Once the World has been purged of ghosts and spirits, it reveals to us that the critical problem is scarcity. Nature is a stepmother who has left us unprovided for. However, this means we need have no gratitude. When we revered nature, we were poor. Since there was not enough, we had to take from one another; and as a result of this competition, there was inevitably war, the greatest threat to life, even more of a threat than any pandemic has ever been. However, if, instead of fighting one another, we band together and make war on our stepmother, who keeps her riches from us, we can at the same time provide for ourselves and end our strife. The conquest of nature, which is made possible by the insight of science and by the power it produces, is the key to the political. The old commandment that we love our brothers made impossible demands on us, demands against nature, while doing nothing to provide for real needs. What is required is not brotherly love or faith, hope and charity, but self-interested rational labor. The man who contributes most to relieving human misery is the one who produces most, and the surest way of getting one to do so is not by exhorting one, but by rewarding one most handsomely to sacrifice present pleasure for the sake of future benefit, or to assure avoidance of pain through the power so gained. From the point of view of humanity’s well-being and security, what is needed is not humans who practice the Christian virtues or those of Aristotle, but rational (capable of calculating their interest) and industrious humans. Their opposite numbers are not the vicious, wicked or sinful, but the quarrelsome and the idle. This may include priests and nobles as well as those who most obviously spring to mind.

This scheme provides the structure for the key term of liberal democracy, the most successful and useful political notion of our World: rights. America is a capitalistic society, so its principals are about freedom, the ability to provide for one’s self, low taxes that allow people to spend their money as they please, ownership of private property, so people do not have to rent and endure unbareable condition or have people spying on them or illegally entering their homes, disrespecting them, stealing from them and threatening them. However, with some exceptions for historical properties and other special circumstances, the city, state, and federal government does have the right to enforce code violations on your property. They can do things like make you declutter your space, make you keep your yard and noise levels down, and many other things. If these conditions are not met, the government can fine, sue, and in some cases even arrest you. Private property is a right and a privilege. Yet, even if you are a renter, The Constitution of the United States of America, Amendment IV states: “The right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Meaning, you cannot just search someone’s home because you want to. You cannot steal from someone’s home. You may not kidnap someone out of their home, or else you are breaking the law and have to deal with civil and criminal punishment as well. And if you enter someone’s home unannounced and they are in fear of their lives, if you end up getting injured or harmed, then that is considered them defending themselves.

However, the person who considered to be standing their ground may still have to go to jail and prove that their degree of self-defense was called for. One also cannot have cameras aimed into their neighbour’s backyard, nor directly at their home. That is illegal and considered an invasion of privacy. Your neighbor can report you to authorities and sue you in a court of law. Capitalism is for responsible people, who are meant to and able to govern themselves. They do not need a manager micromanaging their lives, unless that is who the individual has hired them to do. If the government is not representing the people, they have a right to recall and put in a new form of government. Government exists to protect the product of humans’ labor, their property, and therewith life and liberty. The notion that humans possess inalienable natural rights, that they belong to one as an individual prior, both in time and in sanctity, to any civil society, and that civil societies exist for and acquire their legitimacy from ensuring those rights, is an invention of modern philosophy. Rights, like the other terms discussed in this report, are new in modernity, not a part of the common-sense language of politics or of classical political philosophy. Hobbes initiated the notion of rights, and it was given its greatest respectability by Locke. Unlike the other terms, however, we understand rights perfectly and have immediate access to the thought underlying them. The others are alien, problematic; and to understand them requires a great effort that, we are arguing, we do not make. However, rights are ours. They constitute our being; we live them; they are our common sense. Right is not the opposite of wrong, but of duty. It is a part of, or the essence of, freedom. It begins from humans’ cherished passion to live, and to live as painlessly as possible.

Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments, never finds oneself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when one contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. One will not fail therefore to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which one is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice and confusion introduced into the public councils, have in truth been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations. The valuable improvements made by the American Constitutions on the popular models, both ancient and modern, cannot certainly be too much admired; but it would be an unwarrantable partiality, to contend that they have as effectually obviated the danger on this side as was wished and expected. Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty. There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects. There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests. An analysis of universal needs and their relation to nature as a whole demonstrates that this passion is not merely an imagination. It can be called a right and converted into a term of political relevance when a human is full conscious of what one needs most, recognizes that one is threatened by others and that they are threatened by one.

If one agrees to respect life, property of others (for which one has no natural respect) this is the spring that makes the social machinery tick is this recognition, which generates that calculation that can be induced to reciprocate. This is the foundation of rights, a new kind of morality solidly grounded in self-interest. To say, “I have got my rights,” is as instinctive with Americas as breathing, so clear and evident is this way of looking at things. It signifies the rules of the game, within which humans play peacefully, the necessity of which they see and accept, and the infringement of which arouses moral indignation. It is our only principle of justice. From our knowledge of our rights flows our acceptance of the duties to the community that protects them. Righteousness means for us respect for equal rights equally guaranteed by the force of government. Everyone in the World today speaks of rights, even the communists, the heirs of Marx, who ridiculed “bourgeois rights” as a sham and in whose thought, there is no place for rights. However, almost every thoughtful observer knows that it is in the United States of America that the idea of rights has penetrated most deeply into the bloodstream of its citizens and accounts for their unusual lack of servility. Without it we would have nothing, only chaotic selfishness; and it is the interested source of a certain disinterestedness. We feel people’s interests should be respected. The coming prosumer explosion is underestimated not only in the media that cover business and finance but in academia and government as well. Prosumers are not going to run the World. However, they are going to shape the emerging economy. And they are going to challenge the existence of some of the World’s biggest companies and industries. In fact, they are already doing so. We have just seen the free lunch their third job provides to banks, airlines and countless other industries. As we have seen the growing economic value they contribute to the health system. However, the prosumer story is just beginning.

If prosumers today are buying up tools and technologies to increase their “output” of health, they are doing the same in other fields as well. As of 2022, Home Dept is the World’s largest home improvement retailer. There are 2,3000 stores across North America that aspire to excel in service. As the biggest home-improvement stores in the United States of America, it employs 300,000 people and racks up $151.2 billion in annual sales, an increase of $19.0 billion, or 14.4 percent, from fiscal 2020. Its stores stock up to forty thousand items, mainly for the do-it-yourselfer. Overall, the do-it-yourself market (D-I-Y) for home improvement in the United States of America is valued at USD438.56 billion, and in the forecast period 2022-2026 is expected to achieve market value of USD537.47 billion by 2026. In Germany, D-I-Y companies, led by Obi, Praktiker and Bauhaus, ring up $48.2 billion on home renovations sales. Europe Home Improvement Market size crosses USD245 billion. All this activity is spurred by a rapidly growing audience for home improvement programs on television. In Britain, shows such as Changing Rooms and Ground Force, which offer hands-on, how-to advice to D-I-Yers, were among the most watched shows on the BBC. And the HGTV and DIY Network channels are seen in more than 100 million U.S. homes and twenty-nine countries from Japan, Australia and Thailand to the Czech Republic and Hungary. If that is not enough advice, prosumers can go online to RepirClinic.com, which sells replacement parts for appliances, or to its “RepairGuru” for how-to instructions. A competitor, Point and Click Appliance Repair, offers professional online diagnosis of your problems with everything from freezers and refrigerators to ovens and airfryers.

