Today we have a very special guest, Mr. William Murchison, who's a syndicated columnist. He's
a columnist and on the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News, the largest paper
in Texas, I believe, and one of the founding editors of Texas Republic Magazine. He's a
regular contributor to two publications that I used to like a lot, The Wall Street Journal
in the National Review, and he's the author of his book, Reclaiming Morality in America.
And so he is an acknowledged expert in the two things you're not supposed to discuss
in polite company, politics and religion.
So he is the perfect candidate to speak at the political economy seminar at the Ludwig
von Mises Institute.
So ladies and gentlemen, I give you our special guest, Mr. William Murchison.
I think I'm going to stand up, because I found myself constitutionally unable to talk while
reposing on my hand quarters, and then I can see more fully anyway what's going on in the
room while I'm talking.
If I see anybody falling asleep, then I'll have to know it much faster.
I appreciate your indulgence in waiting for me to arrive from the Atlanta airport.
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,
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.
I think according to recent polls, we rank somewhere below trial lawyers in public esteem and slightly above serial murderers.
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.
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.
I don't know whether you heard, it should have been in today's newspapers that Senator
Dole has now called for reversing Roe vs. Wade.
He wants to call it Wade vs. Roe, just not what we might expect but thank you for being
here today.
It's an honor to be on the campus of Auburn University.
It's an honor to be here in connection with the distinguished Ludwig von Mises Institute.
And I'm glad to see Lew Rockwell walk in.
A gentleman who's writing, I had married, whose public persona I had married for a lot of years.
And I'm grateful for the association with the von Mises Institute that I've had through,
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
I want to see if I can put this in a context that might be helpful to us.
I think that as we have surveyed the ghastly damage that has occurred in Oklahoma City,
it's scarcely two weeks now since the bombing, but it's become a feature of the landscape.
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,
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?
I think it's a good question, but I don't think it exhausts the rhetorical possibilities.
I think we could ask ourselves other questions of the same genre.
We could ask ourselves, for example, what kind of country is it in which the Federal Government sends tanks
into an area inhabited not only by armed men, but by unarmed women and children.
We could ask ourselves, what kind of country is it whose president, a self-confessed adulterer and evader of the selective service system,
When he seeks to reform public health, health care, proposes for us nothing less than the
kind of bureaucracy that would have gladdened the heart of any Soviet aberrant in the good
old days of the Iron Curtain.
What kind of country is it, we might ask, that for the sake of eliminating racial discrimination
proposes to enforce another kind of racial discrimination, different races, different forms of discrimination.
What kind of country is it that perpetually spends more than it takes in, with a bottomless
What kind of a country is it that allows the snuffing out each year of one and a half million
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?
A nation very much like our own. The United States of America in 1995.
The Oklahoma City catastrophe has called forth the analytical resources of my profession to a degree probably you have not witnessed in years.
What does it mean? Oh, tell us, wise men of the media. Oh, tell us, talk show hosts, what does it all mean?
How are we to make sense of it? What must we do? What must we do to avoid repetitions?
Ah, and so now we have proposals that the Federal Bureau of Investigation must be empowered
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.
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.
Because we live in a climate in which we cannot contemplate the broadening of liberties but we must rather think of their contraction.
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.
Of course, we might not have such a band, because at night we would deprive congressmen of their most striking rhetorical weapons.
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.
as a fundamental rethinking of our culture, the culture of our country in 1995.
The primary problem today, as I see it, is not people bombing buildings,
it's people wanting to bomb buildings, desiring to inflict injury on other people,
Not asking themselves the signal and essential questions,
is it right or is it wrong, is it good or is it evil,
but acting upon their impulses and their instincts
in the way that they have been conditioned to do
by the cultural influences that surround them,
in which we live, in which we bathe daily.
There's a final distinction between bombing and wanting to bomb, and the distinction lies in the putting of those questions.
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?
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.
We have lost the moral understanding that we had for so many years in our country.
A sense of right and wrong, good and evil, used to underlie and to undergird the culture.
It made America what it was, it made the West what it was.
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
The Stereotypical Understanding of Moral Culture
of Morality, our sense of what it is and what we ought to be doing as moral people has reached
its low point in American society. I'm a little loathe as a trained historian. That's actually
what I set out to be before I wandered into this debased profession of journalism. I received all
my degrees in my major course work of history and then found other employment, but I've always found
and employment of a sort from my historical knowledge because it has made me, among other
things, skeptical of comparing one historical era to another and striving for exact measurements.
