-by R.J. Rushdoony
No society has yet existed without its share of lower class people, that is, persons who are incapable of a future-oriented life and who are often parasitic in their living. Very often, the number of upper and middle class minds in a culture has been very limited, a thin strata of future oriented and planning minds governing and directing the vast majority of men.
The remarkable progress of Western civilization in the 19th century was due to the fact that great numbers of people moved into the ranks of the middle and upper classes. Society was radically altered; instead of a limited number of men governing a culture, an increasing number of self-governing and foresighted men were rapidly expanding the potentialities of man and society in every area of life. The result was a great era of progress. The ranks of the lower classes of Western countries shrank markedly, especially in the United States, where society, as the community of men whose vision was of a prosperous, developing, and expanding future, came close to including most men, and, in some areas, almost all.
The American mission of “manifest destiny” was to spread civilization, religion, and liberty to every corner of the continent, if not the whole world. (See Frederick Merk: Manifest Destiny and Mission In American History. New York: Knopf, 1963) The school was a very important aspect of this vision. A future oriented people believed emphatically that education was basic to a people with a mission. The purpose of the schools, from grammar school on through the university, was to educate for leadership, to prepare the man of the future for his responsibilities. Schooling meant dignity and a status. Commencement exercises were a great joy to parents, especially of immigrant children: the student had now advanced a step towards the upper class, into the ranks of those who govern rather than are governed.
Men shared a vision of a world transformed by religion, education, and free enterprise into a realm of liberty and progress in which all men dwelled together in contentment and prosperity. It is easy to criticize various aspects of this vision today, but the fact remains that the 19th century did witness vast strides in conquering age-old problems of human society. There was not only a very extensive material progress but one of the greatest advances in Christian missions in history.
Today, however, a very real cultural counter-force is in operation. The ranks of the lower classes are again growing because of the collapse of the upper and middle classes. Civilizations decay when the leadership falters and fails, when its upper class abdicates its responsibilities or abandons its character.
The school as the agency of creating the upper and middle classes of the modern era has become the great mass producer of a lower class mentality, of a present-oriented generation. The modern academic community presents an ironic picture. On the one hand, there are monumental buildings and beautiful grounds which echo the old vision of planning and order. On the other hand, there are the unkempt minds and bodies of the faculty and student body to set forth the new contempt for the old order. It is as if a barbarian horde has captured the temples of an ancient faith. Some curious facts confirm the change. The intellectual today is more susceptible to propaganda than are other people.
There is also a correlation between vulnerability to hypnosis and education. Instead of strengthening the mind for leadership, education today weakens it and makes a man a better follower. Occultism, astrology, and other forms of ancient superstitions have had a ready receptivity among educated peoples. Whereas once the educated man derided these things, today he tends to show interest in them and promote them. More and more universities are adding courses on magic, astrology, and other superstitions to their curriculum. What has happened? Why have the schools created to educate an upper and middle class become the great creators of new barbarians, of the most powerful lower class in history?
The reason lies in the studied rootlessness of modern education. Because the intellectual is at war with Biblical faith, he is at war with the past; he rejects it as lacking his own enlightenment. In terms of modern thought, enlightenment begins by a denial of God. This denial of God is accompanied by an assertion of the autonomy of man and his reason, his mind, and this autonomy means a deliberate rootlessness, a calculated severing of ties with the past. In other cultures, the lower class mind was rootless because it was too poorly educated to have root in the past, and too indifferent religiously to think and plan in terms of a religious faith. As a result, such a lower class mind cuts itself off from the past and from the future by default.
The new lower class of the modern intellectuals cuts itself off from the past by choice, by a revolutionary choice and act, and is more rootless than any previous lower class. This rootlessness is reinforced by its philosophical existentialism, its exaltation of the moment, of the present, and its attempts to cut off that existential moment from any influence from the past and from any fear of future event. As a result, the intellectuals are rapidly becoming the most truly lower class element civilization has yet seen. Not only is there a rootlessness grounded in philosophical principle but also in emotional hatred. The intellectual refuses to see himself as a true child of his past. As Molnar has pointed out, with reference to Sartre, he sees himself as a “bastard”, an outcast and an enemy to the past.
