The Precious Instant of Recognizing the Beloved

Vitality and intentionality are united in the ideal of human perfection, which is equally removed from barbarism and from moralism. The best point of entry into the very special World inhabited by today’s students is the astonishing fact that they usually do not, in what were once called love affairs, say, “I love you,” and never, “I will always love you.” One student told me that, of course, he says, “I love you,” to girlfriends, “when we are breaking up.” It is the clean and easy break—no damage, no fault—at which they are adept. This is understood to be morality, respect for other persons’ freedom. Perhaps young people do not say “I love you” because they are honest. They do not experience love—too familiar with pleasures of the flesh to confuse it with love, too preoccupied with their own fates to be victimized by love’s mad self-forgetting, the last of the genuine fanaticisms. Then there is distaste for love’s fatal historical baggage—gender roles, making the object of one’s affection into possessions and object without respect for their self-determination. Young people today are afraid of making commitments, and the point is that love is commitment, and much more. Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication. Commitment is gratuitous, motives in the soul for moral dedication. Commitment is gratuitous, motiveless, because the real passions are all low and selfish. One may be attracted to someone physically, but that does not, so people think, provide any sufficient motive for real and lasting concern for another. Young people, and not only young people, have studied and practiced a crippled eros that can no longer take wing, and does not contain within it the longing for eternity and the divination of one’s relatedness to being. They are practical Kantians: whatever is tainted with lust or pleasure cannot be moral. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

However, they have not discovered the pure morality. It remains an empty category used to discredit all substantial inclinations that were once moralizing. Too much emphasis on authenticity has made it impossible to trust one’s instincts, and too much seriousness about pleasures of the flesh has made it impossible to take intimate passions seriously. Young men and women distrust eroticism too much to think it a sufficient pointer toward a way of life. The burdens implied in and blessed by eros are only burdens without it. It is not cowardice to avoid taking on responsibilities that have no charm even in anticipation. When marriage occurs it does not usually seem to result from a decision and a conscious will to take on its responsibilities. The couple have lived together for a long time, and by an almost imperceptible process, they find themselves married, as much out of convenience as passion, as much negatively as positively (not really expecting to do much better, since they have looked around and seen how imperfect all fits seem to be.) Among the educated, marriage these days seems to be best acquired in a fit of absence of mind. Part of the inability to make commitments involving pleasures of the flesh result from an ideology of the feelings. Young people are always telling me such reasonable things about jealousy and possessiveness and even their dreams about the future. However, as to dreams about the future with a partner, they have none. That would be to impose a rigid, authoritarian patter on the future, which should emerge spontaneously. This means they can foresee no future, or that the one they would naturally foresee is forbidden them by current piety, as sexist. Similarly, if his or her partner has pleasures of the flesh relations with someone else, why should a man or a woman be jealous? A serious person today does not want to force the feeling of others. The same goes for possessiveness. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

When I hear such things, all so sensible and in harmony with a liberal society, I feel that I am in the presence of robots. This ideology only works for people who have had no experience of feelings, have never loved, have abstracted from the texture of life. These prodigies of reason need never fear Othello’s fate. Kill for love! What can that mean? It may very well be that their apatheia is a suppression of feeling, anxiety about getting hurt. However, it might also be the real thing. People may, having digested the incompatibility of ends, have developed a new kind of soul. None of these possibility for intimate passions students have actualized was unknow to me. However, their lack of passion, of hope, of despair, of a sense of the twinship of love and death, is incomprehensible to me. When I see a young couple who have lived together throughout their college years leave each other with a handshake and move out into life, I am struck dumb. Students do not date anymore. Dating was the petrified skeleton of courtship. They lived in herds or packs with no more sexual differentiation than any herds have when not in heat. Human beings can, of course, engage in pleasures of the flesh at any time. However, today there are none of the conventions invented by civilization to take the place of heart, to guide mating, and perhaps to channel it. Nobody is sure who is to make the advances, whether there are to be a pursuer and a pursued, what the event is to mean. They have to improvise, for roles are banned, and a man pays a high price for misjudging his partners’ attitude. The act takes place but it does not separate the couple from the flock, to which they immediately return as they were before, undifferentiated. It is easier for men to get gratification than it used to be, and many men have the advantage of being pursued. Certainly they do not have to make all kinds of efforts and pay all kinds of attention, as men once did. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