The Sears Web page provides D-I-Yers with access to over 4.5 million parts for your appliances, lawn equipment, power tools, and home electronics. Prosumers buy supplies from these companies, then apply their own sweat equity—that is, unpaid labor—to create economic value whether by adding a room to the house, extending the life of a washing machine or beautifying a property. A parallel investment of unpaid labor can be found in do-it-yourself auto repair, as a visit to any big auto-parts store suggests. The Global Automotive Aftermarket size is expected to hit USD950.1 billion by 2027. Moreover, nearly 89 percent of U.S. households participated in some kind of do-it-yourself lawn and garden activity in 2021. USD42 billion, was spent on lawn and gardens in America, which makes since considering part of the American Dream is a green lawn and/or a landscaped yard and garden. Landscaping can have up to a 77 percent boost in home values. In much smaller England, gardening-mad Britons, spend up to $7 billion. German green-thumbers spend $9 billion. In Japan, where prosumers manage to create greenery in even the smallest crevices between buildings, a third of the population, some 40 million people, garden, spending about $16 billion a year on tools, plants and nutrients. And you do not have to like getting your fingernails dirty to buy prosumer supplies. Sewing remains more than just a hobby for 33 million U.S. women, mostly college-educated and young—nearly one-third of America’s adult female population. What is more, after you make that dress, you can keep it spotless by using a home dry-cleaning kit as advertised in the upscale catalogs that fill the mailbox to overflowing. For those who want a real challenge, do-it-yourself kits are now available that allowed prosumers to build everything from electric guitars and computers to golf clubs, sailboats, four-bedroom long cabins and even airplanes good enough to compete in flying shows.

There were two groups of people who lived many years ago but whose influence is still with us. They were very different from each other, representing opposite values and traditions. The first group lived about 2,500 years ago in the place which we now call Greece, in a city they called Athens. We do not know as much about their origins as we would like. However, we do know a great deal about their accomplishments. They were, for example, the first people to develop a complete alphabet, and therefore they became the first truly literate population on Earth. They invented the idea of political democracy, which they practiced with a vigor that puts us to shame. They invented what we call philosophy. And they also invented what we call logic and rhetoric. They came very close to inventing what we call science, and one of them—Democritus by name—conceived of the atomic theory of matter 2,300 years before it occurred to any modern scientist. They composed and sang epic poems of unsurpassed beauty and insight. And they wrote and performed plays that, almost three millennia later, still have the power to make audiences laugh and weep. They even invented what, today, we call the Olympics, and among their values none stood higher than that in all things one should strive for excellence. They believed in reason. They believed in beauty. They believed in moderation. And they invented the word and the idea which we know today as ecology. About 2,000 years ago, the vitality of their culture declined and these people began to disappear. However, not what they had created. Their imagination, art, politics, literature, and language spread all over the World so that, today, it is hardly possible to speak on any subject without repeating what some Athenian said on the matter 2,500 years ago.

The second group of people lived in the place we now call Germany, and flourished about 1,700 years ago. We call them the Visigoths, and you may remember that your sixth- or seventh-grade teacher mentioned them. They were spectacularly good horsemen, which is about the only pleasant thing history can say of them. They were marauders—ruthless and brutal. Their language lacked subtlety and depth. Their art was crude and even grotesque. They swept down through Europe destroying everything in their path, and they overran the Roman Empire. There was nothing a Visigoth liked better than to burn a book, desecrate a building, or smash a work of art. From the Visigoths, we have no poetry, no theater, no logic, no science, no humane politics. Like the Athenians, the Visigoths also disappeared, but not before they had ushered in the period known as the Dark Ages. It took Europe almost a thousand years to recover from the Visigoths. Now, the Athenians and the Visigoths still survive, and they do so through us and the ways in which we conduct our lives. All around us—in this hall, in this community, in our city—there are people whose way of looking at the World reflects the new way of the Athenians, and there are people whose way is the way of the Visigoths. I do not mean, of course, that our modern-day Athenians roam abstractedly through the streets reciting poetry and philosophy, or that the modern-day Visigoth are killers. I mean that to be an Athenian or a Visigoth is to organize your life around a set of values. An Athenian is an idea. And a Visigoth is an idea. To be an Athenian is to hold knowledge and, especially, the quest for knowledge in high esteem. To contemplate, to reason, to experiment, to question—these are, to an Athenian, the most exalted activities a persona can perform. To a Visigoth, the quest for knowledge is useless unless it can help you to earn money or to gain power over other people.

To be an Athenian is to cherish language because you believe it to be humankind’s most precious gift. In their use of language, Athenians strive for grace, precision, and variety. And they admire those who can achieve such skill. To Visigoth, one word is as good as another, one sentence indistinguishable from another. A Visigoth’s language aspires to nothing higher than the cliché. To be an Athenian is to understand that the thread which holds civilized society together is thin and vulnerable; therefor, Athenians place great value on tradition, social restraint, and continuity. To an Athenian, bad manners are acts of violence against the social order. The modern Visigoth cares very little about any of this. The Visigoths think of themselves as the center of the Universe. Tradition exists for their own convenience, good manners are an affection and a burden, and history is merely what is in yesterday’s newspaper. To be an Athenian is to take an interest in public affairs and the improvement of public behavior. Indeed, the ancient Athenians had a word for people who did not. The word was idiotes, from which we get our word “idiot.” A modern Visigoth is interested only in one’s own affairs and has no sense of the meaning of community. And, finally, to be an Athenian is to esteem the discipline, skill, and taste tht are required to produce enduring art. Therefore, in approaching a work of art, Athenians prepare their imagination through learning and experience. To a Visigoth, there is no measure of artistic excellence except popularity. What catches the fancy of the multitude is good. No other standard is respected or even acknowledge by the Visigoth. Now, it must be obvious what all of this has to do with you. Eventually, like the rest of us, you must be on one side or the other. You must be an Athenian or Visigoth.

