From the Easy Chair

Technology & the Sexes

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 127-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CP169

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CP169, Technology & the Sexes, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 279, December the seventh, 1992.

This evening Douglas Murray, Otto Scott and Mark Rushdoony and I are going to discuss, first of all, technology and the sexes. This subject was suggested to me by Nadine Webber. I am sorry I forgot to bring her letter with me to read it, because it is an excellent statement of what the subject is. Basically it is this. Not too many years ago the housewife did her laundry by hand. She had no vacuum cleaner. She had none of the technological wonders that have transformed modern housekeeping. As a result, her work took far, far more time than it does now. She was busy from early morning till late at evening and if she were a farm wife her work was even heavier.

But with the application of technology to the household, the situation was dramatically altered. Work that once would have taken a few servants to accomplish could be accomplished by a housewife in a relatively short time. And the question Nadine Webber suggested we discuss was: What had this done for the average housewife? How had it altered her life?

Well, of course, it is obvious that the average housewife’s life has been dramatically altered by these things. Most modern women cannot remember what it was once like, but I can recall the days before electricity hit the farming areas of this country and what a radical change came about with electricity. It has given the modern housewife a great deal more time. It has also made life more difficult for her because a great many women were so occupied with the daily routine that they did not have the time to think about the spiritual barrenness of their lives. This problem, I believe, has been greatly increased by the events of the post war world.

The Church has receded in its strength in the life... in the life of the people. The average person does not take his or her faith too seriously. The result is a spiritual barrenness. After World War II something began and I saw it happen which was relatively unknown in the pre war world, namely alcoholism among women. And among women it has always been more extreme, because, first of all, a man protects his wife and tries to conceal it and so do the children. And, second, since she is not out in the world, she doesn’t have to get out and function constantly, which exposes the alcoholism of a man very quickly and leads to his loss of employment and public problems.

So the modern women, more than men in this respect, is face to face with the spiritual barrenness of our culture, with the emptiness of life without a strong faith. And it has created a problem for her. And woman, first of all, revealed the problems of a culture.

When I was among the American Indians the thing that interested me was that the women took the breakdown of Indian culture far more seriously than the men did. The men were busy with their work. They didn’t think about things much. The women either became promiscuous and alcoholic or else they were very often intensely and fanatically Indian. That is, they wanted the old ways. They resented everything in the modern world because they knew it was so destructive. They knew that the children were not coping with the opportunities to go astray that existed nowadays. Hence, their hostility was very, very real. They saw the issues. They were on the front lines, on the receiving end of modern culture and its implications.

Well, with that general introduction, Douglas, would you like to comment?

[ Murray ] Well, it is difficult, unless you have lived a long time, to assess how much impact technology has had on the sexes, how much current technology such as if it is having a greater impact today than, say, whatever technological changes there were 100 years ago or 200 years ago. I can remember going to Canada when I was a small child and watching my grandmother bake 12 loaves of bread a day plus pastries on a wood stove, saw dust, cast iron stove. And if you told a woman today, any woman, even those that consider themselves to be among the crowd that sort of joined this nativistic movement trying to move back into time, they would think you were crazy. And, you know, to be absolutely impossible to do that. And yet this was done as a matter of course by women who were raising large families. And today we have... the technology has given us gas ovens with thermostatic controls and microwave ovens with very controlled cooking and programmable temperature cycles. And women seem to adapt to this technology very easily. Most women shun technology because they either consider it is not part of their role to understand it and those that consider that it is part of their role to understand it can acquire the specific knowledge, read the directions to program a VCR which mystifies a lot of people and to program a microwave oven. And they think nothing of it. But yet if you told them that they had to bake a dozen loaves of bread today on a cast iron stove fed with ... fed with sawdust, they just wouldn’t do it. They just would look at you like you like you are nuts. So it is ... the... the technology affects people in a lot of different ways.

For instance, I have seen—and I am sure you have, too—on airplanes. People used to consider a ride on an airplane as a break from the routine of business which gave them time to think and formulate plans and turn problems over in their mind. It was a problem solving period. Nowadays if you don’t have a lap top computer in use while you are on the airplane, you are considered a shirker. And it doesn’t make any difference whether you are male or female in the business world today. And people don’t get enough time to reflect on problems and time to think in the normal course of every day business.

