From the Easy Chair

Culture of the 20th Century

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 205-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161V39

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161V39, Culture of the 20th Century, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 138, January the third, 1987.

This afternoon Otto Scott and I are going to deal with the culture of our times, of the 20th century. And our concern is specifically with what is happening, how we can describe the philosophy and what its direction is.

Now by way of introduction I would like to call attention to certain aspects of our culture that can be summed up in one word, Existentialism. I am going to read a definition of existential philosophy from the dictionary of philosophy. I quote. “Existential philosophy determines the worth of knowledge not in relation to truth, but according to its biological value contained in the pure data of consciousness when unaffected by emotions, volitions and social prejudices,” unquote.

As the definition goes on, it makes clear that words are not used in relationship to truth, to right or wrong, to good or evil, but with reference to man’s psychology and biology so that our world and life view is to be determined by the biology of our being without reference to anything we have learned that comes from outside of ourselves, from our culture, from our parents, our school and, especially, our churches.

Now existential philosophy, which began with Soren Kierkegaard and reached its high point in Jean Paul Sartre who died a few years ago, is no longer the governing force in philosophy because it has passed into the stream of culture and become the air we breathe. No one calls himself an Existentialist now. We are at the point where to some degree everyone is an Existentialist.

We saw the expression of it in the student revolution of a few years ago, in the hippies, in the common statement, “Do your own thing” and “I want to be me” and a number of other similar affirmations. We see it all around us. We see it in politics. A friend of mine, a state senator has remarked that voters have a short memory. It does not exceed 90 days, so that whatever a candidate for office has done, unless it has been done very recently in most cases the voters discount it. They have a short memory and a short vision of the future.

One of the marks of savages, the people we call savages, tribes that are very backward socially, culturally, religiously is their limited time span. Many of them cannot count above the fingers of their two hands, beyond the number 10. Many of them have even more limited apprehension of numbers. The {?} of South America are said to be unable to count beyond three, one, two and many is their concept. The time span of many such peoples the world over is limited as far as the future is concerned and most of the past drops out except to coalesce as a kind of timeless thing. Thirty days in the future is about all that some cultures can think.

Now modern man is becoming the same. And the results for our culture are deadly. So this is why we are concerned with Existentialism. The word may sound a bit technical, but we are dealing with the realities of the world around us.

Otto, do you want to make some comments at this point?

[ Scott ] Well, yes. The Existentialism of Sartre is what interested me when you mentioned the topic. Now I have a book here called Paris in the Third Reich: A History of the German Occupation; 1940-1944 and in one page here that talks about {?}, the favorite of the gay community, well known as an artistic producer and playwright and so forth who astonished the German troops by appearing at the beauty shop to get his hair done and who had a play on the boards under the Nazis and who was favored by the Nazis because of his influence, I suppose in the French community. One of this protégés was Genet, the so-called novelist who wrote about his homosexuality and thievery in general.

And here we come on to Jean Paul Sartre who his successes during the occupation, says the book, were to move the coming generations in his image. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the goddess of the feminist movement, got their rise into international celebrity under the Nazis. And so, for that matter, did Camus, the Algerian novelist in his start.

Now we have here something rather unusual, but something that I think is typical of our times. We have very well known and famous celebrities whose behavior has been beneath contempt and who are forgiven that behavior for no reason that I can see because the... well, let me put it another way. Their behavior is forgiven because they expressed opinions that fit what Hegel called the spirit of the age and the spirit of the age was that you attained virtue by expressing the right opinions and that gives you the privilege of behaving personally in any way you like. All you have to do is say the right thing. Now this is, of course... this is not even hypocrisy. This is an actual dichotomy between behavior and opinion. Men are judged, then, by the opinions that they hold or express and not by their behavior. We have seen this in the case of Martin Luther King. But in terms of Existentialism, I think it is most remarkable in the case of Sartre, because Sartre was held aloft as the exemplar for the entire post World War II generation. And so, for that matter was Simone de Beauvoir for the women.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Nazi Germany had a great deal of affinity to Existentialism. It is interesting. You mentioned Genet. What Sartre had to say about Genet. He wrote a very voluminous, long winded book about Genet entitled Saint Genet. Now Genet was a pick pocket. He was a professional male prostitute. He was quite a number of things. When he was in prison he began to read and to think about himself and he thought, well, if there is no God, and I do not believe there s, he said, and if there is no good and evil and if we are beyond good and evil, I am as good as anyone else. And why should I not be as much a saint as any man? Why should I be in prison? And he began to write expressing his new found faith.

