The way we behave toward our fellow men depends on one’s evolutionary status. The young inexperienced naive idealist will contradict the aged Worldly-wise cynic for whom like, authority, celebrity, tradition, innovation, have been totally denuded of their glamour. The distance from one answer to the other will also be marked by varying views. It is quite true that moral codes have historically been merely relative to time, place, and so on. However, if we try to make such relativity a basis of non-moral actions, if we act on the principle that wrong is not worse than right and evil not different from good, then social life would soon show a disastrous deterioration, the ethics of the jungle would become its governing law, and catastrophe would overtake it in the end. The relativity of good and evil is no justification for the tolerance of wrong and evil. It would be a mistake to believe that because philisophy affirms that morality, art, conscience, and religion are relative to human beings, it therefore has no moral code to offer. It most assuredly has such a code. This is so because side by side with relativity it also affirms development. It holds up a purpose, traces out a path to its realization, and hence formulates a code. The virtue which he is to practise is not bound by the standards set by law and customs, nor even by conventional morality. His standards are far higher and far nobler. For they are not measured by human weakness but by human possibility. If for so much of his lifetime they must exist side by side with his shortcomings, the latter are not accepted but are resisted. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15 

When embraced by intellectual materialists or unphilosophical mystics, moral relativity has led to foolish and even dangerous practical results. The fallacy is that although all points of view in morality are tenable, all are not equally sustainable. The danger of this teaching of evil’s unreality and moral relativity is that in the hands of the unwise it annuls all distinction between evil and good, while in the hands of the conceited it opens dangerous doors. The undisciplined or the evil-minded will always seize on such a tenant to provide support and excuse for their faults or sins. There is no reason to withhold it, however, for they will commit the same faults or sins anyway whether they have the teaching or not. Because there are levels of moral growth, character, and self-control, it became necessary to lay down laws, codes, and rules for mankind in the masses. These may be of sacred origin, as with a Moses, or of secular authority, as with a ruler. Where the name of God is invoked to give them weight, this is usually a human device. However, the come-back of Universal Law is very real, and not a fancy. The discovery of moral relativity gives no encouragement however to moral laxity. If we are freed from human convention, it is because we are to submit ourselves sacrificially to the Overself’s dictate. The unfoldment of progressive states of conscious being is not possible without giving up the lower for the higher. The doctrine that ethical and artistic values are relative need not be inconsistent with the doctrine that they are also progressive. They evolve from lower to higher levels. Being ideas in some individual mind, they improve with the refinement of that mind’s own quality. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15 

The codes of good and bad are usually part of religion and certainly belong to the religious level. However, the idea of goodness implies the idea of badness, so both are held in the mind although in different ways: one explicitly, the other implicitly. The philosopher does not depend on them but on their source, the Higher Power. The ego being an illusory entity, its virtues are in the ultimate sense either imaginary or also illusory. Nevertheless, moral perfection of the ego is a necessary stage on the journey to perfection of consciousness, to Overself. To cast it aside as being merely relative, to reject ethics and virtue as being unnecessary, is a trick of the intellect to enable the ego to stay longer in its own self-sufficiency. The first fact in life is the struggle for existence; the greatest forward step in this struggle is the production of capital, which increases the fruitfulness of labour and provides the necessary means of an advance in civilization. Primitive man, who long ago withdrew from the competitive struggle and ceased to accumulate capital goods, must pay with a backward and unenlightened way of life. Social advance depends primarily upon hereditary wealth; for wealth offers a premium to effort, and hereditary wealthy assures the enterprising and industrious man that he may preserve in his children the virtues which have enabled him to enrich the community. Any assault upon hereditary wealth must begin with an attack upon the family and end by reducing men to “swine.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 15 

The operation of social selection depends upon keeping the family intact. Physical inheritance is a vital part of the Darwinian theory; the social equivalent of physical inheritance is the instruction of the children in the necessary economic virtues. If the fittest are to be allowed to survive, if the benefits of efficient management are to be available to society, the captains of industry must be paid for their unique organizing talents. Their huge fortunes are the legitimate wages of superintendence; in the struggle for existence, money is the token of success. It measures the amount of efficient management that has come into the World and the waste that has been eliminated. Millionaires are the bloom of a competitive civilization: The millionaires are the product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done…It is because they are thus selected that wealth—both their own and that entrusted to them—aggregates under their hands….They may fairly be regarded as the naturally selected agents of society for certain work. They get high wages and live in luxury, but the bargain is a good one for society. There is intense competition for their place and occupation. This assures us that all who are competent for this function will be employed in it, so that the cost of it will be reduced to the lowest terms. In the Darwinian pattern of evolution, animals are unequal; this makes possible the appearance of forms with finer adjustment to the environment, and the transmission of such superiority to succeeding generations brings about progress. Without inequality the law of survival of the fittest could have no meaning. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15 