But I think it's safe enough to see that the American moral understanding, this junitive
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.
Morality, we have come to understand in our time as a bad thing.
That's an extraordinary revelation, if you call it a revelation, of the part of modern people, that morality is bad.
What do we think of moral people as doing? What do we think of morality as being?
We think of moral people as being usually people of a rather elderly caste of mind,
who sit around, they all have to be male too, sitting around wringing their hands over the
younger generation and the healthy pursuits that they're engaging in, and thinking of
ways to thwart them, to make them as unhappy as we possibly can.
And morality, on this understanding, embodies the code that these people unasked for, unrequested,
try to impose on the rest of us.
Morality viewed in this way is what a few unhappy people try to do to the vastly happy
majority to drag them down to their own level.
That's not so.
It never was so, it never has been so, no matter how our culture may protest.
Morality is best viewed and the reason that I indulge in this question and ask you indulge
I have recently, as you heard in the introduction, written a book called Reclaiming Morality in America.
I try to define morality in a way that to me is persuasive to people who accept organized religion,
accept the tenets of the Christian faith or the Jewish faith, or indeed of another religion altogether.
But also, for those who think that there needs to be a rational basis for morality, other
than the thunderous voice from the mountaintop saying, thou shalt not.
There is this element to the traditional morality that we have embraced as Westerners, but it
has a rational basis to it.
It's a question of who we are, where we came from, and what we're to do while we're in
in this world, who we are, where we came from, and what we do.
You might call it, if you were inclined to do so, the owner's manual for the human body
and spirit.
Virmalny speaks to that which enhances man's place in this world, brings out the highest
and the noblest.
You know, when I speak of man, I'm speaking generically.
I have to make that apology these days in modern times,
because if I say man, people will sometimes ask,
well, what about women?
And I'm speaking of man and woman together.
And I'm speaking of man and woman together
in a way that traditional morality understands
is fundamental to our place in life.
Man and woman is made for each other,
not as antagonists,
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.
A relationship that leads to the formation of families and the procreation of life.
And that's based on fidelity, lifelong fidelity, each to the other.
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.
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,
and then putting reins on the worst of those temptations and sometimes the best of those temptations
and striving to live in a just and an honorable and a decent and a virtuous manner
because as we practice justice and virtue and decency we obtain the highest happiness
and we know this through the testimony not only of our parents and our grandparents
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,
This great warp and wolf of Western culture that's much more than a series of forbidding
titles in the Centapican that are a part of our way of life.
We understand this.
We know this.
We know that justice and virtue and mercy and truth are good for us, even if we must
die for them, as occasionally we must.
Our culture has taught us this.
And yet the great irony is that the culture of the West today has become despised, downtrodden,
reviled.
The culture that invented democracy, the culture that invented freedom, the culture that is
the most inspired of all by religious truth is reviled because of certain offenses that
It is alleged to have created it against particular members, women or blacks or ethnic minorities
of one sort or another, Indians, that's particularly popular nowadays.
The culture of the West is said to have brought nothing but suffering and hardship to these
people and therefore we have to reject it.
All the songs and the stories and the poems and the legends that tell us about justice
And we are to strive for a new understanding. What is that understanding to be composed
of? What's to make it up? That understanding is to be made up of our personal intuitions.
That has been the downfall of our moral understanding in the 20th century. The impulse to make it
We go up as we go to substitute for the great tradition of Western society our personal insights.
We substituted what I call the horizontal view of life.
We have put it in place of what I call the vertical view of life.
The vertical view, what was it?
It was the upward glance toward authority, toward God at the top of the authority scale.
God was a word that we didn't use to shrink from using in public discourse at an earlier
time in our past.
But in any case, we saw life as structured in a vertical sense, some things being better
than other things, some things being ipso facto inferior to other things and therefore not
to be grasped or to be appropriated.
Differentiated. A structure of value. What do we have today? What have we replaced it with?
We've replaced it with a culture that we imported from political democracy.
Political democracy, do not mistake me, has been a good thing for this country.
It has given us the freest government in the history of mankind.
But when we imported political democracy from the political realm to the cultural realm,
then we began to treat values in the way that we treated political candidates.
Each equal to a claim on our affections, and our hopes, and our aspirations.
Each having an equal claim on us. All values being alike.
The horizontal view is the name that I have given to this view because everything seems to be on the same plane.
We look left, we look right, we look behind us, we look ahead of us, and we see people doing particular things.
