From the Easy Chair

BOOKS; New & Old

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 129-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CQ171

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CQ171, BOOKS; New & Old, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 281, January the fourth, 1993.

This evening Douglas Murray, Otto Scott, Mark Rushdoony and I are going to begin by discussing various books, new and old, books of a variety of kinds which we think are of interest to you.

I should begin by discussing one that at many points I disagree with, but the author is unquestionably able. He is John Ralston Saul, the book Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. It was published by the Free Press of Macmillan in 1992.

What Saul points out in this book is that we have in recent generations looked at everything rationalistically. We have swept aside all the richness of life, the various things that are important people and, as true heirs of the Enlightenment we have reduced everything to terms comprehensible by reason.

Now there is a great deal he goes into in terms of that and I am not going to try to review the whole book except to call attention to one aspect of it. He points out that John F. Kennedy, as president, brought to Washington, DC Robert Mc Namara. And Mc Namara applied to the problems of national defense a rationalistic approach which he felt would revolutionize the defense posture of this country in its financial status. Instead of asking the manufacturers to manufacture only those things that were necessary for national defense, he decided that several times our national needs of these equipments should be manufactured and then sold to all the third world countries all over the world.

Of course, these countries, some of which have populations as low as a couple of hundred thousand did not have the money for state of the art weaponry. And so they decided in Washington the thing to do was to loan them the money to buy our weaponry and thereby create prosperity for us.

Very quickly Britain and France, Sweden and other countries got into it, countries like those in the Far East and also Red China and among them and Brazil which is the primary producer now of armored vehicles.

Well, by 1972 it became apparent that not even the interest on these thing was going to be paid. But the loans have continued at an accelerated rate as well as the sale—if you can call it that—of the weaponry. So, now, the whole world is armed to the teeth as never before in history. And having gone into Somalia we find that we are faced there with the weaponry primarily of the USSR and of the United States. And it is not going to be a case of fighting primitives with primitive weapons.

Moreover, it is providing the opportunity for conflict all over Africa and all over the world so that a thousand soldiers die every day somewhere in the world out of these conflicts which are aspects of civil wars, border skirmishes and the like. And as the economic recession deepens, what we can expect is that having the weaponry and still getting more weaponry, they are going to use it to seize food from other peoples so that anyone who believes that we have blissful days ahead is living under an illusion.

Douglas, would you like to carry on now?

[ Murray ] Well, I remember my brother was in the air force during Mc Namara’s tenure and I remember him saying one time when he came home from an overseas assignment that Mc Namara’s nickname in the military was Mac the knife and that he went through with a meat axe and... and cut quite a bit, particularly in the air force. I think the... one of the other things interesting to me is that, you know, we always accuse the Russians of destabilizing third world countries in order to give them an opening. And I think we probably are either copying or beat them to the punch in a lot of places. It was... it was a horse race to see who was going to destabilize a particular country first.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Murray ] Also... also most of the loans that were made to those third world countries were ... a lot or them were Chase Manhattan Bank and it is... it is interesting where the money came from. And the ... the tax payers are really we are... we are getting down to where the chickens come home to roost now. All of those loans where the interest hasn’t been paid and the principle will never be repaid and in some cases where the countries are even going out of existence, or... or changing politically those debts will be repudiated.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] And the... and the U S tax payer is going to be picking up the tab for those loans that have been non performing as well as eventually repudiated.

Mc Namara came out of U S industry, I believe. He worked for Ford Motor Company.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] And he really was not a wealth generator while he was at Ford. Ford Motor Company was not doing well at all while he was there. He was there as an efficiency man. He was strictly a glorified bean counter. And he didn’t build the company up, to me... to my knowledge.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, John F. Kennedy and Mc Namara, between the two of them, will have fathered more wars than any other two men in history.

Otto?

[ Scott ] Well, that is probably true. Mc Namara was one of the quiz kids that Ford hired. He wasn’t one of their successes. That is the reason that they were happy to see him go to Washington. Most companies don’t send their best men to Washington. They need them on the job.

