WEBVTT NOTE Culture and Morality 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.360 Today we have a very special guest, Mr. William Murchison, who's a syndicated columnist. He's 2 00:00:06.360 --> 00:00:12.920 a columnist and on the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News, the largest paper 3 00:00:12.920 --> 00:00:19.080 in Texas, I believe, and one of the founding editors of Texas Republic Magazine. He's a 4 00:00:19.080 --> 00:00:23.800 regular contributor to two publications that I used to like a lot, The Wall Street Journal 5 00:00:23.800 --> 00:00:31.920 in the National Review, and he's the author of his book, Reclaiming Morality in America. 6 00:00:31.920 --> 00:00:36.720 And so he is an acknowledged expert in the two things you're not supposed to discuss 7 00:00:36.720 --> 00:00:39.380 in polite company, politics and religion. 8 00:00:39.380 --> 00:00:45.200 So he is the perfect candidate to speak at the political economy seminar at the Ludwig 9 00:00:45.200 --> 00:00:47.520 von Mises Institute. 10 00:00:47.520 --> 00:00:50.960 So ladies and gentlemen, I give you our special guest, Mr. William Murchison. 11 00:00:51.960 --> 00:01:04.160 I think I'm going to stand up, because I found myself constitutionally unable to talk while 12 00:01:04.160 --> 00:01:11.640 reposing on my hand quarters, and then I can see more fully anyway what's going on in the 13 00:01:11.640 --> 00:01:12.640 room while I'm talking. 14 00:01:12.640 --> 00:01:16.840 If I see anybody falling asleep, then I'll have to know it much faster. 15 00:01:16.840 --> 00:01:21.040 I appreciate your indulgence in waiting for me to arrive from the Atlanta airport. 16 00:01:21.040 --> 00:01:46.040 I arrived shortly after 10 o'clock this morning in your time, and through the good offices of Mr. Tucker, I got here actually on time, I think to our great surprise, we actually made it in time, and you're particularly kind to indulge a member of the media, quite so far, 17 00:01:46.040 --> 00:01:57.040 The profession to which I belong is obviously not the most degenerated in America today for reasons that you probably will not have to wonder at. 18 00:01:57.040 --> 00:02:12.040 I think according to recent polls, we rank somewhere below trial lawyers in public esteem and slightly above serial murderers. 19 00:02:12.040 --> 00:02:26.040 But, nonetheless, I have been a member of this distinguished profession, ex-distinguished profession, as some people prefer, for many years, and I'm probably going to die in harness. 20 00:02:26.040 --> 00:02:39.040 I have to say, if nothing else, that we have a record constancy that exceeds that of politicians, the members of the media at least know what they think. 21 00:02:39.040 --> 00:02:47.240 I don't know whether you heard, it should have been in today's newspapers that Senator 22 00:02:47.240 --> 00:02:55.600 Dole has now called for reversing Roe vs. Wade. 23 00:02:55.600 --> 00:03:07.640 He wants to call it Wade vs. Roe, just not what we might expect but thank you for being 24 00:03:07.640 --> 00:03:08.640 here today. 25 00:03:08.640 --> 00:03:10.640 It's an honor to be on the campus of Auburn University. 26 00:03:10.640 --> 00:03:17.640 It's an honor to be here in connection with the distinguished Ludwig von Mises Institute. 27 00:03:17.640 --> 00:03:21.640 And I'm glad to see Lew Rockwell walk in. 28 00:03:21.640 --> 00:03:27.640 A gentleman who's writing, I had married, whose public persona I had married for a lot of years. 29 00:03:27.640 --> 00:03:36.640 And I'm grateful for the association with the von Mises Institute that I've had through, 30 00:03:36.640 --> 00:04:06.640 I wanted to make a few remarks today about American culture, and I want to do this in the context of the topic that is probably on most people's minds because of the 31 00:04:06.640 --> 00:04:14.640 I want to see if I can put this in a context that might be helpful to us. 32 00:04:14.640 --> 00:04:24.640 I think that as we have surveyed the ghastly damage that has occurred in Oklahoma City, 33 00:04:24.640 --> 00:04:32.640 it's scarcely two weeks now since the bombing, but it's become a feature of the landscape. 34 00:04:32.640 --> 00:04:50.640 We ask ourselves, what kind of country is this? What kind of country is it that makes it possible for a building in which hundreds of people are doing their business in a peaceful manner to be destroyed, 35 00:04:50.640 --> 00:05:01.640 these lives snuffed out including the lives of young children, babies? What kind of country are we that makes it possible for something like this to happen? 36 00:05:01.640 --> 00:05:08.640 I think it's a good question, but I don't think it exhausts the rhetorical possibilities. 37 00:05:08.640 --> 00:05:13.640 I think we could ask ourselves other questions of the same genre. 38 00:05:13.640 --> 00:05:22.640 We could ask ourselves, for example, what kind of country is it in which the Federal Government sends tanks 39 00:05:22.640 --> 00:05:33.640 into an area inhabited not only by armed men, but by unarmed women and children. 40 00:05:33.640 --> 00:05:49.640 We could ask ourselves, what kind of country is it whose president, a self-confessed adulterer and evader of the selective service system, 41 00:05:49.640 --> 00:05:59.120 When he seeks to reform public health, health care, proposes for us nothing less than the 42 00:05:59.120 --> 00:06:06.440 kind of bureaucracy that would have gladdened the heart of any Soviet aberrant in the good 43 00:06:06.440 --> 00:06:10.120 old days of the Iron Curtain. 44 00:06:10.120 --> 00:06:18.840 What kind of country is it, we might ask, that for the sake of eliminating racial discrimination 45 00:06:18.840 --> 00:06:31.320 proposes to enforce another kind of racial discrimination, different races, different forms of discrimination. 46 00:06:31.320 --> 00:06:40.560 What kind of country is it that perpetually spends more than it takes in, with a bottomless 47 00:06:40.560 --> 00:07:10.560 What kind of a country is it that allows the snuffing out each year of one and a half million 48 00:07:10.560 --> 00:07:33.560 And yet will not allow in its public schools the expression of religious opinion on this or any other question. What kind of country is it? 49 00:07:33.560 --> 00:07:43.560 A nation very much like our own. The United States of America in 1995. 