Easy Chair Series

Romantic Movement; Thomas Chatterton; Education; Bad Historiography; Mature Criticism; Supreme Court Cases; Cindy Rocker; St. Vincent de Paul Society; Salvation Army; Privatization; Effects of Homosexuality; English Countryside; Murderers; Anne Hutchinson; Sir John Bowring; Water Supply; Rutherford Institute;

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 1-91

Genre:

Track:

Dictation Name: EC124

Year: 1986

This is R.J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 124, June 2nd, 1986.

I would like to start our time together this evening with a discussion of a book, really portions of a diary, by Margaret Fountaine, F O U N T A I N E. The title is Love Among the Butterflies. This was published in 1980. It is now out of print, although it may be still available as a paperback.

Margaret Fountaine is an interesting representative of the Romantic Movement. She was a person of no consequence. She was born in 1862. Her father was a Church of England rector. She died in 1940. Margaret Fountaine very early in life inherited a great deal of money from a wealthy uncle. She did not marry. She began to travel all over the world to collect butterflies and also men, and she was a rather shameless man chaser who was hopelessly romantic. She liked to go to out of the way places, away from the conventionalities of civilization.

She would say that, “Freedom is the crowning joy of my life.” And for her, freedom meant doing what was unconventional. She saw herself as pure and high-minded in spite of her affairs and believed that all pure and high-minded people like herself were providentially protected. She maintained this belief even when she no longer believed in God.

She regarded free love as the best and the purest. There was a very real element of perversity in her, a preference for the wrong sort of man and a sense of caste.

Now why do I call this book to your attention? The reason for so doing is it represents something that is very, very prominent in our culture today. It has been for two centuries, the Romantic Movement.

The Romantic Movement, perhaps can be best described by citing the life of one person, Thomas Chatterton, the poet. Let’s turn to another book, an older one which I read just recently. This is by Louis Filler, F I L L E R, Vanguards and Followers: Youth of the American Tradition, published in 1978. In the course of his discussion of youth and youth movements in this country, the author turns back to one of the fountainheads of Romanticism, Thomas Chatterton whose dates are 1752-1770. Let me quote now a portion of the pages he devotes to Chatterton.

“William Wordsworth called him, in his poem, Resolution and Independence, the sleepless soul that perished in its pride. Chatterton was a martyr and pioneer of youth. Apprenticed to a local attorney, he pored over ancient Church documents and histories of early England and Bristol and spent time learning to create old manuscripts which might be sold and so release him from his servitude and hopeless prospects.”

Parenthetically, let me say he was a forger, but it is put rather gently and in a complementary manner.

To continue from Filler.

“His poems opened roads for the coming Romantics. Chatterton’s poems in his on 18th century voice range from satire to lyrics and sharply explored the society about him and his relation to himself. He sought to interest in his manuscripts the antiquarian Sir Horace Walpole, son of the Prime Minister and best remembered for his concept of serendipity to continue, that is dilettante enthusiasm.

“Chatterton himself took off for London to join in the democratic movement headed by the demagogue John Wilkes and to make his mark with plays and poems. Wilkes was imprisoned and Chatterton publicly denounced as a forger. Proud and defiant he wrote cheerful letters home and sent gifts, but his last verses were tragic in their loneliness. He committed suicide and was buried in a nameless grave. He was, however, the author of two notable volumes of poetry, his own and Rowley’s and of an undying legend.

“The Romantics adopted him and followed him. John Keats dedicated Endymion to him, Percy Bysshe Shelley honored his solemn agony and across the English Chanel Alfred de Vigny celebrated him in his play Chatterton, one of numerous continuing tributes to the poet abroad and in America embodying the conviction that genius ought not to be confined by ordinary law,” unquote.

Now there are several things to be said about this. First of all, the poems that Chatterton forged in the name of Rowley supposedly, a poet of a few centuries earlier, as well as those he wrote in his own name, were all trash. I read them all some years ago when I was a student and we were given the usual Romantic account of Chatterton. There was nothing in them to commend them. I have read some of them again since and my opinion has only been even more confirmed.

But notice this. He became a hero because, having committed a crime, having been found out, he committed suicide and he was idolized by prominent people who held the conviction that genius ought not to be confined by ordinary law.