But you really began on the question of books and this one book I would like to just say if I had dug up going into literary now an old column written by Max Rafferty. Remember him?

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes.

[ Scott ] He was the ... what was he secretary of education for the state of California?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And a very good one. He was hounded out of office by the press. And he put together a list of what he called proper reading for a group called America’s Future in New Rochelle, New York. And recently I have to correct myself. Recently America’s Future—and he wrote this a number of years ago—came out with a special report, “Humane Literature in High Schools,” written by Russell Kirk, biographer of T. S. Eliot and other books. And here are his suggestions. I ... I have looked at them and I think that ... I don’t know if any high school in the United States that would come up to this standard, but we could have come up to it in our day, Rush.

Ninth grade level Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Shakespeare’s Mid Summer Night’s Dream, Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables or the Marble Fawn, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality or The Heart of Midlothian, selected poems of Spencer, Burns, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, Whittier, Longfellow, Chesterton, Kipling, Mayfield, Yeats and Frost.

Tenth grade level Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra or Henry V, Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Henry Esmond and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.

 

Eleventh grade level Milton’s Paradise Lost, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations or Bleak House, T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, Orwell’s Animal Farm, selected poems by George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvel, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith and Alexander Pope.

Twelfth grade level Epistles of Saint Paul, which, incidentally, if taught as literature is still constitutional, Shakespeare’s King Lear or Coriolanus, Samuel Johnson’s Rasulus, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, Christopher Marlow’s Dr. Faustus, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim.

Now I doubt very much if those books are being promoted or recommended today even on a college level.

[ Rushdoony ] I had a high percentage of those in grade school and the ninth grade. A handful of them I had in my early college years. It tells you how much we have deteriorated.

Well, I think one of the things that is... that is important is that in Christian schools and home schools we are beginning to return to the classics. And I have asked Mark to call attention to some of the things that are now routinely taught in our Chalcedon grade school.

Mark, do you want to start off with one of them?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, I had trouble finding classics. They are... they are hard to find if you want to ... to... to buy them for student use. And...

[ Rushdoony ] They are out of print.

[ M Rushdoony ] They are... they are available, but they are hard to find, because the... the big name publishers they don’t... when you ... when you sell a ... a classic for two dollars and 99 cents in paper back form there is... there is not a whole lot of profit there. So I had a... a difficult time finding anybody who carried the classics, maybe a book club would once in a while carry one or two. But a ... a difficult time.

I ... I did find a source for them, however, and I thought I might list this and give the address for anybody who is interested. It is called the book source and their address is 4127 Forest Park Boulevard, Saint Louis, Missouri 63108. And it wasn’t until I found this catalog that I was able to supply the school with a number of these. There are many of their... their books are available in paper back for only a few dollars. And I figure if they... they last through about three classes of literature you have given the students these book classics to read for a dollar to two at the most per student.

This book source has a lot... has thousands of titles and a lot of them are pure garbage. You know, I mean out of there is... pick a title here. For instance, here is one. Mom, the Wolfman and Me. And it is not exactly classic literature. But if you look carefully through these, there is pages and pages of fine print of titles. There is a lot of classics that you can find.

I was... the reason I was looking for this and had this catalog just happened to come in the mail one day. We were... they found us on a mailing list somehow and it just happened to come my way. It is hard to want students to read good literature and then to say, “Well, find a book in the library and bring it to me.” And they were... what they were bringing to me was garbage. And like Mom, the Wolfman and Me was the kind of things they were bringing. And I would say, “No, try to find something else.”

So I recommend for a Christian school or home school do is you are going to have to start accumulating classics. You know, home schoolers need to do it when they go to used book stores, yard sales. If you find a classic, you better pick it up. Don’t assume just because it is a famous classic that everybody has heard of that you are going to be able to find it available.

And we have had a terrible time finding our... our school library is still lacking many classics that are no longer available. So pick them up wherever you can find them.

I picked up about ... some of the books that I ... I assign. I don't teach literature every year, but Captains Courageous is a great one, particularly for junior high age students, because it is about a ... a... well, it... just a brat who is too big for his britches and he gets humbled a little bit and it is... it is a good story of a boy who learn something of character and ... and work habits.