Of course, it is much harder to be Athenian, for you must learn how to be one, you must work at being one, whereas we are all, in a way, natural-born Visigoths. That is why there are so many more Visigoths than Athenians. And I must tell you that you do not become an Athenian merely by attending school or accumulating academic degrees. My father-in-law was one of the most committed Athenians I have ever known, and he spent his entire adult life working as a dress cutter on Seventh Avenue in New York City. On the other hand, I know physicians, lawyers, and engineers who are Visigoths of unmistakable persuasion. And I must also tell you, as much in sorrow as in shame, that at some of our great universities, perhaps even this one, there are professors of whom we fairly say they are closet Visigoths. And yet, you must not doubt for a moment that a school, after all, is essentially an Athenian idea. There is a direct link between the cultural achievements of Athens and what the faculty at this university is all about. I have no difficulty imagining that Plato, Aristotle, or Democritus would be quite at home in our classrooms. A Visigoth would merely scrawl obscenities on the way. And so, whether you were aware of it or not, the purpose of your having been at this university was to give you a glimpse of the Athenian way, to interest you in the Athenian way. We know on this day how many of you will choose that way and how many will not. You are young and it is not given to us to see your future. However, I will tell you this, I can never wish for your no higher compliment than that in the future it will be reported that Athenians mightily outnumber the Visigoths. Now, when you are watching television and believe you are looking at pictures, you are actually looking at the phosphorescent glow of three hundred thousand tiny dots. There is no picture there. These dots seem to be lit constantly, but in fact they are not. All the dots go off thirty times per second, creating what is called the flicker effect of television, which is similar to strobe or ordinary fluorescent light.

For many years conventional wisdom held that since this flickering happens at a rate beyond the so-called flicker-fusion rate of the human eye, we do not consciously note it, and we presumably are not affected by it. However, recent discoveries about the biological effects of very minor stimuli, and the growing incidence of television epilepsy among those particularly sensitive to flicker, have shown that whether we consciously note flicker or not, our bodies react to it. A second factor is that even when the dots go “on,” not all of them are lit simultaneously. Which dots are on determines the picture. In a sense, the television screen is like a newspaper photograph or the image on a film, which are also comprised of dots, except that the television dots are lighted one at a time according to the scanning system that starts behind the screen. Proceeding along a line from the upper-right-hand portion of your screen across the top to the left, the scan lights some dots and skips others, depending upon the image to be conveyed. Then the scan goes down another line, starts at the right again and goes across to the left and so on. What you perceive as a picture is actually an image that never exists in any given moment but rather is constructed over time. You perception of it is as an image depends upon your brain’s ability to gather in all the lit dots, collect the image they make on your retina in sequence, and form a picture. The picture itself, however, never existed. Unlike ordinary life, in which whatever you see actually exists outside you before you let it in through your eyes, a television image gains its existence only once you have put it together inside your head. As you watch television you do not “see” any of this fancy construction work happening. It is taking place at a rate faster than the nerve pathways between your retina and the portion of your brain that “sees” can process them.

You can only see things happening within a range of speeds. This is because five million years of human evolution developed our eyes to process only that data which were concretely useful. Until this generation, there was no need to see anything that moved at electronic speed. Everything that we humans can actually do anything about moves slowly enough for us to see. Even though you do not see every dot go on and off in sequence, these events are happening. Your retina receives the light continuously and your brain cells record their reception. The only thing that does not happen continuously is the translation of the energy into images inside your head. That happens only at about ten times per second. Television is sending its sequential images at thirty times per second. A few years ago, there was a big fuss about advertisers exploiting the differential in these rates. A technique called subliminal advertising places images within the dot-scan sequence at a speed which is faster than sight. You get hit with the ad, but you cannot process this fast enough, so you do not know the ad is registering. Your seeing process are plodding along at noneletronic speed while the advertisers have access to electronic speed. Your brain gets the message, but your conscious mind does not. According to those who have used the technique, it communicates well enough to affect sales. For entire hours or more per day that the average person is watching television, the repetitive process of constructing images out of dots, following scans, and vibrating with the beats of the set and the exigencies of electronic rhythm goes on. It was this repetitive, nonstop requirement to reconstruct images that are consciously usable that caused McLuhan to call television “participatory,” another unfortunate choice of words. It suggests exactly the opposite of what is going on.

I wish he has said “overpowering.” The word “participatory” has been passed around at thousands of cocktail parties, misleading people to assume if they only could have managed to get through McLuhan’s books, they would have discovered that their innate feeling (anecdotal evidence) that the experience is passive and that is “deadens my mind” was somehow wrong. In fact, watching television is participatory only in the way the assembly line or a hypnotist’s blinking flashlight is. Eventually, the conscious mind gives up noting the process and merges with the experience. The body vibrates with the beat and mind gives itself over, opening up to whatever imagery is offered. The Net, much like the TV, always provides a bounty of useful information and research tools, but its constant interruptions scatter some people’s thoughts and words. This may cause some to write in disconnected spurts. This makes it clear that big changes are in order. It may be good to take a vacation and disconnect and enjoy nature. However, the dismantling of one’s online life is always painful. For months, some experience how their synapses howls for their Net fix. Many will sneak back on and click the “check for new mail” button. Occasionally, some will go on a daylong Web binge. However, in time the cravings will subside, and one will find one’s self able to type at one’s keyboard for hours on end or to read through a sense academic paper without their mind wandering. Some old, disused neural circuits will spring back to life, some newer, Web-wired ones were quieting down. Then one will feel generally calmer and more in control of one’s thoughts—less like an animal in a lab pressing a lever and more like, well, a human being. One’s brain will be able to breathe again. For many people who are self-employed and have returned to the electronic cottage, they have the option of disconnecting. However, most people do not.

If they wanted to escape the network, the Web is so essential to their work and social lives that they could not. The internet, as its proponents rightly remind us, makes for variety and convenience; it does not force anything on you. Only it turns out it does not feel like that at all. We do not feel as if we had freely chosen our online practices. We feel instead that they are habits we have helplessly picked up or that history has enforced, that we are not distributing our attention as we intend or even like to. The question, really, is not whether people can still read or write the occasional book. Of course they can. When we begin using a new intellectual technology, we do not immediately switch from one mental mode to another. The brain is not binary. An intellectual technology exerts its influence by shifting the emphasis of our thought. Although even the initial users of the technology can often sense the changes in their patterns of attention, cognition, and memory as their brans adapt to the new medium, the most profound shifts play out more slowly, over several generations, as the technology becomes ever more embedded in work, leisure, and education—in all the norms and practices that define a society and its culture. How is the way we read changing? How is the way we write changing? How is the way we think changing? Those are the questions we should be asking. So many people love the Net because it keeps their e-mail running all the time. They play around with a few new social-networking services and they post entries into the electronic diary. There are also Blu-ray players with built-in Wi-Fi connections. It lets one stream music from Pandora, movies from Netflix, and videos from YouTube (the New MTV) through one’s television and stereo. One has to confess: it is cool. And most of us could not live without it.

