Home » American Dream (Page 31)
Category Archives: American Dream
Mr. Cresleigh Builds His Dream House and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies!
An advantage of biologically programmed behaviour is that it prepares terrestrial beings to survive in their natural environments. A disadvantage is that evolution is slow. Natural selection prepares a species only for a future which resembles the biological past. If know is power, and power corrupts, how will humankind ever survive. As Second Wave civilization pushed its tentacles across the planet, transforming everything with which it came in contact, it carried with it more than technology or trade. Colliding with First Wave civilization, the Second Wave created not only a new reality for millions but a new way of thinking about reality. Clashing at a thousand points with the values, concepts, myths, and morals of agricultural society, the Second Wave brought with it a redefinition of God…of justice…of love…of power…of beauty. It stirred up new ideas, attitudes, and analogies. It subverted and superseded ancient assumptions about time, space, matter, and causality. A powerful, coherent World view emerged that not only explained but justified Second Wave reality. This World view of industrial society has not had a name. It might best be termed “indust-reality.” Indust-realty was the overarching set of ideas and assumptions with which the children of industrialism were taught to understand their World. It was the package of premises employed by Second Wave civilization, by its scientists, business leaders, state’s people, philosophers, and propagandists. There were, of course, contervoices, those who challenged the dominant ideas of indust-reality, but we are concerned here not with the side currents but with the mainstream of Second Wave thought. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
On the surface, it seemed, there was no mainstream at all. Rather, it appeared that there were two powerful ideological currents in conflict. By the middle of the nineteenth century every industrial nation has its sharply defined left wing and its right, its advocates of individualism and free enterprise, and its advocates of collectivism and socialism. This battle of ideologies, at first confined to the industrializing nations themselves, soon spread around the globe. With the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the organization of a centrally directed Worldwide propaganda machine, the ideological struggle grew even more intense. And by the end of World War II, as the United States and Russian attempted to reintegrate the World market—or large parts of it—on their own terms, each side was spending huge sums to spread its doctrines to the World’s non-industrial peoples. On one side were totalitarian regimes, on the other the socalled liberal democracies. Guns and bombs stood ready to take up where logical arguments ended. Seldom since the great collision of Catholicism and Protestantism during the Reformation had doctrinal lines been so sharply drawn between two theological camps. What few noticed, however, in the heat of this propaganda war, was that while each side promoted a different ideology, both were essentially hawking the same superideology. Their conclusions—their economic programs and political dogmas—differed radically, but many of their starting assumptions were the same. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Like Protestant and Catholic missionaries clutching different versions of the Christian Bible, yet both preaching Christ, Marxists and anti-Marxists alike, capitalists and anticapitalists, Americans and Russians marched into Africa, Asia, and Latin America—the non-industrial regions of the World—blindly bearing the same set of fundamental premises. Bothe preached the superiority of industrialism to all other civilization. Both were passionate apostles of indust-reality. The World view they disseminated was based on three deeply intertwined “indust-real” beliefs—three ideas that bound all Second Wave nations together and differentiated them from much of the rest of the World. The first of these core beliefs had to do with nature. While socialists and capitalist might disagree violently about how to share its fruits, both looked upon nature in the same way. For both, nature was an object waiting to be exploited. The idea that humans should hold dominion over nature can be traced at least as far back as Genesis. “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the Heavens and over every living thing that moves on the Earth,” reports Genesis 1.28. Nevertheless, it was decidedly a minority view until the industrial revolution. Most earlier cultures emphasized instead an acceptance of poverty and the harmony of humankind with its surrounding natural ecology. These earlier cultures were not particularly gentle with nature. They slashed and burned, overgrazed, and stripped the forests for firewood. However, their power to do damage was limited. They had no great impact on the Earth and no need for an explicit ideology to justify the damage they did. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Perhaps earlier cultures had no idea the damage they were doing? However, not all capitalist did damage, they may have had good intentions. For instance, Oliver Fisher Winchester, November 30, 1810—December 10, 1880. Went from New England farm boy to World-renowned industrialist and entrepreneur. In addition to his role in building the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, he was a generous patron of Yale University and a founder of the Yale National Bank and the New Haven Water Company, and he was elected lieutenant governor of Connecticut in 1866. The New Haven Palladium eulogized him as “an eminent citizen, to whose public spirit and private enterprise [New Haven] is indebted for much of her present property…The great establishment which he organized, and to which he gave his name, stands to-day as a monument to the great ability and enterprise which marked his whole business career.” Many people credit or blame the Winchester’s for creating guns, but they did not. They only revolutionized gun production. Firearms have been major instruments in the course of history since their first primitive appearance in the fourteenth century. However, in all that time no marker of longarms can equal the international image of adventure attached to the Winchester. The historian, collector, or curator who pursues the Holy Grail of Winchester belongs to a select group of devotees of one of the most fascinating marques in Americana. Arguably it is the Winchester that won the West. And the two most glamorous and sought-after blue chips in gun collecting Worldwide are Colt, primarily a handgun maker, and Winchester, primarily a maker of shoulder guns. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Designed with mechanical ingenuity and made with advanced manufacturing techniques—mass production decades before Henry Ford and the automobile—most Winchester were graceful and handsome in line and form. And for the lover of decorative arts a prized portion of production has the extra merit of hand decoration such as gold-plated engravings of the Goddess of Liberty, inspired engravings on gold plating of deer, and Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave, and other patterns in silver and gold plating. Increasingly the most prized Winchesters are leaving private hands and becoming permanent exhibits in museums. Some are worth in the range of a nice used car, a mansion, while others are priceless. Among the many guns Mr. Winchester own, two of his prized possessions were a deluxe pair of ivory-gripped Volcanic Navy pistols, which were passed down through the family. Mr. Winchester made magnificent guns like the standard silver-plated and blue navy pistol with rosewood grips, or a pocket pistol with walnut. There were also other guns with hand decorations of checkered or carved select-gain stocks, special finishes, engraving and precious- metal inlaying, and sometimes elegant casings. A few were presentations, even gifts of the state. Tracing its origins back to 1849, Winchester is the oldest maker of lever-action repeating firearms in the World, and at is peak in the twentieth century was the largest gunmaker in the World with over 18,000 employees. As an ammunition manufacturer, Winchester remains the World’s largest. The marque is also possessor of one of history’s most famous brand names. In many respects Winchester is to firearms and ammunition as Ferrari is to automobiles and Tiffany is to silver. Now, you may be wondering why is Winchester so important? Well, there are many reasons. When America did not have law and order, people needed a way to protect themselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
For instance, in a July 14, 1863 newspaper report, in the Louisville Journal, written by its editor George D. Prentice, was highly laudatory: “In the days, when rebel outlaws and raids are becoming common in Kentucky, when guerillas are scouring different countries nightly, and practising the most atrocious outrages, when even the central positions of our State are openly threatened, and when it is understood in high quarters that secret companies are on foot for a sudden and general insurrection as some favorable moment, it behooves every loyal citizen to prepare himself upon his own responsibility with the best weapon of defense that can be obtained. And certainly the simplest, surest, and most effective weapon that we know of, the weapon that could be used with the most tremendous results in case of an outbreak or invasion, is one that we have mentioned recently upon two or three occasions, the newly invented rifle of Henry, now on exhibition, and for sale at Messrs. Jas. Low and Co.’s, Sixth street. This rifle, as we have stated, can be loaded in eight or ten seconds with fifteen cartridges, and the whole number can be fired in fifteen seconds or less, so that one man, with the weapon is equal to fifteen armed with ordinary guns…It may lie loaded for a week at the bottom of a river, and, if taken out, will then fire with as much certainty as if it had been kept perfectly dry all the time. It is remarkably simple, not liable to get out of order, and is utterly free from the objection sometimes urged against other repeating rifles that two or more charges are liable to be fired at once.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Benjamin Tyler Henry was a well-known gun engineer, who was eventually employed by Oliver Winchester when Oliver Winchester became one of the investors in “Smith & Wesson Company,” which changed its name to “Volcanic Repeating Arms Company” in 1855. By 1857, Mr. Winchester had positioned himself as the principal stockholder in the company and relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, changing the name to New Haven Arms Company. The Henry rifle was one of the most noteworthy inventions in the Winchester history. With financial backing from O.F. Winchester, the tooled up revolutionary new repeater had to prove itself. The Henry was of .44 caliber, with a 216-grain conical bullet, backed by a 26-grain powder charge. The birth of this gun was fueled by the Civil War market and by 1862, Henrys were in the field. President Lincoln was so intrigued by them that he test-fired a Spencer repeater on the White House lawn. The future of the Henry was likely boosted by special presentations to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, and even a gift to President Lincoln—all guns with single-digit serial numbers, richly engraved and inscribed, and fitted with rosewood stocks. They Henry was even tested at the Washington Navy Yard (conveniently, Secretary Welles was from Connecticut), reported in May of 1862:187 shots were fired in three minutes and thirty-six second (not counting reloading time). and one of full fifteen-shot magazine was fired in only 10.8 second. A total of 1,040 shots were fired, and hits were made from as far away as 348 feet, at 18-inch-square target—quite impressive accuracy with open sights. The report noted, “It is manifest from the above experiment that his gun may be fired with great rapidity, and is not liable to get out of order. The penetration in proportion to the charge used, compared favorably with that of other arms.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
By July of 1692 the Henry was on the market, and it quickly found popularity with both civilian and military purchasers. An extraordinary encounter between seven Confederates and Captain James M. Wilson, commanding officer of Company M of the 12th Kentucky Cavalry, was widely publicized, appearing in various advertisements and journals. This account shows why protection was needed. H.W.S. Cleveland’s Hint to Riflemen gives an account: “Capt. Wilson had fitted up a long crib across the road from his front door as a sort of arsenal, where he had his Henry Rifle, Colt’s Revolver, et cetera. One day, while at home dining with his family seven mounted guerillas rode up, dismounted and burst into his dining room and commenced firing upon him with revolvers. The attack was so sudden that the first shot struck a glass of water his wife was raising to her lips, breaking the glass. Several other shots were fired without effect, when Capt. Wilson sprang to his feet, exclaiming, ‘For God’s sake, gentlemen, if you wish to murder me, do not do it at my own table in the presence of my family.’ This caused a parley, resulting in their consent that he might go out doors he sprang for his cover, and his assailants commenced firing at him. Several shots passed through his hat, and more through his clothing, but none took effect upon his person. He thus reached his cover and seized his Henry Rifle, turned upon his foes, and in five shots killed five of them; the other two sprung for their horses. As the sixth man threw his hand over the pommel of his saddle, the sixth shot took off four of his fingers; notwithstanding this he got into his saddle, but the seventh shot killed him; then start out, Capt. Wilson killed the seventh man with the eighth shot. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
“In consequence of this feat the State of Kentucky armed his Company with the Henry Rifle.” Wilson’s company was not the only one to be armed with the Henry, but the issuing of such arms was counter to War Department policy. Assistant Secretary of War Peter Watson wrote to O.F. Winchester (August 9, 1862) that “companies arming themselves with Henry’s repeating rifle, will [not] be allowed to retain them in the field…as great inconvenience has resulted from promises heretofore given in other cases to furnish companies of troops with special arms. If you choose to arm and equip a whole regiment at your own expense, or the regiment chooses to arm itself, it will be accepted with the condition that it shall be at liberty to use its own arms and equipments exclusively.” Despite the War Department objections, 240 Henrys were purchased by the federal government for the 1st District of Columbia Cavalry. Inspired by that moral victory, O. F. Winchester gleefully wrote to Brigadier General Ripley stating, “If these arms were sued as efficiently by the men who are to receive them as they have been by our Union friends in Kentucky, the country will have no cause to regret the expenditure.” Still another federal government purchase was 800 more Henrys, to equip the eight companies of Maine cavalry assigned to the 1st District of Columbia Cavalry. Armed also with Spencer rifles, the First Maine had ample opportunity to demonstrate the superiority of breech-loading metallic-cartridge repeaters. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
The regimental chaplain, Samuel H. Merrill wrote in his memoir on the First Maine and the 1st District cavalry units: “This regiment was distinguished by the superiority of the carbines with which it was armed. It was the only regiment in the Army of the Potomac armed with ‘Henry’s Repeating Rifle.’ After having witnessed the effectiveness of the weapon, one is not surprised at the remark, said to have been made by the guerilla chief. Mosby, after an encounter with some of our men, that ‘he did not care for the common gun, or for Spencer’s seven shooter, but as for these guns that they could wind up on Sunday, and shoot all the week, it was useless to fight against them.’” Reports of the successful use of Henrys in the Civil War are numerous, both from the Union point of view and from the Confederates who forced the incessant fire. The incredible firepower, especially in comparison to the muzzle-loading single shots, is evident in Major William Ludlow’s account of the Battle of Allatoona Pass: “What saved us that day…was the fact that we had a number of Henry rifles…These were new guns in those days and [the commander] had held in reserve a company of an Illinois Regiment that was armed with them until a final assault should be made. When the artillery reopened…this company of 16-shooters sprang to the parapet and poured out such a multiplied, rapid, and deadly fire that no men could stay in front of it, and no serious effort was thereafter made to take the fort by assault.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Even though it may have not been the most popular firearm used in the Civil War, it was one of the best and most popular firearm used in the Civil War, the Henry rifle found plenty of use among troops in the Union Army. After the Civil War, O.F. Winchester renamed his increasingly successful firearms company yet one more time, to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Winchester’s lever-action repeating rifles became internationally famous for their speed, ease of use, accuracy, and affordability, the latter of which was assisted by the company’s proprietary use of mass manufactured, interchangeable parts. Sales were also propelled by Winchester’s widespread use of romanticized images of the American west in its marketing. Between the paintings of rugged cowboys, frontiersmen, sportsmen, and enthusiastic endorsements by larger-than-life celebrities like “Buffalo Bill” Cody, and Teddy Roosevelt, who said, “ The Winchester…is by all odds the best weapon I ever had, and I now use it almost exclusively…It is as handy to carry, whether on foot or horseback, and comes up to the shoulder as readily as a shotgun; it is absolutely sure, and there is no recoil to jar and disturb the aim, while it carries accurately quite as far as a man can aim with any degree of certainty…The Winchester is the best gun for any game to be found in the United States, for it is deadly, accurate, and handy as any, stands very rough usage, and is unapproachable for the rapidity of its fire and the facility with which it is loaded.” The Winchester repeating rifle earned an international reputation as “the Gun that Won the West.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
With the coming of the Second Wave civilization one found capitalist industrial gouging resources on a massive scale, pumping voluminous poisons into the air, deforesting whole regions in pursuit of profit, without much thought about side effect or long-term consequences. The idea that nature was there to be exploited provided a convenient rationalization for shortsightedness and selfishness. However, the capitalists were scarcely alone. Wherever they took power, Marxist industrializers (despite their conviction that profit was the root of all evil) acted in exactly the same way. Indeed, they built the conflict with nature right into their scriptures. Marxists pictured primitive peoples not as coexisting harmoniously with nature be as engaged in a fierce life-and-death struggle against it. With the emergence of class society, they held, the war of “man against nature” was unfortunately transformed into a war of “man against man.” The achievement of a Communist classless society would permit humanity to get back to its first order of business once again—the war of man against nature. On both sides of the ideological divide, therefore, one found the same image of humanity standing in opposition to nature and dominating it. This image was a key component of indust-reality, the superideology from which Marxist and anti-Marxist alike drew their assumptions. A second, interrelated idea carried the argument a step further. Humans were not merely in charge of nature, they were the pinnacle of a long process of evolution. Earlier theories of evolution existed, but it was Dr. Darwin, in the middle of the nineteenth century, brought up in the most advanced industrial nation of the time, who provided scientific underpinning for this view. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Dr. Darwin spoke of the bling workings of “natural selection”—an inevitable process that mercilessly weeded out weak and inefficient forms of life. Those species who survived were, by definition, the first. Dr. Darwin was chiefly concerned with biological evolution, but his ideas had distinct social and political overtones that others were quick to recognize. Thus the Social Darwinists argued that the principle of natural selection worked within society as well, and that the wealthiest and most powerful people were, by virtue of that fact, the fittest and the most deserving. It was only a short leap to the idea that whole societies evolve according to the same laws of selection. Following this reasoning, industrialism was a higher stage of evolution than the non-industrial cultures that surrounded it. Second Wave civilization, to put it bluntly, was superior to all the rest. Just as Social Darwinism rationalized capitalism, this cultural arrogance rationalized imperialism. The expanding industrial order needed its lifeline to inexpensive resources, and it created a moral justification for taking them at depressed prices, even at the cost of obliterating agricultural and so-called primitive societies. The idea of social evolution provided intellectual and moral support for the treatment of non-industrial peoples as inferior—and hence unfitted for survival. Dr. Darwin himself wrote unfeelingly of the massacre of the aborigines of Tasmania and, in a burst of genocidal enthusiasm, prophesied that “At some future period…the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the World.” The intellectual front-runners of Second Wave civilization had no doubt about who deserved to survive. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
While Marx bitterly criticizes capitalism and imperialism, he shared the view that industrialism was the most advanced form of society, the stage toward which all other societies would inevitably advance in turn. For the third core belief of indust-reality linked nature and evolution together was the progress principle—the idea that history flows irreversibly toward a better life for humanity. This idea, too, had plenty of preindustrial precedent. However, it was only with the advance of the Second Wave that the idea of Progress with a capital P burst into full flower. Suddenly, as the Second Wave pulsed over Europe a thousand throats began to sing the same hallelujah chorus. Leibniz, Turgot, Condorcet, Kant, Lessing, John Stuart Mill, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and countless lesser thinkers al found reasons for cosmic optimism. They argued over whether progress was truly inevitable or whether it needed a helping hand from the human race; over what constituted a better life; over whether progress would or could continue ad infinitum. However, they all nodded in agreement at the notion of progress itself. Atheists and divines, students and professors, politicians and scientists preached the new faith. Business people and commissars alike heralded each new factory, each new product, each new housing development, highway, or dam as evidence of this irresistible advance from bad to good or good to better. Poets, playwrights, and painters took progress for granted. Progress justified the degradation of nature and the conquest of “less advanced” civilizations. And once more the same idea ran parallel through the works of both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. As Robert Heilbroner has noted, “Smith was a believer in progress….In The Wealth of Nations progress was no longer an idealistic goal of mankind, but…a destination to which it was driven….a by-product of private economic aims.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
