From the Easy Chair

Cultural Suicide

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 165-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DJ205

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DJ205, Cultural Suicide, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 317, July the sixth, 1994.

This evening Douglas Murray, Otto Scott, Mark Rushdoony and I will discuss, first of all, cultural suicide.

Cultural suicide comes about when a people lose faith in the moral premises of their culture and they become suicide and turn the society into suicidal ways. About 10 years ago there was an interesting book published—and I do not recall the title—but it was by Malrick, a Russian writer who was a strong dissenter and in and out of prison. He is the man who about 20 years ago wrote a book entitled Will the Soviet Union Survive or Outlast 1984? a very important book in which he saw the disintegration from within of the Soviet Union. And, in fact, he in that book said the great ally in propping up the Soviet Union was the United States.

But in his later book Malrick described the loss of faith on the part of the people. They no longer believed in the promises that Marxism offered. They no longer believed that there was any hope for them in Soviet society. They had no hope in any sphere.

As a result, they became arsonists. Their despair would have an outlet and their hostility to the general culture in burning down buildings—beginning with their own. They were called in Russia red roosters.

I thought of that again and of cultural suicide when I heard someone say on television that having AIDS was a badge of honor. It is difficult to imagine a more suicidal statement than that. We have a great many people now who are suicidal. We are told by experts that a great deal of automobile collisions are caused by people who are rather suicidal. And Dorothy and I have seen an example of that which was horrifying, a man deliberately ramming another car.

So we have a culture in which people lost hope. They no longer believe in the ideas that mark their society, the liberal hope in the state as man’s savior. And, therefore, they become suicidal in all that they do.

Well, with that brief introduction, Douglas, would you like to continue?

[ Murray ] Well, it is along the same line Otto and I were discussing earlier the people in this country have been fed a continuous diet, day and night, of negative thinking and devaluing of American citizenship and what was considered the norm and the American way of life 30 or 40 years ago and this constant propaganda effort on the part of the liberal left to persuade people that this country and what it stands for is no longer valid, plus the rapid deindustrialization within one generation of this country which has taken away the jobs and the ... separated family members and caused people to separate families, to separate by long distances is just... it has destroyed the fabric and those people that are ... who do not have faith, do not have some resources to fall back on they are the first ones to... to go over the edge. They are the ones that ram the cars, that commit the senseless crimes. In effect, they are just ... they have lost all hope and they are ready to commit suicide, because of the ... in their mind I believe, the peace of death is preferable to the pain of life and it is... I have seen quite a bit of it in the past 20 to 25 years working in law enforcement. You see people who just do unrealistic things, just irrational things to themselves.

And when they finally calm down a little bit and you try to ask them the... the reason for this and they just generally mumble something to the effect that they can’t take it any more. And you see people throughout our society that have simply given up. They have given up on the political system. They have given up on the academic system. They no longer have any faith in what any politician says. As far as they are concerned, they are all liars. And they have no faith in the legal system. It has become very arbitrary, very capricious and the entire fabric of our society has just been rendered inoperative in the minds of a large segment of our population.

[ Rushdoony ] Otto?

[ Scott ] Well, those who have done so much to create that sentiment would be shocked to hear you say it, because they seem to have the attitude that they can dump all the acid they want onto the country and the rest of us will just keep our heads down and work and believe that everything is fine. I have seen some people express that sort of disillusion, disillusion in the ... on TV and the host gets very shocked. It couldn’t be so.

On the other hand, we have what we... I think we have two levels at work. We have a very high technological level which is standardized time. It has eliminated space. We have instantaneous faxes and so forth. We have more and more a technological, governmental, commercial, social, scientific elite who think everything is wonderful, because they are doing very well. And we have what Spengler predicted, the growth of the {?}. We have people that no longer fit. They have not the marketable skills. They haven’t continued in school long enough to acquire them. We have a racial minority which no longer believes excepting for minority in trying to get educated. They think it is too white.