50 00:07:43.560 --> 00:07:57.560 The Oklahoma City catastrophe has called forth the analytical resources of my profession to a degree probably you have not witnessed in years. 51 00:07:57.560 --> 00:08:06.560 What does it mean? Oh, tell us, wise men of the media. Oh, tell us, talk show hosts, what does it all mean? 52 00:08:06.560 --> 00:08:13.560 How are we to make sense of it? What must we do? What must we do to avoid repetitions? 53 00:08:13.560 --> 00:08:22.560 Ah, and so now we have proposals that the Federal Bureau of Investigation must be empowered 54 00:08:22.560 --> 00:08:45.560 To look into the lives of Americans with much more diligence than ever before, that the Federal apparatus must be given heightened powers to survey groups that may be planning more actions like this, that may have dark designs that we do not even yet suspect. 55 00:08:45.560 --> 00:09:00.560 We know now, we strongly suspect that the measure that would have been coming up in Congress in recent times to repeal the ban on assault weapons is probably dead for this year. 56 00:09:00.560 --> 00:09:09.560 Because we live in a climate in which we cannot contemplate the broadening of liberties but we must rather think of their contraction. 57 00:09:09.560 --> 00:09:26.560 So I fully expect during the course of the debate for someone, because of the nature of the deadly instrument in Oklahoma City, I fully expect for a coalition of senators and representatives to call for a federal ban on fertilizer. 58 00:09:26.560 --> 00:09:38.560 Of course, we might not have such a band, because at night we would deprive congressmen of their most striking rhetorical weapons. 59 00:09:38.560 --> 00:09:55.560 Nonetheless, what I think we ought to be thinking about is not so much the contraction of liberty, perhaps not even so much as its expansion in this time. 60 00:09:55.560 --> 00:10:06.560 as a fundamental rethinking of our culture, the culture of our country in 1995. 61 00:10:06.560 --> 00:10:14.560 The primary problem today, as I see it, is not people bombing buildings, 62 00:10:14.560 --> 00:10:22.560 it's people wanting to bomb buildings, desiring to inflict injury on other people, 63 00:10:22.560 --> 00:10:26.560 Not asking themselves the signal and essential questions, 64 00:10:26.560 --> 00:10:31.560 is it right or is it wrong, is it good or is it evil, 65 00:10:31.560 --> 00:10:34.560 but acting upon their impulses and their instincts 66 00:10:34.560 --> 00:10:37.560 in the way that they have been conditioned to do 67 00:10:37.560 --> 00:10:42.560 by the cultural influences that surround them, 68 00:10:42.560 --> 00:10:47.560 in which we live, in which we bathe daily. 69 00:10:47.560 --> 00:10:58.560 There's a final distinction between bombing and wanting to bomb, and the distinction lies in the putting of those questions. 70 00:10:58.560 --> 00:11:16.560 Is it right or is it wrong? What kind of order do we live in today that makes it possible to contemplate the extinction of hundreds of innocent lives in the bombing of a building? 71 00:11:16.560 --> 00:11:29.560 We live not so much in a culture of order, of any kind. We live in a culture of disorder, of moral and social and cultural disorder. 72 00:11:29.560 --> 00:11:40.560 We have lost the moral understanding that we had for so many years in our country. 73 00:11:40.560 --> 00:12:04.440 A sense of right and wrong, good and evil, used to underlie and to undergird the culture. 74 00:12:04.440 --> 00:12:10.240 It made America what it was, it made the West what it was. 75 00:12:10.240 --> 00:12:40.240 And that sense no longer unites us. In fact, the recognition of that sense of right and wrong and good and evil has become in many people's eyes a kind of badge of an antique understanding and a repressive mindset as if to say, I know what you ought to be doing, and what's more, I have every intention of 76 00:12:40.240 --> 00:12:47.240 The Stereotypical Understanding of Moral Culture 77 00:13:10.240 --> 00:13:16.800 of Morality, our sense of what it is and what we ought to be doing as moral people has reached 78 00:13:16.800 --> 00:13:23.680 its low point in American society. I'm a little loathe as a trained historian. That's actually 79 00:13:23.680 --> 00:13:29.600 what I set out to be before I wandered into this debased profession of journalism. I received all 80 00:13:29.600 --> 00:13:37.840 my degrees in my major course work of history and then found other employment, but I've always found 81 00:13:37.840 --> 00:13:42.920 and employment of a sort from my historical knowledge because it has made me, among other 82 00:13:42.920 --> 00:13:53.240 things, skeptical of comparing one historical era to another and striving for exact measurements. 83 00:13:53.240 --> 00:14:01.320 But I think it's safe enough to see that the American moral understanding, this junitive 84 00:14:01.320 --> 00:14:23.320 The force behind our culture is mostly today unattended and neglected. It no longer binds us together. It no longer serves as a force for action and a caution against the wrong kinds of action. 85 00:14:23.320 --> 00:14:28.560 Morality, we have come to understand in our time as a bad thing. 86 00:14:28.560 --> 00:14:36.640 That's an extraordinary revelation, if you call it a revelation, of the part of modern people, that morality is bad. 87 00:14:36.640 --> 00:14:40.640 What do we think of moral people as doing? What do we think of morality as being? 88 00:14:40.640 --> 00:14:49.760 We think of moral people as being usually people of a rather elderly caste of mind, 89 00:14:49.760 --> 00:14:57.320 who sit around, they all have to be male too, sitting around wringing their hands over the 90 00:14:57.320 --> 00:15:03.160 younger generation and the healthy pursuits that they're engaging in, and thinking of 91 00:15:03.160 --> 00:15:07.520 ways to thwart them, to make them as unhappy as we possibly can. 92 00:15:07.520 --> 00:15:14.520 And morality, on this understanding, embodies the code that these people unasked for, unrequested, 93 00:15:14.520 --> 00:15:17.400 try to impose on the rest of us. 94 00:15:17.400 --> 00:15:25.620 Morality viewed in this way is what a few unhappy people try to do to the vastly happy 95 00:15:25.620 --> 00:15:29.440 majority to drag them down to their own level. 