We, free citizens of the Great Republic, feel an honest pride in her greatness, her strength, her just and gentle government, her wide liberties, her honored name, her stainless history, her unsmirched flag, her hands clean from oppression of the weak and from malicious conquest, her hospital door that stands open to the hunted and the persecuted and the rich of all nations; we are proud of the judicious respect in which she is held by the monarchies which hem her in on every side, and proudest of all of that lofty patriotism which we inherited from our fathers, which we have kept pure, and which won our liberties in the beginning and has preserved them unto this day. While that patriotism endures the Republic is safe, her greatness is secure, and against them the powers of the Earth cannot prevail. I pray you to pause and consider. Against our traditions we are now entering upon an unjust and trivial war, a war against a helpless people, and for a base object—robbery. At first our citizens spoke out against this thing, by an impulse natural to their training. To-day they have turned, and their voice is the other way. What caused the change? Merely a politician’s trick—a high-sounding phrase, a blood-stirring phrase which turned their uncritical heads: Our Country, right or wrong! An empty phrase, a silly phrase. It was shouted by every newspaper, it was thundered from the pulpit, the Superintendent of Public Instruction placarded it in every school-house in the land, the War Department inscribed it upon the flag. And every man who failed to shout it or who was silent, was proclaimed a traitor—none but those others were patriots. To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, “Our Country, right or wrong,” and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation? #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

For in a republic, who is “the country?” Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant—merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who is not. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. Who, then, is “the country?” Is it the newspaper? is it the pulpit? is it the school-superintendent? Why, these are mere parts of the country, not the whole of it; they have not command, they have only their little share in the command. They are but one in the thousand; it is in the thousand that command is lodged; they must determine what is right and what is wrong; they must decide who is a patriot and who is not. Who are the thousand—that is to say, who are “the country?” In a monarchy, the king and his family are the country; in a republic it is the common voice of the people. Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak. And it is a solemn and weighty responsibility, and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or the empty catch-phrases of politicians. Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which is not. You cannot shrink this and be a man. To decide it against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country—hold up your head! you have nothing to be ashamed of. Only when a republic’s life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

This republic’s life is not in peril. The nation has sold its honor for a phrase. It has swung itself loose from its safe anchorage and is drifting, its helm is in pirate hands. The stupid phrase needed help, and it got another one: “Even if the war be wrong, we are in it and must fight it out: we can not retire from it without dishonor. You have planted a seed and it will grow. Perhaps the most abusive example of technology is found in the work of Francis Galton, who was born in 1822, died in 1911, and therefore lived during the richest period of technological invention. He may be thought of as one of the Founding Fathers of Technopoly. Galton is also known as the founder of “eugenics,” a term he coined, which means the “science” of arranging marriage and family so as to produce the best possible offspring based on the hereditary characteristics of the parents. He believed that anything could be measured and that statistical procedures, in particular, were the technology that could open the pathway to real knowledge about every form of human behavior. The next time you watch a televised beauty contest in which women are ranked numerically, you should remember Francis Galton, whose pathological romance with numbers originated this form of idiocy. Being unsatisfied with vagueness about where the most “beauty” was to be found, he constructed a “beauty map” of the British Isles. As he told us, he classified “the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent.” He then proved statistically tht London had the most beautiful girls, Aberdeen the must unattractive; this is no doubt made it awkward for Galton to spend his vacation in Scotland. If this were not enough, he also invented a method for quantifying boredom (by counting the number of fidgets) and even proposed a statistical inquiry for determining the efficacy of prayer. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

