This Confusion Has its Roots in Early Childhood

Of everything found in the entire human knowledge base, including both current knowledge and obsoledge, nothing in recent centuries has increased the life span, nutrition, health and wealth of our species more than that trace element we call science. Yet among the many signs that we are changing the deep fundamental of wealth is today’s mounting guerrilla war against science. This was is an attempt not just to challenge scientific facts but to devalue science itself. Its goal is to change how science is conducted and to dictate what scientists may or may not investigate. At the deepest level, it aims to force a Worldwide truth-shift—to reduce reliance on science as a way of validating truth. If successful, it could sidetrack the future of the knowledge economy and the chances for reducing global misery and poverty, darkening the century to come. On the surface, it would appear that, on a global basis, science is flourishing. Worldwide, the number of scientists and engineers is growing, as are Research and Development expenditures–$161 trillion by the end of 2022 in the United States of America alone. A significant amount of that Research and Development has gone to foreign researchers and immigrants who have flooded into the United States of America science community from all parts of the World. The United States of America has also been the training ground for legions of scientists now working around the globe, from China to India to the middle East and Mexico. In the business sector, IMB alone spent $6.33 billion on Research and Development in 2020. Its researchers are now headed by Arvind Krishna. Under Mr. Krishna’s direction, IBM scientists and researchers received 9,139 U.S. patents in 2020, the most of any company, marking 28 consecutive years of IMB patent leadership. Patents were awarded to more than 9,000 inventors located in 46 U.S. states and 54 countries. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

These innovations not only improved IBM’s physical products but, more important, represent salable intellectual property of the kind that brought in $73 billion in revenue in 2020. IBM’s main products are no longer just physical—they are services and knowledge. The precise pathways by which science translates into generalized economic growth are extremely complex and a matter of lively debate. However, in the words of Gary Bachula, former U.S. undersecretary of commerce, “Leading economists now identify technical progress as a major, if not the most important, factor in sustained economic growth, accounting for as much as one half U.S. economic growth in the past 50 years.” In recent years, according to a National Science Foundation report, “other nations are increasing their Research and Development investments, focusing on areas such as physical sciences and engineering, which receive comparably less funding in the United States.” It is, of course, a cliché to say that scientific knowledge is a two-edged sword because some of its findings are exploited in destructive ways. The same is true, however, for religion and non-scientific knowledge—neither of which has unleashed a comparable flood of discoveries that have contributed to global health, nutrition, safety and other social benefits. Because the business World is so diverse is one reason why the universities are formally integrated, and students of all backgrounds are used to seeing each other. In the university, while students may choose to segregated themselves by race, simply because of cultural values or limited expose to others, there are melting pot groups where people of diverse backgrounds gather and have social exchange. These students have made the adjustment, without missing a beat, to a variety of religions and nationalities. People tend to be open with associating with the other students of different cultures who want to be associated with and forget the rest. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

However, as expressed before, some students stick together because they want to partake fully in the common culture, with the same goals and tastes as everyone else, but they are doing it by themselves. They continue to have the inward sentiments of separateness caused by exclusion when it no longer effectively exists. The heat is under the pot, but they do not melt as have all other groups. Yet, they still know that the work force is diverse and that there can be no justification for separatism where the ideal of common humanity must prevail, which is why some groups enjoy segregation while they can. Segregation usually tends only to be negative when it is enforced. Most people want to be held to the highest standards of achievement, others believing that gains are incremental over generations. Everyone is still an integrationist, for the most part, most people want profits and are looking for the best talent available. That is why universities are making their best effort to prepare their students for the great intellectual and social challenges awaiting them in the business World. However, there is still an issue with students reading books, especially in non-math classes. The university has opened up sections of various ethnic histories, but there is also a reason students do not read. Because they are not interested in the authors. Even though they have an obligation to read their textbooks to pass their classes, an idea is being proposed that there are not just American English classes, but classes that pertain to certain races. Such as an African America English class, dealing with the same curriculum, but the novels are from authors of their race. Many other people of various ethic background would like the same kind of English classes. However, in semesters when enrollment is too low, particular classes can be cut, and student may choose to take other types of English classes. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Another reason some student chose to segregate is because of fear. Militants of their own race threaten them—and threaten to do bodily harm to students with independent inclinations. Sometimes students who wish to be just a student and to avoid allegiance to their racial group have to pay a terrific price, because they are judged negatively by their peers and because their behavior is atypical in the eyes of the own culture. Also, different racial groups, who are social with others who are not of the same race, may make it difficult for others of a different background to understand them because it is too hard to read them. People are not always on the same wavelength so one cannot just see someone of a different race and think they can be friends. One will have to have a connection established based on a class, club, job, or a hobby. If you are interested in another person’s hobby, they will focus much on having fun, instead of wonder why are you talking to them? All this can be daunting, but it is a good lesson in socialization. People often do not want to be given special treatment because they will believe that everyone doubts their merit, their capacity for equal achievement. Their successes become questionable in their own eyes. Those who are good students fear that they are equated with those who are not, that their hard-won credentials are not credible. They are the victims of a stereotype. Those who are not good students, but have the same advantages as those who are, want to protect their position but are haunted by the sense of not deserving it. This is why some believe it is better to sick together, so these subtle but painful difficulties will not arise. Reason cannot always accommodate the claims of any kind of power whatever, and democratic society cannot accept any principle of achievement other than merit. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Acts not antisocial that are punished are most animal expression and some spirited enterprise. These include a lot of trespassing and hell raising with annoyance and minor damage. Most behavior involving pleasures of the flesh. Running away and truancy. But even certain important “theft.” The trespassing and hell raising speak for themselves. Where everything has become property and order, it is quite impossible to be vivacious, aggressive, undeliberate, exploratory and venturesome, without being of order and sometimes smashing things. This is generally agreed and the police are usually not unreasonable. However, the bother comes when emotional heat is generated and meets incipient deeper grounds of delinquency, the exchange of insults and the need for revenge. Exempli gratia, a police officer is rude and the boys get angry; or a chap foolishly drives away the kids who are diving from his cruiser, so they retaliate by boring holes in the bottom of it and sinking it. Most behavior involving pleasures of the flesh would give more satisfaction and do lasting good, and certainly result in far less damage, if any, if it were completely ignored by the police and not subject to any social disapproval qua sexual. There may be grounds for debate about the harmfulness or indifference of “corrupting the moral of a minor”—many societies have managed handsomely without such notions; but all competent authority would agree that, in most cases, more damage is done by the fear and shame accompanying an act involving pleasures of the flesh than can possibly follow from the simple act itself. (Typically, “self-love” is a habit without deleterious effects in itself, yet a source of behavior difficulties effects in itself, yet a source of behavior difficulties because of strong social disapproval. It is hard to find a rational reason for committing mere delinquent of intimate passions to an institution. To effectively help them, they must be divorced from restraint and stigma. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

In truancy, the burden of proof lies on the schools, which are demonstrably stupefying to many children, whose truancy is therefore a kind of self-preservation. Naturally, these kids get nothing from hanging around the streets either. The solution is hard but simple: decide that the kids are in the right and make good education at whatever cost. The same thinking applies to vagabondage. If a kid is a lonely runaway without domicile or means of support, it takes no great wisdom to infer that one has left a cruel of drunken home or a situation of intolerable uselessness and boredom, or that one is ashamed. Then provide one with something worthwhile, and give one solace. However, consider the principle of the burden of the proof in even an important crime like auto left, important solely because cars are expensive. (The real social danger, from wild driving, occurs with all car-crazy adolescents, not only those who steal cars.) Almost all juvenile auto theft is for joy riding. A band of kids, now mostly locked up, made it a point of their game to return the car to the identical spot, a foolhardy gesture. Now we live in a society where for all classes these cars are the chief means, and the Madison Avenue symbols, of power, manliness, freedom to go and do. Kids of other periods drove the horses at an early age; in rural places they drive cares at eleven. In urban traffic conditions young adolescents cannot be licensed to drive. Underprivileged kids may never have the means to drive. What then? When an absurd social pattern has created