There is an easy familiarity. However, at least some of those advantages for men are offset by nervousness about their performance in pleasures of the flesh. In the past a man could think he was doing a wonderful thing for a woman, and expect to be admired for what he brought. However, that was before he could be pretty sure that he was being compared and judged, which is daunting. And certain aspects of the undeniably male biology sometimes make it difficult for him to perform and cause him to prefer being the one to express the desire. Women are still pleased by their freedom and their capacity to chart an independent course for themselves. However, they frequently suspect that they are being used, that in the long run they may need men more than men need them, and that they cannot expect much from the feckless contemporary male. They despise what men used to think women had to offer (that is partly why it is now offered so freely), but they are dogged by doubt whether men are very impressed by what they are now offering instead. Distrust suffuses the apparently easy commerce between the genders. There is an awful lot of breaking up, surely disagreeable, though nothing earthshaking. Exam time is great moment for students to separate. They are under too much stress and too busy to put up with much trouble from a relationship. “Relationships,” not love affairs, are what they have. Love suggests something wonderful, exciting, positive and firmly seated in the passions. A relationship is gray, amorphous, suggestive of a project, without a given content, and tentative. You work at a relationship, whereas love takes care of itself. In a relationship the difficulties come first, and there is a search for common grounds. Love presents illusions of perfection to the imagination and is forgetful of all the natural fissures in human connection. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

About relationships there is ceaseless anxious talk, the kind one cannot help overhearing in student hangouts or restaurants frequently by man and women who are “involved” with one another, the kind of obsessive prattle so marvelous captured in old Nichols and May routines or Woody Allen films. In one Nichols and May bit, a couple who have just had pleasures of the flesh for the first time, assert with all the emptiness of doubt, “We are going to have a relationship.” This insight was typical of University Chicago in the fifties, of The Lonely Crowd. The only mistake was to encourage the belief that by becoming more “inner-directed,” going farther down the path of the isolated self, people will be less lonely. The problem, however, is not that people are not authentic enough, but that they have no common object, no common good, no natural complementarity. Selves, of course, have no relation to anything but themselves, and that is why “communication” id their problem. Gregariousness, like that of the animals in the herd, is admitted by all. Grazing together side by side and rubbing against one another are the given, but there is a desire and a necessity to have something more, to make the transition from the herd to the hive, where there is real interconnection. Hence, the hive—community roots, extended family—is much praised, but no one is willing to transform his indeterminate self into an all too determinate worker, drone or queen, to submit to the rank-ordering and division of labor necessary to any whole that is more than just a heap of discrete parts. Selves want to be wholes, but have lately also take to longing to be parts. This is the reason why conversation about relationships remains so vacuous, abstract and unprogrammatic, with its whole content stored in a bottle labeled “commitment.” It is also why there is so much talk about phenomena like “bonding.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

In the absence of any connectedness in their souls, human beings seek reassurance in fruitless analogy to mechanism found in brutes. However, this will not work because human attachment always has an element of deliberate choice, denied by such analogy. One need only compare the countless novel and movies about male bonding with Aristotle’s discussion of friendship in the Ethics. Friendship, like its related phenomenon, love, is no longer within our ken because both require notions of soul and nature that, for a mixture of theoretical and political reasons, we cannot even consider. The reliance on relationships is a self-delusion because it is founded on an inner contradiction. Relations between the genders have always been difficult, and that is why so much of our literature is about men and women quarreling. There is certainly legitimate ground to doubt their suitability for each other given the spectrum—from the harem to Plato’s Republic—of imaginable and actually existing relations between them, whether nature acted the stepmother or God botched the creation by an afterthought, as some Romantic believed. That man is not made to be alone is all very well, but who is made to live with him? This is why men and women hesitated before marriage, and courtship was thought necessary to find out whether the couple was compatible, and perhaps to give them basic training in compatibility. No one wanted to be stuck forever with an impossible partner. However, for all that, they knew pretty much what they wanted from one another. The question was whether they could get it (whereas our question today is much more what is wanted). A man was to make a living and protect his wife and children, and a woman was to provide for the domestic economy, particularly in caring for husband and children. Frequently this did not work out very well for one or both of the partners, because they either were not good at their functions or were not eager to perform them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