I think that one of the ... the experiences that I have had that I found difficult to understand was we ... years ago in the 1970s moved to a very affluent area in Marin County. And we had previously lived in a very middle class area. Everybody put in their 40 hour week and this area the women did not work because the men made enough money. And I told my wife, you know, get out, mix in the neighborhood. Get to know some of the other women in the neighborhood.

She says, “They don’t come out until 11 o'clock in the morning.”

And I said, “Why is that?”

She says, “They don’t get up until 11 o'clock in the morning.”

And then she found that she says even when they do, they appear as though they are drugged. Their speech is slurred.

Well, I said, “Are they drinking?”

Well, no. And we come to find out that the majority, not a minority, but the majority of women in this affluent neighborhood were being drugged by their doctors. They were being given prescription valium because they had too much time on their hands and they didn’t know what to do with it. So it seems like when people... people are released from the ... the ... the slavery of these long hours, arduous tasks, this sudden release, this sudden freedom, they don’t know what to do with it and it becomes a burden to them. So they either anesthetize themselves with drugs and alcohol and they don’t seem to have the slightest idea how to handle that free time.

Now there is a few women will jump in to what they call civic work. They will join an organization like the Red Cross or they will do some type of civic work which was very good, but many of them end up getting paid big salaries to do this. And that becomes a career for them. And their families generally suffer as a result of it. They make the decision that they have got to do something with their time and they do something with their time, but their family suffers. Their kids suffer. And we saw that in this particular area. The kids just grew up like animals. They grew up wild. There was no direction. The fathers worked long hours so that they could create this free time for their wives.

So that the problem seems to me, in just looking at the neighborhoods that I have lived in, is that technology has really not freed women up. It has given them simply a new problem to deal with which many of them simply can’t cope with. They can’t deal with it. They ... they have just never had to face this decision: What can I do constructively with my time? They don't consider that they should ... that it would be valuable for them to spend this time nurturing their... their children. And it is ... I... I had a discussion with a woman recently who as telling me about her mother was a very frustrated lady because she couldn’t have a career.

And I said, “Why did she, you know, decide after the marriage, after the children that she suddenly had to have a career?” You know, at that point you can do a lot of damage making those kinds of lifestyle changes?

So technology has wrought a lot of havoc and... and people are ... are really not able to cope with it. They are not prepared for it. It has moved too quickly. The technology has come too quickly and we are... we are choking on it.

[ Rushdoony ] Otto, would you like to comment?

[ Scott ] Well, of course, the first thing about the subject, as far as women are concerned, comes to my mind is almost a witticism and that is that almost all these labor saving devices are created by men. I haven’t heard women making any particularly acknowledgement of that. Although women have been confronted with a lot of those tasks though the centuries, they never themselves made them easier for themselves.

[ Murray ] You are going to get a letter from a female engineer.

[ Scott ] I... I am sure I will. I just think it is one of those... one of those little points about women that ... that has always interested me. I... I have... I really am inclined to think that if it had been left to them we would still be in that nice warm cave.

There were... There were reasons, of course, why men made these labor saving devices and they didn’t make them to help the women. They made them to make money. And with the growth of the mass market and it really, as I understand it, it hit the United States in a fairly large way in the 20s. And the middle class, up until World War II had servants. So the women had time on their hands and went into civic work and that sort of thing, book clubs and all that, bridge and so forth.

The Depression through a sort of a crimp into that for the whole country in which life became a great deal more serious for everybody on all levels. The ... somebody and... and I was trying to think of his name. I can’t recall it off hand, an Italian name, a professor came out with a book in the late 40s, I think it was, on leisure, in which he gave some historical depth to the fact that the so called labor saving world and ... of the... of our time is mainly a deception. We have less leisure and we have had less leisure than our fathers or our grandfathers and certainly much less leisure than in former centuries.

This has been a century in which both men and women have been put to work in the most brutal fashion. And there is very little real leisure time. I know that I was amazed to discover when Anne and I had our daughter that other young couples that we knew were in the same condition we were in. None of us had any leisure. We were always driving the kid to a dance lesson or to the guitar lesson or to school. I was busy around the clock, which I still am, of course, and there was hardly any time. All these... all these women were trying to balance the meals, the diet, their husband, the kid and this all American idea that you have to be completely and totally educated in all areas at all times.