For Marx, of course, these private aims produced only capitalism and the seeds of its own destruction. However, this event in itself was part of the long historical sweep carrying humanity forward to socialism, communism, and an even better beyond. Throughout Second Wave civilization, therefore, three key concepts—the war with nature, the importance of evolution, and the progress principle—provided the ammunition used by the agents of industrialism as they explained and justified it to the World. Beneath these convictions lay still deeper assumptions about reality—a set of unspoken beliefs about the very elementals of human experience. Every human being must deal with these elementals, and every civilization describes them in a different way. Every civilization must teach its children to grapple with time and space. It must explain—whether through myth, metaphour, or scientific theory—how nature words. And it must offer some clue to why things happen as they do. Thus Second Wave civilization, as it matured, created a wholly new image of reality, based on its own distinctive assumptions about time and space, matter and cause. Picking up fragments from the past, piecing them together in new ways, applying experiment and empirical tests, it drastically altered the way human beings came to perceive the World around them and how they behaved in their daily lives. The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into one’s head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe one, was the true founder of society. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes of filled in the ditch and cried out to one’s fellow humans: “Do not listen to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the Earth belong to all and the Earth to no one!” However, it is quite likely that by then things had already reached a point where they could no longer continue as they were. For this idea of property, depending on many prior ideas which could only have arisen successively, was not formed all at once in the human mind. It was necessary to make great progress, to acquire much industry and enlightenment, and to transmit and augment them from one age to another, before arriving at this final stage in the state of nature. Let us therefore take things farther back and try to piece together under a single viewpoint that slow succession of events and advances in knowledge in their most natural order. Human’s first sentiment was that of one’s own existence; one’s first concern was that of one’s preservation. The products of the Earth provided one with all the help one needed; instinct led one to make use of them. With hunger and other appetites making one experience by turns various ways of existing, here was one appetites making one experience by turns various ways of existing, there was one appetite that invited one to perpetuate one’s species; and this blind inclination, devoid of any sentiment of the heart, produced a purely terrestrial act. Once this need had been satisfied, the two genders no longer took cognizance of one another, and even the child no longer meant anything to the mother once it could do without her. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Such was the condition of humans in their nascent stage; such was the life of a terrestrial being limited at first to pure sensations, and scarcely profiting from the gifts nature offered one, far from dreaming of extracting anything from her. However, difficulties soon presented themselves to one; it was necessary to learn to overcome them. The height of trees, which kept one from reaching their fruits, the competition of animal that sought to feed themselves on these same fruits, the ferocity of those animals that wanted to take one’s own life: everything obliged one to apply oneself to bodily combat. Natural arms, which are tree branches and stones, were soon found ready at hand. One learned to surmount nature’s obstacles, combat other animals when necessary, fight for one’s subsistence even with humans, or compensate for what one had to yield to those stronger than oneself. In proportion as the human race spread, difficulties multiplied with the humans. Differences in soils, climates and seasons could force them to inculcate these differences in their lifestyles. Barren years, long and hard winters, hot summers that consume everything required new resourcefulness from them. Along the seashore and the riverbanks they invented the fishing line and hook, and became fishermen and fish-eaters. In the forests they made bows and arrows, and became hunters and warriors. In cold countries they covered themselves with the skins of animals they had killed. Lighting, a volcano, or some fortuitous chance happening acquainted them with fire: a new resource against the rigours of Winter. They learned to preserve this element, then to reproduce it, and finally to use it to prepare meats that previously they devoured raw. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
This repeated appropriation of various being to oneself, and of some beings to others, must naturally have engendered in human’s mind the perceptions of certain relations. These relationships which we express by the words “large,” “small,” “strong,” “weak,” “fast,” “slow,” “timorous,” “bold,” and other similar ideas, compared when needed and almost without thinking about it, finally produced in one a kind of reflection, or rather a mechanical prudence which pointed out to one the precautions that were most necessary for one’s safety. Since suburbs during the first half of the century were seen as little more than outlying residential areas, it is perhaps understandable that they attracted minimal literary or scholarly attention. For example, George Babbitt sold real estate in the suburban Glen Oriole development, but he lived in the city of Zenith. Authors and writers in the early decades of the twentieth century largely ignored suburbs while stressing the evils of the city. Typical was Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago,” which praised the raw vitality of the city but also noted the city’s wickedness, and brutality. By comparison suburbs were once just a community of beautiful sprawling homes. Overall, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that until the post World War II era, major American writers generally ignored the suburbs. True, Ernest, Hemingway caustically referred to Oak Park, where he had grown up, as a community “of wide lawns and narrow minds,” but he apparently did not think it merited a novel. Sinclair Lewis’s exposure to the meanness of small-midwestern-town life in Main Street (1920) was far more typical of cosmopolitan writers of the first half of the twentieth century. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
In Babbitt (1922) Mr. Lewis, with equal acid, detailed the life of George Babbit, a small-city real estate developer and subdivider. Mr. Lewis’s fictional city of Zenith was a literary twin of the empirical study by Robert and Helen Lynd of Middletown, which was actually Muncie, Indiana. Generally, writes of the era agreed in their viewing small-town and small-city values as fostering full conformity and repression of creativity. Only in the large metropolitan area could one be truly free. Not until the suburban housing boom following World War II were the charges that early-twentieth-century writers had leveled against the small towns and small cities redirected at suburbia and suburban lifestyles. The evils of Sinclair Lewis’ fictional Gopher Prairie became those of Levittown. One major exception to ignoring suburbia as either a literary site a literary metaphour is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic, The Great Gatsby. Mr. Fitzgerald places the rootless Gatsby in West Egg, one of the newly developing wealthy suburbs of Long Island. These were places without a background for people who were also reinventing themselves. Although he did not further expand the theme in later works, Mr. Fitzgerald is the first to hint at suburbia as a conscious and artificial creation especially designed to accommodate those possessing shallow roots. Whether it is Gatsby’s wealthy established suburb or the post-World War II mass suburbia of Levittown, suburbia began to be portrayed not as a place of stability, but as a temporary residence for transients. Popular-culture images of suburbia prior to the suburban exodus of the 1950s and 1960s was generally more charitable. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Images of suburbia tended toward the comfortable and mildly comic, such as Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover showing suburban wives, still in their bathrobes, driving their husbands in the family station wagon to the suburban commuter train station. Movie versions of suburbia were also benign and inclined toward the small-town nostalgia of Andy Hardy-type communities. The comic dimension of the upper-middle-class city dweller seeking a semirural retreat was reflected in the success of stories turned into movies such as Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. Interestingly, the former began as a cautionary article in Fortune on the perils of suburban living. (Eric Hodgins, “Mr. Blandings Builds His Castle,” Fortune Magazine, April 1946, pp. 138-189). On the other hand, Jean Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies was a satiric and ironic look at women’s life in the 1950s suburbs (Jean Kerr, please Don’t Eat the Daisies, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1957). In reality, the suburban backyard barbecue became an American cliché during the 1950s. It symbolized the close national association of suburban life with family values. It also has been said that prior to the 1960s, urban-area scholars were not particularly astute or insightful in examining the phenomenon of suburbanization. Social science’s treatment of suburbs can be described in few words: suburbs essentially were ignored. They were the focus of neither theorizing nor research. Even textbooks in the rapidly developing field of urban sociology went little beyond Earnest Burges’s 1924 description of suburbia as an outer-commuter’s zone. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
No one seemed to think the area, or the process, merited further elaboration. The major scholars of suburbia, Harlan Paul Douglass, in his 1934 article on “Suburbs” in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, portrayed suburbs as limited to the well-to-do. Living in the suburbs, in his words, was “virtually limited to the most highly paid types of labor and o the upper middle classes” (Harlan Paul Douglass, “Suburbs,” Encyclopedia of the social sciences, Vol. XIV, New York, 1934, p.434). Even as late as the 1950, Queen and Carpenter, in the urban sociology text The American City, (McGraw-Hill, 1953), gave only 4 of its 383 ages to even a mention of suburbs. One should send out experimental feelers in one’s mental-emotional World until one recognizes an element that seems different from all the others—subtler, grander, nobler, and more divine than all the others. Then, catching firm hold of it, one should try to trace its course back to its source. The point where the personal ego establishes contact with the Overself is reached and passed only through a momentary lapse of consciousness. However, this lapse is so brief—a mere fraction of a second—that it may be unnoticed. A presence enters one’s consciousness and comes over one, a benign feeling to which one is glad to surrender oneself, a mysterious solvent of one’s egotism and desires. The value of letting oneself pass this point can hardly be overestimated, even though it be done only during the limited sessions of prayer or the casual periods of unexpected visitations. For from them peace, wisdom, sanity can be emanated. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
At this point there is the mysterious division between human normal prayer and divine contemplation, between discursive thinking and its dissolution as the divine self takes over, between mental concentration and release into still, timeless being, between imagery and pure Consciousness. Koestler got his glimpse by working out Euclid’s geometrical proof of the infinitude of the number of primes. That he was able to learn of the reality of the Infinite by purely mathematical and precise method, without becoming a vague emotional mystic, so satisfied his highly intellectual and scientific nature that, in his own words, an “aesthetic enchantment” fell upon him. This developed until he became one with Peace never before known. The experience passed away, as it usually does, but it remained to hunt his memory. It inspired his journey to India and Japan several years later, where he spent a year trying to meet holy people and self-actualized. These meetings did not bring him what he sought, but his faith in the authenticity of that earlier glimpse never left him. He knew what few mystics know, that he did not need to violate the integrity of Reason, nor become lost in generally hazy gushy feelings, to know Infinity, which is truth of Reality. The difference of people is determined by their nature. If it is true some people are aggressors, it may be that one day, this quality may be their undoing. Those who seek communion with the Overself, this sublime glimpse of its hidden face, must make the Quest their chosen path. Few things that grow here poison us. Most of the animals are small. Those big enough to kill us do it in a way easy to understand, easy to defend against. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
The air, here, is just what the blood needs. We do not use helmets or special suits. The Star, here, does not burn you if you stay outside as much as you should. The worst of our winters is bearable. Water, both salt and sweet, is everywhere. The thing that live in it are easily gathered. Mostly, you can eat them raw with safety and pleasure. Yesterday my wife and I brought back shells, driftwood, stones, and other curiosities found on the beach of the immense fresh-water Sea we live by. She was all excited by a slender white stone which: “Exactly fits the hand!” I could not share her wonder: Here, almost everything does. It is for us to praise the Lord of all, to proclaim the greatness of the Creator of the Universe for He hath not made us like the pagans of the World, nor places us like the heathen tribes of the Earth; He hath not made our density as theirs, nor cast out lot with all their multitude. We bend he knee, worship and give thanks unto the King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He. He stretched forth the Heavens and laid the foundations of the Earth. His glory is revealed in the Heavens above, and His might is manifest in the loftiest heights. He is our God; there is none else. In truth He is our King, there is none besides Him; as it is written in his Holy Bible: Know this say, and consider it in thy heart that the Lord is God in the Heavens above and on the Earth beneath; there is none else. May your mind be so well purified and so strongly concentrated within the Good, the True, and the Beautiful that it is not affected by Worldly disturbances. Do not allow your mind to be muddy and weak like others. A correct example is better for you. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
Cresleigh Homes
The movie set of a delightful rom-com…or your dream home?! Yes, dreamy spaces like these can be your daily reality, too. 😍 The Brighton Station Res 3 model is perfection for entertaining – both indoors and out!
For a real retreat, escape to your primary suite and bathroom on the second floor or further enjoy a more secluded living area in the delightful upstairs loft. It’s life-changing by design. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-3/
Ten Minutes on the Clock, but a Thousand Centuries in My Heart!
The Greek philosopher Aristotle had a recipe for handling relationships smoothly. You must be able, he said, “to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way.” Psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer call such self-control “emotional intelligence.” Emotional intelligence refers to a combination of skills, such as empathy, self-control, and self-awareness. People who excel in life tend to be emotionally intelligent. Indeed, the costs of poor emotional skills can be high They range from problems in marriage and parenting to poor physical health. A lack of emotional intelligence can ruin careers and sabotage achievement. Perhaps the greatest toll falls on people who are still developing or marginalized members of the community. For them, having poor emotional skills and being subjected to dealing with those who have substandard emotional skills, makes them become victims of depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, unwanted lifestyle choices, aggression, and violent crimes, or they can also become violent criminals. The Devil has a sure foothold in Massachusetts during the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 because many people seemed to be lacking emotional intelligence. People who were skeptical of witchcraft were thought to must undoubtedly be a witch. For instance, that Martha Corey’s skepticism was held against her is clear evidence that by this time the magistrates’ attitudes had hardened into those of the witch hunter. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
It was at Martha Corey’s examination that one typical kind of behaviour first appeared. She bit her lip, and several of the afflicted children complained that they were bitten She was charged with biting her lip, and she quite naturally asked what harm was there in it. The Reverend Mr. Nicolas Noyes of Salem Town explained: “I believe it is apparent she practiseth witchcraft in the congregation; there is no need of images.” That is, instead of tormenting images she was using her own body as an image, biting the children by biting her own lips, and later pinching them by clenching her fingers together. From Martha Corey’s examination on, any motion on the part of the accused was apt to produce a corresponding effect in the afflicted children. It must have been a most convincing spectacle, as though black magic were being worked before the very eyes of the beholders. And as the effects produced on the children were obviously painful, they were that much more convincing. In some cases there were seen to be marks of bites or pinches on the children’s flesh; on other occasions there were pins literally stuck in their flesh. There are at least three explanations for this behaviour. In the first place, hysterics are extremely suggestible, and for hysterics familiar with the idea of image magic, it would be easy to assume that an accused person biting her lip was trying to bit them. A similar phenomenon is the “arctic hysteria” of North American Indians, in which the group imitates the motions of the shaman. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Secondly, hysteric will often try to injure themselves; they will beat their heads on the floor, or run into fire or water. (But they seldom succeed in injuring themselves seriously because they are most apt to make these attempts when other people are present, an able to stop them.) Surely this is the explanation for the pins in their flesh; the afflicted stuck them there themselves. However, this is not to say there was conscious fraud; people in fits are after all not responsible for their actions. Some of the bites and pinches, too, were probably self-inflicted, but it is also probable that some were not. Skin lesions are among the commonest of psychosomatic symptoms, and surely some of these bites and pinches were psychosomatic. Hathorne and Corwin, of course, thought the cause was witchcraft, and they committed Martha Corey to jail for further examination and eventually trial. And with her commitment to jail, Salem had very nearly committed itself to a witch hunt. Yet there would be moments during the succeeding month when the course of events would seem to hesitate and waver; moments wen the slightest change of circumstances might have averted the final catastrophe. On Saturday, March 19, two days before the examination of Martha Corey, the Reverend Deodat Lawson arrived in Salem Village. He has been its minister from 1684 to 1688 and had now returned as a visiting preacher and for personal reasons as well; the afflicted girls were saying that his wife and daughter, whom he had buried there, had been killed by witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Reverend Deodat Lawson tells us that there were at that time ten afflicted persons—three girls from nine to twelve years old: Elizabeth Parris, Abagail Williams, and Ann Putnam; three adolescent girls: Mary Walcott, Mercy Lewis, and Elizabeth Hubbard; and for married women: Goodwives Putnam, Pope, Bibber, and Goodall. He conducted both the morning and the afternoon services on Sunday, but without incident. Several of the afflicted persons were present. This was not Lawson’s first introduction to the behavior of the afflicted. He had lodged the night before at Ingersoll’s Tavern, and there had seen Mary Walcott, who, “as she stood by the door was bitten, so that she cried out of her wrist, and looked on it with a candle we saw apparently the marks of teeth, both upper and lower set, on each side of her wrist.” He had also visited the parsonage, where Abigail Williams “had a grievous fit.” He would see more on Monday, at Martha Corey’s examination, and on Wednesday, when he went to Thomas Putnam’s to see his wife, Ann Putnam, Senior. “I found her lying on the bed, having had a sore fit a little before. She spake to me and said she was glad to see me. Her husband and she both desired me to pray with her while she was sensible, which I did, though the apparition said [id est, to Ann Putnam, Senior] I should not go to prayer. At first beginning she attended but after a little time was taken with a fit, yet continued silent and seemed to be sleep. When prayer was done, her husband going to her found her in a fit. He took her off the bed to set her on his knees, but at first she was so stiff she could not be bended. But she afterwards set down, but quickly began to strive violently with her arms and legs.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Shortly afterward she began to argue with an apparition, and she thought that telling it a passage from the Christian Bible would make it vanish. She said, “I am sure you cannot stand before that text!” Then she was sorely afflicted, her mouth drawn on one side and her body strained for about a minute, and then said “I will tell, I will tell; it is, it is, it is!” three or four times, and then was afflicted to hinder her telling. At last she broke forth and said “It is the third chapter of the Revelations.” I did something scruple the reading it. [Reverend Lawson was reluctant because in this case reading the Bible might be construed as using it as a charm.] However, thought not versed she opened her eyes and was well. This fit [had] continued near half an hour. Her husband and the spectators told me she had often been so relieved by reading texts that she named, something pertinent to her case. The next day was Lecture Day at Salem Village and Reverend Lawson preached the sermon, which he published shortly thereafter under the title Christ’s Fidelity the Only Shield Against Satan’s Malignity. Historians have consistently represented it as an attempt to sir up the emotions of the community, but in fact it was nothing of the sort. To be sure, Reverend Lawson did reaffirm that the girl’s afflictions were the “effects of Diabolical malice and operations, and that it cannot rationally be imagined to proceed from any other cause whatsoever.” Reverend Lawson was far from depending on the magistrates to cure the country of its troubles. In fact he warned the community that there was ultimately no legitimate secular defense against witchcraft. There was, for example, no legitimate means of testing to see whether an accused person was a witch: “we find no means instituted of God to make trial of witches.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Nor could one rightly defend oneself against witchcraft with white magic, such as boiling one’s urine or nailing a horseshoe over the door, because such charms were in themselves, “a kind of witchcraft,” and might well give a more secure foothold to the Devil. Careless accusations of suspected persons might also backfire, Reverend Lawson warned. “Rash censuring of others, without sufficient grounds, or false accusing any willingly…is indeed to be like the Devil, who is a calumniator, of false accuser.” Most important, he warned his listeners that the Devil might appear in the shape of an innocent person. Indeed, he suspected this was precisely what had happened when church members saw the apparitions of other church members afflicting them. The Devil had taken “some visible subjects of our Lord Jesus and [used] at least their shapes and appearances…to afflict and torture other visible subjects of that same Kingdom. Surely his design is that Christ’s Kingdom may be divided against itself.” Given all these difficulties the only sure protection against witchcraft, the “Only Shield Against Satan’s Malignity,” was faith in Christ, and the application of that faith in prayer. And such prayer would be answered, particularly if it came from a people bound to the worship of God, like those of New England, by their church covenants: “whensoever God hath declared a person or people to be in covenant with Him, as the objects of His special mercy and favour, He will assuredly and shortly suppress the malice of Satan, however violently engaged against them.” In the late 19th century, it seemed that San Jose, California had come under a spell. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Mrs. Sarah Winchester moved to San Jose, California after the tragic loss of her baby daughter and husband and began to construct one of the most unique and elaborate Queen Anne Victorian mansions the World had ever witnessed. According to legend, Mrs. Winchester enacted a nightly séance to help with her building plans and for protection from “bad” spirits. While she sometimes drew up simple sketches of the building ideas, there were never any blueprints! In the morning, she would meet with Mr. John Hansen, her dutiful foreman, and go over new changes and additions. During the early years of construction, this resulted in some unusual and impractical concepts such as columns being installed upside down—though some suggest this was done deliberately to confuse the evil spirits. However, this is how the Winchester Mystery House became known as “the house built by the spirits.” Mr. John Hansen stayed with Mrs. Winchester for many years, redoing scores of rooms, remodeling the in one week and tearing them apart the next. It is doubtful whether Mr. Hansen ever questioned his boss. Mrs. Winchester may have been trying to confuse evil spirits, or simply unsure if she was pleased with aspects of traditional designs, but there was so budget ceilings or deadlines to meet. This resulted in many features being dismantled, built around, or sealed over. Some rooms were remolded many times. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