Immediately the intellectuals and the writers of France petitioned for his release. And to the everlasting discredit of General de Gaulle, he released Genet.

And Genet began to write and to produce some pornographic films, all of which were hailed as great works of art, precisely because he did things evil and called them equal with good, in fact, the new good. Because, as Camus said, “Because there is no God and because what God chooses is good, we must chose evil. It must be our way of life.” And Genet self consciously chose evil. This temper, of course, is in evidence throughout the world.

A few years ago, a film director, Polanski, husband of Sharon Tate who was murdered by the Manson crowd was charged with child molestation and fled the country. And immediately he was lionized by the film community and a film nobody remembers which he produced had, I believe, three Oscar nominations or awards.

Now this is typical of our times. All you have to do to qualify for high place, to be regarded as an intellectual or an artist is to display a contempt for all values, to insist that none exist, that, in fact, the affirmation of evil is necessary to intellectual respectability.

That is why abortion is popular. That is why, especially, homosexually is popular. To reject God you have to reject what is good. You have to choose as you way, as your good.

[ Scott ] Well, it is interesting you bring up Polanski. Polanski was indicted for having sex with a 13 year old girl. That was the charge and, obviously he admitted that that was a true charge. It is interesting to reflect that the girl’s mother saw nothing wrong.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Had sent her to Polanski’s home to engage in a party and so forth. Now Hollywood did take Polanski as a matte of defiance they nominated his movie—I don’t recall the name of it either—for 18 Oscars.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, 18.

[ Scott ] Eighteen. It received three, simply to put it in everybody’s eye and to say, “This is one of ours and he is a great artist and the fact that he fled the country under this particular charge is not going to sway our judgment of him. And that whole thing reminds me of a journalist who went down through some of the sun belt states, as a matter of fact, investigating the whole business of selling daughters to film makers. And some of the propositions that he... and inducements that the parents had offered the producers and this particular excursion were hair raising. There was absolutely no bounds either on the part of the daughters or their parents. But I take this thing... you... you started the... the discussion with Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard I am not as familiar with as you are. To me it is from the American view point it always stems from Emerson.

Emerson and his reading of Hinduism, which equates good and evil as being equal, so that you can go to nirvana either through the path of evil or the path of good. And Hemingway, rather Emerson carried on about being beyond good and evil. He talked about the higher law which we are again hearing about, by the way in the race relations disorders of New York City. Some of the black spokesmen who are very indignant over the killing of a black man by a white band in Queens are talking about using the higher law to take vengeance upon anyone who is standing around.

Well, we can trace from Emerson to Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s book Thus Spake Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil and so forth. We can go from Nietzsche, then, we can go to the arguments or the Marxists and the Nazis that anything in a good cause is good, no matter how evil it might seem to be nor how evil it might be so that evil and good are equated in a partnership. And then, of course, we get to the Third Reich and to Sartre and to Beauvoir and the whole bunch.

Now nobody is talking about how Sartre died, what his last years were like, his drunkenness, his incontinence and his whole falling apart. Simone Beauvoir who was associated with him for so many years actually sat down and wrote in detail about his collapse simply to make money and also to perpetuate the idea of being in the public eye.

So you have a third element here, as far as I am concerned and that is anything to achieve a presence in the world of propaganda. Here we are doing everything because it will elevate the individual into public attention.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And that is an element that previous generations were unaware of, excepting, of course, on the very high level, courts, the army, places like that, because only the... only the rulers and the soldiers could achieve things, but... lasting things.

Now through the vehicles of propaganda all kinds of creeps can get up and get attention.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. You mentioned Emerson and I am very glad you did, because while Soren Kierkegaard began the existentialist philosophy, the primary influence and the primary source of Existentialism in the United States and probably England as well was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson did have powerful influence in Europe so that Nietzsche, for example, and others, reflect very strongly the influence of Emerson.

It was after World War II that the influence of Kierkegaard began to prevail in this country merging with that of Emerson, although prior to World War II in the 30s the influence of Kierkegaard was very strong in American seminaries.