However, Galton’s main interest was in demonstrating, statistically, the inheritance of intelligence. To that end, he established a laboratory at the International Exposition of 1884, where for threepence people could have their skulls measured and receive Galton’s assessment of their intelligence. Apparently, a visitor received no extra credit for demanding his or her money back, which would surely have been a sign of intelligence. We can be sure that not many did, since Galton was considered a major intellect of his day. In fact, Lewis Terman, the man most responsible for promoting IQ tests in America, calculated that Galton’s IQ was more than 200. Terman, who fancied making such estimates of the dead, ranked Charles Darwin (Galton’s cousin, incidentally) at a mere 135, and poor Copernicus somewhere between 100 and 110. For a definitive history and analysis of the malignant role played by statistics in the “measurement” of intelligence, I refer to the reader to Stephen Jay Gould’s brilliant book The Mismeasure of Man. Here, I will only cite three points made by Gould, which I believe are sufficient to convince anyone with a higher IQ than Copernicus of the dangers of abusing statistics. The first problem is called reification, which means converting an abstract idea (mostly, a word) into a thing. In this context, reification works in the following way: We use the word “intelligence” to refer to a variety of human capabilities of which we approve. There is no such thing as “intelligence.” It is a word, not a thing, and a word of a very high order of subtraction. However, if we believe it to be a thing like the pancreas or liver, then we will believe scientific procedure can locate it and measure it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The second problem is ranking. Ranking requires a criterion for assigning individuals to their place in a single series As Gould remarks, what better criterion can be used than an objective number? In the ranking of intelligence, we therefor assume that intelligence is not only a thing, but a single thing, located in the brain, and accessible to the assignment of a number. It is as if “beauty” were determined to inhere in the size of a woman’s chest. Then all we would have to do is measure the chest and rank each woman accordingly, and we would have an “objective” measure of “beauty.” The third point is that in doing this, we would have formulated our question “Who is the fairest of all?” in a restricted and biased way. And yet this would go unnoticed, because, as Gould writes, “The mystique of science proclaims that numbers are the ultimate test of objectivity.” This means that the way we have defined the concept will recede from our consciousness—that is, its fundamental subjectivity will become invisible, and the objective number itself will become reified. One would think that such a process would appear ridiculous on the breast of it, especially since, by believing it, we must conclude that Dolly Parton is objectively proved to be more beautiful than Audrey Hepburn. Or, in the case of intelligence, that Galton had twice as much of it as Copernicus. Nonetheless, in Technopoly all this is take very seriously, albeit not without a few protests. After a lifetime of working in the field of intelligence measurement, E.L. Thorndike observed that intelligence tests suffer from three small defects: “Just what they measure is not known; how far it is proper to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and compute ratios with the measures obtained is not known; just what the measures signify concerning intellect is not known. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

In other words, those who administer intelligence tests quite literally do not know what they are doing. That is why David McClelland remarked, “Psychologists should be ashamed of themselves for promoting a view of general intelligence that has engendered such a testing program.” Joseph Weizenbaum summed it up by saying, “Few ‘scientific’ concepts have so thoroughly muddled the thinking of both scientists and the general public as that of the ‘intelligence quotient’ of ‘IQ.’ The idea that intelligence can be quantitatively measured along a single linear scale has caused untold harm to our society in general, and to education in particular.” Gould has documented some of this harm, and Howard Gardner has tried to alleviate it (in his book Frames of Mind). However, Technopoly resists such reproaches, because it needs to believe that science is an entirely objective enterprise. Lacking a lucid set of ethics and having rejected tradition, Technopoly searches for a source of authority and finds it in the idea of statistical objectivity. This quest is especially evident not only in our efforts to determine precisely how smart people are but also in our attempts to find out precisely how smart groups of people are. Aside from the fact that the procedures used do not and cannot give such an answer, one must ask, Of what Earthly use is it to declare that one group of people is smarter than another? We must keep in mind the story of statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet. That is to say, in a culture that reveres statistics, we can never be sure what short of nonsense will lodge in people’s heads. The only plausible answer to the question why we use statistics for such measurements is that it is done for sociopolitical reasons whose essential malignancy is disguised by the cover of “scientific inquiry.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

