I’m on to Your Game, You Can’t Make Me Flip

Leaders are people who do the right thing. They have a significant role in creating wisdom, and the know how and skill to do it all. So truly inspirational leadership is that it makes a way for the dream to be obtained. Amazing as it may seem, fully half a century after the knowledge economy began, we know embarrassingly little about the “knowledge” that lies behind it. If, for example, knowledge is the oil of tomorrow’s economy, as many have suggested, then how much of this intangible “oil” exists? Petroleum companies, armies, Wall Street traders and Middle East sheikhs spend fortunes trying to estimate the real—as distinct from claimed—size of global oil reserves. However, does anyone know how much the World knows? Or how the World’s knowledge supply is changing? How much of it is worth knowing? And what is it worth? To answer questions like these, we will need to blaze some surprising pathways, exploring bizarre beliefs about everything from the Christian Bible and the Holy Koran to science, the behavior of beavers and toxic tomatoes. The more we use…? Our starting point is a single critical fact: Knowledge—another of the deep fundamentals of revolutionary wealth—has become one of the fastest changing components of our economic and social environment. This is why any comparisons of knowledge to oil is misleading. The ways in which we store and deliver petroleum have changed only modestly in the past century—we still rely on pipes, tanks and tankers. By contrast, with the spread of computers, satellites, mobile phones, the Internet and other digital technologies, we are drastically altering the ways in which we create and store knowledge, the speed at which it decays, how we judge its validity, the tools we use to make more of it, the languages in which it is expressed, the degree of specialization and abstraction in which it is organized, the analogies we rely on, the amount that is quantified and the media that disseminate it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Moreover, all these dimensions of knowledge are changing simultaneously, at speeds never before encountered—and opening up countless new ways to create wealth. Another basic difference between oil and knowledge is that the more oil we use, the less we have left. By contrast, as we have suggested, the more knowledge we use, the more we create. This difference alone makes of mainstream economics obsolete. Economics can no longer be defined—as it often was—as the science of the allocation of scarce resources. Knowledge is essentially inexhaustible. These changes in the way we relate to knowledge have powerful effects on real-World wealth—who gets it and how. They send lawyers, accountants and legislators scurrying to rewrite existing rules about taxes, accounting, privacy and intellectual property. They intensify competition and accelerate innovation. They make old regulatory rules obsolete. They create continuous turbulence and turnover in methods, markets, and management. They allow whole industries and sectors to move beyond mass production and mass consumption to higher-value-added, more personalized products, services and experiences. Above all, these changes in knowledge demand much faster, smarter decision-making under more and more complex, if not chaotic, conditions. Yet, for all the thousands of analyses and studies of emerging knowledge economies, the impact of knowledge on creating wealth has been, and remains, misleading undervalued. Though the United States of America is still a great manufacturing power, fewer than 20 percent of its labor force works in this sector. Fully 56 percent performs work that is managerial, financial, sales-related, clerical or professional. The category growing most rapidly of all is professional—the most knowledge-intensive. Such much-quoted numbers, however, underestimate the new reality. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Far more than 56 percent are engaged in knowledge work. That is because today many machine operators, whether in leading-edge American steel mills or, for that matter, South Korea consumer-product plants, spend at least part of their time monitoring computers, much like pilots in a 747 cockpit. Cars have computers in the windows, in the cockpit, on the grill and on the bumper. Truck drivers rely on computers in their cabs. They may not be categorized as knowledge workers, but they, too, are generating, processing and transmitting knowledge or the data and information that underlie it. They are, in effect, part-time knowledge workers, but are not counted as such. And that is not all that goes uncounted. The knowledge we all use to create wealth includes hard-to-measure tacit or implicit knowledge stored inside our heads. What makes us knowledgeable,” for example, is an everyday understanding of the people around us. It includes knowing whom to trust, how a boss will react to bad news, how teams work. It includes job skills and behavior we may have learned by simply watching others. It includes knowing about our own bodies and brains, how they perform and when they let us do our best work. Some of this tacit knowledge is trivial. However, some is vital to everyday life and to productive endeavors. It is that back-of-the-mind knowledge on which we all depend—knowledge we may not even know we have. And precisely because it is so varied, and so far in the background, it, too, is often ignored by economists. In short, for these and other reasons, knowledge has long been shortchanged by economists—and today more than ever. To peer into the heart of tomorrow’s economy, therefore, we need to compensate for this lack of knowledge about knowledge. Every one of us, at any given moment, has an individualized inventory of work- and wealth-related knowledge. Authors presumably know something about the craft of writing and about the book-publishing industry. Dentists know about teeth. Gas station attendants know about steering fluids. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