Now the tragic fact is how deeply both sources, Kierkegaard and Emerson, but especially Kierkegaard have influenced seminaries. And both Catholic and Protestant seminaries for a long time have been subject to these influences. All the mainline protestant churches are radically influenced. The present pope John Paul II has a background as an existentialist philosopher. And this explains a great deal of what he has been doing of late, especially, so that one the reasons why the churches have declined is precisely this existentialist temperament.

Karl Barth, the whole of the neo Orthodox movement within the churches, again, very heavily Kierkegaardian, existentialist in orientation. So you have many people in the church who preach a seeming orthodoxy. They use all the right language. They talk about the incarnation and the resurrection and the miracles, but it is not in real history. It is in super history, in a psychological world so that they have made everything existential. And the results have been that there is a form of godliness but the power is lacking. Some evangelical seminaries are wide open now and have been for some time to existentialist thinking. I won’t mention any names, although one or two quite... are quite prominent because I couldn’t cover all of them and, to be fair, I would have to name the existentialists in all the evangelical seminaries. But very definitely they have a toe hold, just as liberation theology does, which is an aspect of the same faith which says: What we want her and now is the essence of the truth, what my biology demands. That is the real.

[ Scott ] Well, we get into some very interesting secular manifestations, because the general community doesn’t know the origin of these ideas. It simply accepts the prevailing ideas as though they come out of no place. They just are given. I hate that phrase, but that is what is used now. And if we apply it in the general community it means that anything goes so long as it doesn’t get you into trouble.

Now Polanski is the subject of an article, a recent article in Commentary magazine which is the reason that I was able to remember the number of Oscar nominations. Somebody wrote an article called “The Rise and Fall of Roman Polanski,” in which the pointed out that after he fled to Europe he began to lose a certain amount of esteem in Europe. The Europeans being much more pragmatic than the Americans, less, I would say, awfully materialistic in Europe. The question of earning a living in Europe is a vital thing. They don’t have all the ease that we have here in getting by. So when Polanski lost the great American market, then he became less important as a movie director and producer. There was less commercial value to him. And having made a series of good films not picked up by Hollywood, he is ... is now considered a has been.

Consequently, you might say, that in the old term this would be the rewards of sin, but it isn’t so. It is not because of what he did or what he said, but simply because of his market value, totally divorced from any ethical considerations. All Europe is living in terms of its market value at this moment. It is living off international commerce. It is living off the American market to a very great extent. It is living off the expense of the American tax payers and it is not mounting any resistance to the Soviets nor will it. If the Soviets ever move—because I think two wars could pretty well sap the will of the Europeans to fight anymore. So he comes in when we look at the great seed bed of the West at the end of the road of Existentialism. Where does it lead? It leads, of course, to the idea that Sartre and de Beauvoir epitomized so well in their own lives. Anything to get by.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. One of the things that I think reveals what Existentialism has done for us, most television programs manifest. If you live for the moment, if the moment alone is real, as Existentialism maintains, then the essence of a story is continual sensations.

Now in my childhood one of the things that was very common place both in my home when my father would read to us by the hour at times and at school when if a class did well and it was an impetus to do our work promptly, the teacher would devote a sizable portion of the class to reading and it was a delight.

Well, the older writers, very commonly began with two, three pages of description. Those are now left out in abridged editions for students. But then we listen to them with a relish. They evoked a picture of the past. They set the stage. The point was not the momentary feeling or sensation, but if you pick up a novel today and especially if you pick up a detective story it is all action, statement, the moment. And you are supposed to respond instantly to everything. There is no patient building up so that you have a sense of the past, present and future.

They used to say that Chinese food—and probably they still say it—could fill you up and leave you hungry again within an hour. Well, you can read and enjoy some of these modern novels and detective stories, the best of them and the next day you have trouble remember what the sequence of action was and what the plot was because it is so totally geared to the moment that there is no real sense of continuity and of life. Life has a past, present and future. This Existentialism does not have and it reflects itself in modern art.

[ Scott ] Well, sensationalism, of course... Sensations can never even be recalled. There isn’t any way that you can ever recall the moment of surprise. There isn’t any way that you can recall a moment of anger. You look back and say, “Well, yes, I remember that that made me angry at the time.” But you look back. You are no longer angry about it and it is part of the past.