It is estimated that the Winchester mansion once contained 500 to 600 rooms, but because so many were redone, only 160 remains (110 open for touring). This naturally resulted in some peculiar effects, such as stairs that lead to the ceiling, door that go nowhere and that open onto walls, and chimneys that stop just short of the roof! Once a room was completed, and most importantly, not targeted for further alterations, it was adored with some of the best furnishings money could buy. Mrs. Winchester appreciated beauty, and she was a woman with exquisite taste. Freight cars loaded with gold- and silver-plated chandeliers, imported Tiffany art glass windows then valued at up to $1,500 ($39,587.50 in 2021 dollars), German silver and bronze inlaid doors at twice that amount, Swiss molded bathtubs, rare precious woods like mahogany and rosewood, and countless other items were docked onto a side track at San Jose. Everything was then transported to the house, where much of the material was never even installed. However, the employees often times seem to be bewitched by the Devil. “Oh, how I wish I were out of this dreadful, dreadful house!” said Stella the maid. “Please do not think me very ungrateful for saying this, after taking such pains to provide us with a Heaven upon Earth, as you thought, Mrs. Winchester.” What happened could, of course, have been neither foretold, nor guarded against, by any human being. Stella, Mrs. Winchester’s maid came to her with a very long face, and said, “If you please, Mistress, did you know that this house was haunted? #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Mrs. Winchester was so startled. She replied, “Good Heavens! No! is it?” Stella then explained, “Well, Mistress, I’m pretty nigh sure it is,” and the expression of her countenance was about as lively as an undertaker’s; and then she told Mrs. Winchester that cook had been that morning to order in groceries from a shop in the neighbourhood, and on her giving the man the direction where to send the things to, he had said, with a very peculiar smile, “The Winchester mansion–, eh? H’m! I wonder how long you’ll stand it; last cook held out just a fortnight.” He looked so odd that she asked him what be meant, but he only said, “Oh! nothing; only that help never did long at the Winchester mansion. He had known staff go in one day, and out the next, and during the last four years he had never known any remain over a month.” Feeling a good deal alarmed by this information, the cook naturally enquired the reason; but he declined to give it, saying that if se had not found out herself, she had much better leave it alone, as it would only frighten her out of her wits; and on her insisting and urging him, she could only extract from him, that the house has such a mysterious history. “You know, Mrs. Winchester, how firmly I believe in apparitions, and what an unutterable fear I have of them; anything material, tangible, that I can lay hold of—anything of the same fibre, blood, and bone as myself, I could, I think, confront bravely enough; but the mere thought of being brought face to face with the ‘bodiless dead,’ makes my brain unsteady.” Mrs. Winchester had the prettiest mansion in California. She told Setlla, “Most good things that had ever been in the World had had a bad name in their day; and moreover, the grocer probably a motive for taking away the house’s character.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Mrs. Winchester derided Stella’s “babyish fears,” to such an extent that she felt half ashamed, and yet not quite comfortable, either and then came the usual rush of the mansion’s engagements, during which one has no time to think of anything but how to speak, and act, and look for the moment then present. Marriam Marriot, Mrs. Winchester’s niece was to arrive the previous day and, in the morning, the weekly hamper of flowers, fruit, and vegetables arrived. Stella always dressed the flower-vase, while other servants ate so tasteless; and as she was arranging them, it occurred to her—you know Stella’s passion for flowers—to carry up one particular cornucopia of roses and mignonette and set it on Marriam’s toilet-table, as a pleasant surprise for her. As Stella came downstairs, she had seen Ashely, another maid. Ashely was a fresh round-faced country girl—she went into the room, which was being prepared for Mrs. Marriot, with a pair of sheets that she had been airing over her arm. Stella went upstairs very slowly, as her cornucopia was full of water, and she was afraid of spilling some. She turned the handle of the bedroom-door and entered, keeping her eyes fixed on her flowers, to see how they bore the transit, and whether any of them had fallen out. Suddenly a sort of shiver passed over her; and feeling frighten—she did not know why—she looked up quickly. The girl was standing by the bed, leaning forward a little with her hands clenched in each other, rigid, every nerve tense; her eyes, wide open, starting out of her head and a look of unutterable stony horror in them; her cheeks and mouth not pale, but livid as those of one that died awhile ago in mortal pain. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
As Stella looked at her, her lips moved a little, and an awful hoarse voice, not like hers in the least said, “Oh! my God, have see it!” and then she fell down suddenly, like a log, with a heavy noise. Using Mrs. Winchester’s call system, she alerted Mr. Hansen to what area in the mansion they were in. The message was loudly audible and Mr. Hansen came running in, and between the two of them they managed to lift Ashely on to the bed, and tried to bring her to herself by running her feet and hands, and holding strong salts to her nostrils. And all the while they kept glancing over their shoulders, in a vague cold terror of seeing some awful, shapeless apparition. Two long hours she lay in a state of utter unconsciousness. Meanwhile Mr. Hansen, who had been down to his guest house, returned. At the end of the two hours they succeeded in bringing Ashely back to sensation and life, but only to make the awful discovery that she was raving mad. She became so violent that it required all the combined strength of Mr. Hansen and Walley (the butler) to hold her down in the bed. Of course, the sent off instantly for a doctor, who, on her growing a little calmer towards evening, removed her in a carriage to his own house. The doctor had come later to tell Mrs. Winchester that Ashley was pretty quiet, not from any return to sanity, but from sheer exhaustion. Stella, Mrs. Winchester, Mr. Hansen and Walley were, of course, utterly in the dark as to what she saw, and her ravings were far to disconnected and unintelligible to afford them the slightest clue. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Everyone was so completely shattered and upset by the awful occurrence. No one was allowed to occupy that room again. Mrs. Winchester would shudder and run by quickly as she passed the door. Eventually Mr. Hansen boarded it up. Legend has it this room is one of the 50 not opened to guests on tours. Mrs. Winchester was still unconvinced as to the house being at fault. You know, she felt like the mansion was a godmother, a protector to her, and was responsible for its good behaviour. She thought the girl simply had a fit. Why not? She knew of a man who was subject to seizures of that kind, and immediately on being attacked his whole body became rigid, his eyes glassy and staring, his complexion livid, exactly as in that case. Or it was also possible that, if no a fit, that perhaps the girl was subject to madness? The doctor had to ascertain where there was not insanity in her family. Even allowing the possibility, nay, the actual unquestioned existence of ghost in the abstract, is it likely that there should be anything to be seen so horribly fear-inspiring, as to send a perfectly sane person in one instant raving mad, which, after many years of residence in the house that Mrs. Winchester had never caught a glimpse of? According to this hypothesis, everyone in the mansion should have, by that time, been stark raving mad and in a lunatic asylum. Stella told Mrs. Winchester that she was leaving that “terrible, hateful, fatal house. I wish I had escaped from it sooner! Oh, my dear Mrs. Winchester, I shall never be the same woman again if I live to be a hundred.” After Stella left, Ashley was removed to the lunatic asylum, Agnews State Hospital, where she remained in the same state. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Ashely had several lucid intervals, she was closely, pressingly questioned as to what it was she saw; but she maintained an absolute, hopeless, silence, and only shuddered, moaned, and would hide her face in her hands when the subject was broached. Stella went to see her, and on her retuned was sitting resting in the drawing-room, before going to dress for dinner, talking to Mrs. Winchester about her visit, when Theophilus Riesinger walked in, he had always been waling in the last ten days, and Mrs. Winchester always flushed up and looked happy, whenever he made his appearance. He looked very handsome, dear fellow, just came in from the park in a coat that fitted like a second skin, black gloves, and a top hat. He seemed in tremendous spirits, and was as sceptical as Mrs. Winchester to the ghostly origins of Ashley’s seizure. “Let me come here tonight and sleep in that room; Mrs. Winchester,” he said, looking very eager and excited, “with the gas lit and a poker, I’ll engage to exorcize every demon that shows his ugly nose; even if I should find seven white ghostisses, sitting on seven white postisses.” “You don’t mean really?” asked Stella, incredulously. “Don’t I? that’s all,” he answered, emphatically. “I should like nothing better. Well, is it a bargain?” Mrs. Winchester turned quite pale. “Oh, don’t,” she said, hurriedly, “Please, don’t; why should you run such a risk, besides the room has been boarded up? How do you know that you might not be sent mad too?” He laughed very heartily, and coloured a little with pleasure at seeing the interest she took in his safety. “Never fear,” he said, “it would take more than a whole squadron of departed ones, with the gentleman at their head, to send me crazy.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
He was so eager, so persistent, so thoroughly in earnest, that Mrs. Winchester yielded at last, though with a certain strong reluctance to his entreaties. Her eyes filled with tears, she had the room opened up and walked away hastily to the conservatory. Nonetheless, Father Riesinger got his wish; it was so difficult to refuse him anything. Mrs. Winchester gave up her engagements for the evening. And at about 10.00pm, she went to bed. Then he went, jumping up the stairs three steps at a time and humming a tune. The human victims of this tragedy should never be forgotten. With a magnitude registering 7.9, high intensity shaking was felt at 5.13am on April 18, 1906. It felt like the most powerful Earthquake on Earth. All of the sudden the whole Earth started shaking like crazy, and the shaking got worse and worse. Devastating fires soon broke out in the San Francisco Bay Area and lasted for several days. More than 3,000 people died and over 80 percent of San Francisco was destroyed. The position of the people in Agnews was critical; a number of insane persons escaped from the demolished asylum, and were running at random about the country. 117 patients and staff were killed and buried in mass graves on the site. The main building and some others were irreparably damaged. The ground just opened up. Back at her mansion, Mrs. Winchester was in her Daisy Bed Room, when she was awakened by the jolt, “Every time I took a step,” she said, “I fell. I heard an awful sound. The seven-story town went flying up and crashed down onto the house, trappimg me in my bedroom and destroying most of the fourth floor along with it.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
People were running, but the valley just opened up and swallowed them. Dozens of people sank into the Earth. “The house seemed to shake forever and ever. I felt a lump in my throat, a gasping for breath—ten minutes on the clock, but a thousand centuries in my heart. Then again, loud, sudden, a violent banging on the door! I made a simultaneous rush to the door. My servants came and saved me. They said I had been trapped in my room for days. As we walked down the hall, there was Father Riesinger, standing in the middle of the floor of the room we had boarded up, rigid, petrified, with that same look—that look that is burnt into my heart in letters of fire—of awful, unspeakable, stony fear on his brave young face. For one instant he stood thus; then stretching out his arms stiffly before him, he groaned in a terrible husky voice, ‘Oh, my God, I have seen it!’ and fell down dead. Yes, dead. Not in a swoon or in a fit, but dead. Vainly we tried to bring back the life to that strong young heart; it will never come back again till that day when the Earth and the sea give up the dead are therein. I cannot see for the tears that are blinging me; he was such a dear fellow.” Then an omnipresent, malevolent voice, said, “Can you feel that? Drowning deep in my sea of loathing, broken your servant I kneel. Will you give it to me? There is no turning back now. You’ve woken up the demon in me.” This is a true story. The Winchester mansion is a 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester rifle. The study of theology also tells us that a distinction between spirit and soul has remained obtuse till present day. As a result, the learned theologians of the most advanced organized religions take one for the other, keeping the identities and so interrelationship between the two hazy. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
This obtuse relationship has been trickling down for the millenniums, from when humans lived in caves in the Mesolithic era, around 14,000 years BC. Sorcery is also visible in burial rites and construction of monuments. Belief in a deity or an afterlife could be an evolutionarily advantageous by-product of people’s ability to reason about the minds of others. The Victorian period was an era of deep and sustained religious belief in the supernatural. People have a bias for believing in the supernatural. Yet people think there is a dark force behind many of the tragic events that are happening today. A force that has a significant impact on Society. Repeatedly we see cases involving law-breaking, or violence on the rise, and in many cases people believe it proceeds from an unknown dark force. Perhaps the Victorian belief in the spiritual and occult was not too farfetched. And God say everything He had made, and found it very good. And He said: This is a beautiful World that I have given you. Take good care of it; do not ruin it. It is said: Before the World was created, the Holy One kept creating Worlds and destroying them. Finally He created this one, and was satisfied. He said to Adam: This is the last World I shall make. I place it in your hands: hold it in trust. May His great name be blessed for ever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. May the prayers and supplications of the House of America be acceptable unto their Father in Heaven; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
The most expensive window was built on the north side of the house with a room built over it. Ever wonder why? Come learn about this beautiful story at the Winchester Mystery House.
Now open for GUIDED Mansion Tours!
🎟️ Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
Its Inhabitants Live with More Ease, Decency, and Peace than You Can Imagine!
Benefits of expanding trade were not evenly shared. They flowed mainly from the First Wave World to the Second. To facilitate this flow, the industrial powers worked hard to expand and integrate the World market. As trade passed beyond national boundaries each national market became part of a larger set of interconnected regional or continental markets and, finally, part of a single, unified exchange system envisioned by the integrational elites who ran Second Wave civilization. A single web of money was woven around the World. Treating the rest of the World as its gas pump, garden, mine, quarry, and cheap labour supply, the Second Wave World wrought deep changes in the social life of the Earth’s non-industrial populations. Cultures that had subsisted for thousands of years in a self-sufficient manner, producing their own food supplies, were sucked willy-nilly into the World trade system and compelled to trade or perish. Suddenly the living standards of Bolivians or Malayans were tied to the requirements of industrial economies half a planet away, as tin mines and rubber plantations sprang up to feed the voracious industrial maw. The innocent household product margarine provides a dramatic case in point. Margarine was originally manufactured in Europe out of local material. It grew so popular, however, that these materials proved insufficient. In 1907 researchers discovered that margarine could be made out of coconut and palm-kernel oil. The result of this European discovery was an upheaval in the lifestyle of West Africans. “In the main areas of West Africa,” writes Magnus Pyke, former president of the British Institute of Food Science and Technology, “where palm oil was traditionally produced, the land was owned by the community as a whole.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Complex local customs and rules governed the use of the palm trees. Sometimes a man who had planted a tree was entitled to its product for the rest of his life. In some places, women had special rights. According to Pyke, the Western businessmen who organized “the large-scale production of palm oil for the manufacture of margarine as a ‘convenience’ food for the industrial citizens of Europe and America destroyed the fragile and complex social system of the non-industrial Africans.” Huge plantations were set up in the Belgian Congo, in Nigeria, the Cameroons, and the Gold Coasts. The West got its margarine. And Africans became semi-slaves on huge plantations. Rubber offers another example. After the turn of the century when automobile production in the United States of America created a sudden heavy demand for rubber tires and inner tubes, traders, in collusion with local authorities, enslaved Amazonian Indians to product it. Roger Casement, the British consul in Rio de Janeiro, reported that the production of four thousand tons of Putumayo runner between 1900 and 1911 resulted in the death of thirty thousand Indians. It can be argued that these were “excesses” and were not typical of Grand Imperialism. Certainly the colonial powers were not unrelievedly cruel of evil. In places they did build schools and rudimentary health facilities for their subject populations. They improved sanitation and water supplies. They no doubt raised the living standard for some. Nor would it be fair to romanticize precolonial societies or to blame the poverty of today’s non-industrial populations exclusively on imperialism. Climate, local corruption and tyranny, ignorance, and xenophobia all contributed. There was plenty of misery and oppression to go around long before the Europeans ever arrived. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Nevertheless, once torn out of self-sufficiency and compelled to product for money and exchange, once encouraged or forced to reorganize their social structure around mining, for example, or plantation farming, First Wave populations were plunged into economic dependence on a marketplace they could scarcely influence. Often their leaders were bribed, their cultures ridiculed, their languages suppressed. Moreover, the colonial powers hammered a deep sense of psychological inferiority into the conquered people that stands even today as an obstacle to economic and social development. In the Second Wave World, however, Grand Imperialism paid off handsomely. As the economic historian William Woodruff put it: “It was the exploitation of these territories and the growing trade done with them that obtained for the European family wealth on a scale never seen before.” Built deep into the very structure of the Second Wave economy, feeding its ravenous need for resources, imperialism marched across the planet. In 1492 when Columbus first set foot in the New World, Europeans controlled only 9 percent of the globe. By 1801 they ruled a third. By 1880, two thirds. And by 1935 Europeans politically controlled 85 percent of the land surface on Earth and 70 percent of its population. Like Second Wave society itself, the World was divided into integrators and integrates. Not all integrators were equal, however. The Second Wave nations waged an increasingly bloody battle among themselves for control of the emerging World economic system. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
English and French dominance was challenged in World War I by rising German industrial might. The war’s destruction, the devastating cycle of inflation and depression that followed it, the revolution in Russia, all shook the industrial World market. These upheavals brought on a drastic slowdown in the rate of growth of World trade, and, even though more countries were sucked into the trading system, the actual volume of good traded internationally declined. World War II further slowed extension of the integrated World market. By the end of World War II, Western Europe lay in smoking ruins. Germany had been reduced to a lunar landscape. The Soviet Union has suffered indescribable physical and human damage. Japan’s industry was shattered. Of the major industrial powers only the United States of America found itself unharmed economically. By 1946-950 the global economy stood in such disarray that foreign trade was at its lowest level since 1913. Moreover, the very weakness of the war-stricken European dependence. Gandhi, Ho Chi Minh, Jomo Kenyatta, and other anti-colonialists stepped up their campaigns to oust the colonizers. Even before the wartime guns stopped firing, therefore, it was apparent that the entire World industrial economy would have to be reconstituted on a new basis after the war. Two nations took upon themselves the task of reorganizing and reintegrating the Second Wave system: the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The United States of America until then played a limited part in the Grand Imperial campaign. In opening its own frontier it had decimated the Native Americans and cordoned them off in reservations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
In Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, Americans imitated the imperial tactics of the British the French, or the Germans. In Latin America throughout the early decades of this century U.S. “dollar diplomacy” helped United Fruit and other corporations guarantee low prices for sugar, bananas, coffee, copper, and other goods. Nevertheless, compared with the Europeans, the United States of America was a junior partner in the Grand Imperial crusade. After World War II, by contrast, the United States of American stood as the chief creditor nation in the World. It had he most advanced technology, the most stable political structure—and an irresistible opportunity to move into the power vacuum left behind by its shattered competitors as they were forced to withdraw from the colonies. As early as 1941 U.S. financial strategists had begun to plan for a postwar reintegration of the World economy along lines more favourable to the United States. At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, held under U.S. leadership, forty-four nations agreed to set up two key integrative structures—in International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The IMF thus fixed the basic relationship of the major World currencies. The World Bank, meanwhile, at first established to provide postwar reconstruction funds to European nations, gradually began providing loans to the non-industrial countries, too. These were often for the purpose of building roads, harbours, ports, and other “infrastructure items” to facilitate the movement of raw materials and agricultural exports to the Second Wave nations. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Soon a third component was added to the system: The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade—GATT for short. This agreement, again promoted originally by the United States of America, set out to liberalize trade, which had the effect of making it difficult for the poorer, less technologically advanced countries to protect their tiny fledgling industries. The three structures were wired together by a rule that prohibited the World Bank from making loans to any country that refused to join the IMF or to abide by the GATT. This system made it difficult for debtors of the United States to reduce their obligations through currency or tariff manipulation. It strengthened the competitiveness of U.S. industry in World markets. And it gave the industrial powers, and especially the United States of American, a strong influence on economic planning in many First Wave countries, even after they had attained political independence. These three interconnected agencies formed a single integrative structure for the World trade. And from 1944 to the early 1970’s, the United States of America basically dominated this system. Among nations, it integrated the integrators. As a direct result, the American suburb became more than a geographical location. Suburbs also became more than various collections of certain types of residences. Nor are suburbs simply the abodes of certain types of people. American suburbs are all the above and far more—for suburbia is not just a place, it is an idea. This suburban ideal is called, in one urban scholar’s felicitous term, a “bourgeois utopia.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
The suburbs that best met this idealized goal were the nineteenth-century suburbs of privilege. These well-to-do suburbs represented not only a place, but also a romanticized and idealized image of nature and of the role of the family in such an idyllic setting. The suburb was the humane alternative to the dehumanizing aspects of the city. To popular writer of the time, the suburb represents an escape from the filth, noise, and debauchery of the nineteenth-century industrial city. Suburban life was portrayed in a highly idealized light that stressed numerous advantages, and all but ignored inconveniences and liabilities. Suburbs were to allow families to achieve the benefits of the Jeffersonian rural ideal without having to forgo the comforts and convenience of the city. The suburb was said to be the perfect merger of the energy of the city and the charm and openness of the country. Here proud parents could raise healthy children in the safety and openness of the country. Early country small towns copied the compact pattern of the city. This mean crowding existing structures together and building right up to property and street lines. Such small towns saw themselves as nascent cities, and as such they copied city patterns. The goal of the designed romantic suburb we will presently discuss was quite different. Rather than ape the city, the suburb consciously sought to return its residents to nature. Winding roads and large lots with trees, foliage, and ample emerald green lawns all were designed to suggest the virtues of a comfortable home nestled in benign nature. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
