Easy Chair Series

Culture and Child Rearing, I

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 79-91

Genre:

Track:

Dictation Name: EC387

Year: 1986

This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 387, May 28, 1997.

I realize as I gave the number, 387 for the Easy Chair, that we have been doing this for 16 years or more now. In that time we have covered a great deal of territory, but there is a great deal more to be covered.

Tonight Douglas Murray, Andrew Sandlin, Mark Rushdoony and I will be trying to answer questions submitted by the reverend Byron Snap. I am going to start off for the first part of the first question. I had written in the April Chalcedon Report, Random Notes number 67 about culture and child rearing because at one time I had hoped to do a book on the subject and actually was collecting material on it.

Well, I have had experience with diverse cultures. My hometown, Kingsford, California when I was a child and a young man, was a community of mainly foreign born adults. I knew of one family that was of old American stock. It was fairly newly settled area, farm land and the cultures there were transmitted from the old country, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Armenian and a smattering of a few others. And I have worked among the Chinese and Indians in particular. So I will deal with that first part, because I think it is better not to try to cover too much ground, but take each portion of Byron Snap’s question individually.

Well, I will start with the Indians. The thing to remember about the American Indians is that the culture of the intermountain Indians was one very different from that of the southwest Indians such as the Navajos and the Pimas and some of the others.

The Indians of the Shoshone and Paiutes and other related tribes were wanderers and food gatherers. Periodically the whole tribe would come together at a particular point, but if you are going to live off the land, you cannot travel in great numbers, because there is only so much food. As a result, the Indians, Paiute and Shoshone both, were food gatherers. They went around in small bands of from 15 to 25 or 30 hunting small game and big game, foods, berries, pine nuts, anything and everything that they could gather.

Now this meant that except on a few occasions the children had no contact with any other group and when they did it was of their own kind. There was no pattern of deviation. In a small group of 15 to 25 people which meant it was almost like an extended family. The children had no rival pattern of behavior. They behaved because there was no alternate lifestyle for them. As a result, once the Indians saw another culture, the white man’s, it was devastating. They did not have any discipline or restraint.

If you are wandering around and the duty of all from toddlers on up to grandparents is food gathering, that is your life. That is what you do morning, noon and night.

Now just imagine what it would be like if 15 to 25 of us, grandparents, parents and children were out here in the wilderness. Our area is still very sparsely inhabited and there is probably more game now than there was at that time. And yet it would be a very difficult life for us, even if we became very capable in food gathering. This mean there was no problem with the children. There was very little for them to do except work. In the evening the grandparents would tell them stories to educate them in the way to live. And they would say, “When I was young this is what we did,” and so on and so forth. I recall one old man describing what had happened when he had been taught by his grandfather what to do. And an enemy band which was transgressing on their food territory attacked them. He immediately scurried to the nearest animal hold and before they camped the children were taught to look for places like that. Crawled in, pulled in leaves over his head, stayed all night and into the next morning when it is light he crawled out, found everyone in his little band dead except his father who was dying. And his father told him, “You have been taught by your grandfather what to do. Now leave me and go.”

That boy wandered all over the area managing to keep alive. He was about five. When he approached some Indian encampment he always made sure that the wind was blowing away from the camp on the side where he approached and he did this two or three times until he found a camp where they spoke Shoshone. And then he went and joined them.

Now in such a culture, the opportunities for delinquency are not there, because there are no rival kind of behaviors available. It is just one way of life.

Well, when the white man came and the white man’s towns were established here and there, old and young became delinquent. They were an undisciplined people. They were hard working. They were courageous. They were very capable at survival in the kind of world they lived in, but there was no discipline except the discipline of the circumstances. As a result, old and young very quickly became alcoholic and their alcoholism was of a far reaching kind.

I recall vividly when one fourth grader was picked up drunk and taken before the Indian court and rebuked by the woman judge for his behavior and for his drinking. And he was astonished. He said, “But I have been drinking all my life.” And it was probably close to the truth.

Let me add something. That boy was a handsome blonde, blue eyed youngster. He looked like he was a Scandinavian, but, you see, culturally he was an Indian. His behavior was Indian. And so quite logically having nothing but an Indian culture to grow up in, his reactions were Indian. His lack of self discipline was again Indian.

Now I want to stop there if you have any questions about this.

[Sandlin] Rush, what would you delineate were the both good points and the bad points of Indian child rearing?

