A Vast Unsleeping Money Machine

Basic words do not state something that might exist outside them; by being spoken they establish a mode of existence. Beginning about 1960, the fifty-two-minute play and its variations began to disappear. There were many reasons for its demise. For one thing, writers discovered that there was much more money to be made writing movie scripts, and many of them fled to Hollywood, including, by the way, Paddy Chayesky. Some of them left because they objected to the limitations imposed by the television screen, including the commercial interruptions, and they hoped to find greater artistic freedom on the stage and in the movies. Second, and of special importance, was the advent of color, video tape, improved editing techniques, and other technical developments, including the use of film. Television became the technician’s medium, not a writer’s medium. Everyone became fascinated with the ingenious possibilities of technical magic—which is also the case, by the way, with current American filmmakers—and the quality of scripts came to be irrelevant. Third, television broadcasting began to occupy all the hours of the day, and it is of course impossible to write and produce meaningful drama for such a ravenous consumer of talent and material. Entrepreneurs and executives had discovered that money may not grow on trees, but television is a vast, unsleeping money machine, provided that it is used to keep viewers in a condition of almost psychopathic consumership. Thus, American television turned away from serious, provocative, original drama, and toward sit-coms, soap operas, and game shows. In other words, the function of television changed. Its uses fell into the hands of merchants who, obviously, have different agenda from other artists. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Executives are very excited that there are still undeveloped communities that have not been yet exposed to television. You have audiences that are not over saturated with television, so they are neither cynical nor stupefied. Your merchants have not yet taken control of television, and you have stringent government regulations to hold them back. You do not have a large and powerful movie industry nor, we should add, advertising industry, to steal away talented directors, writers, and actors. Your entire nation sits within one time zone, which makes live television a practical consideration. And please keep in mind that the “liveness” of television broadcasts gives them an immediacy and simultaneity that film, videotape, and books may never have. To deny television drama this distinctive feature is the equivalent of doing a film without the benefit of editing. (However, many people would not like to only see the directors cut of films, but also the unedited versions. Hollywood still has magic most in the World have never seen in person.) Moreover, there is no need to limit yourselves to the fifty-two-minute drama, although one hopes Ingmar Bergman’s self-indulgent eleven-hour experiment, Scenes from a Marriage, will not be used as a model. Remember: a television play that can be shown, cut or uncut, in a movie theater is probably not much of a television play. To continue: You do not operate your television system twenty-four hours a day, so television will not eat everyone up in two months. You have a rich culture that is increasingly significant in World affairs, especially in its effort to reduce international paranoia and nuclear-bomb madness. So your writers are provided with weighty themes to explore, and they have the political freedom to do so. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

At the same time, your culture creates disturbing problems for its people, leading to the development of interesting and serious grievances. Keep in mind that grievance, as Ibsen and Strindberg have shown us, is always the stuff of important drama. And finally, we assume you have a wealth of young and energetic writers and directors who are not obsessed with technological wizardry but who, on the contrary, are passionate about the mystical and transcendent possibilities of the dramatized word. Thus, the conditions are present here for the emergence of a television theater that will speak to and for a national audience who will support and take pride in it. If we are wrong in assessment, we hope you will be gentle and circumspect in correcting us. We are trying our best to see things a beneficial way, and it is not good for our health to get too much bad news. Television has certain effects on individuals. It was not only abstract entities like corporations that benefited disproportionately during the commodity boom. So did the people who owned the corporations. Dr. Lester C. Thurow, professor of economics and management at MIT and former member of the Council of Economic Advisors, published some enlightening figures in the Public Interest Economics Newsletter of December 1975. By 1962, says Mr. Thurow, during the final spurt of the greatest economic growth of any industrial nation in history: “The top 18 percent of all families owned 76.2 percent of all privately held wealth in the United States of America, while the bottom 25 percent, roughly 50 million people, had no assets at all…recent estimates suggest no significant change.” Mr. Thurow continues: “The top 5 percent of the families own more wealth than the bottom 81 percent. The top .008 percent hold as many assets as the bottom half of the population.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Mr. Thurow goes on to say that “wealth and power are even more concentrated than are indicated in these data, because of the inter-relationships among the wealthiest individuals and the large corporations they control.” In other words, this .008 percent can, through their stock ownership and interlocking directorships, effectively dominate the few corporations that in turn dominate the few corporations that in turn dominate the economy. We believe Mr. Thurow is suggesting conspiracy, or at least a startling degree of collaboration among these few. Perhaps his academic standing prevents him from putting it that way. Since we do not have know all the details, we are willing to draw the obvious conclusions. Mr. Thurow goes on to talk about income: “The income gap between the bottom 5 percent [of the families] and the top 5 percent is 45 to 1, and the income gap between the bottom 1 percent and the top 1 percent is 525 to 1. The top 1 percent received nearly three times as much income annually as the bottom 20 percent of the America population. The fact that only the government transfer payments [social security, welfare, food stamps, unemployment insurance have kept the position of the lowest income groups from declining, indicates that the distribution of earnings by the private sector is becoming more and more unequal…The lowest fifth of the population receives only 1.7 percent of the earnings as distributed by the market [private industry], down from the already miserable 2.6 percent in 1943. The top fifth receives through the market 28 times as much in wages and salaries as the lowest fifth.” Mr. Thurow’s point is that if the government, that is, the taxpayer, did not pick up the slack which industrial growth has created, the widening gap between the rich and the poor would be perfectly obvious. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