The bastard mentality, anti-bourgeois, revolutionary, non-conformist, and perpetually at war, is made into the modern hero by the intellectuals. More than a hero, he is also seen as the new prophet. “The new philosopher abandons the traditional role of the teacher and assumes that of the prophet” Instead of investigating and communicating immutable truths, this bastard-prophet gives a vision of a new world which depends on the ruin of the present order. (Thomas Molnar: Sartre: Ideologue of Our Time. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968.) This vision is a vision of hate, and even love is defined as hate by Sartre. In Le Diable et le bon Dieu, Sartre defined love as the “hatred of the same enemy.” To love is simply to be united in hatred of God and His order.
Not surprisingly, the new barbarians, like Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, and others, emphasize, not truth and justice in establishing a new order, but the power of “charisma” (miraculous power) by commanding personalities. (See L. Clark Stevens: est, The Steersman Handbook, p. 130. Santa Barbara: Capricorn Press, 1970.)
The goal is freedom, but freedom as defined by Hitler and Stalin is not freedom as defined by Christ. Almost 30 years ago, de Rougemont saw clearly what freedom had become for modern man: “For most of my contemporaries, Liberty is the right not to obey. When they are given this right they are bored and clamor for a tyrant.” (Denis de Rougemont: The Devil’s Share, p. 97. New York: Pantheon Books, 1944.) This is it exactly. For an upper class mind, freedom is the opportunity to plan and work realistically for future goals and to create a personal and a social order in terms of those goals. Freedom becomes the condition for work and planning: it has a function in terms of the present and the future. For the lower class mind, freedom is “the right not to obey”, and the right to disrupt and destroy an order that requires obedience.
Obedience is a future oriented virtue. Children are taught obedience because they must be schooled into living with reality and mastering it. Dictatorships require obedience from their subjects in order to further their plans for the present and the future. Obedience comes into its own in a free society, where men by an inner discipline commit themselves to practical work and planning for the future. Such men maintain this discipline in the face of disappointments and frustrations, because the ability to use failures and setbacks profitably is an aspect of their future oriented nature. Philosophically, therefore, our schools today are grave diggers, committed by principle to destroying the past and to denying that God’s absolute laws govern man’s past, present, and future. Dr. Timothy Leary is a true product of the modern university and has a natural appeal to a generation educated into the rootlessness he represents. In a New York meeting, Leary once declared, “We do not pray to anyone up there but to what is inside ourselves…Let us go back and free the world from good and evil.Then we are all through with the good-evil thing and you will be reborn.” (Diana Trilling, “Celebrating with Dr. Leary,” Encounter, June, 1967.) This is the dream: dispense with good and evil, with all absolute law, and live as “free” men in a world where moral law, economic law, all law is destroyed in favor of “free” man, man with a total right not to obey.
As men face a world collapsing around them because the lower class mind, like a plague, is infecting old and young, they have two ways out. First, they can retreat into pessimism and despair. They can recognize the hopelessness of dealing with lower class minds and surrender. This is easy to do. A particularly vicious young hoodlum was killed by police recently in a gun battle. The record of violence by this teen-aged criminal was a serious one. The mother, with no criminal record, is proving herself even more depraved than her son. She is demanding action against the police, who fought in self-defense, for killing her murderous son. Her son could rob, maim, and murder as a part of his right not to obey, but she refuses to recognize the right of the police to require obedience to the law and to use force to protect the law, innocent victims, and themselves. Such an attitude becomes daily more prevalent.
It is easy to become discouraged. But to surrender is in effect to deny God; it is to deny that He is on the throne, and that “Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end” (Isa. 9:7). The second course is the realistic one: to rebuild. Are the schools our grave diggers? Then we must build new schools. Already, every year, more and more children and youth are being educated in Christian schools and into a Biblical perspective. The future belongs to those who prepare for it, not to those who destroy it, or who fear it.
Only as future oriented men, men of God, begin each in their calling, to rebuild all things in terms of their faith, can there be any restoration or direction to history. We will never regain that direction if we wait for the majority to join us; we are then only weather vane men, incapable of doing more than responding to the winds of history. We shall be driven instead of driving. We will then, whatever our professed faith, have joined the lower class. The reconstruction of schools, families, churches, civil governments, and vocations will be accomplished only as men under God feel that they have no other alternative but to act. Then, by faith, as free men whose calling it is to command the future for God, they will, a step at a time, accomplish His purposes in history.
CHALCEDON REPORT NO. 66
February 1, 1971