Why can't I do as well? Why can't I, likewise, seek to do what I want to do in my personal
spirit? And so I will. And I'll do whatever I want to do. The do-it culture. I guess do
it. The name of that paradigmatic 1970s book by Jerry Ribbett, which had an exclamation
Do it! Do whatever you want to do, so long as you enjoy doing it.
Interesting thing about Jerry Ribbon, because he was crossing a freeway in Los Angeles recently,
was struck by an automobile, he was crossing against the light, jaywalking, and was struck by a car,
Struck by a car and died of a cerebral hemorrhage several days later doing it.
I think a rather graphic illustration of the point that I made about the beneficial aspects
of morality.
As we obey the moral law, we thrive, or at least we die with honor.
As we disregard it, we sink lower and lower and lower.
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.
There are three principal teaching institutions on which we rely for the imparting of norms and standards.
They are the schools, the church, and the family, and each in its own way has failed.
The public schools, the public schools which now educate the vast majority of American students,
have become institutions not so much for the imparting of knowledge, and certainly not for the imparting of values,
But for the kind of feel-good acculturation that our society seems to demand now, multiculturalism and pluralism and sex education and socialization,
not to mention keeping kids off the street who might be robbing 7-elevens if they were left to their own devices.
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.
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.
But the Church has entered upon a time when the teaching of the Gospel and the propounding
of religious truth became less important than the solution of what were deemed to be intractable
social problems, poverty and crime and war.
The Church sought to make a place for itself in the world by propounding what it thought
The Churches, as they retreated from their historic duty of propounding religious truth, became less and less consequential in day-to-day activity.
So that you found churchmen, frequently, who wanted to be thought of as vomit, adopting
the most extreme and extraordinary positions, saying things that you never thought that
they would say, because the churches have been importers of truth, divinely reveal
truth, and yet you will find clergy, throughout America today, throughout western culture,
and encouraging people to do whatever they want to do in the name of their individual
destiny or their inner child or whatever, such as the lowliest state to which the churches
have brought themselves.
But the family itself has been disqualified to a great extent as a teaching institution
by the simple dissolution of families, which has been encouraged by the culture.
Divorce has been the great solvent.
The idea has been that no longer is marriage a lifetime covenant, but rather an arrangement
that we enjoy and enter into so long, and this was one of the 1960s formulations that
people put in their marriage ceremonies, so long as love shall last.
So long as love shall last, which is a very extraordinary thing to say because people
People fall out of love day by day, but the people who deeply love seem to move beyond
that and to forgive and to move onward to a higher plateau of love than these daily interruptions
of affection seem to make possible.
But the family is dissolved, single mothers have taken up the job in many cases that was
was designed for two parents, the education, the faithful rearing of children, and it becomes
impossible then for the family to do an effective job, even when the family isn't inclined to
do so.
It becomes very difficult for the family to carry on the job of training.
The poor single mother comes in at the end of the day, sometimes all she can do is put
food on the table, make sure the homework is done, and the lights turn out at bedtime.
Don't call on her to impart moral teaching, but the family has been disabled by the trends of the times.
And so are three great teaching institutions, churches, schools, and family,
no longer teaching the great truths of the West.
What's our hope? Our hope in these times is for a reopening of moral debate.
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.
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.
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,
A religious conversion could fix this country faster than anything else could possibly do,
far faster than any presidential election. The problems of our day will not be solved
by politicians, and they will not be solved by journalists, I'll tell you that. The finished
The most pointed psalm that I know of in a battle is this one, from which I quote just a few words,
Oh, put not your trust in princes or on any child of man, for there is no help in them.
Oh, put not your trust in princes. I've never heard better political advice in my life.
Of course, our modern-day princes who are politicians can't acknowledge that.
They can't acknowledge something that is to be found in a book that the Supreme Court
says cannot be lawfully admitted to a public school classroom, or from which a quotation
might be used at a public function on taxpayer-sponsored premises.
So to find this book, you go to your bookshelf at home. You go to the place where books like
this came from, the church. Or you go when all else fails to the nightstand in your motel.
But you go. The reformation of our culture, the great task facing us today, far, far greater
Then the reformation of our economy, of our political structure.
Mute testimony to this are those ghastly pieces of rubble in Oklahoma City, the work of people
who have forgotten God, and we must not forget him, we must not forget him, and we must not
forget what those who have forgotten him have done.