One has to understand, certain things are only one’s opinions but can be confirmed by objective measure, then one can believe one has an irreproachable authority for making decisions about the allocation of resources. This is how, in Technopoly, science is used t make democracy “rational.” Now, the title of Chief Information Officer did not yet exist in American firms but there was a small “Data Priesthood”—the data-processing professionals. Because no one else could make the “giant brain” do anything, these few professionals essentially “owned” the firm’s mainframes, and anyone who wanted information processed had to come to them. The priests enjoyed the blessing of an info-monopoly. Then came the micros. Desktop computers arrived with the force of a whirlwind in the late 1970s. Immediately sensing that these inexpensive new machines would erode their power, many data professionals threw everything they had into a campaign to keep them out of their companies. The DP priests sneered at the microcomputers’ limited capacity and small size. They fought against the budgeting funds for them. However, just as an entrenched monopoly, Western Union, could not keep the telephones out of the hands of Americans in the 19^th century, the business community’s voracious hunger for information swept aside all opposition from the data professionals. Soon thousands of executives were end-running the data priests, buying their own machines and programs, beginning to network with one another.  It became clear that companies would need dispersed computer power, not just a few centrally controlled mainframes. The “giant brain” fantasy was dead, and with it the concentrated power of the DP staff. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Today, in many big firms more than half of all computer processing power is outside the Information Systems department, and, as a senior manager of Deloitte & Touche puts it, the computer professional still have “Worlds more to lose.” Executives no longer came, tugging their forelocks and shuffling their feet, to beg for a few minutes of computer time. Many, no longer under the control of the DP priesthood, had their own sizable departmental budgets for computers. The priests now faced a situation not unlike that of the medical doctors, who lost their godlike status as more and more medical knowledge seeped into the lay press and the media. Instead of dealing with computer illiterates, the DP professionals now confronted a large number of “end-users” who knew something of the basics of simple computing, read computer magazines, bought machines for their kids at home, and were no longer awestruck by anyone who rattled on about RAM and ROM. The “micro revolution” demonopolized computer information and shifted power out of the hands of the priesthood. Like most revolutions, the micro revolution was a messy affair. With individuals and their departments rushing out to buy whatever kind of machines, software, and services they wanted, the result was an electronic Tower of Babel. So long as these were mainly stand-alone systems, it did not matter much. However, once it became necessary for these machines to talk to the mainframes or to one another and the outside World, the drawbacks of unrestrained liberty became starkly apparent. Computer professionals carried a grave warning to their bosses. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Computer democracy could end by shrinking the power of top management itself. How could anyone responsibly run a company when its entire computerized information system was out of control? Different machines, different programs, different data bases, everyone “doing his own thing” raised the specter of anarchy in the office. It was time to clamp down. In every revolution there is a period of upheaval and extremism, followed by a period of consolidation. Thus the DP staff, backed by senior management, now set about institutionalizing the revolution and, in the process, recouping some of the priesthood’s erstwhile influence. To impose order on computers and communications, the new CIOs were handed far greater resources and responsibilities than ever before. They were told to integrate systems, connect them up, and formulate what might be called “rules of the electronic road.” Having originally been hoarders of centralized information, and having lost control of the system for a time, the new information systems people and the CIOs who lead them have now reemerged as data police, enforcing new rules that, together, define the firm’s information system. These rules, which cover technical standards and types of equipment, also usually govern access to central data banks, priorities, and many other matters. Ironically, the latest surprising twist of the screw finds many CIOs singing the virtues of the very microcomputers they once despised. The reasons are clear. Micros are no longer the 98-pound weaklings they once were. Together with minis and workstations, they are now so powerful they can actually take over many of the old functions of the mainframe. Hence, many CIOs are calling for “downsizing” and further decentralization. “Downsizing is a phenomenal trend,” reports Theodore Klein of the Boston Systems Group, Inc. “I was recently at a conference of sixty MIS directors and just about every one was doing this in some form.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

