From the Easy Chair

Memory

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 142-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CW184

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CW184, Memory, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 294, July the sixth, 1993.

Our subject this evening is memory. I am sorry that Douglas Murray is not here, because he is the one who suggested this topic and it is a very important one because we do have a problem today as a world, a loss of memory.

Now amnesia is a very rare disease, but on those rare occasions people have a radical loss of memory and for a time do not know who they are, what their family vocation or anything else is. This is a major disaster because to be a rootless person without a past is to be almost less than a person. Providentially, true amnesia is a great rarity. It is more common in fiction than in reality.

But in society we do have amnesia cultivated. We have an educational system in most of the world today that despises the past. We have replaced in public education history with social science. And as I believe I wrote in The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum, social science is not history. It only uses history because the concern of social science is to teach how man can control man, time and history. So social science is, implicitly, socialistic. Its goal is not knowledge, but control and power.

Well, a people that have a loss of memory are more easily controlled, because their past, the strength of achievements they have made, the knowledge of their achievements if removed from them leave them helpless. It is even worse when their past is warped and they are given an impression of knowledge, a theory about their past which is totally false.

And we see this in our time, for example, there is no question of the fact that Hitler was an evil man. But there is no question, also, that just as Clinton is a minority president today and not the one the majority voted for, because the vote was split, so it was when Hitler took power and then consolidated it and ended any further possibility of replacement.

But what has happened is that Germany is now treated as a malefactor nation whose people some how have a special variety of original sin and depravity which puts them in a worse category than anyone else. As a result, this false teaching is being dimmed into the present generation and into the German people.

Memory is a corrective to this. If you have a sound memory of your past as an individual and as a people, you cannot be destroyed as many a person and many a nation has been destroyed by being given a false past.

For example, take France. If the French people could do as they chose, they would be celebrating, whether you like it or not, Napoleon’s birthday rather than Bastille Day. But they are not allowed to celebrate the one and must celebrate the other so that a rootlessness has been created by the revolution and regimes that have come since the 1848 revolution and the overthrow of Louis Napoleon and the French people to a great degree have a warped picture of their past.

Well, of course, the greatest warping involves the faith. We are not told certain things about our times, about the 20th century that would help us to understand it. The thought is to original with me and others have pointed it out, but the most powerful influence on the tyrants and evil politicians of the 20th century was one man. Whether you look at Stalin or Hitler or Mussolini or whether you look at any number of presidents and premiers in various countries, the major influence of their thinking in the 20th century is come from Charles Darwin. But we have excluded his influence in analyzing these people. And only a few scholars have documented his profound influence on the politics of the 20th century. So, at that point, we have a loss of memory which has been carefully inculcated.

We can go on at some length and some of you will perhaps supplement losses of memory as well as important memories that are basic to the life of man.

[ Lindsey ] Also the memories that you have and what you know help determine what you do and what you are able to learn, at least in my experience and in what I have observed and that what you are familiar with is what you tend to and that what you ... when you... if you are... if you believe certain... if you have certain familiarities, you will pick those particular things up. And so that when we see things on the news today, what is... what we have in our memories and what we have filled our minds with has great import into what we take out of them and the influence that we have.

As Paul wrote, “Take care to use every moment wisely.” Well, as we fill up our memories and our minds with what we watch then, in part, we are helping determine what we will end up doing in the future.

[ Rushdoony ] Very good, Walter.

Otto, what would you like to add?

[ Scott ] Well, the description of memory... you are talking about historical memory. You are talking about national memory and national histories, which, of course, are composites of many different memories. And I have found looking around an old article here Time magazine, January fifth, 1981 on the question of individual memory in which a psychologist has gone into the subject in some depth, Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of Washington at Seattle at that time.

