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(Hutchison: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to welcome you all again this evening to the Forum for the second and last of the lectures which Professor Rosenstock-Huessy is giving us on the series entitled, "Before and After Karl Marx -- Prophecies Fulfilled and Unfulfilled." Professor RosenstockHuessy.)

Since the audience in New York of course changes from day to day, I had better say one result of last night. Men would like to experiment with the weather, we said. The meteorologist of New York State, you remember, complained that he couldn't get the weather into his laboratory. And just as much, Mr. {Gardner Murphy} would say that he can't get the human soul under his instruments. That's the -- so the psychologists say they don't know whether the people in religion, or poetry, or politics are right, because they haven't the laboratory. They can't experiment. And most of you believe that the day will come when this all will be done in the laboratory. But the weatherman, as you remember in the story yesterday, was a little wiser. He said, "These masses of air, they are guided by nothing but themselves, and I can't get -- in the laboratory."

And then I reminded you that man would be like hot -- this hot air, these masses of air in the air, if we had to wait before -- until we could get ourselves into the laboratory, but that fortunately we got out of this state of hot air by the fact that we are an experiment carried out by a power that distributes from generation to generation this functions -- His functions, and which makes prophets and fulfillers; which promises and which disappoints, and which crucifies, and which gospelizes, and apostolizes and finally writes the Gospel story. And we said that in this strange voluntary connections, from generation to generation -- of which to you as theologians, St. Paul is a great shining example -- era, and generation, and eons are founded {and} that, in the Christian era, the key is found to this power of forming cycles that go from promise to fulfillment. And we saw also that this is not just a simple way from 1 to 2, from A to B, but that it goes through the tremendous phases of the promise, the prophecy in which the Lord speaks, and He alone, and the answer given by the creature as the Thou that is appealed to, that is in- -- commanded, "Take Thee to Egypt and lead my people out of Egypt," the second person; and then the apostolic age where "We, the 12" take over; and the thir- -- fourth age, where this is all written down in the Gospel story. We had -- it becomes history and can be what you think is the beginning of the word "objectified." It's the end always of life when something becomes the object. Then it's over. Then you can give it to the psychologist, to Mr. {Gardner Murphy}, but then it is utterly unimportant.

Today I have to apply this to the march from Karl Marx, and Darwin, and Freud, and Nietzsche -- these four dis- -- disangelists, these four people who wrote the Gospel before the catastrophe happened, who began at the other end and destroyed and dissolved humanism and its unholy alliance as idealism with Christianity, who stripped us naked of our complacency as citizens of the academic world; of seminaries, and universities, and colleges, and made us into -- back into animals, into individuals, into class warriors, and into insane men in a frenzy.

These -- the gospel writers of this strange type, these four -- Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx -- began obviously a century in 1846. And I tried to take you back into those heydays in which the division between Marxians and liberals took place, in which Proudhon explained the liberal gospel once more in the last minute, so to speak, to Karl Marx. And I could show you, I hope, that for a hundred years, nothing much has changed in this array of two mentalities: the constant doubter on the liberal side and the man who doesn't believe in force and the constant striker and -- I tried to show you that Karl Marx became, so to speak, the symbol, or the shelter, the roof, under whose guidance all the strikes of the following hundred years could be explained, so to speak, by the Bellona, the Mars, the god of war, of class war, who Marx was able to embody for these people in their despair.

Today I shall take you through two more phases of this century, to make clear to you that there is such a holy experiment which allows us direction in history and a march through time with meaning, because there are volunteers, free men from generation to generation, who together con- -- form a connecting link, a meaningful past, a real galaxy of shining stars, just as the saints of old in the Christian church. We have to speak of the downfall of Marxism and the victory of Marx. But I have a handicap there. We'll have to speak of war and peace. We'll have to speak of revolution and Kladderadatsches and catastrophes. And the blight of American Christianity, as you know, is pacifism, that you still -- believe that the Christian church can deal with one-quarter of reality, with the sexless man -- male human being in business. That's by and large the picture the idealist has of man. This person is neither a woman, nor -- nor a virgin, nor a mother; it's the worker. It's the secretary, writes the -- serves the typewriter. And it is peaceful and kind.

That's one-quarter of reality. This country has had more wars in the last 150 years than any other country in the world -- Europe, and China, and India, et cetera. Yet, this is not made a part of reality in this -- your thinking and you think that you're Christian ministers when you abstain from the digestion of war, which comes under the Lord's command, "I'm -- have -- shall bring a sword."

So gentlemen, I -- and ladies -- I feel very handicapped, because you will say that is all my private whim, that wars and revolutions are the content of the history of the last hundred years of mankind. Despite the fact that one of -- or the other of you may have been to Korea, despite the fact that one of you is a chaplain in the United States Army, he is a pacifist. That's a great mental luxury.

And I was exposed to this and I have to make a little -- a little detour, to lead you into this, because I have talked to -- to a member -- illustrious member of the faculty of your college today, and even there I could not see any willingness -- although the gentlemen certainly is not a pacifist, he was very strong against the pacifists, in fact -- but he cannot see the connection of our economic history and the world wars. That's too much, here -- talked of the elasticity of the -- of the bourgeois class to adapt themselves to new conditions. He did not see who had adapted this class to new conditions, two wars, that is.

So I may tell you a little story that happened to me a fortnight ago in class. I had reminded them that the economic history of the last 1500 years consisted of three great epochs in which each time a new way was found of prolonging peace and escaping the necessity of war and military conflict. The monasteries of the early Middle Ages, the cities of the late Middle Ages, and the market-seeking economy -- which you call capitalism -- of the colonial, mercantilistic and the socalled capitalistic centuries, that each time a new wave was found of intensifying the peacetime economy to pro- -- to extend the terms of peace, the ti- -- periods of peace. And I showed them that war was normal and natural and peace was very incredible and very miraculous, and to be re-created from moment to moment, and quite unexpected and only to be hoped for, but certainly not simply to be believed in.

And the -- a Jewish boy after class said -- rather, he thought it was very witty -- "Well, you -- one sees this man's German background. He of course has to talk of war." So I took the opportunity in the next class of talking at some length of the new general class -- the class of generals in Israeli who run that state and their ideology and the military character of the experiences of the new state of Israel.