In the false belief that industrial growth will provide benefits to the poor and unemployed, we provide tax breaks to assist individual growth. Meanwhile, with out own taxes, we feed the growing number of hungry and poor, who are blamed for the rising taxes. We pay for what is being taken away from us. At each turn of the cycle, the situation becomes more desperate. What these figures reveal is that America is every bit as dominated and directed by a tiny fraction of wealthy people. To further illustrate this example, it would be as to say all the politicians in the United States of America are the ones with the money, and make more money when they are out of office and everyone else is less affluent. People are wondering why the less affluent are penalized so heavily, when it has been proven that the trickle-down method does not work, and for those who are being stabilized by it, others use the system to try and make sure these people lose their financial support and become even worse off. Looking at the past 22 years, 2000-2022, through our new reality of unemployment lines, bankrupted small businesses and corporations, and the immense profits of congress and a handful of corporate giants, we can see that we are now much further away from an egalitarian society than we were three decades ago. We need to fight a war on poverty in the United States of America, focus on putting our own farms and farmers back to work, buying American beef, pork, lobster, fish, fruit, vegetables, and grain. And produce our own toys, cars (American cars are becoming so popular and to make sure they stay that way, and to stimulate the economy, the government should issue $5000-$15,000 in down payment assistance instead of tariffs on other products), steel, cloths and more. This would help to increase not only the minimum wage, which should be around $30 an hour by now, but it would also drive-up overall wages so people can afford to rent and buy in their communities without government assistance. We have to make sure the American Dream was not just a dream. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

The inharmoniousness 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 the 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. Is it 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 not inevitable. The result is that both marriage and career are devalued. For a long time middle-class women, with the encouragement of their husbands, had been pursuing careers. It was thought they had a right to cultivate their higher talents instead of being household drudges. Implicit in this was, of course, the view that the bourgeois professions indeed offered an opportunity to fulfill the human potential, while family and particularly the woman’s work involved in it were merely in the realm of necessity, limited and limiting. Serious men of good conscious believed that they must allow their wives to develop themselves. However, with rare exceptions, both parties still took it for granted that the family was the woman’s responsibility and that, in the case of potential conflict, she would subordinate or give up her career. It was not quite serious, and she usually knew it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

This arrangement of giving up her career to take care of the family was ultimately untenable, and it was clear in which way the balance would tip. Couples agreed that the household was not spiritually fulfilling for most women and that many women have equal rights. The notion of a domestic life appropriate to women had become incredible. Why should not women take their careers as seriously as men take theirs, and have them be taken as seriously by men? Terrific resentment at the injustice done to women under the prevailing understanding of justice found its expression in demands seen as perfectly legitimate by men and women, that men weaken the attachment to their careers, that they share equally in the household and the care of the children. Women’s abandonment of the female persona was reinforced by the persona’s abandoning them. Economic changes made it desirable and necessary that women work; lowering of infant mortality rates meant that women had to have fewer pregnancies; greater longevity and better healthy meant that women devoted a much smaller portion of their lives to having and rearing children; and the altered relationships within the family meant that they were less likely to find continuing occupation with their children and their children’s children. At forty-five they were finding themselves with nothing to do, and forty more years to do it in. Their formative career years had been lost, and they were, hence, unable to compete with men. Even if she were to brave the long hostile public opinion, a woman who now wanted to be a woman in the old sense would find it very difficult to do so. In all of these ways the feminist case is very strong indeed. However, though the terms of marriage had been radically altered, no new ones were defined. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