Accordingly, in Sumner’s evolutionary sociology, inequality of powers was at a premium. The competitive process develops all powers that exist according to their measure and degree. If liberty prevails, so that all may exert themselves freely in the struggle, the results will certainly not be everywhere alike; those of courage, enterprise, good training, intelligence, perseverance will come out at the top. These principles of social evolution negate the traditional American ideology of equality and natural rights. In the evolutionary perspective, equality was ridiculous; and no one knew so well as those who went to school to nature that there are no natural rights in the jungle. There can be no rights against Nature except to get out of her whatever we can, which is only the fact of the struggle for existence stated over again. In the cold light of evolutionary realism, the eighteenth-century idea that men were equal in a state of nature was the opposite truth; masses of men starting under conditions of equality could never be anything but hopeless savages. To Sumner rights were simply evolving folkways crystallized in laws. Far from being absolute or antecedent to a specific culture—an illusion of philosophers, reformers, agitators, and anarchists—they are properly understood as rules of the game of social competition which are current now and here. In other times and places other mores have prevailed, and still others will in the future. Each set of views colours the mores of a period. The eighteenth-century notions about equality, natural rights, classes and the like produced nineteenth-century states and legislation, all strongly humanitarian in faith and temper; at the present time the eighteenth-century notions are disappearing, and the mores of the twenty-first century will not be tinged by humanitarianism as those of the last hundred years have been. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15 

Sumner’s resistance to the catchwords of the American tradition is also evident in his skepticism about democracy. The democratic ideal, so alive in the minds of men as diverse as Eugene Debs and Andrew Carnegie, as a thing of great hopes, warm sentiments, and vast friendly illusions, was to him simply a transient stage in social evolution, determined by a favorable quotient in the man-land ratio and the political necessities of the capitalist class. Democracy itself, the pet superstition of the age, is only a phase of the all-compelling movement. If you have abundance of land and few men to share it, the men will all be equal. Conceived as a principle of advancement based on merit, democracy met his approval as socially progressive and profitable. Conceived as equality in acquisition and enjoyment, he thought it unintelligible in theory, and thoroughly impracticable. Industry may be republican; it can never be democratic so long as men differ in productive power and in industrial virtue. Many people fear democracy and attempt to set limits upon it in the federal structure; but since the whole genius of the country has inevitably been democratic, because of its inherited dogmas and its environment, the history of the United States of America has been one of continual warfare between the democratic temper of the people and their constitutional framework. Marx’s picture of the healthy man is rooted in the humanistic concept of the independent, active, productive man, as it was developed by Spinoza, Goethe, and Hegel. The aspect in which Marx’s and Dr. Freud’s independence is a limited one; the son makes himself independent of the father by incorporating his system of commandments and prohibitions; he carries fatherly authority within himself and remains obedient to and dependent on the father and the social authorities in this indirect way. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15 

For Marx independence and freedom are rooted in the act of self-creation. “A being,” Marx wrote, “does not regard himself as independent unless he is his own master, and he is only his own master when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the favor of another considers himself a dependent being. But I live completely by another person’s favor when I owe to him not only the continuance of my life but also its creation, when he is its source. My life has necessarily such a cause outside itself if it is not my own creation.” Or, as Marx put it, man is independent only “…if he affirms his individuality as a total man in each of his relations to the World, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, willing, loving—in short, if he affirms and expresses all organs of his individuality”–if he is not only free from but also free to. Marx, freedom and independence were not merely political and economic freedom in the sense of liberalism, but the positive realization of individuality. His concept of socialism was precisely that of a social order which serves the realization of the individual personality. Marx wrote: “[This crude communism] appears in a double form; the domination of material property looms so large that it aims to destroy everything which is incapable of being possessed by everyone as private property. It wishes to eliminate talent, etcetera, by force. Immediate physical possession seems to it the unique goal of life and existence. The role of worker is not abolished but is extended to all men. The relation of private property remains the relation of the community to the World of things. Finally, this tendency to oppose general private property to private property is expressed in an animal form; marriage (which is incontestably a form of exclusive private property) is contrasted with the community of women, in which women become communal property. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15 

