Although the philosophic experience is understood by the philosophers to be what is uniquely human, the very definition of man, the dignity and charm of philosophy have not always or generally been popularly recognized. This is not the case with the other claimants to the throne, the prophet or the saint, the hero or the statesman, the poet or the artist, whose claims, if not always accepted, are generally recognized to be serious. They were always present, apparently coeval with civil society, whereas philosophers appeared late on the scene and had to make their way. And this has something to do with the problem, but it may be symptom rather than cause. I doubt that the people have much greater access to the typical experiences of prophets, kings, and poets than to those of the philosophers. Great imagination, inspiration, intrepidity in the pursuit of glory are further from the ordinary lives of ordinary men than is the experience of reasoning found in the practical arts in daily use, like farming, building, shoemaking, and which is despised by the higher men. Socrates always has to remind his aristocratic interlocutors of these crafts and uses them as models of the knowledge aristocrats lack. However, this may indicate part of the difficulty: the people want something higher, something exalted, to admire. And certainly Socrates’ person, at first sight anyway, does not provide such an object of admiration, as Aristophanes’ comedy makes abundantly clear. Moreover, and more important, the prophets, kings, and poets are clearly benefactors of mankind at large, providing men with salvation, protection, prosperity, myths and entertainment. They are the noble bulwarks of civil society, and men tend to regard as good what does good to them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Philosophy does no such good. All to the contrary, it is austere and somewhat sad because it takes away many of men’s fondest hopes. It certainly does nothing to console men in their sorrows and their unending vulnerability. Instead it points to their unprotectedness and nature’s indifference to their individual fates. Socrates is old, unattractive, and not well off, of no family, without prestige or power in the city, and babbles about Ether’s taking Zeus’s place. The kings praised by poetry and illustrated in sculpture are ambiguous. On the one had they seem to exist for their own sake, beauty in which we do not participate and to which we look up. on the other hand, they are in our service—ruling us, curing us, perhaps punishing us, but for our sakes, teaching us, pleasing us. Achilles is perfection, what most men can only dream about being, and is therefore their superior and properly their master. However, he is also their warrior protector, who in order to save Greece overcomes the fear of death that other men cannot overcome. All the heroes are in the business of taking care of and flattering men, the demos, receiving admiration and glory as their pay. In some sense they are fictions of civil society, whose ends they serve. Not that they do not do the deeds for which they are praised, but the goodness of those deeds is measured, alas, by utility, by the greatest good of the greatest number. The statesman possesses virtues that are supposed to be good in themselves; but he is measured by his success in preserving the people. Those virtues are means to the end of preservation, id est, the good life is a good way of life, it cannot, at least in its most authentic expression, be, or serious be understood to be, in the city’s service. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The theoretical life, therefore, has an almost impossible public relations problem. Socrates hints at this in his Apology when, ridiculously—since he was never angry and since he distinguished himself as a soldier exclusively in retreats—he likens himself to Achilles. The defenselessness of philosophy in the city is what Aristophanes points out and ridicules. He, the poet, has much sympathy with the philosopher’s wisdom but prides himself on not being so foolish. He can take care of himself, win prizes from and be paid by the people. His stance is that of the wise guy in the face of the wise man; he is city smart. He warns the philosophers and proves prophetic in comically portraying the city’s vengeance. The generation of great men who followed Socrates, including Plato, Xenophon and Isocrates, took the warning very much to heart. Philosophy, they recognized, is weak, precisely because it is new, not necessary, not a participant in the city’s power. It is threatened and is a threat to all the beliefs that tie the city together and unite the other high types—priests, poets, and statesmen—against philosophy. So Socrates’ successors gathered all their strength and made a heroic effort to save and protect philosophy. Socrates in Aristophanes’ story minded his own business, was the subject of rumor and ridicule, until a father who was in debt because of his son’s prodigality wanted to free himself of his obligations. Socrates’ atheism was the right prescription for him, insofar as it meant that he need not fear Zeus’s thunderbolt if he broke the law, if he perjured himself. The law is revealed to be merely manmade, and hence there is no witness to his misdeeds if he can escape the attention of other men. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Philosophy liberates this unwise old man. His son, too, is liberated, but with the unexpected consequence that he loses reverence for his father and his mother, who are no longer under divine protection. This the father cannot stand and returns to his belief in the gods, who it turns out protect the family as well as the city. In a rage he burns down Socrates’ school. Aristophanes was prescient. The actual charges against Socrates were corrupting the youth and impiety, with the implication that the latter is the deepest cause of the former. And whatever scholars may say about the injustice of Aristophanes’ or Athens’ charges, the evidence supports those charges. In the Republic, for example, marriages are short-term affairs arranged only for reproduction, the family is dissolved, wise sons rule over and can discipline unwise fathers, and the prohibitions against incest are, to say the least, relaxed. The reverence for antiquity is replaced by reason, and the rule of fathers and the ancestral are disputed. This follows immediately from Socrates’ procedures, and it entered into the bloodstream of the West, one of the innumerable effects of philosophy that, for better or worse, are to be found only there. Angry fathers are one of the constituencies morally hostile to Socrates, who was not trying to achieve this result, or to reform the family. His example and the standards of judgment he invoked simply led to it. Socrates collided not with culture, society or economy but with the law—which means with a political fact. The law is coercive. The human things impinge on the philosophers in the form of political demands. What philosophers need to survive is not anthropology, sociology or economics, but political science. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Thus without any need for sophisticated reasons, political science was the first human science or science of human things that had to be founded, and remained the only one until sometime in the eighteenth century. The stark recognition that he depended on the city, that as he looked up to the Heavens he lost his footings on the ground, compelled the philosopher to pay attention to politics, to develop a philosophic politics, a party, as it were, to go along with the other parties, democratic, oligarchic, aristocratic and monarchic, that are always present. He founded the truth party. Ancient political philosophy was almost entirely in the service of philosophy, of making the World a safer place for philosophy. Moreover, the law against which Socrates collided was the one concerning the gods. In its most interesting expression of the law is the divine law. The city is sacred, it is a theological-political entity. (This is, by the way, why the Theological-Political Treatise is for Spinoza the book about politics.) The problem for the philosophers is primarily religion. The philosophers must come to terms with its authoritative presence in the city. Socrates in the Apology makes some suggestions as to how the philosopher must behave. He must deny that he is an atheist, although he remains ambiguous as to the character of his belief. Any careful reading of the Apology makes clear that Socrates never says he believes in the gods of the city. However, he does try to make himself appear to be a sing sent from the gods, commanded to do what he does by the Delphic god. Nonetheless he is condemned. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Socrates states his problem succinctly in explaining his way of life to his jurors: “If I tell you that I would be disobeying the god and on that account it is impossible for me to keep quiet, you will not be persuaded by me, taking it that I am ironizing. And if I tell you that it is the greatest good for a human being to have discussions everyday about virtue and the other things you hear me talking about, examining myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not livable for a human being, you will be even less persuaded.” The people recognize Socrates’ irony, his talking down to them, and see how implausible his religious claims are. His irony appears as irony and is therefore not successful. However, the truth, unadorned by the Delphic cover, is incomprehensible, corresponding to no experience his audience has. He would be closer to success in sticking to his first story. One can from this very description analyze the political situation. There are three groups of men: most do not understand him are hostile to him, and vote for his condemnation; a smaller but not inconsiderable group also do not understand Socrates but glimpse something noble in him, are sympathetic to him and vote for his acquittal; finally, a very small group knows what he means when he says the greatest good for a human being is talking about—not practicing—virtue (unless talking about virtue is practicing it). The last group is a politically inconsiderable. Therefore the whole hope for the political salvation of philosophy rests with the friendliness of the second group, good citizens and ordinarily pious, but somehow open. And it was to such men, the gentlemen, that philosophy made its rhetorical appeal for almost two thousand years. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
When they ruled, the climate for philosophy was more or less salubrious. When the people, the demos, ruled, religious fanaticism or vulgar utility made things much less receptive to philosophy. Tyrants might be attracted to philosophers, either out of genuine curiosity or the desire to adorn themselves, but they are the most unreliable of allies. All of this rests on a psychological analysis that was forced on the philosophers, who had previously not paid much attention to men or their souls. They observed that the most powerful passion of most men is fear of death. Very few men are capable of coming to terms with their own extinction. It is not so much stupidity that closes men to philosophy but love of their own, particularly of their own lives, but also love of their own children and their own cities. It is the hardest task of all to face the lack of cosmic