80 - Profound Questions and Answers

Questions on Economic Libertarians (Murray Rothgard), (Fractional Res.)

 

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 9-24

Genre: Talk

Track: 9

Dictation Name: RR206G13

Location/Venue:

Year:

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, very good question. Existentialism is the total absorption with oneself. On the other hand, so much of what passes for religion today, claims that you should be totally unselfish and never think of yourself; and what is our answer to the two positions? Well, it is that both are false. According to our faith, when we come to Christ we are to renounce ourselves because the old man in us, the old Adam, the old self, is a perverted one, a sinful one, dead in sins and trespasses. And we are to hate the old man and separate ourselves from him, and become the new man Jesus Christ, become members of His humanity. Now as members of Jesus Christ, the old man is still always there somewhat, but the new man, the true, the basic man in our lives, is now Jesus Christ. We cannot hate ourselves now because we are not the old Adam, that is not the truth about us now, he is still there in the background; but the truth about each of us who are now Christians is Jesus Christ. As Paul said: “I live, and yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

Now, as our Lord Himself said: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Well, He was saying you should love your neighbor, and you should love him as yourself. Well now, that is not any talk about hating yourself is it? What it is saying is, you have got to respect the God-given rights that you have, just as you respect the God-given rights of others, and you cannot have this respect for others unless you have it for yourself.

So that there is what some time ago a very great saint of God who has now gone to his Lord said, should be called a ‘holy selfishness,’ and we should not allow the oriental, the Buddhist type of selflessness to possess us. And in this respect Ayn Rand has attacked not the Biblical position but she has attacked this pseudo idealistic view in our time; and she is right as far as she goes, but her own answer is an existential absorption with the ego, which is equally bad; and we must avoid both for the Biblical perspective.

We cannot allow ourselves to have preeminence over God, but under God we have to respect ourselves, to love ourselves according to the word of God and according to His requirements, and we cannot love our neighbor if we do not love ourselves. Yes?

[Audience Member] You mentioned way back at the beginning that Jesus performed this cure in a way that was forbidden by the Talmud, by the law; what, how was that (?) were they forbidden to cure people that way?

[Rushdoony] We don’t know the reason for the regulation, but there was not only all kinds of regulations against healing, but there was also specifically a law against anointing the eyes with spittle and clay.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] That I don’t know, but we definitely know that at that time there was such a regulation. So what our Lord did, since He had healed many a man just by saying that he should see, He deliberately broke their Sabbath laws; in other words He pitted His law as God incarnate against their law, and gave them a miracle which was a violation of their law to give them a more obvious choice, and their choice of their own self righteousness was made very obvious thereby.

But we find that on several occasions our Lord deliberately healed on the Sabbath, and their perversion of scripture was so apparent because as He pointed out, the mosaic law made it clear that if your cow or donkey or some of your livestock fell into a well or a pit on the Sabbath day you should take it out, immediately. Now the whole premise of the Mosaic law is that it takes the minimal case in order to make clear that this applies in everything, so that what it very clearly said was that works of mercy, works of healing, were certainly valid on the Sabbath day; just as Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. As Paul tells us, of course it applies to the ox but it has primary reference to man, it makes clear how fundamental this principle is, that the laborer is worthy of his hire, because the scripture applies it even to the ox.

Now, this was true of the law with regard to works of mercy on the Sabbath, but the law had no meaning to them and this is what our Lord was driving home with each of these miracles. It was not the law of God, it was the law of man. And this is precisely the situation we have today; what is the sin of all sins to the churches today? It is breaking with the denomination or going against the hierarchy, and so on. And you can be guilty of almost anything, but if you knuckle under to the hierarchy you are alright, and I have seen them forgive any kind of sin, including fraudulent use or misappropriation of money, sexual sins, and so on, and in fact be very ready to do it because now they have a little power over the man and they can use him so much more readily. They like a sinner in the pulpit, one whose sin they know, they have the information on, because he is their boy.