The feminist response that justice requires equal sharing of all domestic responsibility by men and women is not a solution, but only a compromise, an attenuation of men’s dedication to their careers and of women’s to family, with arguably an enrichment in diversity of both parties but just as arguably a fragmentation of their lives. The question of who goes with whom in the case of jobs in different cities is unresolved and is, whatever may be said about it, a festering sore, a source of suspicion and resentment, and the potential for war. Moreover, this compromise does not decide anything about the care of the children. Are both parents going to care more about their careers than about the children? Previously children at least had the unqualified dedication of one person, the woman, for whom their care was the most important thing in life. Is half the attention of two the same as the whole attention of one? Is this not a formula for neglecting children? Under such arrangements the family is not a unity, and marriage is an unattractive struggle that is easy to get out of, especially for men. And here is where the whole business turns nasty. The souls of men—their ambitious, warlike, protective, possessive character—must be dismantled in order to liberate women from their domination. Machismo—the polemical description of maleness or spiritedness, which was the central natural passion in humans’ souls in the psychology of the ancients, the passion of attachment and loyalty—was the villain, the source of the difference between the genders. The feminists were only completing a job begun by Hobbes in his project of taming the harsh elements in the soul. With machismo discredited, the beneficial task is to make men caring, sensitive, even nurturing, to fit the restructured family. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

Thus once again men must be re-educated according to an abstract project. They must accept the “feminine elements” in their nature. A host of Brad Pitt and Paris Hilton types invade the schools, popular psychology, TV and the movies, making the project respectable. Men tend to undergo this re-education somewhat sullenly but studiously, in order to avoid the opprobrium of the most attractive label and to keep peace with their wives and girlfriends. And it is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them “care” is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail. It must fail because in an age of individualism, persons of either gender cannot be forced to be public-spirited, particularly by those who are becoming less so. Further, caring is either a passion or a virtue, not a description like “sensitive.” A virtue governs a passion, as moderation governs lust, or courage governs fear. However, what passion does caring govern? One might say possessiveness, but possessiveness is not to be governed these days—it is to be rooted out. What is wanted is an antidote to natural selfishness, but wishes do not give birth to horses, however much abstract moralism may demand them. The old moral order, however imperfect it may have been, at least moved toward the virtues by way of the passions. If men were self-concerned, that order tried to expand the scope of self-concern with themselves. To attempt the latter is both tyrannical and ineffective. A true political or social order requires the soul to be like a Gothic cathedral, with selfish stresses and strains helping to hold it up. Abstract moralism condemns certain keystones, removes them, and then blames both the nature of the stones and the structure when it collapses. The failure of agriculture in socialist collective farming is the best political example of this. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