So we have here what we are really talking about is not simply two countries, black and white, up and down. We are talking about a multiplicity of groups. We are talking about the Asians. We are talking about Hispanics. Yes, you don’t hear much about the Hispanics, but they are doing quite well. They are earning a living. They are taking care of themselves. They are better off than they were in Mexico. They don’t pay as much attention to the rest of us as you might think, in my opinion, because they never did. In Mexico they didn’t pay any attention to the elite. Their children may, but so far there is no much sign of that.

So what we are really talking about is several countries in formation. And cultures don’t disappear. They change. And it is not clear what we are changing into.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, it seems to me that the first culture that self destructed was that of the Garden of Eden. It wasn’t an intentional sort of in one case it wasn’t suicidal, but it was self destructive. And it was self destructive because they rebelled against God. And any time a culture rebels against God, it is headed down a dead end and that is what we are doing. We are abandoning our Christian foundation. We are abandoning Christian morality. We are abandoning everything Christian and we are doing it quite consciously as a culture. And the downward spiral... spiral we see in our economy, in our morals, the disintegration we have of communities, I think, is all directly traceable to the fact that we don’t have a common faith. And we certainly don’t have any type of belief system that is rooted in anything eternal.

Adam and Eve wanted to be as gods. They thought they were improving themselves, like liberals, probably generally believe they are improving us. But nevertheless what they did was... was destructive. And if suicide is ... is often characterized, first of all, by people lose hope. That has already been mentioned. But the disintegration of our society if we look what it is doing to major groups, to youth, our education, their education means very little or nothing. They can get out of school. They may not know anything. Whatever they know may not be useful to get a career. And youth have lost hope. So why not be consumed by everything irrelevant, rock music, drugs, entertainment. Men very often cannot find jobs that you would call their calling. Many men who have had careers have found that there have been ended and their middle aged or beyond and suddenly they have no job and no future and no savings. Women have been taught that child bearing in the home is... is non productive and they should look outside the home for fulfillment. And they haven't found fulfillment there.

So our culture has no hope, because everything that was once considered a hope has been pulled out from under them or told... or they have been told that it is invalid. And so our culture has become self destructive. And something else that is often characteristic of people who are suicidal, they often talk of destroying... of killing themselves. Sometimes before they do it. They sound out the idea. And sometimes people ... they say people don’t take them ... people don't take them seriously when they talk of suicide and they only think that it only is ... if apparent that they were serious, because people would call it after they destroyed themselves.

But much in our culture, much of our philosophy is self destructive. Environmentalists even talk of ... of removing man from major parts of the earth. Our... our pop philosophy is in ... in ideologies today are often at face value self destructive.

So man is talking of destroying himself. Man, according to the environmental... environmentalist is the problem.

[ Murray ] One of the problems I see is far, far too much credibility is given statements from university, people in universities. Every day they are trumpeting some idea which somebody is, you know, just turning over in their minds to see whether or not it looks good. And suddenly the media seizes on it as the wave of the future and this confuses a lot of people because these are untried, unproven approaches and they generally take away something, but they give nothing in return and that is what disorients people. They lose their centering. They lose their moral centering with situational ethics. When they lose their job they lose their self esteem. And it doesn't take much for someone without much education to feel like they have lost it all and that life is hopeless.

[ Rushdoony ] Since World War II, especially after 1960, several writers said that pornography had changed its meaning. Before pornography had reference to perverted and abnormal interest and depiction in various ways of sexuality. But after about 1960 the new pornography became anything Christian so that it was regarded as intellectually disreputable to talk in a specifically Christian way, to represent Christian civilization in what you stood for so that more and more people who are Christians and Christian scholars began avoiding anything that specifically referred to Christianity or Christ, as though somehow this were taboo and in bad taste.

What had happened, of course, was that our civilization had shifted from being centered on Christian man as the maker, the shaper of society to economic man. With World War II, when it ended, or towards the last, Peter Drucker said it was the end of economic man, but that it would be followed by industrial man, a more highly technological concept of the same faith in economics.