In the words of CIO magazine, the journal of the CIOs, “Downsizing puts control in the hands of business-unit managers.” However, that control is now firmly governed by rules set by computer professionals. Many CIOs, in fact, with support from above, are attempting to recentralize control under the flag of “network management.” Says Bill Gassman, a marketing specialists for DEC: “Network management is more than a technical issue; it’s political.” His view is shared by others who believe, in the words of Datamation magazine, that “the arguments for centralized network management…frequently masks a desire by some within MIS organizations to regain personal operational control lost during the past few years.” In short, while info-wars rage in the corporation’s external environment—pitting, as we saw, retailers versus manufacturers, or industries and even nations against one another—info-wars on a smaller scale are raging internally as well. CIOs and their staffs become, whether they mean to or not, info-warriors. For though they may not conceive of their function in these terms, their largely unrecognized task is to redistribute power (while trying, not surprisingly, to expand their own). Functioning as both highway engineers and state troopers on our fast-growing electronic highways—they build as well as attempt to manage the systems—they are put in the distasteful position of being, in a sense, the corporation’s “executive thought police.” While the first, primitive assemblers were controlled by changing what molecules are in the solution around the device, getting the speed and accuracy wanted for large-scale manufacturing takes real computation. Carl’s setup uses a combination of special-purpose molecule processors and general-purpose assemblers, all controlled and orchestrated by nanocomputers. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Computers back in the 1990s used microelectronics. They worked by moving electrical charge back and forth through conducting paths—wires, in effect—using it to block and unblock the flow of charge in other paths. With nanotechnology, computers are built from molecular electronics. Like the computers of the 1990s, they used electronic signals to wave the pattens of digital logic. Being made of molecular components, though, they are built on a much smaller scale than 1990s computers, and work much faster and more efficiently. On the scale of our simulated molecular World, 1990s computer chips are like landscapes, while nanocomputers are like individual buildings. Carl’s desktop PC contains over a trillion nanocomputers, enough to out-compute all the microelectronic computers of the twentieth century put together. Back in the dark ages of the 1980s, an exploratory engineer proposed that nanocomputers could be mechanical, using sliding rods instead of moving electrons. These molecular mechanical computers were much easier to design than molecular electronic computers would have been. They were a big help in getting some idea of what nanotechnology could do. Even back then, it was pretty obvious that mechanical computers would be slower than electronic computers. Carl’s molecular electronic PC would have been no great surprise, though nobody knew just how to design one. When nanotechnology actually arrived and people started competing to build the best possible computers, molecular electronics won the technology race. Still, mechanical nanocomputers could have done all the nanocomputing jobs at Desert Rose: ordinary, everyday molecular manufacturing just does not demand the last word in computer performance. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

For Carl, the millions of nanocomputers in the milky waters of his building ponds are just extensions of machines on his desk, machines there to help him run his business and deliver products to his customers—or, in the case of the Red Cross emergency, to help provide time-critical emergency supplies. By reserving those three separate ponds, Carl can either build three different kinds of equipment for the Red Cross or use all the ponds to mass-produce the first thing on the Red Cross list: emergency shelters for ten thousand people. The software is ready, the plumbing is fine, the drums of building materials are all topped up, the Special Mix for this job is loaded: the build is ready to start. “Okay,” Carl tells the computer, “build Red Cross tents.” Computer talks to nanocomputers. In all three pools, nanocomputers talk to assemblers. The build begins. Three tragic conflicts in the twentieth century—World War I, World War II and the Cold War—represented the terminal climax of the industrial era and gave rise to the unique collision of wealth waves that we see on the planet today. The Second Wave wealth system is in retreat. By contrast, the Third Wave wealth system, starting in the United States of America, has already—in a few short decades—crossed the Pacific and transformed Asia. In the years ahead, we will see the wave overrun the shores of Latin America and Africa as well. The signs are already apparent. Behind this World transformation, we have shown, are unprecedented changes at the level of the deep fundamentals of wealth. Nowhere is this clearer or more revealing than in Asia’s historic rise and China’s great awakening. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