An imaginary motive takes the place of a real one, and when the imaginary motive fails to produce the real effect, those who have not been motivated by it are blamed and persecuted. In family questions, inasmuch as men were understood to be so strongly motivated by property, an older wisdom tried to attach concern for the family to that motive: the man was allowed and encouraged to regard his family as his property, so he would care for the former as he would instinctively care for the latter. This was effective, although it obviously had disadvantages from the point of view of justice. When wives and children come to the husband and father and say, “We are not your property; we are ends in ourselves and demand to be treated as such,” the anonymous observer cannot help being impressed. However, the difficulty comes when wives and children further demand that the man continue to care for them as before, just when they are giving an example of caring for themselves. They object to the father’s flawed motive and ask that it be miraculously replaced by a pure one, of which they wish to make use for their own ends. The father will almost inevitably constrict his quest for property, cease being a father and become a mere man again, rather than turning into a providential God, as others ask him to be. What is so intolerable about the Republic, as Plato shows, is the demand that men give up their land, their money, their wives, their children, for the sake of the public good, their concern for which had previously been buttressed by these lower attachments. The hope is to have a happy city made up entirely of unhappy men. Similar demands are made today in an age of slack morality and self-indulgence. Plato taught that, however laudable justice may be, one cannot expect prodigies of virtue from ordinary people. Better a real city tainted by selfish motives then one that cannot exist, except in speech, and that promotes real tyranny. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or virtue Rewarded, published in 1740, was a literary milestone of massive proportions. When the kindly and sympathetic Mr. Richardson penned it, he was merely an accomplished, professional how-to-letter-writer who expanded his craft into narrative form, told a true story that had deeply affected him, and unwittingly produced the English language’s first novel. For fifteen years after “a gentleman” had recounted it to him, Mr. Richardson had pondered the story of a young servant girl and her unpleasant and all-too-representative experience in service. As a mere slip of a twelve-year-old, this child had been forced to go into service because of her family’s financial problems. She became the personal maid of a woman who died three years later, whereupon her dead mistress’s son attempted, “by all manner of temptations and devices, to seduce her.” So far, so ordinary—this was, after all, the lot of hundreds of thousands of young domestics throughout England. However, here the story deviated from the usual path of pregnancy, discovery, disgrace, expulsion from service, childbirth in a hovel or even a ditch, ruin, misery, perhaps death. For in the story Mr. Richardson heard, the bonnie lass “had recourse to…many innocent stratagems to escape the snares laid for her virtue,” which included nearly drowning herself. However, she persevered, and finally, “by her noble resistance, watchfulness, and excellent qualities, subdued” her tormentor so that he actually did the decent but astonishing thing and married her. Even more astonishingly, the bride managed to vault the social abyss between herself and her husband and “behaved herself with so much dignity, sweetness, and humility, that she made herself beloved by everybody.” Both rich and poor adored her and her grateful husband blessed her. Apparently this is what had really happened, and Mr. Richardson set himself the task of committing the story to paper. Mr. Richardson painstakingly presented it from the heroine’s perspective, with all the nuances and judgment a beleaguered fifteen-year-old might have had. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Pamela is the 533-page result. Pamela was staggeringly successful, to its publisher’s delight, selling out five editions in its first year. (282 years later, it is still required reading for thousands of postsecondary literature courses.) Its message—that maidenly virtue and virginity were marketable commodities that could greatly advance their owner and her family—resonated with the rising middle class. The great poet Alexander Pope raved that Pamela’s would do more for virtue than volumes of sermons. However, vociferous critics also emerged, foremost among them Henry Fielding, who detested Pamela’s cloying and calculating coyness. Months after Pamela’s triumphant appearance, Mr. Fielding counter-attacked with Shamela, subtitled “An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. In which, the many notorious Falsehoods and Misrepresentations of a Book called Pamela, Are exposed and refuted; and all the matchless Arts of that young Politician, set in a true and just Light…Necessary to be had in all Families…” Ten months later, Mr. Fielding’s lengthier novel Joseph Andrews appeared, still parodying Pamela. Here the hero is the virtuous Joseph Andrews, in dire danger from his aggressive, lascivious, and upper-class female employer. When he resists her advances, she is aghast. “Have you the assurance to pretend, that when a lady demeans herself to throw aside the rules of decency, in order to honor you with the highest favor in her power, your virtue should resist her inclination? That when she had conquered her own virtue, she should find an obstruction in yours?” “Madam,” said Joseph, “I can’t see why her having no virtue should be a reason against my having any: or why, because I am a man, or because I am poor, my virtue should be subservient to her pleasures.” “I am out of patience,” cries the lady: “did ever a mortal hear of a man’s virtue! Did ever the greatest, or the gravest, men pretend to any of this kind! Will magistrates who punish lewdness, or parsons who preach against it, make any scruple of committing it?” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Mr. Fielding was getting in his own strikes against what he regarded as the preposterous and morally revolting Pamela, in which virginity is called a virtue, ticketed with a price tag, and hawked to the highest bidder. In his own moral scheme, chastity—true chastity—is essential, for men ad for women. He slips in lessons about the consequences of debauchery—a ruined young woman condemned to Newgate Prison for prostitution, while her seducer suffers only pangs of remorse. Joseph Andrews’s chastity is more than his physical virginity. It is his commendable ability to master his sensuality. Chastity is not some smug item for barter. It is a religiously derived way of life and deserving of more profundity than Pamela was able to give it. Let us proceed to some more general moral premises of modern times. The Protestant Reformation won the possibility of living religiously in the World, freed individuals from the domination of the priest, and led, indirectly, to the toleration of private conscience. However, it failed to withstand the secular power; it did not cultivate the meaning of vocation as a community function; and in most sects the spirit of the churches did not spring from their living congregations but was handed down as dogma and ascetic discipline. The final result has been secularism, individualism, the subordination of human beings to a rational economic system, and churches irrelevant to practical community life. Meantime, acting merely as a negative force, the jealous sectarian conscience has drive religion of social thought. The Scientific revolution associated with the name of Mr. Galileo freed thinking of superstition and academic tradition and won attention to the observation of nature. However, it failed to modify and extend its method to social and moral matters, and indeed science has gotten further and further from ordinary experience. With the dominance of science and applied science in our times, the result has been a specialist class of scientists and technicians, the increasing ineptitude of the average person, a disastrous dichotomy of “neutral” facts versus “arbitrary” values, and a superstition of scientism that has put people out of touch with nature, and also has aroused a growing hostility to science. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