support for what we care about. Socrates, therefore, defines the task of philosophy as “learning how to die.” Various kinds of self-forgetting, usually accompanied by illusions and myths, make it possible to live without the intransigent facing of death—in the sense of always thinking about it and what it means for life and the things dear in life—which is characteristic of a serious life. Individuals demand significance for this individual life, which is so subject to accident. Most human beings and all cities require the unscientific mixture of general and particular, necessity and chance, nature and convention. It is just this mixture that the philosophers cannot accept and which he separates into its constituent parts. He applies what he sees in nature to his own life. “As are the generations of leaves, so are the generations of men,”—a somber lesson that is only compensated for by the intense pleasure accompanying insight. Without that pleasure, which so few have, it would be intolerable. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The philosopher, to the extent that he really only enjoys thinking and loves the truth, cannot be disabused. He cherishes no illusion that can crumble. If he is comic, at least he is absolutely immune to tragedy. Nonphilosophic men love the truth only as long as it does not conflict with what they cherish—self, family, country, fame, love. When it does not conflict, they hate the truth and regard as a monster the man who does not care for these noble things, who proves they are ephemeral and treats them as such. The gods are the guarantors of the unity of nature and convention dear to most men, which philosophy can only dissolve. The enmity between science and mankind at large is, therefore, not an accident. Behind every strategy there is a dream, an image of what should be. A Third Wave strategy for breaking the back of poverty begins with what may, to some, seem like a dream—but could well become a reality, and soon. Indeed, it is the old anti-poverty strategies, not the new one, that are unrealistic. Incremental microchanges at the village level are not enough to bring about the massive progress that is needed. Nor can China or India, or those who follow their course, hope to succeed by turning themselves into megafactories polluting their air, land, and water to degrees never before seen and jam-cramming hundreds of millions more peasants into cities already at the breaking point. We will keep people from fleeing the countryside into urban favelas, villas miserias, shantytowns and squatter villages only when the productivity gap is closed between what brute labor on the soil can accomplish and what advanced technology makes possible today—and will make possible tomorrow. It will also take far greater clarity of purpose. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The entire public discussion of global poverty is muddied by a failure to decide whether the goal is to minimize absolute poverty—or to close the much-discussed “gap” between rich and poor. Closing the gap can be accomplished by impoverishing the affluent without necessarily raising the living standards of the poor one iota. However, contrast, the individual revolution radically widened the gap—but also reduced poverty. Attempts to move everyone forward equally have repeatedly proved a disaster. The prime goal should be to raise the living conditions above absolute poverty, whether or not the relative gap widens. Only after every baby is fed, after everyone’s drinking water is safe, after average life expectancy in poor countries reaches at least seventy and after basic education targets are met should closing the gap be a priority. What is needed is a strategy aimed at nothing less than the transformation of today’s impoverished rural areas into centers of advanced, highly productive enterprise—regions no longer dependent on the muscle power of emaciated, old-before-their-time parents but on the brainpower of their children. To be realistic, this strategy must look beyond the immediate—at what is emerging, even embryonic. Fortunately, powerful tools now being developed can help us. They begin with the fiercely contested issue of genetically modified food. Where is protein engineering headed? Protein engineering is a powerful tool in synthetic biology that can create proteins with tremendous potential for therapeutic and industrial use. The field has recently taken giant leaps forward from its origins, and some of its pioneers predict that the next five to ten years hold exponentially more promise. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
True protein engineering is building proteins completely from scratch, engineered to do what you want them to do. Like the IBM physicists, protein designers are moved by a vision of molecular engineering. Bill DeGardo predicted, “I think we will be able to make catalysts or enzymelike molecules, possibly ones that catalyze reactions not catalyzed in nature.” Catalysts are molecular machines that speed up chemical reactions: they form a shape for the two reacting molecules to fit into and thereby help the reaction move faster, up to a million reactions per second. New ones, for reactions that now go slowly, will give enormous cost saving to the chemical industry. Denver researchers John Stewart, Karl Hahn, and Wieslaw Klis announced their new enzyme, designed from scratch over a period of two years and built successfully on the first try. It is a catalyst, making some reactions go about 100,00 times faster. Nobel Prize-wining biochemist Bruce Merrifield believed that “if others can reproduce and expand on this work, it will be one of the most important achievements in biology.” DeGrado also has longer-terms plans for protein design, beyond making new catalysts: “It will allow us to think about designing molecular devices in the next five to ten years. It should be possible ultimately to specify a particular design and build it. Then you will have, say, proteinlike molecules that self-assemble into complex molecular objects, which can serve as machinery. However, there is a limit to how small you can make devices. You will shrink things down so far and then you will not be able to go any further, because you have reached your molecular dimension.” Mark Pearson shows that management at Du Pont also has this vision. Regarding the prospects for nanotechnology and assemblers, he remarked, “You know, it’ll take money and effort and good ideas for sure. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