And the begins with a rather interesting anecdote that psychologist Jean Piaget vividly remembered an attempt to kidnap him from his baby carriage along the Champs-Élysée. He recalled the gathered crowds, scratches on the face of the heroic nurse who saved him, the policeman’s white baton, the assailant running away. However vivid, Piaget’s recollections were false because years late the nurse confessed she had made up the whole story. And many social scientists believe that most childhood memories are a dream like reconstructions of stories told by parents and friends. And she goes on or the article goes on to say that memory is not as reliable a source as we like to believe and I have... you and I have gone into this. We remember what a book looks like. You run all over the place. It doesn't look like that. When you finally find it it is some other damn color. And this applies, it think, to a very great extent.

Hypnosis and truth serums, I have discovered—and it is repeated in this article—hypnosis does not revive the truth of what occurred or the truth. You can lie under hypnosis and you can lie under truth serum. You can answer questions... you are given questions and under hypnosis and under truth serum and you are apt to give answers to please the questioner or to go along wit the questioner so that they are not, as they are supposed to be.

We do not have, in other words, this idea of a perfect tape recorder in our head which records everything accurately. We see things differently and we remember them differently. And my observation has been that people tend to remember what they like to remember and to forget what they don’t want to admit or don’t like to admit about themselves and about others.

[ Rushdoony ] That is very interesting because you remember about 10, 15 years ago a couple of new age people, doctors, wrote books about people who had hovered between life and death and had magnificent visions, supposedly...

[ Scott ] Yes...

[ Rushdoony ] ... of heaven.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, a surgeon then wrote a book in response to that and said he questioned everything those books had stated, that, as a matter of fact he became a Christian because of his experiences in the operating room. He found people who had been on the borderline between life and death come out often screaming because they had been in hell and the next day would have no memory of it and would supplant it with a feeling of bliss.

[ Scott ] Really?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Interesting.

[ Rushdoony ] They would censor their experience, but they would come out of it in total shock at the experience of hell. It was so vivid, so real that it made him realize thee people have seen something and they don’t want to remember it. It is not going to change their lives because they will not allow it to. So this is what made him a Christian.

His book did not get much attention, but it certainly deserved considerable attention.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well apropos what Otto was saying about memory that was interesting, because I have always wondered whether the memories of your childhood, especially the... the earlier you go back, how much of them you really remember directly and how much of it you remember remembering, how memory is based upon your memory from a few months ago, a few years ago and it... it ... it is like the party game that used to be popular is when somebody whispers something into one person’s story, a little short story into one person’s ear and then they have to whisper it and the next person. And by the time it gets around the room, the story is completely changed. And sometimes I wonder if memory doesn't work that way in our own minds, which means it is not all... own always dependable, especially as a good... as childhood memories.

A good example of that is no mater how much people hate high school as soon as they graduate they get nostalgic about the good times they had in... in school and they forget how much they hated it and how much they wanted out. That is why propaganda works. It is because false ideas, false knowledge, false memories can be implanted in your mind and you... and you will accept them if they are presented in the right way.

[ Scott ] I was very interested on one occasion where by a more or less joint action a CEO lost his job. That is a very traumatic thing in a corporation and a bunch of us were sitting in some fellow’s office the following morning. This was all done at night and at a special board meeting. And the following morning sat around reminiscing about him telling anecdotes. And I was very interested in the fact that every anecdote put him in a bad light, every one. Now I knew that he had done a great many good things to everyone in the room. And ... including myself. And we all had mixed feelings about his overthrow. But every anecdote that was recollected was about some instance where they ... he had said something savage to them or he had cut them down in one way or another. And I realized then, for the first time, that people never forget an insult. they forget compliments. They forget flowers and favors and everything else, but they never forget an insult.