However, not all knowledge belongs to individuals. Work teams, companies, industries, institutions and whole economies each, at any given moment, develop their own collective knowledge supply. The same might be said of societies and nations. All this knowledge is stored in two fundamentally different ways. One part of the knowledge supply is found inside our skulls. In each of us there is a crowded, invisible warehouse full of knowledge and its precursor data and information. However, unlike a warehouse, it is also a workshop in which we—or, more accurately, the electrochemicals in our brains—continually shift, add, subtract, combine and rearrange numbers, symbols, words, images and memories, combining them with emotiosn to form new thoughts. As they by, these thoguts may include everything from Wall Street stats, ideas about our customers, a friend’s trip about our golf swing, images of our mother’s face, worries about a sick child or a technical formula for improving a product, all interspersed with flashes of last night’s baseball game on TV, fragments of an advertising jingle from a car commercial and a half-finished outline for an overdue memo. Individually, such disparate items may mean little. However rearranged, they take on shape and larger meaning. They often turn into action that alters important decisions about our personal life, work and wealth. Concern for the sick child may make it hard to concentrate on the memo, or to keep tomorrow’s golf date with a customer, while the drop in stock-market prices may lead us to defer buying that new BMW. Let us inspect that knowledge warehouse and workshop. If we could shrink ourselves down to nanosize and walk around this constantly changing mental space, we would find endless rows and piles of facts and supposed facts. We would find concepts jumbled together or neatly piled atop other concepts, and linked to still others. Somewhere we would find all of our assumptions, plausible or not, about people, love, pleasures of the flesh, nature, time, space, religion, politics, life, death and causation. Hidden in some dark, remote corner we would find grammar the very languages we use and the logic and rules we apply to arrive at and manage our collection of meanings. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

It is a busy, churning place, operating without stop, even when we sleep. Whole some knowledge is continually lost, forgotten, mutated or rendered pointless, new, wealth-relevant knowledge is continually added. We can call all of this put together our personal knowledge supply. We all have one. There are more than seven and a half billion of these personal knowledge supplies currently walking around the planet—more than at any time in human history. However, by far most of the World’s knowledge is stored outside the brains of living humans. It is the accumulated knowledge of the ages—and of the moment—stored externally on everything from ancient cave walls to the latest hard drives and DVDs. For millennia humans had extremely limited ways to pass knowledge from one generation to the next. Apart from oral narratives (told and retold with accumulating inaccuracy), most knowledge died with each dying person and each dying generation. The rate of social and technological change in these early human societies was so slow, therefore, that even accurate accounts mainly told the same stories over and over again. A giant breakthrough occurred thirty-five thousand years ago when some unremembered genius drew the first pictograph or ideograph on a stone or a cave wall to memorialize an event, person or thing—and, in so doing, began storing non-oral memories outside the human brain. Another great advance followed the invention of various forms of writing. Millennia later came additional huge leaps with the successive invention of libraries, indexing and printing, all of which increased the rate at which knowledge grew from generation to generation. It is sobering to think that without this one factor—growth in our ability to generate and accumulate knowledge—we might still be living little better than our ancestors did more than thirty-five thousand years ago. Today, with the arrival of every-more-powerful computers, ever-more Web sites and ever-more new media, we are generating—and accumulating—data, information and knowledge at unprecedented speeds. To accommodate them, we have in recent decades been building what is, in effect, an immense megabrain outside, and in addition to, our six and a half billion individual human brains. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

