Transcript
{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this
...application to our question. In the New York schools, they have decided that the emphasis in history should be put on leaders, on men. And as we will see right away, this is a strange swing from a time when history was taught as so-called "economic" or "social" history. I know a famous course in one of the leading universities of this country where the poor boys -- seniors in the history course -- had to learn that a great epoch came when blacktop pavement was introduced into New York City in 1874.
It certainly hasn't changed the mores of the New Yorkers, ever since the days when in 1859, 1860, the mayor of New York decided that he was going to secede from the Union because of the election of Mr. Lincoln. The -- 1874 makes no epoch in history. And all the talk of the technocrats, or the -- these very small minds who govern so -- for the last 40 years the classrooms of this nation, are far behind the times. And this board of regents in New York tries to amend for this by saying, "We must get real people into history. And the boys must know who lived at a certain time."
Now why is that necessary? We have made a -- a beginning, gentlemen, to understand the crisis of our time, by simply looking not into the defeats by army and navy -- this is another side of the same picture -- but into the complete madness or insanity that governs the arts. I told you that when the largest success of a season can be A Streetcar Called Desire, then there is no drama, because the hero doesn't rise above his time. Drama means the clash of two epochs. And the hero of a tragedy embodies the new epoch. And that he is the hero of a new epoch conditions his defeat by the old epoch. Socrates is condemned. Jesus is crucified. The saints -- Jeanne d'Arc goes to her death because the old people -- the old times do not understand the new. And the experience of two times meeting -- that's the tragedy.
Think of Romeo and Juliet. Here are the young lovers. They are allowed to show the greatness of their frenzy, of their passion; but the -- the plague on both your houses, Montecchi and Capelletti, the two families bury the new love. And it is left to future generations to heal this wound. And the same poet who, at the beginning of his career, wrote -- Romeo and Juliet in 1594, writes Cymbeline and the Winter's Tale in 1608, where the lovers are allowed to survive, to heal the grievances and the conflicts of their parents. And therefore they are not tragedies, but they are going, you see, into the new time. And the old time is buried. And that is why -- the reason why Shakespeare is the greatest poet of the last thousand years, and perhaps of all times, because he has in every one of his plays, a clear conception that drama is conflict of two times.
Let me enlarge on this with some -- some tidbits which you do not find on -- at the critic's table. All people who -- try to understand literature just because it is literature by itself inside, so to speak, remain inside, have no yardstick. We who know that man's concern is with time and space, with speeding up, with forgetting time, with forming, molding time in order to feel free and redeemed, we get outside literature in our criticism. We can comprehend the sports, and the studies, as you know, and the ritual, and the drama, and the lyrics, and the novel, under one and the same criteria.
And so tragedy and comedy -- tragedy and comedy, the two ways of the drama, can -- easily understood if you see the fool in a comedy -- think of Twelfth Night and Malvolio. The famous -- what's he called there? Who knows Malvolio? In Twelfth Night. Hmm? What's he? What is his function?
(A jester, a fool.)
Malvolio?
(Oh, Malvolio. Oh, oh, oh.)
(He's the butt of the jokes.)
Yes, but what's his function there? What's he in -- in the house of the --?
(A steward, isn't he?)
Wie?
(A steward. The steward.)
A steward, yes. He has been identified as a Mr. Farrington in -- in the -- Lord Derby's household. We have the acts in which he makes all these strange utterances which Shakespeare quotes, whoever Shakespeare was. And in such a comedy, Malvolio is behind the times.
Comedy means that the hero, or the funny person is behind the times. Society already lives in a new era, in a new epoch, under new mores; and the pedant and the fool stay behind. And you have therefore in comedy the travesty of tragedy. In tragedy, the hero is ahead of his time; and in comedy he is behind his time. But again, you have the same conflict of the times. Only the mores of the society laugh at the pedant. For example, which -- think of Holofernes in Shakespeare, and -- and other such types. He is left behind as obsolete, as dated.
The same is true of -- if you read Plau- -- the Roman Plautus, or Aristophanes, the comedy is based on a real reversal of tragedy. And that's why Plato has this famous utterance in The Symposion, as you may -- has anybody read The Symposium of Plato? Who has? One man, shamefully adv- -- averse. I hope all the others have read it, too, but just are too bashful to say so.
Well, that's a great -- great scene in the -- in the love feast of Plato, The Symposion, in which at the end, after a long night of discussions, Socrates stands in a throughfare, undaunted -- he can- -- nobody can get him down, despite all the alcohol they have deleted, and -- and proves to his own satisfaction that the real poet must be a writer of poe- -- of bur- -- burlesque comedy and of tragedy as well. Because the full mastery of the problem of time, which the artist craves, the dramatist, you see, can only stand revealed if he proves that he can reverse the process. He knows then what is funny and what is serious; what is tragic, you see; and what is to be la- -- ridicul- -- ridiculous. Ridiculous, a man who is behind his times, you see; heroic, a man who is ahead of his time.
And therefore, Shakespeare, so to speak, takes up the gauntlet, and whereas you have in antiquity either comedy writers or tragedy writers; you have either Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides on the one-hand side -- or you have Menander, and Aristophanes on the other; Plautus and Terentius in Rome. You -- you get in Shakespeare the free man, the free spirit, who at -- it seems to us at random can at the same time publish the most serious tragedy in the same year, and the most hilarious comedy.
This is miraculous, gentlemen. You don't find easily a man who is the best in stone-throwing, and the best in s- -- in track. This pentathlon, which the Greeks craved, you see, that you had five different sports, so to speak, supplementing each other and demanding really different qualities, was also the ideal of -- is also the ideal of the human mind. And in our era, in the Christian era, it has been solved representatively by Shakespeare. That's why he's so much greater than Racine, or Corneille, or MoliŠre, because MoliŠre only writes comedy, and Racine and Corneille only write tragedy. And I -- always feel that the French, with all their rational passion, have remained Greeks, pagans. They are too clever. You have to be much more humble, and much more passionate, and much more subservient to the spirit, as a man like Shakespeare has been. These people are too clever, these Frenchmen, so they are only one thing.
Stereotype is always rational, gentlemen. But stereotype is not life. Stereotype is not mastery of li- -- of -- of a free man. Rationalists are boring. Don't trust a rationalist. They are always right. They have no idea how it looks on the other side of the fence. I prefer any stupid horse, because at least it has this firm belief that the truth is on the other side of the fence.
Well, to come back to the -- to the issue on hand, gentlemen. Since modern art has lost direction, since music, and since painting, and sculpture, and architecture are no longer under the directing force of heroic drama and its consummation in the transubstantiation of the Mass, where the death of the hero is celebrated every day all over the world -- since -- they have gone secular. That is, they say, "I am a painter; I am a sculpture," and no longer say, "I try to express the truth in painting -- through painting," which is a great difference; since they think they are what they are, they are dead. Any man who can identify himself with any one quality or thing is dead. If a man is just a doctor, don't marry him. He'll never be home.