“But to my way of thinking, there is no absolute fundamental limitation to preclude us from doing this kind of thing.” He did not say his company plans to develop nanotechnology, but such plans are not really necessary. Du Pont is already on the nanotechnology path, for other—shorter-term, commercial—reasons. Like IMB, if they do decide to move quickly, they have the resources and forward-looking people needed to succeed. Scientists have moved beyond predicting the structures of proteins that exist in nature to designing completely new “unnatural” proteins—and then custom-designed proteins for particular purposes. For example, scientists working with virologist Ian Wilson, Ph.D., a professor of structural biology at the Scripps Research Institute, designed a protein that can exploit a vulnerability on the surface of the influenza virus. Using a program called Rosetta, they identified candidate chains of amino acids that might fold in the right way, and tested the top candidates on the real flu virus. The most successful of the new proteins, which they named HB1.6928.2.3, proved 100% protective against death from the flu in a mouse model in a study published in Nature in October 2017. Now, if three different materials are arranged in a grid capable of generating electricity, researchers at Martin Luther University (MLU) Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) have found that the energy generations of ferroelectric crystals in solar cells can be increased by a factor of thousands. To achieve this increase in electrical energy production, the researchers created crystalline layers of barium titanate, strontium titanate, and calcium titanate, which they placed alternatively on top of one another, separating the positive and negative charges in the same photovoltaic device. This arrangement could greatly increase the efficiency of solar panels. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Who else build molecular objects? Chemists, most of whom do not work on proteins, are the traditional experts in building molecular objects. As a group, they have been building molecules for over a century, with ever-increasing ability and confidence. Their methods are all indirect: they work with billions of atoms at a time—massive parallelism—but without control of the positions of their workpieces. The molecules typically tumble randomly in a liquid or gas, like pieces of a puzzle that may or may not fit together correctly when shaken in a box. Scientist need more control of the accuracy of their designs. One outstanding challenge is developing catalysts for reactions for which there currently are no catalysts. Another critical issue is understanding how these designed proteins interact with biological systems. In the past, a grad student or post-doc would make the mutations in a protein, evaluate the effect, and come up with a hypothesis for how the protein is working. Then they would make more mutations, repeat the process five or ten times, and slowly get something improved. Scientists think they can fully automate the entire process. Once the computational methods the lab has developed to identify key protein design sequences, they are handed over to a liquid-handling robot that mimics the process of a protein engineer in an automated fashion. The robot can be working around the clock, optimizing. They can let this thing go for a week or so and it will have gone through tends of rounds of optimization without any need for input from a human. The goal is to optimize enzymes that can degrade biomass into sugars to in turn be transformed into fuel. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Scientists can make new fluorescent proteins for probes and diagnostics and more sophisticated medicines that can recognize targets with higher specificity—mimics of naturally occurring hormones that have improved pharmacological properties. Within the next few years, an entirely new class of medicines and materials based on de novo protein designs will exist. Chemists mix molecules on a huge scale (in our simulation view, a test tube holds a churning molecular swarm with the volume of an inland sea), yet they still achieve precise molecular transformation. Given that they work so indirectly, their achievements are astounding. This is, in part, the result of enormous amount of work poured into the field for many decades. Thousands of chemists are working on molecular construction in the United States of America alone; add to that the chemists in Europe, in Japan, and in the rest of the World, and you have a huge community of researchers making great strides. Though it publishes only a one-paragraph summary of each research report, a guide to the chemical literature—Chemical Abstracts—covers several library walls and grows by many feet of shelf space every year. However, a serious objection raised by physicians, and one which has resonated throughout the centuries of technological development in medicine, is that interposing an instrument between patient and doctor would transform the practice of medicine; the traditional methods of questioning the patients, taking their reports seriously, and making careful observations of exterior symptoms would become increasingly irrelevant. Doctors would lose their ability to conduct skillful examinations and rely more on machinery than on their own experiences and insight. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