While much mentioned in financial news, Asia remains insufficiently understood on both Wall Street and in Washington—which, because of history and geography, face more toward the Atlantic than the Pacific. Between 2001 and 2005, when the United States of American opened free-trade negotiations with twenty nations, just one was in Asia. Citing this critically, one U.S. senator remained Washington that Asia “is hoe to six of the past decade’s ten fastest growing economies, five of the top ten U.S. trading partners and more than half the World’s population.” He might have added that it is also home to the overriding majority of the World’s Muslims and is the region most surrounded by nuclear weaponry. Above all, Asian is home to China. And unless the United States of America, Europe and the rest of the World understand what is really happening in China—the China that lies hidden behind the flood of unreliable economic and financial statistics—it will be difficult to make sense of what lies ahead. For what happens there—one way or the other—will radically reallocate wealth and shake the planet. By 2004, China had pushed past Japan to become the World’s third biggest trading nation after the United States and Germany. That same year saw China sitting on more than $500 billion of the World’s $3.5 trillion in foreign-currency reserves. It owned nearly $175 billion worth of U.S. Treasuries—an amount exceeded only by Japan—putting it in a position to jolt the entire global economy if it chose to replace dollars with euros or a basket of other currencies. In little more than two decades, China had become a giant force looming over the World economy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

However, can China’s spectacular growth continue? Will China actually become the global superpower of the year 2020, as so many forecasters predicted? No, but they have made significant progress and they have moved the date of expectation of becoming the global superpower to 2025. Conventional wisdom attributes China’s startling progress to its break with communism and its transition toward a market economy. However, that is hardly a sufficient explanation. Other nations have tried shifting in the same direction, and none has experienced anything like China’s success. Moreover, China even now cannot yet be described as a fully developed market economy. That market cliché also overlooks the trickle-down effect set in motion when, as we have seen, Silicon Valley transferred progressively higher-level computer-manufacturing operations to Japan, South Korea and Taiwan—each of which then set up plants and mainlined capital into China—all this before Beijing’s shift toward market economies had gone very far. Another equally important reason for China’s spectacular performance can be found in the way it has applied its novel twin-track development strategy. Now, humans have been long lived on this planet. An immediate aspect of agriculture, brought to light increasingly in recent years, involved the physical well-being of its subjects. Lee and Devore’s researchers show that “the diet of gathering peoples was far better than that of cultivators, that starvation is rare, that their health status was generally superior, and that there is a lower incidence of chronic disease.” Conversely, Farb summarized, “Production provides an inferior diet based on a limited number of foods, is much less reliable because of blights and the vagaries of weather, and is much more costly in terms of human labor expended.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

The new field of paleopathology has reached even more emphatic conclusions, stressing, as does Angel, the “sharp decline in growth and nutrition” caused by the changeover from food gathering to food production. Earlier conclusions about life span have also been revised. Although eyewitness Spanish accounts of the 16^th century tell of Florida Indigenous fathers seeing their fifth generation before passing away, it was long believed that primitive people died in their 30’s and 40’s. Robson, Boyden and others have dispelled the confusion of longevity with life expectancy and discovered that current hunter-gatherers, barring injury and severe infection, often outlive their civilized contemporaries. During the industrial age fairly recently did life span lengthen for the species, and it is now widely recognized that in Paleolithic times humans were long-lived, once certain risks were passed. Devries is correct in his judgment that duration of life dropped sharply upon contact with civilization. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities. Malaria, probably the single greatest killer of humanity, nearly all other infectious diseases are the heritage of agriculture. Nutritional and degenerative diseases in general appear with the reign of domestication and culture. Cancer, coronary thrombosis, anemia, dental carries, and mental disorders are but a few of the hallmarks of agriculture; previously women gave birth with no difficulty and little or no pain. People were far more alive in all their senses. !Kung San, reported R.H. Post, have heard a single-engined plane while it was still 70 miles away, and many of them can see for moons of Jupiter with the unassisted eye. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