I say this to the ladies present, of course. But there are now women doctors, too.
Any man who says he's just this, has ceased to live. How can he know what he be- -- is going to be tomorrow?
This is the dramatic character of life: that we either may be sacrificed in battle, or in -- in resistance to injustice, we can't know. Or we may be left behind as funny people, as oddities by the -- swift onslaught of change, of revolution. The Russians always talk of have-been people. Well, they think that all America consists of these have-been people, these people who no longer can adjust themselves to the real future of the human race in unity. They think of our isolationists. They really think that -- all the isolationists think the world is one thing, and America is another. They want everybody else to unite, and keep the sovereignty of the -- of America, besides.
That is, you see, the queer rela- -- our relation to the United Nations, that we really don't -- nobody in America wants the United Nations. I don't. But we won't want to have them for the others; so they must be good.
So we in a way are lof- -- left behind, because in our modern times, no nationalism will stand up under the whip of times. It's -- it's funny. It's absolutely funny. I mean, the French at this moment are the funniest nation in the world, you see, because they are thinking still of Great France. That's funny. You cannot even think of Great America without fe- -- sounding funny, you see. This isn't the issue anymore, to stress your -- your na- -- national heritage. This isn't -- I mean, Albania does this, too. What's Albania? Or Guatemala?
Gentlemen, the order has gone out of this business of creative art, of -- of creation of free time. And therefore, we -- we said already, and let me repeat this once more, we have this strange spectacle that at this moment, the arts are eviscerating themselves. You have abstract art. You have atonal music. You have
spacebound architecture, you see. And you have analytical drama. That is, the drama -- nothing happens in the drama; you are just in -- as in Mr. O'Neill, thrown back. Mourning Becomes Electra, you see. That is, at the end of the drama, we are, so to speak, in an age that is earlier than the beginning, that people go back on themselves, as we have it in psychoanalysis where -- where the sick person, you see, grows younger all the time, tries to go back into -- the mother's womb. And they even preach this. They say that's the ideal desire of man, you see: live backward.
There is a novel I read as a young man, where it is described how a man inven- -- makes a great invention, injects a kind of fluid into himself, and now begins to live backward. And the last moment when he, of course, cannot -- no longer write his autobiography, is when he is lifted up into the womb of his mother, back again, you see. This little novel was written 40 years ago, I suppose. I'm -- terribly old. Or even longer. But that's the trend of our age, you see, to find all the ways backward. And -- part of the American desire at this moment is also to go back to the good times of 1913, or of Jefferson Democracy, you see, and forget about the nasty world and all these Russians, you see, and -- et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Wouldn't it be nice?
I -- a friend of mine was a naval commander. He was sent to Ohio to take over a college there as a -- for the Navy during the war. And he was received by the president of the college with the words: "This is a splendid town. Here is neither a Jew, nor a Catholic, nor a Negro," you see. In Ohio. I don't know if there is such a town, but certainly it must be a very dead town.
But that is the -- are the hope of going -- of living backward. Why do you look so amazed? Are you from Ohio?
Let us look into our departments of philo- -- studies, all philosophy, the shamefully hidden intellectual activities on a college campus. We have there the same absence of direction today. But it comes from omission. We said in the arts, drama is no longer the stage. It's so commercialized. If you can play 5,000 times Tobacco Road and demand from human beings to be the actors on this outfit for -- for five years, and there is no punishment, no penalty on this, you see, it's much worse than slave la- -- labor. And that's what you do to the so-called actors in this country.
That's why I have a friend who gave up her American citizenship, and has gone to Europe, because she says, "There is repertory -- theater. I can't -- it's -- I'm very sorry. I was -- have been proud to be an American, but I -- here is no opportunity for me. I am either unemployed, or I am abused. And I don't wish to be either."
And as long as you do not remedy this, gentlemen, you can have no dramatic art in this country. But nobody wants to do anything. They build big theaters instead of just paying small salaries to actors. Ask all these rich donors to the Metropolitan, you see, what they're devo- -- what they're spending their money for: costumes, and buildings, and electric light, but not on people. For some stars, perhaps. I mean, it would be so cheap to have repertory theaters in any decent town from -- of more than 100,000 people in this country. But it can't -- seems -- can't be done. Hollywood on the one end, you see, and the building craze on the other, prevents it. You can find any man in this country to give 5 million for brick. But you can't find him spending $5 million on salaries for actors, or on -- for any other such purpose, you see. You get $5,000 for a human being, and you get $5 million for building in this country. It should be the reverse.
We have now a church building loan fund, you see, because there are no Christians left -- now -- beginning to build churches. You can meet in any parlor. Why do you need a church? The money is spent on this, and look at the salaries of the ministers who are then to be placed into these churches. I -- I know you must have heard of this big drive now in church loan funds. Utterly ridiculous. They have asked me to help them. I -- I'm not going to do anything.
Because you cannot have architecture, because they have drama. If you have no living people who do something in the church, you can't -- you can't go and -- and have the back of the thing -- the background, so to speak, you see, come to life. And that's what we have today. The hugest building in the world. You know, the -- it took one engineer, a special man, you see, to pull all the WCs in the Empire State Building when we had the Depression. I mean, such a building it is, that one man has just to go around and pull the strings, you see, so that the water doesn't rust -- doesn't -- the plumbing doesn't -- doesn't suffer in the Empire State Building. But what's in it? Typewriters.
We have architecture without direction. And then you always build the Tower of Babel, because, as -- as you see, architecture is movement. Now nobody can seriously build a building in order to climb the sky. But we call this "skyscraper," you see, because nothing moves. It's, so to speak, the evasion of -- of real movement. You know how difficult it is for these people to get down, and -- and to leave the house, and to enter it again. And they commute 3 hours on the subway -- or on the Long Island Railroad, as you know, and -- back and forth, and they call this "life." And they buy Life even, and Time, because they don't have it. That's the success of Life, you see. It's the substitute for your own living. We have centralized all these things. The simplest drama, Life and Time, you can buy it all on the magazine stands. But you don't have it yourself, because you have no time. You commute.
Well, we are so privileged here in this environment, because we have time. And I -- I only want you to know that you are -- are the most privileged people in the world at this moment, because you still can realize the proper relation of drama and architecture, and of painting, and singing, and music. If you get it into your system, you will change all this. And that's your generation's business, to make these big cities livable again. They aren't what they should be.