I wished I knew a way of convincing you that what I have to say has very little to do with German militarism. But it has very much to do with my willingness to obey the order that God seems to have given to men, to allow the mind to take possession of everything given. You bodily, either by your brothers and friends, or in person, have been in uniform. And you exist; and we have here only this peaceful meeting, because Hitler did not land on these shores 10 years ago.

And you will be asked to sacrifice 30 percent of your budget to military

armament -- to armaments. Now I think it is not laziness only and stupidity, but it is folly and crime then not to begin to ask you whether man is not perhaps placed between war and peace, and whether it wouldn't be wiser for you to study not always your little peacetime society in the suburbs of New York, but perhaps to see man as alternating between his situation as a warrior for these penates, for his home, and as a worker, an -- a wage earner, an employee and a nice little sugar daddy.

As long as you don't do this, certainly theological thinking is very irrelevant and very insignificant. It is foolish. And every serious man is right that he doesn't listen to you. Why should he? He has to embrace the total of the national budget. He cannot just live on your niceties on Sunday or Saturday afternoon or morning.

So I think gent- -- I may ask you to understand that this is not my special national brand of political thinking, but that it is an honest attempt to obey. And it is so terrible in this country that one has to say these primitive things, that the mind, as much as the body, is not free to think what he pleases, but that it is an instrument of obedience. If you don't obey God, then you have to obey General Eisenhower. And if you don't obey General Eisenhower, then you have to obey Mr. Hoover. That is, obedience is necessary, but it can be obedience to the creator, who will give us, I think, the freedom to think about war and peace without fear and without prejudice. But if you only wish to think about peace, because that's so much nicer, you will not think at all.

And I need not tell you that this is the general state of society in America, that the people just don't think at all, because they only think about a little, little fragment of life. They know of these other parts of life, but they don't think that perhaps war is part of the destiny of man. Since we have been created, war is always looked at as caused by tyrants or by aggressors or by --wouldn't you perhaps allow me the suggestion that perhaps wars come from the end of time, from this famous eschatology of which Professor Grant and other teachers of you now begin to speak again, that perhaps war is the way of mobilizing us from our laziness and complacency towards the appointed end of the human race. If you look as -- war -- at war from the point of view of the Aristotelian final cause, you would perhaps stop of talking about the causes of war. There are many causes for peace, but there is no cause of war, because it is the creation in its pre-human state itself. The war -- world without the living Word is at war. And each time a new word has to be spoken, which then may create peace. But as long as this word is not spoken, you have the Cold War or the Hot War or the Warm War or the Lukewarm War. I think in this country it's the Lukewarm War.

War is from the end of time, and not from the beginning. If there was no war,

you wouldn't -- we wouldn't reach our destination. You -- I just remind you of the fact that the Mexican War brought one-third of the United States under the domination of the United States. After all, that's very simple. Of course, you also got Puerto Rico later and perhaps we had -- we shouldn't have gotten that. But wars certainly -- they are perhaps not manifest destiny, but they are beckoning us from the end of time. This was known to our forefathers a hundred years ago. They went in various directions of including -- of -- in making the attempt of including war into their thinking. Marx did it. And he said that unemployment and crisis would lead to wars between the nations, and that a final clash would finish this chaotic society's peaceful endeavors. And there would be a jump then into the classless society.

Proudhon wrote a more important book, I think, than Marx on war, because he had more vision about the virtues of war. He wrote a book, which I recommend to everybody who wants to make a beginning, to think about the next century. And it's called, La Guerre et la Paix, "The War and the Peace." It's written in 1861, and it's -- as you see, contemporary with Tolstoy's novel. It is forgotten, the book. I think it's not right that it should be forgotten. It's a good book, because it stresses the fact that certain things can only be achieved by war whenever the people who have lived in peace are no longer willing to make the sacrifices of the previous war, when they wish to have the cake and eat it too, when you -- then you have to have the next war. Now after 30 years, usually the people go soft and do forget that at one time, they earned this peace by heroic sacrifice and loss of life. And therefore then, they want to have the cake, as I said, and eat it, too; and will not pay the penalty which they paid 30 years before. So then the next war obviously is due, because the peace has been eaten up. It has been devoured by the complacency of the second generation, or maybe the third. That's in every case to be distinguished.

Proudhon says, and this is, I think, the lasting contribution of this book in two volumes -- just as much as Carlyle, by the way, in his Hero and Hero Worship -- also a book which is despised in this country because it is so true -- that force is a part of the real creation. Force, take -- think of the labor forces. And that force therefore cannot be despised. It is impossible for the United States -- say -- I say now, in addition to this -- to give votes to Cuba, or to Panama, and to Cos- -- to Puerto Rico, or to Costa Rica and think that you can transfer force. Force is a creature of God Almighty. This mighty republic is very much inclined to think that it can part with energ- -- part of its energies by bestowing votes on these unhappy republics. It is impossible. You cannot get rid of your responsibility by farming out votes in the League of Nations to these -- they don't become more powerful, perhaps you become less powerful. That's all that happens.

This power which is vested in the Cons- -- United States at this moment,

cannot be transferred, as little as you can transfer one of your legs to somebody else. But that's what the whole American thinking is about. Can't we rid ourselves of our power, of our force, of the vehemence of energy and vitality, which pulses through our body and of which -- I don't know why, people seem to be ashamed. And Proudhon says whenever force is despised, whenever force has no organic and creative outlet in peace, when people try to replace it by shareholding companies, with votes -- every man a vote -- then something terrible happens. This force must find an outlet, because it is true in the creation of our God, there are only forces. We too are only forces; and we are real forces. And the forces that are able to build the Empire State Building and the George Washington Bridge -- they are to be respected as tremendously creative forces which do not occur in other parts of the world so easily. And so these creative forces have to find a -- a real recognition by your minds, gentlemen, or you go on talking about individuals, and pacifism, and -- and then there will be the next conflagration. And that's how the world war happened. It happened against the will of the liberal mind, who had doubts about everything and no use for force.

The people of 1846 therefore have a prophecy for us: Don't forget the creative and positive meaning of war. That's part of the prophecy of Proudhon, Carlyle, und Marx. Now we come to the second chapter tonight: the downfall of Marxism. Marx, the prophet -- and Marxism, the organization -- are obviously an utter contradiction, because if the economic forces, as Marx foresaw or predicted, or foresaw and predicted -- it's not quite the same to foresee and to predict -- if the forces of capitalism are self-destructive and lead finally to the great Kladderadatsch, to the great cataclysm of capitalism itself, as Marx thought, then the founding of the First, the Second, and the Third International is foolish. The founding of a Communist Party is impossible, meaningless, and the doing anything about this catas- -- cataclysm is im- -- is, so to speak, would be a refutation of Ma- -- the Marxist doctrine that these forces of capitalism have to beget the new society themselves. And everything that you try to do by willpower outside the economic process itself is ridiculous.