[Rushdoony] Well, they were very kindly towards each to the point...

[Sandlin] The parents to the children, you mean? Or... or...

[Rushdoony] And the children to one another. To the point of making play impossible. They did not want to disappoint anybody. It was a culture where because life had been meager, there was no restraint on gratifying a child’s wishes.

[Sandlin] Oh.

[Rushdoony] ...if you could do so. Thus, I recall baseball games on the school playground which was next to the mission, where a seven year old would want to play with teenagers. And they would let him into the game. Well, it would quickly spoil the game, because a six or seven year old boy is no ... in no way prepared to play ball with teenagers. But they wouldn’t object. I never heard an Indian baby cry all the years I was there, because if it wanted something the mother or an older brother or sister or the father would instantly give him what they wanted. If they showed the least sign of being restless the mother immediately put them to her breast so that an Indian child grew up without disappointments.

[Sandlin] And no discipline then, right?

[Rushdoony] No discipline. So that when they faced the world of the white man which was all around them, it created major problems for them. They were not capable of meeting it.

Any other questions or observations about the American Indians?

This is why to this day the Indians have a problem with alcoholism. There is a lack of discipline. There is also a constitutional inability to take liquor. Some peoples, it is a moral discipline to abstain. But some people can drink a lot without feeling it and I knew some Indians who could barely get a small swallow and they were severely affected. It was almost as if it were an allergy.

Well, the reservation where I was in recent years it has been listed as the number one suicide area in the United States. Frustration is something the Indian cannot take. And since it was a very isolated reservation it took a while for the world to come closer to it.

[Sandlin] Was the religion sort of the typical Indian long house religion?

[Rushdoony] It was... no. It was more a belief in medicine, healing. That is why among American Indians, at least the western peoples I am familiar with, oh, I am trying to think of the man who built the university in Oklahoma, Pentecostal.

[Sandlin] Oh, Oral Roberts.

[M. Rushdoony] Oral Roberts.

[Rushdoony] Oral Roberts. I am reasonably well informed at all times on what is going on in the world of religion, but before I ever heard of Oral Roberts, most of the Indians knew about him because of his healing ministry. And healing is at the heart of Indian religion.

Well, let’s continue. The Chinese. Well, the Chinese have a totally different culture than the Indians, a very pragmatic one. One of the things that always interested me was that both the Chinese and the Indians believed that when a person died in a house his spirit would haunt that... the house thereafter.

Well, the American Indians, western ones, would promptly burn the house down to drive the ghosts away and build something else or ... and this drove, oh, the Roosevelt housing program directors crazy. They would see smoke rising somewhere on the reservation and they knew there was another house with a loan on it going up in smoke and they would never collect, because they believed that if the spirit was... were not properly taken care of before death, which mean that at the point of death you took wild rose bush branches and laid them over the body to keep the spirit from crawling out. And then the spirit would stay and be safely buried. If the person died during the night, it was a disaster.

Well, the Chinese have a similar belief. But they just move out of the house 30 days and it is their belief that the spirit of the departed will be discouraged at the end of that time and then they can move back in, very practical. You don’t burn down your house.

There was a story told in my day in San Francisco’s Chinatown about a white woman who was ... who had overly imbibed and was more than slightly drunk. She heard a commotion, sounds of an accident or something and she leaned out of her first story window to see what was happening and she lost her balance and fell feet first into the garbage can just below her window. And at that moment two elderly Chinese rounded the corner and saw that and shook their heads.

“Americans very wasteful. That woman good for 10 years yet.”

Well, ancestor worship to the pagan Chinese was an important part of their faith. And this meant that religion was centered around the family. It gave a tremendous authority and discipline to the family. You did not disobey your parents.

I have told this story some other year, or two stories along this line about the authority of the Chinese family. When I was in Chinatown, this was in the 30s, this very fine Christian young man was interested in a particular kind of study which he could get best at the University of Chicago. And his father, proud of his son’s achievements, put up the money at no small sacrifice so that the son could go to the University of Chicago.

Well, when he came back at Christmas everybody in his age group was interested in hearing about Chicago and the university there. And the young man told them about it. I know. I was in on part of the conversations. Within days the heads of some of the tongs or family associations called on Mr. Fong’s family association and said, “Don’t you think it would be better for Mr. Fong’s son to come and go to school here and not create a bad example for other children?” The family association told Mr. Fong and before the weekend was over, the son was back. That was the way things were.

