of the Russians by the 1850s. And a very strange thing. The teenagers began this contemptuous attitude toward their parents with which we are so familiar today.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The whole arguments against the family structure and against manhood and so forth were floating in the top levels of Russia in 1856, because I happen to be researching that year right now because it is the year that Wilson was born. And all these ideas traveled around the world, the United States being a distant colony of Europe and colonized not by aristocrats, but by the Middle class and by the working class remained aloof from these currents longer than any other great power. We were catapulted into it with World War II.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, it is interesting that the style, the speech, the sexual revolution, everything that marked the hippie movement you found in Russian youth.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ...prior to World War I.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes. Nihilism.’

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Anarchism.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Long hair and blue tinted glasses.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The works...

[ Rushdoony ] The whole works.

[ Scott ] And look what happened to them.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now switch it over to the Weimar Republic.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Defeated Germany after World War I where they had homosexual and lesbian night clubs and entertainments and the long hair and the avant-garde art, fractured images of the human psyche. It means whatever you want it to mean.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And look what happened to them. The interesting part about all of this is that the results are seldom if ever added up. We have here professors of enormous learning who never add up the results of these experiments. Even today with the Soviet Union starving they are still telling us that we need more regulations and controls to protect the people from polluting the environment.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I recall one of the most important universities in the world a professor, a friend of mine, now retired, who was regarded as one of the ornaments of that university so that he... he was on a number of occasions relied upon to represent them here and abroad. But when he took a stand against abortion which was surprising considering that he had no trait of Christian orthodoxy, he told me he was ostracized.

[ Scott ] Ostracized. Well, that is...

[ Rushdoony ] He was finished.

[ Scott ] In the name of tolerance.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] In the name of freedom and liberty.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Ostracized. Well, going back to the masculine thing. It was considered throughout the centuries the epitome of masculinity to stand up and to fight. The Spanish army was the last army in Europe whose generals had to lead their troops into battle personally. And that was in their last big collision which was the Spanish Civil War. They were still doing that. The practice had been abandoned by other countries. In World War I the generals lived in the chateaus in France far behind the front lines in situations of great elegance.

One of the downfalls, I think, of the masculine image was the terrorist, because the terrorist attacked the innocent and the undefended and the ...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... disarmed. He attacked at random innocent people who couldn’t fight back because they didn’t even know there was a fight going on. They didn’t attack the soldiers. They didn’t attack the army. They didn’t attack the police. The attacked men and women and innocent civilians in restaurants.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I mean a friend of mine was in Saigon during the Vietnamese War, a seaman in a restaurant that was bombed. He said it was a terrible business. He said there were cadavers, there were dead people all over the place. He came out with only light injuries because he wasn’t ... he wasn’t close to where the bomb landed, but he said it was a devastating thing.

Somebody just went by on a bicycle and threw the bomb into the restaurant. This was supposed a way to fight. This is the most cowardly possibly thing. And yet our media promotes these people as heroes of the revolution.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Soldiers for the cause.

[ Rushdoony ] You probably recall the book published about 1960 by Robert Lindner.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Rebels Without a Cause.

[ Scott ] Very much so.

[ Rushdoony ] And I heard very learned men say it was a caricature of reality because it was portraying monsters who did things for no reason at all, brutal and cruel things.

[ Scott ] He based it on the observations and discussions with actual individuals.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And it was prophetic to what was already beginning and was soon to triumph the world over.

[ Scott ] No question. This was... this is, of course, the return of Barbarism.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The barbarians would consider t his sort of thing a coup. The American Indians, for Instance, were great bluffers. If they could scare you, that was a coup. And, of course, if they couldn’t, they would go all out. And they would attack and kill men, women and children, babies in arms no matter.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] There were no rules. There used to be rules for Christians. Non combatants were safe. It was only the soldiers that were in danger.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, when the rules go it means that masculinity has gone. And...

[ Scott ] That is exactly the point.

[ Rushdoony ] Dorothy made a point to me, oh, many years ago when we were much younger. She said, “Men are foolish when they get into any kind of trouble with a woman, because they believe in the {?} Queensbury rules. They are going to be ... they fight fair, at least in those days they did. But a woman’s weapons,” she said, “are the weapons of weakness.”

[ Scott ] It depends upon the social situation. I remember when I was a boy being taught that the Roman women gave their sons the shield to go into war and said, “Come back with it or on it.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And the rules applied to both sexes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But what I am trying to say is that men now have become effeminate and, therefore, their weapons are the weapons of weakness, not of strength. They don’t fight fair anymore.