Well, this contradiction struck, of course, people from the very beginning. But people wanted to do something, and so they went and organized. I'm not speaking of the unions. I'm speaking of the Communist Party, of the International, of the Socialist Party in all countries. The contradiction has been -- that's the old -- old story now. I need not go into any of the details. But the downfall of capital- -- of Marxism obviously occurred, and the victory of Marx, if -- and now I have to ask for your one second of faith, and not of just understanding -- and that's perhaps more as a person in New York is willing to give.

When we entered the catas- -- era of catastrophes in 1904 with the first Russian Revolution and the Russo-Japanese War, in this prelude of the -- of our era, of our

own time, it was shown that our revolutionary era would consist of a strange order of things very different from what Marx had foreseen or known about revolutions, that wars would begin the game and revolutions would follow. The Russo-Japanese War began and the famous Red Sunday of January -- 22nd, in St. Petersburg, followed. In the French Revolution, as you know, it was the reverse. Paris began and Napoleon was the consequence -- the Napoleonic Wars, I mean.

So we have here the real embodiment -- the incorporation, the fulfillment of prophecy, or of the disangelists' gospel in -- beginning in 1904 with this prelude which sets already the form- -- it gives the formula, the recipe for everything that has happened since, and that ends in the Korean War in 1950. War first, and revolution as its consequence only or its -- as its acknowledgement or as its recognition. The war mobilizes the masses of the workers and changes their social situation totally. The peasants of Russia can make the revolution in 1917, because they are in the army, instead of being in factories.

In 1914, when the First World War started, Marxism was repudiated by the working masses, because they all voted the credits of war for their respective governments. Marx had seen in England before a kind of what he called "supercapitalism" or "super-imperialism," which would take in the English workers and allow them to come out jingoistically for the imperial causes of the British Empire. But he could not have foreseen that in all the industrialized areas of the world, the workers would go to war against each other, and that in the only country that was not industrialized, his gospel would be followed. It's a little bit like the Jews rejecting Jesus, and He has to go to the Gentiles with His faith, that -- the fact that the Russians took to Marxism and the Europeans didn't -- the Europeans being the Jews and the Russians being the Gentiles in this case.

Certainly nothing happened in the way in which Marx had predicted it, and everything happened as he had predicted it. He did predict that the national economies would break down. He did also predict that they would do it heedlessly. I have been old enough in 1914 -- and there's at least one man in this room who has also lived through those days knowingly in 1914 -- all Europe went to war without any purpose. There is a famous document in your own literature which proves this. In 1913, one year before the crown prince of Austria was murdered, the alleged cause of this war, of the world -- two world wars, by the -- large -- the ambassador to the Court of St. James, of Mr. Woodrow Wilson, Walter Page, wrote a memorandum to the president of the United States saying that there was no doubt that within 12 months, a world war would break out, because the go- -- coun- -- nations of Europe had nothing to live for. Wouldn't he be good enough to invent a scheme in the tropics, or at the -- at the Northern Pole, just to give them something better to do than to turn their arms against each other. So you could see that the -- in America it was possible to foresee the

end of these national markets, these national purposes, these national imaginations, these national progra- -- programs. They had nothing in their head. They were just as empty as the three men in Teheran were found, when they had to decide over the future of Europe. They had no idea about the future, so they said they didn't know.

The heedlessness of the wars is the great identification of these events with regard to the Marxian prediction. So, Point 1 of my thesis is that Marxism was refuted, but Marx was not refuted. There's an absolute unwillingness, however, among the Communists, as well as among the liberals, to see that the world wars are fulfillment. The scourge, it seems, the sufferings, the crucifixion of humanity, has not been big enough, and large enough, and total enough to make economists or historians sit up and -- think, "Isn't this the fulfillment of a prediction?"

"Oh no, it isn't. The documents prove that it was just thought out 24 hours before it all started, by some ultimatum, or by some diplomatic step, or by some such ridiculous telephone call."

Gentlemen, that is, by and large, the abdication of the intellectuals, the socalled intelligentsia in our modern world, that they have been proven unable to connect the times, to connect prophecy and fulfillment. I think that's their biggest indictment.

The desperate attempt to find in the -- in the -- as some law schools do, just to give you an example of the modern man's mind, to -- to find in the -- in the stomach-juice of the judges the reasons for a decision of the Supreme Court, as I've heard people actually debate in a law school -- how to influence the digestion of the judges so that the case is decided in favor of the pleading -- of the plaintiff. I've heard historians say that the history of the human race depended on our glands. Well, as long as people believe such nonsense, they will always be taken by surprise. They will always be hot air moving by nothing -- guided by nothing but themselves, and they'll all be astonished. We are the best informed generation, and the most surprised. We know everything, except what must happen tomorrow. But we need not. It's all predicted and prophesied. It's all there. History is in our marrow and in our bone. From our mother's womb, we are the citizens of all times, if we only would like -- want to hear and to listen, but we don't. We want to know. That's something quite different. That's disobedience.

The downfall of Marxism is illustrated by this pamphlet, which I highly recommend as the -- the downfall of the Piltdown Man. It's called, "Shakespeare: A Marxist Interpretation," by {Smirnov}, one of these outputs of the Russian ministry of public instruction in 1936. But that wouldn't be important. But it was

especially edited for the New Theater League, 55 West 45th Street, New York City, in 1936. They even have printed their names here, but I don't wish to give them away.