In order to assure the proper ordering of things, the women in Shakespeare, like Portia and Rosalind, are forced to masquerade as men because the real men are inadequate and need to be corrected. This happens only in comedies; when there are no such intrepid women, the situation turns into a tragedy. However, the assumption of male garb observes the proprieties or conventions. Men should be doing what the impersonating women are doing; and when the women have set things right, they become women again and submit to the men, albeit with a tactful, ironical consciousness that they are at least partially playacting in order to preserve a viable order. Even if it is only conventional, the arrangement implicit in marriage tells those who enter into it what to expect and what the satisfactions are supposed to be. Very simply, the family is a sort of miniature body politic in which the husband’s will is the will of the whole. The woman can influence her husband’s will, and it is supposed to be informed by the love of wife and children. Now all of this has simply disintegrated. It does not exist, nor is it considered good that it should. However, nothing certain has taken its place. Neither men nor women have any idea what they are getting into anymore, or, rather, they have reason to fear the worst. There are two equal wills, and no meditating principle to link them and no tribunal of last resort. What is more, neither of the wills is certain of itself. This is where the “ordering of priorities” comes in, particularly with women, who have not yet decided which comes first, career or children. People are no longer raised to think they ought to regard marriage as the primary goal and responsibility, and their uncertainty is mightily reinforced by the divorce statistics, which imply that putting all of one’s psychological eggs in the marriage basket is a poor risk. The goals and wills of men and women have become like parallel lines, and it requires a Lobachevskyan imagination to hope they may meet. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

The inharmonious of final ends finds its most concrete expression in the female career, which is now precisely the same as the male career. There are two equal careers in almost every household composed of educated persons under thirty-five. And those careers are not mere means to family ends. They are personal fulfillments. In this nomadic country it is more than likely that one of the partners will be forced, or have the opportunity, to take a job in a city other than one where his or her spouse works. What to do? They can stay together with one partner sacrificing his career to the other, they can commute, or they can separate. None of these solutions is satisfactory. More important, what is going to happen is unpredictable. It is the marriage or the career that will count most? Women’s careers today are qualitatively different from what they were up to twenty years ago, and such conflict is now inevitable. The result is that both marriage and career are devalued. There is also a cultural reason why we do not talk much about beauty. Our culture worships change. We become bored instead of serene; and how then can we appreciate the sense of eternity, the timelessness of this experience? In our age “time is money”; we construct great buildings only to tear them down in seventy-five years. We once erected the tallest buildings in the World, the World Trade Center, which was destroyed. Our age is not one in which beauty has a firm place at the Board of Directors meeting. We must nevertheless, being human, communicate by words as much as we can. We see in the Greek ideal of beauty as both male and female. The masculine and feminine are merged. Balance is part of the beauty of humanity. However, the television has some unique qualities that are destroying the natural order. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

Television is so successful because the writers are successful at recognizing certain inescapable facts about the medium, its audience, and the environment in which the audience characteristically viewed the play. For example, television drama, such as Black Knight: The Man Who Guards Me, focuses on people rather than plots, places, or even ideas. The “normal” view of the players on a television screen is the close-up. As a consequence, the human face is given such a continued and forceful presence that it tends to become the overriding emphasis of the play, whether the author intends it or not. Bridges falling down and planes zooming high may be thrillingly pictured in films or described in novels. However, on live television, of course, the space limitations in a studio make them impossible. Even in televised film sequences, such actions are not dramatically persuasive because of the smallness of the screen and the relatively crude definition of the image. Television, as one director puts it, is a “psychoanalytic medium.” What television drama does best is to show faces, and to suggest wat is behind them. Rod Serling once wrote, “The key to TV drama is intimacy, and the facial study on a small screen carries with it a meaning and a power far beyond its usage in the motion picture.” As these writers and directors discovered, television drama is also at its best when highly compressed. There is little time for subplots or for much elaboration of the main plot. The television dramatist, like the short story writer, has time only to relate a bare narrative and evoke a mood, which he does with the help of the camera. Occasionally, the writer is faced with the problem of expanding a brief story, but typically his problem is reverse. Television cannot take a thick, fully woven fabric of drama. It can only handle simple lines of movement and consequently smaller moments of crisis. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