96 00:15:29.440 --> 00:15:32.080 That's not so. 97 00:15:32.080 --> 00:15:39.120 It never was so, it never has been so, no matter how our culture may protest. 98 00:15:39.120 --> 00:15:47.200 Morality is best viewed and the reason that I indulge in this question and ask you indulge 99 00:15:47.200 --> 00:15:59.200 I have recently, as you heard in the introduction, written a book called Reclaiming Morality in America. 100 00:15:59.200 --> 00:16:08.200 I try to define morality in a way that to me is persuasive to people who accept organized religion, 101 00:16:08.200 --> 00:16:15.200 accept the tenets of the Christian faith or the Jewish faith, or indeed of another religion altogether. 102 00:16:15.200 --> 00:16:24.440 But also, for those who think that there needs to be a rational basis for morality, other 103 00:16:24.440 --> 00:16:30.200 than the thunderous voice from the mountaintop saying, thou shalt not. 104 00:16:30.200 --> 00:16:35.400 There is this element to the traditional morality that we have embraced as Westerners, but it 105 00:16:35.400 --> 00:16:37.760 has a rational basis to it. 106 00:16:37.760 --> 00:16:44.720 It's a question of who we are, where we came from, and what we're to do while we're in 107 00:16:44.720 --> 00:16:50.760 in this world, who we are, where we came from, and what we do. 108 00:16:50.760 --> 00:16:57.040 You might call it, if you were inclined to do so, the owner's manual for the human body 109 00:16:57.040 --> 00:16:58.500 and spirit. 110 00:16:58.500 --> 00:17:10.360 Virmalny speaks to that which enhances man's place in this world, brings out the highest 111 00:17:10.360 --> 00:17:13.040 and the noblest. 112 00:17:13.040 --> 00:17:15.480 You know, when I speak of man, I'm speaking generically. 113 00:17:15.480 --> 00:17:18.760 I have to make that apology these days in modern times, 114 00:17:18.760 --> 00:17:21.600 because if I say man, people will sometimes ask, 115 00:17:21.600 --> 00:17:23.800 well, what about women? 116 00:17:23.800 --> 00:17:27.640 And I'm speaking of man and woman together. 117 00:17:27.640 --> 00:17:29.400 And I'm speaking of man and woman together 118 00:17:29.400 --> 00:17:32.480 in a way that traditional morality understands 119 00:17:32.480 --> 00:17:36.400 is fundamental to our place in life. 120 00:17:36.400 --> 00:17:38.760 Man and woman is made for each other, 121 00:17:38.760 --> 00:17:41.960 not as antagonists, 122 00:17:41.960 --> 00:17:54.960 But as the essential units of our society made for each other, and therefore called on to live in a relationship where each honors the other. 123 00:17:54.960 --> 00:18:00.960 A relationship that leads to the formation of families and the procreation of life. 124 00:18:00.960 --> 00:18:07.960 And that's based on fidelity, lifelong fidelity, each to the other. 125 00:18:07.960 --> 00:18:24.960 A commitment that provides a level of happiness and health, as even the medical doctors will tell us today, that is not reachable in other relationships. 126 00:18:24.960 --> 00:18:36.960 This is one aspect of morality. It is living the life for which we were created, understanding the instincts and the impulses and the temptations that we have, 127 00:18:36.960 --> 00:18:42.000 and then putting reins on the worst of those temptations and sometimes the best of those temptations 128 00:18:42.000 --> 00:18:52.320 and striving to live in a just and an honorable and a decent and a virtuous manner 129 00:18:52.320 --> 00:19:00.640 because as we practice justice and virtue and decency we obtain the highest happiness 130 00:19:00.640 --> 00:19:06.640 and we know this through the testimony not only of our parents and our grandparents 131 00:19:06.960 --> 00:19:36.960 But through the great corpus of western literature, through that great book, which we can't have in school rooms anymore because the federal government has told us not to, the Holy Babel, we understand it through the songs and the legends, and the bedtime stories, the prayers, that are part of our culture, that are part of the system, 132 00:19:36.960 --> 00:19:44.160 This great warp and wolf of Western culture that's much more than a series of forbidding 133 00:19:44.160 --> 00:19:48.280 titles in the Centapican that are a part of our way of life. 134 00:19:48.280 --> 00:19:49.280 We understand this. 135 00:19:49.280 --> 00:19:50.280 We know this. 136 00:19:50.280 --> 00:19:58.120 We know that justice and virtue and mercy and truth are good for us, even if we must 137 00:19:58.120 --> 00:20:01.120 die for them, as occasionally we must. 138 00:20:01.120 --> 00:20:03.920 Our culture has taught us this. 139 00:20:03.920 --> 00:20:13.560 And yet the great irony is that the culture of the West today has become despised, downtrodden, 140 00:20:13.560 --> 00:20:15.180 reviled. 141 00:20:15.180 --> 00:20:22.200 The culture that invented democracy, the culture that invented freedom, the culture that is 142 00:20:22.200 --> 00:20:29.520 the most inspired of all by religious truth is reviled because of certain offenses that 143 00:20:29.520 --> 00:20:38.600 It is alleged to have created it against particular members, women or blacks or ethnic minorities 144 00:20:38.600 --> 00:20:42.800 of one sort or another, Indians, that's particularly popular nowadays. 145 00:20:42.800 --> 00:20:47.240 The culture of the West is said to have brought nothing but suffering and hardship to these 146 00:20:47.240 --> 00:20:50.120 people and therefore we have to reject it. 147 00:20:50.120 --> 00:20:57.000 All the songs and the stories and the poems and the legends that tell us about justice 148 00:20:57.000 --> 00:21:07.600 And we are to strive for a new understanding. What is that understanding to be composed 149 00:21:07.600 --> 00:21:15.280 of? What's to make it up? That understanding is to be made up of our personal intuitions. 