As priests wrench off their collars in record numbers, so do monks and other religious, in particular nuns. Since the revolution of pleasures of the flesh, over three hundred thousand nuns have quit their orders, about one in five Worldwide, a breathtaking statistic people in Catholic circles call “the bleeding.” Interviews and surveys coincide in reporting that the vow of chastity is one of the main causes, just as it is among young Catholic women who decide not to join the convents they would have filled decades earlier. This, despite the fact that nuns rank their vows of chastity as “the most meaningful and least difficult of the vows.” Nunly life today is vastly different from in the Middle Ages, when wretched nuns were crammed into convents by harsh families or harsher circumstances. Then, they could never break out of the confines of their cloistered prisons. By the twentieth century, convents were populated primarily by women who had chosen the religious life as a vocation, though a small but constant contingent was composed of the one daughter that parents had promised to God. Mercifully, convents seldom accepted overtly mutinous or obviously unsuitable novices, so as a general rule, nunneries were overwhelmingly populated by dedicated nuns. Until Vatican II, convent life was rigidly structured, censored, and chaperoned. Its inmates, visibly distinguished from the outside World by their ungainly and anachronistic medieval vestments, lived sternly segregated from all outside influences, from the media to their own families. Many congregations banned newspapers and magazines, and a select radio or television program was a rare, supervised treat. Contacts with the World were always monitored, so that even relations had to tolerate another nun’s presence as they chatted with their daughter/sister/niece/aunt/cousin. The same protocol applied to dental, medical, and shopping expeditions, and to visits “home,” which were limited to intervals of five of six years.

The returning nun was accompanied to her parents’ house by a sister from the local convent, and both returned to that convenient to sleep at night. These regulations ensured celibacy and protected nuns from the contamination of any but churchly influences. The rewards of this tightly controlled, celibate life were not just spiritual. Nuns were respected and honored in their communities. They were educated (though usually with no consideration for individual vocational proclivities) for whatever professions their order directed: teaching and nursing were the most common. Most orders were financially successful and many actually wealthy. In sickness and old age her order’s resources assured a nun total security. It is possible that out of a bodily embrace between two creatures a remarkable entity can be born—the human mind with all its qualities and attribute and spiritual possibilities? Pleasures of the flesh are not only something operative on the physical plane, but also on the psychic plane. This psychical union may be harmful to the high-bred person of the two who are engaged in pleasures of the flesh. And maybe that is why some people are into it, but then choose to withdraw their consent. The desire to avoid the sufferings of pregnancy and childbirth may become so strong in a woman that in a further rebirth the pleasures of the flesh may be channeled into desire for celibacy. Many speak of oppression from above and set their mouths to Heaven. People must set out to cultivate impersonal intuition and impartial conscience control of all the functions and keep them in equilibrium. Since most people have had again and again to endure, side by side, one’s own suffering and their grinning well-being, one is overcome: it is not fitting that one such make such comparisons, as one’s own heart may not be pure. Therefore, one must proceed to purify it. Even when one succeeds in being able to wash one’s hands in innocence (which does not mean an action or feeling of self-righteousness, but the genuine second and higher purity which is won by great struggle of the soul), the torment continues. To let go of it, do not contrast between the horrible enigma of the happiness of the wicked and one’s own suffering. Clear reasoning will wipe that slate clean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cresleigh Homes

Ready for some pool? When you’re living at Cresleigh Homes Mills Station Residence Three, you will certainly have enough room for an adult game room!

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#CresleighHomes

In America, the elite, the top one percent of earners, no matter what their race is are considered the cream of the crop. America is a capitalistic society where the dollar is king. Much immigration followed the end of slavery because people need to new supply of labor. Since then, America has become a diverse country and everyone is looking for that American Dream of a beautiful, safe, and peaceful suburban neighbourhood. The discovery of the soul’s basement, exploration into it, and attraction to its dark contents have long been Continental specialties. Obscure longings and search for the elusive grounds of all things are pervasive themes of the nineteenth-and twentieth-century French, German, and (prior to the revolution) Russian literature. Continental “depth” was thought by intellectuals to be opposed to America “superficiality.” American souls were, so to speak, constructed without a basement, more reconciled to this World and not addicted to looking beyond it, not haunted by a sense of the groundlessness of their experience. Thus, when Americans became able to afford the luxury of indulging in Continental literature, as in Continental cuisine, we had to wonder whether their appetite was real and how they would digest the fare. The issue between the Continent and us can be summed up by the word “bourgeois.” The new man of the new democratic political regime has been labeled bourgeois by Continental philosophers and artists for more than two three hundred years. This originally meant a diminished, egotistical, materialist being without grandeur or beauty of soul, and it has maintained that negative sense—best known to Americans because of Marx—up to our day. Yet long after Nietzsche claimed the theme had already become boring, Continental thinkers have been obsessed with bourgeois man as representing the worst and most contemptible failure of modernity, which must at all costs be overcome.

Nihilism in its most palpable sense means that the bourgeois has won, that the future, all foreseeable futures, belong to him, that all heights above him and all depths beneath him are illusory and that life is not worth living on these terms. It is the announcement that all the alternatives or correctives—for example, idealism, romanticism, historicism, and Marxism—have failed. Americans, on the other hand, have generally believed that the modern democratic project is being fulfilled in their country, can be fulfilled elsewhere, and that that project is good. They do not naturally apply the term “bourgeois” to themselves, or to anyone else for that matter. They do like to call themselves middle class, but that does not carry with it any determinate spiritual content. It is rather a good thing to be. If there is a failure here, it is that there are poor people. The term “middle class” does not have any of the many opposites that bourgeois has, such as aristocrat, saint, hero, or artist—all good—except perhaps for proletarian or socialist. If not entirely satisfied, the spirit is at home, in America. Modernity is constituted by the political regimes founded on freedom and equality, hence on the consent of the governed, and made possible by a new science of nature that masters and conquers nature, providing prosperity and health. This was a self-conscious philosophical project, the greatest transformation of humans’ relations with their fellows and with nature ever effected. The American Revolution instituted this system of government for Americas, who in general were satisfied with the results and had a pretty clear view of what they had done. The questions of political principle and of right had been solved once and for all. If revolution means changing of the fundamental principles of legitimacy, in accordance with reason and the natural order of things, and requiring armed combat against those who adhere to old orders and their unjust forms of rule, no further revolution would be necessary.