The summary judgment of Harris and Ross, as to “an overall decline in the quality—and probably in the length—of human life among farmers as compared with earlier hunter-gatherer groups,” is understated. One of the most persistent and universal ideas is that there was once a Golden Age of innocence before history began. Hesiod, for instance, referred to the “life-sustaining soil, which yielded its copious fruits unbribed by toil.” Eden was clearly the home of hunter-gatherers and the yearning expressed by the historical images of paradise must have been that of disillusioned tillers of the soil for a lost life of freedom and relative ease. A history of civilization shows the increasing displacement of nature from human experience, characterized in part by a narrowing of food choices. According to Rooney, prehistoric people found sustenance in over 1500 species of wild plants, whereas, “All civilizations,” Wenke remind us, “have been based on the cultivation of one or more of just six plant species: wheat, barley, millet, rice, maize, and potatoes.” It is a striking truth that over the centuries “the number of different edible foods which are actually eaten,” Pyke points out, “has steadily dwindled.” The World’s population now depends for most of its subsistence on only about 20 genera of plants while their natural strains are replaced by artificial hybrids and the genetic pool of these plants becomes far less varied. The diversity of food tends to disappear or flatten out as the proportion of manufactured foods increases. Today the very same articles of diet are distributed Worldwide so that Inuit Eskimo and an African native may soon be eating powdered milk manufactured in Wisconsin or frozen fish stick from a single factory in Sweden. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

A few big multinationals such as Unilever, the World’s biggest food production company, preside over a highly integrated service system in which the object is not to nourish or even to feed, but to force an ever-increasing consumption of fabricated, processed products upon the World. When Descartes enunciated the principle that the fullest exploitation of matter to any use is the whole duty of man, our separation from nature was virtually complete and the stage was set for the Industrial Revolution. Three hundred and fifty years later this spirit lingers in the person of Jean Vorst, Curator of France’s Museum of Natural History, who pronounces that our species, “because of intellect,” can no longer recross a certain threshold of civilization once again become part of a natural habitat. He further states, expressing perfectly the original and preserving imperialism of agriculture, “As the Earth in its primitive state is not adopted to our expansion, man must shackle it to fulfill human destiny.” The early factories literally mimicked the agricultural model, indicating again that at the base all mass production is farming. The natural World is to be broken and forced to work. One thinks of the mid-America prairies where settlers had to yoke six oxen to a plow in order to cut through the soil for the first time. Or from a scene from the 1870s in The Octopus by Frank Norris, in which gang-plows were driven like “a great column of field artillery” across the San Joaquin Valley, cutting 175 furrows at once. Did you know that in 1948, the Lady of Endor Coven was started by a Toledo, Ohio barber tuned fortune-teller, Herbert A. Sloane, and ceased with this death in the 1980s? Well, Sloane’s creed, based heavily on Gnosticism, taught that Satan was not evil, but the bringer of wisdom and the messenger of God. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

