From the Easy Chair

History; Its Direction & Meaning

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 208-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161W42

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161W42, History; Its Direction & Meaning, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 141, March 16, 1987.

Otto Scott and I are going to discuss history, its direction, its meaning and the very fact of the writing of history.

One of the things we have to recognize, first of all, is that that the word history has a number of meanings. It can refer—to cite just two important meanings—to what actually has happened in time or, second, to what man say has happened in time. Very often there is a great deal of difference between actual history and recorded history. Our daily newspapers in a sense record history as they believe it has happened. But there is a difference between their reporting of events and the events in themselves and the significance of events.

One reason for discussing history tonight is a book published not too long ago for 35 dollars. It is a very large book published in 1987 in New York, Alfred H. Knopf, Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians. It is a book of some almost 800 pages dealing with Christianity in the early years of its history going through Constantine.

By and large I would have to say the book is mediocre. However, the chapter on Constantine and the Church is very interesting. Robin Lane Fox, an English scholar, is basically a Humanist. He is skeptical about the authenticity of some of the New Testament documents. His perspective is clearly not that of an orthodox Christian. However, in chapter 12 he breaks with orthodox historiography. He begins by saying to us as to contemporaries, he conversion of Constantine remains an entirely unexpected event. And he calls it one of histories great surprises, an erratic block which has diverted the stream of human history.

Looking back, we can, he recognizes, ascribe all kinds of pragmatic reasons to Constantine’s decision. However, we know the future and he did not. In fact, he helped shape the future.

The Christians were, perhaps, only one tenth of the population. At that time they were badly divided. It was the most opportune time to smash them rather than to recognize them. And yet Constantine, not only announced himself to be a Christian, but gave a legal status to Christianity, toleration to it.

Now my reason for citing that episode as the starting off point in our discussion, Otto’s discussion and mine, is this. Historiography in the modern age has been marked by a determined insistence that history is only determined by things from within history.

While Fox does not say something from outside of history determined the conversion of Constantine, the chapter does open the door to that. In other words, if you are going to be a modern historian, if you are going to command any respect for the work you do, you have to see events as purely naturalistic in their determination. Determinism. In other words, predestination by man not by God. In fact, at one rather conservative Christian college a professor was fired in the past 10 years because he insisted on a Christian historiography. And the rest of the department said they would lose respectability if he persisted in that stance.

[ Scott ] Some Christian school.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. The other men professed to be adherents to a variety of theological positions, but to all practical intent they were Atheists.

[ Scott ] Well, yes. They are sailing under false pretenses.

[ Rushdoony ] As most Christian colleges do.

[ Scott ] Well, I am sorry to hear it.

[ Rushdoony ] I would say, Otto, in the history departments of your very ultra conservative, whether fundamentalist or Calvinistic colleges, a naturalistic, humanistic historiography prevails. They go to the universities to teach that. They are upset and uncomfortable with anything else.

[ Scott ] Well, it has to be a very limited group of scholars who really believe that we have the information about the past in sufficient detail to be able to explain it or to believe that what men do determine events.

I have several recent books I looked at. I have a book called The Seeds of Change, which deals only with the effect of agriculture on societies and cultures and civilizations. Wheat, corn, et cetera, et cetera. And then I remember a book years ago called Rats, Lice and History.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] In which this is coming back again with the biological fellows, the effect of disease on human events. And then, of course, we always have these people who believe that nature... this is a phantom of their own creation, some phantom called nature which... by which they mean all parts of life and they cant’ say the word God, that nature is somehow or another a shaping force.

And in a book that I picked up just for this, The Paradox of History by Nicola Chiaromonte. He is a ... a... it is hard to say what Nicola actually believes, but he is very witty and he talks about the various attitudes of various writers, Sven Dahl, Pasternak, Tolstoy and others in regard to history. And tracing Pasternak’s book Dr. Zhivago, he finds certain contradictions and he sees in one point where Pasternak is trying to tie in what he calls the process of nature to events and Chiaromonte says, “But invoking the growth of trees and the rhythm of the seasons has very little to do with what we consider history.” He said, “History in terms of nature tends to dismiss the enigma of history in nature and leaves one face to face with a power that is superior to them both.”