The Enlightenment unseated age-old tyrannies of state and church and won a triumph of reason over authority. However, its universalism failed to survive the rising nationalisms except in special sciences and learning, and its ideal of encyclopedic reason as the passionate guide to life degenerated to the nineteenth-century hope for progress through science and learning. And we now have an internationalism without brotherhood or peace, even concealing science as a strategic weapon; and a general sentiment that the rule of reason is infinitely impractical. The rebellion for honest speech that we associate with Ibsen, Flaubert, etcetera, and also with the muckrakers broke down the hypocrisy of Victorian prudishness and of exploiting pillars of society; it reopened discussion and renovated languages; and it weakened official censorship. However, it failed to insist on the close relation between honest speech and corresponding action. The result has been a weakening of the obligation to act according to speech, so that, ironically, the real motives of public and private behavior are more in the dark than ever. Popular culture—this ideal, that we may associate in literature with the name of Sam Johnson and the Fleet Street journalists, in the plastic arts with William Morris and Ruskin, freed culture from aristocratic and snobbish patrons. It made thought and design relevant to everyday manners. However, it did not succeed in establishing an immediate relation between the writer or artist and his audience. The result is that the popular culture is controlled by hucksters and promoters as though it were a saleable commodity, and our society, inundated by cultural commodities, remains uncultivated. More than a billion humans, we are frequently told, subsist on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. Many survive—just barely—on much less. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Today the total annual output of the World money economy—what we have referred to as the visible economy—is something on the order $100 Trillion. That is, we are told, the total economic value created on the planet each year. However, what if the total we humans produce each year is not $50 trillion a year in goods, services, and experiences, but closer to $200 trillion? What if, in addition to the $100 trillion, there were another $100 trillion “off the books,” so to speak? We believe there may well be, and the hunt for that missing $50 trillion is the subject of the next several reports. The hunt will take us from supercomputers to Hollywood and hip-hop music, biological threats, piracy and the search for life in outer space. Nonetheless, there are compensations for the Internet. Research shows that certain cognitive skills are strengthened, sometimes substantially, by our use of computers and the Net. These tend to involve lower-level, or more primitive, mental functions such as hand-eye coordination, reflex response, and the processing of visual cues. One much-cited study of video gaming, published in Nature in 2003, revealed that after just ten days of playing action games on computers, a group of young people had significantly increased the speed with which they could shift their visual focus among different images and tasks. Veteran game players were also found to be able to identify more items in their visual field than novices could. The authors of the study concluded that “although video-game playing may seem to be rather mindless, it is capable of radically altering visual attentional processing.” While experimental evidence is sparse, it seems only logical that Web searching and browsing would also strengthen brain functions related to certain kinds of fast-paced problem solving, particularly those involving the recognition of patterns in a welter of data. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