One may say that this idea of the community of women is the open secret of this entirely crude and unreflective communism. Just as women are to pass from marriage to universal prostitution, so the whole World of wealth (id est, the objective being of man) is to pass to the relation of universal prostitution with the community. This communism which negates the personality of man in every sphere, is only logical expression of private property, which is this negation. Universal envy setting itself up as power is only a camouflaged form of cupidity which reestablishes itself and satisfies itself in a different way. The thoughts of every individual private property are at least directed against any wealthier private property, in the form of envy and the desire to reduce everything to a common level; so that this envy and levelling in fact constitute the essence of competition. Crude communism is only the culmination of such envy and levelling-down based on a preconceived minimum. How little the abolition of private property represents a genuine appropriation is shown by the abstract negation of the whole World of culture and civilization, and the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and wantless individual who has not only surpassed private property but has not yet even attained to it. The community is only a community of work and of equality of wages paid out by the communal capital, by the community as universal capitalist. The two sides of the relation are raised to a supposed universality; labour as a connection in which everyone is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15 

Tenderness, love, and compassion are exquisite feeling experiences and generally recognized as such. However, there are some human experiences which are not as clearly identified as feelings but are more frequently called attitudes. They do not express the same direct relatedness to another person, but are, rather, experiences which are within oneself and which only secondarily refer to other persons. The first one among this group is “interest.” The word “interest” today has lost most of its meaning. To say “I am interested” in this or that is almost equivalent to saying “I have no strong feeling about it, but I am not entirely indifferent.” It is one of those cover words which mask the absence of intensity, and which are vague enough to cover almost anything from having an interest in a certain industrial shock to an interest in a young lady. However, this deterioration of meaning which is so general cannot deter us from using words in their original and deeper meaning, and that means to restore them to their own dignity. “Interest” comes from the Latin inter-esse, that is, “to be in-between.” If I am interested, I must transcend my ego, be open to the World, and jump into it. Interest is based on activeness. It is the relatively constant attitude which permits one at any moment to grasp intellectually as well as emotionally and sensuously the World outside. The interested person becomes interesting to others because interest has an infectious quality which awakens interest in those who cannot initiate it without help. When we think of its opposite, curiosity, the meaning of interest becomes still clearer. The curious person is passive. He wants to be fed with knowledge and sensations and can never have enough, since quantity of information is a substitute for the depth quality of knowledge. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15 

The most important realm in which curiosity is satisfied is gossip, be it the small-town gossip of the woman who sits at the window and watches with her spyglasses what is going on around her or the somewhat more elaborate gossip which fills the newspaper columns, occurs in the faculty meetings of professors as well as in the management meetings of professors as well as in the management meetings of the bureaucracy, and at the cocktail parties of the writers and artists. Curiosity, by its very nature, is insatiable, since aside from its maliciousness, it never really answers the question, Who is the other person. Interest has many objects: persons, plants, animals, ideas, social structures, and it depends to some extent on the temperament and the specific character of a person as to what his interests are. Nevertheless, the objects are secondary. Interest is an all-pervading attitude and form of relatedness to the World, and one might define it in a very broad sense as the interest of the living person in all that is alive and grows. If the interest is genuine, even when this sphere of interest in one person seems to be small, there will be no difficulty in arousing his interest in other fields, simply because he is an interested person. Another of the “human experiences” is responsibility. Again, the word responsibility corresponds to the distinction between the authoritarian and humanistic conscience. The authoritarian conscious is essentially the readiness to follow the orders of the authorities to which one submits; it is glorified obedience. The humanistic conscience is the readiness to listen to the voice of one’s own humanity and is independent of orders given by someone else. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15 

The survey of attitudes of the American public toward their personal adjustment and toward mental illness is a perplexing problem. Of those persons with acknowledged problems who sought consultation and advice beyond the family circle, the largest proportion (42 percent) turned to clergymen. Approximately 30 percent sought counsel from a general physician. Only 18 percent reported seeking assistance initially from a psychologist or psychiatrist. Of those persons who went for help to psychiatrists, psychologists, or marriage counselors nearly one third had been referred either by their physicians or by their clergymen, although a very small proportion of these referrals came from clergymen or physicians, over three fourths reported that they had received some help, and nearly two thirds reported having been “helped a lot.” Significantly smaller proportions of those who saw marriage counselors, psychologists, or psychiatrists (25 to 46 percent) reported having been helped. Of those persons who claimed to have been helped much by their consultation, the largest single proportion (73 percent) was contributed by those with a “personal problem with a defect in self.” We are left with an apparent inconsistency that should, somehow, be accounted for: individuals who recognize personal adjustment problems caused by some personal defect claim to be helped by therapeutic treatment more often than individuals with other kinds of problems; psychiatrists are consulted more often about just these kinds of problems; yet psychiatrists are not perceived to be the most effective source of help. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15 