David Copperfield is good. It is very intimidating. You give it... a student a book that is over 800 pages and it is funny to watch their reaction. David Copperfield was good because the... the girls liked it because of the romance. The boys liked it because it is a story of a boy growing up into manhood. And there is a lot of adventure and... and such.

Kipling’s The Jungle Books appeals to a variety of students some of whom like some of the stories, some of them don’t. But they... a very popular. And when you assign something like this to be reading you think they are really going to get something out of it because this is not the type of book. As hard as it is to find, it is not the type of book kids will read today unless you find it for them and you make it available to them. This is why I ordered paper back copies, so I could give each student a copy of this particular book and say, “This is what you will read in the next few weeks.”

Your... your... your own... you are going to have to find these, but good books for students themselves. They are not going to find them on... on their own. You go to a public library and you look at what is there available for them to read and you are going to have a hard time finding books that you really want them to read.

[ Rushdoony ] If I may interrupt, Mark, Kipling’s Jungle Books are available in exceptionally fine copies by various publishers and they are reprinted as books that are products of the book maker’s art. They are popular and it is with older people who want their children and grandchildren to enjoy something they enjoyed immensely as a boy. So they are not in the kind of edition that a child will normally get and read. They are geared to the older generation.

Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, a few others that I happened to... I assigned one year is Treasure Island which is a ... it is a great adventure story. I... all my students like that. That was probably the single most popular because it is a very ... it is a... a good adventure story and so on. The action keeps moving in that. Mark Twain... I... I have... I have one student who did not like Mark Twain. It is because, he said, because I have read it six or eight times already. But I... I have never had a student who didn’t like it and it is a good story for a teacher also to read to the students a chapter or so a day. They... they...

[ Rushdoony ] Do you prefer ...

[ M Rushdoony ] ...really like it and I always read it in spring when they are thinking about ... when they get a little bit of spring fever anyway. It is... it is great one to get them ready for summer vacation.

[ Rushdoony ] You use Tom Sawyer? How about Huck Finn?

[ M Rushdoony ] I have that, too. I didn’t assign it that particular year just because I was kind of trying to diversify a little bit on what they read, but I do have that. I teach it and, again, it is probably one that I will assign. I just brought the books that I actually did assign in one... in one school year.

The there book was ... that I assigned that school year was Robinson Crusoe which was the book they liked the least, but I thought it was, in a sense, one of the best books, because it is a very introspective book and... and students today aren’t really geared, many of them aren’t really geared for a book that is introspective. He spends much of the book considering how the fact that here he is on an island all alone, how he has taken his life for granted. He has wasted his opportunity. His parents are alone thinking he is dead and a lot of it is... is his spiritual life, too. He doesn’t really appreciate what God has done for him and here he is on this island. So he spends much of the time contemplating his life and the poor choices that the has made and he comes to a ... a better understanding of his ... his Christian faith as well. So it is a... it is a... of all of these books Robinson Crusoe is the most Christian. But the introspection was a little dull for junior high students.

But the key to having them read the classics is you are going to have to find them for students. They are hard... they are hard... they can be hard to find. And so I ... that is a good source. Like I say, it has got a lot of nonsense books in it. They have got over 6000 titles. Just about anything available for schools is in there. But they do have them and you ... if you need them, I suggest you order these books in advance, because these come from different publishers and it sometimes takes months for... I mean, if I order from this catalog to get them, because some of these publishers apparently they go out of print. They will make a run, a small run and then months later I will receive these... these books that will be shipped directly from the publisher.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I would like to turn our attention to a very remarkable book. The title is The Family Romance of the French Revolution published by the University of California Press in 1992. The author is Dr. Lynne Hunt.

What she has done in this work is a remarkable study, although the fault is that she is so narrowly scholastic. She does not want to make a single application to the present.

Now the term family romance is a rather technical one. It comes basically from Sigmund Freud and with Freud it meant the neurotic’s fantasy of getting free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others was a rule or of a higher social standing.

