How Shall We Then Live, Lesson 9, “The Age of Personal Peace & Affluence”

Man's humanistic thought has come down in many, many forms. Until at a certain point of history, now I would put it in the early 1960s, people heard the same message coming at them from absolutely every side.

Whether they read the book of philosophy, or they went into the art museum, or they listened to music, or they read a modern novel, or they went to the philosophic cinema, it was always the same. And that is that on the humanistic basis, reason leads to despair, to no answers.

And people should try to find answers in the area of non-reason. It had brought people to the place where there were no fixed values whatsoever. These were completely gone. And the great majority of people had come to the place where they had only two horrendous values, absolutely horrible values, personal peace and affluence.

Now, because I'm going to use these terms over and over again in this episode, let me define them carefully, and I'd urge you, please listen with care. As I use the term personal peace, I mean I want to be left alone.

And I don't care what happens to the man across the street or across the world. I want my own lifestyle to be undisturbed, regardless of what it will mean even to my own children and grandchildren. Now, that's what I mean by personal peace.

Affluence means things, things, things, always more things, and success seen as an abundance of things. In the early 60s, a whole generation had been injected by the teaching that reason leads only to pessimism in the area of the meaning of life and of any values.

Students have been hearing this from the professors for a long, long time.

Understood, interpreted. One, therefore, is supposed to...

As a matter of fact, there was a generation that had never been taught anything else. But there was an inconsistency here because most of these professors who taught that life had no meaning and there were no fixed values, they didn't live that way.

They were living in the memory of the past. But we should not have been surprised that at a certain point of time, one generation would act, really act, upon what they had been taught. These students looked around them and they saw these two horrible values of personal peace and affluency being on every side, and they revolted.

That revolution was Berkley, 1964. Looking back into that which is now past history, we don't understand where we are today unless we take a moment to understand the flow through Berkley of 1964. They really wanted to escape the two values of personal peace and affluency.

And they did it in two different ways. First of all came the drug scene, the hippie scene. We've already seen in a previous episode that Aldous Huxley said that as reason does not, humanistic reason, doesn't give a meaning to life.

We can't find objective truth. Give drugs to well people in order that they might try to find truth inside of their own head. The hippie world followed this and they followed it very explicitly. It was an ideology to them.

Let's not make any mistake. Back in those days, it was really an ideology. They really believed in it. They really believed that if you could just take and put drugs into the drinking water, LSD, into the drinking water of the reservoirs of the cities of the world, you had enough people turned on that civilization's problems would be solved.

They believed it with all their heart.

Getting high with the help of your friends. This is a very powerful message.

About the same time at Berkley, there arose a second element in this attempt to escape these two terrible values of personal peace and affluency. This was the free speech movement. At first, the free speech movement on Sproul Plaza was neither left nor right.

It was simply a desire, a demand that they have a right to have freedom, to have political rallies on Sproul Plaza.

And by God, people, we have to push Reagan right back to the wall and if we have to,.

We gotta push him right through the wall.

And we gotta tell him, no, baby, this is our university.

But quickly, it slipped into the new left following Marcuse. Marcuse was a German philosopher, a Marxist, and at that time, he was teaching at San Diego. This spread over the whole world. We can think, for example, of the Paris riots in 1968.

Here they are seeking freedom from these two values. They had the right analysis. Let me say that as somebody who was older. They had the right analysis. This was where our society was with just two terrible values of personal peace and affluency.

But the tragedy was, they tried the wrong solutions. The drug culture came to its height at Woodstock at the festival there in 1969. But in Altima in 1969, there was another festival and the Hell's Angels, who were hired to police the ground, killed at least one man.

And the Rolling Stone, the magazine, came out and quoted someone after that as saying, we've lost our age of innocency. The drug culture was finished. It was completely finished after the Isle of Wight festival in 1970, which ended so ugly, in such an ugly fashion in Europe.

After that, drug-taking changed. Mind you, not less people taking drugs unhappily, but no longer taking them as an ideology. The unhappy thing is probably more people are taking drugs and taking them at a younger age, but drug-taking as an ideology was absolutely done.

The new left went the same way, gradually ground down. It brought forth naturally violence, violence in the United States, violence in Europe, and the idealistic young people really didn't like the violence that it just reasonably and naturally brought forth.

In 1970, the radical students bombed the University of Wisconsin lab building, killing a graduate student. Bombs continue to be planted in the United States, and a small, hardcore of radicals continues to exist.

But the violence of the new left, climaxing in the bombing of this laboratory building, made most young people in the United States no longer see the new left as a hope. So here the students were, and they had tried to escape these two awful values of personal peace and fluency, and now their two hopes, the new left and the drug thing, was gone.

What were they left with? They were left with apathy. Apathy. Many, many people were so glad when the universities quieted down at that time. And in one way, it's good it did quiet down, but I could have wept, and I did weep as I met these young people after this.

All they had left was apathy. And they had tried to escape their parents' poor values, their society's poor values, and they'd gone around in a circle and come back and ended one inch lower. And now apathy ruled with them.