The goal of the idealized romantic suburbs was an improved-upon naturalism. For housewives, living in such planned naturalism—the fresh air, wide vistas, and comfortable cottages—was to allow them to develop their spiritual, sentimental, and intellectual capacities. For the male, the home was to be a refuge from the crowded, dirty, noisy, and dense city. The romantic suburb was designed o counteract the unnatural aspects of urban confusion with the balm of peaceful nature. The American romantic suburb had both American and English roots. It can be seen as an artifact of both Jeffersonian ideals and nineteenth-century British romantic era sensibilities in arts and philosophy. The Englishman J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, writing in 1782, stated that the new American humans lived in a village, “where far removed from the accursed neighbourhood of Europeans, its inhabitants live with more ease, decency, and peace than you can imagine; where, though governed by no laws, yet find in uncontaminated simple manners all that laws can afford. The image of the self-sufficient American was pure Jeffersonian, and it was one of the more enduring symbols of the romantic era. To nineteenth-century writers such as Emerson and Hawthorne, the rural landscape was far preferable to that of the squalid city Creations of nature were preferable to artificial creations of humans. In the view of Emerson, urbanization was a potential danger to the nation in that it was fostering false and artificial tastes. This superficiality was undermining the rural simplicity that was the bedrock of the national greatness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
As expressed by Emerson, “We pave the Earth for miles with stones and forbid the grass. We build streets all round the horizon and shut out the sky and wind.” If such calamities were to continue, not only the artistic sensibilities would suffer; there also would be a sharp undermining of the people’s natural rural virtue. Onto these essentially Jeffersonian beliefs, writers of the nineteenth century then grafted the artistic works of the poets, painters, and writers of the romantic era. Examining the poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson, or even that of Byron or Shelley, is to see a World of picturesque villages and cottages in a bucolic landscape. In American art of the time, the paintings of the Hudson Valley School similarly present a view of nature that is highly idealized and almost mystical. Nature is pure, it is virtuous, and it is basically benign. There is no suggestion that nature can be capricious, evil, violent, or dangerous. It is the nature of Rousseau rather than that of Hobbes. The romantic garden suburb was a pragmatic American response, insofar as it was an attempt to practically prepackage the rural virtues of the affluent suburbanite. The romantic suburb was to provide the jaded urbanite a healthful, restorative return to nature. Thus, moving one’s family from the crowded, sinful city to the pure and open country was not just a practical decision; it was a moral choice. Moving one’s family to a suburban villa, or a large country “cottage,” signified one’s moral rectitude. It was a sign that the home owner was not only well-off, but stable and dependable. In simplest terms, one was a family person. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
By moving to the suburbs, it showed that one was putting down solid rots. One cared for one’s family. One might have to spend one’s days in the hellish city, but one’s spouse and children would be spared. They would abide among flowers and greenery in rural-like domesticity. The line between the home itself and the idealization of the family was blurred. Having the right home became a moral as well as a practical choice. Even before the Civil War, the image of the larger welcoming house with a front porch, a garden, and a spacious tree-shaded lawn was on its way to becoming an American icon. It is generally accepted that architectural and social-morality writers were particularly influential in spreading the gospel of the morality of the suburban villa set in a gracious tree-lined lawn. The most influential of the latter was Catherine Beecher, the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote the immensely popular antislavery potboiler Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Catherine Beecher was the combination Miss Manners, Dr. Spock, and Ann Landers of her day. Her Treatise on Domestic Economy, first published in 1841, became the authority on everything domestic. The book is still a marvel, including everything from how to exercise, to proper manners, to the proper way to eat healthfully, to methods of best caring for infants, to how to raise plants, to skills needed to decorate a parlour, to how to deign a more efficient kitchen. Over a quarter of a century later, in 1869, Catherine and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a new version of Treatise on Domestic Economy titled The American Woman’s Home, which expanded on the idea that not only the home, but also the surrounding community, should provide a tranquil escape from the city. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Also, as the sisters became increasingly doubtful as to weather the city could be reformed and redeemed, the location of the home gradually became as crucial as the home itself. It is one of those interesting side notes of history tht Catherine Beecher, the expert on everything domestic and the advocate of suburban homes, never married or had a home of her own in the suburbs or anywhere else. Nonetheless, for several decades her works publicized the moral as well as practical advantages of living in a suburban country environment outside the city. In her view, women were morally superior to men, and the proper feminine sphere was providing husband and children an elevated home environment. While she never directly advocated leaving the city, it was clear that suburbia, in her view, best provided an environment as free as possible from the corruption of the male-dominated city life. She also stressed the practical and healthful aspects of living a quiet, countrylike life. While relatively few families could afford the ideal suburban villas she championed, Catherine Beecher was very influential with women in setting the image of the suburban home as the physical and moral ideal. The second wrier of great influence was the landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing. Mr. Downing has considerable popularity. He even designed the largely undeveloped Mall in Washington, D.C., into a parklike area having winding carriage drives and a naturalistic setting of trees. (Only at the turn of the century, under the general guidance of the architect Daniel Burnham, did the Mall adopt the classical architecture and proportions with which we now are all so familiar.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
However, Mr. Downing and his disciples, such as Calvert Vaux, were primarily concerned with domestic architecture and were great popularizers of the picturesque suburban villa or cottage. Mr. Downing’s popular book Cottage Residences provided models of Italianate, Gothic, rustic, and Victorian-style comfortable middle-class housing, as did his later The Architecture of Country Houses and Victorian Cottage Residences. Mr. Downing saw domestic cottage architecture as providing a sense of balance and tranquility to counter the unsettling negative energy of the city. However, although Mr. Downing borrowed heavily from the ideas of the English landscape architect John Claudius Loudon, he had innovative deigns and used new building techniques. For example, Mr. Downing used the new balloon frame made out of two-by-fours spaces 18 inches apart rather than the older, and more expensive, post-and-beam method of construction. Balloon-frame homes did not require skilled craftsmen and could rapidly be constructed by two or three humans having basic carpentering skills. Housing reformers such as Mr. Downing preferred to refer to the more elaborate homes as “villas,” which suggested a Roman estate for one of the patrician class rather than the more humble designation “cottage.” The home, in Mr. Downing’s view, was o be republican, but not egalitarian. Suburbia was to be a place for those of taste, not for the urban masses. Similarly to Catherine Beecher, Mr. Downing and Vaux stressed the moral value of the suburban home as a refuge from the hectic businesses and moral vices of the city. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Suburban homes in their design, size, and furnishings were to express the moral superiority of their inhabitants. Domestic architecture was not only to reflect taste and beauty, but also the spiritual ideals and moral development of the inhabitants. As noted by Clark, he architectural reformers of the mid-nineteenth century believed, for example, that Gothic-revival style, with its emphasis on verticality, not only harmonized well with nature but also symbolized an eminently Christian type of dwelling. Dwellings were not simply functional, they also possessed a moral element. Thus, whether the American suburb was a unique American phenomenon, as Kenneth Jackson suggests, or a virtual clone of earlier English models, as Robert Fishman argues, American suburbs soon developed into something quite American. Compared to early English estates, the American suburban vision of the ideal home was considerably reduced in scale. The American suburban home also carried in its designer’s eyes an explicit tie to the agrarian Jeffersonian republican ideal. In Mr. Downing’s words, the homes had to be, “built and loved upon the new World, and not old World, ideas and principles; a home in which humanity and republicanism are stronger than family pride and aristocratic feeling.” The American suburban home was more than a place, it was an ideology. The homeowner would not only be a better citizen, one would be a better person because of the more “natural” character of suburban life. Some things you are not strong enough to change either in yourself or others. What you can do but patiently endure until God’s orders otherwise? Yes, this is a trial, and it is meant to prove your virtue under fire. Without experience in long-suffering, such merits as you have will not amount to a hill of beans. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
What you might want to do is ask God for more annoyance rather than less. Perhaps then He will think it worth His while to come to your assistance. In the meantime bear up and benign. Once someone has been admonished a couple of times, one becomes anxious. Do not mess with one. Instead, commit yourself totally to God. Pray to God that His will and honour will appear in Him and all His servants. However, how can He do this? Well, God has converted bad cranberry juice into premium cranberry juice on at least one festive occasion! Strive to be patient by putting up with the defects of others. Why? Because you have saddled onto others the infirmities that are dragging you down. If you cannot express approval of others, how can you possibly expect them to return approval to you? We are quick to want others to appear polished, but why is it that we are so slow to hammer out our own dents? We want others to be held to the letter of the law. Ourselves? We want to swan around barely observing the spirit of the law. Worse, the uncontrollable behaviour of others has spread through the populace like a plague. Better, our own errant behaviour has swept over the lowlands like a flood. Clearly the latter is to be preferred to the former. We want those others to be surrounded with strictures. We want out own behaviour to know no boundaries. Rare it is that we put ourselves on par with our neighbour, allowing one the same amount of slack as we have come to expect ourselves. If all the World and all the Worldlings were perfect, what glory could we give to God! After all, the source of our spiritual progress is all those neighbours who are annoying us to death. God has ordained it, and St. Paul has written to the Galatians (6.2). We should learn “to carry the burdens of another.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
No one’s without a defect, no one is wise enough to represent oneself. Pauline wisdom to the Galatians (6.2) and Second Corinthians (3.5)! We should carry each other, console each other, help, instruct, admonish each other. That is the sort of wisdom found in Proverbs (3.7), Colossian (3.13), and First Thessalonians (5.11). The more virtue you have, the more adversity you will encounter. Confrontation result. They shake a human up, but at the same time they reveal jus what kind of human one is. When they are in high school, today’s youth should have a general idea of what field they would like to work in. It is not necessary for them to have decided that they are going to be engineers, or secretaries, or doctors, but they need to have started to funnel their skills and interests in a direction. The person who does not aim in a given direction, may wander and drift without ever arriving anywhere, while the person who plans ahead will have a better chance of arriving at one’s destination and will know where one is once one has arrived. Even if you aim someplace and find out it is not what you had in mind, at least you have eliminated one alternative. When youths establish goals, they do not wander aimlessly; instead, they exchange them for other goals. There is a strong relationship between home environment and career development. Parents have more influence on their children’s career choices than do their teachers, friends, or counselors. Not only do they pay the bills in many cases, but they also help form attitudes and feelings about various jobs and the training needed to get them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The purpose is to show people how the “Golden Light” is there for everyone to see. However, do you not think that when people do not get struck by that light and do not hear the thunderous voice they feel cheated? However, it can happen to them, too. Through prayer we can all experience this spiritual ecstasy and God will give us direction in life. When the spirit leaves the body, it is not the end. We are here to realize Oneness with God and will come back until we achieve this. The little voice we gain from prayer will make us give up bad habits. Life is your journey. This will remind you of God’s beauty. As you continue your journey you cannot keep asking to see the Grand Canyon again if you are traveling from Los Angeles to New York. God has many faces. What should a human do to live a perfect life in God’s eyes? Simply reaffirm the oneness of your soul with the Infinite Soul. Prayer means to know that you are one with God. God is omnipresent, and the activity of God is here and now. God’s energy can be perceived by the senses, and that is this “Light.” Dark nights of the soul will give us a great humility, which will smash any pride the glimpse might have engendered. The first thing God gave the created World was physical light. The first communication God makes to the human who has attained His presence is the vision of supernatural Light. During this rare experience the human feels that one is free from Earthly attachments and Worldly desires, that the intense peace one enjoys is the true happiness, that God’s reality is the overwhelming fact of existence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
This vision is a gift, a grace, so it may come suddenly, unexpectedly, but more often it comes to someone who has prepared oneself for it by purification and contemplation. Beneficial changes appear in one’s character and one’s outlook. The lower nature is weakened, the baser attributes are thinned down. Spiritual truths are confirmed for one, and certain false beliefs are cancelled. Yet, if the vision of Light brought union with God, intimacy with God, it did not and could not enable one to know God as God knows Himself. One could not penetrate His inmost nature and substance. Seeing the Light in front of one is one state; being merged into it is another, and superior. To describe the wonders and benefits, the delights and beauties of these glimpse will whet the appetite of people without satisfying it. Hence they will then be led to ask how such a glimpse is to be obtained. Wherever you are is home and the Earth is paradise. Wherever you set your feet is holy land. You do not live off it like a parasite. You live in it, and it in you, or you do not survive. And that is he only worship of God there is. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Thou who establishes peace in the Heavens, please grant peace unto us and unto all America. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to grant our portion in Thy Holy Bible and may the Temple be rebuilt in our day. There we will serve Thee with awe as in the days of old. Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His Kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
CRESLEIGH RIVERSIDE AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA |
Now Selling!
Cresleigh Riverside Model Home is OPEN! Nestled at the southern end of Plumas Lake, bordering an orchard to the west, Cresleigh Riverside is home to the largest home sites in the three Plumas Ranch communities.
Its executive-style residences feature space and amenities that are well beyond the norm – many on country lots that back up to the Ranch’s adjacent fruit orchards. With four floor plans available, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.
Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Additional game rooms, bedroom space and three-car garages provide other custom possibilities.
Gain the freedom of large home sites and the extra space and flexibility with Cresleigh Riverside. Homeowners will love the convenient commuter access to nearly Sacramento and Yuba City.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Go! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/
The Community in the Heavenly Orchard Made History in a Number of Ways!
A great mind said that individualism is a part of being a human being. When the day comes that the mind and body can be separated, what will happen to the soul? No civilization spreads without conflict. Second Wave civilization soon launched a massive attack on the First Wave World, triumphed, and imposed its will on millions, ultimately billions, of human beings. Long before the Second Wave, of course, from the sixteenth century on, European rulers had already begun to build extensive colonial empires. Spanish priests and conquistadors, French trappers, British, Dutch, and Portuguese or Italian adventurers fanned out across the globe, enslaving or decimating whole populations, claiming control of vast lands, and sending tribute home to their monarchs. Compared with what was to follow, however, all this was insignificant. For the treasure these early adventurer and conquerors sent home was, in effect, private booty It financed wars and personal opulence—winter palaces, colourful pageantry, a leisurely workless lifestyle for the court. However, it had little to do with the still basically self-sufficient economy of the colonizing country. Largely outside the money system and the market economy, the serf who scraped a bare living from the sunbaked soil of Spain or the misty heaths of England had little or nothing to export abroad. They scarcely grew enough for local consumption. Nor did they depend on raw materials stolen or purchased in other countries. For them life went on, one way or another. The fruits of overseas conquest enriched the ruling class and the towns rather than the mass of ordinary people who lived as peasant. In this sense, First Wave imperialism was still petty—not yet integrated into economy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The Second Wave transformed this relatively small-scale pilferage into big business. It transformed Petty Imperialism into Grand Imperialism. Here was a new imperialism aimed not at bringing back a few trunkloads of gold or emeralds, spices and silks. Here was an imperialism that ultimately brought back shipload after shipload of nitrates, cotton, palm oil, tin, rubber, bauxite, and tungsten. Here was an imperialism that dug copper mines in the Congo and planted oils rigs in Arabia. Here was an imperialism that sucked in raw material from the colonies, processed them, and very often spewed the finished manufactured goods back into the colonies at huge profit. Here, in short, was imperialism no longer peripheral but so integrated into the basic economic structure of the industrial nation that the jobs of millions of ordinary workers came to depend on it. And not just jobs. In addition to new raw materials, Europe also needed increasing amounts of food. As Second Wave nations turned to manufacturing, transferring rural labour into the factories, they were forced to import more of their foodstuffs from abroad—beef, mutton, grain, coffee, tea, and sugar from India, from China, from Africa, from the West Indies and Central America. In turn, mass manufacturing grew, the new industrial elite needed bigger markets and fresh outlets for investment. In the 1880’s and 1890’s European statesmen were unabashedly open about their objectives. “Empire is commerce,” proclaimed the British politician Joseph Chamberlain. The French premier Jules Ferry was even more explicit: What France needed, he declared, were “outlets for our industries, exports, and capital.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Jolted by cycles of boom and bust, faced with chronic unemployment, European leaders were for generations obsessed by the fear that if colonial expansion stopped, unemployment would lead to armed revolution at home. The roots of Grand Imperialism were, however, more than economic. Strategic considerations, religious fervor, idealism, and adventure all played a part, as did racism, with its implicit assumption of European superiority. Many saw imperial conquest as a divine responsibility. Kipling’s phrase, the “White Man’s burden,” summed up the European’s missionary zeal to spread Christianity and “civilization”—meaning, of course, Second Wave civilization. For the colonizers regarded First Wave civilizations, no matter how refined and complex, as backward and underdeveloped. Rural people, especially if they happened to wear dark skins, were supposedly childlike. They were “tricky and dishonest.” They were “shiftless and lazy.” They did not “value life.” Such attitudes made it easier for the Second Wave forces to justify the annihilation of those who stood in their path. In The Social History of the Machine Gun, John Ellis shows how this new, fantastically deadly weapon, perfected in the nineteenth century, was at first systematically employed against “native” populations and not against pale Europeans, since it was considered unsportsmanlike to kill an equal with it. Shooting colonials, however, was thought to be more like a hunt than a war, so other standards applied. “Mowing down Matabeles, Dervishes or Tibetans,” writes Ellis, “was regarded more as a rather risky kind of ‘shoot’ than a true military operation.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
At Omdurman, across the Nile from Khartoum, this superior technology was displayed with withering effect in 1898 when Dervish warriors led by the Mahdi were defeated by British troops armed with six Maxim machine guns. An eyewitness wrote: “It was the last day of Mahdism and the greatest….It was not a battle but an execution.” In the one engagement twenty-eight British died, leaving behind eleven thousand Dervish dead—392 colonial casualties for every Englishman. Writes Ellis: “It became another example of the triumph of the British spirit, and the general superiority of the White man.” Behind the racist attitudes and the religious and other justifications as the British, French, Germans, Dutch, and others spread around the World, stood a single hard reality. Second Wave civilization could not exist in isolation. It desperately needed the hidden subsidy of cheap resources from the outside. Above all, it needed a single integrated World market through which to siphon those subsidies. The thrust to create this integrated World market was based on the idea, best expressed by David Ricardo, that the division of labour ought to be applied to nations as well as to factory workers. In a classical passage he pointed out that if Britain specialized in the manufacture of textiles and Portugal in making wine, both countries would gain. Each would be doing what it did best. Thus the “international division of labour,” assigning specialized roles to different nations, would enrich everyone. This belief hardened into strict and rigid doctrine in the generations that followed and still prevails today, although its implications often go unnoticed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