And, of course, with this politically there came cradle to grave security promised by the state.

Well, I call attention to that because what I have seen lately and what I have heard from a few who have written some rather grim letters is that the old economic faith is gone and the most bitter part of it is that all the security that was promised, all kinds of unemployment benefits, health benefits and so on and so forth are now gone down the tubes. Here in California we saw it, the Walmart pattern and the postal service pattern has been adopted and one of California’s bigger employees, the Bank of America has switched to it. The Bank of America has 25,000 plus employees. Eighty percent of these are now part time. Bank of America recorded, for last year, its biggest earnings precisely because it no longer has to pay all these benefits.

Well, the bitterness on the part of workers, not only for the Bank of America, but for other groups that are switching to this is intense, because they are now looking for part time work with McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken, low paying jobs to supplement their part time bank money and they have none of the benefits. They would gladly give up the benefits if the law permitted in order to have a full time job. But they don’t have it.

And, as a result, the so-called economic recovery that is being talked about is an economic recovery which has sliced a sizable percent of the working sector in the hours of their work and reduced them to part time workers.

Now I submit that this situation was created by all the security oriented federal legislation. It is creating not only massive insecurity with millions of people, but it is cultural suicide. The loss of faith in what Washington has to offer, the bitterness, the feeling that they have no future now is very great.

[ Scott ] Well, I wrote about this for the Chalcedon Report.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I wrote about the shift in industrialization from the first runner countries—England, France, western Europe, the United States, German, et cetera—into the third world. And there... this is an almost inevitable sequence. As the third world industrializes and this... beginning with Asia, but not limited to Asia, because Latin America is beginning to show signs of industrialization. You have the largest steel plant in the world, I believe, is in Venezuela. You have a lot of imports coming in from all over. American wages will continue to go down because in order to be competitive in the world that that government prefers, we could... we could, of course, pull in our international first aid. We could stop giving the money that we can’t afford to other countries and we could stop encouraging our own manufacturers to move to other countries. We could put up high tariffs and we could probably maintain ourselves with high wages. We have got the biggest market in the world for an indefinite period of time. But it would run against all the liberal shibboleths. It would bring to an end the nonsense that we in the United States were put on earth to improve the lot of other ... other people. This seems to be an embedded feeling that the liberal elite conveys that it is our duty to take all the Haitians here to bring in everybody from the Soviet Union that can no longer call themselves refugees, because there is nothing to plea... flee from, but they are still coming in, et cetera.

Well, we have... since we have chosen not to do that, it means that we are going to have an upper class which is incredibly rich, which has already occurred and we are going to have a middle class that will fall in to the working class and the working class wages will continue to go down.

Now this ... this requires a government which is extremely powerful, because otherwise you will run into rebellion. And our government is in the process of enacting more legislation around the clock. They are enacting rules and regulations and laws that they don’t even read. And we are... the new crime bill, for instance, is going to have many different capital punishments in it and they will all be for doing anything to an official. They will not increase the safety of the people in the street. They will get to that later. That will come. Unless, of course, the people recall that they were told when they grew up that they had certain inalienable rights and decide to retake them.

And I would... I look upon that as a very favorable sign, because that would be a sign of life. And no culture ... I think the word suicide is pretty good, because cultures have to do themselves in. You can’t be defeated by somebody else. You have to be... you have to sort of agree with the defeat.

[ Murray ] Yeah, but are we a culture, truly, in the United States?

[ Scott ] Well, we have about 70 percent of the American majority. They have been trying to tell us that we are a, hah, no longer here, but 70 percent is the American majority. And it is still here. And, for that matter, we have immigrants who share in the American belief, in the American traditions and who want to be part of it. So we can’t say that all the people who have come in have been against us. A great many are not. But we have no voice. And we don't have a good intellectual presence. We have been chosen out, you might say. When I say we I am talking now about Christian intellectuals mainly. We have been frozen out of the public arena.

[ Murray ] And the current administration is trying to hasten that process along.