Well, I suppose the problem is for modern man that he cannot admit that such a power exists because it means that while his activities are indeterminate, lead to new conclusion that he wants.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. That is very true. In fact, a very interesting book could be written just on how at key points in history unexpected natural events have altered the course of history. For example, when the Pilgrims and the Puritans went to New England under normal circumstances they would have been wiped out over night by the Indians there. However, before their landing, a strange plague—and scholars still do not know what it was—wiped out virtually all of the Indians, left the land virtually uninhabited. So they were able to land and survive.

Much later in its history a French navy headed for the North Atlantic colonies with one purpose, to capture them and make them a part of Spain. There was no way they could have resisted that French navy. But a storm came up and wiped out that navy.

Or the fact that when Suleiman the Turkish ruler was at the gates of Vienna there was no reason why he could not have taken it if the weather had not prevented his heavy siege guns from arriving. That saved Vienna.

Then there is a curious fact, really, an unusual fact that after Suleiman, who was so very powerful and important, there was no successor to carry on. Europe was divided. The French were ready to help the Turks take over all their enemies in Europe.

[ Scott ] I remember that.

[ Rushdoony ] But what happened? Well, Noah Barber has written in his book The Sultan and I quote, “Greatness made way for degeneracy. Prowess in the field of battle was replaced by prowess in the harem. Statesmanship became a tool for finality. The strange fact is that these traits persisted until the 20th century. It was not a question of a few Sultans misgoverning the empire. Every ruling house spawns the occasional weakling. But this was an unbroken line of weaklings. The 25 sultans who followed Suleiman were almost without exception totally lacking in any of the qualities needed to rule,” unquote.

An amazing fact. But a whole book could be written just on these things that indicate a hand from outside of history has determined history.

[ Scott ] Well, it is also the fact that we don’t really know. All we know is what is recorded. And the record is always an official record. Even newspaper. You were talking about newspapers when you started out and I worked on newspapers. And there is no historian worthy of the name that will pay any attention to anything that appears in a newspaper about any event, because they almost always get it wrong. They get it in the heat of the moment. They get part of the story. And that part of the story they often get wrong. If everyone who has eve been involved in an event that is alter described in a newspaper knows that this is so. They never seem to get anything right. They are not reliable. They are just not reliable as a record. And for that matter neither is the academy nor the official observers.

I think, for instance, of Barnes. Barnes, around 1928 or 29 he was a statistician, by the way, opened up a trunk in a farm house and found it crammed with letters, diaries, logs and so forth from the {?} sisters and Theodore Wells. Now he began... he read all this with growing astonishment and then he began to research the area that they were discussing in their correspondence and where they had been and what they had done. And he found that ever since the Civil War William Lloyd Garrison was credited with what Theodore Well had accomplished in creating the Abolitionist movement.

Now how could everybody be wrong for what amounted to 70 years when ... when Barnes wrote his book and called it the Anti Slavery Impulse and he talked about, if you remember, the burned out district in up state New York.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] .... where these people started out listening to Charles Finney the evangelist, one of our great evangelists who refused to be educated because he knew by some inner light what the truth was about everything. All he wanted to do was preach. We have been cursed with those kind of evangelists ever since. He did an awful lot to destroy the intellectual structure of American Christianity, all with the best of intentions.

At any rate, when Barnes came out with his book tracing the connections between these crazy crusades which began in the 1830s against dancing, against music, against smoking, against travel on the sabbath, against all sorts or things, against eating meat, against coffee and tea. And it finally rolled up into the Abolitionist movement and despite what Finney was doing, despite what Wells was doing, the Grimke sisters and everything else, none of the newspapers caught it. And none of the historians caught it afterwards and when Barnes produced the proof, the universities almost killed him. If they could have, they would have stifled him. They would have exiled him to Elba.

