From the Easy Chair

Culture and Subculture

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 96-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BY140

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BY140, Culture and Subculture, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 250, September 9, 1991.

Otto Scott, Douglas Murray and myself will now discuss culture and subcultures.

Now this is, I think, a particularly relevant subject to some of the problems we face today because Henry Van Til, I think, defined culture best. He said, “Culture is religion externalized.” Most definitions are those of anthropologists who say a culture is the sum total of all of the artifacts, the crafts, the arts, the dancing, the music, of a people so that it is simply a vast collection of miscellaneous things. But Henry Van Til, as a very able thinker, analyzed it clearly when he said culture is religion externalized.

Well, when a culture begins to decay what we have are a variety of sub cultures. And so our subject tonight is culture and sub cultures. Our culture in this century has been humanistic. That note has been increasingly prominent in our culture as it has worked to supplant and has supplanted Christianity. But what we are now seeing are a variety of sub cultures. For example, rock and roll. All over the world in Moscow now and elsewhere is creating a subculture geared to drugs and geared to a variety of things that are obscene and unspeakable. Then Grace Flannigan was telling Dorothy and me a few days ago that on an Oprah Winfrey show recently one of the country’s most prominent and successful dress designers, a woman, whose company is on Wall Street when asked from whence she got her inspiration she said from her lord Satan. And we have a great deal of Satanism as a subculture.

In other words, we have a variety of sub cultures that are competing to take over this country as Humanism disintegrates so that we face problems.

Will the Christians regain their vitality and again create the culture? Or will these sub cultures increasingly take over? They represent a decayed and logical conclusion of Humanism. But they are a variety of evils that now increasingly dominate us. They are on television. They are on the fills. Thy are on the books that are published so that the sub cultures are becoming increasingly aggressive.

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

[ Scott ] Well I will have to come in more or less to verify what you just said. I have something here on Hollywood movies called TV et cetera. It is put out by Brent Vosel’s group in Washington, DC. And it says that last season L A Law introduced its audience to the bisexual character C J Lamb with a scene featuring a lesbian kiss between two attorneys. And a recent interview with one of these actresses named Amanda Donohue who says that the role is as close as you can get to my personality in a fictional role, my morals and my political views.

What are her morals, asked the editors. The actress had no problem with her role in Lair of the White Worm in which her character spits on a crucifix. “I am an Atheist,” she said, “so it was actually a joy. Spitting on Christ was a great deal of fun, especially for me being a woman. I can’t embrace a male God who has persecuted female sexuality through the ages. And that persecution goes on today all over the world.”

Now there is an answer to that sort of behavior and that sort of program. And I wrote about it. I got it from Mrs. Jean Patton, whom you probably know by correspondence, at least, who sent in an excerpt from The Law of Crimes, a single volume commentary on the Indian penal code of 1860 dealing with offenses relating to religion.

Now this was set up by the English colonials in the middle of the 19th century in order to keep the various cults and groups and sub cultures of India from continuing to kill each other. And one of the laws was I a country populated by persons of evidently different religions, the legislature had it in view to punish deliberate acts or offenses perpetuated by persons of one religious persuasion for the insult or annoyance of persons of another persuasion. Another law set a penalty of two years in prison for ... or fines for defiling a place of worship. And it includes penalties for deliberately disrupting a religious worship or for mocking objects held sacred by a religious group.

Now wouldn’t you believe that we would have sense enough to enact such a law in the United States?

[ Murray ] Well, Satanism is now an officially recognized, co equal religion in the United States.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] It is government protected. You know, the... the saying that life imitates art, if the art becomes corrupt, if it becomes satanic then the life and the culture becomes corrupt and satanic also and it seems to be what is going on.