For just as the division of labour in any economy created a powerful need for integration and thereby gave rise to an integrational elite, so the international division of labour required integration of a global scale and gave rise to a global elite—a small group of Second Wave nations which, for all practical purposes, took turns dominating large parts of the rest of the World. The success of the drive to create a single integrated World market can be measured in the fantastic growth of World trade once the Second Wave passed through Europe. Between 1750 and 1914 the value of World trade is estimate to have multiplied more than fifty-fold, rising from 700 million dollars ($29,443,203,125.00 in 2021 dollars) to almost 40 billion dollars ($1,076,780,000,000.00 in 2021 dollars). If Ricardo had been right, the advantages of this global trade should have accrued more or less evenly to all aides. In fact, the self-serving belief that specialization would benefit everyone was based on a fantasy of fair competition. It presupposed a completely efficient use of labour and resources. It presupposed deals uncontaminated by threats of political or military force. It presupposed arm’s-length transactions by more or less evenly matched bargainers. They theory, in short, overlooked nothing—except real life. In reality, negotiations between Second Wave merchants and Firs Wave people over sugar, copper, cocoa, or other resources were often totally lopsided. On one side of the table sat money-shrewd European or American traders backed by huge companies, extensive banking networks, powerful technologies, and strong national governments. On the other one might find a local lord or tribal chieftain whose people had scarcely entered the money system and whose economy was based on small-scale agriculture or village crafts. On one side sat the agents of a thrusting, alien, mechanically advanced civilization, convinced of its own superiority and ready to use bayonets or machine guns to prove it. On the other sat representatives of small prenational tribes or principalities, armed with arrows and spears. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Often local rulers or entrepreneurs were simply bought off by the Western, offered bribes or personal gains in return for sweating the native labour force, putting down resistance, or rewriting local laws in favour of the outsiders. Once conquering a colony, the imperial power often set preferential raw-material prices for its own businessmen and erected stiff barriers to prevent the traders of rival nations from bidding prices up. Under such circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the industrial World was able to obtain raw materials or energy resources at less than fair-market prices. Beyond this, prices were often further depressed in the favour of the buyers by what might be termed “The Law of First Price.” Many raw materials needed by Second Wave nations were virtually valueless to the First Wave populations who had them. African peasants had no need for chromium. Arabian sheiks had no use for black gold that they under their desert sands. Where no previous history of trade existed for a given commodity, the prince set in the first transaction was crucial. And this price was often based less on such economic factors as cost, profit, or competition than on relative military and political strength. Typically set in the absence of active competition, almost any price was acceptable to a lord or tribal chief who regarded his local resources as valueless and found himself facing a regiment of troops with Gatling guns. And this First Price, once established at a low level, depressed all subsequent prices. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
As soon as this raw material was shipped back to the industrial nations and incorporated in final products, the low initial price, was for all intents, frozen in place. Example: Suppose Compnay A bought a raw material from Colonia for one dollar a pound, then used I to manufacture widgets selling for two dollars each. Any other company seeking to enter the widget market would strive to keep its own raw-material cost as, or below, that of Company A. Unless it had some technological or other edge, it could not afford to pay significantly more for its raw material and still sell widgets at a competitive price. Thus the initial price set for the raw material, even if arrived at under the shadow of bayonets, became the base for all subsequent negotiation. Eventually, as a World price was gradually established for each commodity, all industrial nations benefited from the fac that the First Price had been set at an “a-competitive” low level. For many different reasons, therefore, despite much imperialist rhetoric about the virtues of free trade and enterprise, the Second Wave nations profited greatly from what was euphemistically called “imperfect competition.” Rhetoric and Ricardo aside, the benefits of expanding trade were not eventually shared. They flowed mainly from the First Wave World to the Second. Many people during the Second Wave also had popular-wisdom reasons for moving to the suburbs. For example, one of the reasons was the filth and crime of the city, and the sharply rising urban taxes, and much higher prices for most goods and services. “White flight” is commonly believed to be a major cause of suburbanization. Two causes of American residential deconcentration were a better quality of life and newer, more affordable housing. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
However, while race, taxes, higher prices for most good and services, crime, or all of these factors doubtlessly were important for individual families, researchers have known for decades that such “commonsense” explanations tend to be overrated as major contributions to postwar suburbanization. In reality, they had little impact on the massive suburbanization that occurred before the late 1960s, when these explanations first became fashionable. This is not to say that race, crime, poor schools, urban decay, and high taxes are not factors in white flight from the city today. However, it is a mistake to project today’s situation back into the past. The fact is that during the 1940s, 1950, and much of the 1960s, cities were doing reasonably well in terms of crime and taxes. Today it is hard to imagine a New York City in which, including family and criminal violence, there were under fifty murders a year, but that was the case during the 1940s. In 1942, for example, there were only forty-four murders in all of New York City. Moreover, white flight to the suburbs was largely irrelevant, because virtually all housing in the United States of America, city and suburban, was de facto segregated. Urban European Americans, particularly those living in the large industrial cities of the North and Middle-West, already lived in segregated, all-European American neighbourhoods. Until the federal open-housing legislation of 1968, city housing was segregated by law in the South and by custom in the North. This meant that African American and European Americans were in separate housing pools. In Northern as well as Southern cities, African Americans could only find housing in segregated African American neighbourhoods. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
New housing units were added to the non-European American communities housing pool through expanding ghastly impoverished communities full of deviance, crime, drugs, disorder, and pests through blockbusting. Blockbusting is the practice of one person of an undesired category buying into a neighbourhood at a higher than market rate price, then persuading other owners to sell property cheaply by making the neighbourhood undesirable for them by making too much noise, having too much traffic, bringing in pests, keeping their house in poor repair, having too many cars parked on the street and in the driveway, selecting odd paint colours for the house, cutting down trees, and having too many people in front of their house, and thus lowering the price of other houses, which causes people to sell before their property values fall too much, and the saboteur then gets their family and friends into a once prestigious community and it begins to decline and become highly undesirable. It is the opposite of gentrification, in this case. However, gentrification is also a form of blockbusting that rehabilitates undesirable communities, driving up prices and making them highly coveted places to life. Currently Harlem, New York is in the process of gentrification. Nonetheless, gentrification is not always bad because as prices increase, people who live in poverty gain equity, can sale, move to another state in experience a higher quality of life. Whereas reverse gentrification is usually always bad, as it makes communities unlivable, undesirable, and brings an increase in crime rates. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
During the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, publicly sanctioned racial segregation kept African Americans confined within specific undesirable deviant neighbourhoods. Established patterns of housing segregation meant that for the vast majority of middle-class European Americans, “White Flight” would have been meaningless. Only during the last fifty years does White flight emerge as a major variable. Following World War II other factors were more important. The mass suburbanization exodus of young couples during the decades immediately following World War II was not caused by flight from the city so much as by the baby boom and by government subsidies for a new suburban housing. The available lower-cost new housing was largely in the suburbs. Research shows that suburbanization in the decades immediately following World War II represented a moment toward the values associated with suburban living, such as privacy, space, cleanliness, and other suburban amenities, rather than a fleeing from perceived urban ills. The suburbs were where young families could find new, affordable, single-family housing subsidized by government loans. Not surprising, young European American families suburbanized in massive numbers. The prototypical example of the tract suburb was Levittown. The Levitt brothers, Bill and Alfred, had a construction company that had built upper-middle-class housing on Long Island dung the late 1930s. Early in World War II, they had obtained a government contract to build 2,350 mass-produced homes for war workers in Norfolk, Virginia USA. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
In the process they had learned just how many things could go wrong, but they also learned how to cut construction costs by standardizing the building process. Bill later served with the Seabees in the Pacific Theatre, where he learned how to invent new ways to put up airfields in minimal time. He came back with ideas about how to revolutionize the housing industry. Instead of building one house at a time, he proposed to mass-produce housing. Instead of building one house at a time, he proposed to mass-produce housing. He did housing construction what Henry Ford had done for automobile manufacture. In 1946 the Levitts began building what was at that time the largest private-housing development in North America on 4,000 acres of potato farms they had purchased some twenty miles from New York City on Long Island. They named it Levittown. The community made in history in a number of ways. First, Levittown was not designed as an upper-middle-class housing development; rather, it was built expressively for young working and middle-class ex-GIs. This originally meant a single housing style having 12-by-16 foot living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bath. Second, the Levitts were the first developers to use mass productions techniques. They did not have an actual assembly line, but they came closer to this approach than any other larger builder of the time. Setting Levittowns apart from other developments was that they were built on a scale not preciously attempted. Most builders then (and now) would build only a handful of houses at a time and use the monies from the sale of one home to purchase materials to build another. The Levitts built hundreds of homes at a time and, in effect, had their own finance company. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Whole areas went up at once. Teams working on specific tasks went from house to house completing each task in assembly line fashion. Construction was broken down into a number of simple steps so it could be done by semiskilled workers who would repeat the same process over and over. Homes were built on identical concrete slabs laid out on identical cookie-cuter 60-foot lots. All the cement foundations in a neighbourhood would be laid at the same time; all the walls went up at the same time; and all the interiors would be finished simultaneously. Even tree planting was routinized. One crew would machine-dig a similar hole in each front lot; another crew would drop a tree off a truckbed near the hole; and a third crew would plant the tree in the hole. Levitt claimed they were able to complete a house every fifteen minutes. To keep down coasts and prevent being stopped by strikes, the Levitts even had their own subsidiary timer company in Oregon. They even owned their own lumber yards and nail works. Levittown revolutionized the housing industry after the World War II by using mass production techniques in the construction of thousands of houses on what had been potato fields. The Levitt brothers claimed their techniques enabled them to complete a house every fifteen minutes. And very importantly, the Levitts did all this at a price well below that of comparable homes while making profit well above that of competitors. They were able to do so because of standardization. Variety, as with the early Fords, was severely limited. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
In fact, originally, all houses were identical 800-square-foot four-room Cape Cods with an unfinished upper floor that could be finished and expanded into two bedrooms as the family grew. The price for all this was only $7,990 ($79,957.92 in 2021 dollars), and a Bendix automatic washer was included. A more expensive rancher mode was later added. A rancher at the new Levitown outside Philadelphia cost the new suburbanites $8,990 in 1954 ($89,965.17 in 2021 dollars). For this home, a veteran would have to put down no payment, and the monthly payment on a thirty-year VA loan would be only $59 ($590.43 in 2021 dollars) a month. This was well below contemporary urban rental costs, much less than other suburban subdevelopments. Total closing costs were only $10 ($100.07 in 2021 dollars). Levittown was designed to be mass suburbia. The original Levittown was planned as an entire community housing over 80,000 people in almost 17,500 single-family homes. Levittown from the first was praised by the popular press and magazines and severely criticized by architects and planners. New York’s intellectual elite scorned its repetitive commonness, and the term “Levittown” entered the language as a derisive term meaning a mass-produced suburb of look-alike homes housing look-alike people. Levittown, however, was an immediate and overwhelming success with the public. Levitt particularly designed his communities for young veterans and growing families. Before its opening, young couples lined up for days to get one of those homes. On one single spring day in 1949, some 1,400 families signed purchase contracts for their own Levittown homes. Mass suburbanization based on subdivisions of detached single-family homes was underway, and suburbia would never be the same. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
We now take the postwar era of building subdivisions for granted, but it was not inevitable that American mass suburbanization would take the form it did. In Great Britain the government sponsored new towns filled with row houses, while in Sweden the emphasis was on suburban high-rise housing. By contrast, in the United States of America, postwar federal government home loan policies and the response of builders like the Levitts virtually assured acre upon acre of identical free-standing homes. Without these government policies and veteran, suburbia today might look far different. Rapid and sustained economic growth following World War II led o rising affluence and optimism regarding the future. For the first time large numbers of Americans had enough money to purchase homes and could also obtain automobiles and household durables such as washing machines, lawn mowers, sewing machines, and more. This era of consumer confidence lasted from the mid-1940s through the 1960s. The decade of the 1970s was one of uncertainty and discontent, but the ethos of prosperity still prevailed. People expected the boom and bust of the 1970s to be an aberration, with prosperity and continual economic expansion to continue. By the 1980s expectations had shrunk to where most consumers simply sought to stay where they were and not fall further behind. The 1990s continue the pattern of uncertainty. Post war suburbanization was fed by economic growth, and median family income adjusted for inflation today is not appreciably higher than that of two decades ago. The real difference is that family income today requires two and sometimes three breadwinners. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Even if interest rates are low, the cost of home ownership is going up. In the mid-1950s, the average thirty-year-old worker could carry a mortgage on a then median-priced home for 14 percent of one’s gross earnings. Three decades later, it took a full 44 percent of the average thirty-year-old worker’s gross earning to purchase the median-priced home. This means that purchase of the average home now requires two incomes (or more) to accomplish what a single income could afford in the 1950s. It is now harder to buy that starter homes in a nice suburb. In 1980, 62 percent of all married couples aged thirty to thirty-five had bought their first home. By 1990, the percent of such couples in their first home had gone down to 52 percent. For younger couples, aged twenty-five to twenty-nine, the decline in homeowning was from 43 to 36 percent. For many young couples the buying of the first home is far more difficult than it had been for their parents. And it does not seem possible, though, that housing cost might decline somewhat during the decade of the 2020s. Declines early in the decade were recession-related, but later in the decade another factor comes increasingly into play. That is the much-heralded aging of the baby boom generation. As boomers age, they are followed by the “baby bust” cohorts. The smaller size of this latter group should result in some weakening demand for housing, and thus some slackening of prices, particularly for first homes. This should be good news for young couples seeking their first home. It will be much less popular with those boomers who bought at peak prices in the late 1980, particularly those boomers who purchased their homes as investment rather than as places to live. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
During the 1980s housing prices rose considerably faster than incomes or inflation. This is less likely to be the pattern of the 2020s. Houses are likely to be purchased more as homes in which to live rather than largely as investment properties. Therefore, a bad deed should never be done, no, not for anything in the World, not even for the love of God or another human being. A good deed sometimes has to be squeezed into the daily routine, especially when it is for the advantage of the poor. The opus interruptum in question would seem to be lost forever, but it is not; it has been converted to a better work. A deed done without charity has no spiritual value. Saint Paul propounded that in his First to the Corinthians (13.3). A deed done with charity, however small or insignificant it may be, is a thoroughly fruitful work. The way God weighs in, it is not what the deed is; humongous does not count. It is the motive, how the deed is done. Done for the love of Jesus Christ is by far the best. He does much who loves much. He does much who does a thing well. He does a thing well who serves his community more than himself. Carnality often mummers as Charity. Human Nature, Selfishness, Retribution, Convenience, they to hide behind the same holy mask, attempting to crash the Final Party. The one who True and Perfect Charity cannot find oneself in the mirror. One desires only that the glory of God flare out in all things. One envies no one; one has no pet peeves, no private toys; one does not rejoice in oneself alone. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
On the contrary, one want to be blessed in God rather than possess all things without God; again, Saint Paul’s First to the Corinthians (13.4). One attributes nothing to anyone, but refers everything to God. One sees all things fluting fountainlike from God. One sees all Saints on the far side of Judgment picnicking in Heavenly Orchard. Charity it is, then, the love for Jesus Christ. From a spark of this True Charity, you would have more than enough light to see that all Earthly things—pressed down, filled to overflowing, beyond all measure, out of all proportion, plentifully, prodigally, extravagantly, superfluously, redundantly, excessively—mount up to nothing at all. It would be just wrong to argue that every physical disease proves a moral fault or mental deformity to exit, as it would be to argue that the absence of such disease proves moral or mental perfection o have been attained. Many other terrestrial beings are quite healthy too! Where physical laws of hygiene have been broken and continue to be broken, where gluttonous or ill-informed eating and intemperate living have led to bodily disturbance, the sufferer must still rectify one’s physical errors whether one’s spiritual healing is successful or not. Nature has implanted true instincts in our body to sustain and protect it. If we, through slavish acceptance of society’s bad habits, pervert those instincts or dull their sensitivity and poison our body, Nature forces us to suffer sickness and pain as the warning consequences of such perversion. Insofar as humans through ignorance fail to observe nature’s laws or through weakness persistently disobeys them, one is everywhere suffering the penalties attached to one’s wrong habits. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The truth is that no human is free to please oneself and eat what one fancies. All human, including all teachers and members of cult which claim this freedom and who trespass against themselves in this matter, will have to pay the penalty in some way or at some time. The human who reveals in one’s sensuality will naturally defend it. However, when some form of great suffering comes to one as a direct consequence, and one see it for the first time as a sin, one will cease doing so. Ill health disturbs the mind, and if prolonged or serious, may bring on neuroses. The way one views oneself and others, one’s life and the World, has too often been affected by chronic disagreeable sensations in a small part of the body, too often been improved by improving the physical condition, to assert that physical cases are unimportant. Why is it that the number of deaths from cancer has been increasing so rapidly in our times, and so disproportionately to the increase in population? Why is it that this is happening in all those parts of the World where civilization has spread? Why is it that those people who live in the most modern way—the Americans—have the most cancer. Is there not a hint here that our present way of living contributes something to its cause? How many people who would never dream of committing murder upon someone else, commit it upon themselves? Health troubles show up the value of good health, since the physical body’s condition has a strong influence upon the mind’s condition. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
It is worth the trouble of studying the body’s true needs to keep it a useful and efficient temple of God. I believe the Earth exists, and in each minim mote of its duty the holy glow of thy candle. Thou unknown I know, thou spirit, giver, lover of making, of the wrought letter, wrought flower, iron, deed, dream. Dust of Earth, help thou my unbelief. Drift of the Earth, help thou my unbelief. Drift, gray become gold, in the beam of vision. I believe with doubt. I doubt and interrupt my doubt with belief. Be, beloved, threatened World. Each minim mote. Not the poisonous luminescence forced out of its privacy, the sacred lock of its cell broken. No, the ordinary glow of common dust in ancient sunlight. Be, that I may believe. Amen. Grant peace, well-being and blessing unto the World, with grace, lovingkindness and mercy for us and for all America, Thy people. Bless us, O our Father, all of us together, with the light of Thy presence; for by that light Thou hast given us, O Lord our God, the Book of Mormon and Holy Bible of life, lovingkindness and righteousness, blessing and mercy, life and peace. O may it be good in Thy sight at all times to bless Thy people America with Thy peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who blessest Thy people America with peace. O Lord, please guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile, and to those who slander me, let me give no heed. May my soul be humble and forgiving unto all. Please open Thou my heart, O Lord, unto Thy sacred Law, that Thy statutes I may know and all Thy truths purse. Please bring to naught designs of those who seek to do me ill; speedily defeat their aims and thwart their purposes for Thine own sake, for Thine own power, for Thy holiness and Law. That Thy loved ones be delivered, answer us, O Lord, and save with Thy redeeming power. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
CRESLEIGH RIVERSIDE AT PLUMAS RANCH
Cresleigh Riverside at Plumas Ranch Residence 3 has a floorplan that is great for a growing family. With up to 5bedrooms, you will have plenty of room for everyone to have space and privacy, yet the open one-level floor plan has nearly 3,000 square feet, which will bring families together, but allows them to have plenty of space. Your stunning kitchen is the heart of the home, and it is perfect for everything from quick weekday dinners to large dinner parties, where your guests will rave about your incredible new home.
You will be hard pressed to a contemporary floorplan that offers this much space. There are four bedrooms, two and one half bathrooms, and a three car garage. Utilize the den as your own private study or convert into an optional fifth bedroom if needed. The Dining Room and Kitchen are well situated to make entertaining a breeze.
The location of the Owner’s Suite makes it feel like a separate wing from the rest of the home allowing for maximum privacy and retreat.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Home Mini! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-3/https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-3/
Many People Feel Alone in the World in a Very Painful Way!