Revolution, a new word in the political vocabulary, which first referred to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, made in the name of very much the same principles as ours, is akin to the movement of the sun from night to day. The French Revolution, called a new dawn by Kant, was a much greater event than the American Revolution in the eyes of the World at that time because it concerned one of the two great powers in it, the veritable school of Europe, with one of the oldest and most civilized peoples. It was fought and won for freedom and equality, as were the English and American revolutions. It would seem to have completed the irresistible triumph of modern philosophy’s project and to give a final proof of the theodicy of liberty and equality. However, unlike its predecessors, it gave birth to a dazzling array of interpretations and set off reactions in all directions that have not yet exhausted the impulse it lent to them. The Right—in its only serious meaning, the party opposed to equality (not economic equality but equality of rights)—at first wanted to undo the Revolution in the name of Throne and Altar, and this reaction probably breathed its last only with Francisco Franco in 1975. Another form of the Right, as it were a progressive Right, wanted to create and impose a new kind of inequality, a new kind of inequality, a new European or German aristocracy, on the World, and it was blasted out of existence in Berlin in 1945. The Left, which intended to complete the Revolution by abolishing private property, is still quite alive but has never succeeded in doing so in those nations, particularly France, most influenced by the French Revolution. It was the Center, the bourgeois solution, which in the long run won out, but after so many regrets and so many disappointed aspirations, in France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Portugal, as it has in England and the United State of America.

The last really great bourgeois-haters died at about the same time: Sarte, DeGaulle, and Heidegger. (Americans are not sufficiently aware that hatred of the bourgeois is at least as much a thing of the Right as of the Left.) One can expect a certain literary afterglow, since bourgeois-baiting is almost a reflex among writers and is unlearned with great difficulty, as was proved when so many kept at it even though there were Nazis and Communists around who might have merited their attention. In order to keep that flame alive, many literary persons interpreted Hitler as a bourgeois phenomenon, an interpretation that they have made stick by force of repetition. We may now have out of the new revolutions, and the new metaphysics required to justify them, which were intended to rectify the French Revolution’s perceived failures; but the reconciliation with realty is more fatigued than enthusiastic. We used the word “perceived” because, on the basis of the variety of readings of the French Revolution—by monarchists, Catholics, liberals, socialists, Robespierreans, Bonapartists—which were not idle academic exercises but life-forming and action-engendering, Nietzsche concluded that there was no text here but only interpretation. This observation is the foundation of the currently popular view that there is no is but only perspectives on becoming, that the perception is as much reality as there is, that things are what they are perceived to be. This view is, of course, allied with the notion that man is a value-creating, not a good-discovering, being. It is not surprising to find its source at least partially in the greatest events of modern politics. The misunderstanding between America and the Continent is that where Americans saw a solution, Continentals saw a problem. The American Revolution produced a clear and unified historical reality; the French Revolution, a series of questions and problems.

Americans have tended to look at the French Revolution with indulgence. It is represented the good things, akin to ours, but did not succeed in providing a stable institutional framework for them. A large segment of intellectual opinion on the Continent, the most influential segment, regarded the French Revolution as a failure not because it was not successful in establishing a liberal democracy but because it had been entirely too successful in producing the liberal democratic type of man, id est, the bourgeois—and giving his class, the bourgeoisie, power in society. Even so pro-American and proliberal a writer as Tocqueville, who understood the French difficulty to be indeed its incapacity to adapt to liberal institutions, was melancholy about the prospects for a fully human life within them. America found little to charm them in the ancien regime in France. Its throne and alter were the very reality of, respectively, the unjust inequality and the prejudice that the America regime was intended to replace in the World. America, they believed, would succeed in its project with relative ease because we began here with the equality of conditions. Americans did not have to kill a king, displace an aristocracy that would stay around and cause trouble, or disestablish a church and perhaps abolish it. However, the need to do all this, plus the presence of the Parisian mob, which could not accept the rule of law, prevented the French from attaining the reasonable consensus required for orderly democratic government. However, another view of these events dominated public discussion on the Continent. To some Europeans, the Americas represented an intolerable narrowing of the human horizon, and the price paid for their decent order and prosperity was too high. The French aristocracy had a nobility, brilliance and taste that contrasted sharply with the pettiness and grayness of liberal society’s commercial life and motives.

The loss of what that aristocracy represented would improverish the World. More important, the religion that was dismantled could be thought to express the depth and seriousness of life. If the noble and the sacred cannot find serious expression in democracy, its choice worthiness becomes questionable. These are the arguments, the special pleading of the reactionaries, the disinherited of the ancien regime. Overstressed? Too busy? Wondering where all the time has gone? With the money economy operating at hyperspeeds, time squeeze is now a source of near-universal anger. People rant about receiving two hundred e-mails a day, while the incessant ring of cell phones makes uninterrupted thought all but impossible. Multitaskers combine television, phone calls, online games, stock-market reports and short types messages in constant, quivering interaction with the outside World. This acceleration and shift from sequential to simultaneous activity, driven by hypercompetition, represents a major change in the way we relate to the deep fundamental of time—and to our work, friends and family. In more and more homes and companies, acceleration into fast lane translates into painful conflict between job time and family time. In addition to hours spent working for pay at our jobs or professions, we all devote unpaid time to performing the everyday personal and familial tasks required of us. The burden is especially heavy for women and for those in the “sandwich generation,” who find themselves simultaneously taking care of both children and aging parents. Today, however, something new has been added to these burdens. On top of Job One (paid work) and Job Two (unpaid household work), many of us now find ourselves holding down Job Three (unpaid as well). While we were writing this report, and email arrived from the company that had recently sold us a copying machine.