I might say that the children didn’t particularly enjoy it or like it, nor did they, in my estimation, come up with any gratitude for it that they ... you might say this was almost like a trickle down culture. This is the sort of upbringing that only wealthy children received when I was a boy and it has fallen down the middle class where the middle class began to feel that every child was entitled to ballet and to music and to this and to that and to everything else which didn't leave the kid very much leisure either. And the pace of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s just kept getting faster and faster for everybody involved. And the servants disappeared. Now the servants disappeared, you meant... meant you had to do the work that the servants used to do. Somebody had to go to the store. Somebody had to do this. Somebody had to do that and so forth. And, as you know, I have had several matrimonial experiences and I had the experience of being married to a career woman and that mean that there was a day school and it meant that there was a cleaning woman and all other kinds of things, special clothes, of course, for the office and all that.

I once figured out that it netted me or it netted the house 15 dollars a week for my wife to go to work as a social worker. But it meant a great deal to her psychologically. And she was a ... she felt that this was a... the x factor in her life to a larger extent, I am sorry to say, than her marriage, because it is almost a masculine pattern. When women are forced into the work outside the home and outside the family context and go into the work market, they enter into the equivalent of a masculine lifestyle and ... and they are beginning to have some of the problems that men have traditionally had to encounter. But, of course, in this area men are much more used to the rules. We grew up learning certain rules in our actions with each other, which women have not had. So they ... they some... they lack manners in business. They come on too tough and they are very poor administrators in that sense, because they become tyrannical. They crack down. And as far as the labor saving is concerned, why technology is, to a great extent responsible for the ... for the pushing women into the marketplace. There are so many now ... there are aspects to our market place that do not require a man’s strength, his physical strength or, for that matter all of his attributes.

Now it is not working too well. In some areas, for instance, public relations which I was in for a number of years. I notice now that almost all firms use women in public relations and I can ... I don’t really even have to get too close to ... I... I have dealt with several of them recently. And their idea of public relations is almost like mother defending the family. They are not ... they are not really tuned in to altering what the other guy things so much as in putting a perfect face, embalming everything that goes on in the company to make it seem perfect and flawless and so forth and ... but they don’t cost as much as their male predecessors. They... they may not be as... as clever.

[ Rushdoony ] And may we send these remarks of yours to Molly {?} and her friends?

[ Scott ] You have my permission. You have... wait until I change my address, though. But in many respects, I mean, in... in ...in terms of real estate sales, for instance, I notice that most real estate sales people are female today excepting for the office manager, people like that. They are in retail sales where the... we used to have male clerks. And they are... they are even barbers and so forth and so on.

The overall effect has been to reduce salaries across the board, excepting for the top. And to reduce the amount of leisure that families have and to reduce their standard of living in this sense, that although a combined income can be fairly handsome, it increases the insecurity of their lives because you have two jobs to worry about instead of one, two set of bosses to worry about instead of one and so forth.

So technology, which enabled employers to bring women into both the factory and the mines... I ... I... when I wrote a book on coal mining I ran into women who were coal mining, going down because now the coal miner uses a great deal more of complex machinery than before and so on. So the subject goes far beyond the house and it goes far beyond the family. It goes on into the creation of a new kind of civilization which has brought in an area of anonymity and insecurity and pressure which I don’t think has been properly evaluated by our... by our builders, or by the people themselves.

You know, there... a microwave is just another way of cooking. It is not a particularly good way. It doesn’t... it doesn’t brown the food and it ... it works from the inside out. It has special uses, but over all the old stove really turned out better food. And there is an anonymity involved in this kind of high pressure active life which has done an awful lot to break down neighborliness. For instance, you don’t have to talk to your neighbor. You have got the television. You have got the radio. You have got the telephone. And there is an anonymity and a pressure and a coldness that has taken over. I won’t go on into some of the other things that has happened like the computerization of our private lives by the government and so forth, but we are confronting with ... we are being confronted, I think, via technology, with problems that are yet to be assessed by the people whom you would assume to have assessed them, by our intellectuals. They... they I think your comment that it has been too quick may... may be the heart of the problem, because we have gone through transitions and changes that formerly took centuries. And Rush and I can say that we have lived several centuries. We have lived at least a century of experience just by the pace of the introduction of technology.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, you mentioned microwave ovens. One physicist who we both know told us once that we won’t know of a generation or more how good or how bad microwaves are, because, he said, they change the molecular structure of the food.