Now Hunt takes this term family romance, and alters its meaning. She says that at the time of the onset of the French Revolution the history of a culture had a very different background than ours. It had a semi patriarchal view of the family. The father was regarded as the head of the household and over him the local authorities finally going all the way up to the king who was the father of the country and was so termed. And this was the case in country after country. And people felt a security and a satisfaction in the concept of the nation as a greater family.

Well, with the rise of the revolutionary element there was an immediate hostility to this analogy. The family become the target of venom and hatred and of pornography, beginning with the particular local family going on up to the king. And a vast literature, pornography, dealt with Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in particular to attack them as viciously as possible.

All authority was damned. The idea was, in effect, not reverence for authorities over one, but, in effect, a rape of all authorities over one so that the language of family life was transferred to politics and politics and pornography became essentially interrelated. The language of the revolutionaries, the language of the writers of the day went over board on attacking normal family life and the normal patriarchal authorities in a society in favor of illicit sexuality, rape, homosexuality, sodomizing people above one and so on, as the way to deal with the entire social order. And, as a result, the destruction of the concept of the family in the patriarchal sense meant a demand for a particularly vicious and venomous sexualized revolutionary fervor.

Now, of course, the implications of the ... after Hunt’s work are far reaching. We again have the rise of pornography. We again have homosexuality exalted and lesbianism and rape has become more and more commonplace. And we have had books by rapists who speak of the delight in raping women who are of a superior social scale than they, superior educationally or if on campus, superior intellectually. The whole goal being as at the time of the French Revolution to pull everyone down to their level and to trod them under foot.

So Hunts’ work is very important, far more important than she has indicated in her book. I reads one review where the implications were every clearly seen and pointed out. And I think we should see those implications because they are deadly. But Lynn Hunt studiously avoids any and all reference to the implications of the family romance of the French Revolution for our time.

I think we need to recognize that she has touched on something which is far more important than she realizes, because there is an aspect to this that we have not dealt with. It came with a hostility towards Christianity. She doesn't go into that, but very superficially, scarcely at all. But it was a very much a part of the revolutionary language. After all, God is the father of all. And in a revolt against the world of the family, this is the key, striking from the local family all the way up to God.

[ Murray ] Well, this assault is continuing today. I was listening to the radio and heard a ... a review of a book written by a woman anthropologist and her thesis is to equate humans as animals and drawing parallels between human behavior and animal behavior. So there has been no let up in this attempt to tear everybody down to the lowest level. And they are using people with degrees, putting them out there as experts and it is really is a ... seems to me an orchestrated movement.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] And there seems to be no one in the... at least in the scientific community that can get any press that is able to refute what people write in some of these books such as this anthropologist. And it is very tough, unless you have got someone like this reviewer on the radio today that is willing to take issue with him.

[ Scott ] Well, radio has become the last bastion of free speech in the country, especially at night with the exception of Rush Limbaugh who is on in the... from 12 to three, I think, I the East. And he is ... he is ... he is almost a lone {?}. I really expect that he will be knocked off the air one of these days. But so far they haven’t found the right method.

Well, I don’t have any particular books in mind tonight. I have been more interested in... and my mind has turned more to the question of the role of literature in the United States today and the way that I grew up as a reader. I was educated by reading. I wasn’t educated much in the school sense, but I worked my way up from fairy tales onward. And I remember that there was a branch library down the block when we lived in Manhattan and I could be found there at any time. My mother... I never forget my mother coming into that library to drag me home for dinner and greatly irritated me, because I was always there. They didn’t have school readers in libraries in those days. You just had to find a book and read.

And my thinking with my daughter when she was born and was growing up I began to read to her before she could speak. And at one point my wife said, “Really, she can’t even speak yet, you know.” And I was reading the... one of the fairy tales Sleeping Beauty in the original version, not the Disney version. And I said, “Well, you may be right, but she seems to be listening.” At any rate when we reached the point where the prince kisses the sleeping beauty and brings her to life I stopped and looked down at her and she raised her face to be kissed.