an insoluble dilemma, is it the case that the kids must be the ones punished? Certainly from such a crime as auto theft I fail to see, with Bloch and Flynn’s Delinquency, that “youthful offenders under eighteen years have become our greatest single threat to law-abiding security.” However, as it is, our dilemma works out as follows: “A couple and their three-year-old son were killed in Queens last night when their car hit s telephone pole after it was struck by a stolen car being chased by the police. Five shots were fired in pursuit and two hit the car.”) #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Auto theft takes us into the second category of “innocent acts destructive in their consequences and needing control.” Of course none of these acts, except vagabondage, is innocent in the sense that the kid does not know it is forbidden, unless he is a moron. However, to do the forbidden, in order to transgress limits that seem unnatural, is normal and innocent; and if the limits are unnatural it is often necessary and admirable. However, I want especially to call attention to acts whose motivation is strongly approved socially, but where the frustrating conditions of the boys’ ignorance or ineptitude in handling the baffling means, gets them into trouble. An obvious cause of innocent trouble is playing. Some wise authorities have compared delinquent behavior to play. So when A.K. Cohen, again, speaks of the “uselessness” of much delinquent destructiveness and thievery as a counteraction to middle-class ethics, he is surely exaggerating. All play is “useless,” and since everything is property, underprivilege kids are bound to play with other people’s property. This can be very serious. A band of kids decided it would be bully to remove the blocks and set a huge truck in motion downhill, resulting to $100,000 worth of damage. However, of course it is bully. (I think so.) However, let us go on to a much more thorny illustration, which would not generally be viewed in the light I want to place it in: the plight of a present-day poor boy with regard to earning money and having a little money. Many parents have long since given up the struggle to encourage youths to share in the few remaining home duties that still require physical effort. Yet, no school program can provide the discipline, the maturity, or the self-respect that comes from performing real work that is highly valued and fairly paid for by the adult World. Newsboys were often praised for getting jobs. Over one half of newspaperboys used to belong to our middle- or upper-middle-income groups. That was not a surprising fact because it took a great deal of arranging, and living in the suburbs, to get such a news route going. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Does it not raise the question as to how the poor boys, who have not learned such expert management, will get their discipline, maturity, self-respect? In 2020, around 17.6 percent of teenagers between ages 16-19 were employees while enrolled at school if the United States. That sounds promising. For a child, to get money is a major part of his notion of being grown-up and independent, for this is what all grown men do: they make money and thereby free to act. Earning some money affirms that a young fellow is a man. As our system becomes more tightly organized and more draught resistant landscaping is used, the less affluent and middle-class kids are squeezed out. We no longer have a neighborhood tradition of small after-school jobs—fewer shops make occasional deliveries; to deliver for the chain stores is a full-time job (except perhaps on Saturday s); messengers are hired full time; there are fewer lawns to mow, there is no snow to shovel; there are fewer news routes due to technology; baby stilling is a middle-class business and belongs mostly to girls. An early teenager is caught in the following trap: one gets nothing out of school and does not do one’s homework; on the other hand, he is too young to get working papers. The youth cannot continue to beg from his parents, for the sums now come to $50 or $60 dollars and he feels degraded by being dependent. How will he get some money to prove his legitimacy and independence? Many petty thefts and burglaries—that seem “useless” risks to the sociologist, and therefore he interprets them as counteraction to bourgeois values—are desperate efforts to feel grown-up. They are compelled by an objective dilemma. Naturally, subjectively, they are not innocent; they are energized by frantic excitement, cold sweat and terror, and finally the need to be caught, to escape the anxiety; but we must look at the whole picture. There are “short cuts,” but maybe there is no long way round. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

The question is this: if these kids had socially acceptable opportunities to earn money, would they avail themselves? Some would. It is worth trying. They might learn discipline, maturity, self-respect. We have experimented for two summers with employment of 100 to 150 teenagers from high delinquency areas. Our $350 per-week employees all stayed out of trouble. But on the occasions we tried what were essentially “made work” jobs, the young people understood this immediately and lost all interest. It is with the next category, acts intentionally antisocial, that we come to the delinquents who largely fill the courts and the reformatories. Malicious destructiveness, theft, and burglary for real money (often for narcotics), vengeful assaults, nonconsensual attacks of pleasures of the flesh. In these, the reactive hostility of the standard delinquent syndrome has begun to operate, and it inevitably leads to getting caught. An illustration: some