[ Scott ] It is cooking by radio waves.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. So that could be a plus and it could be a minus.

Mark?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, I ... it... it is a big subject and I... and what ... what Douglas said is more true in my case. I have lived through very little of these technological changes, but just from looking at history all changes produce social implications. You go back to the industrial revolution, the agricultural revolution. It changed society and it... and it... and the changes are permanent. And the purpose of technology, which is merely just a science... science put to practical use is ... has traditionally been as a labor saving device.

And if you look at the agricultural revolution, for instance, when threshing machines and so forth came in, their... their purpose was obvious, so that a man could do more work in a day and this knitted.... it obviously made possible the industrial revolution so that fewer farmers were necessary so that when our country was founded we were somewhere up around 95 percent of people directly involved in agriculture. Now it is exactly the opposite. Only about five percent are directly involved in agriculture. The rest have been involved... can be involved in other areas. So it... it... it produces a permanent change.

But if you assume that technology is for the purpose of labor saving devices, then you have the logical question: What am I going to do with this saved, the saved time? And usually that means you do more work and man can accomplish more work. He can exercise even more dominion, we could say, in theological terms.

When you bring that into the home, a lot of our technology today saves time and we come into the question: Well, what are people going to do with the time they are saving? If the time required to keep house is lessened by our technology, what are we going to do with that time? Al though a lot of our technology seems to increase our time because the technology itself is time consuming and time wasting such as television.

A lot of what you are going to do with this saved time depends upon your... your... your theological perspective. If you have a covenantal perspective that, you know, I have an obligation to work, to use my time productively, whether it is in a man’s work, in the home, his family responsibilities. And you look at it that way. But if people don’t have a faith then time saving machine opens up what we have today is my... my life is for my own enjoyment. Therefore, labor saving devices allow me time for recreation.

There is a tremendous amount of people today who live for their weekends. Jobs, work is only a means of getting enough wealth to subsidize their entertainment.

[ Rushdoony ] Living for the weekends is a good point. I know that with ministers it is a problem, because if the weather is good on a weekend they are going to lose a sizable number of people to recreation. If it is bad, they are going to lose people because they won’t come out in the rain or the snow. So both ways it has altered our life considerably.

Before we go on to the masculine side of this question, technology and the sexes, I would like to bring up a fact that a professor who was a Civil War veteran after the war entered into teaching and retired some time shortly after World War I. At that time the women’s vote became a matter of constitutional prerogative. He was very hostile to it and said it would be a revolution in American life. Because, he said, the focus of women’s life prior to getting the vote had been the family and, after that, charitable work in the community. And he said the history of the United States witnessed to the fact that there had been a tremendous outpouring of charitable work that had altered the character of this country dramatically. But, he said, women now look to politics rather than to charitable activities as a means of changing the country. And it will, he said, have a disastrous effect.

I know that more than one writer has called attention to the fact that the so-called wild towns of the old West were not as wild as they were said to be, but even at their worst, whether Tombstone or Dodge City or any of the others, within a year they were law abiding settled places, because of the women. As soon as the women moved in, they cleaned up the town. Read any account of the old West and you find how active, for example, the good woman of a community were not only in ending illegal activities, but also in the conversion of prostitutes and in their rehabilitation. And they did a very successful work there, a very fine work.

Well, now, going over to men, I think I can illustrate something of the change by calling attention to life among the American Indians as I saw it. The men in the old days had done two things, hunting and fighting. They had a protective role and they provided meat. If there were agriculture in the tribe the women provided it.

With the end of the old tribal life the men suffered and alcoholism developed almost immediately, because they no longer had their old protective function in society. Their place in Indian society had been dramatically depreciated and I feel that something similar has happened among the non Indian American population. We have had all kinds of legislation that has demeaned men.