So she was following...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... the fairy tale. And later on I made a list of all of the books that I bought for this and for early youth, early childhood. Beyond a certain age, of course, we cut off. And I turned it over, but Chalcedon never used it. There was an awful lot of fairy tales on the list. And it is my thinking at that time was that if you are going to teach somebody to play a musical instrument they star with the scales which is the deadliest thing in the world when it would be much easier to start with tunes, with melodies and give the kid a chance to get some feeling for music before they get involved in the scales and the... and the key signatures and the rest of the nuts and bolts of music.

And to entice Liz into literature I found fairy tales opened up the gates of imagination. And they were also very moral. The person who wasn’t the smartest, but who was the best, who was gooder, you might say, usually wound up winning. And the clever villainous people wound up losing. And I thought it planted a lot of subliminal lessons.

Since then I have become aware of the fact that fairy tales are not particularly condoned in Christian circles today. And I am really at a loss to understand why.

[ Rushdoony ] I mentioned your list to somebody at the time and they begged to borrow it and I have forgotten who it was and I have never seen it again.

[ Scott ] Great. I thought it was simply rejected.

[ Rushdoony ] No. I mentioned it to someone very favorably and they asked if I could send it to them, promised to return it and, as so often is the case, I never saw it again.

[ Scott ] I will dig it up if you would like to see it again.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Sometime after both of us have finished our travels I would like to see it.

[ Murray ] Well, I think, the use of television by many parent to part their children in front of the television set...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ... just destroys them. They don’t... you know, either don’t have the time or not inclined to read to young children today and unless that is done either at the time you started, Otto, before they can speak or before they can read, this seed doesn’t get planted. It doesn’t grow.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, our TV set was broken for 12 years.

[ Murray ] How did you break it?

[ Rushdoony ] Well in the 1890s people read on an average about four hours a day. In the 1990s or at least 80s the average time that children spend before a television spend before a television set is about four hours.

So television has replaced reading with a great many.

[ Scott ] Here... here your grandchild, Joe’s children have no TV so they are readers.

[ Murray ] I heard a school...

[ Rushdoony ] Omnivorous readers. Yes.

[ Murray ] I heard a school administrator, this was quite some years ago, too, that they had determined through studies that children who arrived at kindergarten had already consumed over 3000 hours of television time, had logged 3000 hours of television time. And they referred to that as unrelated input data.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, I don’t know how long it will take the American people to realize that television is programmed by enemies of this culture.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They are absolutely alien to this culture.

[ Murray ] Well, you can... you can see that I some of these so-called beloved programs like Sesame Street. Have you ever sat there and watched that?

[ Scott ] Once.

[ Murray ] It is deadly.

[ Scott ] Once, once. There was a {?} male black man counting from one to 10 in tones that made... made these number sound threatening and I turned it off. I did like the Muppets when they first appeared. But a little of that goes a long way.

[ Rushdoony ] Mark, did you want to comment?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, a lot of people are getting rid of their televisions. Twenty years ago if you said children shouldn’t be exposed to television it is a bad influence on them, a lot of people would have looked at you as though you were a little strange. Now it is... it is going to be a whole lot harder to get a... a look like that, to make a statement. Most people will have to at least give tacit approval that there is a lot of truth to that statement because it... it is just so hard to justify what is on television today.

[ Murray ] Well, they... they... they can see the results. It is not safe to walk to the store in the evening anymore.

[ M Rushdoony ] So I think children today are... at least in, you know, Christian homes, are watching far less television than children of 20 years ago did by far.

[ Scott ] The hidden family.... I was reading my books to my children.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I was shocked to hear that. I was pleased, but I was also shocked.

[ M Rushdoony ] I think of...

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ M Rushdoony ] Excuse me. But I think a lot of what... what Otto was saying about the fairy tales. A lot of people are a little nervous about fairy tale because the New Age movement they are afraid it is predisposing them to the occult magic. Personally I think people over react to ... to... to some things and the spiritual influence of... of ... of such things. But I think that has come... become a very popular thing to now... to... to react against anything that has... that has called itself magic.