And what was left? The two values of personal peace and affluency now ruled supreme. Now, turning away from the United States, a dominant, strong minority in Europe, and a majority of students, for example, let's say in South America and other parts of the world, they turned to a new leap into the area of non-reason.

And that is, they committed themselves to the Marxist, Leninist, or the Mayist line. Why is this a new kind of leap into the area of non-reason, as utopian in a bad sense as the old drug leap? Well, I'll tell you why.

It's simply because everywhere where Marxian Leninism has come to power, it has always meant oppression, always. And these young people just closed their eyes to that. They closed their eyes to the fact that oppression is a part of the communistic system.

No one has pointed this out more to us than Solzhenitsyn in his emphasis as he's brought it into the Western world in his writings and lectures. And he has said that 15 million inmates of the prison camps existed at one time in Soviet Russia.

He has said that from the Communist Revolution in Russia until only 1959, 66 million people died for political reason. So everywhere one looks in the communist world, it always brings forth internal oppression.

But we must never forget, it also brings forth external oppression. We can think of various things, but the thing which quickly comes to our mind is hunger. And we can think of the war in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

I was living in Switzerland in November 4, 1956 when the Russian tanks moved into Hungary. And at that particular time, I had a radio with a shortwave band all day long. I listened to the Hungarian students speaking in English, sometime broken English, sometime good English, hoping the external world would listen.

I was marked by that day. I'll never forget it.

Never.

Those voices pleading for help. The newspapers right after that carried a picture of a beautiful open-faced lovely girl called Ilan Troth. The picture was a picture of Ilan Troth on trial for her life because of her part in trying to stand against the external oppression that Marxist-Leninism naturally brings with it.

She was hanged on July 1957. Marxist-Leninism is a leap. It's a leap for another reason, even a more basic one than the one I've given. Its foundation, its philosophy, is materialism. Now, all through this series, we've shown that humanism, man beginning from himself, cannot generate any real values or meaning or any real dignity to man.

And here is a system that is built completely and consciously and totally on materialism. There is no place for the dignity of man in a materialistic system. So-called communism with a human face that some of the thinkers in communist-controlled countries have pled for, and some outside of communist-controlled countries have also pled for, it isn't possible.

It just isn't possible on the basis of materialism. And yet, strangely enough, the young people and older ones in non-communist countries are caught by the idealistic Marxist-Leninism.

It was my conviction after examining the different trends in parties and so forth that the Communist Party most held to those ideals.

The reason is that there's so much talk of dignity. Dignity of man, he'd be treated better.

In order to solve those problems and in order to give life, a meaningful and purposeful life to young people.

Where does this come from on a materialistic base?

It doesn't.

Do you wanna know what it is?

I'll tell you.

And there's only one way to understand idealistic utopian Marxianism, and that is that it's a Christian heresy.

And in struggling against and condemning that which is wrong in the world, and Lord knows there's enough of what's wrong in the world.

Idealistic utopian communism simply reaches over, takes these words, which could never be produced out of materialistic philosophy, brings them back, uses them, separated from the natural results of their own position, and in doing so, catches these who are caught by idealistic Marxian-Leninism.

But when Marxian-Leninism comes to power, it's a different story. It's always oppression, and the will of the majority suddenly has no meaning. Not only does the dignity of the individual cease to exist, but the will of the majority has no meaning either.

Now we must understand there are two streams of Leninism-Marxianism. They must be kept separate, and we must see these two streams clearly. The first is the idealistic utopian stream. These usually young people, though sometimes older, who have leapt into the area of non-reason to accept Marxian-Leninism.

That's one stream. The second stream is the hardcore orthodox communist party members in various countries outside of the communist bloc. Now we find that the danger is that people who have only the two values of personal peace and affluency, if they seem to be promised peace and affluency by communism, nobody knows what great majorities of these people will do.

Nobody knows.

More than that, we must see there's a danger in that these two streams of the idealistic Marxian-Leninism and the hardcore Marxian-Leninism orthodox party could flow together in a country at a given moment of history and create a situation that would be forever irreversible.

And that is a very real danger.

This type of danger is before the United States just as well.

The United States has also its marks very much upon it and no more so in any area than the area of the generation of arbitrary law. I want to talk about arbitrary law at some length, actually. Man demanded to be autonomous from God in God's revelation.

And what this has resulted in is relativity not only in personal and public morals, but in law as law. The nature which men try to build their law on, as we remember back in one of the previous episodes, just is not sufficient for the simple reason that nature is both cruel and non-cruel.

And as such, you cannot build a stable system of law on nature. And what we're left with in the humanist flow today in the United States is purely variable sociological law. And by sociological, what I mean is law that is merely based on what some group decides is good for society at a given moment.

The man who opened the door for this, perhaps more than anyone else, was Oliver Wendell Holmes. And he wrote in a letter, I'll quote him exactly, the ultimate question is what do the dominant forces of the community want?