[ Rushdoony ] I would like to go back to something that you said earlier, Otto and Mark as well. It is true that we very often reorganize our past in our memory. On the other hand, I think it has become habitual in our time to impugn our memories of the past. I know that I can remember things back to the time when I was crawling. And in the early 30s when I mentioned that fact once at a family get together everyone laughed, but I told them something I remembered in a home we lived in, in the town of Kingsburg before we moved down to the farm. No one remembered what I did. Crawling around I could remember the difference between the totally enclosed back porch and the kitchen was a half step. To me crawling up and down that was a big thing. Nobody remembered that and I proved that that was true. No one had any relationship to that house, but I found out something from the people who had been in it not too long before and I was right.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] So memory can be valid.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, memory is not always invalid or we wouldn’t be able to function. I can remember when I could run under the table, the kitchen table at my grandparents’ home without having to bend down. At one time I ran into the table and hit my forehead and I stopped running under the table. So, you know, you have got occasional...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...memories when you are quite... quite small. The ... we ... to an extent our memories are reliable, but we have now... we were talking about it a little while ago about the false memory syndrome that therapists are bringing up. And also we have the business of the family memory in which we hear things when we are very young and we incorporate them into our memories.

I once said, I think, in public, that I almost felt like I had been in World War I because I heard so many World War I stories when I was a boy that the ... the whole period is terribly familiar to me. But, of course, it is that second hand. It is not part of my memory.

[ Rushdoony ] Well there is an aspect of memory that is very much neglected today. In my day—and I don’t know what your schools in New York were like. I think they were exceptionally good from what I have heard—memorization was all important, a constant drill. I was appalled not ... well, some years ago, yes, in the 60s and early 70s to learn that children, at least those I talked to at the time did not memorize the multiplication tables.

[ Scott ] How do they remember them?

[ Rushdoony ] They had to stop and do some kind of ...

[ M Rushdoony ] They ... they... they are given a little card that they can put on their desk, right, they can attach to their notebook and so...

[ Scott ] A card?

[ M Rushdoony ] Yeah, so they... they look at it on the chart.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh.

[ Scott ] My goodness.

[ Rushdoony ] But so much of what we learned was drilled into us.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Memorization.

[ Scott ] Absolutely.

[ Rushdoony ] And not only in math or arithmetic, but in history.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And other subjects.

[ Scott ] Well, the dates, remember...

[ Rushdoony ] The dates, everything. And, of course, in some European countries dates cannot be used in history courses. They are strictly forbidden.

[ Scott ] Why?

[ Rushdoony ] Because they are interested in man. And therefore they jump around in history to understand the aspiration of classes and groups. It is not history. It is social studies.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, social studies were what the Bolsheviks introduced in Russia once they attained power.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They eliminated history.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And they also eliminated law.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because they were going not have new law and new history. So we took that from the Soviets.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the Soviets took it from John Dewey.

[ Scott ] Well... in that case we deserved it, didn’t we?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. To get back to drill and memorization, back in the 50s and early 60s I knew a very remarkable man, Colonel Joseph Denton, a man who began his military career in the Spanish American War, fought with Pershing against Pancho Villa was in World War I and trained troops in World War II. And he told me on one occasion how important the old army standard of drill was. And he feared that there were elements in the military that no longer had the same respect for drill. Drill, he said, is comparable to memorization in a school. You automatically know that two times two is four. You don't stop to think. And he said the purpose of drill in the military is to make everything so automatic that you don't even take time to think. You respond in a situation because you have been drilled to associate that kind of response with that type of situation. And he said a man’s life depends on that kind of drill so that the memorization is so total that it is instinctive.

Now we have lost our appreciation of that type of memorization and even William James recognized in some of his writings how... because it was certainly true in his own life and he was not a Christian, how the memorization by children and the drill in Bible verses would pay great dividends, to put it in a very mundane form. During their life because of key moments they would remember verses that fitted their need. With James, when he was about to commit suicide at one point in his life he suddenly remembered the lines from the song of Moses, the eternal God is thy refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms. And he went from suicide to a deep sense of peace and went to bed and slept.

Well, I think we need to return to that type of memorization, drill, because what you learn as a child becomes very difficult to forget. The Bible verses catechisms, these things have a lasting influence.