Well, a great deal could be said about the Romantic Movement, but here we have some of the key aspects of it. The Romantic Movement then and now believes that youth and genius should not be bound by law, that they have a right to do as they please. Certainly this marked the youth movement of the 60s and 70s. It still is prevalent today in the drug culture and in other movements—in punk rock and its successors—the belief that the ordinary laws of God and man cannot bind those who are in the vanguard, the Chattertons of our day.

Moreover, the life of Chatterton revealed also the suicidal nature of all such Romantics. Romantic poets in a good many instances died young. They courted death. They were suicidal all the days of their life. This was true of Lord Byron and of Shelley, of course, as well as Chesterton.

They had an urge to be defeated so they could feel sorry for themselves. And so in everything they did, they tended to court trouble, to court opposition, to provoke hostility so they could feel sorry for themselves as the misunderstood geniuses.

Much more could be said about the Romantic hatred of all conventions and morality, its desire to revolt against whatever is the status quo, whether it be good or bad, its belief that it has a mission that places it beyond criticism and much more. The importance of all of this to us today is far more than literary, far more than merely artistic.

One of you, Gene Neumann, asked me to discuss some time sin in the political sphere. Well, Gene, here it is, someone indirectly. The Romantic Movement has governed the world of politics since the French Revolution. It has governed Marxism and democracies, every form of government, Fascist, National Socialist, Socialist, every one of them. They are all Romantic to the core.

The Romantic Movement courts defeat. It creates impossible situations. The Romantic never can be satisfied. He is always going to be in perpetual revolution, perpetual revolution in the name of freedom so that nothing will satisfy him. The Romantic dreams of an impossible perfection and, therefore, feels that he is too good for this world and, therefore, he creates a demand in the political sphere that is so unrealistic that it hinders any solution to any problem.

Well, we have this kind of politics in our world today. This is why we aggravate problems instead of solving them. The war in 1860 here in the United States was a Romantic war. It wasn’t fought essentially to free the slaves, but to enable people to strike a moral pose. The Abolitionists had a “holier than thou” Pharisaism. They were Romantics. They were ready to use the Blacks to fulfill their own romantic pose, but when it came to concrete measures, they were less successful. They were better at expressing opposition and hatred. And so they did a great deal of harm to the free Negroes after the war because their solutions were expressions of hatred rather than patient, careful efforts to create a better order.

Romanticism today acts as though the way to peace is to disarm. Romanticism feels that all that is needed is for men of good will—meaning the Romantics—to pass laws that they themselves have devised and all will be well. The Romantics are dangerous people. They are destructive of society and they are great for impossible causes.

One of the things that is creating major problems for farmers and costing farm groups a great deal of money to fight measures in various legislature, designed to assert animal rights. In fact, the Minnesota University daily paper had an article earlier this year and I quote from it.

“Any possible justification of humans eating non human animals likewise serves as a plausible justification for humans eating humans,” unquote.

In other words, if you eat fish and chickens and beef, you are a cannibal. You are on the same level. Well, this is a kind of insanity that the Romantics go for. They have no problem getting hearings before legislators because they can line up as witnesses prominent people in the film community, prominent women all over the country and, as a result, get a very kindly hearing, again and again.

These Romantics are a major problem, as I indicated, to farmers who have to spend a great deal of time trying to counteract these animal rights lobbies.

Well, one of the areas of Romantic political expression has been the public school movement. There is no question that it has been a product of Romanticism. The founders of the movement were heavily influenced by it. Moreover, for them, education or democracy, sometimes both, express their religious faith. For example, in a book by Ira S. Steinberg, Ralph Barton Perry on Education for Democracy, published by the Ohio State University Press in 1970, we have an interesting statement that democracy, according to Perry, is an ideology.

"It defines an order of values which pervades all of the major aspects of human life. As such, it requires faith, but a peculiar sort of faith, a fait that will not tolerate Dogmatism or Fanaticism. It is a faith in human reason,” unquote.

In other words, this was a religious concern. Their faith was in human reason and in education as the inculcation of reason into the generations to come so that for Ralph Barton Perry and others the public schools constituted their religious establishment. And, as good Romantics, they believed that all men could be saved if they were educated. Horace Mann was a very naïve advocate of this faith. He believed that the universal adoption of public schools would, by the 1930s, in 100 years, abolish prisons, poverty and a good deal else. Well, it goes without saying that Horace Mann was wrong.