Shakespeare was with the Marx -- Karl Marx family a favorite. His daughters had to enact it, and he recited it, Shakespeare, for pages and pages. He thought he was a great genius who enlightened Marx. But if you read Mr. {Smirnov}, it is the other way around: Marx enlightened Shakespeare. I have no time, and I haven't even the brain power to show you how satanically stupid this pamphlet is. But I would think that it should be prescribed reading for theologians. I mean this very seriously, gentlemen. If you do not study this aberration of the human mind, the communist writings in this country in the '30s, you do not understand what you have to learn or what you have to come up to or what you have to overcome. What -- how the sovereign power of the spirit really has to do something with this game, this puzzle here, this crossword puzzle of Mr. A. A. {Smirnov}. It is, I think, in all -- I've read mu- -- many of these things, because as you may know, I have written a book on the revolutions of the -- of the last thousand years -- it is of all the documents of the human mind, the greatest platitude, and yet, the greatest separation of Marx and Marxism, between Marx and Marxism. The genius of Marx, the worshiper of Shakespeare, and the stupidity of Marxism cannot be better illustrated than by this Marxist interpretation of Shakespeare. In -- in one -- saying it in one word, it's moving in circles. It says absolutely nothing, because it knows beforehand, before -- without being able to prove it, that Shakespeare is a great genius. This he accepts -- on hearsay, I should say, you see -- and because he has absolutely no reason from his own thesis to believe that it is a great -- that is a great genius. There is no place for this, you see, in his own ideology. So he's rather desperate. Sentence after sentence, and page after page, he's -- he has some epithet, you see, which says it's really great, but it shouldn't. And it shouldn't, it shouldn't, it can't -- because he's torn, you see. Shakespeare doesn't know to which class he belongs. Obvious he didn't.

The downfall of Marxism, gentlemen, came from a premise -- clearly stated, I should say, in Marx but overruled by his own ambition -- that since the thesis and the antithesis and since classes in his own time opened his own eyes to reality, that perhaps other conflicts in other centuries were able to state their own differences in the terms that we have to learn and hear in the Age of the Reformation, or in the Age of the Franciscans and Dominicans, in the voices of these people. I think that for Marxism, I have a right to deduce my claim that just as the 19th century talked in terms of capital and labor, so obviously these other periods talked in the terms of their own conflicts; and we have to learn their lingo, the lingo of the 16th century and the 17th century before we even know what they were talking about. And to find behind all these str- -- struggles of the

past the same conflicts, as in the 19th century, is really against the sacred Hegelian and Marxian problem -- positions of dialectics, because the self-consciousness of capital begets the anti-self-consciousness of the proletariat. Well, all right. Then why should not the people in the other centuries have stated with the same genius as Marx for the proletariat, stated their case in such a way that the interpretation of Marx is not available, is not applicable to these other centuries. They were, after all, Marx's equals -- Cromwell was -- you see. And there's absolutely no reason to -- from his own premises, to allow him to carry over his thesis and antithesis in their own -- in the same phrasing and the same words, and Mr. {Smirnov} is so very useful for you to learn just this, that Shakespeare has to be read and not interpreted, and that the critic of Shakespeare is not the genius, but Shakespeare is the genius.

Famous vote taken in my class: who is the better man, the critic or -- or the artist? Majority vote: the critic.

Now if the big catastrophe of these two last wars for -- I ask you for this ounce of faith -- is the prediction of Marx, as I firmly believe, then the new century is not the century of labor and capital, but of war and peace, of a world that is one already in two and that, by the way, fulfills the prediction of Proudhon that the end -- final state of society could neither be a world government ever, nor could it be a league of nations -- that's all in this book here of 1846 -- but it ha- -- would have to be the antagonism, the creative antagonism of two great powers. That's the state of affairs as we have, which is very human. There is husband and wife, so I don't see why there shouldn't be Communism and America. Brother and sister, at least, quarreling.

I have reasons to believe that if I had time, you would even follow me in this argument that these two great powers -- world powers are in a new position. They are not just like the Bourbons and the Habsburgs of old, for -- out for equilibrium of power. At this moment, you just look at the map of the world. Russia and America are both so preoccupied with digesting the spoils, with organizing the tremendous areas that have fallen to their sway, that it will take 50 years perhaps before they are knowing where they stand, how far they have -- they have managed to regalvanize Brazil and Manchuria. Nobody can envy these two -- poor great powers of this task to galvanize these other areas into life and action and the famous standard of living. And that is -- obviously a very disagreeable task. So it is much cheaper to talk about the war between Russia and America; but unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, you are not going to see it happen.

We will -- are going to see happen, however, the -- the -- the development of two tremendous armed camps, who will have to tackle this great creature, war, as Marx and his century had to tackle this gro- -- great, great creature, produc-

tion, peacetime production, economy, commodities, capital, labor. The headache that this war will give us as a creature, as a creatura belli, as the liturgy of the Church would have to call it, as that ever newly created being called war, that is the topic of the next science, I'm sure, of the next great enterprise of the human mind. Whoever partakes in this task of mastering the reality of war and thereby then for the first time perhaps becoming able to subject it to arbitrary treatment, or to management, whoever participates in this will belong to the people who have re- -- done repentance for the impotency of the last century in the life of the Church, who was without prophecy and fulfill- -- without crucifixion and without fulfillment and had to leave it to these disangelists to prophesy and to gospelize and to see fulfillment.

I do think that the two world wars amount to some such metaphysical or religious dignity of an event of a world order. I told you that I know very well that very few people are willing to step up to the time of Marx or go after Marx, that most of you prefer to live before Marx. And so therefore, in order to encourage you to believe that perhaps something has happened that allows you to take stock and to say that prophecy and fulfillment now lie behind us in such a way that we can live and include this great story, encompass it into our way of thinking, not because it is before us, but because it already has shown up a great deficiency of Protestantism of the last centuries, and thereby make Christianity a power in life again, which it isn't today -- I want to show you how -- what happened between the two World Wars very briefly with regard to these United States, who after all, when I landed on these shores were, as you know, quite unconcerned. Although they were in the throes of a terrible depression -- had this unemployment of 11 million people -- still in this year in which I landed had jurisprudence, in which the pre-Marxian truth was held that labor was a commodity which could be sold acr- -- over the counter. That, in the face of 11 million unemployed, who had certainly no counter to sell their labor at, was quite some boldness of the academic mind, the judicial mind, of the educated people in this country.

Well, in 1935, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States saw the light and he voted as a minor- -- in a minority vote that this wasn't so, that labor was not a commodity, because after all it seemed to him that the worker marched himself in person into the factory, and I -- he couldn't quite see where the counter was which separated the man and the -- his labor. Next year, the minority of the Supreme Court became a majority and voted this strange concept of 1846 out of existence. In the same year, there appeared a book, the first book of a recognized, decent authority -- a man who could be a full professor in a university -- on the theory of unemployment. If you look up the books on economics in this country especially, any year before 1935, unemployment was mentioned as undesirable perhaps, or also as desirable because the wages were then very low.