And now, I think I've used up the allotted 30 minutes and I'd be glad to answer any questions.
Well, speaking for maybe the other revile profession you mentioned, the lawyers, the trial lawyers, especially under great attack.
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
and the
education in general in preparing lawyers and he was speaking of the culture in general but lawyers in particular.
He said that the people in charge of higher education in the 19th century recognized that a higher education, college education,
primary the doctors, lawyers, preachers and teachers and the guardian sort of the public trust of freedom.
He said that the purpose of a higher education in the 19th century was based on the
I think that's wonderfully said. I couldn't agree more with that. The legal profession
is a national example of the corruption that our culture has inflicted on those institutions
Lawyers were guardians of our culture.
The lawyer was a guardian, and it really wasn't all that long ago that lawyers were guardians
of our culture.
I proposed myself in high school and in my very early years in college to become a lawyer.
I thought better of it and, as I say, trained as a historian instead.
But I will remember that the legal profession in those days was not a business.
to some degree, by the lawyers in my town, my rather small Texas town, as a trust, which
did well by some members and less well by others, but which nevertheless transcended
individual aspiration. It was a very high trust. To go into the kind of teaching that
you have reference to is a difficult thing because we have to persuade people to do that
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.
Education is a central thing. Education at all levels is the problem of schools, the churches, the families.
The love of virtue is a kind of instinct that rational human beings seem to have engrafted in most of them at birth.
at Birth.
But that instinct will be dormant unless it's treated like a fragile plant and watered and
tended and given sunshine.
And that's the task of education.
So I very much endorse the point that you made.
Leland?
Mr. Murchison, I think you're magnificently right about the great damage being done by
trends and fashions that undercut morality.
My question has to do with whether we should look to religion for restoration, because
if you tell people that religion is the key to the way out, I think you've got to tell
them that the doctrines of religion are in fact true.
It won't work to tell them that it would be convenient if they were true, or it would
be convenient if you thought they were true.
You've got to be able to tell them that the doctrines of religion are true, and then it
becomes important to figure out which doctrines are true, because you can't make a compromise
really between Islam and Judaism and Christianity. In important respects, they're saying different
things. For example, the divinity and the redemptive mission of Christ is not just a
detail which we cannot accommodate to among different religions. So that's really my question,
which particular religious doctrines are the truth?
As a Christian, if you call Episcopalianism Christian, which it is on rare and random occasions,
as a Christian I am more than willing that Muslims should teach the validity of their
faith.
I'm more than willing that Jews should teach the validity of their faith.
But I simply expect Christian ministers and pastors and priests, likewise, to have as
is high concern for the validity of their faith, which I happen to believe is true.
I think that the great flaw of religion in our present time, the religious establishment,
has been to see essentially all religions on the same par.
It's gotten so bad in the Episcopal Church that now we're not even supposed to talk about
evangelization of people who are not Christian. We purged the missionary hymns out of our
last hymnal to Greenland's icy mountain, Africa's sunny shore. We're not supposed to talk about
taking the gospel to the healing. We're supposed to talk only about offering an interesting
The question that you ask, which truth is valid, is unanswerable, except at the individual
level, about which I mean that each seeker must decide which religion best reflects his
The question then becomes one of how we inspire the religious establishment to offer a version
of truth, as opposed to simple alternatives, and to make those versions enticing and attractive
And we have to get the churches past this very 1960s horizontal way of thinking, but
I think that will happen, I think that will happen, not because I as a layman will have
any effect or the media, God help us, will have any effect or the politicians, but rather
under, because the church is not of man. The church is under God, and he will have the
say in what happens to the church. Question? Yes?
Just as an interesting quick note to what you just said, C.S. Lewis in his Abolition
of Man in an Appendices says that there's a lot of commonality between these major religions,
whether they're from the Far East or they're from the Christian West, there's a commonality
Right. Some things are better than other things and that some things are right and other things
are wrong. We're politically incorrect or we're reactionary if we express an opinion
And we're certainly repressive. There is one of the most deadly words of the American left, repressive.
My goodness, we don't want to do anything that the liberal media might construe as repressive,
such as express the judgment that something is better than something else.
But you're right, that commonality of our culture has been missing for a very long time.
The media has been celebrating the 20th anniversary of the downfall of Vietnam. Do you think the
Vietnam War and segregation were responsible for the success or takeover of the liberal
philosophy and that sort of thing?
Yes, I do to a great extent because I think that the civil rights battle of the 1950s
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.