As machines grow more human, we must be weary that we do not become less so. The businessmen, intellectuals, and revolutionaries of the early industrial period were virtually mesmerized by machinery. They were fascinated by steam engines, clocks, looms, pumps, and pistons, and they constructed endless analogies based on the simple mechanistic technologies of their time. It was no accident that man like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were scientists and inventors as well as political revolutionaries. They grew up in the churning culture wake of Sir Isaac Newton’s great discoveries. Newton had searched the Heavens and concluded the entire Universe was a giant clockwork operating with exact mechanical regularity. La Mettrie, the French physician and philosopher, in 1748 declared man himself to be a machine. Adam Smith later extended the analogy of the machine to economic, arguing that the economy is a system and that system “in many respects resembles machines.” James Madison, in describing the debates that led to the United States Constitution, spoke of the need to “remodel” the “system,” to change the “structure” of political power, and to choose officials through “successive filtrations.” The Constitution itself was filled with “checks and balances” like the inner work of a giant clock. Jefferson spoke of the “machinery of government.” American political thinking continued to reverberate with the sound of flywheels, chains, gears, check and balances. Thus Martin Van Buren invented the “political machine” and eventually New York City has its Tweed machine, Tennessee it Crump machines, New Jersey its Hague machine. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Generations of American politicians, right down to the present, prepared political “blueprints,” “engineered elections,” “steam-rollered” or “railroaded” bills through Congress and the state legislatures. In the nineteenth century in Britain, Lord Cromer conceived of an imperial government that would “ensure the harmonious working of the different parts of the machine.” Nor was this mechanistic mentality a produce of capitalism. Lenin, for example, described the state as “nothing more than a machine used by the capitalist to suppress the workers.” Trotsky spoke of “all the wheels and screws of the bourgeois social mechanism” and went on to describe the function of a revolutionary party in similarly mechanical phrases. Terming it a powerful “apparatus,” he pointed out that “as with any mechanism this is in itself static…the movement of the masses has…to overcome dead inertia…Thus, the living force of steam has to overcome the inertia of the machine before it can set the flywheel in motion.” Drenched in such mechanistic thinking, imbued with an almost blind faith in the power and efficiency of machines, the revolutionary founds of Second Wave societies, whether capitalist or socialist, not surprisingly invented political institutions that shared many of the characteristics of early industrial machines. The structures they hammered and bolted together were based on the elemental notion of representation. And in every country they made use of certain standard parts. These components came out of what might be called, only half facetiously, a universal represento-kit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The components were: Individuals armed with the vote, parties for collecting votes, candidates who, by winning votes, were instantly transformed into “representatives” of the voters, legislatures (parliaments, diets, congress, bundestages, or assemblies) in which, by voting, representatives manufactured laws, executives (presidents, prime ministers, party secretaries) who fed raw materials into the lawmaking machine in the form of policies, and then enforced the resulting laws. Votes were the “atom” of Newtonian mechanism. Votes were aggregated by parties, which served as the “manifold” of the system. They gathered votes from many sources and fed the into the electoral adding machine, which blended them in proportion to party strength or mixture, producing as its output the “will of the people”—the basic fuel that supposedly powered the machinery of government. The parts of this kit were combined and manipulated in different ways in different places. In some places everyone over the age of twenty-one was permitted to vote; elsewhere only Caucasian males were enfranchised; in one country the entire process was merely a façade for control by a dictator; in another the elected officials actually wielded considerable power. Here there were two parties, there a multiplicity of parties, elsewhere only one. Nevertheless, the historical pattern is clear. However the parts might be modified or configured, this same basic kit was used in constructing the formal political machinery of all industrial nations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Even though Communists frequently attacked “bourgeois democracy” and “parliamentarianism” as a mask for privilege, arguing that the mechanisms were usually manipulated by the capitalist class for its own private gain, all socialist industrial nations installed similar representational machines as soon as possible. While holding forth a promise of “direct democracy” in some far-off post-representational era, they relied heavily in the meantime on “socialist representative institutions.” The Hungarian Communist Otto Bihari, in a study of these institutions, writes, “in the course of election the will of the working people makes its influence felt in the governmental organs called to life by voting.” The editor of Pravada, V.G. Afanasyev, in his book The Scientific Management of Society defines “democratic centralism” as including “the sovereign power of the working people…the election of governing bodies and leaders and their accountability to the people.” Just as the factory came to symbolize the entire industrial techno-sphere, representative government (no matter how denatured) became the status symbol of every “advanced” nation. Indeed, even many non-industrial nations—under pressure from colonizers or through blind imitation—rushed to install the same formal mechanisms and used the same universal represento-kit. Nor were these “democracy machines” restricted to the national level. They were installed at state, provincial, and local levels as well, right down to the town or village council. Today in the United States of America alone there are at least some five-hundred thousand elected public officials and 85,000 local governmental units in metropolitan areas, each with its own elections, representative bodies, and election procedures. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Thousands of these representational machines are creaking and grinding away in nonmetropolitan regions, and tens of thousands more around the World. In Swiss cantons and French departments, in the counties of Britain and the provinces of Canada, in the vivodships of Poland and the republics of Russia, in Singapore and Haifa, Osaka, and Oslo, candidates run for office and are magically transmuted into “representatives.” It is safe to say that more than one-hundred thousand of these machines are now manufacturing laws, decrees, regulations, and rules in Second Wave countries alone. Apart from governments as such, virtually all the political parties of industrialism, from extreme right to extreme left, routinely went through the traditional motions of choosing their own leaders by vote. Even contests for precinct-level or local cell leadership typically required some form of election, if only for the ratification of choices made from above. And in many countries the ritual of election became a standard part of the life of all sorts of other organizations, from trade unions and churches to Cub Scout packs. Voting became part of the industrial way of life. In theory, just as each huma being and each vote was a discrete, atomic unit, each of these political units—national, provincial, and local—was also regarded as discrete and atomic. Each had its own carefully defined jurisdiction, its own powers, its own rights and duties. The units were wired together in hierarchical arrangements, from top to bottom, from nation to state or region or local authority. However, as industrialism matured and the economy grew increasingly integrated, decisions taken by each of these political units touched off effects outside its own jurisdiction, thereby causing other political bodies to act in response. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
A decision by the Diet regarded the Japanese textile industry could influence employment in North Carolina and welfare services in Chicago. A congressional vote to put quotas on foreign automobiles could make additional work for local governments in Nagoya or Turin. Thus while at one time politicians could make a decision without upsetting conditions outside their own neatly defined jurisdiction, this became less and less possible. By the mid-twentieth century, tens of thousands of ostensibly sovereign or independent political authorities, stretching around the planet, were connected to one another through the circuits of the economy, through vastly increased travel, migration, and communication, so that they continually activated and excited one another. The thousands of representational mechanisms built out of components of the represento-kit thus increasingly came to form a single invisible supermachine: a global law factory. Now it remains only for us to see how the levers and control wheels of this global system were manipulated—and by whom. Born of the liberating dreams of Second Wave revolutionaries, representative government was stunning advance over earlier power systems, a technological triumph more striking in its own way than the steam engine or the airplane. Representative government made possible orderly succession without hereditary dynasty. It opened feedback channels between top and bottom in society. It provided an arena in which the differences among various groups could be reconciled peacefully. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Tied to majority rule and the idea of one-man/one-vote, it helped the poor and weak to squeeze benefits from the technicians of power who ran the integrational engines of society. For these reasons, the spread of representative governments was, on the whole, a humanizing breakthrough in history. Yet from the very beginning it fell far short of its promise. By no stretch of the imagination was it ever controlled by the people, however defined. Nowhere did it actually change the underlying structure of power in industrial nations—the structure of sub-elites, elites, and super-elites. Indeed, far from weakening control by the managerial elites, the formal machinery of representations became one of the key means of integration by which they maintained themselves in power. Thus elections, quite apart from who won them, performed a powerful cultural function for the elites. To the degree that everyone had a right to vote, elections fostered the illusion of equality. Voting provided a mass ritual of reassurance, conveying to the people the idea that choices were being made systematically, with machine-like regularity, and hence, by implication, rationally. Elections symbolically assured citizens that they were still in command—that they could, in theory at least, dis-elect as well as elect leaders. In both capitalist and socialist countries, these ritual reassurances often proved more important than the actual outcomes of many elections. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Integrational elites programmed the political machinery differently in place, controlling the number of parties or manipulating voting eligibility. Yet the electoral ritual—some might say farce—was employed everywhere. The fact that Russia and Eastern European elections routinely produced magical majorities of 99 to 100 percent suggested that the need for reassurance remained at least as strong in the centrally planned societies as in the “free World.” Elections took the steam out of protests from below. Furthermore, despite the efforts of democratic reformers and radicals, the integrational elites retained virtually permanent control of the systems of representative government. Many theories have been advanced to explain why. Most, however, overlook the mechanical nature of the system. If we look at Second Wave political systems with the eyes of an engineer rather than a political scientist, we suddenly are struck by a key factor that generally goes unobserved. Industrial engineers routinely distinguish between two fundamentally different classes of machine: those that function intermittently, otherwise known as “batch-processing” machines, and those that function uninterruptedly, called “continuous-flow” machines. An example of the first is the commonplace punch press. The worker brings a batch of metal plates and feeds them into the machine, one or a few at a time, to stamp them into desired shapes. When the batch is finished the machine stops until a new batch is brought. An example of the second is the oil refinery which, once started up, never stops running. Twenty-four hours a day, oil flows through its pies and tubes and chambers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
If we look at the global law factory, with its intermittent voting, we find ourselves face to face with a classical batch processor. The public is allowed to choose between candidates at stipulated times, after which the formal “democracy machine” is switched off again. Contrast this with the continuous flow of influence from various organized interests, pressure groups, and power peddlers. Swarms of lobbyists from corporations and from government agencies, departments, and ministries testify before committees, serve on blue-ribbon panels, attend the receptions and banquets, toast each other with cocktails in Washington or vodka in Moscow, carry information and influence back and forth, and thus affect the decision-making process on a round-the-clock basis. The elites, in short, created a powerful continuous-flow machines to operate alongside (and often at cross purposes with) the democratic batch processor. Only when we see these two machines side by side can we begin to understand how state power was really exercised in the global law factory. So long as they played the representational game, people had at best only intermittent opportunities, through voting, to feed back their approval or disapproval of the government and its actions. The technicians of power, by contrast, influenced those actions continuously. Finally, an even more potent tool for social control was engineered into the very principle of representation. For the mere selection of some people to represent others created new members of the elite. When workers, for example, first fought for the right to organize unions, they were harassed, prosecuted for conspiracy, followed by company spies, or beaten up by police and goon squads. They were outsiders, unrepresented or inadequately represented in the system. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Once unions established themselves, they gave rise to a new group of integrators—the labour establishment—whose members rather than simply representing the workers, mediated between them and the elites in business and government. The George Meanys and Georges Seguys of the World, despite their rhetoric, became themselves key members of the integrational elite. The fake union leaders in Russia and Eastern Europe never were anything but technicians of power. In theory, they need to stand for re-election guaranteed that representatives would stay honest and would continue to speak for those they represented. Nowhere, however, did this prevent the absorption of representatives into the architecture of power. Everywhere the gap widened between the representative and the represented. Representative government—what we have been taught to call democracy—was, in short, an industrial technology for assuring inequality. Representative government was pseudorepresentative. What we see, then, glancing backward for a moment summary, is a civilization heavily dependent on fossil fuels, factory production, the nuclear family, the corporation, mass education, and the mass media, all based on a widening cleavage between production and consumption—and all managed by a set of elites whose task it was to integrate the whole. In this system, representative government was the political equivalent of the factory. Indeed, it was a factory for the manufacture of collective integrational decisions. Like most factories, it was managed from above. And like most factories, it is now increasingly obsolete, a victim of the advancing Third Wave. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
If Second Wave political structures are increasingly out of date, unable to cope with today’s complexities—part of the trouble, as we shall see, lies in another crucial Second Wave institution: the nation-state. The World War II ex-GIs, and their brides who moved to the new suburban subdevelopments after the war represented the beginnings of the mass suburbanization of North America. This postwar era was a period of economic boom and intense optimism. After all, the Depression was over, and America’s productivity had won the war. That productivity meant that by the mid-1950s America, with 6 percent of the World’s population, was producing half the World’s goods. The postwar prosperity showed in the 1950 census, which indicated that the United States of America now had become a nation of homeowners, with 55 percent of American householders now owning rather than renting. At the end of World War II, the average American family was renting. New housing starts in 1949 went over a million a year—a pace that would be maintained for forty years. The veterans moving to the new suburbs were not only great in number, they also differed from earlier suburbanites insofar as they represented a wide swath of American society. Not all of the veterans obtaining VA loans were middle-class, and many were not WASPs. Suburbia was not only being enlarged, it was also ethically, economically, and religiously being democratized. The newcomers were Catholics and Jews as well as mainline Protestants; they were Irish, Italian, and Polish as well as English or northwest European; they were high paid educated professionals and factory workers as well as professionals and managers. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
While advertisements still stressed that moving out was moving up, the fact was that suburbs were coming to mirror mainstream America. A few boundaries however, remained—those of race, religion, language, and culture. Racially, postwar suburbs looked Art of Thanksgiving by Norman Rockwell. Virtually all the newcomers were Christian, from Europe, spoke English, and kept their homes, inside and out, picture perfect. People who did not fit these standards were not welcomed. There is no question that the new metropolitan-area housing, and lots of it, was needed by the late 1940s. During the Depression new buildings starts for the nation had dropped to as low as 92,000 in 1933. During the war millions of people had been encouraged to migrate into the cities to take jobs in the expanding war industries. However, except for a limited amount of “temporary” housing, little new housing was built for the war workers. This was due in good part to the lobbying of banking and real estate interests such as the National Association of Homebuilders, who strenuously fought the government building defense housing. Real estate builders and sellers felt such housing would be a glut on the market after the war ended. As a result, by 1946 there were hardly any homes for ale or, for that matter, apartments for rent. Some 6 million families, unable to get their own housing, were doubling up with relatives. Something had to happen. What occurred was a government-subsidized mass exodus to new tract suburbs of standardized single-family homes. With city landlords raising rents and landlords not wanting to rent to couples with young children, it is not surprising that middle-class and even working-class families flooded out from the cities to the greener opportunities of the suburbs. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
During the 1950s and 1960, the suburban population of the United States of America dramatically increased from 35 million to 84 million suburbanites. This was a growth rate of 144 percent. By 1970, 37 percent of Americans lived in the suburbs. The 2020 census figure increased to 52 percent. Currently, half the United States of America’s population lives in the suburbs. However, rural communities are also seeing 16 percent growth, especially as people want to get back to nature and keep their families socially distant and out of crowded cities. Many of the new postwar suburbanites settled in the subdivision tract suburbs being erected on the periphery of urban areas. They moved there because that is where new housing was available. Only in the suburbs could the goal of every family having its own home (and mortgage) be realized. “I have not yet reached perfection, but I press on, hoping to take hold of that for which Christ once took hold me of. My friends, I do not reckon myself to have got hold of it yet. All I can say is this: forgetting what is behind me, and reaching out for that which lies ahead, I press towards the goal to win the prize which is God’s call to the life above, in Christ Jesus,” reports Phil. 3.12-14. For we are always traveling, and must leave behind us what we know and possess, and seek for that which we do not yet know and possess. All of us are on a journey along the road of life. It is a journey across time, as we move through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. However, it is also a journey of discovery, as each new being in the road helps us learn more about ourselves, our World, and perhaps the purpose of our journey. Where are you on the road of life? How much progress have you made in your spiritual journey? #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Developmental psychology has given us some tools to help us think about the journey. For example, Erik Erikson describes eight stages or eras in the human life span, and identifies a specific challenge that must be mastered at each stage. The first four stages cover infancy and childhood, as the infant first forms a special bond with the parents, and then spends the childhood years gradually disengaging from the parents, building a sense of individual competence, and preparing for an independent life in adulthood. The journey begins in earnest during adolescence, as each of us struggles to achieve a sense of identity. Who am I? What is important to me? Where am I headed in life? Yogi Berra’s lighthearted approach to life decisions is well known: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” However, most of us recognized as adolescents that there is more wisdom in Robert Frost’s view—that the “road not taken” steadily diverges from the path we chose, leading inevitably to different life outcomes. In part, the identity crisis of the teen years is produced by new ways of thinking, a set of new intellectual tools that Jean Piaget calls formal operational thought. The adolescent can now think much more clearly about abstract ideas and hypothetical possibilities, including options for future careers and relationships. For most of us, career choices flows out of identity formation—and for Christians, part of our identity is our place in God’s plan. The theologian Walter Brueggemann states, “As we move from the question ‘Who am I?’ to the question ‘Whose am I?’, eventually all questions of identity become questions of vocation…Vocation is finding a purpose for being in the World that is related to the purpose of God.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The related question of intimacy soon arises: With whom do I wan to share my life? The theologian Henri Nouwen echoes Erikson’s emphasis on intimacy, arguing that the search for intimacy is a “desire to experience a sense of inner completeness, a sense of inner unity, because many people feel alone in the World in a very painful way.” It is natural and normal to want a partner in the journey of life. However, even the choice of a mate is built on the successful resolution of earlier challenges. Specially, a mature capacity for intimacy is built on the foundation of a secure sense of identity. Dr. Nouwen claims, “For real intimacy to be possible, both husband and wife need to be fully developed human beings…This means that intimacy is only possible for people who have found identity.” What is the next step for the adult who has achieved identity and intimacy? Dr. Erikson claims that mature adults struggle to express their generativity—a concern for the next generation and for the future of society. Those who focus on their own needs and achievements will eventually stagnate, while those who turn outward to make a difference in other people’s lives will find their own lives renewed with vigour and a new sense of purpose. Individual generativity spreads outward like ripples expanding in circles from a stone dropped in a pond, combining with generative impulses from other adults, to foster societal generativity, which enhances the next generation’s development. Finally, as we approach the end of our journey, Dr. Erikson sees a final challenge: to develop a sense of ego integrity—to be able to look back on our life and see that the various pieces and phases of the journey actually fit together to form a meaningful and worthwhile whole. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Ideally, we will be able to acknowledge our mistakes, yet still feel that we did our best with the gifts that God gave us; we will be able to express our regrets about the wrong turns and blind alleys, yet still see the hand of God guiding our path. The metaphour of life as a journey is helpful image, but it is not the only way we can think about the life span or our own development as individuals. The psychologist Dan McAdams prefers the metaphour of life as a story—a personal narrative in which each chapter represents a phase of our life, complete with heroes and villains, unfolding with high drama. From this perspective, each of us constructs the meaning and purpose of our story—initially in adolescence and young adulthood—and this in turn shapes the events in the next chapter of our life. Which of these metaphours do you prefer? Both metaphours have rich connections with biblical themes, but the journey metaphour perhaps captures more of the flavour of the Christian’s walk with God and the sense of movement through the life span. The journey metaphour also echoes in one of the earliest names for Christianity in Greek (as reported in Acts 9.2; 19.23; 24.14, 22): hodos—“the way.” Each of us is “on the way” along the road of life. As Dr. Luther describes it, “we are always traveling, and must leave behind us what we know and possess, and seek for that which we do not yet know and possess.” Each sage of our journey involves leaving behind the baggage of the previous phase, and equipping ourselves for the next phase by realigning ourselves with the compass setting as it points toward our destination, the end point in the journey. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In the words of St. Paul, “forgetting what is behind me, and reaching out for that which lies ahead, I press towards the goal to win he prize which is God’s call to the life above, in Christ Jesus.” If the vision of Light brought union with God, intimacy with God, it did not and could not enabled one to know God as God knows Himself. He could not penetrate His inmost nature and substance. This, the ultimate beyond the Light, is called “the Divine Darkness” by the Fathers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Seeing the Light in front of one is one state; being merged into it is another, and superior. This is the penultimate experience, the last but one of the mystic’s way. One finds oneself totally lost indeed but lost in the most dazzling Light. The ego seems to have vanished: infinity and universality of being have replaced it. Ecstatic rapture fills one. Is it any wonder that the Greek Orthodox Church mystics of the first few centuries believe this was the ultimate experience of pure Spirit, the final union with God? Yet it may not last, cannot last, must come to an end. It may have held one for one or two minutes only or it may have done so for a longer period. It may never recur again in one’s whole lifetime—this is so in most cases—or it may come several times more. However, it stands as a landmark until the end of one’s years. Where the Greek Orthodox Church regards the Light experience as the highest point reachable by humans, the Indian Philosophic Teaching regards it as the highest point reachable by humans, the Indian Philosophic Teaching regards is as the last stage before the highest. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
For anything which is “seen” implies the existence of a “seer” as separate from it. This is not less so even in the case of the Holy Light. Not seeing but be-ing is the final experience according to his Teaching. “You have to go beyond seeing and find out who is ‘I’ who experiences this light,” said Ramana Maharshi to a disciple. Turn your eyes on yourself. Stop judging the faults of others. Why? You snoop about long and hard in the lives of others, and all you come up with is a thimbleful. In the process you leave much wreckage behind even where you found no fault. Make an inventory of your own faults and negligences, and you will come up with a basketful. Yes, it is a matter of the heart, our heart, and we are always in a terrible judgmental state. However, have you noticed? When others commit faults, we harden our hearts against them, excusing little because they should know better. However, when we commit the very same faults, we soften our hearts, excusing much because of the wonderfulness of ourselves. It is a matter of common sense. Resist the rush to judgment. You know it is wrong, and it would not happen so often if God were truly the sole object of your gaze. However, there is no doubt we suffer damage. Something lurks on the inside. Something trips us up on the outside. Unbeknownst to themselves, many people are self-seekers; that is to say, it is themselves they are chasing, and they do not even know it. They seem happy enough when things are going their own way. However, they are not, they run and sit in a corner and cry big tears. How can his happen? Well, with so many of us thinking and holding so many different opinions, there is bound o be a disagreement now and then; and no one, not even the friendly and the civil, the religious and the devout, are exempt from hurt feelings. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Old habits die hard. That is practical wisdom, and so is this: Nobody trusts farther than one can see. Here is some spiritual wisdom. Rely on Jesus Christ as your Lord and Master. If you do no, but rely rather on your own ability to logick your way through life, then you will not be nominated for the Homo Illuminatus award. God sees Himself as creator and sees us as creatures. To the end He wants us to climb above mere human reason. He wans to light our love with the Divine Torch. Both common sense and practical experience inform us that some sicknesses come solely from physical causes. The proper way to treat them is to use physical methods, that is, to find those causes and remove them, and to apply physical remedies. Those who transgress against the body’s law of being and suffer the penalty in ill health, cannot reasonably blame God’s will when they ought to blame their own abuse, neglect, or ignorance. The penalties of violating hygienic laws may in some cases be escaped by spiritual means, but the penalties of continuing to violate them may not. The cause which engenders a malady must be itself removed, or else the removal of the symptoms which are merely its effects will be followed eventually by their reappearance or by those of a different malady. Wisdom here tells us to obey the laws and to regard disease as a warning of our transgression of them. Those who seek healing only to be restored to sensual courses and selfish designs, may commit further errors and be worse off in the end. In protecting the Earth, we found good pine needles and harsh dried wood along with rocks helpful. When you begin to examine our Earth, you find tiny flowers and small grass blades, Ornamented by the chatter of ground squirrels. You find your soil is soft and rocky; it does not permit artificial soil topping. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Our pine trees are diligent, dedicated and graceful; in either life of death they will always perform their duty of pinetreeness, equipped with sap and bark. We find our World of wilderness so refreshing. Along with Summer’s drum, we produce occasional thundershowers, wet and dry messages; we cannot miss the point, since this Earth is so bending and open to us, along with the rocks, we are not shy, we are so proud—we can make a wound in a pine tree and it bleeds sap, and courts us, in spite of the setting-sun shadow; they bend and serve so graciously, whether dead or alive. We love our pines and rocks; they are not covered with the superstitious setting-sun chemical manure of this and that. We are so proud of the sky that we produce on our horizon. Our stars twinkle and wink as if they know us; we have no problem of recognition. Our rocks and pine trees speak for us. O Lord our God, be gracious unto Thy people of America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy Sanctuary and receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worship of Thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. O may our eyes witness Thy return to America. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who restores Thy divine presence unto America. We thankfully acknowledge Thee, O Lord our God, our fathers’ God to all eternity. Our Rock art Thou, our Shield that saves through every generation. We give Thee thanks and we declare Thy praise for all Thy tender care. Our lives we trust into Thy loving hand. Our souls are ever in Thy charge; Thy wonders and Thy miracles are daily with us, evening, morn, and noon. O Thou who art all-good, whose mercies never fail us, Compassionate One, whose lovingkindness never cease, we ever hope in Thee. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
“Open concept” means the freedom to design an interior according to your needs, taste, and style. We love showcasing unfurnished homes, like these pictures of Mills Station Residence 1, so that you can create a mental picture of how it will look when it’s YOURS. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-1/
Where there is No Love, What Use is Beauty?