To them the only real sin is: “Thou shalt not violate what the hierarchy in the church says constitutes true Presbyterianism or Methodism, or Congregationalism, or Roman Catholicism, or what have you. And this of course is what Phariseeism was, it was the same thing: ‘this is the truth’ and they begin with their false premises and reason logically to their conclusion, not realizing that the judgement is upon them. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] It is not going to stop until they have the one world religion. The ecumenical movement is just the first step, there will be the one world religion together with the one world state. Already all your churches and religions are part of UNESCO and through UNESCO a part of the UN. So that there is a great deal of cooperation with them; it was not an accident that at the festival of faith you had the various oriental religions, and the Roman Catholic Archbishop, the Council of Churches representatives, and others, all participating; it was a festival of all faiths. And this is for the public consumption to prepare them for the deeper cooperation that shall come, and already you are getting joint schools and the like set up, and for example in Berkeley you have a seminary which I attended, which was established about 70-80 years ago, it is in part Congregationalist, and part Methodist although I’m not sure how much money the Methodists put in, Pacific Civic School of Religion. Now, notice it is not the Pacific School of Theology or of Christianity, but of Religion, and the specific purpose is to teach the one world religion, not a particular religion. This is their ultimate purpose.

[Audience Member] When you refer to the festival of faith, you are talking about the event that took place in (?) park there?

[Rushdoony] Yes, at the (?) palace in South Francisco.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes. Mhmm?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, that is a question you often encounter. Now the answer to that would be: “Are you a totalitarian?” In other words, do you want man totally to be a puppet, so that the possibility of evil would not exist? Then the possibility of man and of freedom would not exist. In other words, what they are asking for is a world which is an impossibility.

Now God has decreed all things, that we know; and it would be impossible for man to have freedom apart from the decree, but what these people want is a logical impossibility, and of course this is what they ask for in socialism too, because what do they ask for in socialism? They want the freedom of man, together with total control by the state, and it doesn’t work. So on the one hand our Supreme Court keeps telling us: “We believe in total individual liberty, we are going to break the shackles of the past.” On the other hand, they increase the powers of the state. And after a while you realize that this is only an illusion, it leads to the total breakdown of everything, it is an impossibility. So what these people are asking for is something that cannot exist.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] They would say then: “Well, I don’t like his plan.” Yes, and you would have to say: “Well then, let’s hear your plan. Let us suppose you were God, how would you do it? Would you interfere with everybody at every moment and make it impossible for anyone to act in terms of their own nature? Would you overrule them? What kind of a world would you have? In other words, would you at every moment be saying: Now look John Jones, I’m not going to let you do this thing because it won’t be fair to your wife and to your employees, or to your neighbors.”

In other words, what such situation reveals is a thoroughly totalitarian mentality. A thoroughly totalitarian mentality. I recall once an argument with one person who never spoke to me afterwards, so apparently the argument was a good one, because I didn’t care to speak with him to begin with; but he started badgering me, I didn’t start the conversation, about what a nasty religion I had, a God who sent people to hell; and He was such a nasty totalitarian God. And I said: “And your God would send everybody to heaven?” “Oh absolutely, there would be hell.” and I said: “In other words, you don’t believe in any freedom of choice. I believe in the freedom for people to go to heaven or to hell. Let them decide for themselves.” And I said: “I think you have chosen a different place than I have, but that’s up to you. Now are you going to take away that freedom? And you are the one who is talking about totalitarianism, isn’t yours totalitarian? Maybe your idea of what constitutes heaven is my idea of hell. Are you going to force me to go there?” Well he was very, very put out.

But you see, they are the ones who want the world exactly one way, and their idea of justice is never God’s idea of justice; their idea of justice is: “Everything in the world should be exactly as we want it; exactly.” Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, that’s a modern concept, certainly you have a great deal of hell on earth, but there is a lot of hell in hell, and this is nonsense. It is trying to get away from the grim reality of the scripture. And you see these people who want absolute justice from God, and they don’t want hell. How can you have justice if you don’t have hell? What kind of justice is there in a world, (this is a good answer to use with such people) if Stalin went to heaven? And if some of our politicians whom we won’t name at this time went to heaven too; there wouldn’t be much justice and there wouldn’t be much heaven, as far as I am concerned.

