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Sit Down and I Will Tell You a Story, Stand Up and We Will Play a Game!
Some people try to find things in this game that do not exist. Football is two things. It is blocking and tackling. One important class of experiential products will be based on simulated environments that offer the customer a taste of adventure, excitement, titillation or other pleasure without risk to one’s real life or reputation. Thus computer experts, roboteers, designers, historians, architects, automotive engineers, and museum specialists will join to create experiential enclaves that reproduce, as skillfully as sophisticated technology will permit, the splendor of ancient Rome, the pomp of Queen Elizabeth’s court, the traditional arts, ceremonies, calligraphy and flower arranging of Japan, the economic prosperity and rapid development and advancement of China, the rich culture and mysterious of Africa, the superior engineering of Germany, the liveness and flavour of Latin culture, the intelligence of the Middle East, and the hardworking and orderly conduct of America. Customers entering these pleasure domes will leave their everyday clothes (and cares) behind, don costumes, and run through a planned sequence of activities intended to provide them with a first-hand taste of what the original—id est, unstimulated—reality must have felt like. They will be invited, in effect, to live in the past or perhaps even in the future. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Production of such experiences is closer than one might think. It is clearly foreshadowed in the participatory techniques now being pioneered in the arts. Thus “happenings” in which the members of the audience take part may be regarded as a first stumbling step toward these simulations of the future. The same is true of more formal works as well. When Dionysus in 69 was performed in New York, a critic summed up the theories of its playwright, Richard Schechner, in the following words. “Theater has traditionally said to an audience, ‘Sit down and I will tell you a story.’ Why cannot it also say, ‘Stand up and we will play a game?’” Mr. Schechner’s work, based loosely on Euripides, says precisely this, and that audience is literally invited to join in dancing to celebrate the rites of Dionysus. Artists also have begun to create whole “environments”—works of art into which the audience may actually walk, and inside which things happens. For instance, BMW believes that design should always be a reflection of your identity, and so they make cars with a strong personality. When designing the BMW Concept i4, the goal was to make it organic, and less industrial. In its captivating dynamic, engineers wanted to add more nature-inspired elements. More handworked wood, intelligent fabrics—designs for all the sense so one feels like the cabin of the car is a living room. The artists who produce these are really “experiential engineers.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Knowledge gained for research on creating experiences will permit the construction of fantastic simulations. However, it will also lead to complex live environments that subject the customer to significant risks and rewards. The African safari today is a colourless example. Future experience designers will, for example, create gambling casinos in which the customer plays not for money, but for experiential payoffs. Certain American television programs, such as Survivor and The Bachelor, already pay players off in experiential rewards. In the future, simulated and non-simulated experiences will also be combined in ways that will sharply challenge human’s grasp of reality. In Ray Bradbury’s vivid novel, Fahrenheit 451, suburban couples desperately save their money to enable them to buy three-wall or four-wall video sets that permit them to enter into a kind of televised psycho-drama. They become actor-participants in soap operas that continue for weeks or months. Their participation in these stories is highly involving. We are, in fact, beginning to move toward the actual development of such “interactive” films with the help of advanced communications technology. The combination of simulation and “reals” will vastly multiply the number and variety of experiential products. However, the great psych-corps of tomorrow will not only sell individual, discrete experiences. They will offer sequences of experiences so organized that their very juxtaposition with other another will contribute colour, harmony or contrast to lives that lack these qualities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Beauty, excitement, suspense or delicious sensuality will be programmed to enhance one another. By offering such experiential chains or sequences, the psych-corps (working closely, no doubt, with community mental health centers) will provide partial frameworks for those whose lives are otherwise too chaotic and unstructured. In effect, they will say: “Let us plan (part of) your life for you.” In the transient, change-filled World of tomorrow, that proposition will find many eager takers. Many architects are now designing homes to feel like luxury hotels. These places are all about lifestyles—inviting the community to become part of the property. Adding unique vantage points, creating indoor/outdoor experiences, and making homes larger, function, bright and comfortable is what is making architecture exciting these days. People are always looking for a home that is special, affluent home buyers are seeking homes that are destinations with purpose and meaning, where lifelong memories can be created because luxury is the absence of worry. Home buyers want to know they are in good hands with gorgeous detail abound. Creative space segmentation is necessary, providing both intimae and social zones, as well as furniture delivering comfort and functionality. More extravagant entrance features are emerging, which include large green walls, indoor waterfalls, large chandeliers and multimedia stations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
No longer is the classic bed-table-closet combo enough to make a guest bedroom or primary bedroom feel inviting. Home buyers are looking for creative offices for those who are business travelers, interesting looking TV panels and an extra sofa or accent chairs next to the king-sized bed are just some of the key ingredients for a trendy guest bedroom or primary bedroom. We have also seen colourful walls and eclectic décor mixes, which can definitely appeal to guests or the home’s primary occupant wanting to experience unique accommodation. Bathrooms stopped being perceived as auxiliary rooms, spaces to be minimized, in order to expand living areas. The modern individual expects more than one got in the past. A resort bathroom with spa-like features is an open invite to relaxation and a sure-proof method of alluring potential buyers through the promise of ephemeral luxury. Think en-suite bedrooms, water fall showers, over-sized bathtubs, dual sinks, giant towels, beauty items and plenty of space. Fewer home builder base the appeal of the kitchen strictly on practicability. Cooking is an art and so should be the exhibition space. We have seen more and more home builders come up with exciting designs and turn the kitchen design into a memorable space. Theme are highly recommended, pushing creativity to new heights. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Sensory experiences go a log way. Beside open concept, the blurring of indoor-outdoor boundaries is well integrated in the array of services offered by modern homes builders, who strive to keep their indoor-outdoor transition as ethereal as possible. Not only are the offering more windows, larger windows, walls of glass, but also expanding the patio spaces so nature is brought inside in every possible way. Wood paneling, stone decorations, lush greenery, vibrant lawns, indoor waterfalls—these are just some of the elements employed to release the tension of residents. Sustainability is a delicate issue for home owners as they are doing their best to minimize short term costs. However, being ahead of the game is important, which leads to innovative ideas. Over-sized windows for natural lighting, solar panels to conserve electricity, luxury vinyl wood plank floors, and energy efficient appliances are just a few of the trends for staying green. It is a fact that a home will stay in a buyer’s mind for a long time if the accommodation is unique. With this in mind, home builders are offering individual personalized spaces as never before. With home hubs, butler’s pantries, build-in furniture, card rooms, super family rooms, and workspaces in the house. And more than anything, homes should provide comfort, that feeling of being home away from home, in your own home. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
No mater how luxurious, technology friendly and well-themed the home, coziness is a major factor to consider. Wood additions, inspired decorating items, carpets, a fireplace, build-in tables, uniquely shaped kitchen islands all add up to a memorable home. In the World outside of the home, agriculture and the manufacture of goods will become economic backwaters, employing fewer and fewer people. Highly automated, the making and growing of goods will be relatively simple. The design of new goods and the process of coating them with stronger, brighter, more emotion-packed psychological connotations, however, will challenge the ingenuity of tomorrow’s best and most resourceful entrepreneurs. The service sector, as defined today, will be vastly enlarged, and once more the design of psychological rewards will occupy a growing percentage of corporate time, energy, and money. Investment services, such as mutual funds, for example, may introduce elements of experiential gambling to provide both additional excitement and non-economic payoffs to their shareholders. Insurance companies may offer not merely to pay death benefits, but to care for the window or widower for several months after bereavement, providing nurses, psychological counseling and other assistance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Based on banks of detail data about their customers, they may offer a computerized mating service to help the survivor locate a new life partner. Services, in short, will be greatly elaborated. Attention will be paid to the psychological overtones of every step or component of the product. Finally, we shall watch the irresistible growth of companies already in the experiential field, and the formation of entirely new enterprises, both profit and non-profit, to design, package and distribute planned or programmed experiences. The arts will expand, becoming as Ruskin or Morris might have said, the handmaiden of the industry. Psych-corps and other businesses will employ actors, directors, musicians, and designers in large numbers. Recreational industries will grow, as the whole nature of leisure is redefined in experimental terms. Education, already exploding in size, will become one of the key experiences industries as it is beginning to employ experiential techniques to convey both knowledge and values to the students. The communication and computer industries will find in experiential production a major market for their machines and for their software as well. With COVID-19 and more people working from home and going to school at home, I would expect Cisco TelePresence IX5000 Series to become more people. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
This system allows immersive collaboration beyond the boardroom. Cisco TelePresence IX5000 Series offers a triples screen, high-fidelity audio and video, and rich collaboration tools, and more bandwidth of existing products. The IX5000 Series brings people together to make decisions faster with high-definition video and theater-quality audio. The immersive, lifelike experience increases engagement, which helps teams build relationships and trust. Participants can share multiple content sources on three 70-inche LCD screens. The 4K cameras allow flexible whiteboard placement and the series features industry-first support for H.265 video on a triple-screen product. This product allows people to work from home, teach from home, attend class from home and interact with others as if they are in the same room. In short, those industries that in one way or another associate themselves with behavioural technology, those industries that transcend the production of tangible goods and traditional services, will expand most rapidly. Eventually, the experience-makers will form a basic—if not the basic—sector of the economy. The process of psychologization will be complete. With more people working from home, spending less on transportation, they will be able to afford larger homes with real offices or even classrooms. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The essence of tomorrow’s economy is an emphasis upon the inner as well as the material need for individuals and groups. This new emphasis will arise not merely from the demands of the consumer, but from the very need of the economy to survive. In a nation where all essential material needs can be filled by perhaps no more than three-fourth or even half of the productive capacity, a basic adjustment is required to keep the economy healthy. It is this convergence of pressures—from the consumer and from those who wish to keep the economy growing—that will propel the techno-societies toward the experiential production of the future. The movement in this direction can be delayed. The poverty-stricken masses of the World may not stand idly by as the World’s favoured few traverse the path toward psychological self-indulgence. There is something morally repellent about one group seeking to gratify itself psychologically, pursuing novel and rarified pleasures, while the majority of humankind lives in wretchedness or starvation. The techno-societies could maintain a more conventional production, shifting resources to environmental quality control, and then launching absolutely massive anti-poverty and foreign assistance programs. By creaming off “excess” productivity and, in effect, giving it away, the factories can be kept running, the agricultural surpluses used up, and the society can continue to focus on the satisfaction of material wants. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
A fifty-year campaign to erase hunger from the World and family planning methods, for example, would not only make excellent moral sense, but would buy the techno-societies badly needed time for an easier transition to the economy of the future. Such a pause might give us tine to contemplate the philosophical and psychological impact of experiential production. If consumers can no longer distinguish clearly between the real and the simulated, if whole stretches of one’s life may be commercially programmed, we enter into a set of psycho-economic problems of breathtaking complexity. These problems challenge our most fundamental beliefs, not merely about democracy or economics, but about the very nature of rationality and sanity. One of the great unasked questions of our time has to do with the balance between vicarious and non-vicarious experience in our lives. No previous generation has been exposed to one-tenth the amount of vicarious experiences that we lavish on ourselves and our children today, and no one, anywhere, has any real idea about the impact of this monumental shift on personality. Our children mature physically more rapidly than we did. The age of first menstruation continues to drop four to six month every decade. The population grows taller sooner. It is clear that many of our young people, products of television and instance accesses to oceans of information, also become precocious intellectually. However, what happens to emotion development as the ratio of vicarious experience to “real” experience rises? Does the step-up of vicariousness contribute to emotional maturity? Or does it, in fact, make it as slow as molasses on a Winter’s day? #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
And what, then, happens when an economy in search of a new purpose, seriously begins to enter into the production of experience for their own sake, experience that blur the distinction between the vicarious and the non-vicarious, the simulated and the real? One of the definitions of sanity, itself, is the ability to tell real from unreal. Shall we need a new definition? We must begin to reflect on these problems, for unless we do—and perhaps even if we do—service will in the end triumph over manufacture, and experiential production over service. The growth of the experiential sector might just be an inevitable consequence of affluence. For the satisfaction of human’s elemental material needs opens the way for new, more sophisticated gratifications. We are moving from a “gut” economy to a “psyche” economy because there is only so much gut to be satisfied. Beyond this, we are also moving swiftly in the direction of a society in which objects, things, physical constructs, are increasingly transient. Not merely human’s relationships with them, but the very things themselves. It may be that experiences are the only products which, once brought by the consumer, cannot be taken away from one, cannot be disposed of like non-returnable soda pop bottles or nicked razor blades. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
For the ancient Japanese nobility every flower, every serving bowl or obi, was freighted with surplus meaning; each carried a heavy load of coded symbolism and ritual significance. The movement toward the psychologization of manufactured goods takes us in this direction; but it collides with the powerful thrust toward transience that makes the objects themselves so perishable. Thus we shall find it easier to adorn our services with symbolic significance than our products. And, in the end, we shall pass beyond the service economy, beyond the imagination of today’s economists; we shall become the first culture in history to employ high technology to manufacture than most transient, yet lasting of products: the human experience. The flood of novelty about to crash down upon us will spread from universities and research centers to factories and offices, from the marketplace and mass media into our social relationships, from the community into the home. Penetrating deep into our private lives, it will place absolutely unprecedented strains on the family itself. The family has been called the “giant shock absorber” of society—the place to which the bruised and battered individual returns after doing battle with the World, the one stable point in an increasingly flux-filled environment. As the super-age of information revolution unfolds, this “shock absorber” will come in for some of its own shocks. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Social critics have a field day speculating about the family. The family is “near the point of complete extinction,” says Ferdinand Lundberg, author of The Coming World Transformation. “The family is dead except for the first year or two of child raising,” according to psychoanalyst William Wolf. “This will be its only function.” Pessimists tell us what will take place. Family optimists, in contrast, contend that the family, having existed all this time, will continue to exist. Some go so far as to argue that the family is in for a Golden Age. As leisure spreads, they theorize, families will spend more time together and will derive great satisfaction from joint activity. “The family that play together, stays together,” et cetera. A more sophisticated view hold that the very turbulence of tomorrow will drive people deeper into their families. “People will marry for stable structure,” says Dr. Irwin M. Greenberg, Professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. According to this view, the family serves as one’s “portable root,” anchoring one against the storm of change. In short, the more transient and novel the environment, the more important the family will become. It may be that both ideas in this debate are wrong. For the future is more open than it might appear. #RandolphHrris 14 of 21
The family may neither vanish nor enter upon new Golden Age. It may—and this far more likely—break up, shatter, only to come together again in weird and novel ways. If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till Go sees the World to be either redeemed or no further redeemable. A Christian cannot, therefore, believe any of those who promise that if only some reform in our economic, political, or hygienic system were made, a Heaven on Earth would follow. This might seem to have a discouraging effect on the social worker, but it is not found in practice to discourage one. On the contrary, a strong sense of our common miseries, simply as humans, is at last as good a spur to the removal of all the miseries we can, as any of those wild hopes which tempt humans to seek their realization by breaking the moral law and prove such dust and ashes when they are realized. If applied to individual life, the doctrine that an imagined Heaven on Earth is necessary for vigorous attempts to remove present evil, would at once reveal is absurdity. Hungry human seeks food and sick humans healing none the less because they know that after the meal of the cure the ordinary ups and downs of life still await them. I am not, of course, discussing whether very drastic changes in our social system are, or are not, desirable; I am only reminder the reader that a particular medicine is not to be mistake for the elixir of life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Since political issues have here crossed our path, it is clear that the Christian doctrine of self-surrender and obedience is a purely theological, and not in the least a political, doctrine. Of forms of government, of civil authority and civil obedience, I have nothing to say. The kind and degree of obedience which a creatures owes to its Creator is unique because the relation between creature and Creator is unique: no inference can be drawn from it to any political proposition whatsoever. The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the World we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the World: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in the World and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with out friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home. We must never mistake the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the “unimaginable sum of human misery.” When a human hesitates too long over taking a course which intuition tells one, he or she should take, and in which one’s higher life is concerned, it may be that destiny will intervene and make one suddenly realize that this is the way, and that all doubts should be thrown out. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
An intuition may be sudden and unexpected, quite contrary to the line of previous thought about the matter. This is certainly true of many appearances but it is not true of other ones. An intuition may come into the mind apparently by hazard, unsummoned, experience. Every thought which comes down to us from that serene height comes with a divine authority and penetrating force which are absent from all other thoughts. We receive the visitant with eagerness and obey it with confidence. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached he maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the Universe. The addition of a million sufferers adds no more pain. Intuition is not the equal but rather the superior of all other human faculties. It delivers the gentlest of whispers, commands from the Overself, whereas the other faculties merely carry them out. It is the master, they are the servants. The intellect things, the will works, and the emotion drives towards the fulfilment of intuitively felt guidance in the properly developed spiritually erect human. Of all evils, pain only is sterilized or disinfected evil. Intellectual evil, or error, may recur because the cause of the first error (such as fatigue or bad handwriting) continues to operate; but quite apart from that, error in its own right breeds error—if the first step in an argument is wrong, everything that follows will be wrong. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Sin may recur because the original temptation continues: but quite apart from that, sin of its very nature breeds sin by strengthening sinful habit and weakening the conscience. Now pain, like the other evils, may of course recur because the cause of the first pain (disease, or an enemy) is still operative: but pain has no tendency, in its own right, to proliferate. When it is over, it is over, and the natural sequel is joy. This distinction may be put the other way round. After an error you need not only to remove the causes (the fatigue or bad writing) but also to correct the error itself: after a sin you must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an “undoing” is required. Pain requires no such undoing. You may need to heal the disease which caused it, but the pain, once over is sterile—whereas every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time. Again, when I err, my error infects every one who believes me When I sin publicly, every spectator either condones it, thus sharing my guilt, or condemns it with imminent danger to one’s charity and humility. However, suffering naturally produces in the spectators (unless they are unusually depraved) no bad effect, but a good one—piety. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Thus that evil which God chiefly uses to produce the “complex good” is most markedly disinfected, or deprived of that proliferous tendency which is the worst characteristic of evil in general. The Real is forever and unalterably the same, whether it be the unmanifest Void or the manifested World. It has never been born and consequently can never die. It cannot divide itself into different “realities” with different space-time levels or multiply itself beyond its own primal oneness. It cannot evolve or diminish, improve or deteriorate. Whereas everything else exists in dependence upon Mind and exists for a limited time, however prolonged, and therefore has only a relative existence, Mind is the absolute, the unique, the ultimate reality because with all its innumerable manifestations in the Universe it has never at any moment ceased to be itself. Only its appearances suffers change because they are in time and space, never itself, which is out of time and space. The divisions of time into past, present, and future are meaningless here; we may speak only of its “everness.” The truth about it is timeless, as no scientific truth could ever be, in the sense that whatever fate the Universe undergoes its own ultimate significance remains unchanged. If the Absolute appears to us as the first in the time-series, as the First Cause of the Universe, this is only true from our limited standpoint. It is in fact only our human idea. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The human mind can take itself the truth of transcendental being only by taking out of itself the screens of time, space, and person. For being eternally self-existence, reality is utterly timeless. Space divisions are equally unmeaning in its “Be-ness.” The Absolute is both everywhere and nowhere. It cannot be considered in spatial terms. Even the word “infinite” is really such a term. If it is used here because no other is available, let me be clearly understood, then, that it is used merely as a suggestive metaphor. If the infinite did not include the finite then it would be less than infinite. It is erroneous to make them both mutually exclusive. The finite alone must exclude the infinite from its experience but not vice versa. In the same way the infinite Duration does not exclude finite time. Hence, corruption and defects in natural things are said to be contrary to some particular nature; yet they are in keeping with the plan of universal nature; inasmuch as the defect in one thing yields to the good of another, or even to the universal good: for the corruption of ne is the generation of another, and through this it is that a species is kept in existence. Since God, then, provides universally for all being, it belongs to His providence to permit certain defects in particular effects, that the perfect good of the Universe may not be hindered, for if all evil were prevented, much god would be absent from the Universe. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
A lion would cease to life, if there were no slaying of animals; and there would be no patience of martyrs if there were no tyrannical persecution. Thus Augustine says (Enchiridion 2): “Almighty God would in wo wise permit evil to exist in His works, unless He were so almighty and so good as to produce good even from evil.” It would appear that is was on account of these two arguments to which we have just replied, that some were persuaded to consider corruptible things—exempli gratia, casual evil things—as removed from the care of divine providence. Dear Lord in Heaven, your bow’s swift arrows: are they blessing or destruction? Please show your blasting face to those who need it. Please show your blessing face to those who deserve it. Whether beating down mercilessly or shining benevolently, please bring what is right to each, God. Whether by fighting off enemies or singing them to peace, please be my protector, and I will always speak sweety of You. Our God and God of our fathers, please accept our rest. Please Sanctify us through Thy commandments, and please grant our portion in Thy Torah. Please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and please make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord our God, please grant that Thy holy Sabbath be our joyous heritage, and may America who sanctifies Thy name, rest thereon. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest the Sabbath. O Lord our God, please be gracious unto Thy people of America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy sanctuary and receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worships of Thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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It Was Not Merely the Affluence of the Surroundings, but their Programmed Pleasantness!