[ Scott ] Well, people who do not defend their religion cannot be said to have that religion. That is point number one. Point number two is that we have probably the greatest amount of information available to us today of any generation of people that have ever lived. We could comb the law books of every culture to find out how we could handle this. One of the problems with modern America is that it has ceased to look beyond its own borders to find any examples or any wisdom or any knowledge anywhere else. We are not that smart. We don’t have to reinvent the human race. We have been a great and tolerant country who has allowed our toleration to put us into danger of being able to continue having a majority culture. So obviously we have to do something to protect ourselves.

[ Murray ] Well, you have to ask yourself the question. What motivates a culture to create art, music, literature, architecture? In Europe, before this country was formed, religion was the prime mover behind art, religion, rather, literature and music and we have lost that. We have... we have these rock people now who are considered the poets of today. They are the poet laureates in our society and they are now controlling the agenda.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it was Christianity which created the medieval and Renaissance culture. But it is still religion which dominates our culture. But the religion is Humanism. Now one of the things that to me reveals the blindness of the western world is its reaction to Rushdie’s book Satanic Verses. The attitude of the Islamic fundamentalists has bee that this is a blasphemous book. Therefore the author must be killed. And although it has not been publicized, several translators and publishers in various parts of the world have been actually assassinated.

Now the liberals have been horrified by that. But they haven’t confronted the basic issue, namely, that they themselves are equally intolerant in their own way, that humanistic laws refuses to tolerate anything else. It is increasingly working to outlaw everything. I have been in and out of courts of years now simply because the Humanists cannot tolerate Christian schools and Christian home schools. I am involved in a case right now in Sacramento, our state capitol. At the moment I forget whether it is a federal office or a state office. I think it is a federal office. And this man has been fired from his job because the desk he has and it is a desk and a whole vast floor of desks all one next to another, on the wall next to himself he has various signs that are ultra fundamentalistic. Jesus saves and that sort of thing. And he has been told to remove them. He refused and he was fired. But nothing was said about some of the other signs that people had including on person who believes in Hawaiian spirit gods and is a fanatic on the subject and has all kinds of literature there and signs, things to pass out.

Others who are animal rights people and are very aggressive about that and others who are environmentalists and are going to save the trees from the loggers, the whole place is full of any number of groups propagandizing everybody with signs and with literature and button holing them. But this one man has a few Bible verses and signs and he is the one who is fired.

So we talk about being tolerant religiously. We are tolerant against ... we are tolerant in favor of everything that is anti Christian.

[ Scott ] Well, that is true and I remember. I was thinking when you were talking about the leather people, the leather and chains, the rock and roll.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The leather people go across the board. The ... do you remember the book Understanding Russia in which he described the shamans of Russia?

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes.

[ Scott ] And the shamans appeared in beards and in leather and in chains and drums and pipes and fifes and harps. And they use all these instruments and costumes and so forth to create a sort of religious ecstasy in their followers. And they moved up from Mesopotamia into Russia. And the holy fools of Russia are not Christians. This is one of the great surprises that I found in her book. Christianity has nothing to do with that. These were the shamans and they alternated between great austerities and terrible indulgences and degradations.

The Russian people decided that these were holy people, that this was an evidence of their... if they went all out like Rasputin in one direction and then all out in another direction and this duality was accepted by the Russian people for centuries and respected and they were given special privileges and fed and taken care of and so forth.

It became confused in the 19th century with Christianity because of certain Russian novelists and writers described these people...

[ Rushdoony ] Tolstoy {?}

[ Scott ] ... described, Tolstoy in particular and some others, who described them as being God’s fools. They were anything but God’s fools. We have the same thing here. The rock and roll crowd is allowed things which would send anyone else to prison.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They have orgies in hotels, anywhere, in the streets. And the concerts that they put on dive all these young people into frenzies together with the drugs which are also part of the shaman thing. So what we are talking about here is a regression. These are all steps backwards. Christianity had overcome this at one time, but it didn’t overcome it completely and it didn’t overcome it by sitting down and chanting little charms. It overcame these subcultures by, in some cases, by killing them. The Paulists, for instance, had to be wiped out because they considered actions of the flesh to be bad, that God, Jesus had never taken form on earth, that he was all spirit and the early... the Church fathers said if everyone followed these people it will be suicide. They are dangerous.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. They traveled up ... the probably came from Manichean and Zoroastrian sources. They came up through Armenia, Byzantium, the Balkans and Bulgaria into France where they were the...