We must remember also that television is family entertainment viewed within the home. In an earlier time, producers and writers believed that this imposed limitations on both language and the themes of television plays. Controversial topics might be maturely explored in the theater or in other literary forms, but (they believed) on television such subjects tended to be shocking, not only because of television’s unselected audience but especially because of the medium’s almost painful explicitness. It is probably still true that words that might scarcely be remembered when read in novels or heard on the stage can almost never be forgotten when they invade the living room. A now famous example of this occurred on February 19, 1956, when the Alcoa Hour presented Reginal Rose’s Tragedy in a Temporary Town. One of the actors, Lloyd Bridges, was overcome by the excitement of a particular scene and uttered an expletive that was not in the script but that might have been had the play been performed on the stage. The words themselves would have gone practically unnoticed in a Norman Mailer or Nelson Algren novel. On television, the event was a cause celebre. Television writers worked for years within these limitations and produced a substantial body of serious drama, true theater of the masses. They were able to do so for reasons that may be instructive to any who hope to use television to the same end. In the first place, the emphasis was on original drama written by young and largely unknown writers—writers who had little experience in the theater and therefore did not bring to their work the prejudices of theatrical tradition. Along with their equally young directors, they were free to explore the resources of television as a new and unique medium. They wrote television plays, not stage lays or movie scripts. Second, they were not interested in adapting Shakespeare and the rest of the classical cannon to the television screen. They wanted to write in the idiom of their own time, about anxieties and issues that concerned their audiences. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

Moreover, the young actors they used were not trained in the classical repertoire, and would not have been any good at doing Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen, Rostand, Shaw, or even Strindberg. However, they were well suited to speak in the voices of Americans—a butcher from the Bronx of a misunderstood man from Mississippi or a baseball player from Indiana. Among the actors who got their start by doing fifty-two-minute plays are James Dean, Grace Kelly, Dustin Hoffman, Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Joanne Woodward, Robert Redford, and Rod Steiger. And, since so many plays were required to fill the screen each week, the television networks gathered together what amounted to a repertory company. In other words, there was work, and plenty of it, for writers, with the result that talented people from all over the country flocked to New York with scripts in hand and reasonable prospects of seeing their plays produced on television. As Moss Hart, himself one of America’s most famous writers for the stage, once remarked in urging writers to turn their attention to television: “Consider, we write one play [for the stage], it takes months to put on, and then, if it is a success, we play it eight performances a week, two hours a performance. When we sell out, we reach a weekly audience of perhaps nine thousand people…if we sell out.” However, a television play can be produced in a matter of weeks, he went on, and when it is shown, millions of people see it at once. Of course, many of the plays produced during this period were not that great and quickly forgotten. However, that was also the case with Elizabethan drama. We judge an era by its successes, not its failures. Speaking of failures, perhaps the most important feature of this era was the relative absence of a fear of failure. Plays were not excessively expensive to produce. Thus, failure was not a financial catastrophe, as it is now, and was then in the theater and movies. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

Moreover, each program was sponsored by only one company, and these were often headed by entrepreneurs who were themselves humans of daring, not terrified by failure. Neither were the writers and directors, who were filled with the enthusiasm and conviction of youth. They had something to say and they were not afraid to say it. There were the audiences of the time. These audiences were made up of people who were not over-saturated with television. In those days, television was not on twenty-four hours a day, and the screen was not filled with programs that dull the senses. People looked forward to these weekly dramas, and expected them to be serious and thought-provoking. Unlike today, the commercials were not overbearing, and were designed to fit the mood of the play. The play was the thing, not the commercial. And the play invariably was about the experience and World of the audience. Its characters were recognizable, its issues relevant, its language mature and comprehensible, its themes realistic and poignant. The period of rapid growth from 1946 to 1970, which coincided with the emergence of television and electronic advertising, concentrated wealth and power in this country to an unheard-of degree. It put effective control of the economy in the hands of a few corporate entities. It concentrated immense wealth among a handful of people. Meanwhile, the working classes, and the more disadvantaged nonworking people, to whom the commodity life had promised dazzling benefits, ended up in a far worse, more desperate and more dependent position than ever before. A New York advertising man, Lawrence G. Chait, was the first person to articulate clearly the economic concentration made inevitable by economic growth. In a now-famous speech he gave in Detroit in 1968, Mr. Chait said, “The factor of overwhelming significance in our business and financial life for some years now has been the tend toward concertation of economic power.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

