Our Threatened Freedom

Have We Lost Our Manners

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 72-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 072

Dictation Name: Vol. F - Part 07 - Have We Lost Our Manners

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Have we lost our manners? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

Have we lost our manners? Very obviously people are not as mannerly now as they once were. My favorite story on old-fashioned courtliness and humor goes back to the days of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. In those days Washington was a small city and the area had few people. Roosevelt loved to take friends on hikes around the Potomac River and the marsh area. On one hike, on a hot day, when the group halted, Roosevelt suggested that they take a swim. All the men stripped and dove into the river, swimming in the nude. Roosevelt noticed, however, that the French ambassador, {?}, had removed everything, except his gloves. Mr. Ambassador, asked the nude Roosevelt, have you forgotten your gloves? The debonair Frenchman replied, we might meet ladies. There is something to be said for an era with that kind of wit and presence of mind.

Manners can become absurd, and they can be overly stressed, but they do serve to keep people from manifesting their uglier feelings and dispositions, and civilization needs that restraint. Too often, for example, our news commentators, cartoonists and politicians are unmannerly to the extreme. Anyone who disagrees with them is a menace to civilization, a fascist beast, the enemy of the people, and so on. We are seeing, increasingly, the disappearance of all manners towards people who disagree with us.

Civilized discourse requires and depends on treating those who disagree with us as entitled to courtesy, respect and fair-minded attention. To break the rules of mannerly discourse is a prelude to social violence and civil disorders. It means that we regard the other person as mentally hopeless, and therefore only amenable to coercion and violence.

Manners are important because they presuppose that the best way to change the other person is to show respect, concern and courtesy towards him. We cannot convert someone by first spitting into his face. When we deny that people can be changed, reached or approached by means of good manners, we are also saying that freedom is a useless thing, and that coercion and violence will alone persuade people.

Respect and courtesy for those with whom we disagree is a necessary prerequisite for a free society. The intemperance, venom, and sometimes studied insolence of much of our public discourse is a threat to freedom.

This has been R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.