[ Scott ] Albigensians.

[ Rushdoony ] Albigensians. And for them marital sex and adultery and incest were all on a level. They were catering to the flesh so that they regularly indulged in anything because what difference did it make. And they were creating moral chaos on southern France. Everything was done to try to convert them and finally war as declared against them.

[ Scott ] Well, in... when your back is to the wall, when your life is at stake, when the life of your culture is at stake, when the life of your nation is at stake, you simply cannot ask him to go away. You have to do something.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And this is the step that the American Christian community has not yet confronted.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Now if I may... Douglas, you can follow me on this. You have read Shafarevich's Socialist Phenomenon. He is the only writer I know of who has seen the origins of this in the Masdekite faith which destroyed Persia. And the Masdekites gained control of Persia with their dream of total Communism, the Communism of all women, of all property and of all wealth so that at the end of, I forget... I think it may have been 75 years, there was scarcely anyone in Persia which was an outpost of western civilization, something we forget. Iran comes from the word Aryan.

Scarcely anyone knew who their own father was. And although under the surviving prince {?} II they regained control and they overthrew the Masdekites. They went under ground. They infiltrated Europe. The matter is of family history to me because there was an Armenian {?} or prince Isaac Rushdoony who was one of those killed by the Masdekites.

Well, that was your Paulicians. That was your Bogomiles. That was your Albigensians and a whole host of medieval heresies. And Shafarevich is right. They have stayed under ground through the centuries and reappeared in Karl Marx. And Richard Wurmbrand has written a book on Marx...

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ... and Satanism.

[ Scott ] Was Marx a Satanist?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And I think he has made his case. And there is a body of literature written by Marx which the Soviet Union which has the manuscripts has never allowed to be published for fear it would upset too many people.

[ Scott ] You know, of course, that Shafarevich is now under international condemnation.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Yes. Well, Douglas...

[ Murray ] Well, this is a curious thing. Everybody is asking the question: What event will it take to ignite the Christian culture to react to the degeneration, the pagan degeneration that is going on I our society. And you mentioned earlier about communications that we had more communications, people know more about what is going on today than they have ever known in history.

[ Scott ] No one...

[ Murray ] And yet nobody is reacting.

[ Scott ] I didn’t say that. I ... I said we have available to us more information, but communication is something else. You have to go look for it.

[ Murray ] Ok. I... I... I... I stand corrected as definition of the word. The ... the... the information is available.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Murray ] You have to ask yourself going back in history when the information was not available and, in fact, the communication was not there and yet people seemed to react much more quickly.

[ Scott ] They had leaders. It really wasn’t that the people reacted. It is that the people were led. People, after all, are just a crowd. A crowd that has no officers and no leaders is just a crowd. If it has officers then it is an army. It is ... it doesn’t require a great many leaders, but it does require leaders.

[ Rushdoony ] And leaders cannot exist where there is no authority. See? And our culture has worked to destroy authority. And, as a result, you have all these evil sub cultures coming forward to claim authority.

Now there is an interesting aspect. In fact, I was writing about it today. The tower of Babel. Let us make a name for ourselves by building a government center, a world... a new world order, a united world, the government center. Let us make a name for ourselves.

The word name there is shem. And the prediction, of course, is that the Messiah will be a descendant of Shem. And the word shem is an interesting one because it means authority. So when they used that word they were saying, “Let us make an authority for ourselves apart from God, one which will reach into heaven, that is, rival God.” And that is exactly what people are trying to do today and they are destroying civilization in the process.