As to studies, gentlemen, if you think of our Cross of Reality, we will see -- you have here the -- the sports going on. And you have your spectators. We already have dis- -- dis- -- distinguished the four types of sport. I'm not going to put this in. And you have here the spectators. And the co- -- football coach. And the umpire. And the commentator, who has to write it up in -- in next day's paper. You see immediately that reflection also splits into various possibilities. The spectator can just take it in, and it -- his eyes may reflect it. And we have this craze as the first, so to speak. The ultimate is pure reflection. Pure reflection, pure and simple. That is, you don't say anything, you just see it. And as you know, we have this in heavy measure.
I once saw a picture where you saw a photographer taking a picture of a photographer taking a picture of children looking at a horse race. And a horse race, as you may not know, is the depict- -- depict- -- always depicting the course of the sun. That's why we got the horse races in ancient times, because it was an attempt to describe in the arena the round, you see, race the sun does in the heavens, and -- {at night} underneath. All the -- the racecourses in their strange, round form -- have been invented in ancient times to depict the course of the sun.
So what do -- you have there? We had several reflections. The photograph- -- one photographer, you see, reflecting on the other photographer; the other photographer reflecting on the children; the children reflecting on the horse race. And the horse race reflecting the sun. The horse race plays with the course of the calendar, with the course of the sun, with the sacred year, with the -- day -- life of day and night. The spectators in their eyes reflect the course, the race, the movement there, you see, the picture, and on it goes. And finally you buy Life, which has photographed the photographer photographing the photographer -- well, where do we get? I don't know how many -- you see, once removed, we s- -- we stand at the end when you finally have Life in your hands and look at the picture, because it had to be reprinted, wi- -- printing is an -- also a reflection, is it not? A copy -- a copying of something that had once existed in reality.
And how we live today. A reflection of reflection, of reflection, of reflec-
tion, of reflection is very much en vogue at this moment. That is, the analytical, pure view of everything, Looks, View, how all these magazines are called, in order to stress your interest in seeing things is today represented by photography, by telescopes, by microscopes, by all the means by which movement -- think of the movie camera, you see -- is seen, made visible. And many people think that is the highest in life, if you could see things. We have already talked about this in our -- when we spoke about shame: how destructive it is just to see things, how you cannot live if you are seen all the time, how shame, how discretion is a part of your freedom. That if I would see everything, I would -- you would no longer be able to entwine your -- to entwist your accidental, and your important moves, you see. I would pin you down, so to speak, to every mistake you ever made.
But then there is another way. The football coach has already in his mind the next game, and he sees that one man isn't functioning well. He thinks of the next game, of the future, and he has to pose himself another question. The -- spectator only wants to see: how do they do it? It's an uncritical reflection. It's just a picture, you see. It's a pure picture. The photography -- still life. But if you get another man among the spectators who's responsible for the next game, he doesn't ask, "How do they do it?" But what does he ask? "How can they do it --?"
(Better.)
"Better," or "best." So they -- he is dissatisfied, this spectator. He is dissatisfied. He wants to go ultra. And we will have a type of man who wants to know more { } playing the game. This isn't the best way of playing the game. He wants to improve on it.
Then you can have a man who sits back and looks at the crowd like the -- like the critic, and writes up, "I saw a joyous crowd, but they really were too hilarious. They were shouting too much. They were riotous." He is the critic who asks the question, "What really do they do when they look at this game?" Well, they are -- they are obviously spending money left and right, and he -- perhaps he has the idea that he should recommend a -- a tax on spectators going to the games, as we have it already, you see.
As you know, this state of New Hampshire is so wonderfully clean that the -- its budget is only fed by the Rockingham race course. And that's why the taxes are lower than in Vermont. We are more moral over there. That is, this man asks himself, "What are they doing?" He asks, "What is reflection?" There is then to reflection a question which asks, "What is reflection?" And any man who is a sociologist, or is a -- who is a news commentator, or -- or who is Mr. Crosby, John Crosby in the -- in the -- where does he write? In the Herald-Tribune? Wie?
(Yeah.)
He is of course asking just this question. He tries to find out what makes the public, you see, go to these things. And what do- -- what does retard them, or -- or makes them rebellious. What is reflection?
So we have three men, gentlemen, who ask three different questions among the spectators. And that's the origin of science, of studies. One are the facts: let me know it all. One is epistemological: what is it to reflect at all? The question, "What are these people doing?" For this you must have time. The man who plays the game on the field has no time to ask this question. The na‹ve spectator has no time. But there is then inside the spectators an opportunity of changing around and being the opposite from the na‹ve spectator, being the sophisticated spectator, so to speak, you see. And he would ask the question, "What are they doing?"
Now you don't know it, gentlemen, but we have here the three great founders of science, the { } three fundamental functions and you have them in yourself. And these three men you have heard, but they always meet you in such strange garb that you don't recognize that they are in every human being. They are called Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
Aristotle asks, "What do we see?" He write 158 books on the 158 republics of Greece, and describes what they're doing. He writes a Poetics, in which he looks at drama and tragedy and says, "What do we see?" And Aristotle therefore is pure reflection, pure description, pure content. The man of fact. He's called a realist for this very reason, because he is deeply interested in what man can know. It's so wonderful to know all these things. Any one of us has some Aristotelian element that he just wants to know. And wants to know it all in a comprehensive manner. This Aristotelian principle is very strongly American: give me the facts. There is the opposite question, the So- -- why are you laughing?
(Because it reminds -- there's a little -- some one of the latest records out on this Dragnet scene, about St. George and the dragnet. And this reporter who is always going, "I want the facts. I want the facts." { })
Is he dragged then, finally, by the net? Or what?
(No, they -- they pull the dragon in on charges of devouring maidens { }.)
So the question of Aris- -- of Socrates is: "What do we do when we ask? What do we do when we reflect? What do we do when we stop to see, to look?"
He always asks only a question. He never gives an answer. Socrates is the eternal quest for the right kind of reflection. He wants us to understand what deserves to be thought about, and what doesn't. And he makes the thoughtless person, you see, sit back and -- and understand for the first time that certain things have to be asked.
As in the famous dialogue, when he makes this boy, who has accused his own father, you see, in the courts -- makes him see what a rascal he himself is. The boy is only bent in seeing his father in court, because the father has committed a crime. And Socrates works him up, you see, to a -- such a stage that we all see the greatest exposure of the spectator of this -- of this court trial, you see, because it is the son who wants to see his father, you see, in trial, which is horrid. So to speak, the spectator is shown up in Socrates.
Can you reflect? On what can you reflect? Or how do we reflect? All these questions which in its great- -- in their greatest refinement are called epistemological questions. That is, questions about the power to know. Episteme means knowledge. Now epistemology in philosophy is the -- most refined and the most inward -- most reflexive part of philosophy, because it asks the question about questioning. How do we put a question? How do we formulate the right question? All philosophy of this type, gentlemen, says that most questions dealt with in our sciences are either obsolete or stupid.