Supermarkets are all right, but it is much more fun to shop for food in nature. Here, again, we are already moving in the predictable direction, as a glance at air travel demonstrates. Once flying was simply a matter of getting from here to there. Before long, the airlines began to compete on the basis of pretty stewardesses, gourmet food, luxurious surroundings, cocktails, and in-flight entertainment. Americans Airlines, in the past, carried this process one step further by offering what it called “International accent” flights between major American cities. The American Airlines passengers were able to choose a jet on which the food, the music, the magazines, the movies, and the stewardess’ miniskirt were all French. One could choose a “Roman” flight on which the women wore togas. One could have opted for a “Manhattan Penthouse” flight. Or one could have selected the “Olde English” flight on which the women were called “serving wenches” and the décor supposedly suggest that of an English pub. It is clear that American Airlines is no longer selling transportation, as such, but a carefully designed psychological package as well. We can expect the airlines before long to make use of lights and multi-media projections to create total, but temporary, environments providing the passenger with something approaching a theatrical experience. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The experience may, in fact, soon go beyond theater. The experience was expected to go beyond theater. British Airways once considered pointing a wavering finger at the future when it announced a plan to provide unmarried American male passengers with “scientifically chose” blind dates in London. In the event the computer-selected date failed to show up, an alternate would be provided. Moreover, a party would be arranged to which “several additional Londoners of both genders of varying ages” would be invited so that the traveler, who would also be given a tour of discotheques and restaurants, would under no circumstances be alone. The program, called “The Beautiful Singles of London,” was abruptly called off when the government-owned airline came under Parliamentary criticism. Nevertheless, we can anticipate further colourful attempts to paint a psychic coating on many consumer service fields, including retail. Anyone who has strolled through Newport Center, once an incredibly lavish new shopping plaza in Newport Beach, California, could not fail to be impressed by the attention paid by its designers to aesthetic and psychological factors. Tall white arches and columns outlined against a blue sky, fountains, statues, carefully planned illumination, a pop art playground, and an enormous Japanese wind-bell were all used to create a mood of casual elegance for the shopper. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
It was not merely the affluence of the surroundings, but their programmed pleasantness that made shopping there a quite memorable experience. Once could anticipate fantastic variations and elaborations of the same principles in the planning of retail stores in the future. We shall go far beyond any “functional” necessity, turning the service, whether it is shopping, dining, or having one’s haircut, into a pre-fabricated experience. People are not paying big money to eat in dirty plastic tents in the streets, they want the ambiance of dining in luxury that will make the meal worth the cost. We shall watch movies or listen to chamber music as we have or haircut, and the mechanical bowl that fits over the skull of a woman in the beauty parlor will do more than simply dry her hair. By directing electronic waves to her brain, it may, quite literally, tickle her fancy. Bankers and brokers, real estate and insurance companies will employ the most carefully chosen décor, music, closed circuit colour television, engineered tastes and smells, along with the most advanced mixed-media equipment to heighten (or neutralize) the psychological change that accompanies even the most routine transaction. No important service will be offered to the consumer before it has been analyzed by teams of behavioural engineers to improve its psychic loading. Reaching beyond these simple elaborations of the present, we shall also witness a revolutionary expansion of certain industries whose sole output consists not of manufacture goods, nor even of ordinary services, but of pre-programmed “experiences.” The experience industry could turn out to be one of the pillars of super-age of informationalism, the very foundation, in fact, of the post-service economy. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
As rising affluence and transience ruthlessly undercut the old urge to possess, consumers begin to collect experiences as consciously and passionately as they once collected things. Today, as the airline example suggests, experiences are sold as an adjunct to some more traditional services. The experience is, so to speak, the frosting on the cake. As we advance into the future, however, more and more experiences will be sold strictly on their own merits, exactly as if they were things. Precisely this is beginning to happen, in fact. This accounts for the high growth rate visible in certain industries that have always been, at least partly, engaged in the production of experiences for their own sake. The arts are a good example. Much of the “culture industry” is devoted to the certation or staging of specialized psychological experiences. Today we find art-based “experience industries” booming in virtually all the techno-societies. The same is true of recreation, mass entertainment, education, and certain psychiatric services, all of which participate in what might be called experiential production. When Club Mediterrancee used to sell a package holiday that took a young French secretary to Tahiti or Israel for a week or two of sun and pleasures of the flesh, it was manufacturing an experience for one quite as carefully and systematically as Bayerische Motoren Werke AG Ultimate Driving Machines. Its advertisements underscore the point. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Thus a two-page spread in The New York Times Magazine began with the headline: “Take 300 men and women. Strand them on an exotic island. And strip them of every social pressure.” Based in France, Club Mediterranee now operates over seventy-four vacation “villages” in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, North America, Mexico, the Caribbean, South America, Asia, Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean. Similarly, when the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, offers weekend seminars in “body-awareness’ and “non-verbal communication” at $730 per person, or seven-day workshops starting at $900 and costs $1,700 per person for a couple in a private room, it promises not to simply teach, but to plunge its affluent customers into “joyous” new interpersonal experiences—a phrase some readers take to mean adventures deeper spiritual possibilities that will enlighten them and open gateways to change. Group therapy and sensitivity training sessions are packaged experiences. So are certain classes. Thus, going to an Arthur Murray or Fred Astaire studio to learn the latest dance step may provide the student with a skill that will bring enjoyment in the future, but it also provides a pleasurable here-and-now experience for the lonely bachelor or spinster. The learning experience, itself, is a major attraction for the customer. All these, however, provide only the palest clue as to the nature of the experience industry of the future and the great psychological corporations, or psychcorps, that will dominate it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
They that deny God destroy human’s nobility; for certainly, humans are akin to the beast by one’s body; and if one be not of kin to God by one’s spirit, one is a base and ignoble creature. In Aleksandr Solzhenisyn’s masterful novel The Cancer Ward, a young cancerous political prisoner named Oleg finds momentary escape from the hospital’s horrors in an attractive nurse, Zoya. One day Oleg volunteers to help Zoya with her reports. Reading from patient records, Oleg notices hardly any deaths in the hospital. “I see they do not allow them to die here,” he says. “They manage to discharge them in time.” “What else can they do?” responds Zoya. “Judge for yourself. If it is obvious a patient is beyond help and there is nothing left for him but to live out the few last weeks or months, why should he take up a bed? People who could be cured are kept waiting.” Days later, one of Oleg’s gravely ill friends is told he is being released from the hospital. The man struggles to dress, weakly bids adieu to his comrades, and sets out for the streets. The best he can hope for is an empty bench where he can lie down and wait to die. This account may be cruel, but it is not illogical. The Soviet system is committed to the eradication of any vital practice of religion. God is officially dead there. However, the death of God ultimately spells the death of what it means to be truly human. For it worth is not God-given, it must be established by man. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
And atheistic philosophies, such as the Soviet system, treat humans as an object whose value is determined solely by one’s usefulness to society. Why not, then, subject one to whatever will achieve the government’s objectives: oppression, torture, genocide? In utilitarian terms, sending terminal patients out to die is not inhumane, but eminently sensible. Why waste a bed on someone who will not survive? Now contrast The Cancer Ward with the Winchester Clinic of the General Hospital Society of Connecticut, that Mrs. Winchester left a substantial sum of cash to, in memory of William Wirt Winchester, for the care and treatment of tuberculosis patients. This faithful heiress has provided shelter and help for those patients some of who are treatable and suffering or dying in pain, afraid, and alone. Sometimes she is criticized: “Why care for those who are doomed anyway?” But she explains, “They are created by God; they deserve to die with dignity.” Christianity can never be utilitarian; it holds every human being as precious because human beings are created in the image of God. To understand the unique nature of this Judeo-Christian view, we need only compare the ancient Hebrew law codes in the Old Testament with, say, the Assyrian laws of Hammurabi, another Middle Eastern legal code from the same period. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Historian Paul Johnson has noted that the Assyrian code made the rights of property ultimate, while “the Hebrew [laws] emphasized the essential rights and obligations of man and their laws were framed with deliberate respect for moral values.” Jesus continued—and expanded—the Old Testament law. He constantly affirmed the dignity and worth of the lowest member of first-century society—women, children, Gentiles, tax-collectors, lepers. Today’s calmour for human rights is ironic. Much of the activism emanates from those who claim no belief in God. However, consider what many who have had a major influence on modern thinking believed. Karl Marx, for example, thought humans a victim of economic forces. Dr. Sigmund Freud believed all was lost in the dark web of the psyche. Dr. B.F. Skinner insisted that freedom was an illusion and dignity a lost case. More extreme philosophers get downright angry at the snobbery of specialists—those of us who see humans as the highest species—and assert that humans enjoy no special standing in the Universe. We can no longer base our ethics on the idea that human beings are a special form of creation, singled out from all other animals, and alone possessing a soul. We must learn from Jesus Christ and even love our planet and animal neighbour’s as ourselves. Although we may continue to see normal members of our species as possessing greater capacities…than members of any other species; but we will not regard as sacrosanct the life of each and every member of our species. Species membership alone is not morally relevant. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
In this light, human dignity and human rights are tenuous assertions. If humans are merely a fortuitous collection of molecules in a meaningless cosmos, why should they have any inhere rights? Humans build their kingdoms in accord with their concept of God. The rise of atheism in the twenty-first century has thus provided unlimited license for tyrants. If there is no morally binding standard above the state, becomes god and human beings mere beasts of bureaucratic burden. A government cannot be truly just without affirming the intrinsic value of human life. The Judeo-Christian ethic does more than affirm human dignity, however; it also insists that we are inclined to do evil. Humans are more than a beast, but they are not angels. This dual nature is not properly understood apart from what theologians called original sin. No modern parable portrays human’s sinful nature more powerfully than Nobel prize-winning author William Golding’s novel The Lord of the Flies, in which a planeload of English schoolboys is wrecked on a tropical island. Good British subjects that they are, they attempt to organize themselves into an orderly society while awaiting rescue. However, darker urges soon grip the boys. The veneer of civilization melts away, and many of them revert to savagery, first as a game, then in deadly earnest. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
One of the wounds a boar. Suddenly, “the desire to squeeze and hurt was overmastering.” Soon the boys are chanting with ritualistic fevour, “Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Bash him in!” A sow is caught and killed in a primitive sacrifice, the head cut off and placed on a post, allegedly to assuage the “beast” some of the boys have encountered. Great black and iridescent green files buzz insistently around the severed head. The boys’ “chieftain” giggles as he rubs his bloodied hands n the next boy’s face. The young savages soon turn on a fat, asthmatic, bespectacled lad nicknamed Piggy, who retains more civility than they care to have on their island. “Which is better,” Piggy asks plaintively as they advance on him, “to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill?” Moments later, Piggy is knocked off a cliff. His skull cracks open, his arms and legs twitching. Eventually the pounding waves suck his body into the sea. Piggy’s friend Ralph collapses in a spasm of grief. “With filthy body, mattered hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of the man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise, friend called Piggy.” Later, when the group is rescued, a shocked naval officer asks how such savagery could have happened. “I should have thought that a pack of British boys—your are all British, are you not?—would have been able to put up a better show than that—I mean.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Civilization, empire, education, all of the trappings of human progress had clothed these young innocents. Now, their faces smeared with blood, their consciences apparently inoperative, they bear the guilt of death of two playmates. When William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, the Swedish Academy declared that his novels “illuminate the human condition in the World today.” They reflect as well what Golding described as “an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system, however apparently logical or respectable.” Golding’s views sound grimly anachronistic in a culture constantly heralding human’s ability to achieve utopia through modern science, education, and technology. This notion was given impetus by, among others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Enlightenment writer who insisted the human misery was rooted in the structures of society. Change the structures and you can the man, he said. Rousseau looked to primitive human experience as a rosy time of innocence free of socially induced vices. From the beginning of human’s history, however, we see not guilelessness, but betrayal and evil. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
After the account of the Garden of Eden the Bible tells the story of the first four people on the planet—and before long, one of them killed his brother. This murder was committed long before the urban blight and social deprivations. There were—and are—no noble savages. Human nature has not changed since Cain. This is vividly illustrated in the memoirs of Cuban poet Armando Valladares, Against All Hope, in which he recounts his twenty-two-year imprisonment by Fidel Castro for speaking out “against Communism because it went against my religious beliefs and some of my more idealistic notions of the World.” For such treason, Valladares was thrown into the human-made hell of a Cuban prison. He was given showers of human urine and excrement by sadistic guards. During an escape attempt he broke three bones in his legal and was captured and brought back to his cell. “Guards stripped us again,” he writes. “They were armed with thick twisted electric cables and truncheons. Suddenly, everything was a whirl—my head spun around in terrible vertigo…The beatings felt as if they were branding me with a red-hot branding iron, but then I suddenly experienced the most intense, unbearable, and brutal pain of my life. One of the guards had jumped with all his weight on my broken, throbbing leg.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
One cannot read this and explain the torture, the sadism, and the evil only in terms of godless political systems. The problem is human nature. The only progress between Cain and the Communist jailers of Armando Valladares has bee the technological sophistication of cruelty. Given the wealth of such examples today, why is it so difficult for modern humans to acknowledge the inherent evil in the human heart? Why is sin an outmoded term, used only by Bible-thumping preachers, born-again zealots, or the titillating covers of paperback thrillers? The core of sadism is s passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being, whether an animal, a child, a man, or a woman. To force someone to endure pain or humiliation without being able to defend oneself is one of the manifestations of absolute control, but it is by no means the only one. The person who has complete control over another living being makes this being into one’s thing, one’s property, while one becomes the other being’s god. Sometimes the control can even be helpful, and in that case we might speak of a benevolent sadism, such as one finds in instances where one persons rules another for the other’s own good, and in fact furthers one in many ways, expect that one keeps holding one in bondage. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
However, most sadism is malevolent and orthodox psychoanalysis claims that there is a particular aspect of sexuality common in all forms of sadism. That it somehow arouses tyrants sexually to terrorize their victims. Complete control over another human being means crippling one, strangling one, thwarting one. Such control can have all forms and all degrees. Albert Camus’s play, Caligula, provides an example of an extreme type of sadistic control which amounts to a desire for omnipotence. We see how Caligula, brought by circumstances to a position of unlimited power, gets ever-more deeply involved in the craving for power. He sleeps with the wives of the senators and enjoys their humiliation when they have to act like admiring and fawning friends. He kills some of them, and those that remain have to smile and joke. However, even all this power does not satisfy him; he wants absolute power, he wants the impossible. As Camus has him say, “I want the moon.” It is easy enough to say that Caligula is mad, but his madness is a way of life; it is one solution of the problem of human existence, because it serves the illusion of omnipotence, of transcending the frontiers of human existence. In the process of trying to win absolute power Caligula lost all contact with humans. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Caligula became an outcast by casting them out; he had to become mad because, when the bid for omnipotence failed, he was left a lonely, important individual. The case of Caligula is of course exceptional. Few people ever have the chance to attain so much power that they can seduce themselves into the delusion that it might be absolute. However, some have existed throughout history, up to our time; if they are defeated, they are considered mad-humans or criminals. This extreme solution to the problem of human existence is barred to the average person. Yet in most social systems, including our, even those on lower social levels can have control over somebody who is subject to their power. There are always children, wives, or dogs available; or there are helpless people, such as inmates of prisons, patients in hospitals, if they are not well-to-do (especially the mentally sick), pupils in schools, members of civilian bureaucracies. It depends on the social structure to what degree the factual power of superiors in each of these instances is controlled or restricted and, hence, how much possibility for sadistic satisfactions these situations offer. Aside from all these situations, religious and racially marginalized groups, as far as they are powerless, offer a vast opportunity for sadistic satisfaction for even the poorest of the majority. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Sadism is one of the answers to the problem of being born human when better ones are not attainable. The experience of absolute control over another being, of omnipotence as far as one, or it is concerned, creates the illusion of transcending the limitations of human existence, particularly for one whose real life is deprived of productivity and joy. Sadism has essentially no particular aim; it is not trivial but not devotional. It is the transformation of importance into the experience of omnipotence; it is the religion of psychical cripples. The misreading of the nature of human beings has resulted in the denial of personal responsibility, and is institutionalized into various social reforms; these contributed markedly to the social pathologies of American inner cities. What many of these reforms shared (in varying ways and degrees) was an assumption that people are not in control of their own behaviour and should not properly be held responsible for the consequences of their actions. The economic system is to blame; the social environment is to blame; perhaps accidents and conceivably genetics are to blame. However, there is some truth to that. If people are not raised properly and not taught right from wrong, they may not know what decisions to make. If people are born with intellectual disabilities, they may not know what is correct behaviour. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
If people are oppressed by corruption, they may not have any choice but to become a criminal to survive. If politicians and their families are not held accountable by laws, they may continue down the path of evil and sin and keep hurting people because they can get away with it and think it is fun. So, there are factors in society that can contribute to corruption and sin in humans. It can be because they do not know better, or they never face civil and legal consequences for their actions. Any effort to encourage individual initiative and responsibility among America’s politicians and urban poor was derided as “blaming the victim.” Blaming the system rather than the “victim” further eradicated individual responsibility and dignity. However, the elimination of individual responsibility has encouraged the corresponding utopian belief in human’s collective perfectibility. While Christian teaching emphasizes that each person has worth and responsibility before God, utopianism argues that salvation can only be achieved collectively. Utopianism always spells disaster because the utopian holds that if the goal is goodness and perfection, then the use of force is justified. In contrast, the Christian realization that perfection eludes us in this life resists the tyranny and bloodshed of the dictator who promises a brave new World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Thus, twenty-first century men and woman have inherited a stark dilemma. With God dead or ill, they are stripped of their source of dignity and reduced to sophisticated beasts. At the same time, society denies individual sin, blaming all social ills on environment, and illogically assumes human perfectibility. Both propositions run counter to the evidence of history. Humans are neither ape nor angel. Deep down inside, humans know they are created. They desperately long to know the Power beyond us and discover a transcendent purpose for living. That is why Mrs. Winchester conducted mystic meetings with the spirits in her famous Blue Séance Room. We long as well to shed the guilt of sin, to be free people, forgiven in the sight of the God we know is there. Many search for God through bizarre spiritual journeys, attested to by the popularity of religion and tabloid psychics, reincarnation, Beverly Hills spiritual gurus, crystals, cosmic energy and symbols, seaweed, and channeling. Such contraband only intensify desire to seek contact with God and Jesus and the spiritual World. The occult is a question to discover more than the material World. Modern men and women do not want to be left to thrash about in darkness while the World worships the fake news industry and their favourite tool, politicians, as gods. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
The fake news media and politicians will only lead us to a journey that ends gruesomely and shockingly, like the piles of bones at Jonestown. The people’s frustration inevitably deepens into despair. For some, like Hemingway, who accept the logic of this age, the despair turns to tragedy; for millions of others, it fosters a brooding sense of alienation and helplessness. And so we come full circle, back to where we began. For it is this pervasive sense of impotence that has paved the way for the emergence of political saviours and the all-powerful state that promise salvation through changed structures. Before we discuss our future further, we must pray. Your arms are strong, Father; they can hug a child or restrain one from harm. Please wrap them around this planet Earth and all of your children and please heal us and protect us from harm. Please give us a sign that you are alive and love you human children. We trust You to know what is needed. The children of America shall keep the Sabbath and observe it throughout their generations as an everlasting covenant. It is a sign between our Heavenly Father and the children of American forever; for in six days the Lord made Heaven and Earth, and on the seventh day He ceased from work and rested. May the people who sanctify the seventh day be sated and delighted with Thy bounty. For Thou didst find pleasure in the seventh day, and didst sanctify it, calling it the desirable of days, in remembrance of creation. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
The Mansion Designed by Spirits
San Jose, California
California Historical Landmark Number 868
During a Connecticut thunder storm, Mrs. Winchester’s husband and baby lost their lives in a tragic fire. Foretelling her future, one seer warned her of all the countless spirits seeking her soul and to protect herself, she was told to plan a castle and continue its building indefinitely because as long as it I was under construction, she would live; cessation would prove immediately fatal. As the massive mansion was nearing completion, the Winchester House was the midnight rendezvous for legions of ghosts, with special attention accorded those created by a Winchester rifle slug.
Frightened by the death of Mrs. Winchester, the family sought to disappear from society and go into hiding because they did not want to bare the cruse, and the gatekeeper for the spirits was no longer around to protect the family from the spirits. Rumors have it that the Winchester family died out, but others say they simply went into hiding and do not want to be found. Legends have it that they have other castles around the World, in hope of never being discovered. It has been over three months since the doors of the World’s most beautiful and bizarre mansion closed, and the spirits that walk these halls are just as restless as you are. The doors to the Winchester Mystery House are wide open once more!
Tickets on sale now! winchestermysteryhouse.com
If You Do His Work, You Must Prepare for His Wages!
I must be getting absent-minded. Whenever I complain that things are not what they used to be, I always forget to include myself. The theory of civil disobedience is designed only for a special case of a nearly just society, one that is well-ordered for the most part but in which some serious violations of justice nevertheless do occur. A state of near justice requires a democratic regime, and the theory concerns the role and the appropriateness of civil disobedience to legitimately established democratic authority. It does not apply to the other forms of government nor, except incidentally, to other kinds of dissent or resistance. It is not necessary to discuss this mode of protect, along with militant action and resistance, as a tactic for transforming or even overturning an unjust and corrupt system. There is no difficulty about such action in this case. If any means to this end are justified, then surely nonviolent opposition is justified. The problem of civil disobedience, arises only within a more or less just democratic state for those citizens who recognize and accept the legitimacy of the constitution. The difficulty is one of a conflict of duties. At what point does the duty to comply with laws enacted by a legislative majority (or with executive acts supported by such a majority) cease to be binding in view of the right to defend one’s liberties and the duty to oppose injustice? This question involves the nature and limits of majority rule. For this reason the problem of civil disobedience is a crucial test case for any theory of the moral basis of democracy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
A constitutional theory of civil disobedience has three parts. First, it defines this kind of dissent and separated it from other forms of opposition to democratic authority. These rand from legal demonstrations and infractions of law designed to raise test cases before the courts to militant action and organized resistance. A theory specifies the place of civil disobedience in this spectrum of possibilities. Next, it set out the grounds of civil disobedience and the conditions under which such action is justified in a (more or less) just democratic regime. And finally, a theory should explain the role of civil disobedience within a constitutional system and account for the appropriateness of this mode of protest within a free society. As a word of caution, we should not expect too much of a theory of civil disobedience, even one framed for special circumstances. Precise principles that straightway decide actual cases are clearly out of the question. Instead, a useful theory defines a perspective within which the problem of civil disobedience can be approached; it identifies the relevant considerations and helps us to assign them their correct weights in the more important instances. If a theory about these matters appears to us, on reflection, to have cleared our vision and to have made our considered judgments more coherent, then it has been worthwhile. The theory has done what, for the present, ne may reasonably expect it to do: namely, to narrow the disparity between the conscientious convictions of those who accept the basic principles of a democratic society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Civil disobedience as a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law is usually done with the aims of being about change in the law or policies of the government. Civil disobedience can also be considered a deliberate, discriminate violations of the law for a vital social purpose. By acting in this way one addresses the sense of justice of the majority of the community and declares that in one’s considered opinion the principles of social cooperation among free and equal humans are not being respected. A preliminary gloss on this definition is that it does not require that the civilly disobedient act breach the same law that is being protested. It allows for what some have called indirect as well as direct civil disobedience. And this definition should do, as there are sometimes strong reasons for not infringing on the law or policy held to be unjust. Instead, one may disobey traffic ordinances or laws of trespass as a way of presenting one’s case. Thus, if the government enacts a vague and harsh statue against treason, it would not be appropriate to commit treason as a way of objecting to it, and in any event, the penalty might be far more than one should reasonably be ready to accept. In other cases there is no way to violate the government’s policy directly, as when it concerns foreign affairs, or affects another part of the country. A second gloss is that the civilly disobedient act is indeed thought to be contrary to law, at least in the sense that those engaged in it are not simply presenting a test case for a constitutional decision; they are prepared to oppose the statue if it should be upheld. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
To be sure in a constitutional regime, the courts may finally side with the dissenters and declare the law or policy objected to unconditional. It often happens, then, that there is some uncertainty as to whether the dissenters’ action will be held illegal or not. However, this is merely a complicating element. Those who use civil disobedience to protest unjust laws are not prepared to desist should the courts eventually disagree with them, however pleased they might have been with the opposite decision. It should also be noted that civil disobedience is a political act noted that civil disobedience is a political act not only in the sense that it is addressed to the majority that holds political power, but also because it is an act guided and justified by political principles, that is, by the principles of justice which regulate the constitution and social institutions generally. In justifying civil disobedience one does not appeal to principles of personal morality or to religious doctrines, though these may coincide with and support one’s claims; and it goes without saying that civil disobedience cannot be ground solely on group or self-interest. Instead one invokes the commonly shared conception of justice that underlies the political order. It is assumed that in a reasonably just democratic regime there is a public conception of justice by reference to which citizens regulate their political affairs and interpret the constitution. The persistent and deliberate violation of the basic principles of this conception over any extended period of time, especially the infringement of the fundamental equal liberties, invites either submission or resistance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
By engaging in civil disobedience a minority forces the majority to consider whether it wishes to have its actions construed in this ways, or whether, in view of the common sense of justice, it wishes to acknowledge the legitimate claims of the minority. A further point is that civil disobedience is a public act. Not only is it addressed to public principles, it is done in public. It is engaged in openly with fair notice; it is not covert or secretive. One may compare it to public speech, and being a form of address, an expression of profound and conscientious political conviction, it takes place in the public forum. For this reason, among others, civil disobedience is nonviolent. It tries to avoid the use of violence, especially against persons, not from the abhorrence of the use of force in principle, but because it is a final expression of one’s case. To engage in violent acts likely to injure and to hurt is incompatible with civil disobedience as a mode of address. Indeed, any interference with the civil liberties of others tends to obscure the civilly disobedient quality of one’s act. Sometimes if the appeal fails in its purpose, forceful resistance may later be entertained. Yet civil disobedience is giving voice to conscientious and deeply held convictions; while it may warn and admonish, it is not itself a threat. Civil disobedience is nonviolent for another reason. It expresses disobedience to law within the limits of fidelity to law, although it is at the outer edge of theory. The law is broken, but fidelity to law is expressed by the public and nonviolent nature of the act, by the willingness to accept the legal consequences of one’s conduct. One should be willing to undergo the legal consequences for the sake of fidelity to law. The charge may be contested in court, should this prove appropriate. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
This fidelity to law helps to establish to the majority that the act is indeed politically conscientious and sincere, and that it is intended to address the public’s sense of justice. To be completely open and nonviolent is to give bond of one’s sincerity, for it is not easy to convince another that one’s acts are conscientious, or even to be sure of this before oneself. No doubt it is possible to imagine a legal system in which conscientious belief that the law is unjust is accepted as a defense for noncompliance. Humans of great honesty with full confidence in one another might make such a system work. However, as things are, such a scheme would presumably be unstable even in a state of near justice. We must pay a certain prince to convince others that our actions have, in our carefully considered view, a sufficient moral basis in the political convictions of the community. Civil disobedience has been defined so that it falls between legal protest and the raising of test cases on the one side, and conscientious refusal and the various forms of resistance on the other. In this range of possibilities it stands for that form of dissent at the boundary of fidelity to law. Civil disobedience, so understood, is clearly distinct from militant actions and obstruction; it is far removed from organized forcible resistance. The militant, for example, is much more deeply opposed to the existing political system. One does not accept it as one which is nearly just or reasonable so; one believes either that it departs widely from its professed principles or that it pursues a mistake conception altogether. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
While one’s action is conscientious in its own terms, one does not appeal to the sense of justice of the majority (or those having effective political power), since one thinks that their sense of justice is erroneous, or else without effect. Instead, one seeks by well-framed militant acts of disruption and resistance, and the like, to attack the prevalent view of justice or to force a movement in the desired direction. Thus the militant may try to evade the penalty, since one is not prepare to accept the legal consequences of one’s violation of the law; this would not only be to play into the hands of forces that one believes cannot be trusted, but also to express a recognition of the legitimacy of the constitution to which one is opposed. In this sense militant action is not within the bounds of fidelity to law, but represents a more profound opposition to the legal order. The basic structure is thought to be so unjust or else to depart so widely from its own professed ideals that one must try to prepare the way for radical or even revolution change. And this is to be done by trying to arouse the public to an awareness of the fundamental reforms that need to be made. Now in certain circumstances militant action and other kinds of resistance are surely justified. The year 2100 A.D. is closer to us in time than the great depression, yet the World’s economists, traumatized by it, 9/11, the recession of 2008, and the COVID-19 crisis, remain frozen in their attitudes of the past. Economist, even those who talk the language of revolution, are peculiarly conservative creatures. If it were possible to pry from their brains their collective image of the economy of, say, the year 2125, it would look very much like that of 2010—only more so. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Conditioned to think in straight lines, economists have great difficulty imagining alternatives to communism and capitalism. They see in the growth of large-scale organizations nothing more than a linear expansion of old-fashion bureaucracy. They see technological advance as a simple, non-revolutionary extension of the known. Born of scarcity, trained to think in terms of limited resources, they can hardly conceive of a society in which human’s basic material wants have been satisfied. One reason for their lack of imagination is that when they think about technological advance, they concentrate solely on the means of economic activity. Yet the super-age of information revolution challenges the ends as well. It threatens to alter not merely the “how” of production but they “why.” It will, in short, transform the very purposes of economic activity. Before such an upheaval, even the most sophisticated tools of today’s economists are helpless. Input-output tables, econometric models—the whole paraphernalia of analysis that economists employ simply do not come to grips with the external forces—political, social and ethical—that will transform economic life in the decades before us. What does “productivity” or “efficiency” mean in a society that places a high value on psychic fulfillment? What happens to an economy, when, as is likely, the entire concept of property is reduced to meaninglessness? #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
How economies likely to be affected by the rise of supra-national planning, taxing, and regulatory agencies or by a kind of dialectical return to “cottage industry” based on the most advanced cybernetic technologies? Most important, what happens when “no growth” replaces “growth” as an economic objective, When Gross National Product (GNP) ceases to be the holy grail? Only by stepping outside the framework of orthodox economic thought and examining these possibilities can we begin to prepare for tomorrow. And among these, none is more central than the shift in values that is likely to accompany the super-industrial revolution. Under conditions of scarcity, humans struggle to meet their immediate material needs. Today under more affluent conditions, we are reorganizing the economy to deal with a new level of human needs. From a system designed to provide material satisfaction, we are rapidly creating an economy geared to the provision of psychic gratification. This process of “psychologization,” one of the central themes of the super-age of information revolution, has been all but overlooked by the economists. Yet it will result in a novel, surprise-filled economy unlike any human has ever experienced. The issues raised by it will reduce the great conflict of the twenty-first century, the conflict between capitalism and communism, to comparative insignificance. For these issues sweep far beyond economic or political dogma. They involve, as we shall see, nothing less than sanity, the human organism’s ability to distinguish illusion from reality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Much excitement has accompanied the discovery that once a techno-society reaches a certain stage of informational development, it begins to shift energies into automation and autonomy. Many experts see in the services the wave of the future. They suggest the many retail, jobs, food service jobs and manual labor jobs, even news broadcasting, teaching, many aspects of medical care, and law enforcement will be handled by androids and other machines—a prophecy already on its way toward fulfillment. Actors and musicians are expected to be replaced by holograms. What the economists, however, have not done, is ask the obvious question. Where does the economy go next? After the services, what? The high technology nations must, in coming years, direct vast resources to rehabilitating their physical environment and improving what has come to be called “the quality of life.” The fight against air and noise pollution, aesthetic blight, crowding, noise and dirt will clearly absorb tremendous energies. However, in addition to the provision of these public goods, we can also anticipate a subtle change in the character of production for private use. They very excitement aroused by the mushrooming growth of the service sector has diverted professional attention from another shift that will deeply affect both goods and services in the future. It is this shift that will lead to the net forward movement of the economy, the growth of a strange new sector based on what can only be called the “experience industries.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