John Whitehead the philosopher, by the way, made this statement and I quote.

“The essence of education is that it be religious,” unquote. “The essence of education is that it be religious.”

Well, that is exactly what education always is. But our educators are not honest enough to admit that what they are teaching the children is a humanistic religion. They fight hard to prevent us from recognizing that fact.

Well, now on to another subject, a book I read yesterday, published last year is by an English professor, that is a professor in England, E.A. Thompson Who was St. Patrick? published by Saint Martins Press. I don’t recommend this book. I cite it as a good example of bad historiography. The author begins by telling us that there is very, very little documentation on St. Patrick’s life. In fact, we have just two writings St. Patrick’s Epistle to the Soldiers of Coroticus and his Confession, both rather slim and modest works. Apart from that, we have no other sources. Anything else on Patrick comes much, much later.

Well, given this fact, the author jumps to all kinds of conclusions about St. Patrick. His arguments are from silence. He feels that St. Patrick is not being very honest and failing to acknowledge that Pelagius had been an bishop in Ireland before Patrick became a bishop there.

Well, how do we know that Patrick did not give full expression to that fact? We have only two works surviving. There are so many things that St. Patrick is accused of neglecting that Thompson assumes that he suppressed. As a result, the book, from beginning to end, is an exercise in scholarly sovereignty, playing God over the life of another man. I think it represents the product of modern education.

One of the things that distressed me when I was a student and still disgusts me was the fact that students who were barely able to write decent English were asked by their professors to write papers critiquing Shakespeare and Milton and other great writers as though they had the right to sit in judgment on them. That kind of thing is all too commonplace. It is a routine part of our modern educational system.

Some years ago one of the tasks of being a president of a foundation is, of course, you sometimes have to lay down the law to people and even fire them. I fired a couple of young men, quite young. There were a number of reasons for it and one was that they felt free to go after some of the great men of the faith and ridicule them and poke fun at them as though they were superior. And what I told them was when they were 50 or 60 and they had good ground to do so, they might express their dissent from these men, having a background of tested and tried faith. But given their youth, their untested character, it was arrogance and impudence of the worst sort and the kind of pride that I had no use for.

Well, modern education trains students in this kind of pride. Not surprisingly in grade school children go home to judge their parents. And why not? Everything in their schooling teaches them to pass judgment and to pass judgment with as little knowledge as possible. Given the fact of evolution as a part of their education and the evolutionary belief that what comes last is best, naturally these children feel that they are better than their parents. Therefore, they have the right to pass judgment on them. Well, the Bible has some thing to say about that and what children deserve.

In passing, let me refer to a book by a teacher Lucille G. Natkins, N A T K I N S, published in 1986 by the University Press of America. It is the account by a public school teacher of what it is like to teach today and it concludes with her departure from the public school system. And I will just read from a portion of the last page.

I quote, “David told Arnie that the longer he teaches the more he doubts the connection, if there is one, between schools and education.

“‘That is the second time you have said that in as many days,’ Garrett commented.

“‘I know and I am beginning to think that the truants have an insight that we lack.’

“‘He is a liar,’ Arnie said later. It was without malice. ‘He has written a syllabus and half the materials for a new course this term and reviews kids’ homework each day with a fine tooth comb. If he believes what he says, why is he still working himself into the ground?’”

And then towards the end one of the teachers remark, “‘Three of our students in criminal court in two days. I didn’t think we would ever see the day.’

“‘Well, we are not different anymore. We are just an ordinary school.’”

It is an account of the breakdown of education, of the impossibility of teaching, of the decline of standards, attempts to please the students rather than to teach them on the part of administrations. It represents what is happening increasingly.

Of course, I recall when after the war we were told how bad the decline was and when Sputnik, a Soviet satellite, was flying over the United States we were told by the educational fraternity that there was a great change underway and education would improve. We have heard that repeatedly since and the periodicals are full now of the same kind of talk. Supposedly education has made a turn around and we are going to see great and marvelous things take place in schools.

I think we shall see more of the same, more deterioration. What has happened since the 50s is that we have reached the highest rate of illiteracy in our history and everything points to an even higher rate of illiteracy.