Then to give another illustration of this, the authority of the parents was such that in this one family of two sons and a daughter, the son I think had a graduate degree in chemistry, I believe it was, and worked with an important corporation and drew a very fine salary. The sister had a job with another corporation. Both were college graduates and the older boy had an advanced degree. The youngest was a college student. And yet the youngest told me one night, I forget what event it was the previous night. He said he lost track of the time and he got there too late and he slept in the doorway. And his older brother whose money was several times the income of his father, a janitor, had also done that. He had come home one night exactly one minute after 12. As he reached the door he could hear the clock hit the last ding of the 10. He curled up in the doorway, pulled his coat around him and slept there even though he could hear his parents listening to the news on the Chinese radio station. He would not have dared knock. And that was the authority that existed. Well, this is the authority they have been working to maintain. They have had problems.

I know I was called in once by a group that was going to start Christian school, because they felt the whole influence of the public schools was bad. And I had very few contacts, because I did not want to maintain them, but what I found was that periodically there were disturbing elements that came in, young people no one who knew were not local apparently were from mainland China, Marxists, who had been smuggled in to be a disruptive force. And you may recall, Douglas, there were some violent murders, public murders in Chinatown at that time, which had no eye witnesses.

Well, the Chinese community had more than a few shocks like that, they but the pulled together to maintain their old culture and keep the young people in line. With the Christians it was a different type of discipline, of course, in a Chinese family.

Any comments about... or questions about any of this?

[Murray] The Chinese seem ... have always seemed to me somewhat ambivalent about religion. They can either take it or leave it or indulge in more than one religion at a time.

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Murray] Do you observe this in Chinatown?

[Rushdoony] Yes. They can be Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian which isn’t strictly a religion, but it is close to it. They can be in Christianity for a time in order to get what they can out of it, because basic to the ancient Chinese perspective is that there is no absolute truth. All things are relative, whether it is the old yang and yin kind of thinking or more Buddhist one. No absolutes. You do what is fitting at the right time.

Well, this is a hard thing for a culture to overcome, because its roots go back at least to the time of the Christ if not earlier. It was only in the 1300s, I believe, that this type of relativistic thinking hit China, ah, Japan. So Japan, while it has strains of this, is not as deeply imbued with it.

But it remains to be seen how much Marxism has destroyed this, because Marxism, while philosophically is relativistic, politically and socially it takes rather totalitarian and monolithic and absolutist position.

[Murray] Well, they.... they... my... I grew up in San Francisco so ... and... and spent quite a bit of time either working in... in Chinatown or visiting with people that I knew there and I witnessed many of the demonstrations by young Communists in Saint Mary’s Square in Chinatown and while this is all going on there are people in their 80s doing Tai Chi exercises and they seem to be very tolerant. There is no counter demonstrations.

[Rushdoony] No.

Mark, did you have a question?

[M. Rushdoony] Yes, you had mentioned the ying yang philosophy of the Chinese. The ying yang symbol had... appears a great deal anymore. I see it on t-shirts. It is on jewelry. Surfers have kind of taken it as a common symbol among their sub culture. There was a restaurant near the entrance to a southern California amusement part that could be... that is a large symbol clearly visible from the freeway. It... it has become a very symbol... a... a very common symbol and a lot of people, especially young people are under the impression that it is very harmless. I have heard some say it just means male and female and could... could you go into what ying yangs represents?

[Rushdoony] It has... yes. It has a variety of meanings. It does refer to male and female, to aggressive and submissive. And what it basically sets forth is the relativity of all things. In terms of this there are times when you advance and times when you retreat. There is no hard and fast truth. You do that which is fitting for the time. So it teaches a radical relativism. And you have no truth.

During the 20s I recall vividly the warlords of China each of whom controlled a vast area equal to many, many major nations and how they periodically would switch allegiance or religion. One general Feng, F E N G, was for a long time apparently a very dedicated Christian. And then just as quietly he dropped it.

Now many Americans felt that hypocrisy was the major characteristic of the Chinese. There was a term then very popular known as a description of too many of the ostensible Christians of China, rice Christians, Christians as long as they were getting rice. That was not fair. They truly believed that certain things were fitting at certain times. If you do not believe in absolute truth, you may find psychologically Christianity is very important at one stage and then you out grow it at another. As a result, a hard and fast truth was very alien to Chinese culture.