I mean, I -- I cannot mix with many of my scientific confrŠres, because I'm not interested in their answers, since I think the questions they ask are wrong. If a man asks in the Russian civilization project there or -- or in -- in -- in -- in -- in Harvard, you see, asks the people, "How many people get up in a streetcar in -- in Moscow when a woman enters, and in which order? Does the party member get up first, or the worker get up first, or the doctor get up first?" Then I say to myself, "These people are fools." And -- Mr. Ferguson is absolutely right, the senator who said, "This is a piece of insanity," because they ask just idiotic questions. And there'll never be an answer, that has any bearing on anything. But you are -- this country, as you know, is full of such questionnaires. The questionnaires are perfectly in- -- uninteresting. They don't deserve the paper on which they are printed. And they certainly don't deserve to be answered.
Here is -- a famous questionnaire once was sent out in Dartmouth. And the students were asked, among other questions, to s- -- to write: whom they loved more, their father or their mother. Now the man who asks such a question has to be publicly spanked, and pilloried, and should not be allowed to be a teacher in a college, because that's an immoral question. It is much worse than to break -- to commit adultery. If you try an innocent boy to -- to find out whether he loves his father or his mother. I hope he'll never know it till his
dying day. If you try to know this, you go to the mental -- lunatic asylum.
Of course, all the modern psychiatrists in this country try to ask these questions, because this way they can of course squeeze so much money out of you. Such questions you can ask to the end of your life. There is no end to stupid questions, you see. But this is a forbidden question. If you ask a person, "Whom do you love more, your mother or your father?" you make him stop living, because if you have any inkling at this moment that you may like your father more than your mother, first of all that which you know of yourself is very little. You haven't seen your mother or your father in dead- -- deadly danger. And then there is no more in love. You see, the whole quantitative yardstick in loving more than another is the most -- is murder in the cathedral. You can't say that you love -- love has a quality of its own in every one case. There is no more-ness.
If you give up of one woman for another woman, that doesn't mean that you love the other woman more. The quantity is not in order. The quality of this life is more comprehensive, but you don't deny that this love to the other woman { } you sacrifice it. You may have to -- to -- to uproot it in your heart. But you'll have to cry -- with tears, and you cannot just decide -- is this is a bargain: "Now I have found -- she -- I love her 80 percent, and the other I love 60 percent, so I am very happy. I've made a good bargain." This would be the quantitative measure, that you can forgo the 60 percent just by a decision of this type. It will haunt you if you make it on this basis, if it has been any real -- real -- meant real -- something real. You will suffer for giving it up, because it is just as real as the other. But it has only taken hold in part of your being. But that is tru- -- is something. You cannot say, "I love a rose more than a violet." It's ridiculous. Or "I love the moon more than the sun." They are pa- -- just part of reality. And don't give up one, because you have to say, "Now is daytime, and I have to follow the sun."
But that's how you think, and that's why you are so -- so unreal. You don't live, because you want to remain the master of your destiny. I have told you, you are unreal as long as you think that you can decide whom you love more, your father or your mother. My dear man, my father and my mother are dead now for 20 years. I couldn't answer this question. I buried them myself. I'd -- to give them the obituary. I wouldn't know, and I don't want to know. It's -- was just different. One was my father, and one was my mother. I haven't seen people who can live their father and their mother with the same quality of love. It's just a different energy in -- in you, a different power that makes you related to your father and to your mother. Don't compare them. And if you are unhappy at one moment because you have the squabble with your father, or with your mother, then obviously, this is something to be lived down, and to be forgotten. And not to make -- you can never say at any one moment that you know what
your whole life -- and your life even after their death will only prove in the end whom you really love more.
Gentlemen, since -- knowledge of your own loves must be left to posterity. If you try to know how much you love, you have ceased to love. It's the end of the story. That's the analytical thing; that's for others to decide. But this is -- I -- I have managed the -- the -- the -- the man who -- who was the -- how do you call the first man in college by -- at graduation?
(Valedictorian.)
The valedictorian. The valedictorian declined to answer this questionnaire. And we had a great upheaval here on campus, because -- at least it had some effect, this -- this famous question: "Whom did you love -- do you love more, your father or your mother?" But you all look so very astounded that I make so much fuss about this. But that is the cloud under which you have to live in this country, that such questions are not only asked by criminals, but they are answered by fools. And the fools believe their -- in their own answer. That's the worst part of it. And I have never seen yet that -- the majority of answers of these questionnaires just pokes fun at the question, and answers some, you see, in bad faith. And writes anything, just to -- to disprove all these statistics, and questions. Even the people at the Kinsey Report seem to have told -- tried to tell the truth. Unbelievable. Why, such an -- such an opportunity for a -- for a -- for a practical joke. But it's -- they never take advantage of this. They are -- they are beastly in earnest.
Gentlemen, Socrates can tell you that this is the wrong question. And that's why we need So- -- the element of Socrates in all of you. If you could free this country of the wrong questions asked at this moment, in all the various field of human endeavor, the budget would be balanced. But this is what you don't want to do. That's why it can't be balanced.
You see, you ask, "How much must the soldier eat to be in good spirits?" Wrong question. So we have a tremendous waste in the armed forces with steaks. But why don't you ask the real question of any spartan soldier: "On how little can a soldier live?" Once you would ask this question, you would have a cheap army. And you would have a much better army. But that mustn't be asked in this question. You ask the wrong question: "How much do -- must we spend on the boys so that the mothers of America don't go wailing, and weeping, and in ashes?" So we have the high- -- most ex- -- extravagant army in the world, where everybody eats three times as well as any civilian. Do you think that's an army? It's a joke. But how can we ever balance this budget? And we will go from bankruptcy to bankruptcy because the civilian mind in this country stands
in awe before the armed forces and says, "It can't be done."
My dear people -- foot- -- I say a "football general," no -- air -- an aircraft -- air force general stands with two other colleagues -- and that's a true story. And they read the results of Army and Navy playing. And one says to the other, "Isn't it terrible how popular these boys are? We'll never be popular as long as we haven't our own military academy. The Air Force must have an academy."
"Right you are," says the other. "We will not get the people's sympathy before we haven't a football team," not knowing that football is all over the dam already, as we know here.
And in -- within a week, $90 million were put in the national budget for building a West Point for the Air Force. And that was the only reason. Now I had something to do with this matter. And I can take an oath that there was at the moment, when the Congress was asked to pay $90 million for an Air Force academy, not one thought, not one blueprint, not one plan in the mind of any Air Force expert, what they should do in this Air Force academy.
I had been asked to develop some plans and -- as -- the first thing I s- -- told them was that if they wanted to be an Air Force Academy, they had to have an Air Force sport. That would be kites, and that would be -- don't laugh. It's very important. And the second would be what they do in Elmira. How do you call it?
(Gliders.)
Wie?
(Gliders.)