Pointing out that in 1965 this country had 412,000 business units, he added, “The fifty largest controlled 35.2 percent of the total manufacturing assets.” As for profits, “The twenty largest manufacturing corporations, [who hold] 25 percent of total corporate assets, had 32 percent of [the nation’s] profits after taxes.” That means that only .005 percent of the corporations in this country enjoyed one-third of all corporate profits. Mr. Chait went on: “Assets and profits are, of course, important measures of concentration in national economic life, but there are other very interesting indices. In 1963, for example, there were 112 industries in which 4 companies accounted for more than 50 percent of production. In 29 of these 112 industries, the top 4 companies accounted for more than 75 percent of production. By 1963, 30 percent of the volume of production of consumer goods came from industries in which the top 4 firms accounted for over 50 percent of production.” Mr. Chait quoted economics professor Corwin Edwards to explain why the larger corporations inevitably get larger during periods of economic growth, absorbing or driving out smaller ones: “In encounters with small enterprises it [the corporate conglomerate] can buy scarce materials and attractive sites, inventions and facilities; pre-empt the services of the most expensive technicians and executives; and acquire reserves of material for the future. It can absorb losses that would consume the entire capital of smaller rival…Moment by moment the big company can outbid, out-spend in advertising, technology or talent, or out-lose the smaller ones; and from the series of such momentary advantage it derives an advantage in attaining its larger aggregate results. “The sociologist may very well take exception to this trend,” Mr. Chait said, “but as pragmatists, we must recognize that this in fact is the direction in which the economic organization of our country is moving.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

Finally, he quoted Dr. Edwin G. Nourse, who believes, “There are no discernible limits at which such concentrations of economic power, once fully underway, would automatically cease.” A moving example of the way the process works is offered in The American Farm by Maisie and Richard Conrat. The authors points out that only two hundred and seventy years ago, 95 percent of the population of this country lived on farm land; now less than 5 percent do. The family farm is a creature of the past, and so is the moderately large farm. The economics of technological scale nourish only the hugest agribusinesses and their machines. The critical period in this change came immediately after World War II: “With astonishing rapidity, the 60 horsepower general purpose tractor was replaced by a new 140 horsepower model, then by a towering 235 horsepower machine with a $40,000 price tag. The single-row corn harvester gave place to machines that could handle four rows simultaneously, then eight rows. The cost of such new equipment made it economically imperative for farmers to take on more acreage. Between 1950 and 1975, the acreage of the average American farm doubled and the value of farm machinery trebled…those who could not keep up with the frenzied pace were shoved aside and forced to drop out. In the new agriculture there was no room for the man who simply wished to live on the land and work in the soil and sell enough to pay his bills. The dairyman with twenty cows notified by his milk company that they would not be making pick-ups at his place anymore. From now on the company trucks were stopping only at the farms of the large operators. Small scale vegetable producers, orchardists, and general famers found themselves underpriced and cut out of the market by supermarket chains and agribusiness corporations.” What was true for farmers was true for all business as the rapid-growth phenomenon gave automatic advantage to the larger, better-financed, more technologically advanced elements of the system. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