[ Scott ] Well, I hadn't thought about that, but you are right, because of the rise of Satanism has ... has changed ... we thought of it, you know, as totally innocent.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. You have had two or three generations of writers now who exploited fairy tales for their own ends. Dorothy reminded me about a week ago of something I had forgotten, namely, that Lenin began as a writer of very modern fairy tales.

[ Scott ] I didn’t know that.

[ Rushdoony ] And that tells you what has happened. The ... great many groups have reached out to control the mind of children by fashioning a new type of fairy tale that doesn’t have the deep roots in folk cultures that the old kind did.

[ Scott ] I have the unexpurgated volume of all Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. You know, Disney did a terrible thing. He cut the guts out of all kinds of... of very old traditional children’s literature and it is almost like {?} in Brazil. He ... he took over the whole area for a period.

Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, as they were originally written are quite complicated and eerie almost, but very interesting.

[ Rushdoony ] I would like to deal with a book now which is quite unusual, very simply written but profound. The author is Maggie Gallagher, the title Enemies of Eros: How the Sexual Revolution is Killing Family, Marriage and Sex and What we can do about it, published in 1989 by Bonus Books in Chicago and still available.

She begins with a flat out statement, a sentence that reads, “America today is one of the most sexually repressed societies in history.” And then she goes on to point out what she means by it. What Feminism and Liberalism have done is to work to create an androgynous society in which people are neither male nor female, but a kind of neutral being. She quotes, for example, feminine sociologist Jessie Bernard and I quote. “A variety of ways have been suggested for reducing women’s desire for babies,” which she wants to do. “One commonly suggested proposal to achieve this goal is a greater encouragement of labor force participation by women. More esoteric ideas have to do with the possibility that we could androgenize women, that is give them the hormone androgen for androgenized women apparently tend to be less interested in motherhood than other women. No one has yet suggested Skinnerian behavior modification by means of aversive conditioning, but someone doubtless will in time. Girls will be given an electric shock whenever they see a picture of an adorable baby until the very thought of mother hood becomes anathema to them,” end of quote.

Well, what she points out is that by working to destroy femininity in women and masculinity in men and creating a kind of unisex culture, they have totally warped life. They have worked to create men and women who when they think of sex think only of pleasure, not of the family and of responsibility. And what we have, therefore, today is an ideology. And she has a superb definition of ideology. An ideology is an idea that is afraid. It therefore has to masquerade with a host of posturing whereby you try to evade the natural God given facts.

She points out that because of the anti familistic nature of modern society, women are the victims, because, she says, when a society fails to protect the family it fails to protect women. And as a result, she says that women have never had it as bad as they have now. They are the victims of Feminism, of Liberalism, of this new sexual repression. She quotes some amazing statements from a variety of feminist leaders in which their hostility to the fact of male and female, the family, children, is phenomenal.

So she calls what we have today a pornographic culture. It is, she says, a pornographic culture because we have separated sexuality from the family. We have said it is something that we have to teach every child from the first grade on up in terms of enjoyment. And so you have this situation in New York City today where they plan to introduce education into homosexuality, anal intercourse and much more to first graders, because the whole idea is, as she points out, sexuality must be separated from maleness and femaleness and the family and linked simply to experiencing pleasure.

And so hereditary rights, family rights, obligations, all of those things are the source of attack. And we have a world of developing which will be totally destructive of the family, of religion and of maleness and femaleness. She has been through the wringer, I won’t go into her personal experiences, herself. Ad so she writes out of experience and knowledge with a passion and intensity. It is a remarkable book.

[ Murray ] Well I have ... I wouldn’t pretend to know what is in the mind of women in our culture today, but I have seen interviews of women who chose the career track instead of the family track, who came out of the 60s and 70s, out of the universities and bought the Betty Freidan philosophy and ...and lived it and suddenly came to the realization after they got pretty late in the child bearing time window that they had been conned, simply, and said so in so many words. And the were about a half a dozen women on this panel being interviewed. And they had all achieved, you know, became executives and companies and had gotten law degrees and so forth and been pretty successful and then did a complete turn around...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes

[ Murray ] ... you know, somewhere in their late 30s...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ... around 40 years old did a complete turn around and were willing to admit that they had made a mistake and that they had missed out. They felt that they had missed out. They didn’t do it all as they thought they were going to do when they came out of college. That was the... one of the big terms of their... I... I want it all. Well, they didn’t get it all. And going after... and turning away from the family and going after the ... the career track, they missed the thing of... that they later realized was most vital to them.