The curt message rather peremptorily instructed us to read the mete on our machine and e-mail back the results, along with our machine’s serial number, so that we could be properly billed. What, we wondered, had happened to the meter reader who used to come to the office? If a package had not arrived, there was a time when we could telephone FedEx at a toll-free number to find out why it was late and where it was. A helpful employee—usually a woman—sat at a computer terminal in Memphis, Tennessee, or another distant city and traced our package for us. At some point, hailing it as a grand innovative convenience for the customer, FedEx announced that we customer now have the option of tracking our own packages by going online and typing in some data. What, we wondered, had happened to the young lady? However, it was not only copier manufacturers and delivery services that demanded prosumer participation for their customers. The Bank of America, explaining that it received “a huge number” of requests for canceled checks, requiring some eight hundred employees to locate the checks on microfilm, copy and mail them, introduced technology making it possible for customers to look up canceled checks themselves either online or at an ATM. Once again, the change was presented as a benefit to the customer, which it no doubt is, but only after the customer does a little extra work. Even as it touted the new service, the bank announced a 6.7 percent cut in jobs. And that is just one bank. In the United States of America, bank customers in 2018 executed nearly 20 billion ATM transactions—a third of the Worldwide total. Customers like ATMs in part because they save waiting on lines. In a hurry-up economy every minute counts. Assume that, on average, a simple face-to-fact transaction at the bank or credit union counters might have taken, say, two minutes. That means that customers perform 28 billion minutes of unpaid work that would otherwise have required banks to hire more than 200,000 additional full-time tellers.

This, however, does not mean that 28 billion minutes of customers time have been saved. The average ATM transaction still takes a few minutes. Only now the customer types keys, doing part of the work previously done by the paid teller, and frequently winds up paying an extra fee for the privilege. Ironically, according to banking-industry experts, keeping customers active—typing keys or whatever—gives them the illusion that they have waited less time. The shift of work to prosumers is spreading. Researchers have found that 56 percent of U.S. adults’ own stock, remaining down from before the Great Recession. 20 million U.S. households made their stock-market trades online and nearly 76 million customers book their travel via the Web. In all, over 210 million online purchases were made in the United States of America. In each of these transactions, prosumers acted as their own stockbrokers, travel agents and sales clerks, as companies externalized their labor cost. General Electric, like other home-appliance manufacturers, was bombarded by calls from customers requesting information about GE appliances. Because at one point it cost the company an estimated $5 to answer a phone request and only twenty cents if the customer went online to get the information, the company looked forward to cutting $96 million in expenses—much of which, we might assume, would be reflected in a shrunken workforce. Where, then, do these jobs go? The answer: To the same place the tellers’ jobs go—from paid producers to unpaid prosumers. Across the board, canny companies everywhere are discovering more clever ways to externalize labor. The award for business innovation along this line may go not to some giant, unsatiable American corporations but to the Dohton Bori restaurant chain in Japan. Dohton Bori took the serve-yourself buffettable concept a long leap forward by having its customers do their own cooking on a hot plate on their table.

It is true that some of these changes offer new services and are actively welcomed by customers. And it is theoretically true that perfect competition should drive down the price of such services, thus indirectly repaying customers for their work. Someday part of the saving from the externalization of labor may, indeed, be passed on to the customer. Even in supposedly high-end stores, people check themselves out and bag their own groceries and still have to pay for bags. All services that used to be provided for the customer. Right now, however, competition is anything but perfect and customers are providing yet another free lunch that companies are eating. More externalized labor is heading our way. Shifting work from producer to prosumer is the next great frontier of outsourcing. Now, politics is not the only arena in which serious language has been displaced by the arts of show business. We all have seen how religion is packaged on television, as a kind of Las Vegas stage show, devoid of ritual, sacrality, and tradition. Today’s electronic preachers are in no way like America’s evangelicals of the past. Men like Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, Joel Osteen, and George Whiteside were preachers of theological depth, authentic learning, and great expository power. Electronic preachers such as Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and Jerry Falwell are merely performers who exploit television’s visual power and their own charisma for the greater glory of themselves. When I was younger, I thought this man who did not want his wife to go to church, because he did not like the way “the pastor looked,” was being unreasonable. I thought he was a man of God and this guy was just being jealous. However, after getting older and understanding human beings better, I know that he saw something in the pastor’s character he did not like. To me, he looks like a slick womanizer, but I did not see it before. Young people tend to think that people obey the laws and are who they say they are and grievous injustice is impossible. They just are sheltered and are still unaware.

We have also seen “Sesame Street” and other educational shows in which the demands of the entertainment take precedence over the rigors of learning. And we well known how American businessmen and women, working under the assumption that potential customer require amusement rather than facts, use music, dance, comedy, cartoons, and celebrities to sell their products. Even our daily news, which for most Americans means television news, is packaged as a kind of show, featuring handsome news readers, exciting music, and dynamic film footage. Most especially, film footage. When there is no film footage, there is no story. Stranger still, commercials may appear anywhere in a news story—before, after, or in the middle. This reduces all events to trivialities, sources of public entertainment and little more. After all, if it is shown to us prefaced by a happy McDonald’s commercial and summarized by a Calvin Klein jean commercial, how serious can a protest be? Indeed, television newscasters have added to our grammar a new part of speech—what may be called the “Now…this” conjunction, a conjunction that does not connect two things but disconnects them. When newscasters say, “Now…this,” they mean to indicate that what you have just heard or seen has no relevance to what you are about to hear or see. There is no murder so brutal, no political blunder so costly, no protest so devastating that it cannot be creased from our minds by a newscaster saying, “Now…this.” He means that you have thought long enough no the matter (let us say, for forty seconds) and you must now give your attention to a commercial. Such a situation is not “the news.” It is merely daily version of Springtime for Circus Clowns, and in my opinion accounts for the fact that Americans are among the most ill-informed people in the World. To be sure, we know of many things; but we know about very little.

In fact, most people knowing nothing about the country of origin where the tragedies occur. They do not know where did the people come from, what religion do they practice, and what are its basic tenets. And those who do know somethings report they learned it from Newsweek or Time or The New York Times. Television, in other words, is not the great information machine. It is the great disinformation machine. A most nerve-wracking confirmation of this came some time ago during an interview with the producer and the writer of the TV mini-series Peter the Great. Defending the historical inaccuracies in the drama—which included a fabricated meeting between Peter and Sir Isaac Newton—the producer said that no one would watch a dry, historically faithful biographer. The writer added, if it is entertaining, that it is better for audiences to learn something than to not learn anything at all. And just put some icing on the cake, the actor who played Peter, Maximilian Schell, remarked that he does not believe in historical truth and therefore sees no reason to pursue it. I do not mean to say that the trivialization of American public discourse is all accomplished on television. Rather, television is the paradigm for all our attempts at public communication. It conditions our minds to apprehend the World through fragmented pictures and forces other media to orient themselves in that direction. You know the standard question we put to people who have difficulty understanding even simple language: we ask them impatiently, “Do I have to draw a picture for you?” Well, it appears that, like it or not, our culture will draw pictures for us, will explain the World to us in pictures. As a medium for conducting public business, language has receded in importance; it has been moved to the periphery of culture and has been replaced at the center by the entertaining visual image.