Continuing with our case study of Clare, she was not usually given to crying in movies but one evening, tears came to her eyes when a girl who was in a wretched condition met with unexpected help and friendliness. She ridiculed herself for being sentimental, but this did not stop the tears, and afterward she felt a need to account for her beheaviour. She first thought of the possibility that an unconscious unhappiness of her own might have expressed itself in crying about the movie. And, of course, she did find reasons for unhappiness. Yet her associations along this line of thought led nowhere. It was only the next morning that she suddenly saw the issue: the crying had occurred not when the girl in the movie was badly off but when her situation took an unexpected turn for the better. She realized than what she had overlooked the previous day—that she always cried at such occasions. Her associations then fell in line. She remembered that in her childhood she always cried when she reached the point where the fairy godmother heaps unexpected presents on Cinderella. Then her joy at receiving the scarf came back to her. The next memory concerned an incident that had occurred during her marriage. Her husband usually gave her only the presents due at Christmas or on her birthdays, but once an important business friend of his was in town and the two men went with her to a dressmaker to help her select a dress. She could not make up her mind which of two dresses to choose. The husband then made a generous gesture and suggested that she take both garments. Though she knew that this gesture was made not altogether for her sake but also to impress the business friend, she nevertheless was inordinately happy about it and cherished these dresses more than others. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15 

Finally, two aspects of the daydream of the great man occurred to her. One was the sence in which, to her complete surprise, she singled her out for his favour. The other concerned all the presents he gave her, incidents that she had told herself in detail: the trips he suggested, the hotels he chose, the gowns he brought home, the invitations to luxurious restaurants. She never had to ask for anything. She felt quite taken aback, almost like a criminal who is confronted with overwhelming evidence. This was her “love”! She remembered a friend, a sworn bachelor, saying that woman’s love is merely a screen for exploiting men. She also recalled her friend Susan who had greatly astonished her by saying that she thought the usual flood of talk about love was disgusting. Love, said Susan, was only an honest deal in which each partner did his share to create a good companionship. Clare had been shocked at what she regarded as cynicism: Susan was too hard boiled in denying the existence and the value of feelings. However, she herself, she now realized, had naively mistaken for love something that largely consisted of expectations that tangible and intangible gifts would be presented to her on a silver platter. Her love was at bottom no more than a sponging on somebody else! This was certainly an entirely unexpected insight, but despite the painful surprise at herself she soon felt greatly relieved. She felt, and rightly, that she had really uncovered her share in what made her love relationships difficult. Clare was so overwhelmed by the discovery she had made that she quite forgot the incident from which she had started, the crying in the movie. However, she returned to tears the next day. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15 

The tears expressed an overwhelming bewilderment at the thought of a sudden fulfillment of most secret and most ardent wishes, a fulfillment of most secret and most ardent wishes, a fulfillment of something one has waited for all one’s life, something that one has never dared to believe would come true. Within the next couple of weeks Clare followed her insight in several directions. In glancing over her latest series of associations it struck her that in almost all the incidents the emphasis was on help or gifts that came unexpectedly. She felt that at least one clue for this lay in the last remark she had written about the daydream, which was that she never had to ask for anything. Here she came into territory that was familiar to her through the previous analytic work. Since she had formerly tended to repress her own wishes, and was still inhibited to some extent from expressing them, she needed somebody who wished for her, or who guessed her secret wishes and fulfilled them without her having to do anything about them herself. Another tack she pursued concerned the reverse side of the receptive, sponging attitude. She realized that she herself gave very little. Thus, she expected Peter to be always interested in her troubles or interested but did not actively participates in his. She expected him to be tender and affectionate but was not very demonstrative herself. She responded but left the initiative to him. It is hard to be a caring person without getting duped a time or two. Getting emotionally involved with the wrong people can hurt you in more ways than one. Some people like getting others wrapped around their finger. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15 

There are tremendous pressures today—cultural and political—for conformity, docility, and rigidity. The demand is for technically trained students outperform students in China, and none of this nonsense about education which might improve our interpersonal relationships! The demand is for hard-headedness, for training of the intellect only, for scientific proficiency. We want inventiveness in developing better “hardware,” but creativity in a larger sense tends to be suspect. Personal feelings, free choice, uniqueness—these have little or no place in the classroom. One may observe an elementary school classroom for hours without recording one instance of individual creativity of free choice, expect when the teacher’s back is turned. And at the college level we know that the major effect of a college education on the values of the student is to “shape up” the individual for more comfortable membership in the ranks of college alumni. For the public and for most educators the goal of learning to be free is not an aim they would select, nor toward which they are actually moving. Yet if a civilized culture is to survive, and if the individuals in that culture are to be worth saving, it appears to me to be an essential goal of education. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15 

The Winchester Mystery House

Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/