Gliders. And if they hadn't these sailboats of the Air Force, you see, they could never develop a spirit. It was decided, however, that they should march, on foot, on the parade ground. And they would have for the first two years have exactly the sports of the other armed forces. Now that's the greatest -- demonstration of the fact that there shan't be a -- and shouldn't be, you see, and is no reason for an Air Force academy, because people who have no special play to play are not a group by themselves.
That much you can already believe me. And therefore these -- these $90 million are a shining example of a wrong question. If you ask, "How can the Air Force become popular?" And then build an air academy, you see, you can imagine that all the rest of the Air Force is in the same measure wasting money.
And that's what they happily are doing. And that's why we have four years of reserve officer training on this campus, you see. You could do this in three months, as you well know by now. Don't you?
Wrong questions. If you have only Aristotle, if you have only view, if you have only photography, this craze of seeing things, and you have not the critical question: "Don't photograph this. Why do you photograph this? Shouldn't you stop photographing?" you see, if you cannot negate your own bias to reflect, you are lost. Because, gentlemen, this is pure curiosity. And curiosity has to be balanced by what? By pausing to think, "Should we ask? Should we be curious?" Curiosity is not a virtue. They always tell me that I have to hope for your intellectual curiosity. Gentlemen, if you only come here for the sake of intellectual curiosity -- I'm not interested in your intellectual curiosity. I'm interested in the whole man, and man is a being that -- who is at times curious and at times he's not curious. If you peep through a keyhole while two lovers are assembled, then you are curious in the wrong place, and you need a Socrates who tells you: "Stop, dear Aristotle."
I had a letter today, accidentally, when I -- we drove up here. I was just reading it. And it said -- gave the story of a famous psychiatrist in Europe. And his -- the director of the clinic came to him one morning in great excitement -- moral excitement of course is always the greatest excitement -- and said, "You have to dismiss this nurse. I -- she had a gentleman in her room. And I saw it with my own eyes through the window."
So the head of the clinic said, "Put her into the uppermost floor and buy a curtain." You see, that's the Socrates against the Aristotle.
And you see, that's on a different -- on a different tune, on a different wavelength. The answer is not an answer to this idiot, you see. But it just says, "No looks. No news. No reflection," you see. "No spectators." We li- -- is a different world of yours, the world of love. And I assure you, gentlemen, the greatest line any German poet has ever written is the line by H”lderlin: "Never, never disturb the peace of lovers." That is where reflection has to stop. If you don't do this -- if you break this law, you have committed the sin against the Holy Spirit and it cannot be forgiven. You have to protect all true lovers against your own curiosity. You have no right to peep into keyhole- -- into keyholes. This is a swine that does this. And all the -- most things that we see in our burlesque shows and our papers are swinish, because they try to overtake something that should not be seen. And that's why we have no love in this country, but just sexual -- curiosity. And that's the end of curiosity. You have not to be curious, and for this you have to have a special mandate of the people. There is always a function of -- for Socrates in a community who stops curiosity.
But then you have Plato. Plato asks for the better city, for the better state, for the better arts. He throws out Homer, and says, "Our music must be of a different type. I must re- -- reflect the -- the harmony of the spheres. We must have better poets. They must write comedy and tragedy. These people are too lopsided. They are blockheads." And on it goes. If you read Plato, you always are led to believe that there can be a better world to come. That's why he is called an idealist, because he is all the time trying to ask himself, "But this cannot be the real life. This isn't good enough. The facts are in. My criticism is in. But out of this, there has to come something more."
Now this is then the Greek world, gentlemen, which the liberal arts college at this moment represents to you. It consists of Socrates, very little; too much Aristotle; and day-dreaming, star-eyed, idealistic Plato. Every American boy is in his mind a pacifist; in his legs an athlete; and I'm afraid in his eyes -- now, I won't say what.
No, I don't wish to insult you, gentlemen, but I want to wake you up, that you really are -- you are better than your philosophy. In your philosophy you find no limitations for your curiosity. And although curiosity -- as I say, is very good, as to dead things, it is the enemy of your growth. You cannot reflect too much, you see, for example, as we said already, on yourself, because that's secret, you see. You won't get any answer, except the -- the amount of calories and vitamins you have to eat every day in order to keep healthy. That you can. That's external, you see. That's visible. No harm done.
Don't overextend curiosity to the things that must not be seen. The dramatic in your life cannot be seen. All the blueprints for the future will never come true, because -- I have a friend here living in New Hampshire. He got the honorary degree from Dartmouth this summer. The poor man for the last 20 years is hipped on seeing already the unity of the world by an organization which he c- -- would -- can put on paper. He's devoting his whole time to this scheme, and nothing will ever come from it, you see. He's trying to decide whether the United States and Russia should have 72 and-a-half vote -- votes in the final assembly, or just 72. Well, there will never be an assembly with 72 votes for any one of -- living power, because have you ever seen a marriage of two people where they -- who cast votes? Living people just don't act this way, you see. And living nations don't act this way. Shareholders do, and they can be curious about the commodities they sell, you see. But to frame the lov- -- world of love and hatred, of nations and families according to the rights of a shareholder- -- -ing company, you see, this -- this excludes the future, which is love, you see. It excludes quality, which is history. And it's just quantity, which is work, you see. And that will never work among living beings, you see.
But that is why the imagination today, the so-called Platonic mind in this country, or -- and in Russia too, is such -- so ugly, because it -- it wants to see the future. Gentlemen, there is one great sentence in Plato, which redeems all his idealism. He says, "The real thing I have never put in writing. I have only told people." That is, as the Lord, also. Jesus s- -- nev- -- only told his Apostles, and not the multitude, what He really meant.
So Plato has this in his Seventh Letter. And I think it's one of the greatest sentences. It's never quoted when you -- take a course in Plato, you see, because all his books are just one part of the story. The other is that you can tell only those people anything about the future who are in love with you, who feel responsible. Because -- I told you the story of the boy who crushed my future. He was not in love with me. He sold me down the river, you see, for curiosity's sake. Do you remember the story? And since he was not in love with what I was trying to do, he destroyed it.
Anybody who knows about your hopes for the future, you see, and does not love you, will and must destroy you. Curiosity is destructive as to future. It is only right as to the external world, where things are as they are. Let nobody ever in on your secret. If you have given your fraternity pin to a girl -- you shouldn't -- but if you have, then don't tell all -- everybody else.
They had a story on this in the Saturday Evening Post, you see, where at least for a week this poor woman was allowed to wear it under her sweater. This is a short time where -- in which any secret of love in this country is kept. But at least a little secret must be, because otherwise there is no growth; there is no future. If you tell everybody that you are in love with a girl, the one thing is certain that you are not in love with the girl. You are vain. You are boasting of your love. And that's the last thing a -- a true lover can do.
Now let's have a break here. Five minutes.