This global megabrain is still that of a baby, incomplete, with adult connections not yet in place. Yet at some unknow, crucial tipping point in human history, the amount of knowledge stored outside our brains became larger than the amount stored inside. If anything proves our ignorance about knowledge, it is the fact that this truly momentous change in the history of our species is either unknow or unnoticed by humanity. The “outside brain” is expanding at unbelievable speed. The amount of data, information and knowledge stored in print, film, magnetic or optical form in one year alone is equivalent to that which is contained in a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress. It is equal to every word ever uttered by a human being since the dawn of time. Today, we can assume, the pace is even faster. It is only when we add this exploding external storage to what is inside our human brains that we arrive at our human species’ total supply of knowledge—what might be called the Aggregate Supply of Knowledge, or ASK. This becomes the immense wellspring on which revolutionary wealth can draw. We are not merely expanding the ASK, but altering the way it is organized, accessed and distributed. Internet search engines permit more and more relate contents. Moreover, systems that have until now been dominated by Western approaches to logic and thinking will soon be enriched by alternative epistemologies and more diverse ways to organize thought as we move toward a global knowledge meta-system. We are, therefore, transforming the entire relationship of wealth, in all forms, to the deep fundamental of knowledge—even as we similarly transform its links to time and space. Only by recognizing this can we appreciate, for the first time, why revolutionary wealth today is so qualitatively different from wealth in any previous era. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

When computer scientist Michael E. Lesk of the U.S. National Science Foundation cast light on the emerging global brain, he took a different track. Beginning with our seven and a half billion-plus brains, and based on the rates at which they absorb information and how fast we forget it, Mr. Lesk roughly calculated that the “total memory of all people now alive” is the equivalent of 1,200 petabytes of data. Since a petabyte is equal to 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes, 1,200 sounds like a lot. However, Mr. Lesk nonchalantly assures us, “We can store digitally everything that everyone remembers. For any single person, this isn’t even hard.” After all, he continues, “the average American spends 3,304 hours per year with one or another kind of media.” Some 1,578 hours are spent watching TV, another 12 in front of movie screens—which adds up to about 11 million words. Another 354 hours are devoted to newspapers, magazines, and books. The result, he suggested, is that “in 70 years of life you would be exposed to around six gigabytes of ASCII.” Today you can buy a 20-terabyte disk drive for your personal computer. The amount of data in the World was estimated to be 44 zettabytes at the dawn of 2020. By 2025, the amount of data generated each day is expected to reach 463 exabytes globally. Also, the World spends almost $1 million per minute on commodities on the Internet. By 2025, there will be 75 billion Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in the World. By 2030, 90 percent of every person age six and above will be digitally active. There should be around 175 zettabytes of data by 2025. It is a number that is hard to envision! However, with the countless advanced technological devices available now, processing these massive amounts of data is not impossible. The day is not far off when pupils will need to memorize nothing—they will wear a gadget that stores everything for them. And that raises fascinating questions. Might that gadget also help Alzheimer’s patients? It seems with the advancement of technology and information, to keep up humans have to start turning themselves into partial androids. Yet, everything that has, can, or ever will exist, in this or any other World may be fully described by the complete collection of relevant facts and the corresponding set of logical interconnections. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