Smaller competitors were driven from competition by the mere scale of the expenditure required at every level, from the cost of automation to the salaries of executives to the availability of bank loans. Banks, recognizing very early that large companies are better loan risks than small ones, actively assisted the advancing juggernaut. Smaller companies were wise to face the fact that it was usually better to sell out before things got worse. Nowhere were the advantages of size more evident than in advertising. Only the largest corporations in the World have access to network television time because broadcasting costs average between $120,000 to more than $1 million per minute to reach 30 million viewers. Television is the media counterpart to the eight-row corn harvester. Technology is definitely changing our culture. The switch from reading to power-browsing is happening very quickly. Already, reports Ziming Liu, a library science professor at San Jose State University, “the advent of digital media and the growing collection of digital documents have had a profound impact on reading.” In 2003, Dr. Lui surveyed 113 well-educated people—engineers, scientists, accountants, teachers, business managers, and graduate students, mainly between thirty and forty-five percent said that they were spending more time “browsing and scanning,” and eighty-two percent reported that they were doing more “non-liner reading.” Only twenty-seven percent said that the time they devoted to “in-depth reading” was on the rise, while forty-five percent said it was declining. Just sixteen percent said they were giving more “sustained attention” to reading; fifty percent said they were giving it less “sustained attention.” The findings, said Dr. Lui, indicate that “the digital environment tends to encourage people to explore many topics extensively, but at a more superficial level,” and that “hyperlinks distract people from reading and thinking deeply.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

One of the participants in the study told Dr. Lui, “I find that my patience with reading long documents is decreasing. I want to skip ahead to the end of the articles.” Another said, “I skim much more [when reading] html pages than I do with printed materials.” It is quite clear, Dr. Lui concluded, that with the flood of digital text pouring through our computers, and phones, “people are spending more time on reading” than they used to. However, it is equally clear that it is a very different kind of reading. A “screen-based reading behavior is emerging,” he wrote, which is characterized by “browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one-time reading, [and] non-liner reading.” The time “spent on in-depth reading and centered reading,” is, on the other hand, failing steadily. There is nothing wrong with browsing and scanning, or even power-browsing and power-scanning. We have always skimmed newspapers more than we have read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines in order to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to skim text is every bit as important as the ability to read deeply. What is different, and troubling, is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for deeper study, scanning is becoming an end in itself-our preferred way of gathering and making sense of information of all sorts. We have reached the point where a Rhodes Scholar like Florida State’s Joe O’Shea—a philosophy major, no less—is comfortable admitting not only that he dies not read books but that he does not see any particular need to read them. Why bother, when you can Google the bits and pieces you need in a fraction of a second? What we are experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

Yet even these crises are only part of a vastly larger intellectual drama. Economics and science are, for all their importance, only interacting parts of the World’s far larger knowledge system. And that entire system is caught up in a history-making upheaval. We are slicing and dicing knowledge in new way, crashing out of industrial-age disciplinary boundaries and reorganizing the deep structure of our knowledge system. Knowledge without organization loses accessibility and context. Thus scholars throughout time have divided knowledge into distinct categories. When twelfth-century Europeans translated the works of Arab philosopher Abu Nasr al-Farabi (AD 870-950), they found what has been called a “map of the knowable”—a systematic, hierarchical organization of knowledge into categories. In the medieval West, later on, universities mapped knowledge differently. Every educated person was supposed to master the trivium (consisting of grammar, rhetoric and Aristotelian logic) and the quadrivium (astronomy, arithmetic, geometry and music). Today, as knowledge is broken into more and more specialized and subspecialized categories university offerings are still, like al-Farabi’s, neatly categorized in hierarchical structures. For example, in terms of both academic status and budget, science typically outranks the social sciences, which are regarded as too “soft.” Physics until recently topped science pyramid but is currently being nudged off its pinnacle by biology. Of all the social sciences, economics pulls top rank because, being highly mathematized, it is (or pretends to be) the most “hard.” However, these structures are in danger of collapsing under their own weight. More and more jobs require cross-disciplinary knowledge, so that we find increasing need for hyphenated backgrounds—“Astro-biologist,” “biophysicist,” “environmental-engineer,” “forensic-accountant.” Some tasks require two or more hyphens. Hence, “neuro-psycho-pharmacologist.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