[ Rushdoony ] We there was a particular fact that was startling to me. Earlier I had mentioned the book by Saul Voltaire’s Bastards, rationalism and reason governing everything. Well, she says that where families are totally rationalistic about having children and their babies are completely planned so their approach is totally rationalistic. You have the highest child abuse, because they are not capable of coping with the irrational and you can’t expect a baby to act rationally or a child. So they have become with an act of reason. They have decided to have a family and they have someone to contend with, a baby that doesn’t fit the rationalistic mode and the results are vicious.

[ Murray ] Well I think they feel that if they can break that nurturing chain, you know, the ... the natural tendency of young girls who, you know, around 12, 13 years old, sometimes even younger, want to hold an infant. You know, I have watched it where even at chapel sometimes on Sunday some of the younger girls will want to hold an infant. And obviously it is a pleasurable experience for them.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] And there seems to be a natural nurturing instinct there and these people want to break that chain.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. They work to dissociate girls from dolls and get boys to associate themselves with dolls, because they are going to break the cultural conditioning, as they call it.

[ Murray ] This woman that I mentioned earlier, anthropologist that wrote this book that was being reviewed on the radio today. She was in a... equating animal behavior with human behavior and was trying to equate the ... what she felt was the choice aspect that is being pushed by the liberals own for women and whether or not to have a child with the... with the... what she described as the instinct of animals female animals of various species to either kill or abandon or eat their young as choice and whether or not to ... to nurture their young. So these people are nuts.

[ Scott ] Well, the comparison between humans and animals, of course, ignores the soul. And it is a sort of an immoral comparison. And the female animal does kill the young if they have a part of the litter that ... a dog litter, for instance, is obviously inferior and they can tell by smell apparently. They will kill the inferior ones. And in some instances the male animal will go around and kill the litter of the various animals... we are talking now about mammals.

But I think to lift the thing up a little bit beyond the specific that it is a great example of the tremendous impact of literature to be able to teach ... talk women out of being mothers. This is an accomplishment of propaganda which probably doesn’t have any... any societal precedent. We do know, of course, that the upper class wealthy families of Rome began to restrict their number of children because of the taxation. In order to keep the estate intact enough to pass on through the generations they had to restrict the number of heirs that they had. And countries which didn't do that, like Ireland, for instance, Ireland destroyed its land because all the members of the Irish family had an equal share in the inheritance and, as a result, in a few generations they were all reduced to paupers.

The English did it better because they had primogeniture. The eldest son inherited all the land and, therefore, all the land remained in the hands of the family until this century when taxation come in. But the effect of literature, the effect... propaganda is a variation of literature and all the things that you see on television and the films and everything that you hear on the news program comes from somebody having written it out first. The radio and television news programs come straight from the wire service, word for word. The people who work in these studios and who read the news don’t have the intelligence to write the news. They don’t have the intelligence to summarize it. They are just readers.

So what we are talking now about is the effect of literature on civilization and in civilization is incalculable. And yet we are told constantly that we are living in an image age. We are living in a picture age that literature is on longer effective, but it is effective. And one of the worst parts about it is the book that Rush began with tonight, written by a professor on the family business, the... the concept of the family at the time of Louis XVI, I believe, which was continued, by the way, in Europe long after that. After all, Hegel referred to the Kaiser as the father of the German family and so forth. That book he described as restricted to that time and that period, because it was written by a professional, a professor, a teacher who all teachers are no automatically considered scholars no matter how stupid they are. And this is a teacher, no doubt, of history who was teaching, who ... whose specialty is only that particular era. Anything beyond that era she... she was not supposed to be expert on so she won’t write about it.

By splintering literature in this fashion we have been provided with an immense amount of information and without the capacity to put it together. And if we discuss books as such, we are continuing the splintering.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is just about over. 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.