fifteen-year-olds hold up a crippled old man; the loot is too small and their disappointment at once triggers the deep passion: that his debility is an intolerable threat to their own glorious perfection, so they stomp him to death. A less horrible illustration: The behaviour of a pedestrian or of another motorist that happens to inconvenience the youth in the slightest degree is at once interpreted as a deliberate insult or at least as a proof that that person ought not to exist; and this may easily lead to a case of hit and run. Absolutely typical economic illustration: If a fellow offers to talk half a mile in order to save $15 carfare, his mates will at once contemptuously say that he is “cheap.” Once the “proving” syndrome is present, the boys are quite out of touch with the simplest realities; and vice versa, because they are out of touch with the simplest realties, they are called on to “prove.” So we come to behaviour-to-get-caught: compulsive repetition, increasing negligence, raising the ante, giving way to irrational rage. We can see the fatalism on the surface. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Here is a scrap of conversation with one of the auto thieves mentioned before, not caught: “How is it you were not caught?” “I got scared the other time, the time the cop pulled up and I got away. So I would not go with them.” “Isn’t Steve [the leader] sacred?” “No.” “What do you mean? Isn’t he scare they’ll catch him?” “No. He don’t car if he gets caught.” “Is that what he says? or is that what you think?” “That’s what he said, and I think so too.” “Why did you go ten rides?” “What else is there to do? I can’t just hang around when they all go.” The problem, that is, is the fatalism that the one has whereas the other experiences fear and prudence. (In this particular case the fatalist is the more able boy and has a better home background.) one part of the fatalism is certainly apathy: life had no interesting prospect—exempli gratia, there might be a block in pleasures of the flesh. Another part is certainly the need to be caught, to get out of the anxious round of risks. When it comes to journalism, there is in general, a tendency to concentrate on the surface of events rather than underlying conditions; this is as true for the newspaper as it is for the newscast. However, several features of television undermine whatever efforts journalists may make to give sense to the World. One is that a television broadcast is a series of events that occur in sequence, and the sequence is the same for all viewers. This is not true for a newspaper page, which displays many items simultaneously, allowing readers to choose the order in which they read them. If a newspaper reader wants only a summary of the latest tax bill, one can read the headline and the first paragraph of an article, and if he wants more, he can keep reading. In a sense, then, everyone reads a different newspaper, for no two readers will read (of ignore) the same items. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

However, all television viewers see the same broadcast. They have no choices. A report is either in the broadcast or out, which means that anything which is of narrow interest is unlikely to be included. A newspaper, for example, can easily afford to print an item of conceivable interest to only a fraction of its readers. A television news program must be put together with the assumption that each item will be of some interest to everyone that watches. Every time a newspaper includes a feature which will attract a specialized group it can assume it is adding at least a little bit to its circulation. To the degree a television news program includes an item of this sort…it must assume that its audience will diminish. The need to “include everyone,” an identifying feature of commercial television in all its forms, prevents journalist from offering lengthy or complex explanations, or from tracing the sequence of events leading up to today’s headline. One of the ironies of political life in modern democracies is that many problems which concern the “general welfare” are of interest only to specialized groups. Arms control, for example, is an issue that literally concerns everyone in the World, and yet the language of arms control and the complexity of the subject are so daunting that only a minority of people can actually follow the issue from week to week and month to month. If it wants to act responsibly, a newspaper can at least make available more information about arms control than most people want. However, commercial television cannot afford to do so. This illustrates an important point in the psychology of television’s appeal. Many of the items in newspapers are magazines are not, in a strict sense, demanded by a majority of readers. They are there because some readers might be interested or because the editors think their readers should be interested. On commercial television, “might” and “should” are not the relevant words. The producers attempt to make sure that “each item will be of some interest to everyone that watches,” as Reuven Frank put it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

