Suburbs in the Sky

There are some serious arguments for us to consider when dealing with the revolutionaries who accepted our principles of freedom and equality. Many believed that we had not thought through these cherished ideals. Can equality really only mean equal opportunity for unequal talents to acquire property? Should shrewdness at acquisition be better rewarded than moral goodness? When even Plato required communism among equals, should private property and equality sit so easily together? Communism or socialism never really made much headway against the respect for private property in the United States of America. Locke’s definition of property suited, and still suits, our tempers perfectly, and Rousseau’s critique of it made almost no impression here, although it was and remains very potent in Europe. And freedom for us meant merely acting as one pleases, restricted only by the minimum demands of social existence. We had not adequately understood what really setting laws for ourselves required, nor had we gone beyond the merely negative freedom of satisfying brutish impulsion. As for religion, the domesticated churches in America preserved the superstition of Christianity, overcoming of which was perhaps the key to liberating man. Should a good regime be atheistic, or should it have a civil religion? And, finally, what in the World can we do with the Napoleonic—heroic ambition and military glory—others than ignore or debunk it? Such were the questions raised on the slaughter-bench of History by the French Revolution, questions that we were not eager to hear. They provided the material for a century of serious philosophy on the Continent, to which the spirit of philosophy had repaired from England.

Even Mill, the heir of utilitarianism, which was a still narrower and more self-satisfied version of earlier liberal thoughts, had to turn to a German thinker, Humboldt, for the notion of spontaneity, to give an attractive modern account of the essence of liberty and protect it from the dangers of the tyranny of the majority. Philosophy begins, it seems, in the confrontation with the fundamental political alternatives. Of the truly great philosophers since the French Revolution, only Kant was a friend of liberal democracy. And he felt constrained to reinterpret it in ways that made it both unrecognizable and unattractive to us. He developed a new epistemology that makes freedom possible when human nature is understood to be composed of selfish natural appetites, and a new esthetics that saves the beautiful and the sublime from mere subjectivity. None of the concerned the earlier egalitarian thought of the founders of liberalism. What was acted out in the American and French Revolutions had been thought out beforehand in the writings of Locke and Rousseau, the scenarists for the drama of modern politics. These Columbuses of the mind—Thomas Hobbes led the way, but Locke and Rousseau followed and were considered more reliable reporters—explored the newly discovered territory called that state of nature, where our forefathers all once dwelled, and brought the important news that by nature all men are free and equal, and that they have rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of property. This is the kind of information that causes revolutions because it pulls the magic carpet out from under the feet of kinds and nobles. Locke and Rousseau agreed on these basics, which became the firm foundation of modern politics. Where they disagreed, the major conflicts within modernity were to occur.

Locke was the great practical success; the new English and American regimes founded themselves according to his inspired all the later attempts in thought and deed, private and public, to alter, correct or escape from the fatality of Locke’s complete victory. It is now fashionable to deny that there ever was a state of nature. We are like aristocrats who do not care to know that our ancestors were once savages who, motivated only by fear of death and scarcity, killed one another in quarrels over acorns and steaks. However, we continue to live off the capital passed on to us by these rejected predecessors. Everyone believes in freedom and equality and the rights consequent to them. These were, however, brought to civil society from the state of nature; in the absence of any other ground for them, they must be just a mythical as the tale of the state of nature told by the unreliable travelers. Instructed by the new natural science that provided their compass, they went to the origin and not to the end, as did the older political philosophers. Socrates imagined a shining city in speech; Hobbes discovered an isolated individual whose life was “mean, nasty, brutish and short.” This opens up a very different perspective on what one wants and hopes for from politics. Prudence points not toward regimes dedicated to the cultivation of rare and difficult, if not impossible, virtues, but toward a good police force to protect humans from one another and allow them to preserve themselves as well as possible. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau all found that one way or another nature led men to war, and that civil society’s purpose was not to cooperate with a natural tendency in a human toward perfection but to make peace where nature’s imperfection causes war. The reports from the state of nature mixed bad news and good news.