[ Scott ] Well, now with their ... with their terrible anger against the religious right they have cope out of the bushes.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the hostility is there, but men have always had hostility to face. The world has never been easy in that respect. It is the despair, the growing sense of hopelessness that is so ugly in our time. We have seen it developing. It first began in the urban context with regard to urban politics. You can’t fight city hall. Now it is with regard to the national level and with regard to almost everything in the country, a disillusionment with education, with the churches, with the universities. They feel that wherever they turn the institutions of the country are a threat to them. They are destructive of the quality of life.

[ Scott ] Well, that sort of sentiment should not be dis... encouraged. It should be stamped out. I am... I am opposed to that with every fiber of my being. I think that where it is true the universities have been taken over by idiots, but if we were to abolish tenure we could throw them out. We could get control back. If the next elections go as they appear to go, there will be an awful lot of dumbbells that are going to leave Congress at long last. And what men have done other men can undo.

[ Rushdoony ] That is very, very true. And I hope that process of undoing will begin before the end of the year. But with the economic crisis deepening while there are, I am very happy to report, a great many zealous Christian young men across the country who are very resourceful in trying to create a new job, you have a ... a growing segment that because of their age are cut out of the job market. And that is where the trouble is. These have been the more stable people in our society.

[ Scott ] Well, we went through this in the 30s. Unfortunately, we got Mr. Roosevelt.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Mr. Roosevelt’s idea of helping business was to handcuff it hands and foot and then wait for it to run. He applied regulations all over the place. If we took the other hope, other.... other step of deregulating a lot of the things that have been done could be undone. For instance, the Supreme Court wiped out the slander laws and that gave us this filthy minded press that we have got. We could enact the slander laws again and forbid the Supreme Court to touch them. And that would provide some discipline for the press. And I would say that they should have teeth.

If the press prints something that is untrue, the reporter and the editor ought to go to jail for a while and perhaps the publisher as well. And it wouldn’t take too long to get a responsible press.

There is a whole series of actions which have been done which could be undone. The biggest thing, of course, would be to get rid of our bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is unconstitutional. Everybody knows it. Congress had no constitutional authority to create a single agency. It is supposed to enact the laws for the country. It isn’t supposed to create anybody that enacts laws in their place. So we could wipe... we could do a lot of things.

[ Rushdoony ] Just the other day I read a long biographical essay about a prominent American intellectual writer and conservative, now dead for some years. He was a thoroughly courageous and able man. But what he believed was such a mishmash of a few things from the Bible, a great deal from pagan mythology and philosophy, a great deal from Thoreau and Emerson and a number of other thinkers tossed in.

Now, one of the things that has marked the right, Christian and non Christian and Conservatism, Christian and non Christian, has been precisely this syncretistic approach to things. They will pick ideas out of every context imaginable. And, for example, I have tried to argue with some conservatives—this goes back 20, 30 years—that Emerson is not the great white father of Conservatism, that his premises were radically anti Christian and radically to the left in their logical implications. Of course, Otto has pointed out on other Easy Chairs that Nietzsche was profoundly influenced by Emerson and the whole sexual revolution came out of Emerson and Nietzsche and others of his disciples like Whitman.

So we have had a suicidal direction precisely in that segment of the population that should be salt, a preserving agent, the Christians, on the one hand, and the conservatives on the other.

One of the things that marks the Christian community is the lack of good systematic theology. They do not think systematically. Their thinking is a kind of smorgasbord of ideas picked up from here and there without any coherence. And because of that fact, we have lost to the opposition, because at the heart of the opposition has been Marxism. Marxism is a systematic, reasoned faith. Deny the basic premise and it crumbles. But once you accept its basic premise, everything else follows logically. It, therefore, has had a great deal of power and is powerful still. On the intellectual scene, even though perhaps, perhaps it has taken a bit of a beating on the political scene.

So we have had a suicide, a cultural suicide because too many people really don’t know what they believe. And they will insist that an idea that is radically anti Christian is good Christianity. One of the worst, of course, is that the Bible teaches us to hate the sin and love the sinner. That is good Greek thinking.