In his detailed book Medicine and the Reign of Technology, Stanley Joel Reiser compares the effects of the stethoscope to the effects of the printing press on Western culture. The printed book, he argues, “helped to create the detached and objective thinker. Similarly, the stethoscope helped to created the objective physician, who could move away from involvement with the patient’s experience and sensations, to a more detached relation, less with the patient but more with the sounds from within the body. Undistracted by the motives and beliefs of the patient, the auscultator [another term for the stethoscope] could make a diagnosis from sounds that he alone heard emanating from the body organs, sounds that he believed to be objective, bias free representations of the disease process.” The stethoscope could not by itself have made such ideas stick, especially because of the resistance to them even in America, by doctors whose training and relationship to their patients led them to propose mechanical interpositions. However, the ideas were amplified with each new instrument added to the doctor’s arsenal: the ophthalmoscope (in vented by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1850), which allowed doctors to see into the eye; the laryngoscope (designed by Johann Czermark, a Polish professor of physiology, in 1857), which allowed doctors to inspect the larynx and other parts of the throat, as well as the nose; and, of course, the X-ray (developed by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895), which could penetrate most substances but not bones. “If the hand be held before the fluorescent screen,” Roentgen wrote, “the shadow shows the bone darkly with only faint outlines of surrounding tissues.” Roentgen was able to reproduce this effect on photographic plates and make the first X-ray of a human being, his wife’s hand. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Three basic television standards are in use in different parts of the World at present: NTSC, PAL, and SECAM, each slightly different but incompatible. Because of this, an American program like Flowers of the Attic usually has to be converted from one system to another before it can be telecast abroad. However, the images produced by all three systems are fuzzy by contrast with what is known as QLED. “Quantum dot display” is a display device that uses quantum dots (QD), semiconductor nanocrystals which can produce pure monochromatic red, green, and blue light. QLED is to today’s home video screens what the compact mp3 is to the scratchy platter played on great, great-grandma’s gramophone. Quantum dot can put pictures on the TV screen that are better than the quality of the best big-screen movies. It can make an image blast off the computer monitor looking as bright and sharp as in person, if not better. QLED TV represents a new generation of consumer electronics, one that will drive technological developments in dozens of areas, from chip to fiber-optic to battery to camera technology. Because QD image quality is so good, it could even make it possible for cinemas all over the World to receive their movies via satellite, rather than on film as at present, which could open an additional immense market for satellite receivers and other equipment. In total, therefore, the decisions to which QLED TV standard(s) to use will shape a World market estimated to be worth nearly a trillion dollars. Japanese engineers have worked on QLED TV for nearly twenty years. Now high definition has burst on the World economic scene. The Japanese and Americans threat to render all European television sets obsolete—and to be the only ones with the power to replace them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Economic paranoia is rampant in the United States of America as well as the entire World, people are bogged down in hairsplitting debates, political controversy, and with the health of the planet, its animals and people. However, these could be the result of removing God from his nation. Students no longer pledge allegiance to the flag in class, the ten commandments have been removed from government buildings, saying “God bless you,” to someone is seen by many being as bad as shouting to bad word to them, people no longer stand for the national anthem, and some refuse to play it. Christ said: love thine enemy. Christ’s enemy is Satan, and Satan’s enemy is Christ. Through love enmity is destroyed. Through love Christ and Satan have destroyed their enmity and come together for the End. Christ to judge, Satan to execute Judgement. Consciously or unconsciously, apathetically, half-heartedly, enthusiastically or fanatically, under countless other names by which we know them, and under innumerable disguises and descriptions, men have followed three Great Gods of the Universe ever since the Creation. Each one according to his nature. For the three Gods represent three basic human patterns of reality. Within the framework of each pattern there are countless variations and permutations, widely-varying grades of suppression and intensity. Yet each one represents a fundamental problem, a deep-rooted driving force, a pressure of instincts and desires, terrors, and revulsions. All three of them exist to some extent in every one of us. However, each of us leans more heavily toward one of them, whilst the pressures of the other two provide the presence of conflict and uncertainty. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Only through Christ can we reconcile our differences. The words in the Christian and Mormon Bibles leave the impression that they have welled-up from a deeper source than the intellect. Processian Social Darwinism elicited my sympathy, and their inherent apocalypticism mirrored my own forebodings of the near future. Were they the last National Socialists who would pass through the Flame of the End-Time, as foretold by Savitri Devi in The lightning and the Sun? Could they be the Vanguard of the Second Religiosity of the West as foretold by Oswald Spengler, or were they the Western various of the Thuggee, just one more element in our continuing descent into decadence? Around the time I began to ask these questions, Ed Sanders published The Family. Sanders claimed that The Process were pro-Hitler and Fascist in nature. It was true that they used a variation of the Swastika for their symbol. Their Social Darwinism was not so far afield from Nazi philosophy. They wore black uniforms and groomed themselves as an elite order. And a book they issued, Man’s Greatest Crime, was more hard-hitting and graphic than any anti-vivisectionist literature that I had ever seen. Did not the Nazis, whose Green Party advocate Walther Darre also champion the rights of the animal kingdom and nature? On the other hand, The Process operated a soup kitchen for the homeless and hungry. And they never mentioned politics or economics in any conversations I had with them. A number of members I met among the American recruits were Jewish. Sanders’ accusations and my own speculations raced across my mind, but I could never see any concrete evidence to confirm anything one way or the other. During meditations, we used the same chants Manson used to program others with subliminal messages. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
We were asked to close our eyes and meditate on something like Peace or Love or Fulfillment or whatever. After the meditation came to a close, we played for another hour and a half in the coffee house. Father Barnabas had a good voice for ballad and his folk-style guitar playing was reminiscent of Ian Anderson. One song in particular was quite beautiful in its lyrics and melody. It was about the God Lucifer. Father Matthew and I asked Father Barnabas to show us the chords to the song and give us the lyrics, and to the request his face contorted in anger and said “No!” We were taken aback by his anger, and never again had any personal contact with him. Much like the American Indians, Americans are now being slaughtered and driven off their lands, and many feel they are being forced to assimilate to an alternative lifestyle they do not agree with. Speaking in cultural terms, it is death either way. The only way members of the press could possibly care enough about American people is to have an anthropologist tell rambling stories about the impact on immigration, taxes, and globalization on the American people. Our culture, one that has been functioning well for two thousand years, could be destroy in one generation, in our lifetime, depending on who is in that White House in 2024. It is not only a physical assault, but a technological assault through most of the TV new media. Is it possible to adopt the hard-edged, fact-fascinating, aggressive, gross form in order to preserve a way of thinking that is totally American and completely alien to this new model being drive by California, New York, and the White House? They are totally ignoring people and their struggles and 161,548 people are homeless in California; and that 552,830 Americans are homeless (probably more like 4 million in California alone and 20 million natiin wide) and we do not have the resources to help them, but we can leave our borders open and send at least $52 billion a year to other countries. It takes 1.63 million Americans, who earn the national average salary of $32,000 anually to donate their full pay checks to the government, to generate $52 billion a year. To put that in perfect the top 1 percent pays $612 billion in taxes and the other 90 percent pays $461 billion in taxes. So a substantial amount of your money is being given away. Americans despertaly need that money for housing food and education. They once worked and paid taxes, now other nations are getting rich off of their labor, while the government refuses to help its own people. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
The struggle of the American people today is as much a consciousness struggle as it is a civil rights battle. To the extent that it is framed exclusively as a civil rights issue, the Americans lose, at least in cultural terms. Individual Americans may win a job, or a right, or, if they are ever acknowledged, a small payment for an injustice, but their children and Americans of the future will not be Americans anymore; they will have been moved out nationwide artificially. Since television itself is an outgrowth of an issues argued within it would be predetermined. However, imagine for a moment that television did not exist. Let us say that only print media existed. It so happens that print media, while not perfect, can convey a lot more about American ways of mind than electronic media can because print can express much greater depth, complexity, change of mood, subtlety, detail and so on. Books, especially, can be written in much slower rhythms, encouraging a perception that builds, stage by stage, over the length of a long reading process that make take many hours, or days. Of course, publishers, these days, also riding the rapids of modern life and responsive to commodity-mind, discourage books that move at deliberate speed, preferring those that are punchy, fast-reading, highlighted, riding the tops of waves, like television sitcoms, or advertising. Yet many books do exist that are solely devoted to states of feeling or expression of intuition, or that deal in the realm of subjective reaction. There are books which are exclusively Americana. And so such works as American Pride: Poems Honoring America and Her Patriots by David Bancroft, American Pride by Diana Rosen, and American Titans by Michael Gray, are able to convey more on an imagery level, a sensory level, and an evocational level than all the TV specials combined. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