The business of technique in writing, of course, which you bring up, is partly because we have moved into a visual age. And I remember that one of the big agents in New York, whom I talked to about a possible book, decided that I wasn’t the man to write that particular book, because, he said, when I read your writing, Otto, I don’t see pictures. Well, of course there are some things which I write which are not visual. They are intellectual. So what he was saying is that unless we see pictures there isn’t any point in promoting the book.

This is for a television oriented audience and television, you own, interrupted every 12 minutes or so, you had a very short attention span. So the book is written in brief episodes, bursts of activity.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And it reminds me of the radio show hosts that I have debated with in recent periods. They are always very afraid that I am going to bore the audience. So they interrupt me before I can complete my reply to a question. It never occurs to them that they might bore the audience. They talk for quite a while.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I would add to what you said, Otto, that it is a sensational visual image they want, because the older novelists drew a picture in words, two or three pages, but it was a picture to set a stage. Now it has to be visual shock, continual visual shock, not the development of a setting. That is why, I think, landscape painting is not too popular today. It involves a picture which is an enduring one, which gives you something that lingers with you. You can feel yourself in the picture. It lingers. And that is no longer valid.

[ Scott ] Well, that comment reminds ... carries me into another area. When we were children, we lived in terms of sensation and we lived in the present. If you recall, a day lasted as long as a week seems to last today.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And it was an endless thing. If it was going to be this... this afternoon, it was a great disappointment because that was a long way off. And if something happened in the afternoon you had been reprimanded about in the morning you said, “But that was in the morning.” Because that was a long way in the past. So everything was in the present. And what we are talking about is a return to childhood.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] A sponsored return to childhood by the culture. And this fits in to the treatment of citizens as children by the government who have to be monitored around the clock for their own good and protection.

[ Rushdoony ] Very good.

[ Scott ] So you see how the culture fits in to the purposes of our governors.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I would like to read a few things from Jean Paul Sartre’s classic work Being and Nothingness. First, this sentence. “The only being which can be called free is the being which nihilates its being. Moreover, we know that nihilation is lack of being and cannot be otherwise. Freedom is precisely the being which makes itself a lack of being.”’

In other words, you live only in the moment. You are not a being. You are not something that has an existence apart from the moment. So this is the philosophical defense of total childishness.

Again, he says, “Man makes himself man.” That is an Existentialist, “in order to be God.” Moreover he says, “The principle result of existential psychoanalysis must be to make us repudiate the spirit of seriousness. Chronic child ... childishness, as you said, to repudiate the spirit of seriousness, to deny that there is a good and evil, to live in terms of the pleasure principle for the moment.”

Now how far Sartre carries this comes out vividly and I am reading from the last portion of his book, the chapter entitled, “Conclusion.”

He says, “Thus, it amounts to the same thing. Whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations, if one of these activities takes precedence over the other, this will not be because of its real goal, but because of the degree of consciousness which it possesses of its ideal goal. And in this case it will be the quietism of a solitary drunkard which will take precedence over the vain agitation of the leader of nations,” unquote.

In other words, the town drunk is a better Existentialist than the leader of nations, because the leaders of nations is still governed by things outside of himself. But the town drunk is only thinking of getting drunk.

So this is a call for world suicide, for the end of life. Nothing is worth anything. So you repudiate the spirit of seriousness. You adopt permanent childishness and you say, as the conclusion of your philosophy that it is better to be the village drunk than the head of state.

[ Scott ] Well, the idea that what happens inside yourself is the most important event in the world, which is really what we are talking about, it marked every inmate of every lunatic asylum in the world. The psychiatrists called it involutional melancholia, because it leads to melancholia and then the individual is almost beyond being evoked back into the world, because his entire world becomes himself.

Now I noticed this years ago. I had a job for a brief period of time in the liquor store on the edge of skid row. And I at first felt very sorry for these fellows, these winos who would come in and I would try to talk to them, feel them.... sound them out, find out how they got into that situation and so forth. And they turned to the most frightful bores I ever had tried to talk to in my life, because they could only talk about themselves. They were only interested in themselves. The world that was moving around them was totally beyond their ken. They had not interest in politics or in anything. And if you go about in our culture today I think we are piling up more bores by the square mile than we have ever had at any period in our history. People who will only... they will sit next to me on an airplane and they will tell me all about themselves. They haven’t a question in the world. They are only interested in what is happening to them, where they are in their job, what their family is doing, what their children are doing in school. And finally they get back to, well, who do you think is going to win the next ball game.