[tape interruption]
...enacted in Congress, and we talk of -- or battle orders given out by a commander-in-chief. Well, a lyrical poem has also its straight, and -- def- -- precise public, its group. The lover writes to his sweetheart. And the form that it is in poetry is just as exact and -- what do you mean here, Sir?
It was a large keyhole.
See, you -- our upbringing is very stilted, and very -- very roundabout and far from the truth. We have treated lyrical poetry too much as art, and we
have lost sight of the fact that the originals, the Shakespeare sonnets, or Goethe's Werther, or Goethe's West-™stliche Divan, or even Dante's writings are addressed in order to survive to the person he is in love with. The fact that others are also allowed to read this later, or even at the same time, does not -- must not detract your understanding from the simple fact that this is the ordinary way of expressing one's passion to the person with whom one is in passion.
I assure you, in my experience, that of course may be antiquated and dated, it is much more normal to write a poem to the person you are in love with than -- than a four-page letter. And certainly this has been the rule through the centuries. The Song of Songs couldn't have been composed otherwise. It is normal. The Bible doesn't -- has no -- con- -- doesn't contain any art. That's one of the heresies of our age. The Bible is in earnest. And the Bible says that true love is a sacrament. And as much as any Christian should believe that marriage is a sacrament which the two -- the husband and wife -- contract themselves, in the presence of the Church, and where no clergyman has anything -- any power to do anything -- whether he be a Catholic or a Protestant, no -- the Catholic Church never has said that the sacrament of marriage is perpetrated, or -- or conducted by anybody but the people themselves. They have to do it.
In the same manner, gentlemen, now I'm very serious, the poetry of the Song of Songs is of course simply the sacrament of love in its full flower, in -- into -- Go- -- inspired, God into words. And therefore, the miracle has happened that a purely secular poem has been incorporated into the Bible, because it is a true event. No doubt that the man who composed this showed and demonstrated that he used language to its proper purpose. And the Bible is a collection of the utterances of humanity in the proper and in the improper way. And you can learn what is truth, and what is falsehood.
The -- nobody knows -- nobody has the -- seems to be -- to -- to ask themselves: How could these pious rabbis and pharisees, and -- and -- and kings include into their book the Song of Songs? It is a wedding song. It was probably enacted between the shepherd and the shepherdess, because true love writes in these tomes. And nothing that is true can be omitted from the full creation of the human race. And how could Jesus have come and -- and made the soul, and the Church His bride if there hadn't been already in the Old Testament the prefiguration of what a bride and a bridegroom have to say to each other? They have to sing to each other. And therefore the Church and the Lord also sing to each other in Psalms, and in p- -- in praise. That's the explanation why we have to sing in church. There would be no service otherwise, because we wouldn't feel -- the s- -- our soul wouldn't feel bridal, wouldn't feel loved. If you love, you sing. And if you feel loved, you answer by singing. And otherwise you just
aren't in love.
So, not to sing means that you are not in love. Therefore not to write poems to your sweetheart means that you have a very reduced love, one out of the five-and-ten store, which most people today are satisfied with -- as -- I told you, my -- a previous class once answered at my question, "Do you write poems?"
They said, "Oh, we did this when we were 12 years old."
Well, they have left life behind them. Love -- to love means to seek the world in poetic form. And the arts -- we have already stated this, let me repeat this, gentlemen -- the arts are the wedding gown of love. We need the arts -- you need dress, and necklace, and brilliant, and diamonds for your sweetheart. You must present her with the beauty around her, so that she is -- has a wedding gown around her. You want to show her. You don't want to show her naked. I -- we talked about the terrible man who tried to do -- to boast of the -- of the naked beauty of his sweetheart. Well, he had to die. Death is the answer.
So in order to escape death, and in order to come to life with your sweetheart, you have to write poetry. And you have to shower her with gifts, and you have to buy her good clothes. And you have to buy her a house. And you have to buy her a car. And you have to buy -- build a driveway away from the street. And the hedge around it. And roses, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And on it goes. There's no end to it. And usually when she is 70, you have enough money to buy her the diamond necklace you should have bought her in the first place when she was 20.
So -- it's very funny that old ladies always have the largest diamonds, you see. It doesn't make much sense in my -- estimation. But it is still the loyalty of the husband who, when she is ugly and -- and -- and wrinkly, buys her the diamonds which -- by which he expresses his love for -- to her, makes up for her ugliness as -- doesn't it?
Well, I'm very serious, gentlemen. Everything that surrounds us here, your tie, your shirt, the jacket, the blouse, everything is a token of mutual love and respect. That's why you are not here sitting like -- like wolves and -- and dogs, but why you are dressed. And -- does quite nicely. Here, your green sweater. Everything is an expression of some affection which holds you and makes you a member of Dartmouth, and has said to you, "You may call yourself a Dartmouth boy," and so they give you credit, even if it is the last of the month. You gain time by these artistic -- these artful measures. You don't believe that is all so simple.
But I wanted to say, gentlemen, in the lyrical poem we usually hit reality. The lyrics between two lovers are not a luxury of artistic projection, you see, faraway projection. They are direct speech, the most direct we have. The sonnets of Shakespeare obviously are much more direct than any of his dramas, because they are directed to one person. And if you could only see that the -- the -- the -- the genuine poem in lyrics is the borderline case between play and seriousness. And the greater part of real lyrics is on the serious side. The man had to write this poem in order to survive, you see. And then he adds perhaps some more -- you can see it in Chopin. The first composition is serious. And then he begins to play and develop 20 other nocturnes, where the 19 others are not serious, you see, because they are just playing on his experience that he was provoked to write one nocturne.
So that's the -- usually the poetic output, you see, that the poet is driven to write one poem, and then he gets a taste of it, and keeps going. But the root of poetical production must be necessity. And it cannot be sale -- salability. You just have to open a Canto by Ezra Pound to know that this man is off the track, you see, because that's all done. That's all fabrication. One Canto like the other. I mean, that's no necessity. These are editorials. I mean, that's just like Walter Lippmann writing every day on the world policy -- the opposite from what comes true.
Now there is somebody lacking in this picture. And just as it is when you have no drama, then you have no other arts; and they all stand on their head, and they are perverted; they turn; they commit suicide. That's what they really do at this moment, the arts. They commit suicide. And I told you why I didn't become a musician, and what I try to do instead. When you do not see this crisis of the arts, you will hardly see them perhaps in our studies. But you will see from this cross of reality, that if I have said anything that is truthful, we must find one place that is still unoccupied. And that will teach us something about the new decision of the regents of New York -- New York schools.
You see, when we -- when we play, the future is more tempting than the past. You are all playboys, and you are all talking about the future. You have no time for the past, for the ritual of the past. How often have you put on a tuxedo? Who has put on a tuxedo more than three times during the last year?
Are you a pallbearer?