[ Scott ] Well, there is a lot of variations, however. One of the cases of this particular psychologist ran into was an individual who forget everything excepting her ... her teaching. She taught literature. And she remembered literature while she forgot personal things and was able to continue teaching while she was being treated.

There is also the fact that booze and marijuana affect the memory of recent events and so, of course, does illness and heavy accident. If you get into an automobile accident, a real one, the chances are you won’t remember the crash. You will... you will wake up in the hospital. And you won’t’ remember the actual event.

I do agree on the question of memorization. I have a book at home on a 16th century priest who... a Jesuit who was sent to China who came very close to converting the emperor and he was a marvel of memory and it is called A Memory Palace of... and I have forgotten the name.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I remember the book.

[ Scott ] Do you remember the book?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And just a marvelous thing. And, of course, we do run into these individuals who do have fabulous memories and can... J B Saunders, for one, could remember automobile license numbers, box car numbers, could remember all the orders that he did in his business, would go over them in his mind in the morning while he was shaving. And when I queried him on details of business transactions he knew them all. He could remember them all. He could remember everything.

I have a peculiar memory. I can remember everything that people tell me about their persona life. And if they ever contradict themselves I am immediately aware of it. And it is interesting because I can’t remember all my own personal details.

[ Lindsey ] Well, in that {?} I {?} can I mention something from my personal life that you mentioned alcohol and drugs. Well, I have noticed a similar effect on where I am, that there are certain topics where, because of the course of the kind of work I have done, I deal with them to a large extent when I have... when I am awakened up in the night and I am on the telephone long distance helping repair somebody’s computer system. And so I talk really what ... very well about those topics when I can’t ... I couldn’t add two numbers together. And I can talk about these topics, because I have been ... that is so ingrained in me. And so recently I had to write a paper on the subject and so I tried doing it during the day and I couldn’t’ and I simply stayed up late enough at night and the words flowed effortlessly. And I was very tired the next day, but I had the paper written.

And so I found it interesting that when it talks about it in, I believe, Deuteronomy six... seven I guess it is, that you teach your children wherever you are as you go about the way, when you rise up, when you sit down, so that the... so that the details are concrete on every ... tied to every aspect of life since our memories, often times, at least in my experience, are interrelated with each other.

{?} it is so ingrained in every aspect of your life that this chair is when your father said this very exciting thing to you. And that ... and... and all the details of your life and every aspect of it, you can’t get away from it. You can’t forget it.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, one of the things that marks a high culture is that it has a good memory of the past. It knows the meaning of its history. It knows what its cultural goals are. But when a people have a short term memory and become, as it were, existentialists, they are finished. It is the end of an age, end of a culture. And we have had a culture in recent years that has been shaped by Existentialism. Existentialism, of course, begin early in the last century, but it came into its own, in particular, since World War II. And the essence of Existentialism is that you are influenced not by anything from the past, present or future, but only by the biology of your own being, which means you turn yourself into an animal. You do not allow ideas, morality or religion, family, school, church, state, anything to influence you.

So you work for a cultural loss of memory. And when you do that, you are denying yourself a future. Men cannot sever themselves from the past without severing themselves also from the future.

[ Scott ] Well, the American past has been distorted.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] This country told the truth about itself up until the Civil War. Since the Civil War it has not told the truth about itself. It doesn't know the truth. In the last 30 or 40 years, let’s say the last 40 years since the 30s, since the 60s, we have had a third revolution or a fourth revolution in terms of the America past. The American past has been... has been portrayed as worse than Nazi Germany, as a bunch of degenerates, racists, bigots and so forth. And it has had a terrible effect upon the young people. Now I understand they don’t recall World War II. They don’t recall the past in the continuous sense. And it will pretty soon be impossible to tell them the past because it will be so far removed from what they have been taught that they will not be able to accept it.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, one of the things that has been very moving to me of late is to read in Peter Force’s Collection six volumes, of the basic documents of the American War of Independence leading to it and after it. I had been searching of this for some time and Paul Zimmerman did me a great, great favor in giving me a set, remarkable documents. These were collected and were once very, very widely read. I can recall some years ago when they were often cited. So apparently we had a generation that had some familiarity with Peter Force’s Collection. Now I doubt that very many Americans other than a handful are aware of this material.