Soon, it seems clear, we will run out of hyphens. Seemingly permanent disciplines and hierarchies may disappear altogether as knowledge is organized into ad hoc non-hierarchical configurations determined by the problems at hand. At which point the “map of knowable” becomes a flickering set of constantly changing patterns. This alone represents a quake in the knowledge system that will transform work groupings, professions, universities, hospitals and bureaucracies in general. Beneficiaries of the old ways of organizing ever-more-specialized knowledge—tenured professors, bureaucrats, economists and others—will resist such changes. Surely, deep specialization has paid enormous dividends. However, it also kills surprise and imagination, and breeds individuals afraid to step, let alone think, outside their disciplinary perimeter. Conversely, imagination and creativity are fed when previously unrelated ideas, concepts or categories of data, information or knowledge are juxtaposed in fresh ways. By pulling together widely diverse streams of personal experience and know-how, knowledge workers are likely to bring temporary, novel, out of the you-know-what ideas into their thinking and decision-making. As we have seen, what may be lost in knowledge based on long-term, deeper and deeper specialization may thus, in this new system, be compensated for by enhanced creativity and imagination. Powerful new technologies will help us inject temporary disciplines into fresh plug-in, plug-out modules and models. They already do. We are mining and matching bigger and more diverse databases against one another in search of previously unnoticed patters and connections. This matching is more than just a convenient tool for finding out how supermarket sales of premium cranberry justice and diapers, or how Pop-Tarts and hurricanes may be related. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

Data mining products sometimes startling “who would have thought” insights. Virginia health officials used it to trace an outbreak of salmonella to fruit produced in a small packing shed on a farm in Brazil. Said an official of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “We never had an outbreak from mangos that we have recognized before.” If creativity involves the novel juxtaposition of facts, ideas or insights previously thought to be unconnected, then mining and matching are fundamental parts of the innovation process. When we put changes like these together and then add the splitting data, information and knowledge into smaller, more granular chunks—making it more perishable, classifying things differently, proliferating what-if scenarios, introducing new models at a faster and faster rate and operating at ever-higher levels of abstraction—it is clear that we are not simply accumulating more knowledge. And when we add these to the crises in economic thinking and science, it becomes evident that we are engaged in the fastest and most profound restructuring of knowledge in history, with implications reaching far beyond the economy to culture, religion, politics and social life. At the same time we are making the wealth of individual and nations alike more dependent than ever on that growing global knowledge base. We do not know what strange shortcuts and twisted pathways knowledge as an expanding, organic system will take, or where it will ultimately carry us. Even when we combine all these changes in humanity’s relationships to time, space and knowledge—and the other deep fundamental as well—we only glimpse the truly awesome outlines of today’s global revolution. To see beyond, we need to look at the extraordinary changes that lie ahead, not merely in the visible economy but in the “hidden half” of the entire emerging wealth system. Without taking this next exploratory step, we, as individuals and as societies, will stumble into tomorrow unaware of the amazing potential we hold in our hands. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

John Milton’s Lady, one of the lovely maidenly “stars breathing soft flames,” is captured by a despicable gang of men with evil intentions. The leader, Comus, exhorts her to swallow a magic potion: “List, lady; be not coy, and be not consen’d with that same vaunted name, Virginity…what need a vermeil-tinctur’d lip for that, love-daring eyes, or tresses like the morn? Fortunately, the Lady knows better: Thou hast nor ear, nor soul to apprehend the sublime notion, and high mystery, that must be utter’s to unfold the sage and serious doctrine of Virginity.” After much debate, the Lady’s two brothers dash onto the scene, swords at the ready, and save their sister from the repulsive fate Mr. Milton described as coupling “in the rites of nature by the mere compulsion of lust, without love or peace, worse than wild beast.” Underling Comus was Mr. Milton’s revulsion for the bestiality of pleasures of the flesh and his yearning for celibacy. His chaste love affair with a young Italian man was his most cherished relations, and when Charles Diodati died in 1638, Mr. Milton’s literary epitaph was a passionate ode to their restraint: “Because the flush of innocence and stainless youth were death to thee, because though did’dt not know the joys of marriage, lo, for three virginal honors are reserved.” However, Mr. Milton violated his own precepts. A mission to collect a bad dent was somehow transformed into a proposal of marriage, and instead of the money, he arrived home with Mary, his very young wide. The marriage was unhappy for both husband and wife. Mary found the dour John a bore, and he fond her flighty and incompatible. “It is not strange though many who have spent their life chastely, are in some things not so quick sighted, while they haste too eagerly to light the nuptial torch,” he wrote in self-exculpation. Mary was the real loser, for though her mother and sister moved in with her and Mr. Milton, she died delivering their fourth child. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