So we have to say that if the enemies of Christian education succeed, we are finished as a country because today the people who will command the future are those who are in the Christian schools. It is in this respect that we can have hope for the future. This is one of the key aspects of our hopes for the future, the Christian school children. Of course, the assault on the schools will only intensify in the very near future. So we had better be prepared for more and more trouble. There are trials pending currently and at several states and some major issues facing the US Supreme Court and the outlook is not hopeful as far as the courts are concerned.

I would like to go on to another subject now. Not too many weeks ago we had Cindy Rocker on the Easy Chair discussing the work she has done to help the poor and the needy. Cindy is, as you recall, a young woman, a housewife and mother of five who in Kingsburg and Fresno, California has started remarkable projects. Now she is at work doing something here locally.

In our current Chalcedon Report mailing we have two pages by Cindy Rocker on her work which I strongly commend to your attention. If you would like a few extra copies to use with others in order to get a like project underway in your community, don’t hesitate to write for copies of Cindy Rocker’s account of the Kingsford, California Community Assistance Program.

There are many such projects underway from coast to coast. Some of them have been with us for a long time. Very, very few people are aware of the fact that Christians are doing more than the federal government, more effective work by far, that there are groups—Catholic and Protestant—that have been active for some time and are growing in strength. One such group is the St. Vincent de Paul Society, which is a Catholic group founded some years ago by a young man, I believe, in the early 1800s, a young man who, as I recall, it was a professor of philosophy.

Now the St. Vincent de Paul Societies in this country are doing a great deal. For example, in 1981, which is the last year that I have statistics for, the St. Vincent de Paul Societies in this country spend over 47,500,000 in direct grants to the poor. They did much more than that. They provided housing. They provide food for the hungry. They provided job placement services. They ministered to the elderly. They had a variety of remarkable services, unusual services. For example, in Milwaukee Vincentians visit foreign ships which come to port, drive the sailors on shopping tours and invite them into their homes. They have even been able to render services to the crew of a Russian ship. And the sailors have written back to the Vincentians deeply moved by their Christian hospitality. They have worked among a variety of immigrant groups, racial groups. They have been involved in feeding the hungry and providing shelter in emergency situations. They have been involved in day care for children and much, much more.

On top of that they have been innovative. For example, one of the things they did in one community, Seattle, was to devise a voucher system. They raised funds in a variety of ways so that they could help the poor. But instead of giving them a cash donation, they would give them a voucher for groceries or rent or heating oil or clothing or whatever other need would present itself. And merchants and companies throughout the city would accept the vouchers as readily as cash. This made for greater efficiency and a real control on spending.

This kind of think is important for us to know about. It would take a few volumes to give a survey of what Catholic and Protestant groups are doing from coast to coast. The work of the Salvation Army alone is tremendous. I believe I mentioned when Cindy was with us that the Salvation Army does more for the poor in New York City than the federal government. This kind of thing is important for us to know. We expect the federal government to do everything as though it alone were capable when, in reality, they do very little.

Now to a related subject, a very important book published just this past year, 1985. It is by Dr. Madsen, M A D S E N, Pirie, P, as in Paul, I R I E. Dismantling the State: The Theory and Practice of Privatization. It was published by the National Center for Policy Analysis, 7701 North Stemmons, S T E M M O N S, Suite 717, Dallas, Texas, 75209. Telephone 214-951-0306.

What Dr. Pirie has done in this book is to give us an account of what Margaret Thatcher is currently doing in Great Britain, every form of privatization that is in practice. And, as a result, it is a good manual as to what can be done by cities, by counties, by states and by the federal government. Moreover, as Dr. Pirie points out, the privatization covers a variety of areas. It is much more efficient. It can include even road construction and maintenance, ownership. Regulations by voluntary associations can be better. Universities can be turned over to private associations. Free ports and enterprise zones can be created. The post office can be dismantled. Social Security can be much more effective and so on and on.

I believe that we are going to see more and more of this kind of thing, privatization, unless war or dictatorship prevents it. There is, in fact, now a Private Solutions Newsletter published by the National Center for Privatization, which, I believe, can be had from the same source as this book, the National Center for Policy Analysis.

It is important to note that some people are running for office today utilizing the material in this book and talking about privatization. One such person is Joe Morecraft of Atlanta, Georgia.