Now this is appalling. This is like a national lobotomy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, that reminds me of something which we all do, Otto, which reveals the fact that Existentialism has infected all of us to some degree. It annoys me whenever I do it, but it is a characteristic of this century that we so often begin our comments and our observations by saying, “I think...” As though that were the key, as though that were the most important thing under the sun, what I think. And not, well, as a Christian this is what I should believe. Or as an American or an Englishmen or a German this is what we feel on this issue. This business of what I think as being the ultimate statement to make has become predominant in this century. It is a very new thing, but it manifests the fact of practical existentialism among all of us.

And what is aggravating is that so many people who can’t think sensibly or talk sensibly still feel that the answer to everything in the Bible or everything in any important study or science or art is, well, I think so and so. It is the ultimate in egoism, which is what Existentialism is. It reduces the world to the individual and to his feelings and experiences.

So we all go around saying, “Well, I think so and so.”

[ Scott ] The problem with that is that most of the people who tell me they think about something have not thought about it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] What they are doing is what D. H. Lawrence, you remember, years ago when to Sardinia with his girlfriend at a time when the English pound was very strong and the French... the Italian lira, rather, was very weak. So, of course, the whole trip was very cheap for them, but since they were on short money anyway, they traveled by bus and they talked to a lot of Italians and the Italians were all pretty angry about the pound and lira differential and would say to them, “Why is your pound worth more than our lira? Why is your money worth more than our money?” as though they were responsible for this.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... turn of affairs. And Lawrence said in a phrase I have never forgotten. He said what they were doing, of course, he said, they were chewing up newspaper editorials and spitting them at me. And that epitomizes so well, it summarizes so well so many of the I think people that I run into, because they do not think. They take their opinions from the press, from the television, from the radio and that suffices.

Now there was a time when it did not suffice. You could not maintain yourself in adult company if all you did was echo what the man in the street was saying. You had to come forward with a considered opinion or you were expected to shut up.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And there was a time earlier and I have read this in many accounts, autobiographies of by gone years in journals when people when something important came up asked the local pastor or the local judge or some other dignitary what do you know about this? And then they reflected on that.

Now they shoot off their mouth immediately.

[ Scott ] Well, that is interesting. I asked my father—he was getting elderly and I was staying with him—how things were for him, generally speaking. He said, “All right.” But he said, “I am running out of older men.” And he said, “I miss them.” He said, “They used to tell me precedence when I had an idea would go to an older man. He would tell me, ‘Well, we tried that and we had this result and so forth.’” Now he said, “There are very few left.” And he said, “I ... I don’t ... I don’t have as many places to go to advice as I used to go.”

[ Rushdoony ] That is a very interesting thing, because I hadn't realized until you mentioned it how going to an older man for advice was once common place and it no longer is.

[ Scott ] Well, look at the people who are invited to give opinions on television or radio. First of all, school teachers. They call them professors, but they are school teachers and school teachers, of course, are experts on everything in the United States. Next to school teachers what some of my seaman friends used to call shrinks. Go to the shrink. Ask the shrink. And why a medical education empowers anybody to be able to discuss the national affairs, I don’t know, but nevertheless they have these strange sort of pseudo experts on almost every side.

Recently I read in an article by a young American journalist who spent a couple of years in England and came back shell shocked because, he said, he realized that in the United States knowledge is segregated into academic enclaves, whereas the writers in Great Britain have as an audience an entire educated class. Now this is a very, very, very, very grave national deficiency on our part. We have people who are specialists. They have majored in this or that. And in almost every other respect they are illiterate. And they stayed illiterate. I heard a man say once something very interesting. He went back to the church. He began to take his religion seriously after he was in his 50s. And he realized, he said, that he had stopped thinking about religious matters when he was about 14. So from the time he was 14 till the time he was 50 he had the opinions of a 14 year old boy on some of the largest issues and questions of all time. And it wasn’t until he was mature that he had sense enough to go back and to start thinking and to attend church and to talk to the pastor and so forth and to get involved in the subject.