The most powerful thing we pass along to our children, may not reside in the jeans, but in the soul. Nothing is more confusing to an international business person than the spectacle of an American presidential campaign: the hot-dog gulping, backslapping, and baby kissing, the coy refusal to cast hat in ring, the primaries, the conventions, followed by the manic frenzy of fund raising, whistle-stopping, speechmaking, television commercials—all in the name of democracy. By contrast, Americans find it hard to make sense of the way the French choose their leaders. Still less do they understand the tame British elections, the Dutch free-for-all with two dozen parties, the Australian preferential voting system, or the Japanese wheeling and dealing among factions. All these political systems seem frightfully different from one another. Even more incomprehensible are the one-party elections or pseudo-elections that take place in Russia and Eastern Europe. When it comes to politics, no two industrial nations look the same. Yet once we tear away our provincial blinders, we suddenly discover that a set of powerful parallels lies beneath the surface differences. In fact, it is almost as if the political systems of all Second Wave nations were built from the same hidden blueprint. When Second Wave revolutionaries managed to topple First Wave elites in Franc, in the United States, in Russian, Japan and other nations, they were faces with the need to write constitutions, set up new governments, and deign almost from scratch new political institutions. In the excitement of creation, they debated new ideas, new structures. Everywhere they fought over the nature of representation. Who should represent whom? Should representatives be instructed how to vote by the people—or use their own judgement? Should terms of office be long or short? What role should parties play? #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
In each country a new political architecture emerged from these conflicts and debates. A close look at these structures reveals that they are built on a combination of Old First Wave assumptions and newer ideas swept in by the industrial age. After millennia of agriculture, it was hard for the founders of Second Wave political systems to imagine an economy based on labour, capital, energy, and raw materials, rather tan land. Land had always been at the very center of life itself. No surprisingly, therefore, geography was deeply embedded in our various voting systems. Senator and congress members in America—and their counterparts in Britain and many other industrial nations—are still elected not as representatives of some social class or occupational, ethnic, desirability, or lifestyle grouping, but as representatives of the inhabitants of a particular piece of land: a geographical district. First Wave people were typically immobile, and it was therefore natural for the architects of industrial-era political systems to assume that people would remain in one locality all their lives. Hence the prevalence, even today of residency requirement in voting regulations. The pace of First Wave life was slow. Communications were so primitive that it might take a week for a message from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to reach New York. A speech by George Washington took weeks or months to filter through to the hinterland. As late as 1865 it still took twelve days for London to Learn that President Lincoln had been assassinated. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
On the unspoken assumption that things moved slowly, representative bodies like Congress or the British Parliament were regarded as “deliberative”—having the time and taking the time to think through their problems. Most First Wave people were illiterate and unenlightened. Thus, if drawn from the educated classes, it was widely assumed that the representatives would inevitably make more intelligent decisions than the mass of voters. However, even as they built these First Wave assumptions into our political institutions, the revolutionaries of the Second Wave also cast their eyes on the future. Thus the architecture they constructed reflected some of the latest technological notions of their time. Other fluctuations in American society were reflected in suburban living. By the 1930 housing styles were changing and bungalows were out of fashion as the preferred modest home choice. The term “bungalow” had become a pejorative usage among some housing writers in the same way the term “Levittown” did in the 1960s and 1970s. When he dismissed the plebeian Warren Harding as possessing only “a bungalow mind,” President Woodrow Wilson, who was a cultural patrician, was one of the first to use the term in this way. During the 1930s bungalow styles were replaced by modest “Williamsburg Colonials,” which owed their popularity to the publicity John Davison Rockefeller Sr.’s restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. Following World War II, the charming colonials were largely replaced as the most popular unassuming homes design by Cape Codes. These, in turn, gave way to low-profile ranch homes and, in the 1960s, their successor, the split-levels. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
Postwar one-story ranch houses were built more for economy and utility than style. Since economy of construction was a major factor and space was at a premium, rooms often had multiple functions, such as a living room with a dining room or a combined kitchen and dining area. If the house had a study, it almost certainly doubled as a guest bedroom. Ranch-style homes, with their open floor plans and “family friendly rooms,” were even more informal than the bungalows. The simple one-story design with low-pitched eaves and the picture window suggested a casual and comfortable lifestyle. To make the house seem larger, a sliding glass door commonly opened onto a patio so that the outside seemed an extension of the house. Millions of such ranch-styles homes and their variations were built in the postwar years, as even a cursory viewing of suburban housing demonstrates. Currently, ranch styles are less popular on the east coast, where colonial styles are back in favour. However, modified ranch California styles remain popular on the west coast. Regardless of the preferred housing style, across the country a relaxed family-oriented lifestyle with an emphasis on outdoor activities has become the norm. Today in contemporary homes the emphasis on multiple-use space has resulted in the family room and living room often being replaced by a “great room,” while the dining room has gone the way of the parlour. In recent years master bedrooms and bathrooms have grown far larger, while sun rooms, Florida rooms, California rooms, and decks have become more common. However, in terms of sheer size, in many homes, the largest room is invariably the garage. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
Thus, by the onset of World War II, the patterns for mass suburbanization had been set. Suburbs had already lost their exclusivity as being communities containing homes of only the well-to-do. Suburbs also housed those who were comfortably middle-class. However, in the prewar era, when most Americans were still renters rather than homeowners, and when a typical mortgage was for only half the value of the house and could only be obtained for a period of five years, living in the suburbs was still beyond the hope of the “average” American. No until the coming of the liberal mortgage terms of postwar Veterans’ Administration loads would mass suburbanization of average Americans become a practical reality. Among the passions that agitate the heart of humans, there is an ardent, impetuous one that renders intimate relationships necessary to the other; a terrible passion which braves all dangers, overcomes all obstacles, and which, in its fury, seems fitted to destroy the human race it is destined to preserve. What would become of humans, victimized by this unrestrained and brutal rage, without modesty and self-control, fighting everyday over the object of their passion at the price of their blood? There must first be agreement that the more violent the passions are, the more necessary the laws are to contain them. However, over an above the fact that the disorders and the crimes these passions cause daily in our midst show quite well the insufficiency of the laws in this regard, it would still be good to examine whether these disorders did not come into being with the laws themselves; for then, even if they were capable of repressing them, the least one should expect of them would be that they call a halt to an evil that would not exist without them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
Let us begin by distinguishing between the moral and the physical aspects of the sentiment of love. The physical aspect is that general desire which clines one gender to unite with another. The moral aspect is what determines this desire and fixes it exclusively on one single object, or which at least gives it a greater degree of energy for this preferred object. Now it is easy to se that the moral aspect of love is an artificial sentiment born of social custom, and extolled by women with so much skill and care in order to establish their hegemony and make dominant the general that ought to obey. Since this feeling is founded on certain notions of merit or beauty that a savage is not in a position to have, and on comparisons one is incapable of making, it must be almost non-existent for one. For since one’s mind could not form abstract ideas of regularity and proportion, one’s heart is not susceptible to sentiments of admiration and love, which, even without its being observed come into being from the application of these ideas. One pays exclusive attention to the temperament one has received from nature, and not the taste [aversion] one has been unable to acquire; any women suits one’s purpose. Limited merely to the physical aspect of love, and fortunate enough to be unaware of those preferences which stir up the feeling and increase the difficulties in satisfying it, humans must feel the ardours of the temperament less frequently and less vividly, and consequently have fewer and less cruel conflicts among themselves. Imagination, which wreaks so much havoc among us, does not speak to savage hearts; each human peacefully awaits the impetus of nature, gives oneself over to it without choice, and with more pleasures than frenzy; and once the need is satisfied, all desire is snuffed out. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
Hence it is incontestable that love itself, like all other passions, had acquired only in society that impetuous ardour which so often makes it lethal to humans. And it is all the more ridiculous to represent savages as continually slaughtering each other in order to satisfy their brutality, since this opinion is directly contrary to experience; and since the Caribs, of all existing peoples, are the people that until now has wandered least from the state of nature, they are the people least subject to jealousy, even though they live in a hot climate which always seems to occasion greater activity in these passions. As to any inferences that could be drawn, in the case of several species of animals, from he clashes between males that bloody our poultry yards throughout the year, ad which makes our forests resound in the spring with their cries as they quarrel over a female, it is necessary to begin by excluding all species in which nature has manifestly establish, in the relative power of the genders, relations other than those that exist among us. Hence cockfights do not form the basis for an inference regarding he human species. In species where the proportion is more closely observed, these fights can have for their cause only the scarcity of females in relation to the number of males, or the exclusive intervals during which the female continually rejects the advances of the male, which adds up to the cause just cited. For if each female receives the male for only two months a year, in this respect it is as if the number of females were reduced by five-sixths. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
Now neither of these two cases is applicable to the human species where the number of females generally surpasses the number of males, and where human females, unlike those of other species, have never been observed to have period of heat and exclusion, even among savages. Moreover, among several of these animal species, where the entire species goes into heat simultaneously, there comes a terrible moment that of common ardour, tumult, disorder and combat: a moment that does not happen in the human species where love is never periodic. Therefore one cannot conclude from these combats of certain animals for the possession of female that the same thing would happen to a man in the state of nature. And even if one could draw that conclusion, given that these conflicts do not destroy the other species, one should conclude that they would not be any more lethal for ours. And it is quite apparent that they would wreak less havoc in the state of nature than in society, especially in countries where mores still count for something and where the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of husbands every day give rise to duels, murders and still worse things; where they duty of eternal fidelity serves merely to create adulterers; and where even the laws of continence and honour necessarily spread debauchery and multiply the number of abortions. Let us conclude that, wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without dwelling, with war, without relationships, with no need for one’s fellow humans, and correspondingly with no desire to do them hard, perhaps ever even recognizes any of them individually, savage humans, subject to few passions and self-sufficient, had only the sentiments and enlightenment appropriate to the state; one felt only one’s true needs, took notice of only what one believed one had an interest in seeing; and that one’s intelligence made no more progress than one’s vanity. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
If by chance one made some discovery, one was all the less able to communicate it to others because one did not even know one’s own children. Art perished with its inventor. There was neither education nor progress; generations were multiplied to no purpose. Since each one always began from the same point, centuries went by with all the crudeness of the first ages; the species was already old, and humans remained ever a child. If I have gone on at such length about the supposition of hat primitive condition, it is because, having ancient errors and inveterate prejudices to the true state of nature, how far even natural inequality is from having as much reality and influence in that state as our writer claim. In fact, it is easy to see that, among the differences that distinguish humans, several of the pass for natural ones which are exclusively the work of habit and of the various sorts of life that humans adopt in society. Thus a robust or delicate temperament, and the strength of weakness that depend on it, frequently derive more from the harsh or effeminate way in which one has been raised than from the primitive constitution of bodies. The same holds for mental powers; and not only does education make a difference between cultivated minds and those that are not, it also augments the differences among he former in proportion to their culture; for were a giant and a dwarf walking on the same road, each step they both would give a fresh advantage to the gain. Now if one compares the prodigious diversity of educations and lifestyles in the different orders of the civil state with the simplicity and uniformity of animal and savage life, where all nourish themselves from the same foods live in the same manner, and do exactly the same things, it will be understood how much less the difference between one human and another must be in the state of nature than in that of society, and how much natural inequality must increase in the human species through inequality occasioned by social institutions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
However, even if nature were to affect, in the affect, in the distribution of her gifts, as many preferences as is claimed, what advantage would the most favoured humans derive from them, to the detriment of others, in a state of things that allowed practically no sort of relationships among them? Where there is no love, what use is beauty? What use is wit for people who do not speak, and ruse to those who have no dealing with others? I always hear it repeated that the stronger will oppress the weaker. However, let me have an explanation of the meaning “oppression.” Some will dominate with violence; others will groan, enslaved to all their caprices. That is precisely what I observe among us; but I do not see how this could be said of savage humans, to whom it would be difficult even to explain what servitude and domination are. A human could well lay hold of the fruit of another has of savage humans, to whom it would be difficult even to explain what servitude and domination are. A human could well lay hold of the fruit another has gathered, the game one has killed, the cave that served as one’s shelter. However, how will he ever succeed in making oneself be obeyed? And what can be the chains of dependence among humans who possess nothing? If someone chases me from one tree, I am free to go to another; if someone torments me in once place, who will prevent me from going elsewhere? Is there a human with strength sufficiently superior to mine and who is, moreover, sufficiently depraved, sufficiently lazy and sufficiently ferocious to force me to provide for one’s subsistence while one remains idle? One must resolve not to take one’s eyes off me for a single instant, to keep me carefully tied down while one sleeps, for fear that I may escape or that I would kill one. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
In other words, one is obliged to expose oneself voluntarily to a much greater hardship than the one he or she wants to avoid and gives me. After all that, were one’s vigilance to relax for an instant, were an unforeseen noise to make one turn one’s head, I take twenty steps into the forest; my chains are broken, and one never see me again for the rest of one’s life’ Without needlessly prolonging these details, anyone should see that, since the bonds of servitude are formed merely from the mutual dependence of human and the reciprocal needs that unite them, it is impossible to enslave a human without having first put one in the position of being incapable of doing without another. This being a situation that did not exist in the state of nature, it leaves each person free of he yoke, and renders pointless the law of the strongest. After having proved that inequality is hardly observable in the state of nature, and that is influence there is almost nonexistent, it remains for me to show is origin and progress in the successive developments of the human mind. After having shown that perfectibility, social virtues, and the other faculties that natural humans had received in a state of potentiality could never develop by themselves, that to achieve this development they required the chance coming together of several unconnected causes that might never have come into being and without which one would have remained eternally in one’s primitive constitution, it remains for me to consider and to bring together the various chance happenings that were able to perfect human reason while deteriorating the species, make a being evil while rendering it habituated to the ways of society, and, from so distant a beginning, finally bring humans and the World to the point where we see them now. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
I admit that, since the events I have to describe could have taken place in several ways, I cannot make a determination among them except on the basis of conjecture. However, over and above the fact that these conjectures become reasons when they are the most probable ones that a person can draw from the nature of things and the sole means that a person can have discovering the truth, the consequences I wish to deduce from mine will not thereby be conjectural, since, on the basis of the principles I have just established, no other system is conceivable that would not furnish me with the same results, and from which I could not draw the same conclusions. This will excuse me from expanding my reflections on the way in which the lapse of time compensates for the slight probability of events; concerning the surprising power that quite negligible causes may have when they ac without interruption; concerning the impossibility, on the one hand, of a person’s destroying certain hypotheses, even though, on the other hand, of a person’s destroying certain hypotheses, even though, on the other hand, one is not in a position to accord them the level of factual certitude; concerning a situation in which two facts given as real are to be connected by a series of intermediate facts that are unknown or regarded as such, it belongs to history, when it exists, to provide the facts that connect them; it belongs to philosophy, when history is unavailable, to determine similar facts that can connect them; finally, concerning how, with respect to events, similarity reduces the facts to a much smaller number of a different class than one might imagine. It is enough for me to offer these objects to the consideration of my judges; it is enough for me to have seen to it that ordinary readers would have no need to consider them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
We have been concerned with thought and imagination, but not with language. I had to picture Euston Station, but I did no need to mention it; the child thought that poison was Horrid Red Things, but she could talk about poison without saying so. However, very often when we are talking about something which is not perceptible by the five senses we use words which, in one of their meanings, refer to things or actions that are. When a human says that one grasps an argument one is using a verb (grasp) which literally means to take something in the hands, but one is certainly not thinking that one’s mind has hands or that an argument can be seized like a Winchester rifle. To avoid the word grasp one may change the form of expression and say, “I see your point,” but one does not mean that a pointe object has appeared in one’s visual field. One may have a third shot and say, “I follow you,” but one does not mean that one is walking behind you along a road. Everyone is familiar with this linguistic phenomenon and the grammarians call it a metaphour. However, it is a serious mistake to think that metaphour is an optional thing which poets and orators may put into their work as a decoration and plain speakers can do without. The truth is that if we are going to talk at all about things which are not perceived by the senses, we are forced to use language metaphorically. Books on psychology or economics or politics are as continuously metaphorical as books of poetry or devotion. There is no other way of talking, as every philologist is aware. Those who wish can satisfy themselves on the point by reading the books I have already mentioned in the past and the other books to which those will lead them on. It is a study for a lifetime and I must here content myself with the mere statement; all speech about supersensible is, and must be, metaphorical in the highest degree. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
We have now three guiding principles before us. First, that thought is distinct from the imagination which it accompanies it. Second, that thought may be in the main sound even when the false images that accompany it are mistaken by the thinker for true ones. Third, that anyone who talks about things that cannot be seen, or touched, or heard, or the like, must inevitably talk as if they could be seen or touched or heard (exempli gratia must talk of “complexes” and “repressions” as if desires could really be tied up in bundles or shoved back; of “growth” and “development” as if institutions could really grow like trees or unfold like flowers; of energy being “released” as if it were an animal let out of a cage). Let us now apply this to the “savage” or “primitive” articles of the Christian creed. And let use admit at once that many Christians (though by no means all) when they make these assertions do have in mind just those crude mental pictures which so horrify the sceptic. When they say that Christ “came down from Heaven” they do have a vague image of something shooing or floating downwards out of the sky. When they say that Christ is the “Son” of “the Father” they may have a picture of two human forms, the one looking rather more mature than the other. However, we now know that the mere presence of these mental pictures does not, of itself, tell us anything about the reasonableness or absurdity of the thoughts they accompany. If absurd images meant absurd thought, then we should all be thinking nonsense all the time. And the Christians themselves make it clear that the images are not to be identified with the thing believed. They may picture the Father as a human form, but they also maintain that He has no body. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
They may picture Him older than the Son, but they also maintain the one did not exist before the other, both having existed from all eternity. I am speaking, of course, about Christian adults. Christianity is not to be judged from the fancies of children any more than medicine from the ideas of the little girl who believed in horrid red things. Although disentangling the effects of genes and experience is no easy matter, it more and more seems that the genetic influence is considerable. The range of genetically influences traits is impressive—from physical traits (such as handedness and obesity-proneness), to intelligence, to aggressiveness, to our vulnerability to depression and schizophrenia. In one study of 850 twin pairs, John Loehlin and Robert Nichols found that, compared with fraternal twins whose parents treated them very similarly were not more alike than those who were treated less similarly. Even twins who are reared apart exhibit amazing similarities of tastes, personalities, and abilities. “In some domains it looks as though our identical twins reared apart are…just as similar as identical twins reared together,” reports the investigator Thomas Bouchard. We must be careful not to oversimply genetic effects. Our genes issue orders for our bodies, but our humanity also embodies nurturance provided or withheld, education given effectively or poorly, love sustained or withdrawn. Moreover, as every student of psychology knows, our personality reflects the interactions of our genes, past experience, and present situation. If a slow-witted, frail, uncoordinated boy experiences failure in the classroom, on the athletic field, and in his relations with intimacy, shall we say his low self-image is due to his genes or his environment? It is due to both, because his environment reacts to his genetically influenced traits. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Studies of adoptive families further restrain our belief in the unilateral power of parenting. The astonishing result of these studies is that the personalities of people who grew up together do not much resemble one another, whether they are biologically related or not. To be sure adoption has some wonderful consequences: it transmits values and attitudes, and it provides a nurturing environment for children who might otherwise be hindered by neglect or abuse. Nevertheless, some dimensions of personality, such as temperamental reactivity, seem not to be greatly affected by normal variations in parenting. The developmental psychologist Sandra Scarr puts it more shockingly: “Our studies suggest that there is virtually no family environment effect on personality. These data say that in any reasonable environment, people will become what they will become.” Although the evidence of parental power tempers Dr. Scarr’s sweeping generalization, there are additional influences over which parents have little voluntary control. In The Nurture Assumption, the psychologist Judith Rich Harris argues that for many aspects of development, direct parental influence is minimal. And it is not just genes, she argues; peer influences are also quite strong. Consider: Preschoolers who, despite parents’ urgings, disdain a certain food will often eat the food if they are put at a table with a group of children who like it. Children exposed to one language accent at home and another in the neighbourhood will invariably end up speaking like their peers, not their parents. To predict whether a teen smokes, ask first not whether a parent smokes but whether the teen has friends who model smoking, who suggest its pleasure, and who offer cigarettes or other tobacco products. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