In fact there are still vast numbers who live without any money at all. They have never entered the World money system, scratching by, as our distant ancestors did, basically consuming only what they themselves can produce. A substantial part of this impoverished population would do almost anything to move into the money economy. To enter that economy, humans have had to go through one of what might be called the “Seven Doorways to Money.” Imagine a long hallway with seven doors locked doors. A tired, dirty, hungry crowd pushes and pulls its desperate way along the hall. Each doorway bears a brief, brusque sign telling what must be done to open the lock. Illiterates eagerly ask others to read the signs to them. The signs read as follows: Doorway One: CREATE SOMETHING SALABLE. Grow surplus corn. Draw a portrait. Make a pair of sandals. Find a buyer and you are in. Doorway Two: GET A JOB. Work. Get paid money in return. You are in the money system. As such, you are now a part of the visible economy. Doorway Three: INHERIT. If your parents or your Uncle William bequeaths money to you, this door will swing open. You thereby enter the system. You may never need a job. Doorway Four: OBTAIN A GIFT. Someone—anyone—could give you money, or something you can sell or translate into money. Whatever its form, one you have it, you, too, are in. Doorway Five: MARRY. (Or remarry.) Pick a spouse who has already walked through one of the doors and will share his or her money. Then you, too, can walk on in. Doorway Six: GO ON WELFARE. Money may be grudgingly transferred to you by a government. The amount may be a pittance, but to that degree, you, too, are in the money system. Doorway Seven: STEAL. Finally, there is always theft, first resort of the criminal and last resort of the desperate poor. Of course, there are minor variations—bribes, accidental discovery of money and the life. However, these seven are the main portals through which humanity over the centuries has marched into the money economy. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

Through the repetitive evaluation of links, headlines, text snippets, and images, we should become more adept at quickly distinguishing among competing informational cues, analyzing their salient characteristics, and judging whether they will have practical benefit for whatever task we are engaged in or goal we are pursuing. One British study of the way woman search for medical information online indicated that the speed with which they were able to assess the probable value of a Web page increased as they gained familiarity with the Net. It took an experienced browser only a few second to make an accurate judgment about whether a page was likely to have trustworthy information. Other studies suggest that the kind of mental calisthenics we engage in online may lead to small expansion in the capacity of our working memory. That, too, would help us to become more adept at juggling data. Such research indicates that our brains learn to swiftly focus attention, analyze information, and almost instantaneously decide on a go or no-go decision. It is believed that as we spend more time navigating the vast quantity of information available online, many of us are developing neural circuitry that is customized for rapid and incisive spurts of directed attention. As we practice browsing, surfing, scanning, and multitasking, our plastic brains may well become more facile at those tasks. The importance of such skills should not be taken lightly. As our work and social lives come to center on the use of electronic media, the faster we are able to navigate those media and the more adroitly we are able to shift our attention among online tasks, the more valuable we are likely to become as employees and even as friends ad colleagues. Our jobs depend on connectivity, and our pleasure-cycles—no trivial matter—are increasingly tied to it. The practical benefits of Web use are many, which is one of the main reasons we spend so much time online. It may be too late to retreat to a quieter time. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

Still, it is a serious mistake to look narrowly at the Net’s benefits and conclude that technology is making us more intelligent. It could be making us more dependent and less intelligent in the long run. If the power goes out, fuel supplies are compromised, and your car cannot drive and park itself or do the lane sensing change, what then? If the power goes out nationwide and you have a book report to do and there is no Net, and you need to charge your car up, what then? For instance, people are pushing electric cars, but in January and February of 2023, Japan is expected to see electricity shortages, as they are expecting record cold temperatures. Some thermal facilities where damaged by an earthquake, so they will not be able to produce the needed power. We need to find other alternatives to electric cars. If one does not learn these skills and think beyond the trends, without having a computer assist them, that may have dire consequences. While the constant shifting of our attention when we are online may make our brains more nimble when it come to multitasking, improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively. Does optimizing for multitasking result in better functioning—that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness? The answer is, in more cases than not, no. The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem. You become more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought. As we gain more experience in rapidly shifting our attention, we may overcome some of the inefficiencies inherent in multitasking, but except in rare circumstances, you can train until you are blue in the face and you would never be as good as if you just focused on one thing at a time. What we are doing when we multitask is learning to be skillful at a superficial level. The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: To be everywhere is to be nowhere.” Every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others. Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies has led to widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