No attempt comes close to telling us how much meaningful knowledge there is in all this storage. Or what it is worth. However, all of them support our contention that revolutionary changes are taking place in the deep fundamental of knowledge—changes for which the term revolution is an understatement. We are, in fact, living through the deepest upheaval in the World knowledge system since our species started to think. Until we digest this point, our best-laid plans for the future will misfire. And that takes us to those toxic tomatoes and…the buried head of a child. The Hipster Generation, in our model, are those who have resigned from the organized system of production and sales and its culture, and yet who are too hip to be attracted to independent work. They are a phenomenon of the after of 911. Their number is swelled by youths whose careers, hesitant at best, have been interrupted by the pandemic. This group is socially important out of proportion to its numbers, and it has deservedly and undeservedly attracted attention and influenced many young people. The importance of the Hipster is twofold: first, they act out a critique of the organized system that everybody in some sense agrees with. However, second—and more important in the long run—they are a kind of major pilot study of the use of leisure in an economy of abundance. They are not, as such, underprivileged and disqualified for the system; nor are they, as such, emotionally disturbed or delinquent. Some young men might be driven to this position by personality disturbances, but the subculture they have formed has made sense and proved attractive to others without those disturbances, but who have the identical relation to the organized society. In many ways the Hipster subculture is not merely a reaction to the middle class or to the organized system. It is natural. Merging with the underprivileged, the Hipsters do not make a poor go of it. Their homes are often more livable than middle-class homes; they often eat better, have good vinyl records, etcetera. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Some of their habits, like being scheduled, sloppy, communitarian, easy-going with pleasures of the flesh, and careless of reputation, go against the traditional grain of the middle class, but they are motivated by good sense rather than resentment: if they got wise to themselves, they are probably natural ways that most people would choose—at least so artist and the less affluent have always urged. Their rejection of the popular culture, Broadway theater, status commodities, bespeaks robust mental health. (It is, oddly, just these reasonable and natural ways that have won underserved attention as outrageous. For Madison Avenue boys are miffed and fascinated that Hipster get away with it, and so they keep writing them up.) The Hipster culture share specific traits of the “outside” class to which they have appointed themselves. Some of these are accidental, belonging to the particular marginalized groups who from the present-day poor—just as in France, it is the North Africans who set the tone. Others are essential, pertaining to being “outside” of society, such as being outcast and objects of prejudice; defying convention rather than just disregarding it; in-group loyalty; fear of the police; job uselessness. Besides these natural traits and present-day poor traits, Hipster culture is strongly suffused with the hipsterism that belongs to the middle status of the organized system. This appears in some of the Hipster economic behavior that can be a defensive ignorance of the academic culture; and in a cynicism and neglect of ethical and political goals. Balked in their normal patriotism and religious tradition, the Hipsters seek pretty far afield for substitutes, in the Silicon Valley or on Wall Street. As a typical genesis for a Hipster Generation, we have suggested attachment to middle-class home but withdrawing from its values, without growing into other worthwhile values. They are on speaking terms with their families but dissent from all their ways. They experience the University, for instance, as part of the worthless organized system rather than as Newton and Musk. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Finally, we see that Hipsters regard themselves as in a metaphysical crisis: they have to choose between the system and eternal life; and therefore their more philosophic utterances are religious and strewn with references to the apocalypse and saints of yore as when President Trump calls the TV News media “Fake News,” and for that he was censored and forced out of office. This is not, on the whole, a strong position: to be resigned and still attached, and therefore to have recourse to apocalyptic means. However, let us see what can be made of it, and turn first to the jargon, a variant of urban culture jargon of English, jive. In this talk there is a phrase “make it,” meaning “to establish oneself in some accepted relation to something.” One can make it as a writer, as a counter boy, with girl. The word comes from the common English “make it against difficulties,” as, “They kept shooting at him but he made it across the field.” It is akin to “make good as a lawyer, a writer,” but it is not so strong and positive. (We should not say “Make good as a counter boy.”) The difficulties overcome are those that confront anyone who has dropped “out” of the ordinary social functions when he tries to establish himself as anything at all, to be a something, a something or other. The usage is an acceptance of withdrawal. The Hipster is an enfant terrible turned inside out. In character with his time, he is trying to get back at the conformist by lying low. One cannot interview a hipster because his main goal is to keep out of a society which, he thinks, is trying to use the fake news media and television programs to make everyone over into a preprogramed image. The hipster may be a jazz musician; rarely an artist, almost never a writer. He may earn his living as a petty criminal, a hobo, a carnival roustabout, a coffee shop employee, or a free-lance moving man in Greenwich, Connecticut, but some hipsters have found a safe refuge in the upper income brackets as engineers, computer programmers or movie actors. He is considered infantile, but his infantilism is a sign that he is not aggressive or a tyrant. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

As the only extreme nonconformist of his generation, he exercises a powerful if not underground appeal as a social media influencer. Establishing an acceptable social relation against obstacles, draws from the Role Playing that is the chief function of the middle status of the organized system. One can says, “He made it, I made it in the Silicon Valley,” indicating no specific job, for that is unimportant, but usually means you work at a tech company and can afford a $2 million house, at the least, and a brand-new luxury Hybrid. Now a more general withdrawal, from experiencing altogether, is expressed by the omnicapable word “like.” Exempli gratia, “Like I’m sleepy,” meaning “if I experienced anything, it would be feeling sleepy.” Like if I go to like New Yor, I’ll look for up,” indicating that in this definite and friendly promise, there is no felt purpose in that trip or any trip. Technically, “like” is here a particle expression a tonality or attitude of utterance, like the Greek verily, or now look. “Like” expresses adolescent embarrassment or difference. Thus, if I talk to a young fellow and give him the security of continued attention, the “like” at once vanishes and is replaced by “You know,” “I mean,” “you know what I mean,” similarly interposed in every sentence. The vocative expletive “Man,” however, has different nuances in different groups. Among the Hipster it is used differently and means, “We are not small children, man, and anyway like we are playing together as like grownups.” Among some others, it is often more aggressive and mean, “Man, now don’t you call me boy, buddy or inferior.” And still to others “Man” means, “That is ‘the Man,’ the government or a man of another race who cannot be trusted.” Among proper hipsters it means, “We are not impotent.” So far as I can hear, it never means acceptance of the speakers as adult males, nor does it have the ring of respect or admiration (Mensch), as a woman or hero-worshipping boys might use it. When the interlocutor is in fact respected or feared, he would not be called “man.” (Perhaps “boss”?) #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