[ Scott ] Well, I think the modern effort... you will always think of tower of Babel in architectural terms, building a tower to heaven. The modern effort is through science and science is very interesting because the education of a scientist is different than the education of somebody in the humanities or even the professions for that matter, because science is really technology, the theory of technology and the application of technology, you might say, is science. The young scientists are not taught the history of science. They are simply taught the conclusions of science as though they are full blown. They come... we have discovered this and then this and then this and then this and then that. And their text books are kept as up to date as possible so that they know how to solve this problem, that problem and the other without reference to the context in which the problems were originally solved, without reference to the disputes that accompanied every new paradigm in scientific circles. And it is such a narrow and rigid education that it is quite possible of a scientist—and a good scientist—to be able to pursue his experiments with the paradigm of his specialty without ever reading another book, without listening to a piece of music, without having any culture whatever.

Now this worked very well as long as we are talking about the growth of technology. But it also has produced, it finally overcame the Church. Beginning in the Renaissance, the scientists broke away from the Church at following Galileo and they finally threw the Church out of all of the great universities which the Church had created, Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Oxford and Cambridge and we now have educators in the public schools who are using the scientific method with ordinary kids in which they teach them simply the climaxes and conclusions of certain historical events without the context. There is one of the interesting things about the scientific education is its contempt for the past and for ht people of the past.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And for the traditions of a culture. You might say they are Ortega y Gassett’s internal barbarians who will rise up in our midst instead of outside the gates. Now you have a whole culture, our culture scientifically educated along barbarian lines trying to create, without any sense of the transcendental, the tower of Babel on a global level.

[ Rushdoony ] Ortega said that the scientists were the new barbarians, because they had no sense of the past.

[ Murray ] Well, today in silicon valley you see a lot of frustration down there, people coming out of schools with advanced degrees in technology, particularly computer technology. They are throw always within 10 years.

[ Scott ] Throw always.

[ Murray ] In other words, if they don’t make it from staff engineer to management within 10 years what they know is so obsolete that the company gets rid of them. They... it is turned upside down. Now when they have lay offs in silicon valley, they don’t get rid of production people, necessarily. They get rid of some production people, but they also... they go through their upper management people who have made tremendous contributions over the year... years and if they figure that their current knowledge is below a certain level they dump them.

[ Scott ] That is inhuman.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] The lay offs down there have been brutal like you cannot believe. And.... and the ... the people down there that work down there are burning themselves out on what they call the fast track, trying to make... desperately trying to make it into the bottom rung of management so that they can survive. They say that the computer generation is now down to three years.

[ Scott ] A career is down to three years?

[ Murray ] A computer.

[multiple voices]

[ Murray ] A computer model.

[ Scott ] Oh, I see.

[multiple voices]

[ Scott ] Three years for a new model.

[ Murray ] To keep a new model. Right.

[ Scott ] The Wall Street Journal recently carried an article saying that computers are now at commodity prices.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, they have a new form of human sacrifice there in silicon valley, apparently.

[ Scott ] Well, it is... it is in bred in the whole economic, technological system of the United States. It shocked the Europeans. But we have exported it.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, a culture without a heart is a dead culture in a hurry and I am afraid that is what is taking place. And this is why Dabney said that the trouble with corporations was that they had neither a heart to know nor a rear end to kick.

[ Scott ] Well, they are hot beds of insecurity, I can guarantee you that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, culture and sub culture bring us face to face with what is happening around us because the sub cultures of Humanism are commanding our schools, our television stations, our films and, sad to say, in too many cases, our churches. And the result is a total warfare on the past, a desire to create humanity from the ground up, play God and to make maybe the year 2000 the day of creation when the new humanity will begin. But they certainly dream insane dreams.