150 00:21:15.280 --> 00:21:23.960 That has been the downfall of our moral understanding in the 20th century. The impulse to make it 151 00:21:23.960 --> 00:21:31.960 We go up as we go to substitute for the great tradition of Western society our personal insights. 152 00:21:31.960 --> 00:21:36.960 We substituted what I call the horizontal view of life. 153 00:21:36.960 --> 00:21:43.960 We have put it in place of what I call the vertical view of life. 154 00:21:43.960 --> 00:21:45.960 The vertical view, what was it? 155 00:21:45.960 --> 00:21:52.960 It was the upward glance toward authority, toward God at the top of the authority scale. 156 00:21:52.960 --> 00:21:59.760 God was a word that we didn't use to shrink from using in public discourse at an earlier 157 00:21:59.760 --> 00:22:02.480 time in our past. 158 00:22:02.480 --> 00:22:10.640 But in any case, we saw life as structured in a vertical sense, some things being better 159 00:22:10.640 --> 00:22:17.420 than other things, some things being ipso facto inferior to other things and therefore not 160 00:22:17.420 --> 00:22:20.360 to be grasped or to be appropriated. 161 00:22:20.360 --> 00:22:26.360 Differentiated. A structure of value. What do we have today? What have we replaced it with? 162 00:22:26.360 --> 00:22:30.360 We've replaced it with a culture that we imported from political democracy. 163 00:22:30.360 --> 00:22:34.360 Political democracy, do not mistake me, has been a good thing for this country. 164 00:22:34.360 --> 00:22:37.360 It has given us the freest government in the history of mankind. 165 00:22:37.360 --> 00:22:43.360 But when we imported political democracy from the political realm to the cultural realm, 166 00:22:43.360 --> 00:22:49.360 then we began to treat values in the way that we treated political candidates. 167 00:22:49.360 --> 00:22:57.360 Each equal to a claim on our affections, and our hopes, and our aspirations. 168 00:22:57.360 --> 00:23:03.360 Each having an equal claim on us. All values being alike. 169 00:23:03.360 --> 00:23:12.360 The horizontal view is the name that I have given to this view because everything seems to be on the same plane. 170 00:23:12.360 --> 00:23:17.360 We look left, we look right, we look behind us, we look ahead of us, and we see people doing particular things. 171 00:23:17.360 --> 00:23:31.640 Why can't I do as well? Why can't I, likewise, seek to do what I want to do in my personal 172 00:23:31.640 --> 00:23:38.960 spirit? And so I will. And I'll do whatever I want to do. The do-it culture. I guess do 173 00:23:38.960 --> 00:23:45.200 it. The name of that paradigmatic 1970s book by Jerry Ribbett, which had an exclamation 174 00:23:45.200 --> 00:23:54.200 Do it! Do whatever you want to do, so long as you enjoy doing it. 175 00:23:54.200 --> 00:24:01.200 Interesting thing about Jerry Ribbon, because he was crossing a freeway in Los Angeles recently, 176 00:24:01.200 --> 00:24:09.200 was struck by an automobile, he was crossing against the light, jaywalking, and was struck by a car, 177 00:24:09.200 --> 00:24:16.320 Struck by a car and died of a cerebral hemorrhage several days later doing it. 178 00:24:16.320 --> 00:24:23.800 I think a rather graphic illustration of the point that I made about the beneficial aspects 179 00:24:23.800 --> 00:24:25.720 of morality. 180 00:24:25.720 --> 00:24:31.800 As we obey the moral law, we thrive, or at least we die with honor. 181 00:24:31.800 --> 00:24:38.680 As we disregard it, we sink lower and lower and lower. 182 00:24:38.680 --> 00:25:07.680 What's happened basically is that we have gone from a vertical view of life to a horizontal view, and that our teaching institutions, the institutions that are supposed to impart value to us, to pass on the norms and the traditions of the human race, have likewise taken up to a great and dismaying extent this horizontal view. 183 00:25:07.680 --> 00:25:15.680 There are three principal teaching institutions on which we rely for the imparting of norms and standards. 184 00:25:15.680 --> 00:25:22.680 They are the schools, the church, and the family, and each in its own way has failed. 185 00:25:22.680 --> 00:25:28.680 The public schools, the public schools which now educate the vast majority of American students, 186 00:25:28.680 --> 00:25:36.680 have become institutions not so much for the imparting of knowledge, and certainly not for the imparting of values, 187 00:25:36.680 --> 00:25:51.680 But for the kind of feel-good acculturation that our society seems to demand now, multiculturalism and pluralism and sex education and socialization, 188 00:25:51.680 --> 00:25:57.680 not to mention keeping kids off the street who might be robbing 7-elevens if they were left to their own devices. 189 00:25:57.680 --> 00:26:12.680 All these missions the public schools have taken up because our society has decided that the schools in fact had a mission that went far beyond simple imparting of facts and truths. 190 00:26:12.680 --> 00:26:23.680 The churches entered in the 1960s and even before that, if you want to take it back in a historical sense to the 1890s, you most assuredly can do that too. 191 00:26:23.680 --> 00:26:29.000 But the Church has entered upon a time when the teaching of the Gospel and the propounding 192 00:26:29.000 --> 00:26:36.880 of religious truth became less important than the solution of what were deemed to be intractable 193 00:26:36.880 --> 00:26:42.120 social problems, poverty and crime and war. 194 00:26:42.120 --> 00:26:49.200 The Church sought to make a place for itself in the world by propounding what it thought 195 00:26:49.200 --> 00:27:18.200 The Churches, as they retreated from their historic duty of propounding religious truth, became less and less consequential in day-to-day activity. 