[ Scott ] Well, they tell lies. They tell lies.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I... I have just gotten through listening to Crossfire and Michael Kinsley and Pat Buchanan serving as hosts and Kinsley is beginning to irritate me almost beyond endurance because he has no manners. He interrupts the other fellow before the fellow finishes his statement. And then summarizes what the man tried to say incorrectly and accuses him of having said that.

At any rate, there was... it degenerated this time into a shouting match and there was an English Marxist named Christopher Hitchens who writes for The Nation who was interrupting Ed Meese. He called Meese a liar, a thief and contradicted everything that Meese tried to say. Now if I had been a host on this particular show, if I had been in either Pat Buchanan’s place or Kinsley’s place, I would have said, “Look, dirty mouth, get off the show. We don’t want somebody who cannot let the other man express his point of view.” I would have immediately said, “There is no point in talking to you.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But we have so much forgotten the rules that any statement is allowed, any kind of argument is allowed.

[ Rushdoony ] And that is...

[ Scott ] Just like fish wives. Not like men at all.

[ Rushdoony ] If you go and speak at a university which I will no longer due, the professor who is the chairman or the student body official who is the chairman of the meeting doesn’t have the courage to tell unruly persons to shut up or to instruct somebody to put them out.

[ Scott ] Well, then you can’t have a meeting.

[ Rushdoony ] You cannot have a meeting.

[ Scott ] I was booed at Stanford Law School and the heckled after I spoke. They did let me finish my talk. And then a young man who had had me there, you know, the students escorted me to the car and they apologized for the behavior of their fellows. And I accepted the apology and drove away. And it wasn’t until I had actually left the precincts of the school that it suddenly occurred to me that when I was a young man, anyone who had insulted guests of mine, I would have answered. I would have defended my guests.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They didn’t know enough to do that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Nobody told them that... it wasn’t... it isn’t simply a matter of being told. Most of the things that I knew by the time I grew up were never told to me in so many words. I saw it in operation. I saw how men behaved. I watched my father in dispute. And I remember that it was always conducted in a civil tone.

[ Rushdoony ] Men like that are not men. Whether they are young or old they demonstrate by their cowardice and unwillingness to stand up and put down an insulting person. [

[ Scott ] Well, yes. You have got... you know, you draw the line in this world beyond which the world cannot cross. If you don’t draw the line, the world will run you down.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, when I was younger the living in a rural and small town setting men like that were called, but not with the more polite biblical word, eunuchs.

[ Scott ] Yes, well, spiritually eunuchs.

[ Rushdoony ] Spiritual eunuchs.

[ Scott ] Really, because what we are really talking about is spiritual qualities. Leopold Turmond gave me a book written by a friend of his who was paralyzed. His legs were paralyzed and he wrote on Being a Man was the name of the book. He said—this is a friend of mine who wrote the book—he said, you know, “I would like it if you would review it.”

And I reviewed it. And I read it and I could see why he went to the gymnasium and he built up his torso and his arms and what not, lifting weights and all that. And it was an honest book. It was an interesting book. It was honestly written and I could see why the whole question of being a man to a man who was crippled would be a serious topic, because, of course, he was at a disadvantage and he wanted to overcome that disadvantage and he had spent more time thinking about it than most of us do. I mean, let’s face it. Most of us come into the world this way and we take it for granted.

But it didn’t ring true, because he didn’t go into the spiritual area of manhood which is really where the tests are. The tests are not physical.

[ Rushdoony ] No. They are not and that is where our generation is gone astray. The macho bit is nonsense. And we have a generation of men who are really eunuchs.

[ Scott ] Well, you have to be responsible for your children and your wife. You have to be responsible for the community. You have to... some situations are very difficult. You have to then fall back on what the law says and operate within the law, within the rules of the law.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And beyond the rules of the law there are the rules of civilization.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is almost over, Otto. I will give you a minute to make a concluding statement in a moment, but I would like to say that to me the encouraging thing is that the Christian school movement and the home school movement is beginning to produce a different type of man. The boys that are coming out of it and are now going to through college so that we have generation that is come through the Christian school movement. They are men in the true sense of the word. So the is a counter revolution under way.

[ Scott ] Well, it is a good thing. I agree with you. And I must say also that to be a Christian in this country at this time is to meet a heavy test.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because this is an anti Christian government and an anti Christian civilization.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

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.