[ Scott ] Oscar Pas. Nobel prize winner from Mexico gave a speech in Copenhagen when he received the price which I thought was a very interesting speech. He said, “I am not Spanish.” But he said, “I speak the Spanish language. I was raised in a country that uses... speaks the Spanish language and is steeped in the Spanish culture.” He said, “If I go back to my own sub culture...” And he didn’t use that word, but he used a phrase meaning that. He said, “I would have to go back to the Indian.” But he said, “That would be almost prehistoric.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So he said, “I am a blend of the prehistoric and the modern.” Now he said, “If they take away from me my Spanish culture, I will have none.” And this, I think has a parallel here. People come here from all over the world and they learn the English culture as they learn the English language. You automatically, by osmosis learn English literature and attitudes and so forth. They are a part of our culture. Whether we agree with them or whether we like them or anything else, this is an English cultural language, country. If they take that away there will be nothing left for almost all the descendants of the people who have come here.

Now one of the things that impresses me about the complaints of sub culture groups which has arisen of late, is to wonder why they stay. There is no wall around this country. Nobody is shocked for leaving. There are places they will all over the world they can go. My father came here from South America and he did not like this country. And he left and he stayed away and he is buried in Caracas where he found he did a great deal better than he was able to do in New York or Washington or Boston. I found that quite reasonable on his part, because, after all, his forbearers had left Scotland and mine have left Ireland as well. If you don’t like some part of the world or some culture and you live in the advanced western countries like our own, you can jolly well pick up and move. What holds them here if they hate the majority culture so much? And why does nobody ever ask them? Not to say to them, “Why don’t you go back where you come from?” if they were born and raised here, but ask them just as a matter of curiosity. Why do you stay? Why should anybody stay if he is uncomfortable?

[ Murray ] Well, there is a... you know, a sadistic streak that they want to destroy what is here. You know, it seems to... it seems to be gathering intensity. And I... God doesn’t allow us to know exactly how things are going to turn out, but I can’t help but being curious. What... what act is it going to take, you know, to stimulate people to take action? Everybody is asking this question. What is it going to take?

[ Scott ] Well, of course, what it might take and what we don’t want to see happen would be an internecine war. There have been several speaker, writers recently—Irving Christophe for one and several others, mostly from the Neo Conservative groups—who have pointed out that it is not the Asians and not the Poles and not the Africans and not the Mexicans who are objecting to the majority culture here. It is our black people. The author of Black Athena and others have come up with this theory that everything that the Greeks had was conceived by black people in Egypt and stolen from them. And you wonder why they haven’t continued that brilliance whether the end of their effort when the Greeks took it, but they are spreading this nonsense in their own ranks and they are creating a sort of an imitation, counter culture movement. And it is the black people, black professors, the black successful middle class that is leading the others. We have brought about the question of leadership before. Not the majority of the black people, but their... certain elements of their leaders who are leading them into a confrontation.

[ Rushdoony ] I was laughing at the thought of {?} comments in the English Spectator about this black Athena idea.

[ Scott ] I have forgotten what he said. What did he say?

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, he ... he regarded it as the ultimate insanity and nonsense. And the idea of a scholarship would consider seriously...

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ... so absurd a thesis on such flimsy evidence was to him a joke.

[ Scott ] Well, there was a black professor in New York who was telling large crowds of people that only black people who have melanin in their skin are truly human and that white people are ice people who have frozen all the human values out of themselves.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, western culture is very often damned as though somehow—and I read this regularly—we have confused Christianity and western civilization. Ands that is a myth. First of all western civilization is Christianity. All the languages of Europe and the Christian cultures of the Middle East have been shaped by the Bible, just as in various parts of the world where the Bible is being translated the languages are being reshaped by the Bible and the culture also, because a language is also an expression of a religion and of a religious faith. That is why translating the Bible is so difficult. You really have to transfer words and ideas out of the Bible into a new language. You have to create new ones. And that is why some of the translators, as Tim Vaughan pointed out over a year ago on one of these Easy Chairs, are so evil.

They talk instead of the Lamb of God, about the pig of God. Totally different meaning. So culture as we have know it has been biblical. That is what western means.

So what they are doing now I the schools is to try to alter the English language. The language of the rock and roll culture is regarded as equally acceptable as the black language. And children are not graded for their use of the really illiterate type of language that comes out of these two areas, nor the obscenities.