Well, I mean, youth has no ritual, because it lives in the future. And students live in the future. Gentlemen, the plays and seriousness -- we have already made many distinctions. I told you, how they dis- -- distinguish. Play begins first, and then comes the end. In serious life, the end precedes the begin-
ning. The same is true about our relation to the future. In play, we always only look into the future, and forget the past. In serious life, the past is such a millstone around our neck, you see, that we have very little time for the future. How -- what do you do for the future in -- in earnest at this moment? But in play, you can dream utopias, you see, and it's so simple. When in play, the future is open. But when we work hard -- a farmer has very little time to do anything for the future of Vermont, you see, because he has to milk his cows.
So in serious life, the difficulty is the future. In playful life, in studies, gentlemen, the difficult thing is the respect for the past. You are apt to forget the past. You are living here a carefree life. What do you care for your parents' worries? And what do you care for the debts of the United States? And what do you care of the -- for the unjustice done to the red Indians? And what do you care for the extermination of the Jews by Hitler? And what do you care for anything that was yesterday? It's just yesterday. It's not your business, you say.
In play, we always dissociate ourselves without any pain from the past. In serious life, we have no way of connecting us with the future. The government at this moment in the United States has no time for the future. You just read Mr. -- poor Mr. Eisenhower's speech to the farmers. He has to liquidate his whole program of a -- of a new -- of a new era of capitalism, and has had to promise the farmers everything they wanted to have over the last 20 years. He's licked. No future. He's just thrown back 10 years. He's forced to this, because one man in Wisconsin got up and -- and got the farmers' vote, you see. Next day, he's -- Mr. Eisenhower, who has -- six months ago honestly said he didn't understand a thing about agriculture had to stand up as an expert and tell the farmers what it was all about. Poor man, you see. You can't do this just because an election is lost. Suddenly say, "I don't know anything," and then say, "I know everything," because it is so difficult, gentlemen, to get on with the future.
I take it for granted that the program of the Republicans would have involved some hardship for the farmers for the next five years. I don't doubt that it would have, you see. But still, I -- I'm inclined to think that it would have been good for the country. And what is happening now is not good for the country. It's only good for the vote. And what is good for the vote is usually not good for the country.
So I'm -- I feel -- although I have not voted for Mr. Eisenhower in this election, I feel very sorry for him, because I think he had there something. I think the nationalization of agriculture, this cold socialism which we had put over agriculture, you see, over -- in the last 10 years was bad. And I don't see why they shouldn't get just what they earned. And all these subsidies and so is just the opposite from a -- from a reasonable program, isn't it? For anything you expected
from the Eisenhower administration. But there they are, running for cover, and saying, "We can't do it. The vote in Wisconsin, we are licked."
Four weeks ago, the same Mr. {Edward Benson} stood up and said he wouldn't do it. And after 30 days, he says the very opposite.
Which means, gentlemen, in serious life, the future has no natural place. And in play life, it has -- the past has no natural place. You laugh at original sin, which only means that the past has a right over you. That's original sin. That's the meaning of original sin. You say, "That's just funny, original sin. What's that? That's -- our forefathers believed in original sin." Original sin is just the fact that we are tied into one stream of events, and we can't get out of it, and you have to pay the debts which your fathers contract. And you have the inflation which they brought on. And you -- everything -- everything is just cha- -- you are chained to this terrible past.
Gentlemen, there is one man who is never mentioned in a liberal arts college, although he is the distinctive feature between a liberal arts college of our time and the antiquity. We could just be Greeks were it not for the fact that the past has to be represented in the school as a definite thing. We can't go before the Christian era in your -- our teachings here. We cannot preach slavery. We cannot preach homosexuality as the Greeks did. Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates were unable to exterminate homosexuality. Where you get these three people alone in charge of a liberal arts college, you are back to homosexuality. You are also back to exploitation of raw materials, of other peoples. You are back to the eugenic principles of the veterinarian as Mr. Plato proclaims them in marriage. Here -- love is analyzed away as a funny prejudice, so to speak, or a funny superstition. It's all sex. In Plato, as you -- if you read The State, one of the most horrible books with regard to marriage, he forbids Homer, but he says that there always should be a woman present when a new human being is to be created. He has no shame, because he's purely on the reflective front, outward and inward. It's hard work obviously for him to produce a new being.
Now, the Apostle Paul, gentlemen, if he is not present on a college campus in some form in your and my thinking, you see immediately the whole campus slide back into the Dark Ages of antiquity. The Dark Ages are not the Middle Ages, gentlemen. The Dark Ages are the ages of no women's rights, of no real love between the sexes, of endless war. These 158 cities of which Aristotle has given us the constitutions, they were at eternal war with each other, and the Greeks never expected these wars ever to end. You had a caste system. You had warriors, eternal warriors as in India, to this day, you see. India has preserved some of the features of antiquity as a warning.
Modern man in New York says, "We can do with cocktail parties instead of Paul, and go on to Aristotle, and Plato, and Socrates. We are witty. We are factual. And we are utopians. We found associations for the abolition of evil." And I mean, if you think of what -- Americans have tried over the last 100 years, you see, by willful association, they have really tried to -- to exterminate every evil just by willpower. It has never borne fruit. After 30 years, it was all forgetten -- forgotten, all these wonderful improvement societies. We have reform governments, city government every eight years, you see. Then something is done for two years, and then six years of corruption, then we get another drive and people always believe in the ultimate good here, it seems, you see. They always say, "Now we will be settled forever," because they have no memory of the past. And they'll never use anything that people could know for the last 2,000 years already. What does Paul remind the college community of, gentlemen?
He -- enjoins on the college community the simple knowledge that in serious life, a road into the future is only open by sacrifice. You only create a new era if somebody asks for less than he can get. That's the deed of Jesus, that He asks -- got less than He could have -- had the right to ask for.
Very simple, gentlemen. You try to get something for nothing. So you get stuck in the past. Anybody who tries to get something for nothing overemphasize his given rights that he was already qualified to get. And he of course outbuys the future. There is then less good to be had, because you have gotten too much. Jesus said -- and said, "This is the way of life which all the pagans, all the Gentiles lead, and therefore I have to show that somebody asks for less than he can get, and thereby creates a surplus," what the Catholic Church calls the {opus super erogatum}.
Have you -- do we have here a Roman Catholic? Who is? Have you heard of the -- {opus super erogatum}, of the grace stored up in Heaven by the saints? Well, gentlemen, that's true. That's not just something you learn -- we learned in Church. That is something for everyday use, my dear man. If you have not in every family, and in every community some self-sacrificing people who give more of their time, their money, and even their reputation -- because that's the hardest to give, you see, in order to perform a service -- if there is no unrecognized service in a community, this -- community has no future. It runs down by gravity. It exhausts its resources, because the -- most of the people do ask for more than they deserve. You -- don't you think our bricklayers get more than they deserve? So the poor schoolteachers have to make up, because they do less -- they get less than they deserve.