For the key to post-service economies lies in the psychologization of all production, beginning with manufacture. One of the curious facts about the production in all the techno-societies today, and especially the United States of America, is that goods are increasingly designed to yield psychological “extras” for the consumer. Technology becomes a Veblen good. As the demand of technology increases, which is a luxury good and also a necessity with new products, the price also increases. The future will be packed with positional good, which are goods valued only by how they are distributed among the population, not by how many of them there are available in total (as would be the case with other consumer goods). The source of greater worth of positional goods is their desirability as a status symbol, which usually results in them greatly exceeding the value of comparable good. Various goods have been described as positional in a given capitalist society, such as gold, real estate, diamonds, and luxury goods. More formally in economics, positional goods are a subset of economic goods whose consumption (and subsequent utility), also conditioned by Veblen-like pricing, depends negatively on consumption of those same goods by others. In particular, for these goods the value is at least in part (if not exclusively) a function of its ranking in desirability by others, in comparison to substitutes. Therefore, new is not always better. It depends on the status and ranking of an item you possess. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The term-Veblen good is sometimes extended to include services and non-material possession that may alter one’s social status and that are deemed highly desirable when enjoyed by a relatively few in a community, such as college degrees, Cresleigh Homes, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, big trucks, college degrees, achievements, awards, memberships to exclusive clubs, et cetera. The manufacturer adds a “psychic load” to one’s basic product, and the consumer gladly pays for this intangible benefit. A classic example is the case of the appliance or auto manufacturer who adds buttons, knobs, touch screens, dials to the control panel or dashboard, to replace basic tools that are slightly out of fashion. Or home builders who add luxury features to their new homes like butler’s panties, California rooms, coded entry doors, surveillance systems and other luxury features like stained glass, floor to ceiling windows, and so forth. The manufacturer has learned that increasing the number of gadgets and features, up to a point, gives the operator of the machine or home the sense of controlling a more complex device, and hence a feeling of increased mastery. This psychological payoff is designed into the product. Conversely, pains are taken not to deprive the consumer of an existing psychological benefit. Thus a large American food company proudly launched a labour-saving, add-water-only cake mix. The company was amazed when women rejected the product in favour of mixes that require extra labour—the addition of an egg along with the water. By inserting powered egg in the factory, the company had oversimplified the task of the housewife, depriving her of the sense of creatively participating in the cake-baking process. The powered egg was hastily eliminated, and women went happily back to cracking their own eggs. Once again a product was modified to provide a psychic benefit. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Examples like these can be multiplied endlessly in almost any major industry, from soap and clothing stores to dishwashers and diet colas. According to Dr. Emanuel Demby, president of Motivational Programmers, Incorporated, a research firm employed in the United States of America and Europe by such blue-chip corporations as General Electric, Caltex, and IBM, “The engineering of psychological factors into manufactured goods will be a hallmark of production in the future—not only in consumer goods, but in industrial hardware. “Even the big cranes and derricks built today embody this principle. Their cabs are streamlined, slick like something out of the twenty-first century. Cater-pillar, International Harvester, Ferguson—all of them. Why? These mechanical monsters do not dig better or hoist better because the cab is aesthetically improved. However, the contractor who buys them likes it better. The men who work on them like it better. The contractor’s customers like it better. So even the manufacturers of earthmoving equipment begin to pay attention to non-utilitarian—id est, psychological—factors.” Beyond this, Dr. Demby asserts, manufacturers are devoting more attention to reducing tensions that accompany the use of certain products. Manufacturers of sanitary napkins, for example, know that women have a fear of stopping up the toilet when disposing of them. “A new product ha been developed,” he says, “that instantly dissolves on contact with water. It does not perform its basic function any better. However, it relieves some of the anxiety that went with it. This is psychological engineering if ever there was any!” #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Affluent consumers are willing and able to pay for such niceties. As disposable income rises, they become progressively less concerned with price, progressively more insistent on what they call “quality.” For many products quality can still be measured in the traditional terms of workmanship, durability and materials. However, for a fast-growing class of products, such differences are virtually undetectable. Blindfolded, the consumer cannot distinguish Brand A from Brand B. Nevertheless, she often argues fiercely that one is superior to another. This paradox vanishes once the psychic component of production is taken int account. For even when they are otherwise identical, there are likely to be marked psychological differences between one product and another. Advertisers strive to stamp each product with its own distinct image. These images are functional: they fill a need on the part of the consumer. The need is psychological, however, rather than utilitarian in ordinary sense. Thus we find that the term “quality” increasingly refers to the ambience, the status associations—in effect, the psychological connotations of the product. As more and more of the basic material needs of the consumer are met, it is strongly predictable that even more economic energy will be directed at meeting the consumer’s subtle, varied and quite personal needs for beauty, prestige, individuation, and sensory delight. The manufacturing sector will channel ever greater resources into the conscious design of psychological distinctions and gratifications. They psychic component of goods production will assume increasing importance. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
A merciful human aims at one’s neighbour’s good and so does “God’s will,” consciously co-operating with “the simple good.” A cruel human oppresses one’s neighbour, and so does simple evil. However, in doing such evil, one is used by God, without one’s own knowledge or consent, to produce the complex good—so that the first human serves God as a son (or child), and the second as a tool. For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John. The whole system is, so to speak, calculated for the clash between good humans and bad humans, and the good fruits of fortitude, patience, pity and forgiveness for which the cruel human is permitted to be cruel, presuppose that the good human ordinarily continues to seek simple good. I say “ordinarily” because a human is sometimes entitled to hurt (or even, in my opinion, to kill) one’s fellow, but only where the necessity is urgent and the good to be attained obvious, and usually (though not always) when one who inflicts the pain has a definite authority to do so—a parent’s authority derived from nature, a magistrate’s or soldier’s derived from civil society, or a surgeon’s derived, most often, from the patient. To turn this into a general charter for afflicting humanity because the affliction is good for them is not indeed to break the Divine scheme but to volunteer for the post of Satan within that scheme. If you do his work, you must prepare for his wages. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The problem about avoiding our own pain admis a similar solution. Some ascetics have used self-torture. As a layman, I offer no opinion on the prudence of such a regimen; but I insist that, whatever its merits, self-torture is quite a different thing from tribulation sent by God. Everyone knows that fasting is a different experience from missing your dinner by accident or through poverty. Fasting asserts the will against the appetite—the reward being self-mastery and the danger pride: involuntary hunger subjects appetite and will together to the Divine will, furnishing an occasion for submission and exposing us to the danger or rebellion. However, the redemptive effect of suffering lies chiefly in its tendency to reduce the rebel will. Ascetic practices, which in themselves strengthen the will, are only useful in so far as they enable the will to put its own house (the passions) in order, as a preparation for offering the whole human to God. They are necessary as a means; as an end, they would be abominable, for in substituting will for appetite and there stopping, they would merely exchange the animal self for the diabolical self. It was, therefore, truly said that only God can mortify. Tribulation does its work in a World where human beings are ordinarily seeking, by lawful means, to avoid their own natural evil and to attain their natural god, and presuppose such a World. In order to submit the will to God, we must have a will and that will must have objects. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Christian renunciation does not mean stoic “Apathy,” but a readiness to prefer God to inferior ends which are in themselves lawful. Hence the Perfect Man brought to Gethsemane a will, and a strong will, to escape suffering and death is such escape were compatible with the Father’s will, combined with a perfect readiness for obedience if it were not. Some of the saints recommend a total renunciation at the very threshold of our discipleship; but I think this can mean only a total readiness for every particular renunciation that may be demanded, for it would not be possible to live from moment to moment willing nothing but submission to God as such. What would be the material for the submission? It would seem self-contradictory to say “What I will is to subject what I will to God’s will,” for the second what has no content. Doubtless we all spend too much care in the avoidance of our own pain: but a duly subordinated intention to avoid it, using lawful means, is in accordance with nature—that is, with the whole working system of creaturely life for which the redemptive work of tribulation is calculated. It would be quite false, therefore, to suppose that the Christian view of suffering is incompatible with the strongest emphasis on our duty to leave the World, even in a temporal sense, better than we found it. In the fullest parabolic picture which He gave to the Judgment, Our Lord seems to reduce all virtue to active beneficence: and though it would be misleading to take that one picture in isolation from the Gospel as a whole, it is sufficient to place beyond doubt the basic principles of the social ethics of Christianity. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Before Abraham was God. God is a higher mentalism. “I am” points to the eternal One where no individual entity ever was, is, or shall be. Philosophy raises the questions of Reality and pursues it until an answer can be found. That answer assets there is something unique which alone can be the Real, which ever was, is, and shall be. Philosophy’s fundamental postulate is that there is but one ultimate Power, one sublime Reality, one transcendent Being. It is invisible to all, since it is the power that makes the World visible. It is without form, since it is the Substance out of which all forms are made. The Real is unique—the only undivided, unsplit being beyond which there is nothing else. There is nothing else either beyond it or besides it. It is the unique not only because of what IT is but also because two statements concerning IT can be quite contradictory, yet each can still be correct! Ne transcends all categories. Since the Real is unique, the One without a second and not the One which is related to the Many that spring out of it, it cannot correctly be set up in opposition to the Unreal, the Illusory, the Appearance. They are not on the same level. That which both Greek Plato and Indian Vedantin called “the One” did not refer to the beginning figure of a series, but to “One-without-a-Second.” It is unique. There is nothing to which it can be justly likened, or with which it can be compared. This must be so since it goes beyond and transcends all things without any exception. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Whatever is said of it will only succeed in describing an idea in the mind of the sayer, and this goes beyond and transcends all ideas, again without any exception. You can compare one being or one thing with another but not This, not This! There is a Mind which is self-existent, unique, unlike anything else, unbegotten. The Universal Mind is also unique in that, while comprehending all things, it is itself incomprehensible. It stands alone, unique, unseen and untouchable. Yet from it emerge all the gods of all the planets which they govern, all the ethical injunctions which humans need and must in the end. Please stand about me, your protective spirits, on all six sides, please establish your guards. From all dangers, no matter from what quarter, whether from above or below, please keep me safe. My Lord at my right hand, and my Lord at my left: please be with me throughout my life, watching over me by night and by day. Thy dwelling there forever. Mayest Thou be exalted and sanctified in Jerusalem, Thy city, throughout all generations and to all eternity. O please let our eyes behold the establishment of Thy kingdom, according to the word that was spoken in the inspired Psalms of David, Thy righteous anointed: The Lord shall reign forever. Thy God, O American, shall be Sovereign unto all generations. Hallelujah! Unto all generations we will declare Thy greatness and to all eternity we will proclaim Thy holiness. Our mouth shall ever speak Thy praise, O our God, for Thou art a great and holy God and King. Your arms are strong, Father; they can hug a child or restrain one from harm. Please Wrap them about me: I trust You to know which is needed. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the holy King. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
CRESLEIGH RANCH: BRIGHTON STATION– Rancho Cordova, CA
3-5 Beds 3-3.5 Bath 2,054-3,634 Square Feet
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!
Eco-Technological Development is Firmly Convinced that Human Nature is Eternal and Stability Will Return!
The human task is to make of oneself a work of art. It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief. There are four chief ways in which guidance may be given. They are: intuitive feeling, giving in a general ways approbation or rejection of a proposed course of action; direct and precise inner message; the shaping of outer circumstances; and the teaching of inspired texts. If all four exist together, and if they all harmonize, then you may step forward in the fullest assurance. However, if there are contradictions between them, then great caution and some delay is certainly advisable. It is also needful to remember that the higher self can only be known by the higher part of the mind, that is, the intuition. The emotions are on a lesser and lower level, however noble or religious they may be. The immense satisfaction which the ecstatic raptures give is no indication that one is directly touching reality, but only that one is coming closer to it. They may seem purely spiritual, but they still belong to the ego’s feeling nature and if one believes otherwise one will fall into self-deception. Only through the pure intuition, freed from emotional egoism and transcending intellectual illusion, can one really make a contact with the Overself. And that will happen in a state of utter and perfect tranquillity; there will be none of the emotional excitement which marked the successful practice of the earlier stage of meditation exercises. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
When the deliverance of intuition cancels the deliverance of reason, one may trust oneself to the first, but only when one is sure it is what it purports to be. When one finds some of one’s own intuitions formulated and printed in someone else’s book, one feels their truth is confirmed and one’s own mind confronted. One has the right to judge an intuition rationally before submitting to it, but what if one’s judgment is itself wrong? Intuition may support reason but must supplant it only on the gravest occasions. The sudden revelation of correct understanding, whether in certain situations or about uncertain problems, may come unexpectedly or abruptly anytime during the day. It springs up of its own accord or it appears in a dream message. If the intuitive feeling leads one gently at some times, it also leads one firmly at other times. An intuition is directly self-revealing; it does not depend on what kind of thought and study were done before it appeared. It is also self-evident: the correctness of the receiving conscious is very calm, and when the lapse of time tends to strengthen its authority. The intuitive answer may come in one of several ways, but the commonest is either a self-evident that one cannot help thinking it. This is how intuition usually appears and is usually recognized for what it is. Develop them that another sign to recognize intuitions is the unexpectedness. #RandolphHrris 2 of 21
The mysterious appearance of an intuition may well make us ask where it comes from. At one moment it is no there; at the next it is lodged in the mind. Sometimes we are wiser than we know and utter involuntary answers which surprise us with their unexpected wisdom or unknown Truth in one way intuitions are born. Because it comes from within, it comes with its own authority. When it is “the real thing,” the seeker will not have to question examine or verify its authenticity, will not have to run to others for their appraisal of its worth or its rejection as a pseudo-intuition. One will know overwhelmingly what it is in the same way that one knows who one is. Education and experience alone do not make the mind; there is something higher that mixed itself in now and again with disconcerting incomprehensible spontaneity. One reason why an intuition is so often missed is that it flashes into the mind as disjointedly, as abruptly, and as inconsequentially as a person or s thing sometimes comes momentarily into the field of vision through the corner of an eye. Today the human with a pacemaker or a plastic aorta is still recognizably a human. The inanimate part of one’s body is still relatively unimportant in terms of one’s personality and consciousness. However, as the proportion of machine components rise, what happens to one’s awareness of self, one’s inner experience? If we assume that the brain is he seat of consciousness and intelligence, and that no other part of the body affects personality or self very much, then it is possible to conceive of a disembodied brain—a brain without arms, legs, spinal cord or other equipment—as a self, a personality, an embodiment of awareness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
It may then become possible to combine the human brain with a whole set of artificial sensors, receptors, and effectors, and to call that tangle of wires and plastic a human being. All this may seem to resemble medieval speculation about the number of angels who can pirouette on a pinhead, yet the first small seps toward some form of human-machines symbiosis are already being taken. Moreover, they are being taken not by a lone mad scientist, but by thousands of highly trained engineers, mathematicians, biologists, surgeons, chemists, neurologists and communications specialists. Dr. W. G. Walter’s mechanical “tortoises” are machines that behave as though they had been psychologically conditioned. These tortoises were early specimens of a growing breed of robots ranging from the “Perceptron” which could learn (and even generalize) to the more recent “Wanderer,” a robot capable of exploring an area, building up in its memory an “image” of the terrain, and able even to indulge in certain operations comparable, at least in some respects, to “contemplative speculation” and “fantasy.” Experiments by Ross Ashby, H. D. Block, Frank Rosenblatt and others demonstrate that machines can learn from their mistakes, improve their performance, and, in certain limited kinds of learning, outstrip human students. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Reports Dr. Block, professors of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University: “I do not think that there is a task you can name that a machine cannot do—in principle. If you can define a task and a human can do it, then a machine can, at least in theory, also do it. The converse, however, is not true.” Intelligence and creativity, it would appear, are not a human monopoly. Robotology may be the new wave of the future. Technicians at Disneyland have created extremely life-life computer-controlled humanoids capable of moving their arms and legs, grimacing, smiling, glowering, simulating fear, joy and a wide range of other emotions. Built of clear plastic, that according to one reporter, “does everything but bleed,” the robots chase girls, play music, fire pistols, and so closely resemble human forms that visitors routinely shriek with fear, flinch and otherwise react as though they were dealing with real human beings. The purposes to which these robots are put may seem trivial, but the technology on which they are based is highly sophisticated. It depends heavily on knowledge acquired from the space program—and this knowledge is accumulating rapidly. There appears to be no reason, in principle, why we cannot go forward from these present primitive and trivial robots to build humanoid machines capable of extremely varied behaviour, capable of even “human” error and seemingly random choice—in short, to make them behaviourally indistinguishable from humans except by means of highly sophisticated or elaborate tests. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
At that point we shall face the novel sensation of trying to determine whether the smiling, assured humanoid behind the airline reservation counter is a pretty young lady or a carefully wired robot. (This raises a number of half-amusing, half-serious problems about the relationships between humans and machines, including emotional and even relationships involving pleasure of the flesh. Professor Block at Cornell speculates that human-made relationships involving pleasures of the flesh may not be too far distant. Pointing out that people often develop emotional attachment to the machines they use, he suggests that we shall have to give attention to the “ethical” questions arising from our treatment of “these mechanical objects of our affection and passion.”) The likelihood the that flight attendant with be both human and robot is likely. The thrust toward some form of human-machine symbiosis is furthered by out increasing ingenuity in communicating with machines. A great deal of much-publicized work is being done to facilitate the interaction of humans and computers. However, quite apart from this, Russian and American scientists have both been experimenting with the placement or implantation of detectors that pick up signals from the nerve ends at the stub of an amputated limb. These signals are then amplified and used to activate an artificial limb, thereby making a machine directly and sensitively responsive to the nervous system of a human being. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The human need not “think out” one’s desires; even involuntary impulses are transmittable. The respon 89sive behaviour of the machine is as automatic as the behaviour of one’s own hand, eye or leg. In Flight to Arras, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, novelist, poet and pioneer aviator, described buckling himself into the seat of a fighter plane during World War II. “All this complication of oxygen tubes, heating equipment; these speaking tubes that form the ‘intercom’ running between the members of the crew. This mask through which I breathe. I am attached to the plane by a rubber tube as indispensable as an umbilical cord. Organs have been added to my being, and they seem to intervene between me and my heart.” We have come far since those distant days. Space biology is marching irresistibly toward the day when the astronaut will not merely be buckled into one’s capsule, but become a part of it in the full symbiotic sense of the phrase. One aim is to make the craft itself a wholly self-sufficient Universe, in which algae is grown for food, water is recovered from body waste, air is recycled to purge it of the ammonia entering the atmosphere from urine, et cetera. In this totally enclosed fully regenerative World, the human being becomes an integral part of an on-going micro-ecological process whirling through the vastness of space. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Thus Theodore Gordon, author of The Future and himself a leading space engineer, writes: “Perhaps it would be simpler to provide life support in the form of machines that plug into the astronaut. One could be fed intravenously using a liquid food compactly stored in a remote pressurized tank. Perhaps direct processing of body liquid wastes, and conversion to water, could be accomplished by a new type of artificial kidney built in as part of the spaceship. Perhaps sleep could be induced electronically…to lower one’s metabolism.” Und so weiter. One after another, the body functions of human become interwoven with, dependent on, and part of, the machine functions of the capsule. The ultimate extension of such work, however, is not necessarily to be found in the outer reaches of space; it may well become a common part of everyday life here on the mother planet. This is the direct link-up of the human brain—stripped of its supporting physical structures—with the computer. Indeed, it may be that the biological component of the supercomputers of the future may be massed human brains. The possibility of enhancing human (and machine) intelligence by linking them together organically opens enormous and exciting probabilities, so exciting that Dr. R. M. Page, director of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, has publicly discussed the feasibility of a system in which human thoughts are fed automatically into the storage unit of a computer to form the basis for machine decision-making. Furthermore, research from countless sources contributes toward the eventual symbiosis. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
In one of the most fascinating, frightening and intellectually provocative experiments ever recorded, Professor Robert White, director of neurosurgery at the Metropolitan General Hospital in Cleveland, has given evidence that the brain can be isolated from its body and kept alive after the “death” of the rest of the organism. The experiment, described in a brilliant article by Oriana Fallaci, saw a team of neurosurgeons cut the brain out of a rhesus monkey, discard the body, then hook the brain’s carotid arteries up to another money, whose blood then continued to bathe the disembodied organ, keeping it alive. Said one of the members of the medical team, Dr. Leo Massopust, a neurophysiologist: “The brain activity is largely better than when the brain had a body…No doubt about it. I even suspect that without his senses, he can think more quickly. What kind of thinking, I do not know. I guess he is primarily a memory, repository for information stored when he had his flesh; he cannot develop further because he no longer has the nourishment of experience. Yet this, too, is a new experience.” The brain survived for five hours. It could have lasted much longer, had it served the purposes of research. Professor White has successfully kept other brains alive for days, using machinery, rather than a living monkey, to keep the brain washed with blood. “I do not think we have reached the stage,” he told Miss Fallaci, “where you can turn humans into robots, obedient sheep. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
“Yet…it could happen, it is not impossible. If you consider that we can transfer the head of a man onto the trunk of another man, if you consider that we can isolate the brain of a human and make it work without its body…To me, there is no longer any gap between science fiction and science…We could keep Dr. Einstein’s brain alive and make it function normally.” Not only, Professor White implies, can we transfer the head of one person to the shoulders of another, not only can we keep a head or a brain “alive” and functioning, but it can all be done, with “existing techniques.” Indeed, he declares, “The Japanese will be the first to [keep an isolated human head alive]. I will not, because I have not resolved as yet this dilemma: Is it right or not?” A devout Catholic, Dr. White is deeply troubled by the philosophical and moral implications of his work. As of the year 2018, a team of scientists recently revealed they had successfully conducted experiments on hundreds of pigs that involved keeping their brains alive for up to 36 hours after the animals had been decapitated. Researcher Dr. Nenad Sestan, who lead the team of Yale University scientists, disclosed the nature of the research in a meeting at the National Institutes of Health to discuss the ethical concerns surrounding edge research with the human brain. In essence they were able to successfully remove the pigs’ heads and resuscitate their brains while no longer connected to a body. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Through a delicate, complex process they were able to keep the brains alive by connecting them to a closed-loop system called “BrainEX” that pumps oxygen-rich artificial blood through the necessary areas of the brain to sustain life. The researchers intent, reportedly, is to create a complete atlas of the connections between human brain cells, a monumental undertaking that has never been done. By keeping the pig brains alive, they are able to study them in ways that will contribute to further breakthroughs. This could lead to a radical enhancement of our understanding of the human brain. The research itself is remarkable and, it could change everything. We may have to evolve the way we think about death, consciousness, souls, and what it means to be human. As the brin surgeons and he neurologist probe further, as the bio-engineers and the neurologists probe further, as the bio-engineers and the mathematicians, the communications experts and robot-builders become more sophisticated, as the space humans and their capsules grow closer and closer to one another, as machines begin to embody biological components and humans come bristling with sensors and mechanical organs, the ultimate symbiosis approaches. The work converges. Yet the greatest marvel of all is not organ transplantation or symbiosis or underwater engineering. It is not technology, nor science itself. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The greatest and most dangerous marvel of all is the complacent past-orientation of the race, its unwillingness to confront the reality of acceleration. Thus humans move swiftly into an explored Universe, into a totally new stage of eco-technological development, firmly convinced that “human nature is eternal” or that “stability will return.” He stumbles into the most violent revolution in human history muttering, in the words of one famous, though myopic sociologist, that “the processes of modernization…have been more or less ‘completed.’” He simply refuses to imagine the future. In 1865 a newspaper editor told his readers that “Well informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.” Barely a decade later, the telephone erupted from Mr. Bell’s laboratory and changed the World. One the very day that the Wright brothers took wing, newspapers refused to report the event because their sober, solid, feet-on-the-ground editors simply could not bring themselves to believe it had happened. After all, a famous American astronomer, Dr. Simon Newcomb, had not long before assured the World that “No possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which humans shall fly long distances.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Not long after this, another expert announced publicly that it was “nothing less than feeblemindedness to expect anything to come of the horseless carriage movement.” Six years later the one-millionth Ford automobile rolled off an assembly line. And then there was the great Dr. Rutherford, himself, the discoverer of the atom, who said in 1933 that the energy in the atom’s nucleus would never be released. Nine years later: the first chain reaction. Again and again the human brain—including the first class scientific brain—has blinded itself to the novel possibilities of the future, has narrowed its field of concern to gain momentary reassurance, only to be rudely shaken by the accelerative thrust. This is not to imply that all the scientific or technological advances so far discussed will necessarily materialize. Still less does it imply that they will all occur between now and the turn of the century. Some will, no doubt, die a-borning. Some may represent blind alleys. Others will succeed in the lab, but turn out to be impractical for one reason or another. Yet all this is unimportant. For even if none of these developments occur, others, perhaps even more unsettling, will. We have scarcely touched on the computer revolution and the far-ramifying changes that must follow in its churning wake. We have barely mentioned the implications of the thrust into outer space, an adventure that could, before the new millennium arrives, change all our lives and attitudes in radical and as yet unpredicted ways. (What would happen if an astronaut or space vehicle returned to Earth contaminated with some fast-multiplying, death-dealing microorganism or space ghost?) #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
We have said nothing about the laser, the holograph, the powerful new instruments of personal and mass communication, the new technologies of crime and espionage, new forms of transport and construction, the developing horror of chemical and bacteriological warfare techniques, the radiant promise of solar energy, the discovery that life can be conceived in a test tube, the startling new tools and techniques for education, and an endless list of other fields in which high-impact changes lie just ahead or are already here. In the coming years, advances in all these fields will fire off like a series of rockets carrying us out of the past, plunging us deeper into the new society. Now will this new society quickly settle into a steady state. It, too, will quiver and crack and roar as it suffers jolt after jolt of high-energy change. For the individual who wishes to live in one’s time, to be a part of the future, the super-industrial revolution offers no surcease from change. It offers no return to the familiar past. It offers only the highly combustible mixture of transience and novelty. This massive injection of speed and novelty into the fabric of society will force us not merely to cope more rapidly with familiar situations, events and moral dilemmas, but to cope at a progressively faster rate with situations that are, for us, decidedly unfamiliar, “first-time” situations, strange, irregular, unpredictable. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
This will significantly alter the balance that prevails in any society between the familiar and unfamiliar elements in the daily life of its people, between the routine and non-routine, the predictable and unpredictable. The relationship between these two kinds of daily-life elements can be called the “novelty ratio” of the society, and as the level of newness or novelty rises, less and less of life appears subject to our routine forms of coping behaviour. More and more, there is a growing weariness and wariness, a pall of pessimism, a decline in our sense of mastery. More and more, the environment comes to seem chaotic, beyond human control. Thus two great social forces converge: the relentless movement toward transience is reinforced and made more potentially dangerous by a rise in the novelty ratio. Nor, as we shall next see, is this novelty to be found solely in the technological arrangements of the society-to-be. In its social arrangements, too, we can anticipate the unprecedented, the unfamiliar, the bizarre. All things which are as they ought to be are conformed unto this second law eternal; and even those things which to this eternal law are not conformable are notwithstanding in some sort ordered by the first eternal law. There is a paradox about tribulation in Christianity. Blessed are the poor, but by “judgment” (id est, social justice) and alms we are to remove poverty wherever possible. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Blessed are we when persecuted, but we may avoid persecution by flying from city to city, and may pray to be spared it, as Our Lord prayed in Gethsemane. However, if suffering is good, ought it not to be pursued rather than avoided? I answer that suffering is not good in itself. What is good in any painful experience is, for the sufferer, one’s submission to the will of God, and, for the spectators, the compassion aroused and the acts of mercy to which it leads. If wholeness or integration consists in the union of opposites, symbolized by the emergence of quaternities and mandalas, it follows that the most obvious pair of opposites, good and evil, are to be found in the self. Yet the self, as we have seen, is a God-image, or at least cannot be distinguished from one. The conventional Christian view of God is dualistic, in that God is entirely good (the doctrine of the Summum Bonum), while evil is contained in Satan. However, earlier Christian belief was monotheistic. Clement of Rome taught that God rules the World with a right and a left hand, the right being Christ, the left Satan. All of our lives, many of us has wrestled with the problem of the origin of evil. Just as we have to remember the gods of antiquity in order to appreciate the psychological value of the anima/animus archetype, so Christ is our nearest analogy of the self and its meaning. It is naturally not a question of a collective value artificially manufactured or arbitrarily awarded, but of one that is effective and present per se, and that makes its effectiveness felt whether the subject is conscious of it or not. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Yet, though the attributes of Christ (consubstantiality with the Father, co-eternity, filiation, parthenogenesis, crucifixion, Lamb scarified between opposites, One divided into Many, et cetera) undoubtedly mark Him out as an embodiment of the self, looked at from the psychological angle He corresponds to only one half of the archetype. The other half appears in the Antichrist. The latter is just as much a manifestation of the self, except that one consists of its dark aspect. Both are Christian symbols, and they have the same meaning as the image of the Saviour crucified between two thieves. This great symbol tells us that the progressive development and differentiation of consciousness leads to an ever more menacing awareness of the conflict and involves nothing less than a crucifixion of the ego, its agonizing suspension between irreconcilable opposites. However, it is fitting that one of these two extremes, and the best, should be called the Son of God because of His excellence, and the other, diametrically opposed to him, the son of the evil demon, of Satan and the devil. The opposites even condition one another. Where there is evil…there must needs be good contrary to the evil. The one follows from the other; hence we must either do away with both, and deny that good and evil exist, or if we admit the one, and particularly evil, we must also admit good. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Evil spirits and impure demons do not have the contrary virtue substantially, and they were not created evil but chose the condition of wickedness (malitiae gradus) of their own free will. For it is certain that to be evil means to be deprived of good. To turn aside from good is nothing other than to be perfected in evil. However, who can accurately judge what is good and evil because in some cases it is subjective. Take for instance, The Queen of the Damned, the movie by Warner Brothers, which is based on an Anne Rice novel Queen of the Damned. The vampire Queen, Akasha is 6,000 years old and trying to preserve her race and the planet by feeding on humans. Some might see this as an evil act, where others might she it as a benevolent act. After all, how much different is it from humans trying to preserve their race from feeding on animals and plant life? Food is food, right? This shows clearly that an increase in either good or evil means a diminution of the other, so that good and evil represent equivalent halves of an opposition. Naturally there can be no question on a total extinction of the ego, for then the focus of consciousness would be destroyed, and the result would be complete unconsciousness. The relative abolition of the ego affects only those supreme and ultimate decision which confront us in situations where there are insoluble conflicts of duty. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
This means, in other words, that in such cases the ego is a suffering bystander who decides nothing but must submit to decision and surrender unconditionally. The “genius” of humans, the higher and more spacious part of one whose extent no one knows, has the final word. It is therefore well to examine carefully the psychological aspects of the individuation process in the light of Christian tradition, which can describe it for us with an exactness and impressiveness far surpassing our feeble attempts, even through the Christian image of the self—Christ—lacks the shadow that properly belongs to it. In the fallen and partially redeemed Universe we may distinguish the simple good descending from God, the simple evil produced by rebellious creatures, and the exploitation of the evil by God for His redemptive purposes, which produced the complex good to which accepted suffering and repented sin contribute. Now the fact that God can make complex good out of simple evil does not excuse—though by mercy it may save—those who do the simple evil. And this distinction is central. Offences must come, but woe to those why whom they come; sins do cause grace to abound, but we must not make that an excuse for continuing to sin. The crucifixion itself is the best, as well as the worst, of all historical events, but the role of Judas remains simply evil. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Love is a feeling of deep devotion, concern, and affection. The greatest example of God’s love for His children is found in the infinite Atonement of Jesus Christ. Love for God and fellow humans is a characteristic of disciples of Jesus Christ. Have you recognized the love of God in your life? We manifest our love for Heavenly Father by keeping His commandments and serving His children. Our expressions of love for others may include being kind to them, listening to them, mouring with them, comforting them, serving them, praying for them, sharing the gospel with them, and being their friend. When we remember that we are all children of God—that we are spirit brothers and sisters–our love for those around us increases. The love that results from this realization has the power to transcend all boundaries of nation, creed, and colour. Dear Lord in Heaven, please remind me on my drive that my anger harms me more than that which angers me. Lord of Peace, in ultimate calm sitting, please pass on to me some of your beatific pose. Please remind us that we have the power to overcome anger, as our Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave his life for us and love us and is not angry that our sins before he was born, while he was born, and after his death is the toll he paid for us to cross over into this mortal realm and he still love us. May even my commute be done in beauty. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Land folk, I am here, newly arrived to this place. I have come from my previous home, where I lived under the protecting gaze of the Land Spirits there. In this new place, then, I wish to establish peace again between my people and the people of the land, as it as been done since the unremembered time. I bring gifts to you, I bring offerings, as a suppliant should when entering a chieftain’s hall. Please accept the from me and, with them, my friendship. Please establish between us peace. Please encompass me about with your protection, Holy Ones of ancient times. Please stand about me on all sides, warding away from me all dangers, keeping away from me all harm. Who may be compared to Thee, Father of mercy, who in love rememberest Thy creatures unto life? Faithful art Thou to grant eternal life to the departed. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who callest the dead to life everlasting. Holy art Thou and holy is Thy name and unto Thee holy beings render praise daily. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the Holy God. We sanctify Thy name on Earth even as it is sanctified in the Heavens above, as described in the vision of Thy Prophet: And the seraphim called one unto another saying: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole Earth is full of His glory. Whereupon the angels in stirring and mighty chorus rise toward the seraphim and with resounding acclaim declare: Blessed by the glory of God from His Heavenly abode. From Thy Heavenly abode, please reveal Thyself, O our King, and reign over us, for we wait for Thee. O when wilt Thou reign in America? Speedily, even in our days, do Thou establish Thy dwelling here forever. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
You made it past Wednesday! Time to kick back and relax in your #Riverside Residence 1 home. Grab some loungewear from your spacious Primary Bedroom closet and head downstairs to the kitchen to make plans for the weekend. 😄
Or you could learn more about this residence on our website! And with approximately 2,300 square feet, all on one level, you will likely find all the space you need. Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-1/
If There Was Not a God, then People Could Not Love Each Other!