[ Scott ] Well, if you lose control of language you lose control of thought. You lose control of yourself.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] You know that your discipline begins in your own mind. You have to stop, turn off certain lines of thought in order to gain control over yourself and adolescence. If we lose control of thought we lose control of everything.

[ Rushdoony ] But that is the goal. Do you remember Artaud, A R T A U D, the French playwright who is so important in the history of the new theater. His Ubi plays, U B I...

[ Scott ] Yes, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ... in which the characters simply grunt.

[ Scott ] Yes. Yes. Ubi. And they dignify this by drawing a parallel between Ubi and Stalin. But that was to dignify. That was...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...to make it sound intelligent. I went to see a play... Anne and I went to see a play in New York because we knew a fellow who was playing in the lead, believe it or not. The title of the play was Craps Last Take. And Craps Last Take was a nightmare, a nightmare, a shambles. I mean it was... the set was a slum that old radio set that the had and he was mumbling around and so forth. And we asked our friend, Burnham, afterwards, who played the lead in this understudy one night. I said I didn’t understand the play.

Well, he explained it to me and the explanation was a very brilliant play. It simply wasn’t the play that was put on the boards.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, think of the fact that books have been written about Artaud and Ubi.

[ Scott ] Yes, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Glorifying a return to an animal state.

[ Scott ] Yes. And, of course, the net effect of all this is to turn people away from books all together and away from explanations all together. This comes into Tom Wolfe and his book The Painted Word in which he had these abstract paintings which were no paintings at all unless you had the words to go with them. So if he said he was painting words.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, in the mid 1970s this superintendent of public instruction named Chilton back east, New York, New Jersey, expressed his dismay over a book which, at the time was being required in the high school level, The Naked Ape.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes.’

[ Rushdoony ] And he said, “We are turning our students into apes because we are saying this is what you are in essence.”

[ Scott ] C. S. Lewis’ phrase, {?} trousered apes.

[ Murray ] You bring a picture into my mind. One of the things that I disagree with is the misuse of computers in the classroom. You know, the old, you know, saw about if you put enough apes in a room full of typewriters eventually they will turn out a novel.

[ Scott ] Don’t believe it.

[ Murray ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] The works of Shakespeare was the way...

[ Murray ] Ok.

[ Rushdoony ] Bertrand Russell phrased it.

[ Murray ] But, you know, what modern... or so-called modern education is trying to do is put kids in front of computers and they can’t read books. And, you know, they are feeding them information and asking them to regurgitate it. But, as Otto pointed out, there is no lead up. You know, they don’t know how these events came into being, what their...

[ Scott ] Out of context.

[ Murray ] Yeah, what their impact is on their lives today.

[ Rushdoony ] There are systems that are bankrupting themselves buying computers for all their students who turn them into junk in no time at all.

Bertrand Russell’s idea that if you had infinite time and a vast number apes and a vast number of typewriters, they would, in time, produce every work of Shakespeare. And the idiocy of that, which was taken very seriously and is still cited, is always going to make those apes stay at the typewriters and what was to keep them from destroying them in the first 10 minutes?

[ Scott ] Well, I am glad you brought up Bertrand Russell and some of these others. That is... let’s tick them off—Sartre, Graham Greene—there is a whole coterie of great European icons...

[ Rushdoony ] That is a kindly name for them.

[ Scott ] Well, all right. They are falling now to earth. The collapse of the Communist ideology, the political system in Russia, right now, is minor compared to the intellectual collapse of all these people and everything they have written throughout this entire century, because all of the sudden Marxian Socialism is exposed as a fraud and all this junk that has been written is now absolutely obsolete.

When I think of the bookstores that have the sections of Marxism, when I think of all the Marxist professors and courses there are in the universities, all the plays, Berthold Brecht and the rest of that crew, who can dare put them on the stage anymore? They are obsolete.