To this day they won’t admit what he did. And that is history.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, I think it is interesting that in 1923 when the German inflation was reading the point where it took millions of marks to send a letter across town, there were actually distinguished German economists who were declaring before various Reichstag hearings that they were actually in a period of deflation.

[ Scott ] Indeed.

[ Rushdoony ] Well... and you don’t have to go back to Germany and 1923 for that. I have in my hand The American Journal of Public Health put out by the American Public Health Association. It is the March, 1987 issue. And there is not a word in it about AIDS. I also have their March, 1987 The Nation’s Health, the official newspaper of the American Public Health Association. Again, nothing about AIDS.

But there is more than a little about the great horror of tobacco and what it is doing to this country. Well, air pollution indoors may be greater than you think, and so on.

[ Scott ] Well, cigarette smoking has displaced jay walking as the greatest American crime. I suppose this serves to take their mind off of serious problems. AIDS is a serious problem. They don’t know what to do about it and we still have the paradox of segregating certain people with certain contagious diseases and leaving AIDS alone. But that is... that is another... another story. How the historians will handle our present situation, how historians will look at the United States in the period, say, from 1945 to 1990, is going to be not very pleasant for our descendants to read. They are not going not think that we are very bright.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, certainly, the people in authority don’t give much evidence of intelligence, let alone character. We are living in a very difficult age and looking at it naturalistically is very bleak. I mentioned at the beginning that we have to see more than man in history. The hand of God has to be there. Now shortly after World War I Egon Friedell, a German wrote his three volume Cultural History of the Modern Age. He was thoroughly damned by scholars for these books and, in effect, was regarded as having abdicated as a scholar. In particular, for a comment in volume three, page 478 that I would like to read. In this he deals with the world. Now, mind you, he is writing in the 1920s. And he is looking ahead to what will happen by the end of the 1900s. And he says, and I quote, “There is just these five possibilities that, first, America will triumph materially, which would mean world domination by the United States. And at the end of this interim empire the fall of the West through over technicalization. Two, America will triumph spiritually by becoming sublimated, this implying the rebirth of Germany from whence alone this sublimation could be derived. Third, the East will triumph materially bringing about world Bolshevism and the interim reign of antichrist. Four, the East will triumph spiritually reviving Christianity through the Russian soul. And fifth, the fifth eventuality is chaos.

“These five possibilities present themselves and no others, whether political, ethical or psychological. It will, however, be clear, we hope, to the intelligent reader that none of these eventualities will materialize for world history is not an equation, not even one with several solutions. Its only real possibility is the unreal and its only causality irrationality. It is made by a hither mind than the human,” unquote.

[ Scott ] Well, that is marvelously well put. And history is absolutely packed with examples of the truth of that. If we were to take the logical outcome, for instance, time and time again we find ourselves surprised. You mentioned the Turks outside of Vienna. We think of the Mongols. The Mongols were poised over Europe. Europe was going to be absolutely helpless {?}. They had swept all through Russia, through part of Anatolia, through part of the Middle East. When Genghis Khan died and I was always... I was quite intrigued. I remember reading this as a boy. I think it was in Harold Land’s Biography of Genghis Kahn where the great Khan had what apparently was a stroke in the middle of the night in his tent when he was drinking mulled wine and conversing with his favorite women. And the idea of this great warlord spending all his evenings talking with women really caught my attention when I was a boy. It didn’t fit my ideal of a great warrior. And it stuck in my mind every since.

But, at any rate, he died. All his generals went back to hold a new election and after they had a new election they decided not to expand any farther, but to divide the empire amongst themselves. And Europe was saved. And did anyone in Europe know that it was saved or why it was saved? No. Because in those days there was no reporters to tell them. The only think that happened was that the Mongols did not come any closer.