Perhaps the most important discovery was that there was no Garden of Eden; the Eldorado of the spirit turned out to be both desert and jungle. Humans were not provided for at the beginning, and their current state is not a result of their sin, but of nature’s miserliness. Humans are their own. God neither looks after them nor punishes them. Nature’s indifferences to justice is a terrible bereavement for humans. One must care for oneself without the hope that good humans have always had: that there is a price to be paid for crime, that the wicked will suffer. However, it is also a great liberation—from God’s tutelage, from the claims of kings, nobles, and priests, and from guilt or bad conscience. The greatest hopes are dashed, but some of the worst terrors and inner enslavements are dispelled. Unprotectedness, nakedness, unsuccored suffering and that awfulness of death are the prospects that humans without illusions must face. However, looking at things from the point of view of already established society, humans can be proud of themselves. They have progressed, and by their own efforts. One can think well of one’s self. One has progressed and by one’s own efforts. One can think well of oneself. And now, possessing the truth, one can be even freer to be oneself and improve one’s situation. One can freely make governments that, untrammeled by mythical duties and titles to rule serve one’s interests. The explorations of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau of the origins made possible a new beginning in theory, a project for the reconstruction of politics, just as the exploration and the discovery of the New World promised a new beginning in practice. The two new beginnings coincided and produced, among others wonders, the United States of America.

From his reflection on the state of nature, Locke drew the formula of Enlightenment, with its particular combination of natural and political science. Its starting point is the untrammeled use of reason. In this he simply follows the oldest opinions of the philosophers. Freedom for humans consists in ordering one’s life according to what one can see for oneself through one’s most distinctive faculty, liberated from the force of tyrants and the authority of lies, id est, myths. Through unassisted reason, humans are human, as opposed to the human of this place or time, nation or religion, can know the causes of things, can know nature for oneself. Autonomy does not mean, as is now generally thought, the fateful, groundless decision in the void, but governing oneself according to the real. There must be an outside for the inside to have meaning. So thought Locke and his philosophic predecessors and successors. What distinguished Enlightenment from earlier philosophy was its intention to extend to all humans what had been the preserve of only a few: the life lived according to reason. It was not “idealism” or “optimism” that motivated these philosophers but a new science, a “method,” and allied with them, a new political science. If not provided by them with the genius to discover that knowledge, a clear and distinct mathematical science of the movement of bodies, discovered by the use of a simple method readily understood by ordinary men, could make the knowledge of nature accessible to them. The various mythic or poetic views of the whole that set the horizons for the nations of humans, and within which the philosophers had always lived alone and misunderstood, would be dispensed with, and the fundamental difference in perspective between scientists and nonscientist overcome.

Further, if humans themselves are taken out of the shadows of the kingdom of darkness and examined in the light of science, they see that by nature they belong to the realm of bodies in motion, and that one, like all other bodies, wish to preserve one’s motion, that is, one’s life. Every human has a powerful fear of death, that corresponds to the way of nature. Critical, scientific, methodical examination of the other ends prescribed for humans can show that they belong to the realm of the imagination, of false opinion, or derive from this primary end. Such critical examination, of which is supported by powerful inclinations in all humans, results in a salutary unity of purpose and a useful simplification of the human problem: vulnerable humans must seek the means to one’s preservation. If they are properly educated, since this is what all humans really want, whatever arrangements help them get food, clothing, shelter, health and, above all, protection from one another win their consent and their loyalty. Humans also must face the shifting work from producer to prosumer, which is the current frontier of outsourcing. Shoving work onto the customer is not new. At one time, groceries were kept behind that counter and clerks retrieved them as requested. When Clarence Saunders figured out that he could get customers to work for him, self-serve supermarkets were invented in 1916, and the system was patented. New technologies make further externalization profitable. If Mr. Saunders had returned some years ago, he would not have recognized the optical scanners at the checkout counter. However, these still required a cashier. Today in the United States of America and elsewhere some supermarket chains give customers a handheld gadget that scans each can or box they choose and charges it to their credit card. Look, Ma, no clerk.