Well, it was, I believe, Eugen Rosenstock Huessy who described John Dewey’s Pragmatism as the Chinafication of the United States, because Pragmatism and they ying yang philosophy are identical as far as their basic premises are concerned. There is no truth. Everything is instrumental, useful at a particular time, but not at another.

So with our progressive education now in the schools since the 20s, our school children really have imbibed a Chinese morality or faith. There is no absolute truth for them and now this is open and apparent in our public schools in the values clarification courses where the child is taught to choose his own values. Nothing is absolutely valid for all.

[Sandlin] Rush, I have noticed in reading Chinese books and seeing Chinese films there is almost invariably a note of despair, very cyclical view of history...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] ... no view of hope.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] Almost a determinate... not necessarily a philosophical determinism, but a very practical life. And that would seem to go along with the pragmatic approach that there is really nothing to hope for.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] And...

[Rushdoony] It will take a lot to shake that out of China.

Well, the next part of Byron Snap’s question is the impact of Calvinistic theology on child rearing in America.

That is a very important question. We must remember that while Calvinism was strong in some parts of Germany, in Switzerland and in some parts of France and England, it came into its own in colonial America. And the catechism used in New England, which began in Adam’s fall we sinned all, which every child was to learn, was thoroughly Calvinistic. The Puritans, as Edmund Morgan has pointed out, loved their children with an intensity that few people can appreciate. They knew they were prone to being partial to their children, so they were particularly careful to discipline them properly. When the children reached 10, 12, they would swap children with a friend and the child would become a servant in the other family’s home so that he could be disciplined in a way that his parents might not have been able to do successfully.

But Calvinistic culture created an emphasis on the fact that the child is born a sinner, for the child will be self centered and that it is up to the parents to teach the child the priority of God and the priority of other people to himself. And they were very rigorous about such teaching so that Calvinistic theology had a powerful influence.

What we have seen in the past 30 years is a very, very savage reaction against Calvinism in child rearing so that the child today is reared spoiled rotten. He is indulged. He is give what he or she wants. And the result is we have what back in the 50s they spotted as coming, the child centered culture.

Of course now we have, in a sense, departed from that except that in law we are a child centered culture and the child takes priority over the parents.

[Murray] Well, the government considers... today considers all children virtually wards of the state.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] And another point I don't think that we should neglect, Rush, is the intensity with which the Calvinists in America and elsewhere always held the view of the covenant, the centrality of the covenant which included the idea of the intergenerational faithfulness of the people of God where the children were in covenant with God just as the Christian parents were.

Of course, among evangelicals and Arminians, that whole idea really is lost. They want the little children to grow up to have adult conversion experiences and treat their little children like pagans which is why they don’t mind many of them going to public schools.

But I think we need to get back to the colonial Calvinistic approach. When you mentioned the book by Edmund Morgan, Rush, I wrote down a sentence of his that he quotes in that book that really stuck with me. I think it was in the chapter on Puritan tribalism and the Puritan family. He quoted one of the old Puritans and they are immanently quotable as saying, “God casts the lines of elections in the loins of godly parents.” That is a very powerful...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] ...pregnant statement. And I think we need to remember that, that the Calvinistic approach is not first of all to brig proselytes into the Church, although certainly we should do that. But it is first of all to evangelize and catechize our own children and bring them up in the faith. And one reason that Christianity today is... is so {?} is because we have really lost that. I mean, the ... the second generation tends to go away from the truth because there is no doctrine of the covenant. And, of course, our forefathers had that doctrine and that is why their faith was so virile and strong.

[Rushdoony] Well, to go on with these questions now, here is a very interesting one. Has there been a different approach to child rearing with a growing acceptance of Arminian theology and the innocence of the child?

Very, very definitely. At this point, I would like to say that about the same time Arminianism and Arminian Revivalism emerged and then shortly after the shift in the view of the child and the rise of Feminism.

Well, just think a moment what the Feminists and the child advocates were saying there, the 1830s and 40s. They were talking about the innocence of the child. They were talking about the suppression of the innocent and wonderful female sex and by whom? By the nasty, wicked males. So what happened was that men were demonized, women made innocent and the Feminists went so far as to refer to God as she. So the first attempt at a gender revolution took place a century and a half ago.

Well, naturally the children were innocent.