196 00:27:18.200 --> 00:27:22.680 So that you found churchmen, frequently, who wanted to be thought of as vomit, adopting 197 00:27:22.680 --> 00:27:28.360 the most extreme and extraordinary positions, saying things that you never thought that 198 00:27:28.360 --> 00:27:35.600 they would say, because the churches have been importers of truth, divinely reveal 199 00:27:35.600 --> 00:27:44.520 truth, and yet you will find clergy, throughout America today, throughout western culture, 200 00:27:44.520 --> 00:27:51.840 and encouraging people to do whatever they want to do in the name of their individual 201 00:27:51.840 --> 00:27:58.560 destiny or their inner child or whatever, such as the lowliest state to which the churches 202 00:27:58.560 --> 00:27:59.560 have brought themselves. 203 00:27:59.560 --> 00:28:05.040 But the family itself has been disqualified to a great extent as a teaching institution 204 00:28:05.040 --> 00:28:10.720 by the simple dissolution of families, which has been encouraged by the culture. 205 00:28:10.720 --> 00:28:14.220 Divorce has been the great solvent. 206 00:28:14.220 --> 00:28:21.800 The idea has been that no longer is marriage a lifetime covenant, but rather an arrangement 207 00:28:21.800 --> 00:28:30.100 that we enjoy and enter into so long, and this was one of the 1960s formulations that 208 00:28:30.100 --> 00:28:35.580 people put in their marriage ceremonies, so long as love shall last. 209 00:28:35.580 --> 00:28:41.700 So long as love shall last, which is a very extraordinary thing to say because people 210 00:28:41.700 --> 00:28:49.060 People fall out of love day by day, but the people who deeply love seem to move beyond 211 00:28:49.060 --> 00:28:57.460 that and to forgive and to move onward to a higher plateau of love than these daily interruptions 212 00:28:57.460 --> 00:28:59.900 of affection seem to make possible. 213 00:28:59.900 --> 00:29:05.760 But the family is dissolved, single mothers have taken up the job in many cases that was 214 00:29:05.760 --> 00:29:12.880 was designed for two parents, the education, the faithful rearing of children, and it becomes 215 00:29:12.880 --> 00:29:20.920 impossible then for the family to do an effective job, even when the family isn't inclined to 216 00:29:20.920 --> 00:29:21.920 do so. 217 00:29:21.920 --> 00:29:25.960 It becomes very difficult for the family to carry on the job of training. 218 00:29:25.960 --> 00:29:29.760 The poor single mother comes in at the end of the day, sometimes all she can do is put 219 00:29:29.760 --> 00:29:35.680 food on the table, make sure the homework is done, and the lights turn out at bedtime. 220 00:29:35.680 --> 00:29:45.680 Don't call on her to impart moral teaching, but the family has been disabled by the trends of the times. 221 00:29:45.680 --> 00:29:51.680 And so are three great teaching institutions, churches, schools, and family, 222 00:29:51.680 --> 00:29:55.680 no longer teaching the great truths of the West. 223 00:29:55.680 --> 00:30:02.680 What's our hope? Our hope in these times is for a reopening of moral debate. 224 00:30:02.680 --> 00:30:13.680 And I think that's going on. I think it's commencing. I've been very pleased by the reception that my book on morality has gotten, but I'm not the only author writing about morality today. 225 00:30:13.680 --> 00:30:31.680 Even Time Magazine and Newsweek, which went through about 20 years after, well, certainly Time Magazine did, after the death of Henry Luce, went through a time when it felt that nothing could be sillier than the examination of morals. 226 00:30:31.680 --> 00:31:01.680 The most of all, I think what is necessary is the rediscovery in our time of God and of his benevolent purposes, able to do what he wants to do, to do what he wants to do, to do what he wants to do, to do what he wants to do, 227 00:31:01.680 --> 00:31:08.680 A religious conversion could fix this country faster than anything else could possibly do, 228 00:31:08.960 --> 00:31:15.960 far faster than any presidential election. The problems of our day will not be solved 229 00:31:17.400 --> 00:31:24.400 by politicians, and they will not be solved by journalists, I'll tell you that. The finished 230 00:31:24.400 --> 00:31:37.040 The most pointed psalm that I know of in a battle is this one, from which I quote just a few words, 231 00:31:37.040 --> 00:31:44.720 Oh, put not your trust in princes or on any child of man, for there is no help in them. 232 00:31:44.720 --> 00:31:52.240 Oh, put not your trust in princes. I've never heard better political advice in my life. 233 00:31:52.240 --> 00:31:59.200 Of course, our modern-day princes who are politicians can't acknowledge that. 234 00:31:59.200 --> 00:32:06.120 They can't acknowledge something that is to be found in a book that the Supreme Court 235 00:32:06.120 --> 00:32:13.680 says cannot be lawfully admitted to a public school classroom, or from which a quotation 236 00:32:13.680 --> 00:32:21.840 might be used at a public function on taxpayer-sponsored premises. 237 00:32:21.840 --> 00:32:29.400 So to find this book, you go to your bookshelf at home. You go to the place where books like 238 00:32:29.400 --> 00:32:36.400 this came from, the church. Or you go when all else fails to the nightstand in your motel. 239 00:32:36.400 --> 00:32:47.720 But you go. The reformation of our culture, the great task facing us today, far, far greater 240 00:32:47.720 --> 00:32:52.640 Then the reformation of our economy, of our political structure. 241 00:32:52.640 --> 00:33:03.640 Mute testimony to this are those ghastly pieces of rubble in Oklahoma City, the work of people 242 00:33:03.640 --> 00:33:09.960 who have forgotten God, and we must not forget him, we must not forget him, and we must not 243 00:33:09.960 --> 00:33:15.720 forget what those who have forgotten him have done. 244 00:33:15.720 --> 00:33:21.720 And now, I think I've used up the allotted 30 minutes and I'd be glad to answer any questions. 245 00:33:21.720 --> 00:33:37.720 Well, speaking for maybe the other revile profession you mentioned, the lawyers, the trial lawyers, especially under great attack. 