So if we come up to modern times, the Germans were the strongest military power in the world in 1914. They had the world’s greatest army. They had the world’s largest armaments. They had probably the most advanced technology and the best soldiers in the world. Before then they had a decadent France... to a great extent a decadent France. They had England which had a pitifully small army, no bigger than the police force. They had a navy. The Germans had a navy that was almost the equal of the British. Everything else being equal, they had prepared for this war since 19... since 1870. On... on... on paper there was no chance that France could stop them or that they would be able to be balked from controlling all Europe. And yet they lost World War I and they lost it very badly at enormous cost.

We could say almost the same thing about World War II which was a replay. If it hadn't been for the accident that Franco was half Jewish, Germany would have won World War II.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And very few people—and I don’t know of any text books or any history books—that tell us something that apparently was unknown even to Hitler.

[ Scott ] Yes, it was.

[ Rushdoony ] That this is what kept Spain from falling into the hands of the Axis.

[ Scott ] Well, yes, because Franco... look at what he turned down, whether he was half Jewish or not. He turned down a chance to be leader of a large part of the Mediterranean. Spain was the anchor. If Hitler had Spain he would have Gibraltar and he would have the Mediterranean. He would have had the oil of the Persian Gulf. There was no way that the United States or Great Britain could have landed and fought against him.

[ Rushdoony ] Neither liberals nor conservatives nor Christians nor Jews have been aware of what they owe to Franco.

[ Scott ] That is right. That is right. In fact, Franco has been enormously vilified, enormously vilified. But we go back, then, to history, how history was described. When the King of Spain was forced into abdication, Alfonso XIII—and that brings up an interesting side point that at the Escorial there are a number of crypts that were created centuries ago for the kings of Spain and he occupied the last one.

In any event he abdicated and then you had a temporary dictatorship under Primo Di Rivera. Then you had a republic and you had a series of elections, each election carrying the Cortez farther left until finally Communists took control of the government of Spain and then they decided to launch a massacre of all the priests and the nuns, to burn the churches and take over the monasteries and the convents and the Christian schools. That is what provoked the rebellion.

I remember that period. I remember reading newspapers during that period. I remember very distinctly a friend of mine came to me, my own age at the time, and wanted me to go over to take part in that conflict and I refused. And I do not recall reading about those massacres or those purges.

[ Rushdoony ] No, nor have the accounts of them been publicized. The books that published them went out of notice and out of print very quickly, They were killed.

So we never have known the truth about the Spanish Civil War as far as our schools and universities are concerned.

[ Scott ] Well, then, this is true of all history.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The victors write the history. And what is lost to history is the look, the handshake, the secret agreement, the secret meeting, all the things that do not occur.

Now I haven’t read it yet. I haven’t started it, by Alexi Tolstoy has written a book called The Great Betrayal and he traces what England did, mainly England, with some timid cooperation from the United States, but apparently not a full fledged cooperation in turning over to Stalin every person that could ... you could be described as Russian. The white Russians that escaped in the beginning of the revolution...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... who were not Soviet citizens, the ... the Cossacks who fought against ...

[ Rushdoony ] Families that escaped at the time of the revolution and whose children were born in other countries were loaded in box cars by British and American troops.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And herded back.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] I know because I have talked to someone who was there.

[ Scott ] Well, he traces Mac Millan’s part in that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And Mac Millan refused to discuss it. He refused to answer any questions about it. They finally traced—and I remember reading this in Encounter—one civil servant who actually signed the order and asked him if he was sorry and he said, no, he wasn’t. He simply did his duty.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, I have read two of Tolstoy’s previous books and I am looking forwards to reading this one.

Well, to continue now, I would like to turn to a periodical, a religious periodical, Review for Religious, volume 46, number one, January, February 1987. This is a Catholic periodical and the editor is a Jesuit. However, the point made in this particular article by Gerald A. Arbuckle, S. M., entitled “Mythology, Revitalization and the Refounding of Religious Life,” unquote, is one that is very common among all churches today so that, well, Reinhold Niebuhr popularized it, but it has been used in every particular church.