But, you have to have hell in order to have justice, and when you take hell out of religion you take justice out of politics; and this is what we are doing, we have taken hell out of religion, therefore we are taking justice out of politics, and we are saying the criminals shouldn’t be executed, and we are beginning to challenge the whole idea of prisons, and we are saying they are not guilty society is guilty; so we are taking justice out of our every day life by taking the idea of hell and of punishment out of our religion. And when you add up what these people think is justice, you get a good picture of hell. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, we are given a very graphic picture of what hell is like, and it is compared to, the word for it in fact in the New Testament is ‘Gehenna’ or ‘Henna.’ In other words it was the name for the dump heap at Jerusalem, that is the thing from whence the name ‘hell’ came from. And it was a place of perpetual burning and worms. Now in a junk heap nothing is related to anything else; in this room everything is in relationship to everything else, ceiling, floor, walls, pictures, tables, chairs, everything is meaningful it is related to everything else, because this room has a purpose, it has a function; and everything in it is geared to that function. But in a junk heap nothing has any meaning in relationship to anything else.

And hell is a place of total isolation, and this is the gnawing, burning aspect of it; there is no communion in hell, no possibility of anyone being interested in anyone else, they are perfect existentialists, they are totally and eternally wrapped up in themselves, this is the end conclusion of their lives, and their life is unrelated to anything near them or next to them, and this is the perpetual self torment. And this is what their nature demands, because one recent philosopher wrote a book on the love of anxiety, the book is worthless because his perspective is so far to the left and so irreligious, but he did put his finger on one thing: there is a love of anxiety nowadays, and many, many people keep themselves perpetually in a stew and a fret. They don’t want peace, they don’t want communion, they don’t want any relationship to God or to man. They are living in a perpetual hell of their own choosing, and this is going to be their eternal hell.

As I cited C.S. Lewis once before when I spoke on hell, C.S. Lewis said: “Heaven is the habitation of those who say to God: Thy will be done. And hell is the habitation of those to whom God says: Thy will be done.” Yes?

[Audience Member] Where does the thinking break down in this comment; this was made by a person …?... all these different religions and things …?... that they become confused and then arrive at a point that they believe in God and Jesus Christ but not the virgin birth. What happens in between there?

[Rushdoony] Yes, what these people are trying to do is to reduce Christ and Christianity to another religious figure and another religion among many religions. So they think Jesus is wonderful on their terms, and Buddha was very wonderful, and Mohammed was very wonderful, this is what you find in these people; so that they are trying to get away from the necessity for a decision, for a clear cut faith, a clear cut stand. So they are going to affirm everything, and this is nonsense. Can you affirm that 2+2=4 and 2+2=5 and 2+2=1? This is nonsense. And they are affirming that these religions which are mutually contradictory are all the truth.

This is an evasion of moral responsibility.

[Audience Member] I did not know how to come back, you know, to their questions.

[Rushdoony] Yes, alright, just one point: in Buddhism the ultimate truth, the ultimate reality is nothingness. In our faith Jesus Christ says: “I am the truth, the way and the life.” Now can truth be Jesus Christ and can it be nothingness? Can our goal on the one hand be eternal communion with Christ in heaven and the new creation, and on the other hand Nirvana, oblivion, extinction, eternal death? Which is true, you can’t have both. And on the one hand, is there such a thing as moral law, or in terms of Buddhism, anything goes that you find your peace in, that you find acceptable; so that you can have a way of asceticism, and you can have a way of total sexuality. You can have a way that is militarism, and you can have a way that is pacifism, which is your way? Take it, it is the truth, and that is all you need.

[Audience Member] What about the people who say that they don’t believe in God, but they believe that there might be a supreme being; what do they mean by supreme being?

[Rushdoony] Well, they don’t mean very much by a supreme being, and you might ask them: “Who is this supreme being, is it by any chance yourself?” because what they are doing effectually by leaving him so vague is to leave the field clear for their will to predominate, in other words, there is some supreme being somewhere, but there is no supreme being who has spoken, who has given us His infallible word, who has a binding law for us. So whose word goes? Well, ‘my word, because there isn’t any God who is around, who is definitely vocal and active.’ So this is a subterfuge, and a very poor one. If there is a God, then there is something wrong with that God if he has not openly and clearly revealed himself and spoken so that there is no question as to what he has said, he has been morally delinquent, hasn’t he? A supreme being who hasn’t made himself vocal. That is impossible. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, and no. This gets into a great area of debate, there are various attitudes towards eschatology, that is the doctrine of last things; and there are those who believe that before the end of the world there will be one or more raptures when the saints of God will be taken from earth, and there are those who deny this and say there will be the second coming, and the saints of God will be with the Lord, and the new creation will be ushered in, it is all one act at one time. I hold to the latter opinion. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?... asked if it was the man or his parents who had sinned, because of his suffering. There are many people who feel that any type of suffering is due to sin, …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience Member] The second question has to do with verse 39, where Jesus said: “For judgement I have come into this world, that they which see not might see, and they that see might be made blind.” And I think that may have some relationship with the statement that Jesus made that He spoke in parables in order that all might not understand and be converted.