246 00:33:37.720 --> 00:34:07.720 and I'll be interested in your comments about this observation and the Chronicle on High Education back in 1988, it reprinted a graduation address by an attorney at Cornell University and he was a 50, he'd been practicing law for 50 years and he said that he regretted the public image of lawyers now and that they had perceived correctly as being mainly in a business rather than a profession and he laid the blame on our culture and also on higher education 247 00:34:07.720 --> 00:34:08.220 and the 248 00:34:08.220 --> 00:34:13.620 education in general in preparing lawyers and he was speaking of the culture in general but lawyers in particular. 249 00:34:13.840 --> 00:34:20.500 He said that the people in charge of higher education in the 19th century recognized that a higher education, college education, 250 00:34:21.180 --> 00:34:28.160 primary the doctors, lawyers, preachers and teachers and the guardian sort of the public trust of freedom. 251 00:34:28.400 --> 00:34:32.940 He said that the purpose of a higher education in the 19th century was based on the 252 00:35:02.940 --> 00:35:21.780 I think that's wonderfully said. I couldn't agree more with that. The legal profession 253 00:35:21.780 --> 00:35:30.140 is a national example of the corruption that our culture has inflicted on those institutions 254 00:35:30.140 --> 00:35:34.100 Lawyers were guardians of our culture. 255 00:35:34.100 --> 00:35:40.220 The lawyer was a guardian, and it really wasn't all that long ago that lawyers were guardians 256 00:35:40.220 --> 00:35:41.220 of our culture. 257 00:35:41.220 --> 00:35:48.180 I proposed myself in high school and in my very early years in college to become a lawyer. 258 00:35:48.180 --> 00:35:52.780 I thought better of it and, as I say, trained as a historian instead. 259 00:35:52.780 --> 00:35:58.300 But I will remember that the legal profession in those days was not a business. 260 00:35:58.300 --> 00:36:07.460 to some degree, by the lawyers in my town, my rather small Texas town, as a trust, which 261 00:36:07.460 --> 00:36:12.860 did well by some members and less well by others, but which nevertheless transcended 262 00:36:12.860 --> 00:36:21.660 individual aspiration. It was a very high trust. To go into the kind of teaching that 263 00:36:21.660 --> 00:36:27.020 you have reference to is a difficult thing because we have to persuade people to do that 264 00:36:27.020 --> 00:36:50.020 I agree with you. I very much agree with the point that higher education has a duty to teach virtue and that as it fails to do so, then it has to accept a share of the blame for the lack of virtue in our present-day society. 265 00:36:50.020 --> 00:37:02.020 Education is a central thing. Education at all levels is the problem of schools, the churches, the families. 266 00:37:02.020 --> 00:37:16.020 The love of virtue is a kind of instinct that rational human beings seem to have engrafted in most of them at birth. 267 00:37:16.020 --> 00:37:17.020 at Birth. 268 00:37:17.020 --> 00:37:24.220 But that instinct will be dormant unless it's treated like a fragile plant and watered and 269 00:37:24.220 --> 00:37:27.820 tended and given sunshine. 270 00:37:27.820 --> 00:37:30.380 And that's the task of education. 271 00:37:30.380 --> 00:37:34.420 So I very much endorse the point that you made. 272 00:37:34.420 --> 00:37:35.420 Leland? 273 00:37:35.420 --> 00:37:40.900 Mr. Murchison, I think you're magnificently right about the great damage being done by 274 00:37:40.900 --> 00:37:45.340 trends and fashions that undercut morality. 275 00:37:45.340 --> 00:37:51.580 My question has to do with whether we should look to religion for restoration, because 276 00:37:51.580 --> 00:37:59.020 if you tell people that religion is the key to the way out, I think you've got to tell 277 00:37:59.020 --> 00:38:02.140 them that the doctrines of religion are in fact true. 278 00:38:02.140 --> 00:38:06.340 It won't work to tell them that it would be convenient if they were true, or it would 279 00:38:06.340 --> 00:38:08.540 be convenient if you thought they were true. 280 00:38:08.540 --> 00:38:14.940 You've got to be able to tell them that the doctrines of religion are true, and then it 281 00:38:14.940 --> 00:38:22.540 becomes important to figure out which doctrines are true, because you can't make a compromise 282 00:38:22.540 --> 00:38:29.180 really between Islam and Judaism and Christianity. In important respects, they're saying different 283 00:38:29.180 --> 00:38:34.860 things. For example, the divinity and the redemptive mission of Christ is not just a 284 00:38:34.860 --> 00:38:40.700 detail which we cannot accommodate to among different religions. So that's really my question, 285 00:38:40.700 --> 00:38:44.220 which particular religious doctrines are the truth? 286 00:38:44.220 --> 00:38:54.220 As a Christian, if you call Episcopalianism Christian, which it is on rare and random occasions, 287 00:38:54.220 --> 00:38:59.220 as a Christian I am more than willing that Muslims should teach the validity of their 288 00:38:59.220 --> 00:39:00.220 faith. 289 00:39:00.220 --> 00:39:03.660 I'm more than willing that Jews should teach the validity of their faith. 290 00:39:03.660 --> 00:39:09.540 But I simply expect Christian ministers and pastors and priests, likewise, to have as 291 00:39:09.540 --> 00:39:15.840 is high concern for the validity of their faith, which I happen to believe is true. 292 00:39:15.840 --> 00:39:24.840 I think that the great flaw of religion in our present time, the religious establishment, 293 00:39:24.840 --> 00:39:29.300 has been to see essentially all religions on the same par. 294 00:39:29.300 --> 00:39:34.660 It's gotten so bad in the Episcopal Church that now we're not even supposed to talk about 295 00:39:34.660 --> 00:39:45.460 evangelization of people who are not Christian. We purged the missionary hymns out of our 296 00:39:45.460 --> 00:39:51.860 last hymnal to Greenland's icy mountain, Africa's sunny shore. We're not supposed to talk about 297 00:39:51.860 --> 00:39:59.380 taking the gospel to the healing. We're supposed to talk only about offering an interesting 298 00:39:59.380 --> 00:40:18.300 The question that you ask, which truth is valid, is