We have been separated from our past. Do you remember in Bristol in England, Otto, when some one raised a question in terms of something I had said by way of answer? That apparently I knew the names of the English monarchs of the past few centuries and I think I had referred to something, Richard III and they asked me, “Do you really know them?”

So I named them all from Richard III to the present. And they sat there in shock. None of them knew it. And you and I looked at each other in amazement.

[ Scott ] Yeah, we both knew it. I mean we grew up with English literature.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And I just got through reading the two volume history of the war of the rev... he called it the Revolutionary War, the War of Independence by David Ramsey which has been reprinted recently. And he begins the discussion of the war of independence with the English Civil War.

Now there isn’t a ... he wrote this in 1789 when this was a Protestant country and didn’t want anything to do with the English bishops and didn’t want anything to do with being taxed by parliament without its own consent. And the issue of religion and the issue of commercial rights were intertwined. They were indissoluble. The rights of property and the rights of the individual are indissoluble and it was very clearly understand by two and a half million people in these colonies. There was an argument, of course, as to whether you should fight against the crown or remain loyal, but there was no argument about the issues. Everybody knew them. That is why when you read the papers about the Constitution one is astounded at the level of the... of the language.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...which now post grads have trouble getting through. So not only did we ... have we lost our memory as individuals, but our scholars have lost their memory of the nation. They do not go back. They... they ... they give you... they are almost like surfboard riders. They skim along the top of the wave.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Very good. Very good.

[ Scott ] And, of course, in recollections in memory.... let’s go back to memory is that I find that very similar to reading a book in maturity that you read in your youth it reads differently. And memories change as you get older. They take on more depth and more significance. You suddenly realize, for instance, on childhood. I remember with great shock remembering a situation when I was a boy involving my parents in which I suddenly realized that I was not a central participant. I was a minor figure on the stage when my parents were active. And I had nothing to do with what was happening. All I could do was remember it as a spectator. And to review one’s memories in that respect is a very salutary thing.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because we can come to different conclusions.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

Well, I think something that needs to be done to restore memory is for families to undertake a project of setting down memories of the past. We have better ways of doing this now than ever before. And Mark and Bob, Joanna have several times had me sit right here and talk into the tape recorder and answer their questions about my recollections of the family’s history. We have my aunt who died a week ago Sunday, weeks short of her hundredth birthday set down her recollections which have been transcribed, even as mine are being transcribed, so we can remember what I have said and take off from there.

I think this is something that was once a very common family Bibles used to record births and deaths and comments and a great many families would record in some fashion items from their history or would teach it to their children.

It used to be possible to trace a line of descent very easily though the family’s memory. For example, a group of English settlers from Dorchester settled in New England, named the community after their English home and then, as a group, moved, I believe, to South Carolina and settled there some generations later. And apparently to this day retain their recollections of the moves. I think that is very important. It has been disappearing. It is showing signs of being revived and every one who is listening to this has a tape recorder. I think it would be a very wonderful thing if they sat down with the older generation in their family, recorded things and they themselves recorded them because this is important. Our memory gives us an appreciation of what we have inherited in the way of intangible things.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, some of the best history is family history.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because it recalls what things were really like. I recently received a copy of a letter written from Russia in 1991 by a young girl who was over there as an exchange student in the third largest city in the USSR or whatever it was called at that point. And it was sent to me by her grandmother and I am going to print part of it, because it was... it is fresh and it tells you exactly how it was, how it was in 1991 in the place in which she was staying, she said, with tons of flies, with no seats on the toilets, with the people being very rude, with no restaurants, in the third largest city in Russia. And that is the sort of detail which seldom gets printed. We have lots of correspondents over there going back and forth and scholars of all sorts. They never seem to tell us anything that we can retain or that we ... allow us to visualize the place. And this little letter brings it right to life.