[Rushdoony] Yes, the first part, our Lord denied specifically that all things that you see, such as illness in children and physical conditions are due to sin of the father and the mother. This He categorically denied that there was an absolute connection between the two. But, scripture does say that the sins of the father descend unto the children even unto the tenth generation, and there is no getting around this, this is a scriptural truth. Now how do we see that? Well, we are paying for WW1, and we are paying for the Spanish American war, and we haven’t closed the books on the Civil war yet, and the people who are paying for it weren’t there; it is a case of the sins of the fathers descending unto us, and we are going to be paying for a while for all the socialistic sins of this generation and for its apostasy. We are paying for the sins of our fathers and our grandfathers who began after the Civil war to turn away from the faith and go into a very easy-going Christianity, they didn’t want doctrine they just wanted this love bit, that’s when they started. We are paying for it now, and we will pay for it for a while yet.

So the sins of the fathers do descend upon the children; but this does not mean that anything that happens to us or by birth means that sin is the only cause, and it was this interpretation that our Lord on more than one occasion very, very definitely attacked. In other words, the sins of the fathers descending upon the children, is usually, not always but usually, a social situation; the people, the country, sometimes personal. More commonly in the Bible it means a social context.

Then the second question, the reference there is to what is the most quoted single verse in the entire New Testament, or passage, and it is in Isaiah 6. And in Isaiah 6, the great vision of Isaiah before the Lord, verses 9-10:

“9 And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not.

10 Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.”

So that what our Lord commanded there, and as I said this is the most quoted single passage in the entire New Testament from the Old, the next to this is Psalm 2. What Isaiah was there told and it is extremely important, was this: Judgement is drawing nigh. It is now a question note merely of faith that judgement is drawing nigh, but of sight. Anyone who can see will see what is happening. But these people upon whom judgement must come, I am blinding them. I am going to have their own sin blind them, so that seeing they will not see and hearing they will not understand, because since they will not believe me by faith they are not going to turn to me by sight; so that when they see what is taking place they are still going to be blind by virtue of their faith, and go on to their destruction.

Now we see this being fulfilled today. When you realize what the world situation is now and the chaos we are creating, and the fact that these people had judgement staring them in the face, monetary judgement, economic judgement with respect to their mismanagement of land and of resources so that they are bringing a world-wide disaster, they themselves are talking about the near breakdown of money, the nearness of world wide famine, and they don’t see the answers. In fact the article I read yesterday in the (Barn?) journal on the fact that this year we are 600 million bushels of wheat short of the necessary total required for world consumption doesn’t make the writer wake up to the issue. It is over population and this and that, and if only the government were able to do certain things about it we would have the answer; but we have never had a situation like this that wasn’t created by government interference. Drought alone has never created it. So that they are being blinded by God for destruction, lest they turn and believe by sight, rather than by faith.

Because God will be followed by men who believe, and not by men who when they see that a hangman’s rope is waiting for them say: “Oh, now I believe that crime does not pay.” That’s a little late to believe it, God says: “Go ahead, get up on the platform and put your head in the rope.” Yes?

[Audience Member] Back to your analysis of the left and their use of reason, what relationship does this have with the teachings of a lot of the Libertarians and economist libertarians, who aren’t, you know, for liberty and a free society and all that, but then they stop, they affirm only what they reason; is the problem is that they haven’t clearly defined their first premise?

[Rushdoony] Exactly, and because they don’t have a clear cut first premise, they can’t make up their mind which camp they’re in. And as a result the first premise will increasingly govern them, and some of their subsequent reasoning will disappear. Now I think you are familiar with Murray Rothbard.

[Audience Member] Yes, there are lots of books that I have read, this is one that I (?)