P. J. O’Rourke the ex hippie, ex radical who has now turned militantly against all of his former cohorts has said that in the days when men carried guns, society was very polite. You were never discourteous to a man who carried a gun. And, of course, the wasn’t as much violence, by any means, as we have now.

Technology, thus, has not been good to men or to women and, let me add, to children. In the 1890s the average person including the child read four hours a day. Now that is about the average that each child watches television. So it has been deadly, very deadly in its consequences and we haven’t yet come up with the answers.

Douglas, would you like to comment on the effect on men and on children?

[ Murray ] Well, one of the first effects is very obvious when you see men walking down the streets with big pot bellies, because they sit around and watch television too many hours a day. Instead of being participants in life, they have become spectators and the big emphasis on watching football and watching all the various sports instead of getting on a small team, a local team or going out and doing something physical themselves, they simply have a vicarious participation in it by watching it on television. And it is killing men in hordes. Men are having heart attacks in their 30s and 40s and the doctors couldn’t figure out for a long time why this was happening, that the ... the average age of men who are experiencing heart attacks from arterial blockages and so forth that the age kept coming down. And it is the decrease in physical activity.

And when men don’t exercise their thinking processes slow down. And that is one major effect that television has had. And as far as I am concerned, if television left the face of the earth tomorrow, I would not shed a tear. It is something I could... could do completely without.

The ... that is just one ... one major effect. Men used be able to repair a car. And as a result they felt some sense of ... of worth in being able to handle that level of technology. Now the technology in automobiles has become so complex...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] That anybody is a fool to get into {?} an absolute fool to touch the current day automobile, because they are... they will destroy it. And if you get out on a lonely road at two o'clock in the morning and your car breaks, it becomes a sudden millstone around your neck because there is nothing that you can do about it, where as when I was a kid we thought nothing of pulling the heads off of an engine...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] And putting in new gaskets out in the middle of the countryside at two o'clock in the morning so that we could get home. Nowadays it is... that is just impossible. So there is a lot of... I mean these are just.... you know, you could go down a long list of things where men have gradually lost this ability to deal with this technology, because it has become so complex. I have seen it in amateur radio. Many fellows who got into amateur radio in the 1920s, 1930s they built everything. And, as a result, they learned far more than they could ever learn out of... out of books and ... and courses of study, because they had a hands on experience and that hands on experience was extremely valuable and got them jobs and just all he had to do was say that they were a ham radio operator and they could get a job in any electronics firm in the country. Nowadays if you say that they laugh at you, because everything is store bought. In fact, it is all produced by the Japanese. It is... they are...

Out of the 53 manufacturers of electronics equipment for amateur radio operators that existed by 1955, they are all gone but one today and that this only a sideline of this particular manufacturer. The technology has become so complex that no amateur operator dare get into some of this high tech equipment. They can’t fix it. They have to ship it off to the factory. And as a result they learn nothing.

So many avenues have been closed by this technology because it has happened so fast that neither the current generation nor recent generations are... are able to cope with it.

[ Rushdoony ] Otto?

[ Scott ] Well, the ... what you say about the automobile is, of course, true. It is also true in every other area. It is true in mathematics. It is true in literature. It is true in the social sciences, a phrase I always think it is a ridiculous one. It is true in every area.

We have had an explosion of specializations and the specializations are very demanding. They are not... it is not one of these things like our great grandparents where you learned a skill and could apply that skill throughout life. You are now having to swim hard in order to keep up with the state of the art no matter what you are in, no matter what area of work you choose or what sort of education you have very fast. And it is become more and more anonymous in the sense that you will be thrown off the boat if you make a couple of errors, if you don’t keep up, if you don’t change, if you don’t follow the level of your trade.

It also.... these are not small specialties. These are specialties that continually expand and spawn off more subspecialties, you might say so that you do not really have the time if you are an average person. Let’s say an average bright person. You do not have the time to look very far around you. And one of the problems that has been growing upon us of which I am aware that say, let’s say 25 years or 20 years or so ago, when I was in to interviewing businessmen and these corporate histories, I remember the Europeans talking about the senior managers of a company I was writing up. And they said when they come over and talk to us about the business, we sit on the edge of our chairs and we listen intently because they know what they are talking about and they are brilliant, but as soon as the subject stops being shop and goes into any other area we are absolutely appalled because we have nothing to talk to an American business man about because he doesn’t know anything outside his business. And literally nothing.