[ Rushdoony ] And the sad part is—which we never hear—that in 1917 at the outbreak of the revolution Russia in the cities was as modern as the United States was at that time, because my father and other relatives were there.

[ Scott ] So they knew. Well and you know...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... because of their recollections. Now we had a book for a while which we have incautiously lent to a friend and it never returned about a young girl who was living in Leningrad during the 19... it was 1917. She was a student and she was so interested in her studies and she didn’t know there was anything political going on. She was living in an apartment with her mother. And she noticed one day that there were a series of open ... open trucks going through the city with armed men in them. And then a few days later the lights went out and a couple of days after that the water stopped. And as long as she was there, she got out in 1921 and that was four years later, the water never came back and the lights never came on.

Now I remember that more than I do almost anything else about what a revolution is like.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I had kinfolk tell me I the 50s when he was elderly who had been a successful farmer in the Crimea in Russia and here he lived in a beautiful home on a very ... such a fine farm. And he said, “I lived even better in Russia. On the mechanical side, of course, we have advanced since 1917, but what we had in Russia in 1917 was fully comparable to what existed in the United States if you compared the east coast with Russia. California was far more backward.”

Now that we never hear about.

[ Scott ] No, of course not.

[ Rushdoony ] We are told that here was a primitive country that the Communists were going to bring up to the level of the modern world.

[ Scott ] Well, then you have what you might call a false memory.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Which has been implanted in ...

[ Rushdoony ] That is right.

[ Scott ] Their heart. And we were... we were talking about that earlier.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The... the memories can be planted in. If you... If you hear something often enough from enough quarters it is very difficult to counteract.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Even if your memory is different you may say to yourself, “Well, that was unique.” That might not have been.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, you and I were discussing on the telephone the other day the false memory of the West. And a book published by the University of California at the beginning of the decade of the 80s on the wild west towns demonstrated that they were more law abiding, more Christian than any of our communities today. There was no oppression of either Chinese or blacks. The minority groups were very fairly treated and the wild west towns were really very law abiding. Then, of course, what Bishop Spaulding observed when he was a missionary to the mining camps of the west that they had more college graduates than most places in the United States, because they were full of mining engineers.

Now television and the films have given us a totally warped picture of the West.

[ Scott ] They have destroyed the image and the reputation of America and its people throughout the world.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The... if they were hired to destroy us the couldn’t have worked harder at it.

[ Rushdoony ] That is right. One of the things you routinely find in films beginning with John Wayne’s stagecoach the Christian people, ladies in particular, looking down with contempt on the prostitutes. Well, the reality is never in history did the good women of a community work harder to reestablish into the normal working life of a community and acceptance by all the prostitutes. You go up to Chico where General Bidwell was and his wife came to the frontier out of Washington, DC and the Washington aristocracy. And Mrs. Bidwell and the other Christian women of the town under her leadership worked to reclaim the prostitutes who had drifted from one mining camp to the other. Did so in a remarkable way, totally without any bigotry or prejudice, but we never hear about that.

[ Lindsey ] We have now... because of some recent technological advances in the last couple of generations, unprecedented ability to change our memories in general as Otto and I talked about a while back, that we now have the ability to... to add in photographs and to unprecedented extents. To ... to change legal evidence in unprecented ways. And now we have the ability with computer graphics to do things with film and, you know, again, with photographs. And so the aids to memory that we have turned... that we have ended up relying on in lieu of human memory, we now have the ability to manipulate quite easily and often times quite inexpensively. And so then I have often wondered what will happen in the generations ahead in our courts. Will such things be admissible as evidence anymore, in general, unless the human remembers the various things and what the... the rules of evidence could change because we have... may have to change because we can so easy... so easily manipulate the aids to memory that we have.