It was an afterthought that it was treated at all. In William Taussig's book on economics, it isn't mentioned at all. That went through many editions in this country.

Marx has conquered in this country by this simple fact that ever since 1929, the unemployed have not -- no longer remain the annex of the economic theory, but the key, and the opening gates- -- -way, so to speak, into economic thinking, for any reasonable man in politics. Mr. Eisenhower wants to balance the budget, and he wants to do many things of 1870, but he also says that -- as soon as there is an economic depression in sight, all the big steam engines of the fire department of the United States will be mobilized, budget balanced or not balanced.

In other words, you see the revaluation of values. You see that on the onehand side the lip service is paid to the order of things: before, the unemployed were a liability which had to be turned into an asset, but that since 1929, something tremendous has happened in the United States: our unemployed, our liabilities, which must be treated as assets. That is the secret of a new era, that this which is minus in one era, becomes plus in the next era. It is always the sinner of one society that is the cornerstone of the next society. The proletarian, the unemployed of the 19th century today is the man at whom all the guns of legislation will shoot first, when a crisis occurs. There will be 63 million -- million jobs in one form or another, whatever happens. When this occurs, gentlemen, then people have changed their minds. And of course a change of mind is the only change that matters, the metanoia. The metanoia is not repentance for your little moral sins, gentlemen, but it is the rethinking of your own place in the world, and today it is better to be on the side of the unemployed, because then you may be sure that you will be taken care of.

I had a friend, an older man -- his son is in this room --and in 1913, he made a speech as the head of employers against the idea of collective bargaining. And he said that he would all his life be for free bargaining. And he meant at that time, of course, the bargaining between the employer and the single worker. In 1929, the same man had advanced to an even higher position of influence and authority. He was the president of all the cham- -- the organizations on the employers' side for bargaining with the workers. And in this capacity, he had to make a speech, and he violently came out against the government, which at that time said that it would arbitrate in strikes and would -- with the National Labor Board, you understand -- dictate the tariffs between the labor and capital. And in order to defend the autonomy of the industry, he said that forever would he stand for free bargaining -- only that 16 years only after his first speech, he meant in this term "collective bargaining." This is metanoia: when the same man, without knowing it, you see, uses the same word in the opposite sense, within half a generation. This has happened between the two world wars.

And there again you see the strange situation of the liberal intelligentsia, of which this man was a very decent member, as president -- as a -- of a great business, and a very responsible position. It's afterthought. The world war had already done materially away with national markets, for all practical purposes. It had Balkanized Europe in such a way that this couldn't last, that a new order of things had to follow. Austria was destroyed, Turkey was destroyed, et cetera.

But thinking is a slow process, very different from what you think in the Horace Mann School. Thinking is slow and life is fast. This is another thing which you have to meditate over, because we all have -- I too -- we have to learn that the intelligentsia is the latest group usually to understand, not the first. If they do not make the sacrifice as Marx, and forgo the benefits of the Ford Foundation, then they are the latest to understand. They are blinded by their dependency on the means of making a living. Very important that it took this man 16 years. Myron Taylor of the steel trust said the same thing about collective bargaining, as -- if I remember writing in 1937, when he came back from Italy and invited Mr. and Mrs. John Lewis for lunch and had a little card and on which it was said "Collective Bargaining." Nice lunch menu.

The conversion of the -- of capital, of business, of the intelligentsia to the catastrophe's meaning happened between the two world wars. And therefore, this in-between twilight of between the wars is of great importance. There the intelligentsia discovered what had happened. They discovered the solidarity of the army for the whole nation; that in these modern wars, it became clear, and I think it should be clear to you when you read this word "shelter," in your houses and homes, and on your bridges, that the solidarity of mankind came into the experience and knowledge of the people from a corner on which they had not ever expected it, from the simple threat of war, the threat of war which today includes children and women even more than the soldier at the front, because obviously the hydrogen bomb is not going to be -- wasted on the infantryman in his trench. Now, with this reversal of danger, the solidarity, not of the nation -- there is no nation that can go to war alone -- but of these two great blocs of humanity, has been realized in a very unpredicted and unpromised -- -promising, you may even say -- unpromising way. But it is noth- -- not -- nevertheless the great answer to the outcry of the manifest, Communist Manifest, that there is only the solidarity of the proletariat, and no other, and that the others live by free competition where dog eats dog. This no longer is true. Dog may eat dog, and ma- -- dog may like to eat dog. But no trespassing. It isn't allowed anymore.

The potential soldier, the potential member of the armament race -- you may denigrate this as very poor, very external, very cheap. To me it isn't. It's very sublime that men who try to squabble about peacetime economy and to divide the interest in peacetime between the capital and labor is now suddenly overtaken by this much greater truth of war, in which these differences between capital

and labor are of utter insignificance, can just be {ruled} out.

I could go now back -- my time is up, as I see -- but I could go back and remind you that, of course, Lenin himself made this great leap away from Marxism into the great prediction of the catastrophe when he in 1899 already said the -- "It isn't necessary for the peasants to be revolutionized. We can make the revolution with unrevolutionized peasants." In a way, he foresaw then that the soldierpeasant would do exactly his bidding even more than the worker-soldier, of whom he had to execute quite a number.

All this is my way of saying, in a very short and too-short way, that these three great acts of this drama, or four great acts -- the prelude, which sets the recipe: war first, revolution second -- in the Russo-Japanese War; the First World War, which makes it obvious that the nations have no future, because they have no purpose beyond themselves, because they go into this war in despair and despondency. I could show you the statements of Grey, the English statesman; of the emperor of Germany, the -- on the other side. Utterly hopeless, without any expectation of any meaning, of any outcome, of any -- that may -- would make sense, and yet going.

My friends in the German general staff on August 2nd thought the war was lost. I had two friends there, two brothers who were both captains in the general staff in Berlin. And they both were convinced, and their superiors too, that this war was madness.