[ Rushdoony ] Maybe...

[ Scott ] Overnight.

[ Rushdoony ] Maybe they will have a vigil around Marx’ tomb waiting for his resurrection.

[ Scott ] Well, they have been pulled off their pedestals the same as {?}.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And the same as they are pulling down the statues of Lenin and they are taking the mummy or whatever it is that {?} or wax figure or whatever out of the tomb and...

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, they are?

[ Scott ] Oh, yes. They are moving Lenin and they are going to put him in the ground where he belongs.

[ Murray ] Next to his mom.

[ Scott ] And all kinds of reputations right now are absolutely shocked.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So that you say, you know, what is going to be the catalyst to save the culture? Well, it is happening. It is absolutely happening. They have lost all these characters who have made a living by imitating what they consider the winning side have suddenly lost their whole raison det.

[ Murray ] Who is going to fill the vacuum that they are creating?

[ Scott ] I don’t know, but we have got a lot of young people coming up and we have got a few old people around to say nothing of us. We will fill... we will happily fill the vacuum.

[ Murray ] Well, I think the Christian school is going to play a vital part in filling that vacuum.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And I think the fact that some remarkable entrepreneurs are entering the field is of a special significance.

[ Scott ] Ok.

[ Rushdoony ] Ellsworth Mc Intire, Dr. Mc Intire.

[ Scott ] Sure.

[ Rushdoony ] ...is starting one Christian school after another and demonstrating that he can teach two year olds how to read, add, subtract, multiply, do long division and three years put them at a point where starting regular school they are ahead of third and fourth graders at the least.

Now I believe very, very emphatically that we are now the people who command the brains of the future. This ... and the people on our side who are in every field and endeavor the true entrepreneurs and men with expertise. So I think we are going to take over. The others are dead on their feet.

[ Scott ] And how can they change? After 20, 30 years of all this Marxist pact, what are they going to do?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They are going to have to find something new to say. And they can’t.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, I was told by one student that in his university professors who had been very Marxist a year ago were now, of course, saying the conservatives were all wrong and we predicted all of this.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes, they were on the right side all along.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Yes. It is... it is their time.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. They are not going to be wrong no matter what happens.

[ Scott ] Yes, but they are irrelevant.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And they won’t admit it, but they have lost the war and it is an awfully big war to lose.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I never would have expected that it would be lost so quickly and so drastically. I mean, it has been so sudden and I ... I wrote this recently and I will tell the joke. It was an old joke I heard when I was a boy about these two black fellows who were playing dice. And one of them caught the other cheating and he made a pass at him with his razor. And the other guy said, “Well, you missed me.”

He said, “Just wait till you shake your head.”

You know, when these people shake their head, it is all over. It is truly over.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I wish someone would tell the Democrats and the Republicans and especially President Bush that it is all over.

[ Scott ] Well, President Bush you have to get him on the golf course one of these days. He can’t... he... the... the message is... it ... it isn’t time. It... there is quite a lapse of time before people can grasp the significance of... of {?} events. I found the lapse of two years before the reading public could catch the significance of an essay, two years. So it will be several years before the realization of what has happened is going to sweep over the West, but it is here and it is... there it is.

Well, who is the... the poet who wrote Ozymandias?

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, that was Shelley, I believe.

[ Scott ] Who found these ruins in the desert and said...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... the inscription said, “Stare upon my mighty works.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Yes. Yes, ruins in the desert.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now the whole intellectual world of the Humanists has just fallen to earth.

[ Rushdoony ] And meanwhile their works are crumbling because the paper that has been used to publish books in the past century and a quarter has been pulp with an acid content that destroys the shelf life of the books.

[ Scott ] Since the French Revolution. So it is like your description of the great library at Alexandria which was filled with magical and formulas and the eye of a newt and so forth and so on, junk.

[ Rushdoony ] Junk scholarship. Yes.

[ Scott ] Junk.