Big supermarket chains now also offer self-scan checkout machines designed to reduce the time customers have to wait in line to pay—and the number of clerks and baggers on the payroll. Of course, protests Donald L. Potter, a Los Angeles advertising man, “the store offers no discount to shoppers who are taking over the job of an employee.” One online critic suggest that supermarkets should have “full- and self-service prices like the gas station. It would incentivize me to use the self check-out more often.” What is new these days is the cyberstructure tht makes it possible to convert consumers into prosumers across an astonishingly broad range of activities. With it, all kinds of companies are discovering the delicious potentials of the free-lunch economy. Among all the e-commerce corpses left behind by the turn-of-the-century crash, one big survivor stood out—a firm whose business model took maximum advantage of unpaid prosumer input. Thus Amazon.com’s customers feed free content to its sites in the form of book and music reviews, personal opinions, lists of favorite books and the like. However, when it comes to reducing expenses by saddling someone else with unpaid work, the prize for chutzpa must surely go to tax agencies that off-load complex record keeping and calculation onto the taxee, who performs unpaid labor for the privilege of paying. When we add a third (unpaid) job to our paid work and our prosuming, it is no wonder we are time-frazzled. We are reallocating out time between producing, consuming and prosuming—another transformatory shift in our relationship to time itself. And when we add competitive pressures in the money economy to demographics forces like aging, the advance and spread of knowledge, and the high-speed expansion of technologies available for prosuming, there are plenty of reasons to expect prosuming to explode.

The drive to externalize labor by increasing prosuming is so strong that a recent Dilbert cartoon shows an executive boasting that “over time, with luck, we’ll train our customers to do our manufacturing and shipping, too.” As one can see, it is true that as a medium for conducting public business, language has receded in importance; and that is has been moved to the periphery of culture, to be replaced at the center by the entertaining visual image. This is due to the fact that we are reducing our community from humans coming together, to humans becoming prosumers and having less interaction with others. Forms of communication are neither good nor bad in themselves. They become good or bad depending on their relationship to others symbols and on the functions they are made to serve within a social order. When a culture becomes overloaded with pictures; when logic and rhetoric lose their binding authority; when historical truth becomes irrelevant; when the spoke or written word is distrusted or makes demands on our attention that we are incapable of giving; when our politics, history, education, religion, public information, and commerce are expressed largely in visual imagery rather than words, then a culture is in serious jeopardy. However, this is not a complaint against entertainment nor the visual arts. As an old song has it, life is not a highway strewn with flowers. The sight of a few blossoms here and there may make our journey a trifle more endurable. However, in America, the least amusing people are our professional entertainers. In our present situation, our preachers, entrepreneurs, politicians, teachers, and journalists are committed to entertaining us through media that do not lend themselves to serious, complex discourse. However, these producers of our culture re not to be blamed. They, like the rest of us, believe in the supremacy of technological progress.

It has never occurred to us that the gods might be crazy. And even if it did, there is no mountain top from which we can return what is dangerous to us. We would do well to keep in mind that there are two ways in which the spirit of a culture may be degraded. In the first—the Orwellian—culture becomes a prison. This was the way of some tyrants. In the second—the Huxleyan—culture becomes a burlesque. This appears to be the way of Americans. What Huxley teaches is that in the Age of Advance Technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling countenance than from one whose face exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice; we watch him, by ours. When a culture becomes distracted by trivia; when political and social life are redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments; when public conversation becomes a form of baby talk; when a people become, in short, an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then—Huxley argued—a nation finds itself at risk and culture-death is a clear possibility. Sunlight is probably the most important single element in our environment, yet it has been largely ignored by the scientific community. Visible light has the ability to exert measurable biological effects. Medical uses of the visible spectrum have been virtually ignored by physicians for the past hundred and fifty years. Light intensity as well as wavelength specificity may alter productivity and mood. In the infant, sensory overload by prolonged exposure to highly intense illumination may produce undesirable effects on development. Indeed the manipulation of the light-environment of adults as well as of infants can have consequences of which we may be quite unaware. (One wonders, for example, about the effects on a newborn child of emerging from darkness into the dazzling bright fluorescent light of delivery rooms. Most primitive cultures deliver infants in darkened environments.)