What this means is that a newspaper or a magazine can challenge its audience in a way that television cannot. Print media have the luxury of suggesting or inviting interest, whereas television must always concern itself with conforming to existing interests. In a way, television is more strictly responsive to the demands of its huge audience. However, there is one demand it cannot meet: the desired to e challenged, to be told “this is worth attending to,” to be surprised by what one thought would not be of interests. Another severe limitation of television is time. There is simply not enough of it. The evening news programs at CBS, NBC, and ABC all run for thirty minutes, eight of which are taken up by commercials. No one believes that twenty-two minutes for the day’s news is adequate. For years news executives at ABC, NBC, and CBS have suggested that the news be expanded to one hour. However, by tradition the half-hour after the national evening news is given over to the hundreds of local affiliate stations around the country to used as they see fit. They have found it a very profitable time to broadcast game shows or half-hour situation comedies, and they are reluctant to give up the income they derive from these programs. The evening news produced by the three networks is profitable for both the networks and the local stations. The local stations are paid a fee by the network to broadcast the network news, and they profit from this fee since the news—produced by the network—costs them nothing. It is likely that they would also make money from a one-hour newscast, but not as much, they judge, as they do from the games shows and comedies, they now schedule. So local news that drag out their programming from 4pm to 7pm and again at 10pm are actually costing the stations money and not making money. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

The news suggests that the World is fundamentally ungovernable, where events do not arise out of historical conditions but rather explode from the Heavens in a series of disasters that suggest a permanent state of crisis. It is this crisis—highly visual, ahistorical, and unsolvable—which the evening news presents as theater every evening. The news has shown the audience a World that is out of control and incomprehensible, full of violence, disaster, and suffering. Whatever authority the anchorman may project through his steady manner is undermined by the terror inspired by the news itself. This is where television news is at its most radical—not in giving publicity to radical causes, but in producing the impression of an ungovernable World. And it produces this impression not necessarily because the people who work in television are anarchists. The anarchy in television news is a direct result of the commercial structure of broadcasting, which introduced into news judgments a single-mindedness more powerful than any ideology: the overwhelming need to keep people watching. Time is a critical element in the training, because it takes quite a while before all the trainees become unified in the leadership, discovering the appropriate responses, and developing a peer group understanding of what is expected. Meanwhile, the trainer retains a grim visage. The people in the same room are of all society, embodying all values as delivered from the mountain. The trainers (those broadcasting from the TV) are the ultimate authorities (they consider themselves to be). When the trainers say “ground of reality” they literally mean the structuring of a reality where there is none. It is the social construction of reality. Everything is belief. Everything that we see or experience of the World is only an outgrowth of our belief that what we see and experience is the way things really are. Reality, then, is nothing more than an agreement as to what is real. Therefore, problems that we may have, or problems that may exist in the World (napalm, genocide, oppression, loss of jobs, or partners, pollution and so on) are real only because we believe they are real; in fact they exist only in our minds. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

If we do not acknowledge reality of the social construction of someone else’s view of reality, problems do not exist. So we effectively create these things with our belief systems; so do the napalmed kids, the Jews in Germany, and the laid-off factory worker. Now, it is certainly trye that if you believe a thing is a certain way—let us say you believe yourself to be competent or beautiful, or that you will succeed in your new career—then that will make your belief more likely to become reality. Television producers can be very dangers and so can the news. News is not competing with entertainment shows, so they want to have entertainment to report. TV producers and news anchors have learned, as the science fiction dictators have, that if you control environment carefully enough, and confine human experience totally enough, you can shatter all human grounding. This leaves the subject in such a disconnected state, you can easily predict and control how one will respond to the addition of only one or two stimuli. The TV and especially TV news, in effect, can be mass sense-deprivation experiments. They leave people floating without connections, their minds separated from their bodies, open to implantation of any kind of arbitrary logic. In the end, their minds have been restructured to accept whatever comes. They are clear, simple, open, receptive channels. All personal experience, irrelevant. All complexity, eliminated. All points of reference, disposed of. Floating freely in space. All information is arbitrary, the product of the mind. The news is most important to them. They believe what is coming out of the anchor’s mouth, as if it is the gospel of Jesus Christ. There is no reality aside from the TV news. The only existence is TV news media. The tell-a-vision- has come to replace television. It is a machine of infinite power which inexorably demands that society tunes in. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