There was a great deal of reaction to that. Men were then a bit more masculine and absolutely would not put up with this. And so the child centered society was a while in coming. And Arminian concepts of child rearing did not gain advocacy to too great an extent until well into this century.

[Sandlin] You were talking about that, Rush, and that reminded me again of that book that you recommended that I read some years ago and that I did, Anne Douglas’ The Feminization of American Culture.

[Rushdoony] Yes... of American culture.

[Sandlin] ...of American culture which demonstrates that Feminism came in with the erosion of Calvinism...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] ...over the last century. That was a very powerful work.

Rush would...

[Rushdoony] Yes, go ahead.

[Sandlin] Would you comment on one thing? I ... I have heard you mention this a couple of time and just... it was sort of teased by this idea... maybe earlier this century of the... of the Christian mother with the wayfaring son...

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes, yes.

[Sandlin] And how this really... discuss that for... for while, because I have... I have heard this a number of times and...

[Rushdoony] Well, up until the Great Depression in evangelical circles one of the most popular solos ... there was a solo number, usually always sung by a woman.

Where is my wandering boy?

My heart overflows for I love him, he knows.

Oh, where is my wandering boy?

And the idea of the lantern in the window to welcome the boy home at any hour of the day or night. That kind of thinking was very, very prevalent. Men did not like it, but women went overboard for it, because they were very much sentimentalized.

To give you an indication of how this developed in its decline. In Dorothy’s childhood her parents knew a couple whose only child died, a boy. And the mother spent the rest of her life grieving and that was regarded as something noble. In fact, she became so sensitive to the whole thing, I believe they sold their house and bought one where she could look at the cemetery where her boy was buried and I think she ultimately had the child moved to another location which would be a drier plot. And her husband put up with it and he was a great big brawny railroader. This is the kind of step taken down hill to the destruction of American manhood. Incredible sentimentality. Perhaps some of you can cite examples of the same thing, I don’t know.

[Sandlin] Well, our... our whole religion today, Rush, as you well know, has been so feminized and has entered the Church so much it seems that people aren’t even ... aren’t even aware of it. I will tell you where you really see it and we won’t take long on this, but the music today you mentioned is just so man centered and sentimental.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] And I think you had mentioned earlier, Rush, recently that most of the songs written today are written for women, because the church basically is made up of women.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

Very definitely. If you get a hymnal from the last century it is written in terms of male voices predominating. Now it is female voices and the men who are in the congregation have trouble with them very often, because everything is too high for them so that the whole character of the Church has been warped. And today, of course, you have the ordination of women elders and the ordination of women pastors.

[Murray] I think a great deal of this is the fault of men who drive their wives to church, but don’t go in. And this has been going on for the last two or three generations.

[Sandlin] Well, they don’t lead their families in the faith.

[Murray] Exactly.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Murray] I mean, they have no one else but themselves to blame...

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Murray] ...for the feminization of the Church. They have... they have really have rejected their role.

[Sandlin] Yes. And we attack the feminization of the Church and we should, but it is largely the fault of the men who have refused to assert themselves and take their biblical responsibility seriously.

[Murray] Yeah, well, I want to run home and watch football and television.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Murray] And, you know, I can’t escape from the responsibilities or escape from the world without paying the price.

[Sandlin] Yes. Well, Joe six pack doesn't want to go to church these days for the most part because he says, “Oh, it is a women’s religion.” And unfortunately he is right. Most of it, it is. Most of the time it is.

[Rushdoony] Well, Arminianism from the beginning has had a strong appeal to women. Calvinism has had a stronger appeal to men who are heads of households.

[Sandlin] Absolutely.

[Rushdoony] Well, let’s continue. What impact has the media and technology, computers et cetera, had on child rearing, particularly allowing parental supervision to be replaced by entertaining computer games, et cetera?

Well, that is a question that I am glad to see there, because it does trouble me. There is an intense absorption in computers on the part of young people today. However, I have also read and I have been told by a computer expert that after six months a great many lose interest in computers, so that there is hope perhaps.

[multiple voices]

[Rushdoony] What do you think?

[M. Rushdoony] I don’t... I don’t know if computer games are as popular today as they were 10 years ago. I... I... I... students in my... in my classes don’t seem to talk about them. Ten years ago they were all the rage. You had Nintendo and other such systems that you hooked to your TV and ... and these were really pretty mindless games.

I haven’t heard as much about those in... in... in the last... in... in several years. So I am not sure...