We can, for example, rotate objects in our minds better than we used to be able to. However, our new strengths in visual-spatial intelligence go hand in hand with a weakening of our capacities for the kind of deep processing that underpins mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection. Only if we define intelligence by the Net’s own standards, the Net is making us smarter. If we take a broader and more traditional view of intelligence—if we think about the depth of our thought rather than just its speed—we have come to a different and considerably darker conclusion. Given our brains plasticity, we know that our online habits continue to reverberate in the workings of our synapses when we are not online. We can assume that the neural circuits devoted to scanning, skimming, and multitasking are expanding and strengthening, while those used for reading and thinking deeply, with sustained concentration, are weakening or eroding. Researchers have also found signs that this shift may already be well under way. They gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light multitaskers. They found that the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted by irrelevant environmental stimuli, had significantly less control over the contents of their working memory, and were in general much less able to maintain their concentration on a particular task. Whereas the infrequent multitaskers exhibited relatively strong top-down attentional control, the habitual multitaskers showed a greater tendency for bottom-up attentional control, suggesting that they may be sacrificing performance on the primary task to let in other sources of information. Intensive multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them. As we multitask online, we are training our brains to pay attention to the crap. The consequences for our intellectual lives may prove deadly. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

The mental functions that are losing the “survival of the busiest” brain cell battle are those that support calm, linear thought—the ones we use in traversing a lengthy narrative or an involved argument, the ones we draw on when we reflect on our experiences or contemplate an outward or inward phenomenon. The winners are those functions that help us speedily locate, categorize, and assess disparate bits of information in a variety of forms, that let us maintain our mental bearings while being bombarded by stimuli. These functions are, not coincidentally, very similar to the ones performed by computer, which are programmed for the high-speed transfer of data in and out of memory. Once again, we seem to be taking on the characteristics of a popular new intellectual technology. On the evening of April 18, 1775, Samuel Johnson accompanied his friends James Boswell and Joshua Reynolds on a visit to Richard Owen Cambridge’s grand villa on the banks of the Thames outside London. They were down into the library, where Cambridge was waiting to meet them, and after a brief greeting Dr. Johnson darted to the shelves and began silently reading the spines of the volumes arrayed there. “Dr. Johnson,” said Cambridge, “it seems off that one should have such a desire to look at the backs of books.” Dr. Johnson, Mr. Boswell would later recall, “instantly started from his reverie, wheeled about, and replied, ‘Sir, the reason is very plain. Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find it.” The Net grants us instant access to a library of information unprecedented in size and scope, and it makes it easy for us to sort through that library—to find, if not exactly what we were looking for, at least something sufficient for our immediate purposes. What the Net diminishes is Dr. Johnson’s primary kind of knowledge: the ability to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves, to construct within our own minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of connections that give rise to a singular intelligence. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Much of the way of the World, as you know, has become anti-Christ, or anything but Jesus Christ. Our day is a replay of Book of Mormon history in which charismatic figures pursue unrighteous dominion over others, celebrate license of pleasures of the flesh, and promote accumulating wealth as the object of our existence. Their philosophies justify in committing a little sin, or even a lot of sin, but none can offer redemption. That comes only through the blood of the Lamb. Th best, the “anything but Christ,” or “anything but repentance” crowd can offer is the unfounded claim that sin does not exist or that is it exists, it ultimately has no consequences. We cannot see that argument getting much traction at the Final Judgment. We do not have to attempt the impossible in trying to rationalize our sins away. And on the other hand, we do not have to attempt the impossible in creasing the effects of sin by our own merit alone. Ours is not a religion of rationalization nor a religion of perfectionism but a religion of redemption—redemption through Jesus Christ. If we are among the penitent, with His Atonement our sins are nailed to His cross, and with his stripes and stars we are healed. We are not motivated by the desire to condemn. Our true desire mirrors the love of God. We love those to whom we are sent, whoever they may be and whatever they may be like. Just as the Lord, His servants do not want anyone to suffer the pains of sin and poor choices. Clouds and mountains all tangled together up to the blue sky, a rough road and deep woods without any travellers far away the lone moon a bright glistening white nearby a flock of birds sobbing like children. 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 speed the approach of Thy kingdom on Earth. O Lord, give us faithful humans! Men like Abraham, dauntless and true, who bring to Thine altar devoted love; who brave every hardship Thy will to perform, befriending the stranger in homage to Thee. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

Cresleigh Homes

Sometimes, we swear we can see sparkles ✨ bouncing off the gorgeous tiled backsplash of our new home at #Havenwood! When you’ve got a kitchen this fabulous, it feels almost too good to be true.

The Model 1 at #Havenwood is the smallest in the community, but still includes a separate dining room AND three bedrooms with option to convert the den into a fourth. 🙌 What a find!