“Cool,” being unruffled and alert, has the same nuances. In standard English a man “keeps cool in an emergency.” If there is always an emergency, it must imply that the danger is internal as well as external: the environment is dangerous and feeling is dangerous. As spoken and enacted by a young Hipster, maintain a mask-face and tapping his toe quietly to the jazz, it means, “I do not feel out of place, I am not abandoned and afraid, I am not going to burst into tears.” In the original gangster (O.G.) the nuance is rather, “I’ll stay unruffled and keep out of trouble around here; I won’t let on what I feel, these folk are dangerous.” With the hipster, the jaw is more set and the eyes more calculating, and it means, “I’m on to your game, you can’t make me flip.” In general, coolness and mask-face are remaining immobile in order to conceal embarrassment, temper, or uncontrollable anxiety. To make a remark about language as a whole as used by the Hipsters: Its O.G. base is, I think, culturally accidental; but the paucity of its vocabulary and syntax is for the Beats essentially expressive of withdrawal from the standard civilization and its learning. On the other hand this paucity gives, instead of opportunities for thought and problem solving, considerable satisfaction in the act and energy of speaking itself, as is true of any simple adopted language, such as pig Latin. However, this can have disadvantages. One learns to one’s frustrations that they regard talk as an end in itself, as a means of self-expression, without subject matter. In a Hipster group it is bad form to assert or deny a proposition as true or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning. The aim of conversation is for each one to be able, by speech, to know that he is existing and belonging. So among perfectly intelligent and literate young men, some movie or movie star will be discussed for an hour, giving each one a chance to protect his own fantasies; but if someone, in despair, tries to asset something about the truth or worth of the movie, the others will at once sign off. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

(Among all American adolescents and even fellows in their late twenties, however, there is an embarrassment about “what to say”—“I never have anything to say to a girl,” or “They keep talking about painting and I have nothing to contribute.” Speaking, that is, is take as a role. If they are interested in the subject, they do not have confidence, they will say something, and if they are not interested, why bother? Here too the Hipsters have helped formalize and make tolerable a common difficulty; one contributes just by saying, “Like,” “Cool,” and “Man.”) Now, celibacy can creep up in myriad unexpected ways. Skewed gender ratios, a global fact of life, often produces unwilling celibates. The ratios are distorted by any number of phenomena. Wars are a major contributor, killing off enormous numbers of men in a narrow age range. Female infanticide, the consequence of the World’s preference for male children, warps populations so that women become much rarer—modern China, with 118.5 males for every hundred females, is now experiencing this disconcerting reality. Celibacy is one important response to these skewed rations, especially in light of predications by Chinses officials, who estimate that “the number of hopeless bachelors could mushroom to 80 million. (Polyandry would also be a solution, but globalization may help also as more females go to China for business.) Old age also creates celibates, usually women. Many are married to men who have become impotent, a common problem in older males. Unless these women turn to extramarital affairs, they are forced into celibacy. So are the millions of wives who outlive their husbands, another common phenomenon. Their situation garners little understanding or support. Society assumes these old women and the few men also in their category have become asexual and ridicule them as absence if they show interest in pursuing a relationship which involves pleasures of the flesh. North American nursing homes, for example, usually enforce celibacy. At the end of their lives, even women and some men who are interested in pleasures of the flesh are obliged to retire into a chaste existence they neither seek nor enjoy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Their unwanted lifestyle is reinforced by adult children who are often deeply distressed or disgusted at any hint of activity involving pleasures of the flesh or even desire in their mothers. They find such eroticism inappropriate and threatening, even selfish—they believe good mothers live for others, whereas intimate passions satisfy deeply personal needs. In old age, women are expected to revert to the undefiled state of early childhood when they were genderless, virginal, and pure. As a result, many respond by stifling their sensuality. They are made to feel guilty and inadequate and accept the celibate role they are expected to play. In any case, the death of suitable partners effectively imposes celibacy on even the most amorous older women. On the beneficial side, they are forced into it relatively late in life, unlike other coerced celibates. Today, widowhood connotes sadness, seniority, whitened hair, and the fragility of aging bones. Young widows exist, but because they may remarry, they are not strikingly sadder than divorcees of the same age. To a great extent, our image corresponds to the reality. This was not always so. Until medical advances became widely available, at different times in different places, widows and widowers could be any age. Death respected neither youth nor maturity, carrying off its victims in childbirth, plagues, epidemics, drought, famine, and a host of other natural catastrophes. Widows, in those times, could be teenaged, middle-aged, or very old. From our perspective of celibacy, what really mattered was the future as either perpetual widows or remarried wives. (Widowers, of course, are much rarer and are much more likely to be encouraged to remarry.) All societies have policies about widow remarriage, with many permitting it, some to the extent of making specific provisions for them to marry brothers-in-law, who will be fully invested in parenting any children and in caring for the now single woman. Other societies are—or were—neutral or hostile to widow remarriage. Early Christianity falls into the latter category. Marrying another man, even after the first one was dead, sounded far too much like a license for pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