[ Scott ] Well, how do you separate them.

[ Rushdoony ] Exactly.

[ Scott ] Well, the ... going back to the political, the ... the founders really put together what the English call the interregnum and which was really the Cromwell Republic. They didn't take all of it, but they took a good part. And if we had stuck with it, we probably would be in pretty good shape. It wasn’t perfect, but it was functioning. It has been totally gutted.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Totally gutted. Not a piece of it remains that I can think of, not one. The O J Simpson trial is interesting because since he is charged with a criminal offense he has more basic rights than an ordinary citizen. If somebody throws a marijuana cigarette into a citizen’s home that man could lose his home without a search warrant. Well, I will take it back. He can get... they can get a warrant against the house, not against the occupant. So they take the house. The house being guilty. It is a very strange twist that is going on. And your comment that people don't know what they believe is very pertinent, because it means they don’t know what to stand up for.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And they don’t know when to stand up. They don’t know the difference between right and wrong in the basic sense.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, justice is being dropped steadily because extraneous elements foreign to the crime are being used as a basis for prosecution. I should have clipped out the item, but there was an item the other day that a man who had committed a murder was going to be tried not only for that, but as a hate crime, which would make his...

[ Scott ] You are supposed to like the people you murder?

[ Rushdoony ] Well, there was a difference of race.

[ Scott ] I see.

[ Murray ] Well, that is a ... that is the new insurance policy. If they can’t get you under state law like the two police officers in southern California that the Rodney King...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ...trial, why, then the federal government can do an end run around state law and prosecution and get you for federal crime under the hate laws.

[ Scott ] Well, if there are some who do know the difference between right and wrong and can express it, all is not lost.

[ Murray ] Well, the only real weapon that ... that people have, whether they are disillusioned or dis... feel that they are disenfranchised is at the ballot box. People are shut out of the ... the legal process. They are shut out of the educational process. Any parent that goes to a public school that raises their hand or raises their voice in opposition to what the school is doing is demeaned and, in effect, put on the margin. They are ridiculed. Their qualifications for even asking a question are attacked. You go to a ... it is very instructive and I have been subjected to this at a local high school here. And very instructive the process that they use to put you on the margin when you take issue with what they are doing in a public school. But a lot of these things that you are talking about—Emerson and Nietzsche and so forth—are taught without balance in ... in the universities and lower division universities now. At... at one time at least when I was to high school Emerson was taught in ... in high school and balancing philosophies. But now it... they are never mentioned in high school and they get it in lower division university work, but without balance. The secular humanist point of view is the only thing that is taught. The Marxist point of view is the only thing that is taught in the public school. There is no balance.

Talk to high school kids today that are attending public high school and it is chilling the one sided education that they are getting. It is... it is really not an education. It is a ... a ... a mechanized indoctrination.

[ Scott ] Well, the Soviets tried it to the nth degree and it didn't work. Now {?} the poet’s widow practically gave up. He disappeared into Siberia. Before he left he forced her to memorize all his poems. He felt that he was going to go and he felt that the world being what it is that she would probably be spared, because women aren’t sent away the way men are. They are not usually executed against the wall or anything else, despite what the Feminists think. It is men who know what suffering is all about.

In any event, she ... she did memorize all his poems and she was... she went to work in the provinces as a school teacher, elementary school teacher. She was very well educated. And 20 years later she was absolutely astonished. It might not have been 20 years, but years later she was absolutely flabbergasted when young people came reciting his poems and bringing up the old issues and the old questions that young people always have about justice and about this and that and the other thing. And it was ... she suddenly realize that the human race is a renewable resource.

[ Murray ] The hunger was there.

[ Scott ] That is right. Now a generation, a lot of a generation may be lost or crippled or suffer, but there is always another generation.