How you play the game is for college boys. When you are playing for money, winning is the only thing that matters. I give the same halftime speech over and over. It works best when my players are better than the other coach’s players. A law or policy is sufficient just, or a least not unjust, if when we try to imagine how the ideal procedure would work out, we conclude that most persons taking part in this procedure and carrying out its stipulations would favour that law or policy. In the ideal procedure, the decision reached is not a compromise, a bargain struck between opposing parties trying to advance their ends. The legislative discussion must be conceived not as a contest between interests, but as an attempt to find the best policy as defined by the principles of justice. I suppose, then, as part of the theory of justice, that an impartial legislator’s only desire is to make the correct decision in this regard, given the general facts known to one. One is to vote solely according to one’s judgment. The outcome of the vote gives an estimate of what is most in the line with the conception of justice. If we ask how likely it is that the majority opinion will be correct, it is evident that the ideal procedure bears a certain analogy to the statistical problem of pooling the views of a group of experts to arrive at a best judgment. Here the experts are rational legislators able to take an objective perspective because they are impartial. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
The suggestion goes back to Condorcet that if the likelihood of a correct judgment on the part of the representative legislator is greater than that of an incorrect one, the probability that the majority vote is correct increases as the likelihood of a correct decision by the representative legislator increases. Thus we might be tempted to suppose that if many rational persons were to try to simulate the conditions of the ideal procedure and conducted their reasoning and discussion accordingly, a large majority anyway would be almost certainly right. This would be a mistake. We must not only be sure that there is a greater chance of a correct than of an incorrect judgment on the part of the representative legislator, but it is also clear that the votes of different persons are not independent. Since their views will be influenced by the course of the discussion, the simpler sorts of probabilistic reasoning do not apply. Nevertheless, we normally assume that an ideally conducted discussion among many persons is more likely to arrive at the correct conclusion (if necessary, by vote) than the deliberations of any of them by oneself. Why should this be so? In everyday life the exchange of opinion with others checks our partiality and widens our perspective; we are made to see things from their standpoint and the limits of our vision are brought home to us. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
However, in the ideal process the veil of ignorance means that the legislators are already impartial. The benefits from discussion lie in the fact that even representative legislators are limited in knowledge and the ability to reason. No one of them knows everything the others know, or can make all the same inferences that they can draw in concert. Discussion is a way of combining information and enlarging the range of arguments. At least in the course of time, the effects of common deliberation seem bound to improve matters. Thus we arrive at the problems of trying to formulate an ideal constitution of public deliberation in matters of justice, a set of rules well-designed to bring to bear the greater knowledge and reasoning powers of the group so as best to approximate if not to reach the correct judgment. The ideal procedure is part of the theory of justice. The more definite our conception of this procedure as it might be realized under favourable conditions, the more firm the guidance that the four-stage sequence gives our reflections. For we then have a more precise idea of how laws and policies would be assessed in the light of general facts about society. Often we can make good intuitive sense of the question how deliberations at the legislative stage, when properly conducted, would turn. The ideal procedure is further clarified by noting that it stands in contrast to the ideal market process. Thus, granting that the classical assumption for perfect competition hold, and that there are no external economies or diseconomies, and the like, an efficient economic configuration results. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
The ideal marker is a perfect procedure with respect to efficiency. A peculiarity of the deal market process, as distinct from the ideal political process conducted by rational and impartial legislators, is that the market achieves an efficient outcome even if everyone pursues one’s own advantage. Indeed, the presumption is that this is how economic agents normally behave. In buying and selling to maximize satisfaction or profits, households and firms are not giving a judgment as to what is from a social point of view and the most efficient economic configuration, given the initial distribution of assets. Rather they are advancing their ends as the rules allow, and any judgment they make is from their own point of view. It is the system as a whole, so to speak, that makes the judgment of efficiency, this judgment being derived from the many separate sources of information provided by the activities of firms and households. The system provides an answer, even though individuals have n opinion of the question, and often do not know what it means. Thus despite certain resemblances between markets and elections, the ideal market process and the ideal legislative procedure are different in crucial respects. They are designed to achieve distinct ends, the first leading to efficiency, the latter if possible to justice. And while the ideal market is a perfect process with regard to its objective, even the ideal legislature is an imperfect procedure. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
There seems to be on way to characterize a feasible procedure guaranteed to lead to just legislation. One consequence of this fact is that whereas a citizen may be bound to comply with the policies enacted, other things equal, one is not required to think that these policies are just, and it would be mistaken of one to submit one’s judgment to the vote. However, in a perfect market system, an economic agent, so far as one has any opinion at all, must suppose that the resulting outcome is indeed efficient. Although the household or firm has gotten everything that it wanted, it must concede that, given the initial distribution, an efficient situation has been attained. However, the parallel recognition of the outcome of the legislative process concerning questions of justice cannot be demanded, for although, of course, actual constitutions should be designed as far as possible to make the same determinations as the ideal legislative procedure, they are bound in practice to all short of what is just. This is not only because, as existing markets do, they fail to conform to their ideal counterpart, but also because this counterpart is that of an imperfect procedure. A just constitution may rely to some extent on the citizens and legislators adopting a wider view and exercising good judgment in applying the principles of justice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
There seems to be no way of allowing them to take a narrow or group-interested standpoint and then regulating the process so that it leads to a just outcome. So far at least there does not exist a theory of just constitutions as procedures leading to just legislation which corresponds to the theory of competitive markets as procedures resulting in efficiency. And this would seem to imply that the application of economic theory to the actual constitutional process has grave limitations insofar as political conduct is affected by human’s sense of justice, as it must be in any viable society, and just legislation is the primary social end. Certainly economic theory does not fit the ideal procedure. In an ideal market process some weight is given to the relative intensity of desire. A person can spend a greater part of one’s income on things one wants more of and in this way, together with other buyers, one encourages the use of resources in ways one most prefers. The market allows for finely graded adjustments in answer to the overall balance of preferences and the relative dominance of certain wants. There is nothing corresponding to this in the ideal legislative procedure. Each rational legislator is to vote one’s opinion as to which laws and policies best conform to principles of justice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
No special weight is or should be given to opinions that are held with greater confidence, or to the votes of those who let it be known that their being in the minority will cause them great displeasure. Of course, such a voting rule is conceivable, but there are no grounds for adopting it in the ideal procedure. Even among rational and impartial persons, those with greater confidence in their opinion are not, it seems, more likely to be right. Some may be more sensitive to the complexities of the case than others. In defining the criterion for just legislation one should stress the weight of considered collective judgment arrived at when each person does one’s best under ideal conditions to apply the correct principles. The intensity of desire or the strength of conviction is irrelevant when questions of justice arise. So much for several differences between the ideal legislative and the ideal market process. As we have seen, majority rule is adopted as the most feasible way to realize certain ends antecedently defined by the principles of justice. Sometimes however these principles are not clear or definite as to what they require. This is not always because the evidence is complicated and ambiguous, or difficult to survey and assess. The nature of the principles themselves may leave open a range of options rather than singling out any particular alternative. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
The rate of savings, for example, is specified only within certain limits; the main idea of the just savings principle is to exclude certain extremes. Eventually in applying the difference principle we wish to include in the prospects of the least advantaged the primary good of self-respect; and there are a variety of ways of taking account of this value consistent with the difference principle. How heavily this good and other related to it should count in the index is to be decided in view of the general features of the particular society and by what it is rational for its least favoured members to want as seen from the legislative stage. In such cases as these, then, the principles of justice set up a certain range within which the rate of savings or the emphasis given to self-respect should lie. However, they do not say where in this range the choice should fall. Now for these situations the principle of political settlement applies: if the law actually voted is, so far as one can ascertain, within the range of those that could reasonably be favoured by rational legislators conscientiously trying to follow the principles of justice, then the decision of the majority is practically authoritative, though not definitive. The situation is one of quasi-pure procedural justice. We must reply on the actual course of discussion at the legislative stage to select a policy within the allowed bounds. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
These cases are not instances of pure procedural justice because the outcome does not literally define the right result. It is simply that those who disagree with the decision made cannot convincingly establish their point within the framework of the public conception of justice. The question is one that cannot be sharply defined. In practice political parties will do doubt take different stands on these kinds of issues. The aim of constitutional design is to make sure, if possible, that the self-interest of social classes does not distort the political settlement that is made outside the permitted limits. The heart has its own reasons which Reason does not know; a thousand things declare it. I say the heart leave the universal Being naturally, and itself naturally, according to its obedience to either; and it hardens against one of the other, as it pleases. The heart has reasons which Reason can never know. The nature of the law restrains humans, and thus its very survival presupposes a stronger force behind it—God. Or consider the most readily observable physical evidence, the nature of the Universe. One cannot look at the stars, planets, and galaxies, millions of light years away, all fixed in perfect harmony, without asking who orders them. For centuries it was accepted that God was behind the Universe because otherwise the origin and purpose of life [would be] inexplicable. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
This traditional supposition was unchallenged until the eighteenth century’s Age of Reason, when enlightenment thinkers announced with relief that the origins of the Universe were now scientifically explainable. What we not call the “big bang theory” rendered the God hypothesis unnecessary. Although this theory has captured the imagination of many, it leaves serious questions unanswered. Who or what made the big bang? What was there before it? And how in the big bang process—a presumably random explosion—did planet Earth achieve such a remarkable, finely developed states? The big bang thesis is not by itself antithetical to the Christian biblical view. Professor Owen Gingerich, noted Harvard astronomer, frequently lectures on the “strange convergence” between the biblical and modern scientific explanation of the Universe’s origin. He relates the scientific evidence for the so-called big bang event to the biblical affirmation that the Universe flashed instantly into existence in a great showering of light. Professor Gingerich believes, however, that science deal strictly with the question of “how,” while biblical account addresses the equally critical question of “who.” William Paley, the eighteenth-century English clergyman, told what has become a well-known parable on this point. A man walking through a field discovers first a stone, then an ornate gold watch. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
The stone, the man may reasonably conclude, has simply always been there, a sliver of mineral chipped from the Earth by chance. However, the watch, which has beauty, design, symmetry, and purpose, did not just happen. It had to have been made by an intelligent, purposeful Creator. Some have asserted that the Universe was self-generated. This violates, however, a primary law of logic: the law of noncontradiction that says the Universe cannot be itself and the thing it created at the same time. Other simply state that the Universe itself is self-existent and infinite; it has always been. Yet modern science has discovered no element in the Universe that is self-existent. (A tentative theory exists today with respect to quantum physics that may raise questions about this conclusion.) Granted, the whole can be greater than the sum of parts, but can it be of a different character altogether? Clearly not. Nonetheless this is the view widely expressed today, most popular by Carl Sagan, who proposes that “the Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” That is simply another way of saying that the Universe itself is transcendent. Though Sagan’s films and books are widely used in schools and science, his argument is, in fact, only theory. It is also no more than an acknowledgement that we do not know how the Universe began. At one point or another even the most obstinate atheist or agnostic must deal with this question of first cause. Some people believe that the scientific rationales for how the Universe began are irrational. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Even if modern scientific theories provided satisfactory explanations for the origin of the Universe, however, the question of the origin of humans would still be unanswered. The prevailing view of Mr. Sagan and others is that a chance collision of atoms created life; subsequent mutations over thousands of years evolved into the extraordinarily complex creature we know as human. If this is true, humans are nothing more than an accident that started as slime or, as one theologian has put it, we are but grown-up germs. Our intuitive moral sense rejects such a trashing of human dignity. Interestingly enough, even modern scientific research is beginning to question some of its own theories. Given the laws of probability even allowing for the oldest possible dating of the Universe, they as, has there been enough time for life to begin by random chance and for as utterly complicated creatures as human to evolve. Some cosmologist are proposing that the Universe has been perfectly designed for life in a way that could not have happened by chance. There is an infinity of ways that the Universe could have been set up that would have been more simple, with fewer improbable coincidences. Of course in almost any of these simpler Universes, the odds for the development of anything as complicated as life—no matter how you imagined it—would be nil. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Actually such odds may indeed be nil. The French mathematician, Lecompte de Nouy, examined the laws of probability for a single molecule of high dissymmetry to be formed by the action of chance. De Nouy found that, on average, the time needed to form one such molecule of our terrestrial globe would be about 10 to 243 power billions of years. “But,” continued de Nouy ironically, “let us admit that no matter how small the chance it could happen, one molecule could be created by such astronomical odds of chance. However, one molecule is of no use. Hundreds of millions of identical ones are necessary. Thus we either admit the miracle or doubt the absolute truth of science.” Weighing the evidence, it is not unfair to suggest that it takes as much faith, if not more, to believe in random chance as it does to believe in a Creator. One can understand why no less a scientist than Albert Einstein, though not of an orthodox faith, felt “rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that compared with it all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. Dr. Einstein’s belief in the harmony of the Universe caused him to conclude, “God does not play dice with the cosmos.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Scientific argument also fail to take human’s basic nature into account: We are imbued with a deep longing for a god. Even an obstinate unbeliever like philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote, “One is a ghost, floating through the World without any real contact. Even when one feels nearest to other people, something in one seems obstinately to belong to Gd, and to refuse to enter into any Earthly communion—at least that is how I should express it if I thought there was a god. It is odd, isn’t it? I care passionately for this World and many things and people in it, and yet…what is it all? There must be something more important, one feels, though I do not believe there is.” When people try to suppress their essential nature, they must either admit the haunting desire for a god, as did Russell, or deal with the inner turmoil through their own means, often with disastrous consequences. Hemingway chose the latter course, as, for that matter, did Marx, Nietzsche, and Dr. Freud. Near the end of their lives, they were all bitter and lonely men. Nietzsche’s insanity, many believe, was due as much to the despair of nihilism as to venereal disease. Dr. Freud could not be comforted after his daughter’s death, as if he was grieving at the finality of life without God. In his last days Marx was consumed with hatred. All these men were simply reaping the logical consequences of their own philosophies. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
However, even should we concede that humans just happened, and that one creates one’s own need for God, how do we explain one’s need for purpose? Consistent evidence points not only to human’s deep spiritual longings, but to a purposeful nature in one’s desire for community, family, and work. The great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevski said that not to believe in God was to be condemned to a senseless Universe. In The House of the Dead he wrote that if one wanted to utterly crush a human, one need only give one work of a completely irrational character, as the writer oneself had discovered during his ten years in prison. “If he had to move a heap of Earth from one place to another and back again—I believe the convict would hang oneself…preferring rather to die than endure…such humiliation, shame and torture.” Humans will cling to life with a steadfast resolve while working meaningfully, even if that work supports their hated captors. However, purposeless labour soon snaps the mind. One might argue that our need to work was acquired over centuries of evolution. However, we must do more than work just to survive; we must do work that has a purpose. Evolution cannot explain this. More plausible is the belief that humans are a reflection of the nature of a purposeful Creator. However, for those who insist that God is created by humans, perhaps the most telling argument is to consider the nature and character of the God revealed in the Bible. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
If we were making up our own god, would we create one with such harsh demands for justice, righteousness, service, and self-sacrifice as we find in the biblical texts? (As someone has said, Moses did not come down from the mountain with Ten Suggestions!) Would Israel’s elite have concocted such declarations as “He defended the cause of the poor and needy…Is that not what it means to know me?” Would the pious New Testament religious establishment have created a God who condemned them for their own hypocrisy? Would even a zealous discipline have invented a Messiah who called His followers to sell all, give their possessions to the poor, and follow Him to their deaths? The skeptic who believes the Bible’s human authors manufactured their God out of psychological need has not read the Scriptures carefully. However, can we rely on the biblical accounts? you make ask. When I first became a Christian, I certainly raised such questions. In fact, I began to study the Bible with a lawyer’s skepticism. I suspected it was a compilation of ancient fables that had endured through the centuries because of its wisdom. I made some startling discoveries, however. The original documents from which the Scripture derive were rigorously examined for authenticity by early canonical councils. They demanded eyewitness accounts of apostolic authorship. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Today, a growing body of historical evidence affirms the accuracy of the Scriptures. For example, the prophecy recorded in Psalm 22 explicitly details a crucifixion, with it piercing of the hands and feet, disjoining of the bones, dehydration. Crucifixion, however, was a means of execution unknown to Palestine until the Romans introduced it—several hundred years after the Palestine until the Romans introduced it—several hundred years after the Psalms were written. So modern critics concluded the Psalms were written later, such “prophecies” perhaps even recorded after the fact. Then came the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which made possible the scientific dating of portions of the Psalms to hundreds of years before Christ. Modern technology and archeological discoveries are also adding substantial support to the historical authenticity of Scripture. As historian Paul Johnson has written, “A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts.” However, sometimes personal experience offers the most convincing evidence. Ironically, the Watergate cover-up left me convinced that the biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus Christ are historically reliable. In my Watergate experience I saw the inability of humans—powerful, highly motivated professionals—to hold together a conspiracy based on a lie. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
It was less than three weeks from the time that Mr. Nixon knew all the facts to the time that John Den went to the prosecutors. Once that happened Mr. Nixon’s presidency was doomed. The actual cover-up lasted less than a month. Yet Christ’s powerless followers maintained to their grim deaths by execution that they had in fact seen Jesus Christ raised from the dead. There was no conspiracy, no Passover plot. Men and women do not give up their comfort—and certainly not their lives—for what they know to be a lie. Finally, many of the World’s greatest philosophers and scientists have gone beyond deductive assent to the confidence that God exists because they have experienced Him. Were Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Newton, and the great social reformers of the nineteenth century victims of infantile wis fulfillment? Did some psychological whim motivate St. Francis or George Fox to expend their lives in protest against economic elitism? Was Louis Pasteur, who laboured against great physical disabilities to achieve scientific breakthroughs to benefit humans, simply mistaken in his motivation to do so for the glory of God? What is it that motivated people, both Christian and nonbeliever, to do works of mercy? The goodness of the human heart? Hardly. Human’s basic nature, as we shall see in the future, suggests just the reverse. Rather, love for others, like the need for purpose, is implanted in the hearts and minds of men and women—even those who do not acknowledge it—by a loving and purposeful Creator. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Faith requires no surrender of the intellect. It is not blind, unthinking, and irrational. Nor is it simply a psychological crutch. For me, the objective evidence for God’s existence is more convincing than any case I argued as an attorney. However, most rebellion against God is not intellectual. I have met few genuine atheists who would argue passionately that there can be no God. Instead, the preponderance of objections are moral and personal. Before one’s eventual conversion, when philosopher Mortimer Adler was pressed on one’s reluctance to become a Christian, he replied, “That’s a great gulf between the mind and the heart. I was on the edge of becoming a Christian several times, but didn’t do it. I said that if one is born a Christian, ne can be light-hearted about living up to Christianity, but if one coverts by a clear conscious act of will, one has better be prepared to live a truly Christian life. So you ask yourself, are you prepared to give up all your vices and the weaknesses of the flesh?” It is on the moral level that the most intense battle is being fought for the hearts of modern humans. If Hemingway and the twenty-first century skeptics are right—if God is dead or irrelevant—then the prospect for true harmony and justice is grim. Sometimes children understand this profound truth better than adults. Several years ago my son Leo and I were discussing the evidence for God. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
As I argued that if there were no God, it would be impossible to account for moral law, my grandson Pete, then four, interrupted. “But Grandpa,” he said, “there is a God.” I nodded, assuring him I agreed. “See, if there was not a God, Grandpa,” he continued, “people could not love each other.” Pete is right. Only the overarching presence and provision of God assures that both Christian and non-Christian enjoy human dignity and a means to escape our naturally sinful condition. Without His presence, we could not long survive together on this planet. There is That which abides in itself, sufficient to itself, unique, the Consciousness, the Finality. There is nothing beyond it. Before That one must bow in utmost reverence, humbled to the ground. This is the only thing which is able to subsist entirely by itself, which is independent of and beyond all relations with any other thing. This, considered absolute, is God. In the beginning was Being—Mind; the principle of being, living, was inseparable from the principle of Knowing, Consciousness. It was transcendental and eternal. It is only we humans who are compelled to talk of beginnings although there was no such thing. This is why the Absolute is unapproachable, ineffable. The World is not self-existent but MIND is. Because it is utterly independent of all other things and entities, it is the Absolute. It is in Sanskrit Aja, “the UNBORN,” the only thing which had no beginning in time and which can have no ending for it is BEING itself. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
There were those among the ancient Greek sages who taught with reverence about “THAT WHICH REALLY IS.” It is Self-existent, all-pervading, and boundless in every way. The huge paradox of life becomes plainer as one becomes older. Nothing stands alone, all things come in couples. But stay!—there is one which is exempt from this law. No law can hold it for it holds them all itself. Mind is the ever-free, bound by no authority, chanied to no law, not even the law of cause and effect. This is called “being-by-itself” but others called “Non-being.” These are simply two descriptions of the same thing—one positive, the other negative. Every other entity or thing cannot not be, but not the Supreme Principle, for it is Be-ing itself. That which exists through itself is MIND. This infinite being has the power to support itself—nothing else has. The Infinite Power can never become exhausted. It is self-sustaining. This is the ultimate Being beyond which there is nothing. We are dependent on and dwell in Mind but Mind on the contrary is self-sustained and dwells in itself. If we say, “God is a Mind,” we err greatly. If we say, “God is Mind,” we speak more rightly. The introduction of this shortest of short words falsifies our idea of God because it separates, personalizes, and differentiates the Absolute. Ride beneath their planes, protecting spirits, raising up their wings with your own. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Please guide their weapons, warrior spirits, bringing them to their targets with accuracy. Be with them throughout their mission, spirits of power, that that must be done will be done, that it will be done well. May I go and return in safety. May I go and return with profit. May I go and return accomplishing my goals. May I go and return in the hands of God. May I go and return under His protection. Praised art Thou, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, mighty, revered and exalted God. Thou bestowest loving kindness and possessest all things. Mindful of the patriarch’s love for Thee, Thou wilt in Thy love bring a redeemer to their children’s children for the sake of Thy name. Please remember us unto life, O King who delightest in life, and inscribe us in the Book of Life so that we may live worthily for Thy sake, O Lord of life. O King, Thou Helper, Redeemer and Shield, be Thou praised, O Lord, Shield of Abraham. Thou, O Lord, art mighty forever. Thou callest the dead to immortal life for Thou art mighty in deliverance. Thou causest the wind to blow and the rain to fall. Thou sustainest the living with loving kindness, and in great mercy callest the departed to everlasting life. Thou upholdest the falling, healest the sick, settest free those in bondage, and keeps faith with those that sleep in the dust. Who is like unto Thee, Almighty King, who decreest death and life and bringest forth salvation? Mind, alone, has the right to say, “I AM!” but then, it is forever silent. All others can only say, “I am me,” indicating a person. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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My God Sits in the Back of the Limousine, My God Has the House on the Cover of the Magazine!