But we have millions of 14 year olds in various very important areas walking around. And, contrary to their prototypes in previous generations, this particular group today is quite proud of itself. It feels no sense of deficiency.

Now is this Existentialism in a cultural sense? Are these people living from sensation to sensation? Are they living only to the idea that they are as good as the next fellow? When I got that question I remember a fellow said to me once, I was raised to believe I was as good as anybody else, weren’t you? And I said no. We were raised to believe that we were better than some and not as good as others.

[ Rushdoony ] Your comment about the academic community reminds me of the professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley who in the course of his lecture went on at great length about the platonic philosophy that was basic to the Bible from page one. And he cited the fact that even on page one of the Bible the Greek word was used because the book of Genesis began, what, with the words, “In the beginning was the Word or logos and the word was God and the Word was with God.”

I went up after the class and told this professor, one of the most distinguished men in American philosophy, that his entire point was premised on an error, that what he had cited was from the beginning of John’s gospel, not the book of Genesis. And it did not have a great meaning just because the language used was Greek. He dismissed with a wave of his hand as he went off the whole matte of having transposed what was in John to Genesis and having generalized about the Bible in terms of his allusion as an irrelevant point.

Now things are irrelevant if what counts is not an objective truth. And once you deny God objective truth disappears. So you don’t have to be a formal Existentialist. This man was a Pragmatist. Truth still is not important. And when truth goes, sooner or later everything goes.

[ Scott ] Well, it is also indissoluble. Truth... a partial truth is an untruth. A partial truth is not the truth. But here we get into something entirely different. I have a book at home which I bought a number of years ago called the book of great conversations.

[ Rushdoony ] Ah, yes.

[ Scott ] And ...

[ Rushdoony ] I have that also.

[ Scott ] Oh, do you? Do you have it? And I have... I have looked through it. I haven’t ... I can’t say that I have read it, but I have looked through it. And the thing that struck me immediately is that we do no... we have no conversations on that level anymore. There are no such conversations, so far as I know, held anywhere in the United States.

[ Rushdoony ] I will take exception to that, Otto. Some of our staff breakfasts are on a better level than what I read in that book.

[ Scott ] Well, all right.

[ Rushdoony ] Thanks to you, to a great measure.

[Scott] Well, that is true. We do have good conversations at our breakfasts. That is true. It is the only place that I know of.

Generally the conversation boils down to specifics. If it is on a professional level, it is what are we going to do about what. And if it is on a social level, well, then, of course, we all have to agree with one another. Otherwise the hostess has fainting fits.

[ Rushdoony ] I would like to go back to something now that I have cited on other occasions, because I think it is so relevant, especially in view of the fact that you said the Existentialism, the modern temper, leads to childishness and to a form of insanity.

Turning again to Theodore Shank’s book American Alternative Theater I would like to quote the statement by a contemporary dramatist. “Life, revolution and theater are three words for the same thing.” In other words, life is theater and theater is life. And in terms of that another statement by still another person and I quote, “Acting is not make believe, but living exquisitely in the moment,” unquote.

Now that is pure Existentialism. Living in the moment. And that is why acting is not make believe. The people sitting out there are not living in the moment the way the actors are. So they are not real. The real people are the actors. And you turn the whole world into actors if they are going to be real people. And the result is total insanity, a politics of insanity. How else can you say other than this Existentialist abandonment of reality governs congress where the threat in Cuba and especially Nicaragua is something they won’t face up to. The presence of the KGB, the presence of the GRU in Washington, their influence, their goings and comings. They are totally oblivious because there in the theater of American television and in the newspapers.

[ Scott ] The theater of politics.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now the audience, of course, is the people. The camera, what passes for the camera is the media.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now the media is portraying our political situation, our political scene as a form of theater in which living people are being used as actors and our destinies are involved. Now you talk about diversions, using politics as a diversion.

The great diversion right now, of course, is to reduce the President to a civil servant responsible to Congress, having to report to Congress and having the approval of Congress before he functions on an international level.