unanswerable, except at the individual 299 00:40:18.300 --> 00:40:29.020 level, about which I mean that each seeker must decide which religion best reflects his 300 00:40:29.020 --> 00:40:36.020 The question then becomes one of how we inspire the religious establishment to offer a version 301 00:40:43.620 --> 00:40:50.620 of truth, as opposed to simple alternatives, and to make those versions enticing and attractive 302 00:40:50.620 --> 00:41:07.180 And we have to get the churches past this very 1960s horizontal way of thinking, but 303 00:41:07.180 --> 00:41:14.100 I think that will happen, I think that will happen, not because I as a layman will have 304 00:41:14.100 --> 00:41:20.540 any effect or the media, God help us, will have any effect or the politicians, but rather 305 00:41:20.540 --> 00:41:28.060 under, because the church is not of man. The church is under God, and he will have the 306 00:41:28.060 --> 00:41:33.180 say in what happens to the church. Question? Yes? 307 00:41:33.180 --> 00:41:39.140 Just as an interesting quick note to what you just said, C.S. Lewis in his Abolition 308 00:41:39.140 --> 00:41:45.460 of Man in an Appendices says that there's a lot of commonality between these major religions, 309 00:41:45.460 --> 00:41:49.900 whether they're from the Far East or they're from the Christian West, there's a commonality 310 00:41:49.900 --> 00:42:08.780 Right. Some things are better than other things and that some things are right and other things 311 00:42:08.780 --> 00:42:16.140 are wrong. We're politically incorrect or we're reactionary if we express an opinion 312 00:42:16.140 --> 00:42:25.140 And we're certainly repressive. There is one of the most deadly words of the American left, repressive. 313 00:42:25.140 --> 00:42:30.140 My goodness, we don't want to do anything that the liberal media might construe as repressive, 314 00:42:30.140 --> 00:42:36.140 such as express the judgment that something is better than something else. 315 00:42:36.140 --> 00:42:44.140 But you're right, that commonality of our culture has been missing for a very long time. 316 00:42:44.140 --> 00:42:50.300 The media has been celebrating the 20th anniversary of the downfall of Vietnam. Do you think the 317 00:42:50.300 --> 00:42:58.180 Vietnam War and segregation were responsible for the success or takeover of the liberal 318 00:42:58.180 --> 00:43:00.580 philosophy and that sort of thing? 319 00:43:00.580 --> 00:43:09.780 Yes, I do to a great extent because I think that the civil rights battle of the 1950s 320 00:43:09.780 --> 00:43:39.780 was one that I think encouraged Americans to think of government in a friendlier way than they had thought of it up to that time, of course the New Deal was fundamental there too, but I think Americans came to see government as indispensable in the process of establishing justice, and I think they came also to think of action in the streets as being conducive to the realization of the standard of justice. 321 00:43:39.780 --> 00:43:46.820 Also because many of the people who participated in the Vietnam protest had grown up in the 322 00:43:46.820 --> 00:43:51.980 civil rights demonstrations, there was a certain continuity there between civil rights and 323 00:43:51.980 --> 00:43:52.980 Vietnam. 324 00:43:52.980 --> 00:44:00.620 And we were for peace and justice, and I remember, I grew up in this time, I'm 53 years old, 325 00:44:00.620 --> 00:44:07.940 I graduated from college in 1963, and I can well recall sitting around listening to Peter 326 00:44:37.940 --> 00:44:49.940 of the Cultural Influences that came from this time, likewise, fed the sort of touchy 327 00:44:49.940 --> 00:44:52.140 feelings of the 1960s. 328 00:44:52.140 --> 00:45:02.060 And I think also that we were experiencing cultural breakdown simply from a, it had been 329 00:45:02.060 --> 00:45:06.420 going on throughout the century, it had been going on in the 1920s, it would have gone 330 00:45:06.420 --> 00:45:10.020 on the 30s if it had been for the depression, would have gone on the 40s had it not been 331 00:45:10.020 --> 00:45:11.020 for World War II. 332 00:45:11.020 --> 00:45:17.660 I think it started a long time actually before Vietnam and the civil rights demonstrations 333 00:45:17.660 --> 00:45:23.860 and I'd take it back to the Enlightenment and I could even make if I had another hour 334 00:45:23.860 --> 00:45:31.300 or two, I'd make the case for the Renaissance and the Reformation being the great seedbeds 335 00:45:31.300 --> 00:45:33.500 of our modern calamities. 336 00:45:33.500 --> 00:45:36.500 But how shall it be? It's probably time for another question. 337 00:45:36.500 --> 00:45:38.500 Yeah, this is for you. 338 00:45:38.500 --> 00:45:46.500 Well, you talk about the media being a source of a lot of blame for the problems we have today. 339 00:45:46.500 --> 00:45:50.500 I'm wondering if you could comment on the new media as being part of the solutions. 340 00:45:50.500 --> 00:45:52.500 The new media, the talk radio shows and such? 341 00:45:52.500 --> 00:45:59.500 Talk radio, electronic media, computers, traditional newspaper readerships have been going down. 342 00:45:59.500 --> 00:46:07.500 I'm painfully aware about declining readership. That's something that Jeff Tucker and I were talking about in the car over here. 343 00:46:07.500 --> 00:46:16.500 71% of Americans read newspapers in 1961. It's down to about 60% right now, and that is on the decline. 344 00:46:16.500 --> 00:46:20.500 And that's not even counting the gap between Sunday readership and weekly readership. 345 00:46:20.500 --> 00:46:30.620 But I think that that's part of the failure of the media, as part of the culture, to present 346 00:46:30.620 --> 00:46:38.300 something that's useful, that the culture needs and wants, whether or not it knows that 347 00:46:38.300 --> 00:46:40.580 it needs and wants these things. 348 00:46:40.580 --> 00:46:50.460 The rise of talk radio and the rise of non-traditional newspapers has been a response, I think, to 349 00:46:50.460 --> 00:46:54.960 to the blindness and the obtusity of the establishment media. 