We know less about the effects of light on humans than almost any other thing. We know, however, that ultraviolent light is essential to humans for the synthesis of Vitamin D, and visible light is essential for vision. We know that we need light to survive, but too much can be dangerous. Somewhere there is a balance. The first step has been to copy that sun, but we may not need all parts of the solar spectrum. For example, some plants use some parts, some plants use other parts of the spectrum. If we knew which wavelengths were best for each type of plant, we could design lamps that were optimal for each plant’s growth and well-being. Except for vision and Vitamin D synthesis we have very little information on what part of the solar spectrum humans use and what part one does not. Most people believe in “Godslights”: what is natural is automatically good. “Natural” was all we had for virtually the entire course of human evolution, that is what our bodies are attuned to. Anything that intervenes in this arrangement is potentially dangerous. However, it is possible that humans will be able to eventually find out just which spectrum is needed for which growth characteristic in a human being, and that we can then plan our lighting environments accordingly. Visions of totally artificial underground environments and/or space stations, celebrated as offering everything humans need, flew through the minds of many. So many trees, so much light, so much recreation. Suburbs in the sky. If red, blue, and green phosphorescent lights is being projected to as much as 25,000 volts directly into humans eyes and from there to the endocrine system, and if humans are receiving light in that way for four hours a day on the average, while depriving themselves of natural light, what can be said about the possible affect of this?

While there has been a tremendous amount of research on the effects of temperature and pressure on humans, it has not been fashionable to study the effects of light on man, and light is probably the most important single element in our environment. What does it mean, for example, that people who are predisposed to motion sickness immediately become sick when they walk into a room illuminated with blue light? There are the kind of data that are needed before we can even approach this question. We know that blue light will reduce the concentration of bilirubin in the blood of infants and now jaundiced infants are put under banks of light to treat them, but we do not know yet what the other wavelengths of light in the lamps might be doing to the infants. In another area, we know that our bodies are relatively transparent to red wavelengths of light. You can tell that by putting a flashlight inside your mouth. What you can see from the outside is not blood; it is the red rays passing through you. People are now beginning to be interested in the effects of red light on man. There is research now underway to gain further knowledge about the effects of light entering the body through the skull. It is known, for example, that light comes in through the top of the head, not the eyes. If light entering the bodies of higher mammals by other routes than through the eyes has a biological effect on them, we need to know. And if so, what wavelengths are the active ones. We need to do this kind of research on the higher mammals, as we need to do it now. There is not the slightest doubt that light taken through the eyes affects the cells; there is no doubt that variations in light spectra cause variations in cellular activity; there is no doubt that sitting and looking at the television light affects our cells in some way. However, no one can say how, and not many are asking.

It has been long known that the culture of a person is brought up in influences the content and character of that person’s memory. People born into societies that celebrate individual achievement, like the United States of America, tend, for example, to be able to remember events from earlier in their lives than do people raised in societies that stress communal achievement, such as Korea. Psychologists and anthropologists are now discovering that the influence goes both ways. Personal memory shapes and sustains the “collective memory” that underpins culture. What is stored in the individual mind—events, facts, concepts, skills—is more than representation of distinctive personhood that constitutes the self. It is also the crux of cultural transmission. Each of us carries and projects the history of the future. Culture is sustained in our synapses. The offloading of memory to external data banks does not just threaten the depth and distinctiveness of the self. It threatens the depth and distinctiveness of the culture we all share. Many of us come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (their ideal) is the complex, dense, and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. However, now, many see within themselves the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.” As we are drained of our inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance, we risk turning into pancake people—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button. Culture is more than the aggregate of what an Internet search describes as “the World’s information.” It is more than what can be reduced to binary code and uploaded onto the Internet. To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.