The article begins thus and I quote the first paragraph. “A myth is a story or tradition which claims to enshrine a fundamental truth of inner meaning about the world and human life. Contrary to popular belief, myths are not childish stories nor mere pre scientific explanations of the world, nor are myths to be equated with falsities or fantasies. Myths are deeply serious insights about reality. Without myths we are unable to determine what things really are, what to do with them or how to be in relation to them,” unquote.

Now what this tells us is that for virtually all major religious groups today, revelation has been replaced by myth.

[ Scott ] Yes, I disagree with that writer wholeheartedly.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And for these people, therefore, man somehow has had intuitive insights which he has embodied in myths. And so they face to face with the work of God in history with the revelation of God and the Scripture...

[ Scott ] ... prefer myths.

[ Rushdoony ] They prefer myth.

[ Scott ] Yes. Well...

[ Rushdoony ] They exalt it. There is something wrong with you if you refuse to recognize myth. I have actually had some of them turn on me and walk away saying I am not fit to talk to, because I reject the concept of a myth.

[ Scott ] Well, you made the comment in one of your writings which struck me quite some years ago that history shows the hand of God and that is why so many men prefer myth and legend. But I have run into the myth. The reason I wrote the book about secret six, the people who hired John Brown to commit was to destroy the myth of John Brown.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And almost every myth that I know of has been a distortion of the truth.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, today we have mythology enthroned. And we are to bow down to these experts who tell us that it is not the revelation of God that determines what is right and wrong. The insights of myths...

[ Scott ] Well, Tolstoy... and I used this instance recently, so it is fresh in my mind. In his book War and Peace describing the battle of Borodino the Russians decided to retreat. And the messenger that carried the message to stop firing and to retreat failed to reach one of the batteries. And this battery kept firing and it was foggy, plus the smoke of the scene and so forth. Because that battery kept firing the French thought that their offensive had failed and they retreated instead. That is how the Russians won the battle of Borodino. The only problem here was that the battery didn’t know what it had done and neither did anybody else.

All right. Nobody knew then what turned the tide of battle, except God. And if you have ever even involved in a battle, even at a distance, you can be sure that only God could figure it out, because it is great confusion.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] On all sides. I forget the general who said, “Every battle plan is demolished when action begins.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And this is true of life in general across the board. I don’t ... nobody’s plans ever come out the way they plan them. So how could a group of men all with a plan determine the outcome of events?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Your account of battles reminds me of something I encountered... oh, it is well over 40 years ago when I was on the Indian reservation. A scholar found one of the survivors of a battle ... little horn.

[ Scott ] Oh, Big Horn?

[ Rushdoony ] Big Horn, yes, where Custer...

[ Scott ] Custer, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ...lost his life.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] So he asked that someone persuade the old man very old, very feeble, to talk to him. So he went there to get the story of the battle and the man was very old and his English was very limited. He sat there for quite a while thinking back on the battle. And finally he gave his story of it. It was in four words. Big fight, much dust.

[ Scott ] That is about the size of it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, there is another factor in historiography. When you have this concept of myth governing me—and it does today. Because if you don’t believe in God’s revelation, you are going to be sucked into the world of the myths. And then truth doesn’t mean much anymore.

In the U S News and World Report for March 9, 1987, there is an article “To be Rich, Famous and an Artist.” The point of the article is that nobody knows what is good art anymore. There are no more standards. And so today’s art market is publicity fueled and driven by collectors who often invest for the sake of profit, rather than art. The article describes it as an irresponsible market. And so it is sensationalistic.

Pollack, Andy Warhol and former graffiti artist Keith Haring...

[ Scott ] How can they tell that he stopped?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. He hasn’t, really, of course. These are the men who, because of their sensationalism are making money. They are getting enormous sums of money for their absurd pictures. And no one cares.