[Sandlin] No, I think you are right.

[M. Rushdoony] ...if they are less popular. What is getting more popular is the more sophisticated uses of the computer.

[Sandlin] On the world wide web and so forth.

[M. Rushdoony] ...which present problems... other problems.

[Sandlin] Yes.

[Rushdoony] ...other than mindlessness and other dangers. But I think the computer game craze may have ... be on the decline. I may be wrong about that.

[Sandlin] I think one of the real problems is the transformation from a verbal oriented culture to a... to a visual oriented culture which Neil Postman dealt with in the book Amusing Ourselves to Death. As long as the computer... as long is it is word processing and it is verbal oriented, I don’t think there is a problem. But so much of it today is visual oriented that children, as you well know, Rush, if children aren’t really trained in the verbal character of life and experience, they really are missing a lot and can be easily misled. It is... it is hard to propagandize people who have a strong background in language, whereas if you can titillate their imagination with... with pictures that is a... that is a.... I think that is a real problem.

[Murray] Well, it is hypnotic. Television is hypnotic.

[Sandlin] Yeah.

[M. Rushdoony] Well, it is also a learning, it is…. it is... it is a method of learning that a lot of people don’t know how to read... learn by reading.

[Sandlin] That is right. Good point.

[M. Rushdoony] And they... and they fight against it because all they think of is... is, you know...

[Sandlin] It is dry and boring.

[M. Rushdoony] Your assignments from... from the sixth grade in their geography book and... and they have real contempt for... for learning by the Word. While they have ... whether it was learning, per se, or not they are accustomed to television and movies. And they... they feel the need to see something.

[Murray] And these people...

[M. Rushdoony] Interactive.

[Murray] These people they... it kills creativity.

[M. Rushdoony] Oh, sure.

[Sandlin] Oh, absolutely. Yeah that is right.

[Murray] People who have no imagination have no creativity.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Murray] You know, industry is crying in their beer because they can’t hire people that can solve problems. Well, you can’t solve problems without some intellect, without some creativity.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Murray] You can’t envision the solution to anything. So television has not done our culture a ... a great deal of good from that standpoint.

[Sandlin] Yeah.

[Murray] ... as far as educating children. It has destroyed family cohesiveness. People at the entire family, mothers, fathers and children would prefer to watch television rather than interact with each other. And the pace of our civilization, if you can call it that, is so rapid now that parents just give up and they given their children to the advertisers and give their children to the propagandists and give their children to the people with an agenda on television who have honed the art of brainwashing to a fine art. These people are experts, these people that advertise on the Saturday morning cartoons.

[Sandlin] Absolutely.

[Murray] ...and so forth. They know how to capture the attention and hold it in our children.

Look at this mass hysteria that takes place every Christmas when these people when whatever toy of the moment floats to the surface and people are literally physically fighting with each other at these stupid toy stores to buy this garbage and two weeks later it is in the trash.

Now how can that be? I mean, people with any brains at all, how can that be? It is because their kids have been brainwashed and the kids have this tremendous power over them to badger them until they go get this stupid toy.

[Sandlin] Advertisers work very hard to generate just that response.

Well, it is not going to change any time soon. I mean, the government to the Congress just passed a bill, what was it, a couple of months ago saying that every TV station by 2002 has to have a digitized signal? I mean, which means that you won’t be getting your TV from the waves in the air. It will be by means of electronics like computers are today, produce a brilliant picture. So parents are going to have to fight steadily this... this trend of the... you know, the visualization rather than verbalization.

[M. Rushdoony] Well, the... the... you know, the... the thing boils down what we are... Rush was talking about earlier is the discipline has to be there. You have to monitor what your kids are watching. You have to discuss with them and give them some basis of comparison of what is intellectually...

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Murray] ...feeds them and what...

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Murray] ...will actually destroys them.

[Sandlin] And... and another major problem is that the modern TV in all of this tends to create an artificial world that insulates them from the real ... from reality. And so they can create a world.

Well, you know, the whole idea of cyberspace and... and that sort of thing is... is...

[Murray] Well, it is going in the moment.

[Sandlin] Yeah.

[Rushdoony] Well, we will continue our discussion on the next tape. I want all of you who are listening and have questions to ask, to be sure to send them in, because they are a great help to us. We want these tapes to be helpful to you and we will answer any questions you ask if we are able.

Thank you for listening and God bless you.