When choosing between two evils, I always like to take the one I have never tried before. The justification for majority rule rests squarely on the political ends that the constitution is designed to achieve, and therefore on the two principles of justice. As a reminder, the first principle of justice states that each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all. The second principle of justice states that social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: They are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle). The first principle of equal basic liberties is to be embodied in the political constitution, while the second principle applies primarily to economic institutions. Fulfillment of the first principle takes priority over fulfillment of the second principle, and within the second principle fair equality of opportunity takes priority over the difference principle. The first principle affirms that all citizens should have the familiar basic rights and liberties: liberty of conscience and freedom of association, freedom of speech and liberty of the person, the rights to vote, to hold public office, to be treated in accordance with the rule of law, and so on. The first principle accords these rights and liberties to all citizens equally. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Unequal rights would not benefit those who would get a lesser share of the rights, so justice requires equal rights for all, in all normal circumstances. The second distinctive feature of the first principle is that it requires fair value of the political liberties. The political liberties, concerned with the right to hold public office, the right to affect the outcome of national elections and so on. For these liberties, citizens who are similarly endowed and motivated should have similar opportunities to hold office, to influence elections, and so on regardless of how rich or poor they are. This fair value proviso has major implications for how elections should be funded and run. The second principle of justice has two parts. The first part, fair equality of opportunity, requires that citizens with the same talents and willingness to use them have the same educational and economic opportunities regardless of whether they were born rich or poor. In all parts of society there are to be roughly the same prospects of culture and achievement for those similarly motivated and endowed. So, for example, if we assume that natural endowments and the willingness to use them are evenly distributed across children born into different social classes, then within any type of occupation (generally specified) we should find that roughly one quarter of people in that occupation were born into the top 25 percent of the income distribution, one quarter were born into the second-highest 25 percent of the income distribution, one quarter were born into the lowest 25 percent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Since class of origin is a morally arbitrary fact about citizens, justice does not allow class origin to turn into unequal opportunities for education or meaningful work. The second part of the second principle is the difference principle, which regulates the distribution of wealth and income. Allowing inequalities of wealth and income can lead to a larger social product: higher wages can cover the costs of training and education, for example, and can provide incentives to fill jobs that are more in demand. The difference principle allows inequalities of wealth and income, so long as these will be to everyone’s advantage, and specifically to advantage of those who will be worst off. The difference principle requires, that is, that any economic inequalities be to the greatest advantage of those who are advantaged least. The difference principle is partly based on the negative thesis that the distribution of natural assets is undeserved. A citizen does not merit more of the social product simply because one was lucky enough to be born with the potential to develop skills that are currently in high demand. Yet this does not mean that everyone must get the same shares. The fact that citizens have different talents and abilities can be used to make everyone better office. In a society governed by the difference principle, citizens regard the distribution of natural endowments as a common asset that can benefit all. Those better endowed are welcome to use their gifts to make themselves better off, so long as their doing so also contributes to the good of those less well endowed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The difference principle this expresses a positive ideal, an ideal of deep social unity. In a society that satisfies the difference principle, citizens know that their economy works to everyone’s benefit, and that those who were lucky enough to be born with greater natural potentials are not getting richer at the expense of those who were less fortunate. In justice as fairness, humans agree to share one another’s fate. I have assumed that some form of majority rule is justified as the best available way of insuring just and effective legislation. It is compatible with equal liberty and possesses a certain naturalness; for if minority rule is allowed, there is no obvious criterion to select which one is decide and equality is violated. A fundamental part of the majority principle is that the procedure should satisfy the conditions of background justice. In this case these conditions are those of political liberty—freedom of speech and assembly, freedom to take part in public affairs and to influence by constitutional means the course of legislation—and the guarantee of the fair value of these freedoms. When this background is absent, the first principle of justice is not satisfied; yet even when it is present, there is no assurance that legislation with be enacted. One problem with this procedure of majority rule is that it may allow cyclical majorities. However, the primary defect from the point of view of justice is that it permits the violation of liberty. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
There is nothing to the view, then, that what the majority wills is right. In fact, none of the traditional conceptions of justice have held this doctrine, maintaining always that the outcome of the voting is subject to political principles. Although in given circumstances it is justified that the majority (suitably defined and circumscribed) has the constitutional right to make law, this does not imply that the laws enacted are just. The dispute of substances about majority rule concerns how it is best defined and whether constitutional constraints are effective and reasonable devices for strengthening the overall balance of justice. These limitations may often be used by entrenched minorities to preserve their illicit advantages. This question is one of political judgment and does not belong to the theory of justice. It suffices to note that while citizens normally submit their conduct to democratic authority, that is, recognized the outcome of a vote as establishing a binding rule, other things equal, they do not submit their judgment to it. A justice constitution is defined as a constitution that would be agreed upon by rational delegates in a constitutional convention who are guided by the two principles of justice. When we justify a constitution, we present considerations to show that it would be adopted under these conditions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Similarly, just laws and policies are those that would be enacted by rational legislators at the legislative stage who are constrained by a justice constitution and who are conscientiously trying to follow the principles of justice as their standard. When we criticize laws and policies, we try to show that they would not be chosen under this ideal procedure. Now since even rational legislators would often reach different conclusions, there is a necessity for a vote under ideal conditions. The restrictions on information will not guarantee agreement, since the tendencies of the general social facts will often be ambiguous and difficult to assess. The Lord has said that “there is a law, irrevocably decreed in Heaven before the foundations of this World, upon which all blessings are predicated—and when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 130.20-21. It would seem from this declaration that there is no permanent progress made in any field or in any place except it be through obedience to the governing law. We know this is true in the Heavens, because the Lord said: “That which is governed by law is also preserved by law and perfected and sanctified by the same. That which breaketh a law, and abideth not by law, but seeketh to become a law unto itself, and willeth to abide in sin [sin, being the breaking of the law], and altogether abideth in sin, cannot be sanctified by law, neither by mercy, justice, nor judgment. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
“For judgement goeth before the face of one who sitteth upon the throne and governeth and executeth all things. And one hath given a law unto all things, by which they move in their times and their seasons; and their courses are fixed, even the courses of the Heavens and the Earth, which comprehend the Earth and all the planets,” Doctrine and Covenants 88.34-35, 40, 42-43. This scripture tells us that all things in God’s economy, even those which to us seem inanimate, obey the laws by which they are governed. “The Earth [for example] abideh the law of a celestial kingdom, for it filleth the measure of its creation, and transgresseth not the law,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 88.25. Therefore, it shall be crowned with glory, even with the presence of God the Father; that bodies who are of the celestial kingdom may possess it forever and ever; and they who are not sanctified through the law which I have given unto you, even the law of Christ [which is His gospel—the perfect law of liberty] must inherit another kingdom, for one who is not able to abide the law of the celestial kingdom cannot abide a celestial glory. And one who cannot abide the law of a terrestrial kingdom cannot abide a terrestrial glory. And one who cannot abide the law of a telestial kingdom cannot abide a telestial glory,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 88.19-24. How blessed are Latter-day Saint to be assured by the revealed word of God that there will be no capriciousness in the World to come. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
We are so blessed that every soul will be rewarded according to the law that one has obeyed; all divine law is as immutable as the law of gravity; it is the same yesterday, today, and forever; judgment will be mercifully administered, but it will be administered pursuant to law, and it will not rob justice. Not only are we blessed by having this knowledge concerning the rule of law; we are twice blessed by having both a knowledge and an understanding of the laws by which we are to be judged. If we were to fail to obey the law, in our light of our knowledge of the perfect law of liberty, how shortsighted, how foolish, how tragic that would be. Latter-day Saints should strictly obey the laws of the government in which they live. By our own declaration of faith we are committed to do so, for we declare to the World that “we believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honouring, and sustaining the law,” reports Articles of Faith 1.12. This we do in harmony with the Lord’s command: “Let no human break the laws of the land, for one that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land. Wherefore, be subject to the powers that be, until one reigns whose right it is to reign, and subdues all enemies under one’s feet,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 58.21-22. Civil authority is of divine origin. It may be more or less adapted to the needs of humans; more or less just and benevolent, but, even at its worst, it is better than anarchy. Revolutionary movements that aim at the abolition of government itself are contrary to the law of God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
When the rule of law breaks down in a family, a community, a state, or a nation, chaos reigns. The kingdoms of Heaven are to be free from chaos, because no one will be in any one of them who does not by one’s own free will obey the laws thereof. Here on Earth, some people steadfastly refuse to face such facts. We avoid them by stubbornly refusing to recognize the speed of change. It makes us feel better to defer the future. Even those closet to the cutting edge of technology and scientific research can scarcely believe the reality. Even they routinely underestimate the speed at which the future is breaking on our shores. Thus Dr. Richard J. Cleveland, speaking before a conference of organ transplant specialists, announced in January, 1967, that the first human heart transplant operation will occur “within five years.” Yet before the same year was our Dr. Christiaan Barnard had operated on a fifty-five-year-old grocer named Louis Washkansky, and a staccato sequence of heart transplant operation exploded like a string of firecrackers into the World’s awareness. In the meantime, success rates are rising steadily in kidney transplants to 97 percent. Successful liver, pancreas, and ovary transplants are also reported. Scientists and doctors are getting so good that they even have the ability to do face transplants now. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Such accelerating medical advances must compel profound changes in our ways of thinking, as well as our way of caring for the sick. Startling new legal, ethical and philosophical issues arise. What, for instance, is death? Does death occur when the heart stops beating, as we have traditionally believed? Or does it occur when the brain stops functioning? Hospitals are becoming more and more familiar with cases of patients kept alive through advanced medical techniques, but doomed to exist as unconscious vegetables. What are the ethics of condemning such a person to death to obtain a healthy organ needed for transplant to save the life of a person with a better prognosis? Lacking guidelines or precedents, we flounder over the moral and legal questions. Ghoulish rumors race through the medical community. There has been speculation about the possibility of future murder rings supplying healthy organs for unofficial surgeons whose patients are unwilling to wait until natural sources have supplied the heart or liver or pancreas they need. In Trenton, New Jersey USA—an Israeli citizen living in Brooklyn, New York USA, admitted to brokering three illegal kidney transplants for payments of $120,000.00 UDS or more before he was caught conspiring to organize another illegal sale. Levy Izhak Rosenbaum also known as Isaac Rosenbaum, age 60 at the time he brought to trial in 2011 (now age 70), plead guilty to an information charging him with three counts of acquiring, receiving, and otherwise transferring human organs for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation; and one count of conspiracy to do the same. Mr. Rosenbaum was originally charged with the conspiracy by Complain in July 2009. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The defendant entered his guilty plea before U.S. District Judge Anne E. Thompson in Trenton federal court. Mr. Rosenbaum’s convictions were the first under the federal statue involving illegal market sales of kidneys from paid donors. “Mr. Rosenbaum admitted he was not new to the human kidney business when he was caught brokering what he thought was an organ trafficking,” U.S. Attorney Fishman said. “Trafficking in human organs is not only a grave threat to public health, it reserves lifesaving treatment for those who can best afford it at the expense of those who cannot. We will not tolerate such an affront to human dignity.” According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court: Mr. Rosenbaum admitted that from January 2006 through February 2009, he conspired with other to provide a service, in exchange for large payments, to individuals seeking kidney transplants by obtaining kidneys from paid donors. Specifically, Mr. Rosenbaum admitted to arranging three transplants on behalf of New Jersey residents that took place in December 2006, September 2008, and February 2009. Mr. Rosenbaum admitted that he was paid approximately $120, 000.00 USA, $150,000.00 USA, and $140,000.00 USD, respectively on behalf of these three recipients. Mr. Rosenbaum’s kidney business was exposed through the use of cooperating criminal defendant Solomon Dwek and an undercover FBI agent (the “UC”) who was posing as an employee of Dwek and who represented to Mr. Rosenbaum that her uncle was in need of a kidney transplant. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Dwek and the UC first met with Mr. Rosenbaum in mid-February 2008 at which time Mr. Rosenbaum informed them that “it’s illegal to buy and sell organs,” but assured them that “I’m doing this a long time.” Mr. Rosenbaum explained to Dwek and the UC that he would help the recipient and the donor concoct a fictitious story to make it appear that the transplant was the product of a genuine donation and that he would be in charge of babysitting the donor upon the donor’s arrival from overseas. In Washington, the National Academy of Science, backed by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, has been studying social policy issues springing from advances in the life sciences. At Stanford, a symposium, also funded by Russell Sage, examines methods for setting up transplant organ banks, the economics of an organ market, and evidence of the economics of an organ market, and evidences of class or racial discrimination in organ availability. The possibility of cannibalizing bodies or corpses for usable transplant organs, grisly as it is, will serve to accelerate further the pace of change by lending urgency to research in the field of artificial organs—plastic or electronic substitutes for the heart or liver or spleen. (Eventually, even these may be made unnecessary when we learn how to regenerate damaged organs or severed limbs, growing new ones as the lizard now grows a tail.) #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
And it is totally possible that the human body could be advanced to regrow limbs, organs, and other healthy tissues as it already replaces blood, hair, teeth, nail, skin and you see how can manifest and growth tumors and cancer. So if scientists are able to unlock the secrets of the human body, stopping death and loss of organs and life is totally possible. The drive to develop spare parts for failing human bodies will be stepped up as demand intensified. The development of an economical artificial heart, Professor Lederberg says, “is only a few transient failures away.” Professors R. M. Kenedi of the bio-engineering group at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow believes that “artificial replacements for tissues and organs may well have become commonplace.” For some organs, this is in fact, a reality. Already more than 3 million cardiac patients Worldwide—including a former Supreme Court justice—are alive because they carry, stitched into their chest cavity, a tiny pacemaker—a device that sends pulses of electricity to activate the hearts. Each year 600,000 pacemakers are implanted. Approximal 90,000 heart valve substitutes are now implanted in the United States of America and 280,000 Worldwide each year; it is estimated that nearly half are mechanical valves and half are bioprosthetic valves. Implanting hearing aids, artificial kidneys, arteries, hip joints, lungs, eye sockets and other parts are all in various stages of early development. We shall, before many decades are past, implant tiny, aspirin-sized sensors in the body to monitor blood pressures, pulse, respiration and other functions, and tiny transmitters to emit a signal when something goes wrong. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Such signals will feed into giant diagnostic computer centers upon which the medicine of the future will be based. Some of us will carry a tiny platinum plate and a dime-sized “stimulator” attached to the spine. By turning a midget “radio” on and off we will be able to activate the stimulator and kill the pain. Initial work on these pain-control mechanisms is already under way at the Case Institute of Technology. Push button pain killers are already being used by certain cardiac patients. Such developments will lead to vast new bio-engineering industries, chains of medical-electronic repair stations, new technical professions and a reorganization of the entire health system. They will change life expectancy, shatter insurance company life tables, and bring about important shifts in the human outlook. Surgery will be less frightening to the average individual; implantation routine. The human body will come to be seen as modular. Through application of the modular principle—preservation of the whole through systematic replacement of transient components—we may add two or three decades to the average life span of the entire population. Imagine that, people living to be an average of 100 to 120 and strong and healthy. Unless, however, we develop far more advanced understanding of the brain than we now have, this could lead to one of the greatest ironies in history. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Sir George Pickering Regius professor of medicine at Oxford, has waned that unless we watch out, “those with senile brains will form an ever increasing fraction of the inhabitants of the Earth. I find this,” he added unnecessarily, “a terrifying prospect. With President Joe Biden being the 46th President of the United States and the oldest President so far, being 78 years of age, many feel this is why Speaker on the United States House, Nancy Pelosi fought to remind the people about the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The 25th Amendment deals with Presidential Disability and Succession, which says that is a President becomes unable to do his or her job, the Vice President shall become President. This amendment was passed by Congress 6 July 1965, and ratified 10 February 1967. Such terrifying prospects will drive us toward more accelerated research into the brain—which, in turn, will generate still further radical changes in the society. Today we strive to make heart valves or artificial plumbing that imitate the original they are designed to place. We have even been able to use valves from the hearts of pigs into human beings. We strive for functional equivalence. Once we have mastered the basic problems, however, we shall not merely install plastic aortas in people because their original aorta is about to fail. We shall install specially-designed parts that are better than the original, and then we shall move on to install parts that provide the user with capabilities that were absent in the first place. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Just as genetic engineering holds out the promise of producing “super-people,” so, too, does organ technology suggest the possibility of track stars with extra-capacity lungs or hearts; sculptors with a neural device that intensifies sensitivity to texture; students with super computer brains. We will no longer implant merely to save a life, but to enhance it—to make possible the achievement of moods, states, conditions or ecstasies that are presently beyond us. Under these circumstances, what happens to our ago-old definitions of “human-ness?” How will it feel to be part protoplasm and part transistor? Exactly what possibilities will it open? What limitations will it place on work, play, socialism, intellectual or aesthetic responses? What happens to the mind when they body is changed? Questions like these cannot be long deferred, for advanced fusions of human and machine—called “Cyborgs”—are closer than more people suspect. We are constantly faced by the hoariest of all problems, which is “Why did the Universe arise out of the depth and darkness of the Absolute Spirit?” The Seer can offer us a picture of the way in which this Spirit has involved itself into matter and is evolving itself back to self-knowledge. That is only the How and not the Why of the World. The truth is not only that nobody has ever known, that nobody knows, and that nobody will ever know the final and fundamental purpose of creation, but that God Himself does not even know—for God too has arisen out of the Absolute no less than the Universe, has found Himself emanated from the primeval darkness and utter silence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Even God must be content to watch the flow and not wonder why, for both God and humans must merge and be absorbed when they face the Absolute for the last time. (In the symbolic language of the Bible, “For humans cannot meet God face to face and live.”) That which IS can be none other than Final Being itself, not dependent on anything or anyone, mysteriously self-sufficient without a shape, yet all shaped things and creature have emerged from elements which trace back to it. Forever alone, there was none to witness the Beginning. As Mind the Real is static, as World-Mind it is dynamic. As Godhead It alone is in the stillness of being; but as God it is the source, substance, and power of the Universe. As Mind there is no second thing, no second intelligence to ask the question why it stirred and breathed forth World-Mind, hence why the whole World-process exists. Only humans ask this question and it returns unanswered. For all of us, for the witless and for the wise, there are unanswerable questions in life and we must learn to live with them. None of us is a full and finalized encyclopedia, for however, far we may penetrate into the meaning of things we are always confronted in the end by the Unknowable Mystery. We do not know why the whole process of involution and evolution ever started at all: because we find that there is in the deepest metaphysical sense no becoming and process at all, there is only the Real. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
At the ultimate level there is neither purpose nor plan because there is no creation. Mind, which forever is, can undergo n change in itself and no multiplication of itself. If it could, it would not be what it is—the Ultimate, the Unconditioned, and the Unique. Nor, being perfect, complete, could it have desire, purpose, aim, or motive for itself. Therefore it could not have projected the Universe on account of any benefit sought or gain needed. There is no answer to the question why the Universe was sent forth. It is to impose human limitation upon the transcendental Godhead to say that It has any eternal purpose to fulfill for Itself in the cosmos, whether that purpose be the establishment of a perfect society on Earth or the training of individuals to enter into fellowship with It and participate in Its creative work. Purpose implies a movement in times whereas the Godhead is also the Timeless. Neither this Earth nor the societies upon it can be necessary to God’s serenely self-sufficient being. Yet these fallacies are still taught by the theology of theistic orthodox. We know as much, and as little, about the Primal Mind as we know why there was a beginning of the Universe—that is, precisely nothing. If being asked how to prevent oneself from being deceived by these pseudo-intuitions, it can be said that a useful rule is to check them against other sources on the same subject and see if they all harmonize. If, for example, fifty inspired humans who have written on the subject teach what contradictions the alleged intuition, then there is something wrong on one side or the other and careful investigation is called for. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
It is always safer to ascertain what the great scriptural texts or the classic mystical testaments have to tell on the matter and not depend solely on what one’s intuition tells. We need more. And most of us—deep down—cannot deny it. There is a core of truth buried in every heart, a truth that we cannot escape. All-Father God, protector of travelers, please guards us, please guide us, please bring us through in safety and ease on our journey today. As I enter your realm, spirits of the air, as I mount to the clouds in this airplane, I place myself in your hands. There, among the vagaries of the winds, I will not be afraid, because I know you are my allies. As I fly today, please be at my side. Please protect me until I land again safely. Who is like unto Thee, O Lord, among the mighty? Who is like unto Thee, glorious in holiness, revered in praises, doing wonders? At the shore of the Red Sea, the redeemed offered praise unto Thy name. Singing a new song, they proclaimed Thy sovereignty: “The Lord shall reign for ever and ever.” O Rock of America, arise to help Thy scattered folk; deliver all who are crushed beneath oppression’s heel. Thou art our Saviour: the Lord of Hosts is Thy name; blessed art Thou, O Lord, Redeemer of America. O Lord, please open Thou my lips and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. Expand your faith so you can access everything God has in store. Allow God to be present in your life and have faith in Him, and you will see God make miracles and blessings that you can only imagine in your best dreams! #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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The Most Honest Alchemists Readily Admitted that They Had Not Yet Plumed the Final Secret!