Now on to another item. There is an interesting little paperback from New Zealand put out by the Coalition of Concerned Citizens entitled The Social Effects of Homosexuality in New Zealand, published in 1986 by the Coalition of Concerned Citizens, PO Box 13-455, Christ’s Church, New Zealand. The book is a devastating account of the social effects of homosexuality. Let me read just a few sentences from this very, very important work.

I quote, “Other diseases (he has just been talking about AIDS) that accompany the homosexual lifestyle and their relative occurrence are as follows. About 50 percent of all cases of syphilis occur in homosexuals. Hepatitis B is four to 13 times more frequent among homosexuals compared to heterosexuals. Sixty-eight percent of all homosexual men have been found to have one form or another of the intestinal parasitic infection known as Gay Bowel Syndrome. Homosexuals are 300 percent more likely to have Gonorrhea. Severe oral infection from penile contact such as oral Gonorrhea is 30 times more likely in homosexuals. Lice is three times more likely. Scabies is five times more likely,” and so on and on. Some grim data that you are not likely to find elsewhere.

Moreover, they point clearly to the fact, and I quote, “Homosexual behavior involves a choice over which the individual can have control,” unquote.

Then this point which much as said, quoting again, “Homosexuals cannot reproduce. So they must recruit, especially amongst the young and they are making every effort to do so,” unquote.

A very important little work, well worth your attention.

Well, one of the things obscured in our day by the Feminist Movement is the fact that male and female are different, that men and women are made differently by God, that the woman is not an inferior man, but a different kind of creation. It is interesting to note, for example, that the differences are so real that even a single cell from a human body will identify the sexuality of a person. Moreover, everything including hands are different. One anthropologist has said that a male hand is designed for power whereas the female hand for precision and, therefore, the two are quite different. This does not mean that one is better than then other or that the one is powerless and the other precisionless, but the one is geared to power, the other to precision.

I was very much interested, too, in a statement from Meghan Marshall, The Cost of Loving, and I quote. “In a recent study the psychologist Abraham Sagee and Martin Hoffman played tapes of an infant’s cry near the cribs of babies still too young to leave their hospital nursery and found that girls scarcely one day old cried out in sympathetic response to the recorded wails while boys remained relatively indifferent. The team speculated that these cries were the early signs a woman’s biological predisposition to answer the needs of others.

“In a 1976 study psychologist Janice Lever observed children at play and confirmed what most of us recall from our own childhoods. Boys prefer regulated games like baseball or football while girls favor social ones in which winning and losing are less important than conversation. Cat’s cradle, jump rope and jacks are all talking games in which some girls may excel, but no player needs go away hurt. In comparing the way girls and boys resolved arguments that arose during play, Lever found that boys settled disputes by the rule book while girls would rather quit a game than argue a point. Girls would rather continue a friendship (Lever concluded) while boys preferred to continue a game. Concern for others was a chief feature of girl’s play, part of their early training for a life of caretaking.

“Studying a group of women in their late teens and 20s who were considering abortion, Carol Gilligan found in 1977 that this same principle of concern for others continued to rule women’s decisions,” unquote.

In other words, the women were more likely to make their decision because of what someone they loved wanted them to do. So male and female are categories made by God. And the differences are very, very real.

Now to a very delightful book, probably out of print now, but if you can pick it up at remainder sale as I did, do so. Possibly it is being reprinted. I don’t know. It was put out in 1983 by Crown Publishers, originally by Oxford University Press. The Illustrated Lark Rise to Candleford, a trilogy by Flora Thompson. It is said to be one of the best loved of all books about the English countryside. It was published 40 years ago and the past it describes is now a century away. This woman, Flora Thompson, was born in 1877 and in this book she gives her memories of life in rural England in the villages, small communities of a limited number of houses lining both sides of a road, people who were very hard working and, as she says, their favorite virtue was endurance. They were simple people. They had their feelings, but they also had their faith. They worked hard. They helped one another because in their very simple and meager life they needed one another. They practiced {?} and many like customs. The illustrations in this book by artists of the period and some photographs are gems. Just browsing through the book is a joy and the text as well is a delight.