The Christian God was identified with the Demiurge, whose spirit was trapped in the material World, with Satan sent to Earth to give man occult knowledge, or gnosis, so that the divine aspect within humanity could be returned to God. The Orthodox Satanic Church, in existence from 1971 to 1974 in Chicago, which at its height claimed more than five hundred members, taught a similar system of beliefs. The group’s anti-LaVey philosophy taught that Got the Creator created Satan, who, in turn, became the teacher of all knowledge. Through ritual, prayer, and songs, held every Saturday night at Chicago’s Occult Book Shop, members were exhorted to absorb as much of Satan’s wisdom as they could. For all their differences, all of the neo-Satanic churches share several structural and psychological traits, not only with themselves but with other occult sects. With hero worship often a large factor in the success of these groups their existence has been dependent on the charisma and continued life of the leader. As he or she goes, so goes the cult—which has resulted in a short life span for a majority of occult and virtually all Satanic organizations. As seen, many Satanists are frustrated people reacting against the banality and powerlessness of their lives. Feeling like insignificant cogs in a machine, bewildered by the complexities of various bureaucracies, these people seek out a group that will accept them, in which they can vent their feelings of hostile alienation without being censured. Through the practice of “magic” and the achievement of “adept” levels they can feel that they are unique and powerful. However, becoming part of an elect elite can have side effects. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Rousseau initiated a second Renaissance when he expressed his dissatisfaction with modernity, made possible by his knowledge of the Greek and Roman examples. “Ancient statesmen spoke endlessly of morals and virtue; ours speak only of commerce and money.” Rousseau’s use of his knowledge of antiquity—which was, although not scholarly, very profound—is a perfect model of the reason for having ancient thought available to those great individuals who, as Nietzsche put it, are untimely and need a vantage point from which to get their bearings and become the most timely of all. It is the old Greeks who make men both untimely and timely in crises. Nothing fancy, no infinite searching outside; the book in itself always intelligible, as long as human nature remains the same. This is the role played by the Greek authors throughout the wildly varying ages since they wrote, always Phoenix-like when they appear to have been consumed and are only ashes conserved by the scholars. Rousseau’s fervent appeal for modern man to look back to the ancient city, because it was whole and a true community, was the source of the romantic longing to breathe the fresh air of Greece again. Its moral and esthetic health was what Rousseau conveyed so convincingly. He gave the impulse to all kinds of attempts at a new communitarian beginnings, from Robespierre to Owen to Tolstoy and the kibbutz, an impulse still alive in contemporary thought. However, most of all, as I have discussed earlier, his observations on the tension between Enlightenment and decent politics gave birth to the idea of culture. It was to the study of Greece or Sparta or Athens as models of cultures that Rousseau’s reflection led. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The motive for this study—which flourished particularly in Germany, where Rousseau’s influence was most strongly felt, precisely because of Kant’s and Goethe’s predominance there—was to understand culture, with a view to the founding of a German culture. It was primarily Greek and Roman poetry and secondarily history to which the German thinkers turned for inspiration, and the scholars followed. It was distinctly not Greek philosophy. This was evident in Rousseau himself. The philosophers whose theoretical reflection was necessary to him were Bacon, Descartes and Newton, not Plato and Aristotle. The latter two just did not know the truth about nature. Whatever interest later scholarship had in them was as parts of Greek culture, as typical expressions of it and less interesting than poets, who are culture founders. The Greek philosophers were not valid interlocutors. Rousseau admired Plato and thought he had deep insight into human things, but rather more as a poet than a philosopher or a scientist. Plato was indeed the philosopher for lovers, but Rousseau, without consulting Plato, taught that eros is the child of pleasures of the flesh and imagination. Its activity is poetry, the source of what Rousseau understand to be the life-creating and -enhancing illusions and thereby the source of the ultimate grounds of the folk-minds that make peoples possible. In Plato, eros led to philosophy, which in turn led to the rational quest for the best regime, the one good political order vs. the plurality of cultures. So the discovery of Greek “culture” was contrary to Greek philosophy. And this particular difference, concerning the best regime as opposed to culture, proved fatal to reason. We can recognize this in a preliminary way in Weber’s assumption that it is values rather than reasons that found and sustain communities. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

So you’ve moved into your new #CresleighHome and you’re ready to tackle the backyard. Head on over to our blog and search “landscaping” for all the tips and tricks you’ll need.

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🌼 14 Low-Maintenance Plants for Easy Landscaping
🌼 5 Landscaping Mistakes to Avoid
🌼 5 Best Places to Order Seeds Online

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