It was until very recently considered not worthwhile to rack one’s brains over medieval abstruse alchemical symbols. A fierce controversy is already ranging today among biologist over the problems and ethical issues arising out of eugenics. Should we try to breed a better race? If so, exactly what is “better?” And who is to decide? Such questions are not entirely new. Yet the techniques soon to be available smash the traditional limits of the argument. We can now imagine reaming the human race not as a farmer slowly and labouriously “breeds up” one’s herd, but as an artist might, employing a brilliant range of unfamiliar colours, shapes, and forms. Not far from Route 80, outside the little town of Hazard, Kentucky USA, is a place picturesquely known as Valley of Troublesome Creek. In this tiny backwoods community lives a family whose members, for generations, have been marked by an unusual anomaly: blue skin. According to Dr. Madison Cawein of the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, who tracked the family down and traces its story, the blue-skinned people seem perfectly normal in other respects. Their unusual colour is caused by a rare enzyme deficiency that has been passed from one generation to the next. Given our new, fast-accumulating knowledge of genetics, we shall be able to breed whole new races of bule people—or, for that matter, green, purple, or orange. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
In a World still suffering from the moral lesion of racism, this is a thought to be conjured with. Should we strive for a World in which all people share the same skin colour? If we want that, we shall no doubt have the technical means for bringing it about. Or should we, instead, work toward even greater diversity than now exists? What happens to the entire concept of race? To standards of physical beauty? To notions of superiority or inferiority? We are hurtling toward the time when we will be able to breed both super- and sub-races. As Theodore J. Gordon put it in The Future, “Given the ability to tailor the race, I wonder if we would create all men equal, or would we choose to manufacture apartheid? Might the races of the future be: a superior group, the DNA controllers; the humble servants; special athletes for the ‘game”; research scientists wit 200 IQ and diminutive bodies.” We shall have the power to produce races of morons or of mathematical savants. We shall also be able to breed babies with supernormal vision or hearing, supernormal ability to detect changes in odor, or supernormal muscular or musical skills. We will be able to create a variety breed of humans, and countless other varieties of the previously monomorphic human being. Ultimately, the problems are not scientific or technical, but ethical and political. Choice—and the criteria for choice—will be critical. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Assuming hopefully for the moment that no dictator, self-righteous planning board or omnipotent black box is going to make genetic selections for the coming generation, then who or what is? Not parents, certainly. They will take the problem to their friendly neighbourhood Certified Gene Architect. It seems inevitable to me that there will also be competitive schools for genetic architecture. The Functionalists will persuade parents to produce babies fitted for the present needs of society; the Futurists will suggest children who will have a niche in the culture as it will have evolved in twenty years; the Romantics will insist that each child be bred with at least one outstanding talent; and the Naturalists will advise the production of individuals so balanced genetically as to be in almost perfect equilibrium. Human body styles, like human clothing styles, will become outre, or a la mode as the genetic couturiers who designed them come into and out of vogue. Buried behind this tongue-in-cheek are serious issues, made more profound by the immensity of the possibilities—some of them so grotesque that they appear to leap at us from the canvases of Hieronymus Bosch. Mention was made earlier of the idea of breeding humans with gills or implanting gills in them for underwater environments. At a meeting of World-renowned biologists in London, J.B.S. Haldane began to expatiate about the possibility of creating new, far-out forms of humans for space exploration. “The most obvious abnormalities in extra-terrestrial environments are differences in gravitation, temperature, air pressure, air composition, and radiation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
“Clearly a gibbon is better preadapted than a man for life in a low gravitational field, such as that of a space ship, an asteroid, or perhaps even the moon. A platyrrhine with a prehensile tail is even more so. Gene grafting may make it possible to incorporate such features into the human stocks.” While the scientists at this meeting devoted much of their attention to the moral consequences and perils of the biological revolution, no one challenged Dr. Haldane’s suggestions that we shall someday make humans with tails if we want them. Indeed, Dr. Lederberg merely observed that there might well be non-genetic ways to accomplish the same ends more easily. “We are going to modify man experimentally through physiological and embryological alterations, and by the substitution of machines for his parts. If we want a man without legs, we don’t have to breed him, we can chop them off; if we want a man with a tail, we will find a way of grafting it on to him.” At another meeting of scientists and scholars, Dr. Robert Sinsheimer, a Caltech biophysicist, put the challenge squarely: “How will you choose to intervene in the ancient designs of nature for man? Would you like to control the sex (gender) of your offspring? It will be as you wish. Would you like your son to be six feet tall—seven feet? Eight feet? What troubles you?—allergy, obesity, arthritic pain? These will be easily handled. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
“For cancer, diabetes, phenylketonuria there will be genetic therapy. The appropriate DNA will be provided in the appropriate dose. Viral and microbial disease will be easily met. Even the timeless patterns of growth and maturity and aging will be subject to our design. We know of no intrinsic limits to the life span. How long would you like to live?” Lest his audience mistake him, Dr. Sinsheimer asked: “Do these projections should like LSD fantasies, or the view in a distorted mirror? None transcends the potential of what we now know. They may not be developed in the way one might now anticipate, but they are feasible, they can be brought to reality, and sooner rather than later.” Not only can such wonders be brought to reality, but the odds are they will. Despite profound ethical questions about whether they should, the fact remains that scientific curiosity is, itself, one of the most powerful driving forces in our society. In the words of Dr. Rollin D. Hotchkiss of the Rockefeller Institute: “Many of us feel instinctive revulsion at the hazards of meddling with the finely balanced and far-reaching systems that make an individual what he is. Yet I believe it will surely be done or attempted. The pathway will be built from a combination of altruism, private profit and ignorance.” To this list, worse yet, he might have added political conflict and bland unconcern. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
Thus Dr. A. Neyfakh, chief of the research laboratory of the Institute of Development Biology of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, predicts with a frightening lack of anxiety that the World will soon witness a genetic equivalent of the arms race. He bases his argument on the notion that the capitalist powers are engaged in a “struggle for brains.” To make up for the brain drain, one or another of the “reactionary governments” will be “compelled” to employ genetic engineering to increase its output of geniuses and gifted individuals. Since this will occur “regardless of their intention,” an international genetics race is inevitable. And this being so, he implies, the Soviet Union ought to be ready to jump the gun. Criticized by the Soviet philosopher A. Petropavlovsky for his seeming willingness, even enthusiasm, to participate in such a race, Dr. Neyfakh shrugged aside the horrors that might be unleased by hasty application of the new biology, replying merely that the advance of science is, and ought to be, unstoppable. If Dr. Neyfakh’s political logic leaves something to be desired, his appear to cold war passion as a justification for genetic tinkering is terrifying. Nonetheless, it is safe to day that, unless specific counter-measures are taken, if something can be done, someone, somewhere will do it. The nature of what can and will be done exceeds anything that humans are yet psychologically or morally prepared to live with. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
We have to be careful with playing God, but ignoring God. People had been fed up with the waves of change sweeping the nation in the early nineties. Not only was prayer outlawed in schools, but in all public places, before football games and commencements, and in all public buildings. Even the Senate chaplaincy had been abandoned. A series of ACLU-sponsored cases had reshaped American geography: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was forced to change its name, as was Corpus Christi, Texas. St. Louis was narrowly spared by a five-four decision that held that the word saint no longer held a specifically sacred connotation. Drug dealers’ armed gangs controlled several public schools. Many assume that humans desire only what is good for them, and therefore that pleasure is a guide for desirable actions. However, we know that many of human’s desires are irrational, precisely because they harm one (if not others) and interfere with one’s development. The person who is motivated by the wish to destroy and who feels pleasure in the act of destruction could hardly present the excuse that one has the right to behave destructively because this is a desire and one’s source of pleasure. Mental cruelty, the wish to humiliate and to hurt another person’s feelings, is probably even more widespread than physical sadism. This type of sadistic attack is much safer for the sadist; after all, no physical force but “only” words have been used. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
On the other hand, the psychic pain can be as intense or even more so than the physical. I do not need to give examples for this mental sadism. Parents inflict it upon their children, professors on their students, superiors on their inferiors—in other words, it is employed in any situation where there is someone who cannot defend oneself against the sadist. (If the teacher is helpless, the students often turn into sadists.) Mental sadism may be disguised in many seemingly harmless ways: a question, a smile, a confusing remark. Who does not know an “artist” in this kind of sadism, the one who find just the right word or the right gesture to embarrass or humiliate another in this innocent way. Naturally, if the humiliation is inflicted in front of others, this kind of sadism is often all more effective. Now, Joseph Stalin was a sadist and enjoyed playing God. One particular for Stalin enjoyed was to assure people that they were safe, only to arrest them a day or two later. Of course, the arrest hit the victim all the more severely because one had felt especially safe; besides that, Stalin could enjoy the sadistic pleasure of knowing the human’s fate at the same time that he was assuring one of his favour. What greater superiority and control over another person is there? #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
Here are some specific examples: Shortly before the arrest of the Civil War hero D. F. Serdich, Stalin toasted him at a reception, suggesting that they drink to “Bruderschaft.” Just a few days before Bliukher’s destruction, Stalin spoke of hum warmly at a meeting. When an Armenian delegation came to him, Stalin asked about the poet Charents and said he should not be touched, a few months later Charents was arrested and killed. The wife of Ordzhonikidze’s Deputy Commissar A. Serebrovskii, told about an unexpected phone call from Stalin one evening in 1937. “I hear you are going about on foot,” Stalin said. “That’s no good. People might think what they shouldn’t. I’ll send you a car if yours is being repaired.” And the next morning a car from the Kremlin garage arrived for Mrs. Serebrovskii’s use. But two days later her husband was arrested, take right from the hospital. The famous historian and publicists I. Steklov, disturbed by tall the arrests, phoned Stalin an asked for an appointment. “Of course, come on over,” Stalin said, and reassured him when they met: “What’s the matter with you? The Party knows and trusts you; you have nothing to worry about.” Steklov returned home to his friends and family, and that very evening the NKVD came for him. Naturally the first thought of his friends and family was to appeal to Stalin, who seemed unaware of what was going on. It was much easier to believe in Stalin’s ignorance than in subtle perfidy. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
In 1938 I.A. Akulov, onetime Procurator of the USSR and later Secretary of the Central Executive Committee, fell while skating and suffered an almost fatal concussion. On Stalin’s suggestion, outstanding surgeons were brought from abroad to save his life. After a long and difficult recovery, Akulov returned to work, whereupon he was arrested and shot. A particularly refined form of sadism was Stalin’s habit for arresting the wives—and sometimes children—of some of the highest Soviet or Party functionaries and keeping them in a labour camp, while their humans had to do their jobs and bow and scrape before Stalin without daring even to ask for their release. It does not require much imagination to visualize the extreme humiliation of these high functionaries who could not quit their positions, could not ask for the realize of their wives or sons, and had to agree with Stalin that the arrest had been justified. Either such men had no feelings at all, or they were morally broken and had lost all self-respect and sense of dignity. Still another form of Stalin’s sadism was the unpredictability of his behaviour. There are cases of people whom he ordered to be arrested, but who after torture and severe sentences were released after a few months or years and appointed to high offices, often without explanation. Stalin’s behaviour shows clearly one element in his character—the wish to show people that he had absolute power and control over them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
By his word he could kill them, have them tortured, have them rescued again, have them rewarded; Stalin had the power of God over life and death, the power of nature to make grow and to destroy, to inflict pain and to heal. Life and death depended on his whim. This may also explain why Stalin did not destroy some people. The motive was that Stalin enjoyed the sensation of control by whim and by mood, not restricted by any—even the most evil—principle. And that is why people fear cloning. Without Christian culture and Christian hope, the modern World would come to resemble a half-derelict fun-fair, gone nasty and poverty-racked City. Wise men and women have long recognized the need for the transcendent authority of religion to give society its legitimacy and essential cohesion. One of the most vigorous arguments was made by Cicero, who maintained that religion is “indispensable to private morals and public order…and no man of sense will attack it.” Augustine argued that the essence of public harmony could be found only in justice, the source of which is divine. “In the absence of justice,” he asked, “what sovereignty but organized brigandage?” In the New World the primary civilizing force was Christianity. Christianity provided a transcendent spiritual end which gave Wester culture its dynamic purpose. It furnished the soul for the Western civilization and provided its moral legitimization; or the fir principles which could mediate between the individual and society to provide both with a sense of proportion and responsibility in order to inform behaviour. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
Much of America’s remarkable success has been credited to its religious nature; it was later called a nation with “the soul of a church.” However, men and women need more than a religious value system. They need civic structures to prevent chaos and provide order. Religion is not intended or equipped to do this; when it has tried, it has brought grief on itself and the political institutions it has attempted to control. An independent state is crucial to the commonweal. Both the City of God and the city of man are vital to society—and they must remain in delicate balance. All human history and culture may be viewed as the interplay of the competing values of these two cities; and wherever they are out of balance, the public good suffers. This is why today’s conflict is so dangerous. It would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed should either side win unconditionally. Victory for either would mean defeat for both. In the beginning God created one World (unus mundus). This He divided into two—Heaven and Earth. We can understand the extraordinary fascination emanating from the mystery. Men and women have always been spiritual beings. If this is nothing less than a restoration of the original state of the cosmos and the divine unconsciousness of the World, we gain reliable knowledge. However, modern culture, in its zeal to eliminate divisive influences and create a self-sufficient, “enlightened” society, has ignored this fundamental truth. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Along with denying God, today’s social visionaries have denied human’s intrinsic need for God. At the same time, Christianity has become a pale shadow of the radical Kingdom its Founder announced. The shock waves that threaten the very foundations of our culture today, then, emanate from society’s failure to understand human’s need for God and the Christians’ failure to accurately present Christ’s messages of the Kingdom of God. This failure creates a disadvantage of breaking up, or obscuring, the universal interrelationship of causing events to become so uncertain that a recognition of the greater relationship, id est, of the unity of the World, to become more and more difficult. So before we can hope to deal with the modern religious-political conflict, we must take what at first may seem to be a digression. However, bear with me. For until we understand the true nature of human and the true nature of Christ’s message, we cannot hope to understand the human story and why we are in the mess we are in today—or more importantly, the way out. The place to begin, then, is with human nature itself. To be found in the human body is a kind of aetheric substance. It is the best medicament not only for the body but also for the mind (mens). Though it is a corporeal substance, as a combination of the spirit and soul of the spagyric medicine it is essentially spiritual. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
Meditative philosophy consists in the overcoming of the body by mental union [unio mentalis]. This first union does not as yet make the wise human, but only the mental disciple of wisdom. The second union of the mind with the body shows forth the wise human, hoping for and expecting that blessed third union with the first unity [id est, the unus mundus, the latent unity of the World]. May Almighty God grant that all humans be made such, and may He be one in All. Just as the Church insists on the literal taking up of the physical body into Heaven, so the alchemists believe in the possibility, or even in the actual existence, of their stone or of the philosophical gold. In both cases belief was a substitute for the missing empirical reality. Even though alchemy was essentially more materialistic in its procedures than the dogma, both of them remain at the second, anticipatory stage of the coniunctio, the union of the unio mentalis with the body. Armed with psychological understanding, we are in a position to penetrate into the meaning of even the most abstruse alchemical symbols, and there is no justifiable reason why we should not apply the same method to dogma. Nobody, after all, can deny that it consists of ideas which are born of human’s imagining and thinking. The question of how far this thinking may be inspired by the Holy Ghost is not affected at all, let alone decided, by psychological investigation, nor is the possibility of a metaphysical background denied. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Psychology cannot advance any argument either for or against the objective validity of any metaphysical view. Yet, the psychic is a phenomenal World in itself, which can be reduced neither to the brain nor to metaphysics. Symbols are tendencies whose goal is as yet unknown. We may assume that the same fundamental rules obtain in the history of the human mind as in the psychology of the individual. In psychotherapy it often happens that, long before they reach consciousness, certain unconscious tendences betray their presence by symbols, occurring mostly in dreams but also in waking fantasies and symbolic action. Often we have the impression that the unconscious is trying to enter consciousness by means of all sorts of allusions and analogies, or that it is making more or less playful attempts to attract attention to itself. One can observe these phenomena very easily in a dream-series. Ideas develop from seeds in the course of history. The Assumption of the Virgin, for instance, is vouched for neither in Scripture nor in the tradition of the first five centuries of the Christian Church. For a long time it was officially denied even, but, with the connivance of the whole medieval and modern Church, it gradually developed as a “pious opinion” and gained so much power and influence that it finally succeeded in thrusting aside the necessity for scriptural proof and for a tradition going back to primitive times, and in attaining definition in spite of the fact that the content of the dogma is not even definable. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
The papal declaration made a reality of what had long been condoned. This irrevocable step beyond the confines of historical Christianity is the strongest proof of the autonomy of archetypal images. When Mind concentrates itself into the World-Mind, it establishes a focus. However vast, it goes out of its own unlimited condition, it passes from the true Infinite to the pseudo-Infinite. Consequently the World-Mind, being occupied with its cosmos, cannot be regarded as possessed of the absolute character of Pure Mind. For what is its work but a movement of imagination? And where in the ineffable absolute is there room for either work or imagination? The one would break its eternal stillness, the other would veil its unchangeable reality. This of course it can never do, for Being can never become Non-Being. However, it can send forth an emanation from itself. Such an emanation is the World-Mind. Through its prolonged contemplation of the cosmos Mind thus becomes a fragment of itself, bereft of its own undifferentiated unbroken unity. Nevertheless the World-Mind, through its deputy the Overself, is still for humans the highest possible goal. Because of Mind’s presence, that which humans all call God arises, creates, and dissolves entire Worlds, kingdoms of Nature; yet Mind itself never moves, never acts, is forever still, is the ultimate of all ultimates, forever the only Unpassing, the only Unconditioned, the untouchable Mystery. Mind is the essence of all manifested things as World-Mind and the Mystery being unmanifest Nothing. The distinguishing quality of Mind is a continuous stillness, whereas that of World-Mind is a continuous activity. In the one there is absolutely nothing whereas in the other there is an infinite array of Universes. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
Mind is the essence of all conscious beings. Their consciousness is derivative, borrowed from it; they could know nothing of their power; whereas Mind alone knows all things and itself. When it knows them in time, it is World-Mind; when it knows itself alone, it is the unknown to humans and unknowable Godhead. The World-Mind pervades the cosmos; Mind extends beyond it. Among all numbers, it is the lowest one—1—which is the foundation as well as he constituent of the entire series. However, the empty number—nought—is even more important and significant because it symbolizes the inexpressible, ineffable, and inconceivable Power behind all powers. God is the maker and governor of the World. Godhead means Mind, the absolute, beyond all that is conceivable. Whether we see God’s presence in the untiring activity of the Universe or in the complete quiet of the Void, we do not see two different things but rather two phases of a single thing. World-Mind is only a function of Mind. It is not a separate entity. There is only one Life-Power, not two. Hence it is wrong to say that World-Mind arises within Mind. Similarly of the Overself; it too is a different function of the same Mind. The mind’s first expression is the Void. The second and succeeding is the Light, that is, the World-Mind. This is followed by the third, the World-Idea. Finally comes the fourth, manifestation of the World itself. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
The Supreme Godhead is unindividualized. The World-Mind is individuated (but not personalized) into emanated Overselves. The Overself is an individual, but not a person. The ego is personal. What is the meaning of the words “the Holy Trinity”? The Father is the absolute and ineffable Godhead, Mind in its ultimate being. The Son is the soul of the Universe, that is, the World-Mind. The Holy Ghost is the soul of each individual, that is, the Overself. The Godhead is one and indivisible and not multiform and can never divide itself up into three personalities. What is the Holy Trinity? How could it be three Gods? No—It is the Good, the Beautiful, and the True—three aspects of the One, only God. The holy trinity is truth, goodness, and beauty. For they are learning attributed of the divine soul in humans. Mind in itself stays always in absolute repose: there is then no operation whatever, no movement or manifestation, no creation or communication or revelation; it is forever inaccessible and unknow. This is the “Divine Darkness” of early Christian Fathers, the Godhead of medieval Christians theologians. The idea of Mind in utter repose, absolutely still, unmanifested in any way whatsoever, is the farther limit of human finite thought about the Deity. Mind as such is unconcerned with any World. It is without any limits and could not be confined in any form. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
We can learn something worthwhile from our experience with spiritual and psychological suffering—those pains of the heart that may come from a wounded conscience loneliness, disappointment, or a love that is lost. You would like to know how I behave when I am experiencing pain, not writing about it. You need not guess, for I will tell you; I am a great coward. However, what is that to the purpose? When I think of pain—of anxiety that gnaws like fire and loneliness that spreads out like a desert, and the heartbreaking routine of monotonous misery, or again of dull aches that blacken our whole landscape or sudden nauseating pains that seem already intolerable and then are suddenly increased, of infuriating scorpion-stinging pains that startle into maniacal movement a human who seemed half dead with one’s previous tortures—it “quite o’ercrows my spirit.’ If I knew any way of escape I would crawl through sewers to find it. However, what is the good of telling you about my feelings? You know them already: they are the same as yours. I am not arguing that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means. I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made “perfect through suffering” is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
In estimating the credibility of the doctrine two principles ought to be observe. In the first place we must remember that the actual moment of present pain is only the center of what may be called the whole tribulational system which extents itself by fear and pity. Whatever good effects these experiences have are dependent upon the center; so that even if pain itself was of no spiritual value, yet, if fear and pity were, pain would have to exist in order that there should be something to be feared and pitied. And that fear and pity help us in our return to obedience and charity is not to be doubted. Everyone has experienced the effect of pity in making it easier for us to love the unlovely—that is, to love humans not because they are in any way naturally agreeable to us but because they are our brethren. The beneficence of fear most of us have learned during the period of “crises” that led up to the present war. My own experience is something like this. I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, send this whole pack of cards tumbling down. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another World and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. However, the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over—I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to require my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
In the second place, when we are considering pain itself—the center of the while tribulational system—we must be careful to attend to what we know and not to what we imagine. That is one of the reasons why we are focusing on human pain, and animal pain. About human pain we know, about animal pain we only speculate. However, even within the human race we must draw our evidence from instances that have come under our own observation. The tendency of this or that novelist or poet may represent suffering as wholly bad in its effects, a producing, and justifying, every kind of malice and brutality in the sufferer. And, of course, pain, like pleasure, can be so received: all that is given to a creature with free will must be two-edged, not by the nature of the giver or of the gift, but by the nature of the recipient. And, again, if sufferers are persistently taught by the bystanders that results are the proper and masculine results for them to exhibit, the evil results of pain can be multiplied. Indignation at others’ sufferings, though a generous passion, needs to be well managed lest it steal away patience and humanity from those who suffer and plant anger and cynicism in the stead. However, if spared such officious vicarious indignations, I am not convinced that suffering has any natural tendency to produce such evils. I did not find the front-line trenches or the C.C.S. more full than any other place of hatred, selfishness, rebellion, and dishonesty. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
I have seen great beauty of spirit in some who were great sufferers. I have seen humans, for the most part, grow better not worse with advancing years, and I have seen the last illness produce treasures of fortitude and meekness from most unpromising subjects. I see in loved and revered historical figures, such as Johnson and Cowper, traits which might scarcely have been tolerable if the humans had been happier. If the World is indeed a “vale of soul making” it seems on the whole to be doing its work. Of poverty—the afflictions—I would not dare to speak as from myself; and those who reject Christianity will not be moved by Christ’s statement that poverty is blessed. However, here a rather remarkable fact comes to my assistance. Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere “opiate of the people” have a contempt for the rich, hat is, for all humankind expect the poor. They regard the poor as the only people worth preserving from “liquidation,” and place in them the only hope of the human race. However, this is not compatible with a belief that the effects of poverty on those who suffer it are wholly evil; it implies that they are good. However, Christianity paradoxically demands—that poverty is blessed and yet ought to be removed. I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the World would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mouring, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
If suffer is to teach us, we need a certain perspective because we will all suffer in one way or another. The pain of a wounded conscience comes to us not just to cause suffering. It is an invitation for us to respond in a way that will ultimately lead to joy. To accept the invitation early, we simply need to stop—in midair if necessary—and turn away from whatever we were going to do. If it is too late for that, the invitation of an aroused conscience can still be accepted by a few well-known steps of repentance. This approach will also stop the pain, but it will also leave you true to yourself and to the Universe of God’s reality. At the same time, your capacity for joy will be undiminished—it may even be enhanced through newly discovered self-control. Then the next time pain of conscience comes, it will come as the voice of a friend, to tell you those sensitive, painful kinds of things you would hope a true friend would share. God, Earth-Shaker, Lord of the Sea, your undeniable power moves against this ship, which moves, in response, from side to side. This great ship, proud accomplishment of human mind and muscle, is at your mercy. We who sail on the surface of your depths acknowledge your power, and your mastery of this realm. That is why we turn our prayers toward you, to the blue-maned deep-dweller, who can stretch out His trident-armed hand and make the flat sea-surface grow mountains and canyons, founder the ships that cross it, or who can, if He wishes, still the churning, and smooth the way of the wave-cleaving ships. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
Lord of waters, we pray to you, scattering offerings overboard. Please take them and not us. Please receive them gladly and give in return calm seas and safe passage, until we return to land with gratitude for your kindness. We humble ourselves before You, the one true God, who governs the affairs of this beloved nation. We sever You only because You have granted us this privilege and authority, and so we ask You, dear Father, to please lead us. We seek Your will. Whatever all this means, please give us the eyes to see and the ears to hear. Please have it Your way, not ours, and please forgive us the sin that would make us blind to Your truth. It is truth that Thou alone art the Lord of all Thy people, and a mighty King to the champion their cause. Thou art the first and Thou art the last, and besides Thee we have no King or Redeemer. Thou bringest low and haughty and raisest up the lowly; Thou leadest forth the captives and deliverest the meek. Thou helpest the poor, and answerest Thy people when they call unto Thee. From captivity Thou didst redeem us, O Lord our God; and from the house of bondage Thou didst deliver us. Thou didst reveal Thy saving power at the New Years so that the children of America passed through in safety. Wherefore they praised and extolled Thee, O Lord; they offered thanksgiving to Thee, their living God. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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Yesterday and All Our Yesterdays—Stuck Fast in Yesterday!
Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It is perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we have learned something from yesterday. There is quite clearly no difficulty in explaining why we are to comply with just laws enacted under a just constitution. In this case the principles of natural duty and the principle of fairness establish the requisite duties and obligations. Citizens generally are bound by the duty of justice, and those who have assumed favoured offices and positions, or who have taken advantage of certain opportunities to further their interests, are in addition obligated to do their part by the principle of fairness. The real question is under which circumstances and to what extent we are bound to comply with unjust arrangements. Not it is sometimes said that we are never required to comply in these cases. However, that is a mistake. The injustice of a law is not, in general, a sufficient reason for not adhering to it any more than the legal validity of legislation (as defined by the existing constitution) is a sufficient reason for going along with it. When the basic structure of society is reasonably just, as estimated by what the current state of thins allows, we are to recognize unjust laws as binding provided that they do not exceed certain limits of injustice. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
In trying to discern these limits we approach the deeper problem of political duty and obligation. The difficulty here lies in part in the fact that there is a conflict of principles in these cases. Some principles counsel compliance while other direct us the other ways. Thus the claims of political duty and obligation must be balanced by a conception of the appropriate priorities. There is, however, further problem. As we have seen, the principles of justice (in lexical order) belong to ideal theory. The persons in the original position assume that the principles they acknowledge, whatever they are, will be strictly complied with and followed by everyone. Thus the principles of justice that result are those defining a perfectly just society, given favourable conditions. With the presumption of strict compliance, we arrive at a certain ideal conception. When we as whether and under what circumstances unjust arrangements are to be tolerated, we are faced with a different sort of question. If needed it applies at all, we must ascertain how the ideal conception of justice applies, to cases where rather than having to make adjustments to natural limitations, we are confronted with injustice. The discussion of these problems belongs to the partial compliance part of nonideal theory. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
It included, among other things, the theory of punishment and compensatory justice, just war and conscientious objection, civil disobedience and militant resistance. These are among the central issues of political life, yet so far the conception of justice as fairness does not directly apply to them. Now I shall not attempt to discuss these matters in full generality. In fact, I shall take up but one fragment of partial compliance theory: namely, the problems of civil disobedience and conscientious refusal. And even here I shall assume that the context is one of a state of near justice, that is, one in which the basic structure of society is nearly just, making due allowance for what it is reasonable to expect in the circumstances. An understanding of this admittedly special case may help to clarify the more difficult problems. However, in order to consider civil disobedience and conscientious refusal, we must first discuss several points concerning political duty and obligation. For one thing, it is evident that our duty or obligation to accept existing arrangements may sometimes be overridden. These requirements depend upon the principles of right, which may justify noncompliance in certain situations, all things considered. Whether noncompliance is justified depend on the extent to which laws and institutions are unjust. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Unjust laws do not all stand on a par, and the same is true of policies and institutions. Now there are two way in which injustice can arise: current arrangements may depart in varying degrees from publicly accepted standards that are more of less just; or these arrangements may conform to a society’s conception of justice, or to the view of the dominant class, but his conception itself may be unreasonable, and in many cases clearly unjust. As we have seen, some conceptions of justice are more reasonable than others. While the two principles of justice and the related principles of natural duty and obligation define the most reasonable view among those on the list, other principles are not unreasonable. Indeed, some mixed conceptions are certainly adequate enough for many purposes. As rough rule a conception of justice is reasonable in proportion to the strength of the arguments that can be given for adopting it in the original position. This criterion is, of course, perfectly natural if the original position incorporates the various conditions which are to be imposed on the choice of principles and which lead to a match with our considered judgments. Although it is easy enough to distinguish these two ways in which existing institutions can be unjust, a workable theory of how they affect our political duty and obligations is another matter. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
When laws and policies deviate from publicly recognized standards, an appeal to the society’s sense of justice is presumably possible to some extent. This condition is presupposed in undertaking civil disobedience. If, however, the prevailing conception of justice is not violated, than the situation is very different. The course of action to be follow depends largely on how reasonable the accepted doctrine is and what means are available to change it. Doubtless one can manage to live with a variety of mixed and intuitionistic conceptions, and with utilitarian view when they are not too rigorously interpreted. In other cases, though, as when a society is regulated by principles favouring narrow class interests, one may have no recourse but to oppose the prevailing conception and the institution it justifies in such ways as promise some success. Secondly, we must consider the question why, in a situation of near justice, we normally have a duty to comply with unjust, and not simply with just, laws. While some writers have questioned this contention, I believe that most would accept it; only a few think that any deviation from justice, however small, nullifies the duty to comply with existing rules. How, then, is this fact to be accounted for? Since they duty of justice and the principle of fairness presuppose that institutions are just, some further explanation is required. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Now one can answer this question if we postulate a nearly just society in which there exists a viable constitutional regime more or less satisfying in the principles of justice. Thus I suppose that for the most part the social system is well-ordered, although not of course perfectly ordered, for in this event the question of whether to comply with unjust laws and policies would not arise. Under these assumptions, the earlier account of a just constitution as an instance of imperfect procedural justice provides an answer. It will be recalled that in the constitutional convention the aim of the parties is to find among the just constitutions (those satisfying the principle of equal liberty) the one most likely to lead to just and effective legislation in view of the general facts about the society in question. The constitution is regarded as a just but imperfect procedure framed as far as the circumstances permit to insure a just outcome. It is imperfect because there is no feasible political process which guarantees that the laws enacted in accordance with it will be just. In political affairs perfect procedural justice cannot be achieved. Moreover, the constitutional process must rely, to a large degree, on some form of voting. I assume for simplicity that a variant of majority rule suitably circumscribed is a practical necessity. Yet majorities (or coalitions of minorities) are bound to make mistakes, if not from a lack of knowledge and judgment, than as a result of partial and self-interested views. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Nevertheless, our natural duty to uphold just institutions binds us to comply with unjust laws and policies, or at least not to oppose them by illegal means as long as they do not exceed certain limits of injustice. Being required to support a just constitution, we must go along with one of its essential principles, that of majority rule. In a state of near justice, then, we normally have a duty to comply with unjust laws in virtue of our duty to support a just constitution. Given humans as they are, there are many occasions when this duty will come into play. The contract doctrine naturally leads us to wonder how we could ever consent to a constitutional rule that would require us to comply with laws that we think are unjust. One might ask: how is it possible that when we are free and still without chains, we can rationally accept a procedure that may decide against our opinion and give effect to that of others? Once we take up the point of view of the constitutional convention, the answer is clear enough. First, among the very limited number of feasible procedures that have any chance of being accepted at all, there are none that would always decide in our favour. And second, consenting to one of these procedures is surely preferable to no agreement at all. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The situation is analogous to that of the original position where the parties give up any hope of free-rider egoism: this alternative is each person’s best (or second best) candidate (leaving aside the constraint of generality), but it is obviously not acceptable to anyone else. Similarly, although at the stage of the constitutional convention the parties are now committed to the principles of justice, they must make some concession to one another to operate a constitutional regime. Even with the best of intentions, their opinions of justice are bound to clash. In choosing a constitution, then, and in adopting some form of majority rule, the parties accept the risks of suffering the defects of one another’s knowledge and sense of justice in order to gain the advantages of an effective legislative procedure. There is no other way to manage a democratic regime. Nevertheless, when they adopt the majority principle the parties agree to put up with unjust laws only on certain conditions. Roughly speaking, in the long run the burden of injustice should be more or less evenly distributed over different groups in society, and the hardship of unjust policies should not weigh too heavily in any particular case. Therefore the duty to comply is problematic for permanent minorities that have suffered from injustice for many years. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
And certainly we are not required to acquiesce in the denial of our own and others’ basic liberties, since this requirement could not have been within the meaning of the duty of justice in the origin position, nor consistent with the understanding of the rights of the majority in the constitutional convention. Instead, we submit our conduct to democratic authority only to the extent necessary to share equitably in the inevitable imperfections of a connotational system. Accepting these hardships is simply recognizing and being willing to work within the limits imposed by the circumstances of human life. In view of this, we have a natural duty of civility not to invoke the faults of social arrangements as a too ready excuse for not complying with them, nor to exploit in evitable loopholes in the rules to advance our interests. The duty of civility imposes a due acceptance of the defects of institutions and a certain restraint in taking advantage of them. Without some recognition of this duty mutual trust and confidence are liable to break down. Thus in a state of near justice at least, there is normally a duty (and for some also the obligation) to comply with unjust laws provided that they do not exceed certain bounds of injustice. This conclusion is not much stronger than that asserting our duty to comply with just laws. It does, however, take us a step further, since it covers a wider range of situations; but more important, it gives some idea of the questions that are to be asked in ascertaining our political duty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Like the geography of the planet, the human body has until now represented a fixed point in human experience, a “given.” Today we are fast approaching the day when the body can no longer be regarded as fixed. Humans will be able, within a reasonably short period, to redesign not merely individual bodies, but the entire human race. In in 1962 Drs. J. D, Watson and F. H. Crick received the Novel prize for describing the DNA molecule, advanced in genetic have come tripping over one another at a rapid pace. Molecular biology is now exploding from the laboratories. New genetic knowledge has permitted us to tinker with human heredity and manipulate the genes to create altogether new versions of humans. One of the more fantastic possibilities is that humans will be able to make biological carbon copies of themselves. Through a process known as “cloning” it will be possible to grow from the nucleus of an adult cell a new organism that has the same genetic characteristics of the person contributing the cell nucleus. The resultant human “copy” would start life with a genetic endowment identical to that of the donor, although cultural differences might thereafter alter the personality or physical development of the clone. Cloning would make it possible for people to see themselves born anew, to fill the World with twins of themselves. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Cloning would, among other things, provide us with solid empirical evidence to help us resolve, once and for all, the ancient controversy over “nature vs. nurture” or “heredity vs. environment.” The solution of this problem, through the determination of the role played by each, would be one of the great milestones of human intellectual development. Whole libraries of philosophical speculation could, by a single stroke, be rendered irrelevant. An answer to this question would open the way for speedy, qualitative advances in psychology, moral philosophy and a dozen other fields. However, cloning could also create undreamed of complications for the race. There is a certain charm to the idea of Albert Einstein bequeathing copies of himself to posterity. We could bring Mrs. Winchester back and learn the secrets of her mansion, and find out if she wanted to complete or expand it. However, what of horrible figures enshrined in history? Should there be laws to regulate cloning. Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg, a scientist who takes his social responsibility very seriously, believes it conceivable that those who are most narcissistic, and that the clones they produce will also be narcissists. Even if narcissism, however, is culturally rather than biologically transmitted, there are other eerie difficulties. Thus Dr. Lederberg rises a question as to whether human, if permitted, might not “go critical.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
“I use that phrase,” Dr. Lederberg told me, “in almost exactly the same sense that is involved in nuclear energy. It will go critical if there is a sufficient positive advantage to doing so. This has to do with whether the efficiency of communication, particularly along educational lines, is increased as between identical genotypes or not. The similarity of neurological hardware might make it easier for identical copies to transmit technical and other insights from one generation to the next.” How close is cloning? We have technically been able to clone humans for almost a decade, but as far as we know, no one has actually cloned a whole person. Technically, it is not difficult to produce a clone embryo. However, to even research human cloning, scientists would need to ethically collect a large amount of donated eggs and find enough surrogates to carry them. But even if they made it through that logistical nightmare. Across the board, scientists have found that some embryos expire before they are implanted. And those that make it to term often die soon after birth or end up wit severe abnormalities. Simply, these are risks that are easier to take when it comes to experimenting with non-human beings. However, scientists have learned how the various organs of the body develop, and they have begun to experiment with various means of modifying them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Eventually, things like the size of the brain and certain sensory qualities of the brain are going to be brought under direct developmental control. I think this is very near. However, this ethical, moral, and political questions raised by the new biology simply boggle the mind. Who shall live and who shall die? What are humans? Who shall control research into these fields? How shall new findings be applied? Might we not unleash horrors for which humans are totally unprepared? In the opinion of many of the World’s leading scientist human cloning is a disaster waiting to happen. However, gene editing has some benefits. Imagine the implications of the biological breakthroughs in what might be termed “birth technology.” Within a mere ten to fifteen years a woman will be able to buy a tiny frozen embryo that has been perfected, take it to her doctor, have it implanted in her uterus, carry it for nine months, and then give birth to it as thought it had been conceived in her own body. The embryo would, in effect, be sold with a guarantee that the resultant baby would be free of genetic defect. The purchaser would also be told in advance the colour of the baby’s eyes, and hair, its gender, its probable size at maturity and its probable Intelligence Quotient (IQ). #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Indeed, it will be possible at some point to do away with the female uterus altogether. Babies will be conceived, nurtured and raised to maturity outside the human body. It is clearly only a matter of years before the work begun by Dr. Daniele Petrucci in Bologna and other scientists in the United States of America and the Soviet Union, makes it possible for women to have babies without the discomfort of pregnancy. Fertilized human eggs might be useful in the colonization of the planets. Instead of shipping adults to Mars, we could ship a shoebox full of such cells and grow them into an entire city-size population of humans. When you consider how much it costs in fuel to lift every pound off the launch pad, why send full-grown men and women aboard space ships? Instead, why not ship tiny embryos, in the care of a competent biologist…We miniaturize other spacecraft components. Why not the passengers? Long before such developments occur in outer space, however, the impact of the new birth technology will strike home on Earth, splintering our traditional notions of sexuality, motherhood, love, child-rearing, and education. Discussions about the future of the family that deal only with The Pill overlook the biological witches’ brew now seething in the laboratories. The moral and emotional choices that will confront us in the coming decades are mind-staggering. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Many believe that we are playing God and should not, but we have been made in the image of God and should we sit back and watch as the environment and the human race and animal and plant life have been destroyed, or try to fix errors and make a primary race of humans that is healthy, control the weather and make Earth a paradise and produce enough food to feed humanity, make other planets inhabitable to sustain the human life that is produced by a healthy society, and product animal and plant life from going extinct? We really could produce an animal planet, have a forest planet, so forth and so on. It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them. I emphatically embrace the first alternative. The second might lead to the abominable conclusion that charity is good only because God arbitrarily commanded it—that He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another and that hatred would then have been right. I believe, on the contrary, that they err who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides His will. God’s will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness which always embraces, the intrinsically good. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
However, when we have said that God commands things only because they are good, we must add that one of the things intrinsically good is that rational creatures should freely surrender themselves to their Creator in obedience. The content of our obedience—the thing we are commanded to do—will always be something intrinsically good, something we ought to do even if (by an impossible supposition) God had not commanded it. However, in addition to the content, the mere obeying is also intrinsically good, for, in obeying, a rational creature consciously enacts its creaturely role, reverses the act by which we fell, treads Adam’s dance backward, and returns. We therefore agree with Aristotle that what is intrinsically right may well be agreeable, and that the better a human is the more one will like it; but we agree with Dr. Kant so far as to say that there is one right act—that of self-surrender—which cannot be willed to the height by fallen creatures unless it is unpleasant. And we must add that this one right act includes all other righteousness, and that the supreme cancelling of Adam’s fall, the movement full speed astern by which we retrace our long journey from Paradise, the untying of the old, hard know, must be when the creature, with no desire to assist it, stripped naked to the bare willing of obedience, embraces what is contrary to its nature, and does that for which only one motive is possible. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Such an act may be described as a test of the creature’s return to God: hence our fathers said that troubles were sent to us. A familiar example is Abraham’s trial when he was ordered to sacrifice Isaac. With the historicity or the morality of that story I am not now concerned, but with the obvious question, “If God is omniscient He must have known what Abraham would do, without any experiment; why, then, this needless torture? However, as St. Augustine points out, whatever God knew, Abraham at any rate did not know his obedience could endure such a command until the even taught him; and the obedience which he did not know that he would choose, he cannot be said to have chosen. The reality of Abraham’s obedience was the act itself; and what God knew in knowing that Abraham would obey was Abraham’s actual obedience on that mountain top at that moment. To say that God need not have tried the experiment is to say that because God knows, the thing known by God need not exist. However, God uses these legends in the Bible and gives us free will to cultivate us and not allow nature nor nurture to control us, in hopes that we learn to yield to the righteous will of God through guidance and not force. If pain sometimes shatters the creature’s false self-sufficiency, yet in supreme Trial or Sacrifice it teaches one the self-sufficiency which really ought to be one’s—the strength, which if Heaven gave it, may be called one’s own: for then, in the absence of all merely natural motives and supports, one acts in that strength, and that alone, which God confers upon one through one’s subject will. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God’s, and this is one of the many senses in which one that loses one’s soul shall find it. In all other acts our will is fed through nature, that is, through created things other than the self—through the desires which our physical organism and our heredity supply to us. When we act from ourselves alone—that is, from God in ourselves—we are collaborators in, or live instruments of, creation: and that is why such an act undoes with backward mutters of dissevering power the uncreative spell which Adam laid upon his species. Hence as suicide is the typical expression of the stoic spirit, and battle of the warrior spirit, martyrdom always remains the supreme enacting and perfection of Christianity. This great action has been initiated for us, done on our behalf, exemplified for our imitation, and inconceivably communicated to all believers, by Christ on Calvary. There the degree of accepted Death reaches the utmost bounds of the imaginable and perhaps goes beyond them; not only all natural supports, but the presence of the very Father to whom the sacrifice is made deserts the victim, and surrender to God does not falter though God forsakes it. The doctrine of death which I describe is not peculiar to Christianity. Nature herself has written it large across the World in the repeated drama of the buried seed and the re-arising corn. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
From nature, perhaps, the oldest agricultural communities learned it and with animal, or human, sacrifices showed forth for centuries the truth that without shedding of blood is no remission; and though at first such conceptions may have concerned only the crops and offspring of the tribe, they came later, in the Mysteries, to concern the spiritual death and resurrection of the individual. The Indian ascetic, mortifying one’s body on a bed of spikes, preaches the same lesson; the Greek philosopher tells us that the life of wisdom is a practice of death. The sensitive and noble heathen of modern times makes one’s imagined gods die into life. Mr. Huxley expounds non-attachment. We cannot escape the doctrine by ceasing to be Christians. It is an eternal gospel revealed to humans wherever humans have sought, or endured, the truth: it is the very never of redemption, which anatomizing wisdom at all times and in all places lays bare; the unescapable knowledge which the Light and that lighteneth every human presses down upon the minds of all who seriously question what the Universe is about. The peculiarity of the Christian faith is not to teach this doctrine but to render it, in various ways, more tolerable. Christianity teaches us that the terrible task has already in some sense been accomplished for us—that a master’s hand is holding ours as we attempt to trace the difficult letters and that our script need only be a copy, not an original. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Again, where other systems expose our total nature to death (as in Buddhist renunciation) Christianity demands only that we set right a misdirection of our nature, and has no quarrel, like Plato, with the body as such, nor with the psychical elements in our make-up. And sacrifice in its supreme realization is not exacted of all. Confessors as well as martyrs are saved, and some old people whose state of grace we can hardly doubt seem to have gotten through their, on average, seventy to ninety years surprisingly easily. The sacrifice of Christ is repeated, or re-echoed, among His followers in varying degrees, from the curellest martyrdom down to a self-submission of intention whose outward signs have nothing to distinguish them from the ordinary fruits of temperance and sweet reasonableness. The causes of tis distribution I do not know; but from our present point of view it ought to be clear that the real problem is not why some humble, pious, believing people suffer, but why some do not. Our Lord Himself, it will be remembered, explained the salvation of those wo are fortunate in the World only by referring to the unsearchable omnipotence of God. Guide to travelers, for your help I pray, that you might be with me as I go on my way. I give greetings to the God of this place, I, a traveler, offer up prayers. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
From my land to this one, I have come, meaning no harm to any who dwell here. Land of Spirits, I pray to you; though I do not yet know you, I honour you. Lord of Trees, I pray to you as I enter this forest. Please watch over my steps while I am under your care. Throughout all generations God endureth and His name endureth; His throne is established, and His kingdom and His faithfulness are eternal. His words have living and abiding power. They are forever trustworthy and for all time precious both for our fathers and for us, for our children, and for all future generations of His servants, the seed of America. As for our ancestors so for our descendants, Thy teaching is good and endures forever and ever; it is a truth, a faith, a law which shall not pass away. It is true that Thou art the Lord our God and the God of our fathers, our King and our fathers’ King, our Redeemer and the Redeemer of our Fathers. From everlasting Thou has been our Creator, the Rock of our salvation; our Deliverer and Redeemer forever; there is no God besides Thee. Thou has been the help of our father from of old, a Shield and a Deliverer to their children in every generation. In the height of the Universe is Thy habitation, and Thy laws of righteousness please reach unto the ends of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
At night, passers-by heard ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. The bell in the belfry high in the gables tolled regularly at midnight to summon incoming flights of spirits. Later it tolled again to warn these visitors to return to their sepulchres. About once a week these departed ones relaxed and danced in the Great Ball Room.
Yes, there was a six-foot cypress hedge enclosing the estate. The writer’s father in 1888, helped with much of the ground’s landscaping, pruned this hedge and planted many of the still-standing ornamental trees. He mentioned no barbed wire–nor did the man who removed this hedge decades later.
Entrance was not really barred but we were reluctant to trespass. Adults stretched their necks when they drove by and small boys settled for a peek through the cypress hedge. So much for answers to a few of those endless rumors surrounding our mysterious lady.
Ghosts have always been a part of the human psyche and experience. Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there. The Victorian Gardens are open today! winchestermysteryhouse.com
Simple as All Truly Great Swindles—Pearls Before Swine!
A biographer is like a contractor who builds roads: It is terribly messy, mud everywhere, and when you get done, people travel over the road at a fast clip. We must not think of ourselves as having boundaries as definite as a shall round an egg. It is like believing that objects are separated from each other by black pencil lines, the way they are drawings. Physically we are all separate. My eyes are mine, not yours. Your digestion is yours, not mine His measles are his, not ours. Psychologically this simply is not so. “My” mother is more than “my” teacher is; “my” apple is even more under my control but it is less reciprocal. I am my mother’s son, my teacher’s pupil, but hardly my apple’s eater. Then again, my mother is also my sister’s mother; and interestingly, “my mother” may be more mine than “our mother’ is—or less, it depends on the facts of the situation. However, what is not in dispute is that, when I say “my mother and I,” the boundaries between and around us are different from what I say “our mother and I.” Again, I can think of “I” in a very narrow sense as in “I am going to Australia”—the boundaries round my person and my plans sound clear. However, what is I say, “We are thinking of going to Australia”? Does this represent a picture of me thinking, and of my two friends, each also thinking? Or does it represent the result of our discussion in which each of us has contributed? #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
How are to think of “us” and “we”? We go wrong, I think, when we cling too tenaciously to metaphors which makes our psychological boundaries correspond to our bodily ones. Our digestive processes happen in a place—the stomach—which has a distinct skin round it, but we do not have skins round our minds. Our boundaries are where we are in touch with other people and things. To keep fresh, we need from time to time to re-examine the language in terms of which we try to understand our relationships to others. We are trying to get away from too strong a reliance on the distinction between inner and outer Worlds. This has in my view created some unnecessary problems, not least because of the emphasis it places on the separateness of you from me. To some extent, the distinction between inner and outer Worlds derives from our experience of our bodily self. The senses develop in a sequence which, if all goes well, brings the infant only very gradually into encounters with other people and things. The two most important senses that provide the perceptions which form the basis for the discover of “objects” are sight and touch. Both of them are undeveloped in the first postnatal months, as they need a considerable degree of muscular co-ordination to work properly; as is well known, binocular vision does not exist in the first weeks of life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Moreover both sight and touch, together with hearing, are projective sense; they feel, place or construct the object outside the body, either at a distance (sight and hearing) or at it surface (touch). The situation is utterly different with the two-lower sense, which are well, perhaps even fully, operative at birth. In their function there is hardly any projection; we feel small and tase inside our body—in our mouth or in our nose; moreover, the sensations themselves, more often than not, have nothing to do with objects, only with substances. Here we get some idea of how and why the mixup between ourselves and the World around us has come about. Looking at it as an external detached observer, we recognize that it is based on an interaction between the individual and the external World; one may say that the World has intruded or penetrated into the individual’s mouth or nose, and equally correctly that the individual has taken in parts of the external World—penetrated into it. The same kind of mixup occurs with the sense of temperature, though to a lesser degree. In fact, it forms a transition between the lower and the higher senses, id est, those based on mixup and those using projection. Cold and warmth are felt partly as coming from outside, partly as a state of our own body or even of ourselves: we feel warm or it is warm. Also, the organization of our sense is the cause of the way we think about “in here” and “out there.” By virtue of having two eyes and two ears we can locate stimuli whose source is “out there,” as it were stereoscopically. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
From the energy configurations that excite some of our receptors, we are able to construct a “World-Out-There.” The excitations of sight and hearing we especially tend to interpret as distant from the receptors excited. We sense we are touching, tasting, or smelling something apart from our own receptor reactions. When our perceptions are patterned in conditions of bilateral symmetry, the sum of such perceptions constitutes our World-Out-There. When these conditions are not present, we do not perceive objects and occurrences; instead we construct a World-within on the basis of our subjective feelings. In contrast to perceptions, subjective feelings are those phenomena, those ghosts which we immediately attribute to what is within the boundary, that bag we call the skin, which demarcates “Us” from the “Other.” It is not surprising that some thoughtful minds which were once prone to believe sincerely in the existence of such a faculty as intuition and willing to accept its revelations, as made by others, found their confidence in it gravely shaken. We ventured to point out that egoistic emotions and unconscious complexes frequently masquerade as mystical intuitions, that criticism should be directed solely against such pseudo-institutions and should not be casting doubts upon the existence of genuine intuition itself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
It is admittedly hard to distinguish intuition from its counterfeits, but one way to do so is that it often opposes personal emotions. Thus we may feel strongly and naturally prejudiced against a certain course of action yet a gentler feeling may be in its favour. If it is authentic intuition, one will feel increasingly convinced by it as days and weeks pass until in the end its truth will seem unarguable to one. When one’s self-training and checked experience have gone far enough, the doubts and uncertainties regarding these intuitive feelings will vanish. By that time, they will appear in one’s consciousness as peculiar and unmistakable. What intuition reveals the deepest thought confirms. Of every individual who has reached the stage of being a unit (with a limiting membrane and an outside and an inside), it can be said that there is an inner reality to that individual, an inner World which can be rich or poor and can be at peace or in a stage of war. This way of thinking is very common—in the West at least—and it usually works well enough as a metaphor, providing we do not go constructing the World in this way and then believing that that is the way the World is. There is also a third area, neither inner nor outer, a potential space, a culture space. Christian theologians and probably mystics of many persuasions have had conceptual problems of exactly the same nature. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
While the devout are said to live in Christ, Christ is also said to live in them. The process of differentiation of the object derives particular significance from the fact that infantile dependence is characterized not only by identification, but also b an oral attitude of incorporation. In virtue of this fact, that object with which the individual is identified becomes equivalent to an incorporated object, or, to put the matter in a more arresting fashion, the object in which the individual is incorporated is incorporated in the individual. This strange psychological anomaly may well prove the key to many metaphysical puzzles. Be that as it may, however, it is common to find in dreams a remarkable equivalence between being inside an object and having the object inside. Thinking about ourselves in terms of an inside and an outside can lead us into some tenacious traps. This kind of allocation creates a spatial phantasy of our psychic World: an inner World with an outer World around it, like the pre-Galilean system of the Earth with the sun, stars, and the planets circling round it. This spatial way of thinking has proved so powerful that people have drawn conclusions from it which might perhaps be warranted if there really were such spaces, but which can also cause confusion. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Admittedly, in the history of thought it has proved a useful discipline to regard some facts as subjective and others as objective: facts which several people agree on have normally been regarded as more objective than those which are held only by a single person. Facts held by only one person are usually not called facts, but views, opinions, or less politely, delusions or hallucinations, and they are regarded as subjective, not objective. The more people agree on a fact or on the scientific propriety with which something has been established as a fact, the more objective that fact is considered to be. It is, therefore, not surprising that objective facts have come to be thought of as belonging to a realm called “the outer World”: the World of shared reality. Similarly, the subjective experiences of individuals have been allocated to a realm called the “the inner World.” But is this the best way to think of my experience of you? The notion that God’s voice is necessarily accompanied by occult phenomena or heard clairaudiently inside oneself is a very limited one. It may be totally unaccompanied by anything strange or, as if it were conscience, felt rather than heard. Or it may speak to one indirectly through any other person or any circumstantial event that touches one’s path. The passing of time will either disprove one’s judgements or prove them correct. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
One ought to note carefully this eventual result and compare it with the feelings which possessed one at the tie of making one’s original decisions. In this way one can learn to see for oneself the difference between the marks of a true intuition and those of a false one. An intuition comes into the mind suddenly. However, so does an impulse. Therefore it is not enough to take this mark alone to identify it. It is strong; so is an impulse. It is clear; so is an impulse. To separate the deceptive appearance from the genuine reality of an intuition, look for the trail of assurance, relief, ad peace to follow in its wake. It is never present without certain qualities being present with it, too. There is first an utter serenity, then a steady joy, next an absolute conviction of its truth and reality, finally the paradoxical feelings of a rock-firm security despite any appearance of adverse outer circumstances. The process is partly an unconscious one, they know, because something is being done to them by this higher power. They cannot exactly define why they must accept its truth, but its mental effect is almost hypnotic. It is an intuition which is self-supporting, which must be accepted upon its own mysterious authority. Nor do they accept it because of its inherent strength alone. They accept it also because of its inherent beauty. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Intuitive feelings hover in one, half-guessed at, half-doubted: one does not know what to accept, what to reject, because one does not feel certain whether they are mere ordinary thoughts or authentic messages from Heaven. Raising and training animals may be expensive, but what happens when we go down the evolutionary scale to the level of bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms? Here we can harness life in its primitive forms just as we once harnessed the horse. Today emerging and it promises to chance the very nature of industry as we know. Our ancestors domesticated various plant and animal species in the prehistoric past. However, microorganisms were not domesticated until very recently, primarily because humans did not know of their existence. Today they do, and they are already used in the large-scale production of vitamins, enzymes, antibiotics, citric acid and other useful compounds. Edible microbial biomass derived from bacteria, yeasts, filamentous fungi or microalgae has become a promising alternative to conventional forces of food and feed. Microorganisms are a good source of protein, vitamins and, in some cases, also contain beneficial lipids. The ability of microorganisms to use simple organic substrates for growth permits industrial-scale cultivation of edible microbial biomass in geographical locations that will not compete with agricultural production. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Only a handful of microbial products are currently available for human consumption. However, it was predicted in 1960s, that if the pressure for food continues to intensify, biologist will be growing microorganism for use as animal feed and human food by the year 2000. The use of microbial biomass for animal feed is limited by access to low-cost growth substrates and competition from conventional feed sources such as soy and fishmeal. At a time when the global food production system is threatened by human activity, the production of edible microorganisms has the potential to circumvent many of the current environmental boundaries of food production as well as reducing its environmental impact. Photosynthetic microorganisms such as cyanobacteria and microalgae can be cultivated for food and feed independently of arable land. In addition, recent technological developments in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) capture, extraction and catalytic conversion into simple organic compounds can be used for cultivation of edible microbial biomass for food and feed in a manner that is wholly independent of photosynthesis. The future possibilities, challenges and risks of scaled-up production of edible microbial biomass in relation to the global food system something we really need to consider. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Population growth, changing consumption patters and changing climates are collectively putting a strain on the global food production system. The human population is estimated to reach 9.6 – 12.3 billion people by the year 2100. Retaining the current food production model to satisfy future global food demand therefore has the potential to trap humanity in a vicious spiral of gradually decreasing agricultural output. Because of operating costs and global trends, agricultural yields for the major crops suggest that yield increasing alone will be insufficient for adequately feeing the human population by 2050. The majority of land area currently dedicated to food production is used for feeing animals—either as pasture or cultivation. The current global trends is we see with improving living standards that they are causing an increase in the per capita consumption of animal proteins such as meat, eggs, and dairy products. We need to increase food production by 70 percent. Microorganisms can be used as alternatives to conventional means of food production by facilitating the creation of lab-grown meat and vertical farming crops. Vertical farming or “plant factories”—terms which describe vertically-stacked, fully controlled environments used to produce food—have the potentials to help societies meet this elevated demand, without the need for additional farmland. Vertical farming will also decrease the need to import fresh fruits and vegetables. Lab-grown meat or culture meat, produced in bioreactors without the slaughter of an animal has been approved in some countries like Singapore. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
No-kill, lab-grown meat called “chicken bites,” produced by the United States of America company Eat Just, have passed a safety review by the Singapore Food Agency and the approval could open the door to a future when all meat is produced without the killing of livestock. Dozens of firms are developing cultivated chicken, beef, and pork. The cells for Eat Just’s product are grown in a 1,200-litre bioreactor and then combined with plant-based ingredients. The cells used to start the process came from a cell bank and did not require the slaughter of a chicken because cells can be taken from biopsies of live animals. The nutrients supplied to the growing cells were all from plants. The growth medium for the Singapore production lines includes foetal bovine serum, which is extracted from foetal blood, but this is largely removed before consumption. And a plant-based serum is expected to be used in the next production line. The product was significantly more expensive than conventional chicken until production was scaled up, but Eat Just said it would ultimately be more cost efficient. New technology is always very expensive, until it becomes widely used. A series of scientific studies have shown that people in rich nations eat more meat than their ancestors, and that with lab-grown meat, it should wean committed meat-eaters off traditional sources, which will reduce the strain on the environment and animal population. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Vegan diets are viewed as unappealing by some, and plant-based meat replacements are not always regarded as replicating the texture and flavour of conventional meant. Meat cultivated in bioreactors will meet or exceed standards and avoids the issues of bacterial contamination from animal waste and the overuse of antibiotics and hormones in animals. Once scaled up, the small scale of current cultured meat produced is expected to produce much lower emissions and use far less water and land than conventional meat. “I think the approval is one of the most significant milestones in the food industry in the last handful of decades. It is an open door and it is up to us and other companies to take that opportunity. My hope is this leads to a World in the next handful of years where the majority of meat does not require killing a single animal or tearing down a single tree,” reports Josh Tetrick, of Eat Just. The cultured chicken is nutritionally the same as conventional meat. Some challenged are, however, getting regulatory approval in other nations. Another company, Supermeat.co in Israel, has just begun free public tastings involving a “crispy cultured chicken.” Industry experts said other companies including Memphis Meats, Mosa Meat, and Aleph Farms, might do well in future as they were working on textured products such as steaks and were able to produce significant amounts of lab-grown meat from the starts. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
A new space face for the future of food is underway. Tyson and Cargill, two of the World’s biggest conventional meat companies, now have a stake in Memphis Meats. It is predicted that by 2040 most meat will not come from conventional sources. Cultured meat production is expected to take the World by storm, and experts are convinced that cultured meat will address the health and environmental impact issues that traditional meat has when produced in a highly industrialized way. Cultured meat is expected to be a household favourite and replace traditional meat. At Uppsala University in Sweden, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Arne Tiselius, the Nobel prizewinning biochemist who was once president of the Nobel Foundation itself. “Is it conceivable,” I asked, “that one day we shall create, in effect, biological machines—systems that can be used for productive purposes and will be composed not of plastic or metal parts, but of living organisms?” His answer was roundabout, but unequivocal: We are already there. The great future industry will come from biology. In fact, one of the most striking things about the tremendous technological development of Japan since the war has been not only its shipbuilding, but its microbiology. Japan is now the greatest power in the World in industry based on microbiology. Much of their food and food industry is based on processes in which bacteria are used. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Now Japan will produce all sorts of useful things—amino acids, for example. In Sweden everybody now talks about the need to strengthen our position in microbiology. You see, one need not think in terms of bacteria and viruses alone. The industrial processes, in general, are based on humanmade processes. You make steel by a reduction of iron ore with coal. Think of the plastic industries, artificial products made originally from petroleum. Yet it is remarkable that even today, with the tremendous development of chemistry and chemical technology, there is no single food-stuff produced industrially which can compete with what the farmers grow. In this field, and in a great many fields, nature is far superior to humans, even to the most advanced chemical engineers and researchers. Now what is the consequences of that? When we gradually get to know how nature makes these things, and when we can imitate nature, we will have processes of an entirely new kind. These will form the basis for industries of a new kind—a sort of bio-technical factory, a biological technology. The green plants make starch with the assistance of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the sun. This is an extremely efficient machine. The green leaf is a marvelous machine. We know a great deal more about it today than sixty or seventy years ago. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
We admire plants and their use of solar energy. They have an unparalleled mastery of photochemical synthesis—the way they use light to synthesize energy from the most fundamental of substances—and how they reverse the ordinary process of combustion is amazing. In photosynthesis, law an entirely renewable process of energy creation. When sunlight reached the surface of a green leaf, it sets off a reaction inside the leaf. Chloroplasts, energize by the light, trigger the production of chemical products—essentially sugars—which store the energy such that the plant can later access it for its biological needs. It is an entirely renewable process; the plant harvests the immense and constant supply of solar energy, absorbs carbon dioxide and water, and releases oxygen. There is no waste. If scientists could learn to imitate photosynthesis by providing concentrated carbon dioxide and suitable catalyzers, they could create fuels from solar energy. With well-adapted systems of cultivation and timely intervention, we may succeed in causing plants to produce, in quantities much larger than the normal ones, the substances which are useful to our modern life. Dr. Peidong Yang, a chemist at UC Berkeley, successfully created the first photosynthetic biohybrid system (PBS) 22 April 2015. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The first-generation PBS uses semiconductors and live bacteria to do the photosynthetic work that real leaves do—absorb solar energy and create a chemical product using water and carbon dioxide, while releasing oxygen—but it creates liquid fuels. The process is called artificial photosynthesis, and if the technology continues to improve, it may become the future of energy. How does this system work? Dr. Yang’s PBS can be thought of as a synthetic lead. It is a one-square-inch tray that contains silicon semiconductors and living bacteria; what Dr’ Yang calls a semiconductor-bacteria interface. In order to initiate the process of artificial photosynthesis, Dr. Yang dips the tray of materials into water, pumps carbon dioxide into the water, and shines a solar light on it. As the semiconductors harvest solar energy, they generate charges to carry out reactions within the solution. The bacteria take electrons from the semiconductors and sue them to transform, or reduce, carbon dioxide molecules and create liquid fuels. In the meantime, water is oxidized on the surface of another semiconductor to release oxygen. After several hours or several days of this process, the chemist can collect the product. With this first-generation system, Dr. Yang successfully produced butanol, acetate, polymers, and pharmaceutical precursors, imitating plants to create the fuels that we need. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The PBS achieved a solar-to-chemical conversion efficiency of 0.38 percent, which is comparable to the conversion efficiency in a natural, green leaf. “Our system has the potential to fundamentally change the chemical and oil industry in that we can produce chemicals and fuels in a totally renewable way, rather than extracting them from deep blow the ground,” reports Dr. Yang. If Dr. Yang’s system can be successfully scaled up, businesses could build artificial forests that produce the fuel for our Ultimate Driving Machines, planes, and power plants by following the same laws and processes that natural forests allow. Ince artificial photosynthesis would absorb and reduce carbon dioxide in order to create fuels, we could continue to use liquid in order to create fuels, we could continue to use liquid fuel without destroying the environment or warming the planet. In August of 2015, Dr. Yang and his tea tested his system with a different type of bacteria. The method is the same, expect instead of electrons, the bacteria used molecular hydrogen from water molecules to reduce carbon dioxide and create methane, the primary component of natural gas. This process is projected to have an impressive conversion efficiency of 10 percent, which is much higher than the conversion efficiency in natural leaves. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
There are many such machines in nature. Such processes will be put to work. Rather than trying to synthesize products chemically, we will, in effect grow them to specification. One might even conceive of biological components in machines—in computers, for example. It is quite obvious that computers so far are just imitations of our brains. Once we learn more about how the brain acts, I would be surprised if we could not construct a sort of biological components in the real brain. And at some distant point in the future it is conceivable that biological elements themselves might be part of the machine. BMW already has this technology. Since the electric drive system of the BMW iX requires only a small amount of cooling air, the kidney grille is completely blanked off. Its role has duly turned digital and it now functions as an “intelligence panel.” Camera technology, radar functions and other sensors are integrated seamlessly into the grille behind a transparent surface. The heating elements and cleaning system for the sensors are also embedded in the grille front. The self-healing effect of its surface can repair minor scratches, for example—within 24 hours at room temperature or through a five-minute supply of warm air. BMW called the grille an example of “shy tech,” such features incorporated into the vehicle subtly enough that they go unnoticed until you use them. Humans are on the path toward integrating living tissues in the processes of physical mechanism. We shall have in the near future machines constituted at one and the same time of metal and of living substance. In the light of this, the human body itself takes on new meaning. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
I pray today to the King of Fire, great God, triple God. There is someone here who needs you, someone who is sick. I ask you to being your healing flame, the warmth of life, into one, burning away all that is making one sick, that I might always have a cause to praise you. Please guide us to the right path, protector of the way. Please steer us toward the proper goal, guardian of the path. Please open the road that should be traveled to us, Lord of going. May you walk with me, as I go on my way, walking yourself in front, clearing the way. The Lord spoke unto Moses, saying: Speak unto the children of America, and bid them make fringes in the corners of their garments throughout their generations, putting upon the fringe of each corner a thread of blue. And it shall be unto you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it and remember all the commandments of the Lord, and do them; and that ye go not about after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye use to go astray: That ye may remember to do all My commandments, and be holy unto your God. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the Town to be your God; I am the Lord your God. True and firm, right and faithful, beloved and precious, good and beautiful is this Thy teaching unto us forever and ever. It is true that the God of the Universe is our King, and the Rock of Jacob is our protecting shield and Jesus Christ is our Saviour. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
#Bluffs is one of three communities at #PlumasRanch. These single-story cul-de-sac homes are comfy, cozy, and ready for you to move in once Phase 2 is completed! Read more on our blog. Link in bio.