Television also might be harming our bodies, not just changing the way we think, due to the X-radiation from the television. Since evolved under the influence of sunlight, it is not surprising that many animals, including man, have developed a variety of physiological responses to the spectral characteristics of solar radiation. The findings already in hand suggest that lights has an important influence on human health, and that our exposure to artificial light may have harmful effects of which we are not aware. The solar spectrum is essentially continuous, lacking only certain wavelengths absorbed by elements in the sun’s atmosphere, and at midday it has a peak intensity in the blue-green region from 450 to 500 nanometer. The most familiar type of artificial light is the incandescent lamp…[which] is strongly shifted to the red, or long-wave length end of the spectrum. Indeed about 90 percent of the total emission of an incandescent lamp lies in the infrared. Since the [human] photoreceptors are most sensitive to the yellow-green light of 555 nanometers, most fluorescent lamps are designed to concentrate much of their output in that wavelength region…since fluorescent lamps are the most widely used light sources in offices, factories, and schools, most people in industrial societies spend many of their waking hours bathed in light whose spectral characteristics differ markedly from those of the sunlight. When the path of light is traced through the eye and charted, is shows graphically the dual function. The light passes through the eye and creates chemical interactions in the pineal gland, the pituitary gland, the hypothalamus, the spinal cord, various nerve systems as well as the ovaries and the gonads, thereby affecting sexuality and fertility.

When young rodents are kept continuously under light, photoreceptive cells in their retina release neurotransmitters that activate brain neurons; these neurons in turn transmit signals over complex neuroendocrine pathways that reach the anterior pituitary gland where they stimulate the secretion of the gonadic hormones that accelerate the maturation of the ovaries. Among rodents that had had their eyes or their pituitary gland removed, ovarian growth was no longer affected by light. No one has yet identified which light spectra are the catalysts for ovarian action. Women’s menstrual cycles in pretechnological times were attuned to moonlight. It probably has something to do with the spectral light from the moon. There are also some diseases that are known to be affected by specific light spectra. A skin disease, erythropoietic protoporphyria, is caused by an imbalance reaction to wavelengths in the region of 400 nanometers, the region of the color violet. Herpes infection and psoriasis represent imbalances within a similar range: 365 nanometers, ultraviolet. (The treatment for these now combines light-therapy with the ingestion of certain herb and food. The light apparently interacts with the food.) With respect to infant jaundice: perhaps 25,000 premature American infants were successfully treated with light last year as the sole therapy for neonatal jaundice…blue light is the most effective in decomposing pure solutions of bilirubin, an imbalance of which causes the problem…however full spectrum white light in almost any reasonable dosage has proved effective in lowering plasma-bilirubin levels. The observation that ordinary sunlight or artificial light sources can drastically alter the plasma level on even one body compound opens Pandora’s box for the student of human biology. It represents the strong possibility that the plasma or tissue levels of many additional compounds are similarly affected by light. Some such responses must be physiologically advantageous, but some may not be.

As we me make our days longer with artificial light, the periodicity of light and the mammalian relationship to the light-dark cycle causes major changes to the body. The relationships between time of day, sleep, and wakefulness, the production of catecholamines, magnesium, sodium, potassium, phosphates, and other minerals are altered. In our laboratory at MIT we have investigated the daily rhythmicity in the body temperature of rodents to see what colors of light are most effective in inducing a change in rhythms to a new light-dark cycle and what intensities are needed. The body temperature of rodents normally rises by one or two degrees centigrade at the onset of darkness and falls again at daybreak. We found that green light is the most potent in changing the phase of the temperature cycle and that ultraviolet and red wavelengths are the least potent. Both government and industry have been satisfied to allow people who buy electric lamps—first the incandescent ones and now the fluorescent—to serve as the unwitting subjects in a long-term experiment on the effects of artificial lighting environment on human health. We have been lucky, perhaps, in that so far the experiment has had no demonstrably baneful effects. It is, however, true that variations in artificial light affect our health, and television is one of our main sources of artificial light. What determines what we remember and what we forget? The key to memory consolidation is attentiveness. Storing explicit memories and, equally important, forming connections between them requires strong mental concentration, amplified by repetition or by intense intellectual or emotional engagement. The sharper the attention, the shaper the memory. For a memory to persist, the incoming information must be thoroughly and deeply processed. This is accomplished by attending to the information and associating it meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory.

If we are unable to attend to the information in our working memory, the information lasts only as long as the neurons that hold it maintain their electric charge—a few seconds at best. Then it is gone, leaving little or no trace in the mind. Attention may seem ethereal—a ghost inside the head—but it is a genuine physical state, and it produces material effects throughout the brain. Recent experiments with rodents indicate that the act of paying attention to an idea or an experience sets off a chain reaction that crisscrosses the brain. Conscious attention begins in the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex, with the imposition of top-down, executive control over the mind’s focus. The establishment of attention leads the neurons of the cortex to send signals to neurons in the midbrain that produce the powerful neurotransmitter dopamine. The axons of these neurons reach all the way into the hippocampus, providing a distribution channel for the neurotransmitter. Once the dopamine is funneled into the synapses of the hippocampus, it jump-starts the consolidation of explicit memory, probably by activating genes that spur the synthesis of new proteins. The influx of competing messages that we received whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for the frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation cannot even get stated. And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we are away from our computers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering. Our growing dependence on the Web’s information stores may in fact be the product of a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop. As our use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we are forced to replay more and more on the Net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory, even if it makes us shallower thinkers.

The changes in our brains happen automatically, outside the narrow compass of our consciousness, but that does not absolve us from responsibility for the choices we make. One thing that set us apart from other animals is the command we have been granted over our attention. Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. To give up that control is to be left with the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. With special urgency we must know that the stakes involve in how we choose, or fail to choose, to focus our mind. We cede control over our attention at our daily peril. Everything that neuroscientists have discovered about the cellular and molecular workings of the human brain underscores that point. Socrates may have been mistaken about the effects of writing, but he was wise to warn us against taking memory’s treasures for granted. His prophecy of a tool that would “implant forgetfulness” in the mind providing “a recipe not for memory, but for reminder,” has gained new currency with the coming of the Web. The prediction may turn out to have been merely premature, not wrong. Of all the sacrifices we make when we devote ourselves to the Internet as our universal medium, the greatest is likely to be the wealth of connections within our own minds. Its true that the Internet is itself a network of connections, but the hyperlinks that associate bits of online data are nothing like the synapses in our brain. The Web’s links are just addresses, simple software tags that direct a browser to load another discrete page of information. They have none of the organic richness or sensitivity of our synapses.