[ Rushdoony ] There is an interesting aspect to that. About 20 years or more, maybe 25 or more ago a book was written about the Soviet critique of Existentialism which, as they rightly saw, was sweeping the West. And what came through very clearly was that the Marxist thinkers and their critique of Existentialism and the whole of the western world were more conservative so that while one can say they were practicing murders and tortures on a massive scale such as we did not have in western Europe or in the United States, they still felt there was a truth, Communism.

But they saw in the western drift into Existentialism a total disbelief in anything. The attitude being: Who knows what is right.

[ Scott ] Well, that is what is being preached today.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And that, the Marxists saw as very deadly and they did everything to bar Existentialism from the Soviet Union.

[ Scott ] Well we have a remnant at work. We have the Christian schools and we have the home schoolers.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And the home schoolers are very interesting. These are young people in the... in... in there main because they have young kids who came to the conclusion that the public school system is a fraud and that the government cannot be trusted. Now those are two observations which puts them head and shoulders above most young couples. It means that they have brains and they have courage, because they have been home schooling their kids against all odds. And they are almost all under... involved in a search to improve their own education in order to improve out of their kids, because they know they didn't get one. That to me is the hope of the country.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well it is interesting that two of our men who are here Monday and Tuesday and have charge of the work in Guatemala, Charlie Adams and Dr. Stephen Fretwell, have a tremendous interest in home schools. And when Dr. Fretwell retired taking an early retirement from his university work as a scientist, he went into training parents to home school their children. And he speaks of that with a great deal of delight in having accomplished something there with a number of parents.

[ Scott ] I think he should, because I think they are going to raise a generation that is going to recapture this country.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And this is where it has to come. If the middle aged and the elderly really cannot shape the future. They ... the young have to do this. And in this country we are very fortunate in the fact that a peaceful revolution is still possible. It doesn't... we don’t have to burn the house down in order to improve it.

[ Rushdoony ] I will take exception to your statement that it has to be the young to do it. Maybe in the legwork. But us old timers, Otto, are providing the framework, the ideas, the faith, the rationale for that change.

[ Scott ] Well, we are certainly going to leave a fair amount of rationale. That is for sure. But it is, you know, the... the ages of man. I have forgotten now who it was who said that at a certain age you leave the administration and you look for God. Now writers, of course, being too egotistical to stop their work will continue. But in the main, I think the home schoolers is the generation that is really going to be the fulcrum, the lever, because their children will know the difference between right and wrong. And the ones that I have met so far remind me of myself as a boy. They are very normal. They are outgoing. They are polite. They are smart, like normal kids. I saw a photograph of Bob {?} in the... in a newspaper the other day and he was driving, smoking a cigar, looking very happy with himself. And his 20 year old son was in the back of the car. I have never seen such a sullen looking fellow in my life as his son. And we see this all around us in so many young people. I mean when I was young I was too happy to be sullen.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, one woman here locally who has two teenagers in the high school has said the only happy children she has seen in the community are Christian school children.

[ Scott ] I believe it. I am sure that is true.

[ Murray ] Oh, I have seen it. I have seen it. You go drive by the local public high school. They look like they are getting ready... either going to or coming from a funeral.’

[ Scott ] Gas chambers.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] Ahead. No smiling. No laughing.

[ Murray ] Well, you know, that everybody thought it was a joke when, you know, whoever said it said don't trust anybody over 30. But really it was a disconnecting mechanism to disconnect the younger generations from the old.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, that is interesting. I have been doing some work in my library, reorganizing it. And I have run across a collection of things. I had much more, but some of it got lost in the move. A collection of things representing the student revolution and hippie culture. And, of course, one has a title which became quite famous. Due to lack of interest, tomorrow will be cancelled.

Another photographic album with titles to drive home the title of the book White Trash.

[ Scott ] White Trash.

[ Rushdoony ] They were heralding themselves as white trash, because they were rejecting all categories that separated people, defined excellence or goodness because they wanted none of that.

[ Scott ] Well, that was a revolutionary effort. And that was a genuine revolutionary effort at the time. It reminds me of the ANC telling their young people in South Africa: The revolution before education. And, therefore, {?} said, “We have in South Africa now a lost generation.”