Cresleigh Bluffs is a quaint neighborhood featuring multiple cul-de-sac home sites. The open floor plan and optional covered patio make this home a dream for the neighborhood host and it’s two additional bedrooms offer the space and privacy needed for any family. Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes.
The open concept design includes three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a two car garage. Through the charming front porch enter into the foyer, where two secondary bedrooms. The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters. The great room is spacious and full of natural light. The Owner’s suite is nestled in the rear of the home separate from the secondary bedrooms, providing maximum privacy. Enjoy a spa like experience in the Owner’s bathroom with a large walk in shower and large soaking tub. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-bluffs-at-plumas-ranch/residence-1/
Four Nights Will Quickly Dream Away the Time–Mid-August Thunder Storm Anyone? I Promise to do X!
In golf you are always breaking a barrier. When you bust it, you set yourself a little higher barrier, and try to break that one. Whether it is in education, sports, or career, it is important to apply the same concept to life. The conquest of the oceans links up directly with the advance toward accurate weather prediction and, ultimately, climate control. What we call weather is largely a consequence of the interaction of the sun, air, and ocean. By monitoring ocean currents, salinity, and other factors, by placing weather-watch satellites in the skies, we will greatly increase our ability to forecast weather accurately. Prior to the 1970’s, it was impossible to monitor the weather around the entire globe, but as Dr. Walter Orr Roberts, past president of the American Association for the advancement of since predicted, we are now able to have the entire globe under continuous weather observation at a reasonable cost. And this has vastly improved forecasting of storms, freezes, droughts, smog episodes, tsunamis, and even earthquakes—with attendant opportunities to avert disaster. However, it was also predicted that lurking in the future would also be the awesome potential weapon of war—the deliberate manipulation of weather for the benefit of the few and powerful, to the detriment of the enemy, and perhaps the bystanders as well. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
In a science fiction story entitled The Weather Man, Theodore L. Thomas depicts a World in which the central political institution is a “Weather Council.” In it, representatives of the various nations hammer out weather policy and control peoples by adjusting climate, imposing a drought here or a storm there to enforce their edicts. We may be currently be capable of having such carefully calibrated control. The ionosphere is the outermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere. It begins at about 50 kilometers (30 miles) above Earth’s surface and contains atoms and molecules that are ionized (that is, they lose an electron and become positively charged) by the Sun’s ultraviolet light. HAARP is a full High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, that uses an ionospheric heater, so called because the excitation of electrons increases their temperature. By altering the density of electrons, in a specific region, scientists using HAARP can study how the ionosphere reacts to changing conditions. Many have accused HAARP of controlling the weather to ensure a global warming conspiracy, which is basically what Theodore L. Thomas predicted in April is 1962. No matter if these predications and allegations are true, there is no question that the day is past when humans simply had to take whatever Heaven deigned to give in the way of weather. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Many primitive peoples believed that everything was controlled by some sort of spirit. If there was a storm, the reason must be that the gods were angry. If crops were bad, then the first-born son must be sacrificed to appease the gods. A child born deformed was thought to be possessed by an evil spirit, and had to be killed. A person who was emotionally or physically ill must be possessed by a demon. People also assumed that forces or spirits controlled their behaviour. In most primitive cultures even today, people assume that they have little choice in their own destiny, because it is controlled by good and evil spirits. Through the use of technology and the fake news media, it is possible that people are using fear and the age of information to scare people in order to control them. However, “Take heed that no human deceives you,” reports Matthew 24.4. Deception will play a very big role in the last days, for the “devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time,” reports Revelation 12.2. “He performs great signs, so that he even makes fire come down out of the sky to the Earth in the presence of the people,” reports Revelation 13.13 In the blunt words of the American Meteorological Society: “Weather modification today is a reality.” This represents one of the turning points in history and provides humans with a weapon that could radically affect agriculture, transportation, communication, recreation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Unless wielded with extreme care, however, the gift of weather system is an integrated whole; a minute change at one point can touch off massive consequences elsewhere. Even without aggressive intent, there is danger that attempts to control a drought on one continent could trigger a tornado on another. Moreover, the unknown sociopsychological consequences of weather manipulation could be enormous. Millions of us, for example, hunger for sunshine, as our mass migrations to Florida, California or the Mediterranean coast indicate. We may well be able to produce sunshine—or a facsimile of it—at will. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is studying the concept of a giant orbiting space mirror capable of reflecting the sun’s light downward on night-shrouded parts of the Earth. A NASA official, George E. Mueller, has testified before Congress that the United States of America will have the capacity to launch huge sun-reflecting satellites into space, and in the plane of the can be assigned remotely by electrical signals. By appropriately adjusting the segments, it would then be possible, depending on the need, to spread the entire soar energy reflected by the mirror over wide regions of the Earth’s surface or to concentrate it on single points, or finally to radiate it out into space if not being used. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
“Space mirrors” of this type would be in a weightless state as a result of their orbital motion; this fact would considerably simplify their manufacture. Using these large space mirrors, it would also be possible to make other planets inhabitable, as well as areas in the North of Earth through artificial solar radiation, to keep the sea lanes to Northern Siberian harbours, to Spitzbergen, et cetera free of ice, or to influence even the weather by preventing sudden drops in temperature and pressure, frosts, hail storms, and to provide many other benefits. Humans have the technology to renovate and control the Earth, expand livable region and save rain forests. The present natural light-dark cycle is tired to human biological rhythms in ways that are, as yet, unexplored. One can easily imagine the use of orbiting sun-mirrors to alter the hours of light for agricultural, industrial or even psychological reasons. For example, the introduction of longer days into Scandinavia could have a strong influence on the culture and personality types now characteristic of that region. To put the matter only half-facetiously, what happens to Ingmar Bergman’s brooding art when Stockholm’s brooding darkness is lifted? Could The Seventh Seal or Winter Light have been conceived in another climate? #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
The increasing ability to alter weather, the development of new energy sources, new materials (some of them almost surrealistic in their properties), new transportation means, new foods (not only from the sea, but from hydroponic food-growing factories)—all these only begin to hint at the nature of that lie ahead. In War with the Newts, Karel Capek’s marvelous but little-known novel, humans being about the destruction of civilization through their attempt to domesticate a variety of salamander. Today, among other things, humans are learning to exploit animals and fish in ways that would have made Mr. Capek smile wryly. Trained pigeons are used to identify and eliminate defective pills from drug factor assembly lines. In Ukraine, Soviet scientists employ a particular species of fish to clear the algae off the filters in pumping stations. Dolphins have been trained to carry tools to “aquanauts” submerged off the coast of California, and to ward off sharks who approach the work zone. Others have been trained to ram submerged mines, thereby detonating them and committing suicide on human’s behalf—a use that provoked a slight furor over inter-species ethics. If, and when, humans make contact with extra-terrestrial life—a possibility that many reputable astronomers regard as almost inevitable, research into communication between humans and the dolphin may prove to be extremely useful. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
In the meantime, dolphin research is yielding new data on the ways in which human’s sensory apparatus differs from that of other animals. It suggests some of the outer limit within which the human organism operates—feelings, moods, perceptions not available to humans because of their own biological make-up can be at least analyzed or described. Existing animal species, however, are by no means all we have to work with A number of writers have suggested that new animal forms be bred for specialized purposes. Sir George Thomson notes that “with advancing knowledge of genetics very large modifications in the wild species can no doubt be made.” Arthur Clarke has written about the possibility that we can “increase the intelligence of our domestic animals, or evolve wholly new ones with much higher Intelligence Quotients (IQ) than any existing now.” We are also developing the capacity to control animal behaviour by remote control. Dr. Jose M. R. Delgado, in a series of experiments terrifying in their human potential, implanted electrodes in the skull of a bull. Waving a red cape, Dr. Delgado provoked the animal to charge. Then, with a signal emitted from a tiny hand-held radio transmitter, he made the beast turn aside in mid-lunge and trot docilely away. Whether we grow specialized animals to serve us or develop household robots depends in part on the uneven race between the life sciences and the physical sciences. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
It may be more cost efficient to make machines for our purposes, than to raise and train animals. Yet the biological sciences are developing so rapidly that the balance may well tip within our lifetimes. Indeed, the day may even come when we begin to grow our machines. Now the principle of fidelity is but a special cast of the principle of fairness applied to the social practice of promising. Promising is an action defined by a public system of rules. These rules are, as in the case of institutions generally, a set of constitutive conventions. Just as the rules of games do, they specify certain activities and define certain actions. In the case of promising, the basic rule is that governing the use of the words “I promise to do X.” It reads roughly as follows: if one says the words “I promise to do X” in the appropriate circumstances, one is to do X, unless certain excusing conditions obtain. This rule we may think of as the rule of promising; it may be taken as representing the practice as a whole. It is not itself a moral principle but a constitutive convention. In this respect it is on par with legal rules and statues, and rules of games; as these do, it exists in a society when it is more or less regularly acted upon. The way in which the rule of promising specifies the appropriate circumstances and excusing conditions determines whether the practice it represents is just. For example, in order to make a binding promise, one must be fully conscious, in rational frame of mind, and know the meaning of the operative words, their use in making promises, and so on. Furthermore, these words must be spoken freely or voluntarily, when one is not subject to threats or coercion, and in situations where one has a reasonably fair bargaining position, so to speak. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
If the operative words of a promise are uttered while one is asleep, or suffering from delusion, or if one was forced to promise, or if pertinent information was deceitfully withheld from one, a person is not required to perform. In general, the circumstances giving rise to a promise and the excusing conditions must be defined so as to preserve the equal liberty of the parties and to make the practice a rational means whereby humans can enter into and stabilize cooperative agreements for mutual advantage. Unavoidably the many complications here cannot be considered. It must suffice to remark that the principles of justice apply to other institutions. Therefore the restrictions on the appropriate conditions are necessary in order to secure equal liberty. It would be wildly irrational in the original position to agree to be bound by words uttered while asleep, or extorted by force. No doubt it is so irrational that we are inclined to exclude this and other possibilities as inconsistent with the concept (meaning) of promising. However, I shall not regard promising as a practice which is just by definition, since this obscures the distinction between the rule of promising and the obligation derived from the principle of fairness. There are many variations of promising jut as there are of the law of contract. Whether the particular practice as it is understood by a person, or a group of persons, is just remains to be determined by the principles of justice. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
What do you know about covenants? A covenant is a promise or a solemn agreement. When we covenant with another person, we makes promises to each other. When we make a covenant with the Lord, we know that He will keep His promises. It is very important that we also keep our promises, or our part of the covenant, with the Lord. There are many stories in the scriptures about people who made covenants with the Lord. Do you remember the story of Noah? When Noah lived on the Earth, the people were so wicked that the Lord commanded Noah to build an ark to save at least two of every kind of animal as well as his own righteous family. It rained for forty days and forty nights, and the Earth was washed clean by a great flood. The Lord made a covenant, promising that the Earth would never again be destroyed by a flood. As a sign of that covenant, God sent a rainbow. Today when we see a rainbow, we should remember the promise God made. “And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you; and with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the Earth with you; from all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the Earth. And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be flood to destroy the Earth. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
“And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the Earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the Earth that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the water shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the Earth. And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the covenant,” reports Genesis 9.9-17. A bona fide promise is one which arises in accordance with the rule of promising wen the practice it represents is just. One person says the words “I promise to do X” in the appropriate circumstances as defined by a just practice, one has made a bona fide promise. Next, the principle of fidelity is the principle that bona fide promises are to be kept. It is essential, as noted above, to distinguish between the rule of promising and the principle of fidelity. The rule is simply a constitutive convention, whereas the principle of fidelity is a moral principle, a consequence of the principle of fairness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
For suppose that a just practice of promising exists. Then in making a promise, that is, in saying the words “I promise to do X” in the appropriate circumstances, one knowingly invokes the rule and accepts the benefits of a just arrangement. There is no obligation to make a promise, let us assume; one is at liberty to do so or not. However, since by hypothesis the practice is just, the principle of fairness applies and one is to do as the rule specifics, that is, one is to do X. The obligation to keep a promise is a consequence of the principle of fairness. Therefore, by God keeping His promises, He demonstrates that he is a fair God. I have said that by making a promise one invokes a social practice and accepts the benefits that it makes possible. What are these benefits and how does the practice work? Well, let us assume that the standard reason for making promises is to set up and to stabilize small-scale schemes of cooperation, or a particular patter of transactions. The role of promises is analogous to that which Dr. Hobbes attributed to the sovereign. Just as the sovereign maintains and stabilizes the system of social cooperation by publicly maintaining an effective schedule of penalties, so humans in the absence of coercive arrangements establish and stabilize their private ventures by giving one another their word. Such ventures are often hard to initiate and to maintain. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
It is especially evident that these ventures of giving one’s word and taking another by their word is hard to initiate and to maintain in the case of covenants, that is, in those instances where one person is to perform before the other. For this person may believe that the second part will not do one’s part, and therefore the scheme never gets going. It is subject to instability of the second kind even though the person to perform later would in fact carry through. Now in these situations there may be no way of assuring the part who is to perform first except by giving one a promise, that is, by putting oneself under an obligation to carry through later. Only in this way can the scheme be made secure so that both can gain from the benefits of their cooperation. The practice of promising exists for precisely this purpose; and so while we normally think of moral requirements as bonds laid upon us, they are sometimes deliberately self-imposed for our advantage. Thus promising is an act done with the public intention of deliberately incurring an obligation the existence of which in the circumstances will further one’s ends. We want this obligation to exist and to be known to exist, and we want others to know that we recognize this tie and intend to abide by it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Having, then, availed ourselves of the practice for this reason, we are under an obligation to do as we promised by the principle of fairness. In this account of how promising (or entering into covenants) is used to initiate and to stabilize forms of cooperation, I have assumed that each person knows, or at least reasonably believes, that the other has a sense of justice and so a normally effective desire to carry out one’s bona fide obligations. Without this mutual confidence nothing is accomplished by uttering words. In a well-ordered society, however, this knowledge is present: when its members give promises there is a reciprocal recognition of their intention to put themselves under an obligation and a shared rational belief that this obligation is honoured. It is this reciprocal recognition and common knowledge that enables an arrangement to get started and preserves it in being. “Ye have entered into a covenant with one, that ye will serve one and keep one’s commandments, that one may pour out one’s Spirit more abundantly upon you,” reports Mosiah 18.10. There is no need to comment further on the extent to which a common conception of justice (including the principles of fairness and natural duty), and the public awareness of human’s willingness to act in accordance with it, are a great collective asset. I have already noted the many advantages from the standpoint of the assurance problem. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
It is now equally evident that, having trust and confidence in one another, humans can use their public acceptance of these principles enormously to extend the scope and vale of mutually advantageous schemes of cooperation. From the standpoint of the original position, them it is clearly rational for the parties to agree to the principles of fairness. This principle can be used to secure these ventures in ways consistent with freedom of choice and without unnecessarily multiplying moral requirements. At the same time, given the principle of fairness, we see why there should exist the practice of promising as a way of freely establishing an obligation when this is to be the mutual advantage of both parities. Such an arrangement is obviously in the common interest. These considerations are sufficient to argue for the principle of fairness. Before taking up the question of political duty and obligation, as the discussion of promises illustrates, the contract doctrine holds that no moral requirements follow from the existence of institutions alone. Even the rule of promising does not give rise to a moral obligation by itself. To account for fiduciary obligations, we must take the principle of fairness as a premise. Thus along with most other ethical theories, justice as fairness holds that natural duties and obligations arise only in virtue of ethical principles. These principles are those that would be chosen in the original position. Together with the relevant facts of the circumstances at hand, it is these criteria that determine our obligations and duties, and single out what count as moral reasons. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
A (sound) moral reason is a fact which one or more of these principles identifies as supporting a judgment. The correct moral decision is the one most in line with the dictates of this system of principles when it is applied to all the facts it deems to be relevant. Thus the reason identified by one principle may be supported, overridden, or even canceled (brought to naught) by reasons identified by one or more other principles. I assume, though, that out of the totality of facts, presumably in some sense infinite, a finite or surveyable number are selected as those that bear upon any particular case so that the full system enables us to reach a judgment, all things considered. By contrast, institutional requirements, and those deriving from social practices generally, can be ascertained from the existing rules and how they are to be interpreted. For example, as citizens our legal duties and obligations are settled by what the law is, insofar as it can be ascertained. The norms of applying to persons who are players in a game depend upon the rules of the game. Whether these requirements are connected with moral duties and obligations is a separate question. This is so even if the standards used by judges and others to interpret and to apply the law resemble the principles of right and justice, or are identical with them. It may be, for example, that in a well-ordered society the two principles of justice are used by courts to interpret those parts of the constitution regulating freedom of thought and conscience, and guaranteeing equal protection of the laws. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Although in this case it is clear that, should the law satisfy its own standards, we are morally bound, other things equal, to comply with it, the questions what the law demands and what justice requires are still distinct. The tendency to conflate the rule of promising and the principle of fidelity (as a special case arising from the principle of fairness) is particularly strong. At first sight they may seem to be the same thing; but one is defined by the existing constitutive conventions, while the other is explained by the principles that would be chosen in the original position. In thus way, then, we can distinguish two kinds of norms. The terms “duty” and “obligation” are used in the context of both kinds; but the ambiguities stemming from this usage should be easy enough to resolve. However, one may wonder, is it possible, without appealing to a prior general promise, or agreement to keep agreements, to explain the fact that by uttering certain words (by availing oneself of a convention) ne becomes bound to do something, particularly when the action whereby one becomes bound is publicly performed with the very intention, which one wants others to recognize, of bringing about this obligation. Or what is the something implied in there being bona fide agreements which looks much like an agreement to keep agreements and yet which, strictly speaking, cannot be one (since no such agreement has been entered into)? #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Now the existence of a just practice of promising as a system of public constitutive rules and the principle of fairness suffice for a theory of fiduciary obligations. And neither implies the existence of an actual prior agreement to keep agreements. The adoption of the principle of fairness is purely hypothetical; we only need the fact that this principle would be acknowledged. For the rest, once we assume that a just practice of promising obtains, however it may have come to be established, the principle of fairness is enough to bind those who take advantage of it, given the appropriate conditions already described. Thus what corresponds to the something, which looked like a prior agreement but is not, is the just practice of giving one’s word in conjunction with the hypothetical agreement on the principle of fairness. Of course, another ethical theory might derive this principle without using the conception of the original position. For the moment I need not maintain that the fiduciary ties cannot be explained in some other way. Rather, what I am concerned to show is that even though justice as fairness sues the notion of an original agreement it is still able to give a satisfactory answer to the question. Everyone will admit that choice is essentially conscious; to choose involves knowing that you choose. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Now Paradisal humans always choose to follow God’s will. In following it one also gratified one’s won desire, both because all the actions demanded of one were, in fact, agreeable to one’s blameless inclination, and also because the service of God was itself one’s keenest pleasure, without which as their razor edge all joys would have been inspired to one. The question “Am I doing this for God’s sake or because I happen to like it?” did not then arise, since doing things for God’s sake was what one chiefly “happened to like.” One’s Godward will rode one’s happiness like a well-managed horse, whereas our will, when we are happy, is carried away in the happiness as in a ship racing down a swift stream. Pleasure was then an acceptable offering to God because offering was a pleasure. However, we inherit a whole system of desires which do not necessarily contradict God’s will but which, after centuries of usurped autonomy, steadfastly ignore it. If the thing we like doing is, is in fact, the thing God wants us to do, yet that is not our reason for doing it; it remains a mere happy coincidence. We cannot therefore know that we are acting at all, or primarily, for God’s sake, unless the material of the action is contrary to our inclinations, or (in other words) painful, and what we cannot know that we are choosing, we cannot choose. The full acting out of the self’s surrender to God therefore demands pian: this action to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
How impossible it is to enact the surrender of the self by doing what we like, I know very well from my own experience at the moment. When we undertake a task and become thoroughly immersed in it, it will become a temptation rather than a duty. One may still hope whatever the task is, in fact, in conformity with God’s will: but to content that one is learning to surrender oneself by doing what is so attractive to one would be ridiculous. However, the more virtuous a human becomes the more one enjoys virtuous actions. Intuition is always sure of itself, but few persons are always sure whether what they feel is actually intuition or not. They may test it against reasoned analysis. You lift your magical hands, great healer, and send out healing knowledge. You know each medication and its effects, each technique and when it should be used, each symptom and what it means, each illness and how to treat it, each patient and what to do. May my hands be yours. “Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, so that your day and the days of your children may be many in the land that the LORD swore to give your forefathers, as many as the days that the Heavens are above the Earth,” reports Deuteronomy 11.18-22. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 