In the meantime Gorbachev is coming to the western hemisphere. Gorbachev is already lined up a visit to Havana, a visit to Mexico City and a visit to Buenos Aires. The visit to Argentina is probably going to involve a promise that they will some day get the Falklands back if they give the Soviets a naval base. The Soviets have already received fishing rights off the coast of Argentina. They have a very large hold in Peru. They have a very large hold in Bolivia. They are ... they have the complicity of our state department in getting back control of Chile. They have an ongoing revolution in Colombia which is over 25 years old. They have made inroads in Uruguay to the point when the Tuparmaros, the terrorists there have revived. They are in Nicaragua. They are pressing El Salvador into a state of complete incoherence. They are on the verge of moving against Honduras, Costa Rica and, of course, Gorbachev is going to talk to de la Madrid about picking up all the things that he needs from the Kremlin and let him forget about what he owes to the American bankers.

In the face of this, now our forbearers saw French and Spanish uniforms in Mexico. We will see Soviet uniforms in Mexico.

So far the networks and the media have not even bothered to inform the American people of Gorbachev’s tour which is unprecedented.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They are turning the western hemisphere into a replica of Africa and a replica of what the pre World War II Balkans looked like. And here we sit intent upon destroying another president.

Now this is Existentialism and it reminds me we have to go back to Sartre. It reminds me of Sartre’s play No Exit. Remember that?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] No exit. That this what he was leading his followers for. You are trapped. This is it. This is the end and it is all right.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Everyone living in his own corner of hell talking to himself, wondering if the exit door was opened, but nobody trying it in an endless monologue.

[ Scott ] That is right. That is... you get Samuel Becket from that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ..­. Waiting for Godot. And there wasn’t an aspect of life that Sartre’s cuts didn't try to whither. He took a love affair and he turned it into a story about the lovers being condemned to meet again in the same hotel room ad infinitem forever. It was... it... it is unbelievable. The effort that he made to destroy joy.

[ Rushdoony ] That is a good statement, because whether it is in every day television or in a philosopher like Sartre, it is an every day effort to destroy joy, because having denied God they cannot say that man can be happy, that there can be peace and joy in the world. They have to pollute and destroy everything.

[ Scott ] It is a strange business.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, our time is drawing to a close. Are there ... we have a few minutes. Are there any concluding statements or summaries that...?

[ Scott ] Well, this is how the pagan world died. The pagan world with its endless cycles, remember? Everything was going not recur.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So everything that we were going through was going to recur and recur endlessly as the seasons rotated around one another and the planets around the earth, so man’s life was going to repeat ad infinitem forever. And there was no exit and there was no hope. And this is what Christianity swept to one side and as the faith declined—and I am not sure that the faith declined excepting that those who were anti faith stopped hold of the instruments of communication and have been trying to convince us that the faith declined.

I think if we took a head count, if it was possible, we would find that the faith is flourishing here, for instance, as never before. But the instruments of communication are preaching paganism in the name of modern philosophy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Pagan thinking, Greek and Roman, was never any good. But the so-called great dramatists and writers were men who had one message, that life is terrible and that everything works to frustrate man and all things work together for evil in this world. The lesser ones were concerned with only the perverted pleasures of the moment so that they had become radically existentialist and sensation prevailed to the point that on the Roman stage, finally, they had to heighten sensation by having actual murders committed on stage with condemned men playing the roles and being murdered, actual sex, actual everything on stage.

[ Scott ] Well, we go part way. We have actual sex. I am sure that if the present trends continue it will become even more explicit in time to come. They don’t believe the audience has enough imagination to imagine so therefore they leave nothing to the imagination. And, of course, this kills all the imaginative quality involved in the drama. It... and also there is no catharsis.

So here we are. We see the dreadful ends of so many of these exponents of nothingness and I believe that is the title of his book, Of Nothingness.

[ Rushdoony ] Being and Nothingness.

[ Scott ] Being and Nothingness, yes. He is an expert on nothingness. And it is amazing that he has managed to be so hailed... So many of these people get away with this that nobody laughs.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, well, our time is almost up. I would like to comment briefly on one thing. The Existentialism within the Church. The emphasis is so much on not what will the Lord have us to do, but what is my or your personal experience. I actually had one outstanding prominent pastor tell me that he did not believe that John Calvin was a Christian, because in all his works he never found him make a witness about his conversion experience and the ever increasing joy of that experience and rhapsodizing about the experience. That was the test.

And he went after others similarly.

Well, our time is up. Thank you all and God bless you.

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