[ Scott ] Yeah, this came up because of the movie Jurassic Park. If you see the movie and it is ... it is just a straight adventure thing, you know, it is a theme park idea with dinosaurs and there is no plot. It is stupidity rampant. But the dinosaur scenes are very lifelike. The dinosaurs move very agily and so forth and this, of course, is done by computer graphics. The same computer graphics can change the tapes that you make and have you saying things that you didn’t say by editing. It can change the family photographs, take people in or put people out.

[ Rushdoony ] The Marxists did that routinely.

[ Scott ] Yes, they did it, but they did it with painting with the hand with a brush and so forth.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh.

[ Scott ] And so forth. It is a very clumsy compared to what technology that now exists. They can alter documents. And we already know about the fallibility of human memory in... in criminal cases. And, of course, this goes across the board.

I don’t know whether they put race... they do put race now in the census. But, you know, the woman asked me what I was. I said I was born and raised. I am an American. She said, “That is not the right answer.”

There are no Americans in the American census. There are only native Americans which are Indians. The rest of us are not Americans. We are composite descendants of whatever.

But what ...what has just been said is true that the documentation that historians have relied upon through the centuries can now be altered.

[ Rushdoony ] To comment about a trifle, Otto, we were educated at different ends of the country, you on the east coast and I in California. When I was growing up there were no dinosaurs, only dinosaurs. What was it in New York?

[ Scott ] I don’t know. What did I say?

[ Rushdoony ] Dinosaurs.

[ Scott ] Well, then that was what it was.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, that is what I... you hear nowadays on television and it is like Caribbean. I grew up with Caribbean.

[ Scott ] Well I didn’t, because I... my people were in the Caribbean and that is what they called it. At the Caribbean we could always tell somebody who had never been there when they said that. Something like the Shell Oil Company which is an American company and the Royal Dutch Shell which is an international.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, when I was at the university I had a very fine historian professor who was English and it was Milan, Italy, not Milan.

[ Scott ] That is going too far. It is Caracas, by the way, but the American radio people call it Caracas which would make them laugh down there.

[ Rushdoony ] Caracas.

[ Scott ] It is Caracas.

[ Lindsey ] It seems to me that numerous times in Scriptures like when the Israelites crossed the Jordan and they were to carry 12 stones and one man for each tribe and set up a little pile so that when their children would say, “What is that pile?” the fathers could tell the children what it was that God had done for them.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Lindsey ] So it seems that what you said about tape recording things that... that perhaps that is a modern form of fulfillment of this {?}, things have a place, to tell what God has done in the history of...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] And when they set up a monument it would often be noted at that point in the Scripture, you know, which is still standing or... with the words to that effect, which is still standing.

[ Rushdoony ] An interesting fact is that ... what was it? Rogation Sunday or some such date on the English ecclesiastical calendar a man would take his son on a walk on the boundaries of their property and to help the boy remember if it were a tree he would shove him against the tree or if it were a stream he would make sure he got his feet wet at that point so he would remember those points because those were the boundary marks. Memory was stressed.

[ M Rushdoony ] Before you are done you ought to summarize... I don’t recall the author’s name. You loaned me the book and I still have it. I haven't read it on the authorship of Genesis.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes. yes. Donald J. Wiseman, a great archeologist. And a point he makes about Genesis is that according to research they have found that the word used repeatedly in Genesis “These are the generations of Adam. These are the generations of Noah,” and so on, several times in the book of Genesis you have that word and his research makes clear that that is a bad translation, that it should read, “These are the family records of Adam, these are the family records of so and so.” So he says Genesis is a series of family records put together by Moses. Very remarkable work.

Well, our time is about over. Thank you all of listening and God bless you.

[ Voice ] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.