That's very significant. It's part of the -- the -- the description of the capitalistic society of the 19th century which Marx had given. Well, the new centuries in which we are, into which we are dismissed by the fulfillment of the old prophecy, and for whose new prophets we are waiting, is a century after the great crisis of -- predicted by Marx. If you do not want to take this step, life must become very grim and meaningless for you. You cannot then understand that all those squabbles, of which the daily papers sometimes still make mention, are over. The questions -- you see it, from the way the Taft-Hartley bill has had to be handled, I think rightly so, that the desires of making the closed shop a part of the American Constitution couldn't be fulfilled, because that's after all the -- the central argument, the central question. Are we responsible for the flourishing of the lifetime president of a union?

This is all over. The unions in this country are really to be pitied. They only had 10 short day -- years of triumph. It's too short really to relish it. In -- in England, they had at least the Labour Party government for a short while. But on the whole, these conflicts, these contrasts are very minor from now on. The sooner these people see this, the more they can concentrate on the solution of the

next era. In this era, it will not be dialectics of capital and labor. It will be the dialogue of two great camps, and dialogue is not quite the same as dialectics. It is not thesis and antithesis, but it's partnership of two people who have something very different to say, but who have to say it to each other in a conversation. Anybody who can create a conversation between the East and the West will deserve well and will do something for peace. Anybody who talks about dialectics will not talk at all. You just be abstractionist, let -- putting other people in pigeonholes. If I am in a dialogue, I am not the thesis, and the other man is not the antithesis, obviously. It's ridiculous. Just tell your wife when she listens to you that she's the antithesis.

These are the two things: for war, solidarity; for peace, conversation -- which will dominate, because the prophecy of Marx is honorably fulfilled. Honorably, because he has been recognized in his demand for u- -- solidarity. Fulfilled, because the nations in their nationalism have come to the end of their rope. Yet, in this honorable fulfillment, there's also a victory of the spiritual tradition of the Bible. Because it is the friendship of Engels and Marx; it is the devotion of Jennie Westfahlen, Marxens wife; it is the faith of the working man in Marx and in the word of Marx that has really allowed us today to see this prophet as a prophet, to know of his existence. Who would mention Marx if he hadn't been put on this pedestal of loyalty, and allegiance, and reverence by the working man? I think he is -- has given them this shelter. I think that really all the strikes fought in the last hundred years have been ennobled, have been treated more generously by the fighters, because they had this great program, this great proclamation explaining the strike, every one strike as part of one tremendous outcry for solidarity of the human race in work.

Again, I invite you to -- not to be blinded by the Marxians against the greatness of Marx. They never mention the strikes. But after all, the strikes are the real story of the -- of the suffering of the working man in the last hundred years. And the working man himself partly has been cheated out of this heroic story a little bit, I feel today, by his union leaders who are selling him on wages. No strike has ever been fought for wages, despite all the {utter} aspects. They have always been fight for -- fought for the dignity of man and for the solidarity of the workers. And that is a religious item. That is an act of neighborly love and an act of belonging, or -- an expression of the deep feeling that all men in this tremendous division of labor are together in one great enterprise, regardless of the place, and the factory, and the individual shop in which they are working. The unity of the process of production all over the world is the other experience of the world wars, which is a triumph of the story of our era, which has said that not only the spirit of man must unite in prayer on Sundays in one -- one creed and one faith, but that even our hands may be -- by the scientific process -- be led in such a way that all production all over the globe is really one. That's in-

credibly Christian and incredibly ecumenic. I think it's a better ecumenicity than all the ecumenicity of the churches.

As you know, Lenin recognized this, when he proclaimed in 1917, "Communism, that's the Hindenburg program in industry, plus the Soviets." And in this outcry, he united war and peace in the most -- convincing to me -- convincing manner. We have General Eisenhower as president, as a kind -- a kind of minimum general, in order to bring to the attention of the American public that there has been fought a war, the consequences of which must not be forgotten for industry. West Point has published a new textbook, Economics of National Security, which another attempt to show that war dominates peace, as it should, because otherwise if you -- as long as war dominates peace, there hasn't to be the next war.

Let me then end this very briefly: that society was a creature of special order and rules, production, a secret to be studied, is the great discovery of the 19th century. And it has become conscious -- we have become conscious of this very much. That war is still a strange mis- -- strangely mistreated part of our destiny has to become the topic, I think, of the next century, because always the fulfillment of one prophecy is in itself the question mark which invites the next prophecy. In this moment I feel we stand. We stand at the end of the era predicted by Marx. And we stand in the beginning of an era in which the first word is not yet spoken, because war itself has not yet been addressed, spoken to as a part of creation. It has been pooh-poohed. It has been studied. It has been analyzed. You have generals. But that isn't the problem. The problem is to understand that there is no peace without war and no war without peace. William James spoke of a moral equivalent of war at the end of his life. And he died in despair because he felt that he had wasted his whole life and had only discovered in the last minute what he should have thought about. Well, perhaps you begin. There is an English statesman who once very simply said, "In we are; on we must." Thank you.

(Hutchison: Professor Rosenstock-Huessy has kindly agreed to answer some questions now for a few moments, and then we will adjourn again as last night to the faculty lounge for coffee. And I hope those visitors from outside the seminary will join us there too. Anyone any questions? John?)

(Professor Huessy, you raised the question that war created solidarity, and I assume that you meant a solidarity among -- on the part of the two camps. I would -- I would appreciate your pointing to those particular aspects in this camp, the American camp or the Western camp, where you see solidarity. I see division, and not solidarity that has been created in this camp today. And if I see some solidarity coming, I see it coming under the form and force and power of

one whom I think needs a lot more talking about than paying attention to war or peace. Where is -- wherein lies the solidarity of the West, or of America?)

I would like to have somebody ask me questions who has been here yesterday.

(Thank you.)

(May I ask another question?)

(Hutchison: Please.)

(In the beginning of the lecture, Freud, Darwin, and Nietzsche were execrated as people who stripped man of his human dignity. Yet Freud, Darwin, and Nietzsche in their respective fields concentrated on man's struggle for existence -- Freud in the -- in the conscious and subconscious realm, and Darwin and the war among the species. And Nietzsche more or less glorified the whole subject of war. Now aren't they more or less apostles in keeping with the manifest destiny of war or the idea that war is the -- is the process in the unfolding of civilization?)