The brain’s connections do not merely provide access to a memory; they in many ways constitute memories. The Web’s connections are not our connections—and no matter how many hours we spend searching and surfing, they will never become our connections. When we outsource our memory to a machine, we also outsource a very important part of our intellect and even our identity. The connecting is the thinking. The connecting is the self. Now, when reflecting on the self, it is fascinating to consider The Third Way. The Third Way, is a clerical lifestyle that sprang up after the 1960s pleasures of the flesh revolution, during which priests would frequent bars where they picked up women for necking and petting sessions but steered clear of intercourse. In the 1970s, this behavior matured into The Third Way, a more thoughtful venture shared by nuns and priests as partners who shared affections and personal confidences in dating/necking/petting relationships that seldom led to overt pleasures of the flesh. Decades later, nuns and priests continued to practice The Third Way, though less publicly. Others, dissatisfied with these attempts to indulge sensuality and deepen personal development without actually having overt pleasures of the flesh, maintain that, after all, celibacy prohibits marriage, not pleasures of the flesh, an argument that permits them guilt-free expressions for pleasures of the flesh. These priests, and the nuns who often share their beds, claim to believe that by not creating families, with all the concomitant responsibilities and duties, they retain at least a technical celibacy that permits them to “devote themselves full-time to the service of the larger human family after the pattern of Christ.” Alas, the Church hierarchy lends a certain credence to this sophistry. Too often, when a troubled priest seeks advice about one’s involvement with a laywoman, his bishop will have him transferred away from her, hoping this will end the relationship. In this equation, the woman is a mere obstacle to be escaped—her life and love, future, and (frequently) fetus her problem, her responsibility.

So long as the animal, with all its passions unruled, reigns over the man, so long as the body holds him captive, he will lack the strength to turn the mind far away from it and to concentrate his attention deep enough to get his release. The animal is honorable; it has no higher duty than to be itself, its natural self. So far as man has a body too, he shared this same search for repeated but fleeting physical and pleasurable sensation. However, he alone has the faculty of higher abstract and metaphysical thought, with the sensitivity to feel intuitively the presence of a divine soul Their development is their duty. In their inordinate desire to follow their own desires and to claim freedom from parents and other authority, too many among the young give themselves up to pleasures of the flesh, whether promiscuous or not, whether they used contraceptives or not, to an inordinate degree. In the end they become too irresponsible. When they marry the relationship is more likely to fall apart, the children to feel insecure and to become problem cases. Unfulfilled pleasures of the flesh tends to stir up new problems or affect old ones. It is a stiff and saddening problem, this of the many people to whom a right opportunity for marriage has not presented itself. Yet it is saddening only so long as they fail to understand and master the forces involved with pleasures of the flesh; so soon as this poise is established and balance found within the self, there will be peace too. The philosopher can find wisdom only in total abstinence because that best suits one’s own character. The man who has built a balanced nature finds such temperance a saner and safer path. Just as Nature has hidden the mind’s deepest secret and sublimest satisfaction in the center of its being, so has she hidden a woman’s most mysterious function and joyous activity in the center of her body. The overwhelming emotion of romantic love subsides with time and then only does reason get a chance to be heard.

Claire-Voie (Open Road) provides ample evidence of this unfortunate tendency. Claire-Voie is a France-based support group for priests’ lovers, the mistresses hidden in the shadows, the mothers who cannot name the man who fathered, and also bastardized, their children. The stories are legion. When Father Ghislain’s superiors discovered his intimate relationship with Monique, a parishioner, they relocated him and ordered him to keep Monique a secret. Pregnant Maya Lahoud’s lover was transferred across the ocean to Quebec. Before he left, he asked her to sign a legal document in which he acknowledged paternity of her child whom he pledged to support, but only if Maya agreed never to reveal his identity. Other priests with mistresses report their superiors maintain discreet silences about their affairs, tacitly sanctioning profound hypocrisy and, from their own professional perspective, sin. Yet no official Church pronouncement will ever define celibacy as bachelorhood. Churchmen knew very well what celibacy is. So should those defiant clergy who propose The Third Way. In the cruel glare of publicity focused on religious sinning involving pleasures of the flesh, their reasoning seems specious at best, cynical at worst. How, given the cross fire of pronouncements supporting and denouncing clerical celibacy, and Pope John Paul II’s declaration that priests who desecrate their vows of celibacy bring tragedy upon themselves, can any religious genuinely suppose they can hide behind a shallow definition? How, drenched in the tears of hundreds of thousands of defecting priests, can they dismiss the anguish of these men who understand celibacy as much greater commitment than merely retaining legal bachelorhood? How, deafened by the cries of women abandoned or ignored by the priests who impregnated them, can other priests pretend that celibacy only means being unmarried? Pleasures of the flesh is an ancient primitive impulse. However, today science has put at its disposal certain devices for its satisfaction without some of its undesired consequences. If there mere repression of pleasures of the flesh could turn an ordinary man into a genius, why have so many ascetics been intellectually or inventively sterile?

There are among both sceptics and believers who equate the mystical experience of bliss with the private organ, but it is a poor equation. There are troublesome opposing forces which will resist if you fight them, but serve if your use and redirect them with enlightenment. To some extent, pleasures of the flesh is one of these forces. The reckless entry into marriage under the influence of physical passion is a sign of juvenility, of surrender to adolescent urges, whether the person is eighteen years old or fifty. He has not the patience to wait for a fuller mating nor the prudence to investigate to what he is really committing himself. So-called romances do not necessarily concern love in its basic meaning, for possessiveness and jealousy may accompany them, or they may really belong to animal physiological attraction. How, in the shadow of groups like Corpus (Corps of Reserve Priests United for Service), can they persist in denying that priestly celibacy is a complex and profound condition not susceptible to alteration by blithe redefinition? Surely it would be far more fruitful for them to harken to the man of Corpus and like-minded organizations, whose painful decisions to leave the priesthood, expose the real issues involved, and whose lobbying seeks to clarify and, of course, to change the canon law that even the pope has admitted is not Church doctrine, but discipline. But only one who is pure in heart draws such a conclusion. One who is pure in heart, one who becomes pure in heart, cannot draw any such conclusion. For one experiences that God is good to one. However, this does not mean that God rewards one with His goodness. It means, rather, that God’s goodness is revealed to one who is pure in heart: one experiences this goodness. In so far as America is pure in heart, becomes pure in heart, it experiences God’s goodness. Thus the essential dividing line is not between humans who sin and humans who do not sin, but between those who are pure in heart and those who are impure in heart. Even the sinners, whose heart becomes pure, experiences God’s goodness as it is revealed to one. As America purifies its heart, it experiences that God is good to it.

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