Mr. Milton, meanwhile, was going blind, but his daughters scorned him as brutally as Mary’s mother. He endured a wretched domestic life. His girls stole housekeeping money and sold his books until he finally sent them off to learn the lace-making trade. He remarried, but his second wife died within a year. Throughout this torturous period, Mr. Milton was trying to write Paradise Lost. In 1663, understanding friends introduced Mr. Milton to his third wife, Elizabeth Woodhull. She was a much younger woman who care for him until his death in 1674, and provided the tranquility and stability he needed to complete Paradise Lost, published in 1677. His persona life, specifically his three marriages, was a constant reproach to his values, and this is reflected repeatedly in his poetry. In the magnificent epic poem Paradise Lost, Mr. Milton again celebrated chastity, coupling it with an exploration of terrible temptations to transgress. “Judge not what is best by pleasure, though to nature seeming met,” he warns: For that fair female troop those saw’st, that seem’d of Goddesses, so blithe, so smooth, so gay, yet empty of all good wherein consists woman’s domestick honor and chief praise; bred only and complete to the taste, of lustful appetence, to sing, to dance, to dress, and troll the tongue, and roll the eye; to these that sober race of men, whose lives religious titled them the sons of God, shall yield up all their virtue, all their fame.” In another harsh description of the temptation triumphant, “Adam and Even after they Fell,” Mr. Milton laments that, “SO rose the Danite strong, Herculean Samson, for the harlot-lap of Philistean Dalilah, and wak’d shorn of his strength, they destitute and bare of all their virtue.” Much later, a repentant Eve tells Adam, “…and is miserable it is to be to other cause of misery, our own begott’n, and of our loins to bring into this cursed World a woeful race, that afte wretched life must be at least food for so foul a monster.” In the poetry of the great John Milton, chastity is the ultimate virtue, pleasures of the flesh a mortal sin, and women the seductive snake who entices wavering men to lie with her. Doctrinally speaking, Mr. Milton’s lyrics hark back to the Early Christian Fathers. In that respect, Comus, Paradise Lost, and his other masterpieces are like St. Augustine togged out in gilt-embroidered poetics. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

I walked in your World a mercy, a healing—like a like the Midas touch rained gold, rainbows came from your glance. The Fall of rain, evening rain, was truly a blessing. “Hear, O Heavens, and give ear, O Earth! For the Lord has spoken: I have nourished and brought up sons and have made them great and exalted, but they have rebelled against Me and broken away from me,” reports Isaiah 1.2. God has a plan for each of us. He created this Earth and sent us here so we could have faith and find joy. Our challenges help us grow and prepare us to live with Him again. God wants to help His children be happy. He has blessed us with so much. He loves you, watches out for you, and wants you to communicate with Him through prayers. Jesus Christ has promised, “Your Father which is in Heaven [will] give good things to them that ask Him,” Matthew 7.11. To ensure a righteous judgment, the Savior’s atoning sacrifice will clear away the underbrush of ignorance and the painful thorns of hurt caused by others. The more we understand the Savior’s gift, the more we will come to know, in our minds and in our hearts the truths of the Book of Mormon and that they have the power to heal, comfort, restore, succor, strengthen, console, and cheer our souls. O Lord, give us fearless humans! Humans to meet the trials of life with faith and vision, steadfast hearts and willing hands; human who dare to do the right, and yield not truth to wealth or power. O Lord, give us righteous humans! Humans who are just, humans who are free, humans who respond to their brothers’ and sisters’ needs; who work together with resolute will to spend the approach of Thy kingdom on Earth. The glorious promise of the Savior’s atoning sacrifice is that as far as our mistakes as parents are concerned, He holds our children blameless and promises healing for them. And even when they have sinned against the light—as we all do—His arm of mercy is outstretched, and if they will look to Him and live, He will redeem them. Although the Savior has power to mend what we cannot fix, He commands us to do all we can to make restitution as part of our repentance. Our sins and mistakes displace not only our relationship with God but also our relationships with others. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22