I'm delighted that you ask this question. Obviously you are right. But it -- it has been said of all these four men, in order to -- to show you the paradox in which this -- their doctrines move, that they are the devil's elixir for Christianity. That is, they have shown this, the devil's side, the night side of our life as still in existence and still necessary -- and always necessary. This spur of the fear, of the desire, of the great passions, the lust for power, you see, all the class conflict, but showing at the same time the necessity of transcending this conflict, not by their preaching, but by painting the situation so -- in -- such intolerable terms that something -- men, we were driven out of our complacency, and had to do -- and were perhaps better -- more willing to do anything than -- through all preachings of Christianity for 1900 years. It has been -- Nietzsche has been, I think rightly, called the negative preacher of Christianity, you see, the devil's elixir for the revival of the Christian faith. There is some great depth in this; that as long as we kept this black undercurrent of war, of belligerency in our nature, you see, under cover -- or just called it in general the sinful state of man -- it was not really conjured up from its depths and couldn't be mastered. It is really at this moment that hell has risen. But when hell rises, it can be redeemed. As long as it is -- we are blind to it and don't look into the abyss, you see, it will always explode. It will always break up. As soon -- that's what I have -- tried to tell you when I said -- spoke of this creature of war which has to be conjured. The other conflicts, too -- it is true -- you are right, Sir -- that in confronting us -- ourselves with this, we enter really an era in which we will allow the demons of hell to speak, and not to

conquer. I mean, to be there, and not to conquer.

May I remind you that this Christian church has tried to era- -- organize itself as Heaven in the first thousand years. If you go to the famous monasteries on the promontory of Athos, in Greece, you will still find this -- the heavenly hosts organized there, in full swing. They are so heavenly that not even a feminine chicken is allowed into the monastery there. No sex.

Well, I mean that you know perhaps that the architecture of the Byzantine cathedrals is really a ca- -- an attempt to depict Heaven, very seriously. For centuries, people have devoted themselves in the monastic orders to an attempt to praise the Lord in adoration, just as the angelic choir. This is literally true. Obviously since Dante and the Crusades, man has opened up purgatory. You just have to read Dante or Goethe's Faust to know that the topic of the second millennium is purgatory. That's more or less a civilian mind. Purgatory.

Now we do enter the third thousand years of the Church in which hell itself has to be redeemed. And the redemption of hell will be -- look very different from Dante and Faust and it will look very -- und Goethe -- and it will look very different from a monastery of St. Benedict or St. Basilius. I'm quite serious, but it's no time now to go into this. I'm very grateful to you, because it is hell which these people have revealed. But they have only revealed it. They have forced us to acknowledge its existence. You understand? But nothing is said, so to speak, how to treat them. I really have a hunch -- again, I cannot prove this to you now -- that the Gospel is written first about this hell. It's {only} perverted, I mean, because hell is perversion. First they say, you see, "We will destroy our -- your world of humanism, of Good, True, and Beautiful, of idealism." Then the catastrophe happens, following out their recipe into the gas chambers of Auschwitz, into the concentration camps, into every gruesomeness, into the bombing of Dresden, into every destruction possible, and every one of the nation -- warring nations has its full share in these hellfires, in these really -- real hell. You are still so sheltered here that you just don't know what after all has happened to one half of the human race in the last 50 years. Twenty-five perced- -- percent of the people -- of the humanity only live in the same places at this moment in which they lived 30 years ago.

(Hutchison: Would anyone else like to ask a question now? Or would you like to -- perhaps we might adjourn, Professor Rosenstock-Huessy, down to the -- )

Now. I would -- I'm -- this is an old student of mine, this chaplain. And I would wish to answer his question, but I thought the others should have the first choice. So, you don't mind?

If there only was a division in this country, Sir. All these divisions don't amount to anything. They are not serious. What's the division between Mr. McCarthy and President Dickey or President Conant or who --? These are not divisions to speak of. You are too impatient. I mean, you are too sentimental. You are too touchy. You are too soft. These are not real divisions. What's the division between John Lewis and -- and the president of the st- -- of the coal miners? Where is there any division? They are all thinking in the same terms about more refrigerators and more consumers' goods.

(Hutchison: Any more questions?)

(Do I understand that { } there is no such thing as a -- as a war of -- of ideas? Must be an armed conflict, is that what your position is?)

Well, would you make su- -- I would -- do not -- I'm not sure that I understand your question. Ideas make for war. Idealists are the real war-mongers, because idealists think that they -- their mind is divine. And you can't argue with these people. Platonist is a dangerous fellow. An Aristotelian equally well. They believe in the mind. So you -- the -- the mind is unbreakable, you see. The only person you can deal with is a man who is willing to change his mind. Now any man who is a philosopher can't do that, you see, if he has one philosophy. If he has many, that's of course better. So ideals make for war. That's perfectly true. So the fewer such i- -- idealists we have, the fewer wars we have. The -- Moscow is certainly -- these are ideologists, aren't they? So that's the -- the danger, that's the impenetrable thing about them. They are Platonists.

(Or the power of {a ballot}.)

Pardon me?

(Or the power of {a ballot}.)

Oh, that's only true of Brooklyn, I think.

(Dr. Huessy, would you care to comment, if you would, I think, in keeping with the finale of the lecture, apropos of your statement that the new era will herald a -- the necessity for a -- a dialogue between the East and the West. And by your words, it would seem that the possibility of discussing any element of capital and labor has vanished with the last century and certainly with the wars that have passed. The religious issue is certainly not one that would receive an amenable ear, at any rate, in the -- in the East. Would you care to say any word as how one could begin the dialogue. We have the problem, say, Winston Churchill says he wants to go to Moscow. But what will he say when he gets

there? Wher- -- what words do you speak, what language do you speak? There are no values.)

Well, don't you think that an era always begins this way, that the thing that has to be done is at the beginning impossible? Otherwise it wouldn't be the task. It is impossible. I have read -- written in the preface of my new edition of the revolutions that I hoped one day this book on revolutions could be read in Russia. It cannot today. A friend of Lenin tried to have it translated five years ago and in the meantime, he died; I don't know if a natural death.

So I think it is this fact that it cannot be done at this moment by correspondence or by any cheap means, which suddenly makes it so absurd to speak of Marxens attempt to try to drive the wedge between labor and capital in such a way that -- labor would cease to talk to capital and would become, you see -- on s- -- go on strike and become labor. Class conscience, you see, immune against the temptations of capital and all the -- the ideologists around capital; the journalists, you see, and all the -- the people whom the -- the -- the -- the paid pens of the capitalists. Now this process has -- we have seen happening to a certain extent. In 1914, it failed for Europe. These poor workers were all benighted enough to take up arms for their fatherland, and did not have enough, you see, blocking of -- as antithesis, and so the whole thing fell through with this wonderful idea of thesis and antithesis, you see, because they did talk, and could be talked to. As soldiers, they took orders. They were -- you see, they stood at attention, even.