350 00:46:54.960 --> 00:46:57.360 We have been extremely obtuse. 351 00:46:57.360 --> 00:47:00.860 We don't care what our readers want anymore. 352 00:47:00.860 --> 00:47:06.260 We sit around in small conversational knots, and we decide what they want, and we make 353 00:47:06.260 --> 00:47:08.540 a list. 354 00:47:08.540 --> 00:47:12.540 And then we make sure that our editors get the word, and that's what we give them. 355 00:47:12.540 --> 00:47:16.740 And if the readers don't want it, the viewers don't want it, well, those poor boobs, that's 356 00:47:16.740 --> 00:47:19.020 their problem, not ours. 357 00:47:19.020 --> 00:47:23.020 is their fault for not wanting what we say they ought to want. 358 00:47:23.020 --> 00:47:29.120 But I think that here in the case of talk radio and other non-traditional media, you've 359 00:47:29.120 --> 00:47:31.300 got the good old marketplace working. 360 00:47:31.300 --> 00:47:32.300 God bless the marketplace. 361 00:47:32.300 --> 00:47:37.300 I know I can get Valis saying that at the Von Mises interview. 362 00:47:37.300 --> 00:47:40.500 I just wanted one more comment. 363 00:47:40.500 --> 00:47:47.140 I watched on C-SPAN, a good media, the Senate shall be in charge of the committee. 364 00:47:47.140 --> 00:47:51.900 Did you see this to investigate and do some investigations about increasing security at 365 00:47:51.900 --> 00:47:56.140 federal buildings and he had the man in charge of general services administration. 366 00:47:56.140 --> 00:48:00.980 My point is just to underscore one of your points. 367 00:48:00.980 --> 00:48:06.980 He talked in particular about the great need for great security of child care facilities 368 00:48:06.980 --> 00:48:12.780 in buildings and he talked about the many aspects of kidnappers, of children getting 369 00:48:12.780 --> 00:48:35.780 You are right. You are right. So you are interposing a cultural answer to a political problem. 370 00:48:35.780 --> 00:48:39.620 And you're doing exactly what I've been advocating today. 371 00:48:39.620 --> 00:48:45.220 The problem is not the security of the child care facility at the federal building. 372 00:48:45.220 --> 00:48:53.620 The problem is the growing tendency of families just to put children at the mercy of whatever 373 00:48:53.620 --> 00:48:58.740 child care facility happens to be there to look after their children. 374 00:48:58.740 --> 00:49:08.980 Nobody can substitute the love and the affection and the wisdom of the mother with her children. 375 00:49:08.980 --> 00:49:11.380 You simply can't replace it. 376 00:49:11.380 --> 00:49:18.220 And unfortunately, we have replaced it in our time with the child care facility. 377 00:49:18.220 --> 00:49:23.700 This is not a personal attack on people who for economic reasons have to have both parents 378 00:49:23.700 --> 00:49:28.540 working and therefore have to have the children in some facility or the other. 379 00:49:28.540 --> 00:49:35.540 My point is also that the mother is being forced into the mother's place in many instances. 380 00:49:35.540 --> 00:49:37.540 It's not her choice. 381 00:49:37.540 --> 00:49:43.540 To follow along in the same way that Mises and then Loco Perenis on the college campus 382 00:49:43.540 --> 00:49:49.540 had a detrimental effect on all the campus building aspects of our education. 383 00:49:49.540 --> 00:49:50.540 Right. 384 00:49:50.540 --> 00:49:51.540 Okay. 385 00:49:51.540 --> 00:49:52.540 Let's do it. 386 00:49:52.540 --> 00:49:55.540 We have time for one more question. 387 00:49:55.540 --> 00:50:02.980 Of course. It seems to me a lot of these things that you're bringing up are economic actors acting in their own rational self-interest. 388 00:50:02.980 --> 00:50:08.740 Divorce is two people that are married that don't see it in their interest to be married anymore. 389 00:50:08.740 --> 00:50:15.940 The church has altered their structure. It seems to be that the church has made a rational decision that it's in their self-interest to do so. 390 00:50:15.940 --> 00:50:24.540 Child care is just a rational decision to pay enough money to have somebody take care of the children so that you can enter the marketplace and work. 391 00:50:24.540 --> 00:50:31.220 How do you see those things being altered by bringing the church back? 392 00:50:31.220 --> 00:50:39.420 To a certain extent, this is economic progress giving people more choices, allowing them 393 00:50:39.420 --> 00:50:42.140 to decipher themselves how these things should be resolved. 394 00:50:42.140 --> 00:50:43.900 No, you're right. 395 00:50:43.900 --> 00:50:47.460 The people are behaving as economic actors. 396 00:50:47.460 --> 00:50:55.420 The problem is that they're not doing it as I suggest they ought to in a cultural context. 397 00:50:55.420 --> 00:51:00.620 Every economic decision has got non-economic consequences, and I think that a lot of the 398 00:51:00.620 --> 00:51:07.220 decisions to which you refer are made without thought for anything but economic advantage. 399 00:51:07.220 --> 00:51:13.340 We have to see those decisions as being made in the context of our humanity and our relationships 400 00:51:13.340 --> 00:51:19.420 with other people, with our spouses, our children, our communities, our churches. 401 00:51:19.420 --> 00:51:24.860 And we've destroyed our culture, we've semi-destroyed our culture in our time. 402 00:51:24.860 --> 00:51:30.060 So it's very hard for people to act other than as you suggest they do as economic actors. 403 00:51:30.060 --> 00:51:34.260 If we rebuild the culture, if we manage to rebuild the culture through the intervention 404 00:51:34.260 --> 00:51:41.220 of the churches and families and schools, and that's very difficult to do, then people, 405 00:51:41.220 --> 00:51:48.700 When they do behave as economic actors, they will look beyond the purely economic decisions, 406 00:51:48.700 --> 00:51:53.260 and they will evaluate those decisions in terms of their effects on other aspects of 407 00:51:53.260 --> 00:51:57.580 life, not just the economic aspects of life. 408 00:51:57.580 --> 00:51:58.580 Thank you very much.