And do they want it hard enough to disregard whatever inhibitions stand in the way? This was Oliver Wendell Holmes quite a few years ago. And really what it amounts to is purely variable law. Much modern law is not consistent with the law that has preceded it.

And as a matter of fact, we must say that the Constitution of the United States today can be made to say almost anything on the basis of sociological variable law. Now, we must understand that a law today is not just variable law, but that the courts are actually making law.

They're not only interpreting the law that the legislative has made, but they actually generate law. Now, everybody knows, who knows anything at all about these things, that arbitrary law dominates completely in communistic countries.

But what most people don't realize is that on the humanist flow, arbitrary law has swept over into the Western world as well. I'd like to use an illustration. Consider the human fetus, the unborn baby.

In January 1973, the United States Supreme Court passed the abortion law. Professor Witherspoon of the University of Texas School of Law writes, the court held that the unborn child is not a person within the meaning of the 14th Amendment, so as to strip all unborn children of all constitutional protection for their lives, liberty, and property.

This ruling by the United States Supreme Court is a totally arbitrary absolute. First of all, it is arbitrary medically. This book was put out with the cooperation of many noted scientists in this field, including some from the United States.

It was to inform the British public. It favors abortion. However, it says that the question as to when human life begins is an open question. It, abortion, can be carried out before the fetus becomes viable, although when that is, is in itself an arguable point.

It further states that a biologist might say that human life started at the moment of fertilization when the sperm and the ovum merged. The arbitrariness, medically, of the Supreme Court decision is underlined by the fact that the destruction of the fetus is accepted in abortion, and yet questions are raised as to whether it is right to fertilize an ovum outside of the womb.

That is, in the laboratory, because then it would only live for a few days. This points up the problem that if such a fertilized ovum were successfully implanted in the womb, that it would have the full genetic potential for becoming a human being.

What does this make the five-and-a-half-month-old aborted baby to be? Because it, too, has the full genetic potential for becoming a human being. Justice White of the Supreme Court, in his dissent concerning the abortion law, said that it is an exercise of raw judicial power, an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review.

Upon this arbitrary ruling, medically and legally, the abortion laws of almost every state in the Union were set aside. Most people accepted this law, even though it was arbitrary medically and legally, because it was considered sociologically helpful.

Why would we not accept laws curtailing human freedom? If these were considered sociologically helpful. What we're left with is sociological law, and that is all. And nobody knows where it will end. By this Supreme Court ruling, the unborn child is considered not to be a person.

In our own day, there's been a great outcry, and quite properly, that in the past, the black slave was viewed as a non-person. But now, by this arbitrary absolute brought in on the humanist flow, millions of unborn children of every color of skin are declared by law to be non-persons.

Now, a question has to be asked. In the day when there are no fixed values, why could not the aged, the incurably ill, the insane, and other classes of persons equally arbitrarily be declared to be non-person on the basis of arbitrary law if the courts thought that it was sociologically helpful?

In a day like our own, what's unthinkable today might not prove, and probably will not prove, unthinkable in a very, very few years. Now, let's move on a bit. As the Christian consensus dies, as the basis of our culture, society does not really have many basis upon which it has the possibility of building.

One is that everybody would simply do their own thing. And this has the technical name of hedonism. It means everybody would do what they want to do. But the simple fact is that it is not possible to build a society on everybody doing what they want to do.

One could think of a single man living on a desert island. He can do anything he wants to do within the form of the universe. But when two men are on that desert island and they have to have interrelationship, it is no longer possible for every man to do what he wants to do.

I often think of the illustration of two men trying to do their own thing, regardless of what anybody else thinks, meeting on a narrow bridge. And as they meet on the narrow bridge, something has to happen.

They both can't do their own thing. Everybody understands you can't build a society on people doing what they want to do, on hedonism. All right then, hedonism is a theoretical basis for society after the Christian consensus is gone.

But if it's not possible, what other possibilities are there? Well, there's the possibility of the total dominance of the 51 vote. Now remember, it was Christianity, the Reformation Christianity in the north of Europe that brought forth the forms and the freedoms which we have in the 51 vote.

But I'm talking about the 51 vote after there is no absolute by which to judge the 51 vote. There was a time in the days when the Christian culture was more dominant when the lone individual could stand up with the Bible in his hand and say, you're wrong, even though the majority has voted the other way.

But as the Christian consensus is gone, then there is no absolute by which to judge the 51%. And then this is a very, very different situation. I'll give you a sentence that I wish you'd memorize. If there is no absolute by which to judge society, society is absolute.

The heart of the humanist thinking is making the individual man and then mankind the center of all things. His own measure of making him autonomous. If we're going to live and escape death, not only death individually in the sense of the judgment of God, but death in our culture, in our political life, in our present life, we must turn from that humanist way of making man autonomous.

And we must put the creator at the center of all things. The greatest of all wickedness is putting any created thing in the place of the creator. And when we turn from this, our feet are turned from the paths of death to the paths of life.