Now on to another book very briefly, the author Gary Kinder, K I N D E R, Victim. This was published in 1982 and is out of print. The subtitle is The Other Side of Murder, going into the consequences of the murder. The interesting fact is the self-righteousness of the criminal and their inability to see themselves for what they are, how they justify their behavior and their acts.

Well, another book which I just read recently published in 1981 and probably out of print, Selma R. Williams Divine Rebel: The Life of Anne Marbury Hutchinson. Anne Hutchinson was the Puritan woman who, coming to the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1634 following their pastor she and her husband John Cotton quickly became famous because she had a women’s Bible study group. The leaders of the colony moved against her with good reason. And this book, perhaps, better than any previous one—although it is an inferior book—gives the reason why, because, as a Feminist, the author is interested in vindicating Anne Hutchinson. Anne Hutchinson was in rebellion against the doctrine of original sin. She was an Antinomian to the core. She was an advocate, really, of Anarchy. She was an Antinomian. She did not believe in law in church or state. And she was accused of Libertinism, although the evidence here is not very good.

The fact is, she followed some of the ideas of the {?} which included among some the community of women, but Anne denied this vehemently. However, there is no question that she had some peculiar ideas. She did tend to believe the doctrine of free love to a degree, although she apparently felt that if the laws were abolished there would somehow be some kind of chastity. It is interesting because Anne Hutchinson is held up by so many as the great woman who was wronged by the Puritans.

Now on to a couple of things briefly. Gene {?} called my attention to the fact that in Easy Chair 112 I referred to When I Survey the Wondrous Cross as the work of Sir John Bowery, when really his composition was In the Cross of Christ I Glory. I realized when I finished the tape and was on my way back to my home that I had erred. And then I forgot about it and so that is why I didn’t correct myself immediately.

Then this was sent to me, a very important statement by Bruce N. Ames. It was sent to me by two of you, Robert and Barbara {?}. Dr. Ames is chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of California at Berkeley and he writes critically of the various newspaper reports about the supposedly tainted water supply in some areas. I shall quote in part from this article.

“The carcinogens currently being found in California water supplies such as in Silicon Valley, are represent in extraordinarily tiny amounts that, except in rare cases, are trivial relative to the background level of carcinogens in nature. Therefore I am convinced that such water pollution is irrelevant as a cause of human cancer.” He goes on to say that, “There are in every aspect of nature some of these natural carcinogens, but in small amounts that are harmless.” Then he says, “Our diet contains natural pesticides in amounts at least 10,000 times greater than residues of man made pesticides. Natural pesticides are toxic chemicals, which are present in all plants, usually making up five to 10 percent of a plant’s weight. There is an enormous variety of them, though only a few are present in each plant species,” end quote.

In other words, every plant has its natural pesticide so that a healthy plant can resist pests. So any time you eat fruits and vegetables you are getting these pesticides even though no commercial pesticide is being used. The idea that these things are going to create cancer in human beings is ridiculous, because you would have to take such vast amounts in order for them to be effective.

Dr. Peter Beckman, speaking of the fallout from Chernobyl ridiculed some of the fear and he said, “It is true that if you drink 63,000 gallons of water at one sitting you are going to get a dangerous dose of radiation, but not if you consume less than 63,000 gallons at a sitting.”

Well, on to one thing more. Now I have previously spoken of the Rutherford Institute. Chalcedon had a part in the establishment of it. It is a legal organization to help in the battle against trying to destroy churches, Christian schools and other Christian agencies and institutions. Currently there are over 30 cases being handled by one or another group of lawyers affiliated with Rutherford. However, at present Rutherford needs money and needs it badly. The economy is not good and all of us Christian groups are feeling the impact. Now, without diminishing your giving to Chalcedon, because we need it, too, very frankly, I urge you to send a check to Rutherford. If we are going not preserve our freedom, we have got to help those who are fighting hard in the courts for us. These lawyers can make more money going into regular legal practice, but they are giving of their time and effort to defending religious freedom. Help them. Send your check—and it is tax deductible—to the Rutherford Institute, PO Box 510, Manassas, M, as in Mary, A N A S S A S, Virginia 22110 and tell them that you are doing it at my suggestion, because not only do I want them to know that Chalcedon people are reedy to support the cause, but I want to know what kind of response is forthcoming.

Well, our time is about up. Thank you for listening again and God bless you all.