This is not to say that these books are sufficient. Only direct experience is. However, if the battle were fought in books, Americans might win. If print were the only media in the World, the natural advantage of today’s dominant forms—corporate, military, technological, scientific—over concrete ways of thinking would be vastly diminished. In a wider information field, the American mind would have greater validity. So people who are interested in celebrating and saving American cultures, like people interested in the arts or ecology or nay nonhierarchical political forms, might be well advised to cease all efforts to transmit these intentions through television and devote greater effort to undermining television itself and accelerating the struggle within other information fields. “Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he had committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed,” reports James 5.14-16. A protestant minister told me that one day one of the members of his church who was ill had asked if he lay hands on him and pray for him. The elders however, in every cause refused to do as the man asked. None of them had ever done such a thing before and all thought themselves incapable of doing it. The whole idea was complete alien to them. Why is this? Why is Christendom so ignorant of what the Bible says about the laying on the hands and prayer for the sick? Why do Christians often lack the courage to put into practice the various passages that refer to healing? Why is it left to the sects and the cults to monopolize these Scriptures? Are these promises only meant for the extremist groups? #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Is this a sign of the Church’s poverty that it no longer lives in the light of the promises of the Bible? These are questions which are relevant today. Let us then consider this problem in the light of the passage we have already quoted from the letter of James, and similar passages. It was custom in Jewish communities for the sick to call for the elders to visit them and to pray for them. The early Christians continued this practice although their view of sickness changed somewhat, for they no longer always considered it to be a punishment inflicted on the person by God for some particular sin in his life. The practice of anointing a person with oil was associated in the Old Testament with the choosing of a king and the sanctifying of a priest. It was also a sign of festive joy as we see it expressed. In Psalm 23, “Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup overflows.” Oil was considered to be one of the best medicines in existence. This suggests that in spite of the prayers of the elders, medicine itself was not rejected but actually used to combat the disease. It is evident from the Scriptures that oil had both a liturgical and a medicinal use. “Thus we may see that the Lord is merciful unto all who will, in the sincerity of their hearts, call upon His holy name. Yea, thus we see that the gate of Heaven is open unto all, even to those who will believe on the name of Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God. Yea, we see that whosoever will may lay hold upon the word of God, which is quick and powerful, which shall divine asunder all the cunning and the snares and the wiles of the devil, and lead the man of Christ in a strait and narrow course across that everlasting gulf of misery which is prepare to engulf the wicked—and land their souls, yea, their immortal souls, at the right hand of God in the kingdom of Heaven, to sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and with Jacob, and with all our holy fathers, to do not more out,” reports Helaman 3.27-30. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Cresleigh Havenwood features four distinct floor plans ranging from 2,293 – 3,377 square feet and offering up to five bedrooms.
Each plan has been thoughtfully designed and includes great features such as single story homes, guest suites, optional offices, garage workshops, and more!
Get the most out of your new home with Cresleigh’s All Ready smart home featuring all the connectivity needed to keep your house running. Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes with owned solar included!
Located off of Virginiatown Road and McCourtney Road, residents of the 83 homesites of Cresleigh Havenwood will benefit from a brand new neighborhood in the prestigious City of Lincoln, California.
Palo Verde Park, is just down the street and there’s plenty of recreation to take part in all around town.
Cresleigh Homes offers versatile flex space, an inviting great room and an open dining room that flows into kitchen with a center island and walk-in pantry. Some homes come with a Butler’s Pantry. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/
Whether we’ve been away for business or recreation, it’s hard to beat that feeling of getting back to our own Cresleigh Home.
Randolph Harris II International 