[ Scott ] Well, there is a sort of a bit. The article is really talking, I think... I haven't read it, but it sounds as though it is talking about a slice of the art market. You have several paradoxes, parent... paradoxes functioning in the art world. At the same time that Warhol and other frauds were collecting money from what I was told is about a two billion dollar modern art market, you have the paradox of auctions by the big outlets in which millions of dollars are paid for a Renaissance oil painting, an authenticated painting.

So what we have in terms of art is very similar to what happened in Rome. The Romans paid enormous sums of money for Greek antiquities and faking those antiquities was one of the...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...but industries in the art world of Rome, because the past was... the past of Greece was considered superior to the present of Rome.

Right now in every thing excepting articles such as this, the fact is that most people believe the art of the previous centuries is better than the art of this century. And, therefore it commands higher prices, because we don’t have artists today who can duplicate.

[ Rushdoony ] That is very true, but they are unwilling to say that the modern art is garbage, because they no longer...

[ Scott ] They can’t say it.

[ Rushdoony ] ... have a criterion in terms of which to judge.

[ Scott ] Ah, well, the ... I... I had to think about the subject recently because a small art publication asked me to write an article about modern art and I pointed out the contradiction in the modern art field. It was picked up by the revolution at the turn of the century, if you recall, the 80s and the 90s and the 1900s and so forth. It was picked up by the revolution and all of the artists who were demolishing classic standards were haled as innovators and geniuses. And we know now that Picasso and some of the others got their inspiration from primitive art, only it lacks the awe of the primitive art object which does have a ... an effect when you look at it, because they were religious objects. And somehow or another that seems to come through in the natural setting.

But at any rate, once the revolution succeeded, all those artists were sent to Siberia and all their paintings were made forbidden, because the revolution has no intention of having its standards subverted by artists.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So modern art is running ahead of the revolution. Wherever the revolution succeeds modern art is wiped out. This is the last strong hold, the United States. New York City considers itself the head of the art world. But there is a great many American artists that won’t even go through the town. In fact, some won’t even fly over it. They will fly out of... if they are going to Europe they will fly out of Boston or Baltimore. They will not even go through the New York airport, they have such detestation of the little clique of modern art dealers, painters and publications that are misleading all sorts of art students.

[ Rushdoony ] About, oh, 10, 15 years ago an art periodical—why, I don’t now—decided to ask me—having heard of me through someone they knew—to write an article to give a somewhat Christian perspective on art. I got it back.

[ Scott ] They didn’t like it.

[ Rushdoony ] ... with a very huffy note.

[ Scott ] Well, maybe things have changed, because my article was accepted by this little group.

[ Rushdoony ] Good.

[ Scott ] And... and... and they ... I don’t know whether they liked it or not, but at least they accepted it and I understand they printed it. I haven’t seen it yet.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I picked up a copy of an art magazine recently and was agreeably surprised by its contents. In fact, I sent in a subscription.

[ Scott ] There is a reaction. I was at an auction at the Cowboy Hall of Fame and Museum of Western Heritage in Oklahoma City. It must have been at least eight or nine years ago. There were men in business suits standing in front of each collection of paintings.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And I thought at first they were the artists, but they weren’t. They were the agents. And there was a regular auction that took place and the bidding went very high. And these were very realistic pictures.

Well, all right. We... This is God’s world. And if you don’t find beauty in it, it is not God’s fault.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, of course, beauty is passé with he avant garde artists.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] They have a hatred of beauty, a hatred of life.

[ Scott ] Well, there you are coming into a... the ... a subject that has... has always attracted historians. Why do civilizations die? What are the signs of decay? We only know the Roman situation in detail and the Greek in spots at certain periods. I mean, for instance, whenever I pick up a book that talks about ancient Greece it talks about fifth century B C Athens. It never talks about what happened afterwards. I have never yet seen an article on how the sophists were stoned to death after the Greeks realized they had been misled by those who destroyed their religious belief.