[ Rushdoony ] It disappeared by the grace of God. And those things that are a product of this age of revolution are disintegrating just as their works of art are disintegrating in the museums.

[ Scott ] Well, the paintings are faded before our eyes because they have forgotten how to... how to mix real colors.

[ Rushdoony ] The canvases the papers that they are painting on are disintegrating also.

[ Scott ] Also in terms of operational culture, you might say, more and more I turn on the radio and I hear the same music from centuries ago, the same music up to Sibelius. Nobody plays the modern composers. They are like the couple that I read about who lost the abstract painting and they couldn’t describe it to the police. You can’t... you can’t... you can’t remember what the composition was. How could you possibly remember those compositions? There is no melody. There is no harmony. There is no theme. There is no rhythm.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, we are on the winning side and the culture of our time is Humanistic and it is sub cultures which are Humanism gone demonic.

[ Scott ] That is a good point.

[ Rushdoony ] ... are decaying. It is interesting that the reading public has deceased, partly because of illiteracy, partly because...

[ Scott ] ...of disgust.

[ Rushdoony ] Disgust. The television audience has decreased dramatically. In the last two years the VCR audience has started to nosedive.

[ Scott ] Have you see the selections?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. So in one area after another the Humanistic culture is seeing a decrease. The only area where they are still making money is in hard or acid rock. They are still getting the people in the rock culture out in sufficient numbers to make millions there.

[ Scott ] Well, every period of excess in history so far has led to a puritanical reaction, without exception. There is no such thing as a whole race going over the cliff. The Renaissance led to the Reformation. The Age of Reason led to the Revolution and after the Revolution there was a great recoil. It is almost a human instinct to save yourself from the grave if you become aware of the fact that you are close to the gave.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Then there is... there is an attempt at a rally. And in this case the great rationale which existed from the time of the French Revolution until Perestroika had just come to an end.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They... they have lost their rationale. They have no place to put it.

[ Rushdoony ] Douglas, our time is running out. Is there something you would like to get in before we finish?

[ Murray ] Oh, I was just... thought as Otto was talking there the... regarding the rock concerts. It is interesting that here in this country they used to hold rock concerts at the fair grounds and draw 25 or 30,000 people. Now that is no longer economically feasible to hold rock concerts up here so they have moved up to the fair grounds, the state fair grounds in Sacramento and even that is marginal situation economically. So a lot of these large rock...’

[ Scott ] So they are fading.

[ Murray ] ... groups.

[ Rushdoony ] So they are fading also, very good.

[ Murray ] Like Bruce Springsteen, they are going overseas. They are going to Japan. They are going to be going into eastern Europe and into Russia. The Russians have actually invited them in, strangely enough.

[ Scott ] Well, the Russians... the poor Russians don’t know any better.

[multiple voices]

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the only way the films are grossing so much is that they are making fewer and fewer of them.

[ Scott ] But the theaters are empty.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. The only sizable audiences are near universities, university students and blacks. They comprise the movie audiences today.

[ Scott ] I saw a movie last night. I went deliberately to see it. I should have known better, but I was curious. It is called Dead Again. It was straight Muslim incarnation... Hindu incarnation. Hindu incarnation. That is what the movie was peddling. And I counted the audience. There were 22 people it the theater.

[ Rushdoony ] You had to go out of the county to find a theater.

[ Scott ] I went to Sonora. Sure, sure. We don’t have one here.

[ Rushdoony ] That is why we are blessed here. Well, our time is up. Thank you all for listening and God bless you.

[ Voice ] This message was originally taped by the Chalcedon Foundation. The Chalcedon Foundation is a group of scholars committed to Christian Reconstruction in our day. They have published a number of books as well as The Journal of Christian Reconstruction. The Chalcedon Foundation believes that Christians should press the lordship of Christ in every area of life and should be working toward a Christian society. A free newsletter and more information can be obtained by writing to Chalcedon. That is C H A L C E D O N, P O Box 158...

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