[ Murray ] Well we have the same thing here.

[ Scott ] Yes. We have it especially with the blacks. That is where it took root. It took seed. And they turned education into a racial issue, not entirely, because nothing is entirely, but too many.

[ Murray ] It would certainly be interesting to see how historians of the future view this period, this 30 or 40 years with this feeling of desperation among the young, futility among the young, how they are going to characterize it.

[ Scott ] Well I think with new leadership and there is some coming up... I regard Howie Philips as a very promising figure.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] A very promising figure. He is putting together groups across the country which are new leaders, outlawed by the old leadership, but very vibrant. And I think the pendulum swings. At a certain point in despair you either die or you get up and start fighting. And I agree to a great extent with what was said when we opened and that is that there is a lot of dispirited people in the country, but you can’t live that way forever.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, those people can destroy a country. One or two writers at the time of the beginning of the hippie movement called attention to the parallel to the student revolutionaries in old Russia under the czars. They had their own hippie movement. They dressed the same way. It was a repetition.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And because they destroyed all meaning, they destroyed the distinction between good and evil. They ridiculed such things, for example, as {?} did in the novel {?}. Any taboos with regard to incest. The revolution followed, because they had stripped every other area of life of meaning.

[ Scott ] That is true, but you and I are here. And we have seen that pattern and we understand it. And we are warning against it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And they had nobody to warn them. They didn't know what was going to happen. They actually thought they were going to bring in a better world.

[ Rushdoony ] Not quite. Dostoevsky gave the most devastating portrait ever in The Possessed.

[ Scott ] That is true. And how many read it? He ... he was right. He did it. It was a magnificent portrait and he was writing about people who he saw and who were living at the time, the terrorists.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... who absolutely terrified the bureaucracy, the Soviet bureaucracy. They killed him on all levels. And then, of course, they got killed themselves.

[ Rushdoony ] I think the difference is that we have a strong Christian remnant here that we have a Christian theological position formulated.

[ Scott ] And we have the knowledge.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. In old Russia the theologians were appalling. I have read a bit in the old Russian theologians and it is a very distressing picture.

[ Scott ] Well, they were servile instruments of the state.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, they were also so thoroughly Hellenized that he biblical strand in their thinking was almost nil.

[ Scott ] Now, we do have a great advantage in this country. We have a specific and detailed knowledge of the rise and fall of all kinds of movements and civilizations. We probably know more about the past than any generation that has ever lived. And the fact that it hasn’t been disseminated we can actually lay a the door step of indolent individuals who would rather buy another Mercedes than publish a book.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. This is a problem that I am concerned with, because our work is growing all over the world. I can’t tell you off hand how many people are working for us. Of course, when they are abroad 200 dollars is good money in most countries. But the point is even the Christian community is not interested in investing in ideas, in theology. They want action. They want revival meetings ala Billy Graham. They want a demonstrative kind of show and that is why millions have been spent by Christians in marches on Washington or on the state capital and so on and so forth. All of which are funds that could do a great deal to stimulate a rethinking, an intellectual revival. People have forgotten that the Reformation was the work of scholars. From start to finish, the scholars headed up the Reformation. Luther was a university professor. Calvin was a scholar. So were others of those who were leaders. And that is the great weak link.

The potential, I think, is here in this country in the Christian community if they will wake up and fund ideas. And this is what they are not willing to do. It is the rare person that will contribute to he funding of a book.

So our problem is in the intellectual barrenness on all fronts today. Even if you go into the best of the universities or the most highly regarded, the level of thinking there is for the generality rather appalling.

[ Scott ] It is true. It is true. There has been a great decline. But there is a great hunger building.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And there is a new generation on the horizon.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And Howie Philips couldn’t have done what he is doing this year 10 years ago.

[ Rushdoony ] I agree.

[ Scott ] The ... it is something the... the drop in living standards has an effect.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is about up. Thank you all for listening. Good night and God bless you.

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