But you always have a lopsided society. We have it in this moment. The workers are exploiting us. The farmers, too. They are exploiting us. That's why
I'm so sorry about the reaction to the -- to the -- to this defeat in Wisconsin, because I think the administration was right, and the farmers are wrong, because they just think, "What can I get?" That's not a question to be asked in a decent society. You can only ask, you see, "What can I do?" But who asks this question?
Gentlemen, the -- Paul is the teacher of the Gentiles. And that's a very practical thing, and has nothing to do with the year 50 A.D., when he went -- 52 -- to Corinth. You know they celebrated his 1900th anniversary of his coming to Greece a year ago in Greece with great pomp and ceremony. It just means that he's forgotten. If you read this idiotic book -- The Apostle, there's -- he has no understanding that Paul has created a permanent function in the life of the world, that when we go to school, we are apt to forget all the obstacles in our way of sliding back into any whim or fantasy, into skepticism, into -- as I said -- caste system. You can think up in any school any system of -- of life, and recommend it. The clever wit, you see, can always prove that this is a wonderful system. Read all the modern sociologists, beginning with Marx, and ending with Mr. Pareto, and Mr. Sorokin. Since they deny that they live after Paul and Jesus, they have again castes, and wars, and -- and eugenics, and euthanasia, and all the things Christianity has done away with for good.
So if you do not introduce into the campus one serious person, a teacher that -- doesn't draw on -- on thought or fact, but on something else, then this campus community becomes ridiculous, as it is today. It's a racket. Education in this country is far behind the times. The people know that they must make sacrifices and on the campus this isn't mentioned.
Now I come back to the United -- let me -- end this to -- bring the beginning and end together. Paul stands to remind us of his master. The College of -- Council of Regents in New York City says, "Go back to men, to real men who have lived," because gentlemen, at this point of the Cross of Reality, you remember where the ritual is. We have the qualities, the background produced already, created already, you call it with an abstract word, a very valueless word, "values." But we are not animals. We only know because we have progenitors who were not animals. Our values are our forebears, are living people to whom we can look for guidance and for respect. That's the least you can do. If you cannot come up to them, you at least can feel that -- George Washington has put between you and colonialism a wall. The Fa- -- Founding Fathers stand in this wall, in this breach of the wall and remind you that you cannot fall back behind them. You cannot relapse. That's why you have to look at the backward front upon real people. That's where history stands, and biography, you see, and the humanities, and the cour- -- English department should stand on philosophy. That's why you have to be held by Paul. Paul is only the figure who
has known that man cannot live by thought.
Who asked me this question, you see? He said that's thought control, that we have now to speak of George Washington, again. That's not thought control. That's realism, gentlemen. Coming back to the human situation, this classroom is ridiculous in itself. How can we pull thoughts -- real thoughts, real truth out of our brains? They are -- your brains are empty, shavings in your brain. They are looking around -- have no direction. The dramatic direction, gentlemen, is given by the hero in tragedy. The historical direction comes from the -- the forebears that have gone before us, and have paved the road. Well, the eternal forebear in the Christian era is Christ. It cannot be denied. It's very perturbing for educated people that such an obsolete gentleman should be mentioned in a classroom. I'm sorry. The -- you have -- only -- the only permission that is given you is to forget about Jesus in a classroom, but you have to think of the Apostle of the Gentiles, the teacher of the Gen- -- of Paul. Paul is just a human being as you and me, failing -- converting, that is, turning about, as we all have to do completely. We haven't to speak of the God-man in this classroom, but we have to speak of His apostle, because all the schools of the Christian era are controlled by thought -- Paul. If you call this "thought control" -- who spoke of thought control? -- you may, Sir. You have, of course, have fascist thought control and Christian thought control. If you turn to Paul, you will remain free. If you are a secular mind, you will get the thought control just the same, because nobody can tolerate sociology and psychology as taught today. It is pernicious. It is valueless. You see, it's factual. It's Aristotelian. Or it's Platonic. Utopian. But this cannot go on in a country that is now responsible to the rest of mankind for its mental processes. You have to learn something that is true, Sir. You don't learn it now. You learn things that are arbitrary. And Paul guarantees that we live in the -- in our own era. That there a certain results that condemn the truth.
If a fact-finding committee finds that it would be cheaper to work the copper mines in this country with slave labor, that doesn't help at all. Slave labor is out, you see. But if you find this in Russia, which is a Platonic state, the result is that you run the copper mines by slave labor. Don't you see the difference?
Facts lead you astray, because if you find that it doesn't pay to have free workers work the copper mines, or any -- uranium mines, you do as the Russians do in Bohemia and Saxony, where they have pressed labor, you see, into these copper -- if you do not behave there, and are not a Communist, you are sent to the uranium works in Aue, Saxony, and the Russians get these -- uranium which they need for their radar equipment, because they are Platonists, you see. They do better things than the people in our economy, they think, you see, because Paul isn't watching them. There is no thought control. I'm all for this
expression, certainly. The -- your choice is only between a secular thought control by the powers that be, or by a thought control by the historical process to which we bow if we be- -- want to belong to the era in which we live, where we say the most powerless of men has created our future. The man whom the Romans, and the Jews, and the Greeks condemned, because He stood for the freedom of the human soul, you see, and against slavery, and against promiscuity, and for shame, and for all these things.
Now your idea is thought control or no thought control. That is the -- shoddy and shabby idea of modern liberalism. We cannot live that way. I have tried to say this for the last 50 years, my dear man. So I really know what I am talking about. I have lost my job four times for this sermon. I could -- in this country and over there. In is country, too, I have been chased out of a university, because I dared to mention this fact of Paul and -- of a living God in a classroom. They said, "That's not science." It is a science, Sir. It is higher than science. It is the condition under which a free humanity can only allow science to do its fact. If the facts of science are the highest, then we are lost, because science and slaves matter. Doesn't free it.
So I'm very earnest, Sir. What you have told me about thought control, that is the ter- -- it is the decisive thing. You can still save the freedom in America if you turn to the right thought control. I mean, the McCarthys will win if you have not a higher freedom, a higher thought control, you see. The question is between true faith and cheap faith, fascist faith, you see. But the question is no longer between no faith and faith. And that is the hard issue for you. It's hard to chew. I see -- three-quarters of you surrender just to fascism. That's not the answer. And the other quarter is -- is hankering for some old-fashioned anarchy. That's no answer, you see, because otherwise in these schools there would be taught all the questionnaires and all the nonsense that is taught today, gentlemen.
And please, you must -- I must dismiss this class now. But begin to think that it is your business to distinguish between curiosity and worthwhile knowledge. And when you follow this up, you cannot lose, gentlemen.
Thank you.