This confusion has its roots in early childhood. At a certain age, a child seeks a reality beyond the parents, seeks to contact an outer world and so begins exploring. To the degree the child succeeds, it learns to integrate and process the wider World it has experienced. It can tell the difference between the impulses, images, and experiences which are connected to the World outside, and those which are totally self-generated, floating, not rooted in the World. If the child has made this distinction, then the projections of one’s own mind can be distinguished and identified. This is sanity. The schizophrenic does not learn to make this distinction and cannot tell which images emanate from inside the mind and which are connected to experiences in the World. At this point, all experience, whether internally generated or the result of an interaction with the World, is equal. Projections of the mind take on the same quality as direct experience of the World. One’s experience of the World becomes unreliable, as do one’s own thought processes. Both become floating, unrooted. All are equally internal and equally external. The TV is also an influencing machine. It uses fantasy as a physical manifestation of the confusion. Capable of implanting images which are in the form of rays, capable of implanting alien realities outside of one’s own experiences, capable of changing one’s feelings, this machine “causes” the individual to fall into utter confusion about what is real and what is not, what is internal and what is external. The apparatus of the influencing machines was actually invented in 1919, as an outward manifestation of the manufactures wanted people to be preoccupied with and how they wanted to control them. Many people no longer know what is real. That is why people are more concerned about distant disasters and ignore the ones in their own country and community. We cannot stop the broadcast. We accept whatever comes. One vision is equal to the nest. One thought is as good as the next. All information merges. All experiences merges. People tale everything on faith. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

One explanation is the same as the next one. Contradictions do not exist. We have lost control of our minds. We are all lost in space. Our World exists only in memory. Everything is arbitrary. TV is the guru speaking reality. We have merged with the influencing machine. It is no accident that television has been dominated by a handful of corporate powers. Neither is it accidental that television has been used to re-create human beings into a new form that matches the artificial, commercial environment. A conspiracy of technological and economic factors made this inevitable and continue to. Perhaps the only way to try to make elections fair in the future is for government sponsored advertisements sent to citizens for presidential elections. Everyone knows by now that news can be fake and since the 1960s, people have been hollering about the system being rigged, but as long as they get a democrat as president, people ignore the truth. People turn to the news and do not real professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them. As a result, people who write books, commonly knowns as writers, and publishers are now thinking about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google’s results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors. Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. However, books may soon come with a supplementary comments section with discussions inside of them, and online chats available to login to. You will be able to see who else out there is reading that book and be able to open up a dialog with them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Many people read mainly for the sake of a feeling of belonging rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style. Writing is a means for chatter. To see how small changes in writers’ assumptions and attitudes can eventually have large effects on what one writes, one need only glance at the history of correspondence. A personal letter in, say, the nineteenth century bears little resemblance to personal e-mail or text messages written today. Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence. However, the practice of deep reading that became popular in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention, in which “the quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind,” will continue to fade, in all likelihood of becoming the province of a small and dwindling elite. We will, in other words, revert to the historical norm. We are now seeing such a reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class. The way people read—and write—has already been changed by the Net, and the changes will continue as, slowly but surely, the words of books are extracted from the printed page and embedded in the computer’s “ecology of interruption technologies.” Pundits have been trying to bury the book for a long time. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the burgeoning popularity of newspapers—well over a hundred were being published in London alone—led many observers to assume that books were on the verge of obsolescence. How could they compete with the immediacy of the daily broadsheet? At the century’s end, boos were still around, living happily beside newspaper. However, a new threat to their existence had already emerged: Thomas Edison’s phonograph. It seemed obvious, at least to the intelligentsia, that people would soon be listening to literature rather than reading it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