Well now they are no longer surprised because they, too, have fallen into the same problem. The European businessmen that I have talked to more recently are no different than the American businessmen. This has become a global thing, that the specialty, the demand of the job and the pace of the job narrows the man to the level of a specialist. We used to make fun of specialists. We used to say a specialist is a man who knows more and more about less and less. And in an overall sense it is true. So you have that narrowing of men therefore are not as broad gauge as they were, do not know as much as they used to. I am appalled at how much they do not know, at the lack of literacy, the lack of any historical knowledge, the lack of any cultural knowledge. They don’t have any idea of how the people live in another culture or how they think. They know nothing about the world even though they travel around it, but they travel from airport to airport and office to office. And this is provinciality on a massive scale. Instead of it being one world.

We thought technology would produce one world. It has actually created a more divided world than we ever had before. My grandfather Scott and my Grandfather Mc Givney never met, but if they had—and I know them both—they would have had many, many ideas and attitudes in common even though they lived in different parts of the world on different levels in entirely different areas. That is no longer true.

If... if you take a... the ordinary specialist out of his specialty and put him in with a different collection of people, he has nothing to say, nothing.

Now one of the ... one of the consequences of this increasing anonymity which is the way I translate it in my own mind there is less eccentricity, you might say. There is less individuality. We already know... we all know we agree that we are now surrounded by what is politically correct. We never ... we move out of our own private circle we have to... we share the ... the common things that you say, that you are supposed to say and we all know what they are. We know the taboos of our culture. And we don’t even discuss them because they are taboos. And then you have with technology you have young men whose wives have careers also. So the relationship between the sexes is not the same as it was.

Where my grandmother Mc Givney used to talk about a provider, she thought of a husband as a provider, somebody who took care of you and who... who brought home the bacon. That is no longer true. Marriages are breaking up because one partner gets a ... an offer to move across the country and a better job and the other one doesn’t want to... has to give up their job to go with them and it is not a sex thing anymore. It is not a gender. They don’t like the word sex anymore. They use the word gender. It is not a gender thing anymore. So a man is less to a woman today than he used to be.

[ Murray ] Many of them like it that way.

[ Scott ] Well, it think that is beside the point. There have always been people who have liked almost anything. But I ... you know, couldn’t blame the man for the fact that his position in society has been altered.

Society has ... has altered his position and whether they like it or not, I don’t know. I don’t know what young men... how young men feel about it because I have... I have the impression that they take the world as they find it. It is not something that they think about. This is just the way things are. But I notice a considerable difference in the way women in general look at me, not simply because I am older, but their attitude and their manners are not what they used to be. Unless they are about my age and if they are my age, of my generation, then the... the manners are the same. But younger women no longer have respect for older men or for men. And I believe that men have less respect for women, because the relationship is altered. They are not as mutually interdependent as they were.

[ Murray ] And this has happened very quickly, because I have read books recently on mining history and the early mining camps, as you pointed out, Rush, women were revered.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] I mean they were virtually placed on a pedestal and ... and worshipped. You know the Lily Langtry story and all of these others. And this is what? You know 100 ... 150 years ago.

[ Scott ] Well, that is three generations. Well, a little bit more.

[ M Rushdoony ] There was the local mining town called Jenny Lynn which was named for Jenny Lynn even though she never was there.

[ Murray ] Never appeared there.

[ M Rushdoony ] Never appeared there.

[ Scott ] I wondered about that.

[ Murray ] Well, we... you know, we...’

[ Scott ] The Swedish nightingale.

[ Murray ] We have got to ask the question. Is it progress if my mankind can’t utilize the technology?

[ Rushdoony ] I think it is the breakdown of a culture. We are at the end of a humanistic age. And as a result nothing works. We are going to see a new culture come out of the wreckage and hen it will be able to utilize the technology because the basic values are derived not from technology or the lack of it as it has been the case, but from a religious faith. And when men and women see themselves in the eyes of God and under God, they are going to have a totally different regard one for another.