The “wicked” are those who deliberately persist in impurity of heart. The state of the heart determines whether a human lives in the truth, in which God’s goodness is experienced, or in the semblance of truth, where the fact that it “goes ill” with one is confused with the illusion that God is not good to one. The state of the heart determines. Seeing the prosperity of “the wicked” daily and hearing their braggart speech has brought one very near to the abyss of despairing unbelief, of the inability to believe any more in a living God active in life. Some go so far as to be jealous of “the wicked” for their privileged position. It is not envy which one feels, it is jealousy, that it is they who are manifestly preferred by God. That it is indeed they, is proved to one by their being sheltered from destiny. For them there are not, as for all the others, those constraining and confining “bands” of destiny; they are never in the trouble of humans. And so they deem themselves superior to all, and stalk around with their boasting, and when one looks in their eyes, which protrude from their vanity, one sees the paintings of the heart, the wish-images of their pride and their cruelty, flitting across. Their relation to the World of their fellow-men is arrogance and cunning, craftiness and exploitation. Corpus began in 1974 in response to an American bishop’s dismissal of married ex-priests as of no further use to the Catholic Church. This, at a time when ten thousand ex-priests had married and polls showed that 79 percent of Catholics would welcomes marries priests, galvanized Corpus’s founders to create an advocacy group that is now greatly expanded and highly professional. Corpus’s original cause was simply to work toward an acceptance of a married priesthood—in others words, to end compulsory clerical celibacy.

Today, its mission has expanded to locating and communicating with ex-priests, providing media information about related data such as the number of priests who continue to leave, and endorsing other concerned Catholic groups that aim to smash the rule of mandatory celibacy. One such international group, or rather a movement, is the Austrian-originated We Are Church, which mounts intensive public campaigns for optional priestly celibacy and other Church reforms. By 1996, We Are Church claimed it had collected 2.3 million signatures on a petition demanding change. Canada’s Catholics of Vision, supported by Corpus, has begun a similar campaign, bitterly opposed by several bishops, five of whom banned participants from campaigning on Church grounds. The flood ide of scandals involving pleasures of the flesh perpetrated by clergymen has also provided spokespeople from Corpus and other organizations with arguments for optional celibacy. These, reinforced by publicized studies about the psychological effects of coerced celibacy, lead them to conclude that repression of pleasures of the flesh, the inevitable consequence of mandatory celibacy, creates legions of mentally or physically unbalanced clergymen. Some of these act out in destructive and violent ways, grievously harming people they were supposedly dedicated to counseling, helping, and spiritually guiding. As one ex-priest reflects, “A relationship with God can be deepened by denial, by sacrifice…but it can also be soured and dirtied.” Abuse involving pleasures of the flesh by priests is so widespread and, today, so much more frequently reported that support groups for victims are springing up everywhere. Chicago-based Linkup president, 90 percent of charges against Catholic priests involve abuse of boys, which is consistent with Richard Sipe’s estimate that 6 percent of the American priesthood are practicing unethical/illegal behavior. Protestant clergymen, on the other hand, are mostly accused of heterosexual “counseling situations gone wrong.”

The recent avalanche of scandalous revelations has forced Catholics, including pro—optional-celibacy groups, to confront the issue. The fact remains, however, that the percentage of clergy who commit criminal acts is tiny compared to those who violate their vows of celibacy with consenting adults, whether other religious or laypeople. And not all priests who marry were uncelibate when they resigned from holy orders. Ultimately, though, compulsory celibacy is the common denominator of their fight against Church discipline. Married priests who are involved in pleasures of the flesh can be just as effective as the voluntarily celibate, they argue. Both can function in states of grace, and God alone grants each soul His special gifts. However, that is not the point. We need people in this World to lead and stand as pillars in the community, as proof that pleasures of the flesh is not as important as love. We need people to know that there are people who choose not to indulge in pleasures of the flesh so others may follow in their example. We need people who can prove that it is possible to overcome carnal passions, and they should be placed in a high position and recognized as having status and authority. America and the World needs to become more conservative, so children learn that their body is a temple of God and not something one just throws to the wolves at a certain age or whenever it feels right. Most people do not want their children out prostituting themselves, even if it is not for money. The Law of Chasity is important for boys and girls and men and women to follow so they can protect themselves from unwanted harm and live a dignified life. The path of devotional love is more attractive than any other path. The strength of the emotional nature accounts for this. A person who has reconciled oneself properly to the celibate state finds a freedom, a peace, which is compensation.