[Rushdoony] Yes, now someone called me the other day who was shocked by Murray Rothbards newest issue of Right and Left, and the fact that they are very happy that the Vietnam crowd and the far left like their magazine. They are finding their own level. Their first premise which is in the other camp is governing them increasingly because their first premise is basically totalitarian. And they represent the older liberals of the 18th century and of the Enlightenment, whose perspective was that an elite group, philosopher kings, should govern the entire world. It was totalitarian to the core, but they exempted one area from that government, and it was economics. In this area Laissez Faire should prevail.

Now this was inconsistent, the modern liberal has said: “Why? If we are going to have these enlightened philosopher kings governing the world, why shouldn’t they govern economics?” And you will find that increasingly with these people this is apparent, for example you find that most of these men have dropped 100% fractional reserve, that is no fractional reserve banking. They want to go along with modern banking increasingly, they want fractional reserve, they want a lot of these things. They are hedging.

[Audience Member] Did Rothbard drop that too?

[Rushdoony] He is the only one who hasn’t. He is the only one at that point. But on other things you see, he has given in. He has given in.

[Audience Member] Well he has (?) governing his writings …?...

[Rushdoony] His first premise is the Enlightenment, and this is clearly apparent in an issue of Modern Age in 1961 in which he discusses Conservatism and Liberalism. And his basic perspective is clearly on the left, he is not a conservative, he just happens at certain points to have a conservative economics, but his basic perspective is with the left, with the Enlightenment, with anti Christianity, with everything that is essentially Elitism and the enlightened philosopher kings perspective.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, ultimately there can be no free will in the absolute sense except for God. And this is where they use language very very loosely and crudely, because in the final sense who is free but God alone? You and I are not free, for example, to choose the time of our birth as I pointed out before. We aren’t free to decide the kind of family we are going to be born into, the color of our hair and our eyes, we cannot say and I like to quote this line as I have before, as William Blake, one poet, not a Christian said: “Oh why was I born with another face?” it wasn’t the one he had planned for himself.

We cannot fly, we cannot choose the day of our death and decide we are not going to die, we are not free. Only one who is absolute and sovereign, God, is free in the true sense. So that free will belongs to God alone. Now this does not mean we do not have a limited freedom, we are responsible under God, and this is only possible, and this gets into a great deal of philosophy, and I have gone into this in part in By What Standard and I shall do so in another work on the Philosophy of History which is not yet completed. We can only have this measure of limited freedom, that is the freedom of man, only because God Himself is sovereign, and has ordained all things that come to pass. So that these people really are not being honest with themselves or with you, they are not free and they don’t believe it. If they are free let them decide to live 200 years. Challenge them to. It is impossible on any terms for them to have this thing they call free will. This is a little silly trick they pull on college freshmen and sophomores, and it stays with them throughout their lives and it floods our generation, when anyone who had any intelligence and studied at all would recognize the idea of free will is not a tenable concept when applied to man because man cannot have this utter freedom, he is a responsible creature and responsibility means that he has an element of freedom in relationship to someone.

Now we are never free in the sense that we can do as we please, we are created responsible to God. So if you want to use the word freedom you have to say: “It is freedom under God, with responsibility to God.” we do not have the kind of freedom the existentialists talk about which is total freedom from God, from nature, from people, from everything and anything, so that we are the world in ourselves. This is total anarchism, and this is what existentialism espouses; and the sad fact is that some conservatives today are going overboard on existentialism because they are humanists.

The other day I heard one of the silliest things I have ever heard from a man who often speaks good sense, he has a program for one of the savings and loans company, I think his name is Nightingale, am I right in that?

[Audience Member] Earl Nightingale.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And usually he talks excellent sense, but he came out with a long… well, the whole program was pro existentialism and how marvelous existentialism was because it emphasized the freedom of the individual in a day when we had totalitarianism. Well, there isn’t a single existentialist philosopher who isn’t a totalitarian, most of them are Marxists. I would like to ask him how he reconciles that. But he liked this idea of the utter freedom because he doesn’t believe in God apparently.

So he came forth with an utterly ridiculous approval of existentialism; supposedly this was good conservatism, you stood for the independence of the individual. Well, any independence of the individual from God is radicalism, it is humanism, it is not conservatism, and it is not Christianity. Yes?