In an 1889 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, Philip Hubert predicted that “many books and stories may not see the light of print at all; they will go into the hands of their readers, or hearers rather, as phonograms.” The phonograms, which at the time could record sounds as well as play them, also “promises to far outstrip the typewriter” as a tool for composing prose, he wrote. The book survived the phonograph as it had the newspaper. Listening did not replace reading. Edison’s invention came to be used mainly for playing music rather than declaiming poetry and prose. During the twentieth century, book reading would withstand a fresh onslaught of seemingly mortal threats: moviegoing, radio listening, TV viewing. Today, books remain as commonplace as ever, and there is every reason to believe that printed works will continue to be produced and read, in some sizable quantity, for years to come. There is an unbridgeable chasm between the book tradition that has declared the book a classic and we have made it that through instinct, emotion, and understanding: suffered through it, rejoiced in it, translated it into our experience and (notwithstanding the layers of reading with which a book comes into our hands) essentially becomes it first reader. Although it may be tempting to ignore those who suggest the value of the literary mind has always been exaggerated, that would be a mistake. The distractions in our lives have been proliferating for a long time, but never has there been a medium like the Net, which is programmed so widely to scatter our attention and to do it so instantly. In the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us. One of patience, enchantment, and class. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Celibacy is the most obvious way to avoid revealing or experiencing unconventional pleasures of the flesh. At various times throughout history, nontraditional pleasures of the flesh have been outlawed. People discovered indulging in them have risked a plethora of penalties, often severe, including imprisonment, humiliation, professional disgrace, social ostracism, and religious censure. In these circumstances, adopting celibacy has been an excellent way to avoid risky lifestyles. Celibacy also serves as the most convenient ways to dodge various fears, including fear of intimacy, revulsion for the private area, or both. To some people, it is the easiest way to deal with a broken heart, self-protection against repetition of the sorrow following a failed relationship. Some celebrities are generally acknowledged as true celibates, each for his own reason. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was an artistic genius of the Renaissance, a painter, sculptor, musician, scientist, and inventor whose work still seems breathtakingly inspired. Mr. Da Vinci was also a complicated individual, and much of the intimate details of his personal life remains tantalizing hidden. However, considerable evidence points to his homosexuality. This includes his paintings and sculptures, and a host of little clues susceptible to this interpretation. I, however, never considered that possibility the Mr. Da Vinci was a homosexual. The thought never crossed my mind. I was always impressed by his amazing sculptures and the texture and style of their hair and how lifelike they were. But if people consider him homosexual because of his art, one does one think of a giant gummy bear statue aimed at adults? Anyway, so Dr. Sigmund Freud is probably correct in saying that it is “doubtful whether Mr. Da Vinci ever embraced a woman in passion.” Homosexuality in Renaissance Florence, da Vinci’s home base, was so unremarkable that the German nickname for gay men was Florenzer. Legal penalties against it were seldom enforced, and a man who was reasonably discreet could anticipate few problem. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Leonardo da Vinci was celibate. He actually earned a reputation for perpetual chastity. Mr. Da Vinci’s long bread is sometimes cited as his attempt to obscure his beautiful face, a way to stave off tempting others. “Avoid lustfulness,” he urged. “He who does not restrain his lustful appetites places himself on the same level as beasts. Again, the Saltarelli affair insinuates itself into this interpretation that he was a secret deviant. Mr. Da Vinci had engaged Jacopo Saltarelli as a nude model. Afterward, though he was surrounded by male modes and his latter years lived with Francesco Melzi, his student, who also became his heir, he seems to have ensured that he never gave cause for another accusation. The most plausible and consistent explanation for da Vinci’s chastity is that he found pleasures of the flesh grotesque and was almost paranoically afraid of a repetition of the Saltarelli scandal. To minimize or deny his homosexual orientation, he probably opted for the safe device of chastity. “Therefore, you are no longer a slave (bound servant) but a son; and if a son, then [it follows that you are] an heir by the aid of God, through Christ,” reports Galatians 4.7. We have survived because ours is a genuine democracy. No caste system has been permitted to develop; no autocrat goes unchallenged. The lowly and the mighty alike were the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The craftsman, the merchant and the farmer, all could become great teachers and be harkened to by the whole people. We survived, above all, because of the prophetic voices that break out in America from time to time. We are blessed with humans that never made peace with the foibles of the people or the whims of the rulers. We are compelled to listen to denunciations that cry aloud like a trumpet. We are not allowed to sink into the sweet lassitude of dissipation and degeneracy which leads so many people to despair and death. We are shaken by a mighty hand and outstretched arm. “Wash ye, make you clean…cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 20