Now, obviously, therefore Marxens vision was one of going apart, of a catalytic, you see, process in society. Our process is the opposite. We begin with real separation. They are apart, and the less industry therefore is in Russia, the more these powers of Moscow have to stress that they are apart. There -- the more the ideology of antithesis, you see, is important, the more cities will be built, the more cars that will run, the more sti- -- you see, refrigerators will be built in Russia, the less it will be necessary always to stress the antithesis. But at this moment, it's the only way in which you can govern Russia, that you insist that they are the antithesis, because they don't -- aren't the antithesis, so they have to be told that they are, you see. The -- the consciousness has to make up for the facts. Now, a consciousness that is so beleaguered, and so bombsh- -- you see, so -- so bombed by -- by propaganda and argument, be the antithesis, otherwise there's no reason why we are hostile to the E- -- West -- cannot be reached.

That's the reason why I have to talk to you about it, that this breaking up of this Iron Curtain -- or however you call it, you see, this mental partition -- that schools, like Plato and Aristotle, at this moment have reached proportions of dividing the world, you see. Philosophy's now really dividing the masses, the --

500 million people here and 500 million people there. That's a great task for a super-philosopher. Now Christ came into a world beriddled with philosophies, and showed that the philosophies would not solve this problem. And I do think that's exactly a similar problem today. Then the schools had to be closed and -- or to be redeemed, and today, you have to -- the -- the -- all these people whom -- which we have expe- -- -posed to -- to -- education, you see, now have to be redeemed of their education.

(I hope I'm not exposing myself too much, but I -- I -- which means I'm fearful that I am -- take the risk. I must take the risk, because I'm here to learn. Do I understand you correctly, Sir, that the divisions, based upon our idealisms, are not as real as the divisions based upon our military camps? It seems to me that the real divisions in this or any age are the divisions of our minds; and that if we could get out of our camp and into the Russian camp, we'd find less dividing us there, as far as their uniform is concerned, than perhaps, as far as their minds are concerned. In fact, one of the problems after the conquest of Germany was to keep our men from fraternizing with Germans, with whom they had no real divisions.)

Oh no, it was all sororizing. You -- my answer to your question would also touch on -- on your question once more about the division. Soldiers are the same in all countries. Mr. Eisenhower and Mr. Zhukov can get on very beautifully. And that's nothing to laugh -- it is very serious, that it's all nonsense that a general has more sympathy with the -- with the tailor in his town. He has much more sympathy with another general. And it's very serious, because we have built artificially these things up to say that a general is -- is more interested in a college professor. He certainly is not. Just ask the people at Columbia University.

So, it isn't true. Armies, warring armies need each other. There's great respect for each other, and very easy friendship. It is all pacifistic idiocy to say that people who go to war -- each other hate each other. They love each other. That's why they go to war. Well, obviously. Very true. They help each other to their per- -- completion, to their perfection. What would be the world without decently and honestly fought wars? This -- last war has been poisoned by pacifism. The brutalities of this war, the treatment, the wrong treatment, the impo- -- impotency of making peace has all come from the preaching that war is wicked. That's why you were excluded from any influence, all the theological -- the schools of Christianity. The Christians had made themselves impotent of making sure that the generals, and the officers, and the soldiers would treat the people not as enemies in a -- in a sense of the heart, but as enemies of their political order, which is something quite different, because obviously on the other people defended another order and they were just as honorable and generous as we were. But the -- the Church has done this, the Church by its neutrality as to the

problem of a decent warrior. What have you done in -- in educating your soldiers for being good soldiers and loving their enemy?

A great story -- you may know that one of the fa- -- most famous Christian charities in Germany was founded by a man called von Bodelschwing, in Bethel, Bielefeld. He was even spared by the Nazis. There has been no case of euthanasia in his -- any of his hospitals for the idiots, and the feeble-minded, and the old for which he is famous. He has a great center there in Germany. And -- English bombs did fall on his hospitals, but otherwise he's still there.

He wro- -- once said to a Danish pacifist, who complained over the fact that he had fought in the French and German war and said, "What do you do, when you are killed by a bullet?"

He said, "I embrace the enemy who fired it, and say that he -- I -- he allowed me to die an honorable death for my country, and that this was in -- within God's judgment," and that he was his friend.

There's no enmity between decent soldiers. Even if you shoot the other man, there's no hatred. Only civilians think this, up behind the lines. I mean, some {Crosby}, or some -- some { } -- but that's all nonsense. A commentator may make such remarks on the -- about the Japanese or the Russians or so. But decent soldiers have always loved their enemy. So has Grant loved Lee. What's -- bout -- what's abnormal about this? It's obvious -- { }. People go to war, really -- to a real war, when they are equals. What would this country have done for the last seven years without Russia? And our antagonism against Russia when we have no -- not Germany as an enemy, we would have fallen asleep. Nothing would have happened here. We would have now a wave of unemployment in this country, no prosperity, except for the fear of Russia. Thanks to Mr. Stalin, we have kept awake. It's wonderful. Just, you see, have a good enemy, and you are taken care of. But your friends, beware of them. They put you to sleep.

Do you wish to abolish the reality of enmity in this world? Don't make yourself ridiculous.

(I wish to overcome it with the reality of good.)

The victory is only after the struggle, but you wish to ha- -- give up and abolish the struggle and therefore you have no life, but sterility.

(But Sir, there's a greater struggle, and that is for reconciliation. And it's a real struggle.)

(Hutchison: I see the hour is getting on, now. It's getting on to 20 to 10, and I think we'd all like to thank Professor Rosenstock-Huessy for his extremely stimulating and extremely provocative talks to us all. I -- I would venture, perhaps, to read a quote from a book, which he has written, The Christian Future, or: The Modern Mind Outrun: "All genuine speech remakes both listener and speaker." I'm sure that we have all gained a lot, and perhaps I dare venture to say the same about Professor Rosenstock-Huessy. But meanwhile, on behalf of you all, I'm sure we'd like to thank him very much for his evenings with us here.)