It was, therefore, severely frowned on to remarry after becoming a widow. The assumption was that widows would/should remain perpetually chaste. Once a woman had been married, society recognized her husband’s right to exclusive ownership in any intimate passions, which continued in force even after his death. The general view was that a widow’s remarriage violated that ownership by transferring it to a new man, which was widely regarded as a betrayal of her first husband. Hinduism’s take on widowhood incorporates elements of this fundamental revulsion for female pleasures of the flesh with reincarnation, producing a conclusion that is a merciless condemnation of widows. Basically, Hinduism understands the husband’s death—especially from an accident, disease, or chronic condition, as opposed to old age—as caused by his wife’s sinful behavior in a previous life. How to challenge such an interpretation, which is at the core of the religion’s Worldview? And so instead of sympathy for her bereavement, concern for her economic plight, anxiety about her fatherless children, Hinduism turns accusingly on the widow and consigns her to, at best, a living hell and, at worst, to an agonizing death. Until recently in the Hindu World, widows of any age were reviled and cursed. “Some day that child marriages cause early widowhood,” wrote a Brahmin. “I say that widowhood is not caused by child marriages, but by those child widows having acted against their husbands in previous births. Adultery, teasing, etcetera, might have been the cause…Child widowhood is horrible, no doubt, but it is the effect of the wrath of God upon man.” In other words, widows were criminals, virtual murderers. What sort of life does such an evil creature deserve? The most brutish possible, and the most chaste. Manu, the Hindu lawgiver, decreed a widow should starve herself by eating only herbs, roots, and fruits, and so a widow traditionally ate once a day, only the plainest foods, and was always hungry. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

To ensure her chastity and her family’s honor, she had to remain in her family’s home, was made ugly, and was condemned to emotional and physical torment. Her hair was shaved and she no longer wore the red dot of marriage—the tilaka—on her forehead. She was stripped of all her jewelry, her earrings, nose-ring, bangles, chains, and bracelets. She wore only a white sari without a blouse underneath and went barefoot. Expect to do chores everybody else rejected, she could no longer leave her home, but worked there as a drudge, reviled and cursed. At night she slept on the floor, sometimes on a hard mat. In ancient times, she had to cake her head with mud and sleep on a bed of stones. She could join in no family outings, ceremonies, or celebrations. Despite every privation, a widow’s chastity was always suspect. In a folk song, a widow moaned to her mother-in-law, “I shall be alone in my bed, O mother-in-law, and not just for a few days; immature before marriage, I was totally inexperienced; now, how will I spend my nights and days alone?” Of course, a widow was easy prey, and the predator was often a male relative. If a pregnancy occurred, because the double standard in India thrives as solidly as elsewhere, the widow was shunned and could expect no pity from any quarter. Her seducer, however, being a man, escaped all consequences of the affair. Even if he wanted to, he could not marry her. A widow was forever her husband’s and remarriage was absolutely forbidden. Millions of widows suffered grievously. Many were children who had never even lived with their husbands. Often they were toddlers. Not surprisingly, throughout Indian history the number of child widows has been enormous. The last census of the nineteenth century recorded that Calcutta alone had ten thousand widows under four years of age, and over fifty thousand between five and nine. Between 1921 and 1931, in all of India, the number of child wives rose from 8,565,357 to 12,271,595, creating the potential for millions of future child widows. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