But I do recall that there was a historical description of what tolerated homosexuality meant to a civilization. And that was the argument that once homosexuality became accepted by a civilization, the rise of the homosexuals was considered the vultures of civilization. It was a sign of death.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And there were other signs, unfortunately. Very ... very much evident on our horizon today. There is a historical theory, for instance, to the effect that once a civilization becomes so complex that the average man cannot see for himself the workings of justice, if he cannot see virtue rewarded and evil punished, then he comes to believe that every man’s status is accomplished by pull or by accident or by corruption. And that civilization, then, is in serious trouble because what men cannot rationalize they cannot defend. What they cannot defend will not be maintained.

Now that is a very serious thing.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And I read that description in conjunction with Byzantium after they debased the bezant, after they... that was their last step, I believe, into the abyss.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] When they decided to degrade their money and to cheat the world, which, of course, we are doing with the paper dollar.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So this brings very serious Spenglerian, you might say, considerations.

[ Rushdoony ] Well I think it is worth getting on to in the remaining time a specific area of history because we have just brought out again your book on James I and your secret six may be out again before the end of this year. And you are working on your Wilson book. And in the course of your research you spent a day with one of the more interesting men of this century, Hamilton Fish.

[ Scott ] Indeed, I did.

[ Rushdoony ] And his book has just been published, Tragic Deception: FDR and America’s Involvement in World War II.

[ Scott ] It must be a second edition.

[ Rushdoony ] Well,... oh, you are right. This is came out first in 1983 and has just been...

[ Scott ] Reissued.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... because he gave me a copy and signed it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... in his trembling hand. But he was terribly lucid. He is in his 90s and a fascinating man.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, he is almost unknown to people today and yet he not only comes from one of the most important families in American history, but was in the first half of this century one of the more important men in the United States.

[ Scott ] Very big and an influential man, a contemporary of Franklin Roosevelt’s, an old friend of his when they were in school. Went to Harvard at about the same time.

And I was particularly caught by one of the things that he said to me in the course of the interview. He said, “Remember, Mr. Roosevelt was no friend of the Jews.” And I was astonished at that.

[ Rushdoony ] He documents that in this book.

[ Scott ] And then later I ran into a historian who had access to the Roosevelt records at Hyde Park and he said, “The references to the Jewish people that Roosevelt permitted himself that are overlooked by investigators is really remarkable.” There you have a conflict of myth and reality.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, yes. Well, he was a giant of a man in more ways than one. He stood a full head taller than Mac Arthur, you know.

[ Scott ] Oh, he was... he was... a very, very big man, yes. And ... and had a remarkable war record. He was greatly honored by the black people. And yet he was portrayed when he went against the New Deal as a racist.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That seems to be almost a {?} charge.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, he was an officer in the black troops.

[ Scott ] Yes. He led...

[ Rushdoony ] ... in World War I.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] He was one of the first men, if not the first to introduce civil rights legislation. He was the Congressman from ...

[ Scott ] From Orange County.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, from ...

[ Scott ] I know. That is where my grandparents... my mother’s people are from.

[ Rushdoony ] And from Roosevelt’s home district.

[ Scott ] Yes. I remember very... I remember both of them very distinctly.

[ Rushdoony ] Very remarkable man. And he is working on another book, is he not?

[ Scott ] I don’t... I think he is. He is working on his autobiography.

[ Rushdoony ] Ah, that should be very interesting.

[ Scott ] And... and.... and I certainly hope that he completes it.

He was a very good friend of the Taft family and spent his summers near the William Howard Taft and sons and so forth, knew everybody.

[ Rushdoony ] It is hard for us to realize, because we forget that we are a young country. But there are men living whose grandparents were born under John Adams.

[ Scott ] Absolutely.

[ Rushdoony ] Second President of the United States.

[ Scott ] He is one of them.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And he is still here. Yes, this is ... it is a young country.

[ Rushdoony ] Howard Kirschner was one such person.