Did you want to comment on that, Mark?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, I ... just something along what... what Douglas and Otto were saying about how people feel very small with technology. Have you ever asked somebody what they do? It takes them some length to describe, try to describe to you what they do and then sometimes you don’t even understand it. And I have got that impression from people, how they all say, you know, I really envy you working at Chalcedon, because you are working with ideas and you are... you are working something that you can see... I can see to be important.

And many... many men today feel that they are a very small cog in a very big machine. They can’t even see what their own work is accomplishing and that is very demeaning, because they are part of a very large corporation and their part is very... really very, very small which is, in a way, it is sad because they... they... we have lost the Puritan work ethic, but we have ... we have also lost the vision of what we are doing with our work.

[ Scott ] There is also the loss of authority. And you might say the growth of tyrannical... tyranny in that every part of policy is treated as a territorial possession. So therefore you are not a participant, you are a hand. You are staff.

[ Rushdoony ] I was told within the past few days by someone whose material and financial position far surpasses anything any of us on the staff can talk about, that we men had it made, because our work has a meaning far beyond ourselves. And it gives us satisfaction because it is rooted in something bigger than ourselves. And he felt that we were a privileged group.

[ Murray ] I had an anthropologist tell me not too many years ago that we no longer fit what we make in the... in the western world, that we have created a technology that we simply can’t cope with. We build airplanes that are virtually beyond the ability of human fighter pilots with the best training in the world to cope with. They are always right on the edge of killing themselves every second. All they have to do is have a mental lapse of a second or two and they are dead men. And they are... their useful life as a pilot under those conditions is a matter of a few years and then it is over with. The yuppie generation really was about make all the money you can as fast as you can and get out by the time you are 30 years old. Otherwise it will... the job will kill you. And you read story after story and various magazines, money magazine, et cetera, about the yuppie millionaires who dropped out, you know, bought the place up in the Colorado mountains after they made their 50 million or whatever and dropped out so that they could read and presumably become educated... more broadly educated.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, some years ago I made a point of checking out a few periodicals that were dated January the first, 1900 to see what their predictions were about the 20th century. It was interesting how totally materialistic and mechanistic their predictions were. They were in terms of inventions. And, of course, a good many of the things they predicted did not turn out and I will come to that in a moment.

When I was in the ninth grade the science teacher spent a great deal of time as a fanatic with regard to science and the future outlining the life of a generation or two down the road. He saw all cities as self contained under glass domes, the air totally purified, no germs allowed, which, of course, would destroy all life including human life. And so on and on.

And this was why these dreams of 1900 and 1950, probably, did not in the main pan out because they had a dehumanized perspective of the future. And technology prevailed over man. All the same, because that perspective, even though all their predictions failed, has been too much apart of the 20th century. It has meant that a marvelous technology has all the same produced poor results because our purposes in this humanistic society have been anti humanistic and anti Christian. And I believe that only as we recapture a Christian world and life view can we use technology and see it as a blessing without a curse.

We have about four minutes left. Do each of you want to take a minute or so to say something by way of conclusion?

[ Scott ] Well, of course, Christian community, which is enormous and very varied, is in the process, it seems to me, of breaking up and reshaping. We cannot yet see what kind of shape this new reformation is going to take. The old Churches and the old clergy failed to keep up with the changes that have overtaken us all. And they do not discuss these issues which are the issues they should discuss. They don’t talk about living in this day and age and the problems that it presents to us and that is the reason that the people are leaving the main line churches. And I think every religion, I think Islam is undergoing the same stresses. It may look monolithic from the outside, but it isn’t. As the man in Australia told us, it has created a barrenness of the spirit over there, too. And, of course, people cannot live this way over a long period of time. So there will be some awfully interesting shake ups.

[ Rushdoony ] Mark? Douglas? Would you have a last word?

[ Murray ] Well, the ... one of the tragic things, as Otto pointed out, is that people become very narrow in their outlook and we see this in government. We see it in science where people become such specialists and experts that their... their useful life becomes very short. Technology, for instance, in computer technology is moving so fast that a person with a university education is history by the time they are 30 years old. If they have not achieved at least middle level management, they are gone. They are ... their life is over as far as useful life in that industry. And they generally have to spin off into something else. So it is... it is very ... we are spending all this tremendous amount of money educating people that are only good for a very short period of time and it is a terrible waste.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you. I

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