The Hindu religion taught that before marriage and childbearing, boys and girls should spend years as chaste brachinines. Gandhi, too, hated child marriage. “Where,” he demanded in 1926, “are the brave women who will work among the girl-wives and girl-widows, and who will take no rest and leave none for men until girl-marriage becomes an impossibility?” He lamented as well “the inhuman treatment often accorded to our widows.” Inhuman, indeed, and based solidly on traditional teachings about women. These do not make lovely reading. How, for instance, to digest this ancient wisdom: “even if he were to do nothing else throughout a long life of a hundred years, a man with a hundred tongues would die before finishing the task of lecturing upon the vices and defects of women.” And, continues this litany of condemnation, “women combine the wickedness of a razor’s edge, poison, snake and fire,” and their natural faults are “falsehood, thoughtless action, trickery, folly, great greed, impurity and cruelty.” They are “lascivious, fickle-minded and falsehood incarnate” and “have the hearts of Hyaenas.” Manu the lawgiver expressed it pithily: “Stealing grain or cattle, having pleasure of the flesh with a woman who drinks liquor, or laying a woman, are all minor offences.” Manu’s views are tremendously important because they influenced two thousand years of legislation and custom. Women had no rights and lived only to serve their husbands, who could abuse, discard, or sell them with impunity. Above all, woman had to be chaste. The greatest calamity that could befall a woman was to compromise her chastity. Widowhood was, therefore, doubly incriminating, as incontrovertible evidence of previous sin and as vulnerable states win which weak, lascivious, fickle women were more than ever tempted to stray. The merciless treatment of widows was therefore perfectly logical. It punished them for killing their husbands and, like the best military offenses, struck out and incapacitated them before they could so much as fantasize about resistance. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

That Nature put the hunger instinct into man and animal alike primarily to preserve the life of the physical body and not to satisfy the palate, nobody could rightly deny. The enjoyment of food is subordinate to, and intended to make more inescapable, the instinct required for this highly important necessity of sustenance. Nature is not interested in the human individual’s pleasure so much as in the continuance of his species. She has given him the one for the sake of the latter. Man has in thought, belief, and practice today reversed this order of importance. The result is a totally wrong view about the possibility and the value of continence. From this view stem a hot of moral, nervous, and physical maladies which are plunging one’s life into confusion and disaster. Nature has her rights, it is true, but before we can justly grant them we need to inquire as to what they really are. With you, O my people, my kin-folk, my mother, source of my life, with you I soar the wide spaces of the World; in your eternity I have life eternal. In your glory I am honored, in your sorrow I am grieved, in your affliction, I suffer anguish, in your knowledge and understanding, behold, I am filled with knowledge and understanding. Every footstep, wherever you have trod, is a treasure of life. Your land, the land of your hope, is sacred to me; its Heavens a source of beauty, of eternal splendor; its Carmel and Sharon are the spring of hope, the fountain of blessing, the source of life’s joy. Even its thorns and thistles are garbed in glory, in deathless beauty! These prayers, old and stained with tear, I take into my heart. And unto the God of my fathers, who from the ages past has been their Rock and Refuge, I call in my distress. In ancient words, seared with the pain of generations, I pour out my woe. May these words that know the Heavenly paths, ascend aloft unto God in high, to convey to Him that which my tongue cannot express—all that lies deep hidden within my heart. May these words, simple and true, speak for me before God, entreating His mercy. Perchance the Heavenly God who hearkened to my fathers’ prayers, who gave them courage and strength to bear all their sorrow and degradation, yet ever to hope for redemption—perchance He will also hear my prayer and hearken to my cry, and be to me a protecting shield, for there is none to help or sustain me, but God in Heaven. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

Cresleigh Homes

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