[Audience Member] Could you talk about Satan’s freedom?

[Rushdoony] Satan’s freedom is that of a creature. So it is totally within the providence of God. Now Satan was created as a creature, and the essence of Satan’s idea was: “Why shouldn’t I be God also? And why shouldn’t every creature be God? I am going to lead a revolution against God, a war for independence, a civil rights movement. Why should we be under God’s law? Let’s each have our own law, our own way of life.” And this is the essence of Satan’s position.

Now, Satan does nothing apart from the providence and predestination of God, and so even as our Lord was crucified and before the betrayal Jesus made it clear that this was happening by the foreordained council of the triune God, that not a thing could be done had it not been so ordained. Now this does not take away the responsibility of the creature who chooses this course, because he himself morally makes this decision. Well, you say, “How can you say that Satan when he has been created by God completely is still responsible?” the same way you can say that I am completely a child of my parents, everything I have in me, all my aptitudes were given to me by God, so that they were foreordained by God and by my parents, but I am still responsible. This is a mystery. We have to insist on the responsibility of the individual and of the creature, including Satan, but also that God determines all things that come to pass.

Does that help?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, he is a creature like the rest of us.

[Audience Member] Can one easily understand, or is there some way of understanding why God doesn’t just put Satan down and dispose of him?

[Rushdoony] Because he is doing it in in the only way possible if you are not to reduce us and all history to puppetry. It is being worked out, and men are going to fight this battle under the grace of God and in obedience to His word and triumph. But it is going to be worked out as a real battle in history, and it is being worked out, and we as responsible creatures are each step of the way hammering it out and yet by the providence of God.

Just as a wise parent doesn’t relinquish government over his children, but he governs them in such a way that they develop, and his wisdom is imparted to them and they learn it, and yet they are growing. We are told in proverbs: “Train up a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old he shall not depart from it.” Now, this means two things: first, train up the child, govern him, discipline him in terms of your moral government, but in the way that he should go in terms of his nature, his ability, so that you have respect to your moral principles, your religious principles, to make sure that he is trained up in terms of them, but then also in the way that he should go in terms of his nature, his abilities, his aptitudes.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, in a sense exactly what we have been talking about, the possibility of sin is the possibility of responsibility. If there could be no sin there could be no responsible creature. And so sin itself as it exists, and as we see the immensity of what sin involves, rebellion against God, it works to His glory as we turn to Him and find ourselves in Him, and find our joy and our strength and our peace in Him.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, it does, you’re going into some very, very profound questions which can’t be answered in just a few minutes, but this is the problem of the one and the many, the key problem of all philosophy, and the doctrine of the Trinity is what makes possible both the equal ultimacy of the one and the many, and also the possibility of both the ultimate predestination of God and out ultimate freedom under God, the reconciliation of all these things is in the doctrine of the Trinity. That is why the true Christian doesn’t break what seems to be a paradox and say: “Well I believe just in freedom” or “I believe just in predestination” or “I believe just in the oneness of things” or the many-ness of things; no, you have the equal ultimacy in the doctrine of the trinity. That is such a big subject, and I have been working on it for four years writing this book and I am not through yet, but it is the key problem in all of philosophy and the doctrine of the Trinity is the answer to it, the clear cut answer.

Well, I was interested in a little item in a book by Aubrey Menen, a very delightful writer, a satirist who was born in London in 1912 of an Indian, that is Hindu father, and an Irish mother. And Menen has a gift of taking things and making fun of them in a telling way, and one thing that many people have illusions about including the English who went to India was this business of the burning of widows, the Sati; they thought it was such a horrible custom, such a monstrous, inhuman thing to do to widows, and when they banned it the thing that shocked them was that they had such a battle with the widows! The widows would claw and scream and fight to be burned, and this was destroying family life as far as they were concerned, it was a privilege for only the upper level of women in India, this was not something any woman could do, only the highest caste, and the upper crust of the highest cast could do this. And Menen as one who is part Hindu in this story gives us the reason for it, which I think is a very delightful bit, and I am quoting:

“Marriage like everything else presented no problems in Taxila (part of India) women remained faithful to their husbands, and if husbands were tempted to be untrue to their wives they increased their harems until the desire disappeared of its own accord. Widows burned themselves on their husbands pyres- though not all by an means. That was not called for. Taxila was a thoroughly well adjusted society, and in such an excess of virtue is as unbalancing as an excess of vice. All that was required was that a minority of widows should make the sacrifice, sufficient to maintain the moral tone of the community. The process of selection was well understood: a young wife automatically proclaimed that she would certainly burn herself. This was taken well but lightly by her friends and relations. As the wives grew older, or more importantly as the husbands did, it was thoroughly understood that a large proportion of married women would drop the subject from their conversation. To persist in saying that one would burn oneself was considered in Taxil rather flashy, an attempt to gain credit for being and exemplary wife without going through the effort of being one. For a wife, say of 30 to remark: “May the gods give me courage on the day of his death for I shall need it for what I intend to do.” Would like as not draw the remark from another woman: “And that day won’t be far off my dear if you don’t look to your husband’s diet, he is losing weight daily.” Or buy some equally critical remarks about the children. But certainly genuine devotion and strong will were generally accepted as very suitable to uphold the moral traditions of the country.

Certain wives talked little about the day of sacrifice, but everybody knew they would make it. This reflected great credit on their whole family as well as throwing a certain religious glamor over the wife herself. Difficult as it may be for us to enter into this state of mind, we can approach it by thinking of the social effect created when in our time a woman announces her intention of taking the veil. In that case the heroically virtuous woman is soon lost to society; in Taxila she was very much still in it. Her opinion on all matters of morality was eagerly sought and always followed, her criticisms of other women’s virtue had an unanswerable authority; but it was on her husband that her decision had most effect. For in Taxil, well adjusted as it was, there was still sometimes disputes between husbands and wives, but in the case of the wife known to be ready to burn, and socially accepted as a burnee so to speak, the husband was at a deep disadvantage. It is very difficult to argue with a woman who is ready to die for you, not merely in a manner of speaking but on the pyre. Just think of the advantage a wife had over her husband if she could nag at him with this in mind. “Now don’t over eat dear, are you trying to burn me up?”

In the small matters which count so much in a marriage, the husband taking care of his health for instance, the intended victim had the most powerful if unspoken argument. In bigger matters the husband could scarcely complain of his wife to his friends without being thought an ingrate. So you can see what a disadvantage the man had. A woman of unquestioned moral excellence backed by all the right thinking forces of society can be an overwhelming figure. For this reason in Taxil there was the curious situation that husbands who would normally be proud to have a wife so faithful as to join them on the pyre, often tried hard to dissuade their wives from doing it. Many a husband, especially long lived ones, after suffering a lifetime from a dedicated wife, had felt that the immolation of widows was all, or almost all, to the advantage of the woman; and in the case of a wife who after decades of moral authority over her husband, died a natural death before her husband, the unfairness was even more marked.”

“Apart from the female pillars of society, there were widows who from a genuine sense of grief, and an equally genuine sense of vanity committed Sati unexpectedly. These cases were rare. Some Taxillian husbands with emotional wives guarded against this by writing a eulogy of their spouses into their wills, with the injunction that “she not burn herself to prove her virtue since there was no need” but such wills left an awkward feeling behind them, we may take as a parallel the man of our day who requests no flowers at his funeral. He means to be modest, but leaves the impression that at the news of his death the florists will be besieged.”

Well, I think you get the general idea. We tend as a result of humanist indoctrination to think of life melodramatically, but women are women and men are men, and I don’t believe there is any society in the world where women have been totally crushed and helpless; and these melodramatic pictures you get about what women are like in this and that culture, and how these poor widows were burned to death; well, it was a privilege among them, and the women who were the burnees had a lifetime of moral prestige in the community, and they lorded over it their poor husbands by reminding them daily of the sacrifice they were going to make someday. So, I think we need to take a great deal of this nonsense we get in anthropology today with a grain of salt.

I think we have time for one question or comment. Yes?

[Audience Member] I heard one rumor that Mr. Howard Hughes was possibly looking for a twenty year rejuvenation back in Boston, (endrochronologist?) …?...

[Rushdoony] No, I hadn’t heard anything about it.

[Audience Member] Can they do something to the lands …?...

[Rushdoony] They cannot, because the body is a unit and as we grow older the best thing to do is to grow old gracefully.