[ Scott ] Is that so?

[ Rushdoony ] His grandfather was born under John Quincy... under John Adams.

[ Scott ] Under John Adams.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, the second President.

[ Scott ] Isn’t that interesting? My mother told me that on the back road in front of the small house in the area of New Windsor, which was about 60 miles up from New York, she met an old lady and the old lady said that when she was a young girl she remembered seeing one ... who was the fox from {?} before Buchanan? I...

[ Rushdoony ] Oh....

[ Scott ] The President before Buchanan walking after his retirement.

[ Rushdoony ] Pierce.

[ Scott ] ...wearing a many...

[ Rushdoony ] ...or Fillmore.

[ Scott ] ... a many sided cape. And I am sorry I can’t at this point just ... it doesn't come to my mind his name. But he came from New York state.

[ Rushdoony ] Van Buren.

[ Scott ] Van Buren.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh. He was earlier.

[ Scott ] Yes, yes. Van Buren. He was earlier, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Can you imagine? The past ... the past, of course, if you study the past, as you have, as I have, the past ceases to be the past, because the people are recognizable. I don’t look at the past as an incline. I look at it as a level plane in which we are all on the same level.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, when we consider history we have to begin with the fact that it comes from the hand of God. Otherwise it is meaningless. And that revelation gives us the truth concerning history. That is why in the study of history the Bible is the most important book, because there we have history writing as God ordained it. It tells the truth about the greatest saints, about God’s prophets and it gives us the direction of history as God has ordained it. And without that we are rudderless and we are adrift.

[ Scott ] Well, I think what is most difficult for men to accept is the idea that the meaning of their life is something that they will never learn until after they are finished with it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Luther once said that our lives are like type that is set which is backwards when you look at it, but when printed is totally understandable.

[ Scott ] That is interesting. I have come... you know, I have... several times the meaning of somebody else’s life has come to me instantly when they died, not until they die, because as long as a man is alive there is always a chance that he may change in some manner. But once he dies, the meaning of his life emerges.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, history has disappeared form the public schools. It has been replaced by social science, because social science sees history not as anything independent of man as coming from the hand of God, but as social engineering, predestination by man totally.

[ Scott ] Well, there is also, I think, a more serious reason. The revolution does not want students to understand the fallacies and errors of the past, and particularly do they want to stop anyone from learning the pattern of how tyranny succeeds. If we look at the pattern of revolution since the Cromwellian Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the German Revolution and lesser revolutions in between, we find a similarity of pattern that no student of history can misunderstand. But if it is not taught then people are stripped of their intellectual defenses.

[ Rushdoony ] Well the teaching of history in any old fashioned sense is virtually gone throughout the western world.

[ Scott ] I know.

[ Rushdoony ] Only in Christian schools is it returning.

[ Scott ] Well, that is enough right there to send a child to a Christian school.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Today you no longer try to understand the world as it is so that even geography in the old fashioned sense is no longer taught. You are taught what man can do to the world, not to know the world as it is.

[ Scott ] Well there is a myth about the contemporary world that it is smaller than it used to be, less diverse, when that is not true at all. It is as large and diverse as ever.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is very limited. Are there any concluding remarks you would like to make in a minute or two, Otto?

[ Scott ] Just that people will have to accept the reality of mystery. It is not possible to know everything there is to know. It is not possible to know everything that is known. And yet he average individual resents being told that it isn’t true that there are answers to everything. The fact of the matter is that if there are answers to everything, we will not know what they are and we have to accept that fact and live with mystery throughout our life.

[ Rushdoony ] The know it all is a humanistic person with a humanistic outlook. We cannot have exhaustive knowledge. And, of course, this is what Humanism aims for, to have an exhaustive knowledge of things. And the result it has no knowledge. It begins with fault premises.

Well, our time is about up. Thank you for listening and I think it is important for all of us to recognize that in order to appreciate what history is, we have to see it as the handiwork of God. Thank you and God bless you all.

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