Also because many of the people who participated in the Vietnam protest had grown up in the
civil rights demonstrations, there was a certain continuity there between civil rights and
Vietnam.
And we were for peace and justice, and I remember, I grew up in this time, I'm 53 years old,
I graduated from college in 1963, and I can well recall sitting around listening to Peter
of the Cultural Influences that came from this time, likewise, fed the sort of touchy
feelings of the 1960s.
And I think also that we were experiencing cultural breakdown simply from a, it had been
going on throughout the century, it had been going on in the 1920s, it would have gone
on the 30s if it had been for the depression, would have gone on the 40s had it not been
for World War II.
I think it started a long time actually before Vietnam and the civil rights demonstrations
and I'd take it back to the Enlightenment and I could even make if I had another hour
or two, I'd make the case for the Renaissance and the Reformation being the great seedbeds
of our modern calamities.
But how shall it be? It's probably time for another question.
Yeah, this is for you.
Well, you talk about the media being a source of a lot of blame for the problems we have today.
I'm wondering if you could comment on the new media as being part of the solutions.
The new media, the talk radio shows and such?
Talk radio, electronic media, computers, traditional newspaper readerships have been going down.
I'm painfully aware about declining readership. That's something that Jeff Tucker and I were talking about in the car over here.
71% of Americans read newspapers in 1961. It's down to about 60% right now, and that is on the decline.
And that's not even counting the gap between Sunday readership and weekly readership.
But I think that that's part of the failure of the media, as part of the culture, to present
something that's useful, that the culture needs and wants, whether or not it knows that
it needs and wants these things.
The rise of talk radio and the rise of non-traditional newspapers has been a response, I think, to
to the blindness and the obtusity of the establishment media.
We have been extremely obtuse.
We don't care what our readers want anymore.
We sit around in small conversational knots, and we decide what they want, and we make
a list.
And then we make sure that our editors get the word, and that's what we give them.
And if the readers don't want it, the viewers don't want it, well, those poor boobs, that's
their problem, not ours.
is their fault for not wanting what we say they ought to want.
But I think that here in the case of talk radio and other non-traditional media, you've
got the good old marketplace working.
God bless the marketplace.
I know I can get Valis saying that at the Von Mises interview.
I just wanted one more comment.
I watched on C-SPAN, a good media, the Senate shall be in charge of the committee.
Did you see this to investigate and do some investigations about increasing security at
federal buildings and he had the man in charge of general services administration.
My point is just to underscore one of your points.
He talked in particular about the great need for great security of child care facilities
in buildings and he talked about the many aspects of kidnappers, of children getting
You are right. You are right. So you are interposing a cultural answer to a political problem.
And you're doing exactly what I've been advocating today.
The problem is not the security of the child care facility at the federal building.
The problem is the growing tendency of families just to put children at the mercy of whatever
child care facility happens to be there to look after their children.
Nobody can substitute the love and the affection and the wisdom of the mother with her children.
You simply can't replace it.
And unfortunately, we have replaced it in our time with the child care facility.
This is not a personal attack on people who for economic reasons have to have both parents
working and therefore have to have the children in some facility or the other.
My point is also that the mother is being forced into the mother's place in many instances.
It's not her choice.
To follow along in the same way that Mises and then Loco Perenis on the college campus
had a detrimental effect on all the campus building aspects of our education.
Right.
Okay.
Let's do it.
We have time for one more question.
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.
Divorce is two people that are married that don't see it in their interest to be married anymore.
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.
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.
How do you see those things being altered by bringing the church back?
To a certain extent, this is economic progress giving people more choices, allowing them
to decipher themselves how these things should be resolved.
No, you're right.
The people are behaving as economic actors.
The problem is that they're not doing it as I suggest they ought to in a cultural context.
Every economic decision has got non-economic consequences, and I think that a lot of the
decisions to which you refer are made without thought for anything but economic advantage.
We have to see those decisions as being made in the context of our humanity and our relationships
with other people, with our spouses, our children, our communities, our churches.
And we've destroyed our culture, we've semi-destroyed our culture in our time.
So it's very hard for people to act other than as you suggest they do as economic actors.
If we rebuild the culture, if we manage to rebuild the culture through the intervention
of the churches and families and schools, and that's very difficult to do, then people,
When they do behave as economic actors, they will look beyond the purely economic decisions,
and they will evaluate those decisions in terms of their effects on other aspects of
life, not just the economic aspects of life.
Thank you very much.