If genes and peer influences shape children more than direct parent influence, what does this imply? First, it tells us to agonize less about our in-home parenting style and more about the cultural vapours seeping into our children’s lives. To nurture our children well, we must care about the social environment that nurtures all children, and care about all who influence that social environment. As teachers, youth workers, and media producers and artist we must appreciate the significance of our influence upon youth culture. As the psychologist Mary Pipher has said, “Children are much more socialized by the culture than even the most conscious parents realizes.” Second, it cautions us to be less judgmental. Parents typically feel pride in their children’s successes, and guilt or shame over their failures. They beam when folks offer congratulations for the child who wins an award. They wonder where they went wrong with the child who repeatedly is called into the principal’s office Psychiatry and Freudian psychology have at times been the source of such ideas, by blaming problems from asthma to schizophrenia on “bad mothering.” Society reinforces such parent blaming: believing that parents shape their children’s virtues and blame them for their children’s vices. In many communities, parents can now be fined for their child’s misbehaviour (as if parents of troubled children were not already suffering enough). Should we really castigate the parents of Kip Kinkel (and of an accomplished order sister) following his 1998 murder of them and two fellow students in the cafeteria of his Springfield, Oregon, high school? “Good parents usually have god kids. Bad parents usually have bad kids,” explained one Detroit Free Press letter writer. “Do you really think those killer kids came from healthy homes? When parents fail, shame should follow them.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
The well-being of American’s youth rapidly declined after 1960. By the early 1990s, when youth problems had peaked (before beginning to subside), rates of teen suicide, teen violence, and unmarried teen pregnancy all multiple several times over. Human genetics do not explain this swift social recession. What had changed was the social ecology. Family breakdown, parental abandonment, abuse, and neglect were big-bang factors. These macroparenting factors, along with changes in peer and media influences, mattered. The social-science verdicts bears repeating, because it is so important and so little known: normal variations in well-meaning parenting matters less than most people suppose. The social ecology matters more than many suppose. It may be discomforting to realize that having and raising children is a risky business; in procreation a man and a woman shuffle their gene decks and deal a life-forming hand to their children-to-be, who thereafter are subjected to countless influences beyond their parents’ control. However, perhaps we may also take comfort in knowing that we are therefore responsible not for our children’s behaviour, but for having given them our best. “Training up a child in the way one should go,” and then love the person that results. When thinking about particular families, we also do well to remember that the proverbial admonition is complemented by Jesus’ admonition “Judge not.” Remembering that lives are formed by influences under parents’ control and by influences beyond parents’ control, let us be slow to credit parents for their children’s achievements and slower still to blame them for their children’s problems. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
Likewise, let us restrain our vanity when our children succeed and our feelings of guilt when they fail. As parents, let us train up our children in the way they should go, and let us be slow to judge one another. The need to take care of the nature of our thoughts was illustrated by the life-story of Eugene O’Neill. The gloomy themes of his plays, the guant tragedy and overhanging doom with which he deliberately permeated them, brough him down in his later years with an incurable disease. His palsied hand could not write, and dictated material always dissatisfied him. Those who deny the line of relevant connection between his grim thinking and his sickness ignore that fact that he was an ultrasensitive man—so sensitive that a large part of his life was occupied with the search for a solitary place where no people could interrupt him and where he could live entirely with himself. Why is it that in the stage of heavy sleeping trance a hypnotic subject’s nervous system fails to make the usual reactions to a burning match applied to the hand or a pointed pin stuck into the flesh? Why does the usual sensitivity to pain vanish so largely, often completely? If consciousness really lay in the nerves themselves it could never really be divorces from them. It is because consciousness does not arise out of the material body, but out of deeper principle of the immaterial, that it can function or fail to function as the bodily though-series. Hence when the consciousness is turned away from the body, when it is induced to cease holding the nerve system in its embrace, it will naturally cease holding the pleasurable or painful changes within that system too. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
Fear delays digestion; anger hurt the spleen; excessive lust leads to inflammations, infections, or impotence; jealousy creates excessive bile; a shock caused by bad news may turn hair white. The person who holds such negative feelings as chronic gloom and constant fault-finding, who worries self and nags others, is walking the direct path to either a disordered liver or high blood pressure. Vicious mental and speech habits injure the person’s own body and demoralize other people’s feeling. How much is a person’s bitter, rancorous mind, as expressed in one’s bitter, epitheical speeches, responsible for the malady of dyspepsia which afflicts one for so many years? Anger brings liver’s function to a standstill; this throws its bile back into the system, and bilious indigestion follows. The tears which well up in the eyes are physical, yet the self-pity which causes them in plainly mental. The connection between breathing and thinking has been noted by the yoga of physical control. The connection between breathing and feeling also exists. Apoplexy—a fit of chocking, the inability to breathe caches and almost ceases when bad news is suddenly heard. There is a direct line between emotional shocks, fears, or worries, and stomach ulcers. Saliva may become poisonous in anger. Gastric juice may stop flowing in shock of bad news. A Berlin opera singer went to the United States of America on a visit. While there she received the unexpected news of her husband’s death. The shock severely affected her feelings. That same week she became afflicted with an aliment and suffered greatly from it for several years until she died. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
A last medical science is coming to recognize the power of feeling to make disease in the flesh, the contribution of mind and mood to the body’s sickness. You have some other implements, rarely used. Patience and Endurance Paul would include in that number, as he did in Colossians (1.11). It may take a little while, but with these and the help of God, you will triumph amid the tulips. Callousness and Petulance, broken tools both. What is the common wisdom? Impatience cannot be hurried by impatience! In times of temptation, and if you are the tempted, accept all the advice you can get. If someone else is the tempted, do not deal harshly with one. Give one all the consolation one can handle. Like a ship unmoored, the soul is set a drift by temptation. Like a ship without a tiller, the soul is tossed about the waves. Like a mariner without a chart, the soul is tempted every which way. Like a seaman who has a chart but cannot make head or tail out of it, the soul is at the mercy of the sea. Fire proves iron—that is the kind of point Jesus son of Sirach liked to make (31.26)—and temptation fires the just human. Often we do not know what we can do until temptation opens us up to what we are. Stand sentinel in the intellect we must before temptation strikes. Engage the Enemy at the earliest possible moment. In the chapel. In the dining hall. At the gate. On the road. In the field. To his very point a certain ancient Roman writer, Ovid, the amatory poet, had this wheeze: “If you want stop, stop at the start. Have the antidote ready before you drink the poison. Otherwise you will be dead before the saving draft can reach the lips” (Remedies for Love 2.91-92). #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
That is how temptation works. A simple thought enters the mind. A vivid imagination goes to work. After that it is a nudge, a wink, and a nod. Right from the start you should resist strongly. When you do not, the Enemy bearing evils tiptoes in unawares and wins the day. And so it is everyday. The slower your response, the quicker the Devil’s step. The temptations you have to undergo are graver at the beginning of your spiritual life than at then end. However you look at it, they are all mud. For one person it is a wallow all one’s life. For another, it is just an occasional splatter. Whatever the grand total, we notice one thing. Our temptations have been customized. No two are alike. That explains why each one fits perfectly. The Divine Designer, in association with Weights & Measures Supernatural, has seen to that. That explain also why we can shed each temptation that is laid upon us. The Designer fully expects us to. Another garment awaits the Elect. Therefore we should not despair when we are tempted. We should pray more fervently to God. After all, He thinks us worthy of help in every tribulation. According to Paul in First Corinthians, who should know, “God will give us resources enough” (10.13) so that we can overcome. Therefore, let us humble our souls, huddle ourselves, under the hand of God in every trial and tribulation, as the story of Judith encourages us to do (8.17). Why? “He will help the humble in spirit,” the Evangelist Luke has promised (1.51). And at every temptation that is overcome, He will sound the trumpet. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
In trial and tribulations the perfection of Humankind is hammered out. I give you one example—Virtue. The better it is hidden, the more light it gives off, or so the common spiritual wisdom goes. However, if the virtuous cannot recognize a temptation when it kisses them on the cheek, what good is all the devotion and fervour? For these poor souls, though, there is still hope. If they patiently sustain themselves in time of adversity, then they will continue to inch along the spiritual path. Some seem to be protected from the great temptations of life and yet are overwhelmed by the nit-picking of daily routine. However, there is another way of looking at it. They are humbled, hobbled, by their poor, shabby response to the small temptations. Hence, they are no so overconfident about their ability to handle the large ones. How wonderful, O Lord, are the works of your hands! The Heavens declare Your glory, the arch of sky displays Your handiwork. In Your love You have given us the power to behold the beauty of Your World robed in all its splendour. The sun and the stars, and the valleys and hills, the rivers and lakes all disclose Your presence. The roaring breakers of the sea tell of Your awesome might; the beats of the field and the birds of the air bespeak Your wondrous will. In Your goodness You have made us able to hear the music of the World. The voices of loved ones reveal to us that You are in our midst. A divine voice sings through all creation. Our God and God of our fathers, merciful King, have compassion upon us; O Thou good and beneficent One, please inspire us with the desire to seek Thee. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
In Thine abundant compassion return unto us for the sake of our forefathers who did Thy will; please rebuild Thy Temple as of old, and establish Thy Sanctuary upon its ancient site. Please grant that we may see it rebuilt and make us rejoice in its re-establishment. Please restore America to its service of pronouncing the Priestly Blessing, Americans to their song and psalmody, and America to her habitations. There we will make our pilgrimages to Church, and at the Festivals, as it is writing in Thy Scriptures: Every day of the year shall all human appear in prayer before the Lord, your God, in the place where He shall choose; everyone shall appear before the Lord with some offering, each according to one’s means, according to the bounty with which the Lord hath blessed one. O Lord our God, please bestow upon us the blessing of Thy Festivals for life and peace, for joy and gladness, even as Thou hast graciously promised to bless. [Our God and God of our fathers, accept our rest.] Please sanctify us through Thy commandments, and please grant our portion in Thy Scripture; please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and please make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord God, please let us inherit with joy and gladness Thy holy [Sabbath and] festivals and may America, who sanctifies Thy name, rejoice in Thee. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest [the Sabbath and] America and the Festivals. God’s reality is the overwhelming fact of existence. This vision is a gift, a grace, so it may come suddenly, unexpectedly, but more often it comes to someone who has prepared oneself for it by purification and contemplation. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
Cresleigh Homes
Have you ever tried a wall mural in your home? We love how owning your own home allows you to express your unique style and creativity – whether it’s a mountain mural ⛰ or a unique chandelier. Both are looking fab in our Brighton Station Res 3 model! https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-3/
Learn more about this stunning new residence from Cresleigh Homes!
O Wicked Wit and Gifts that Have the Power So to Seduce!
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange story. Almost all humans are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a lister’s internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a devil, would have no fear mentioning it; but the same traveller having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before one would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things, as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequences is, that the general stock of experiences in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect. The Devil had been raised among us, and his rage was vehement and terrible; and, when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows. It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain Murder was committed in Boston in 1688, which attracted great attention. We hear more than enough of Murders as they rise in succession to their atrocious eminence, and if I could, I would bury the memory this this atrocious eminence, as hi body was buried, in the Witch House’s basement. When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicious fell—on the man who was afterwards brought to trial. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
As no reference was at the time made to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any description of him at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered. Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it—no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive—in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief observed the absence of the dead body from the bed. As the circumstances of the Murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger and stronger posses of the public mind, I kept them away from mine, by knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the universal excitement. John Hathorne asked most of the questions and established the judicial attitude that was to prevail throughout most of the examinations and the trials. Many people suspected that the devil killed this man and he had been summoned by Sarah Good because she had also been accused of bewitching a few girls in the town. Mr. Hathorne asked the children to look at Sarah God and say whether she was one who afflicted them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
They accused her to her face, “upon which they were all dreadfully tortured and tormented for a short space of time.” When they recovered from their fits, they charged her with causing them, saying that her specter had come and tormented them although her body remained “at a considerable distance from them.” This was spectral evidence, that is, evidence concerning a specter or apparition of the accused, rather than her bodily person. It was eventually to become the central legal issue of the trials, but at the moment we need only see why it seemed initially so convincing to the examining magistrates. Here were girls afflicted with violent physical symptoms which had no known physical cause, but which a physician had attributed to witchcraft. There was a malicious old woman accused of causing them. When the sufferers accused her they were immediately thrown into convulsions. What could be more plausible than that the convulsions were inflicted as revenge for the accusation? Yet such behaviour was still unfamiliar enough in Salem so that one of the recorders noted that “none here see the [specters of the] witches but the afflicted and themselves.” However, the change was so startling that I fully believed the girls derived their impression in some occult manner. For instance, we knew there was something occult going on because the throat of the murdered man had been cut straight across. In the opening speech for the defense, it was suggested that the deceased might have cut his own throat in the dreadful condition referred to. Yet, it would have been impossible for such a wound to be self-inflicted by either hand. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Certainly, Mr. Hathorne was convinced; when the children had recovered and repeated their accusation he turned to the accused woman. “Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have done? Why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you this torment these people children?” Certainly many of her neighbours though her malicious, since they attributed to her a number of inexplicable events, including the death of a cow which perished in a “sudden, terrible and strange unusual manner.” Such testimony was common in witchcraft cases, and it has caused much unseemly hilarity among the modern historians. It is likely, they have asked, that His Satanic Majesty the Devil or any of his minions would stop to concern themselves with the fate of a New England cow? The answer is that nothing is more likely. What else would a fertility god concern himself with but the health or sickness of crops, of animals, and of humans? From the standpoint of a society that still remembered who the Devil was, no testimony could be more relevant. As a matter of fact, the village witches who still exist in rural England are often expert in folk medicines, human and animal, as well as charms, and until recently many of them were midwives. Sarah Osburn also denied that she had hurt anyone, but the girls feel again into fits. Mr. Hathorne asked her how this happened. Perhaps, she said, the Devil went about in her likeness doing harm, but she knew nothing about it. Sarah Osburn was the first at Salem to assert the principle that the Devil can impersonate an innocent person. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Whether the devil could or not was a matter of debate in the seventeenth century, but most Protestant authorities agreed with Goodwife Obsurn that, as Hamlet put it, “The Devil hath power/ to assume a pleasing shape.” However, the principle was not discussed at this hearing, since Sarah Osburn was a likely a suspect as Sarah Good, if for no other reason than her lying. Lying was still considered a serious sin in the seventeenth century, and a crime as well, legally punishable by the courts. Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I believed, had any one in Court. When Mr. Hathorne tried to find out how well Sarah Osburn knew Sarah Good she said she did not know her by name. Mr. Hathorne asked if Sarah Osburn had been tempted by the devil, and she said no. Why then, he asked, had not she been at church? She had been sick, she said, and unable to go. However, her husband and others contradicted her. “She had not been at meeting,” they said, “this year and two months.” To understand why the matter of church attendance was considered so significant one must remember that the seventeenth century saw witchcraft as literal Devil worship, and therefore as a rival religion to Christianity. This is why the magistrates sometimes asked accused persons, as they asked Sarah Good, what God they served. And if the accused person avoided speaking the name of God (as Sarah Good did), they had reason to think it a suspicious circumstance. The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the judge, on the other side of the court. He slowly shook a great grey veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form. Then he collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The examinations of Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn afford grounds for suspicion and for further examination. However, the major event of that first day of March was the examination of Tituba. It began like the others, but it changed very quickly: “Tituba, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?” “None.” “Why do you hurt these children?” “I do not hurt them.” “Who is it then?” “The Devil, for aught I know.” “Did you never see the Devil?” “The Devil,” said Tituba, “came to me and bid me serve him.” She went on, with a minimum of judicia prodding, to provide a detailed confession of witchcraft, the first of approximately fifty that were made during the Salem trials. On March first and second, in her examination, Tituba said that the Devil had come to her in the shape of a man—a tall man in black, with white hair. Other times he had come in the shape of an animal. He had told her he was God, that she must believe him and serve him six years, and he would give her many fine things. He had shown her a book and she had made a mark in it, a mark that was “red like blood.” Many people thought this to be a revelation. “Then I saw another beast, coming out of the Earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon. He exercised all authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to comedown from Heaven to Earth in full view of men. Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“He ordered them to set up an image in honour of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless one had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name,” reports Revelation 13.11-17. Sarah Osburn was to die there on the tenth of May. Tituba, like later confessors, was never brought to trial. She lay in jail until she was sold to pay the jailer’s fees, her master refusing to pay them. Sarah Good was brought to trial. Another reaction to Tituba’s confession was to confirm the community in its fear of witchcraft, and particularly its fear of the three accused women. The night of March First William Allen and John Hughes heard a strange noise; it continued frightening them, but the approached and “saw a strange and unusual beast lying on the ground. Going up to it, the said beast vanished away and in the said place started up two or three women fled, not after the manner of other women but swiftly vanished out of sight, which women we took to be Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The next night William Allen again had hallucinations: “Sarah Good visibly appeared to him in his chamber, said Allen being in bed, and brought an unusual light with her. The said Sarah came and sat upon his foot. The said Allen went to kick at her, upon which she vanished and the light with her.” Notice that in this hallucination as in many others the hallucination stops as soon as the subject is able to move or speak. A curse is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, “curse” may refer to such a wish or pronouncement made effective by a supernatural or spiritual power, such as a god, or gods, a spirit, or natural force, or else as a kind of spell by magic or witchcraft. The Winchester rifle is a handsome gun that legend has it was forged in Hell. Whoever possesses the cursed rife either suffers disaster or fortune. Oliver Fisher Winchester was an American businessman and politician, best known as being the founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Oliver Winchester was born November 30, 1810 and dead December 10, 1880. Oliver Winchester was known for manufacturing and marketing the Winchester repeating rifle, which was a much re-designed descendant of the Volcanic rifle of some years earlier. Mr. Winchester was more learned than his kind in the mysteries of a deep and thrilling lore of peculiar fascination. He was a man highly honoured for his natural gifts and knowledge of learned books which nobody else could read, that was when he took his second orders the bishop gave him a mantle of scarlet silk to wear upon his shoulders in which, and his lordship had put such power into it that, when the parson has it rightly on, he could govern any ghost or evil spirit, and even stop an Earthquake. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Such a powerful man, in combat with supernatural visitations discovered that a division of Smith & Wesson firearms was failing financially with one of their newly patented arms. Having an eye for opportunity, Mr. Winchester assembled venture capital together with other stockholders and acquired the Smith & Wesson division, better known as the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, in 1855. By 1857, Mr. Winchester had positioned himself as the principle stockholder in the company and relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, and changed the name to New Haven Arms Company. After experiencing a slow start, and then a booming success with the Henry rifle, the company reorganized once again and the first Winchester rifle was the Model 1866, which had been nicknamed the Yellow Boy. The gun was called Yellow Boy because it should be remembered that, howsoever strange and singular it may sound to us that a mere lad should formally solicit such a performance at his own hands. Gradually Mr. Winchester amassed a considerable fortune. When Mr. Oliver Winchester died on December 10, 1880, his ownership in the company passed to his son, William Wirt Winchester (who married Sarah Lockwood Pardee in 1862), and died March 7 1881 at the young age of 43. The couple has also had a child, Annie Pardee Winchester, born June 15, 1866, and died 6 weeks later on July 25, 1866. Mrs. Winchester was deeply troubled by the loss of her daughter. In the course of her daily walk, she had to pass a certain heath or down where the road wound along through tall blocks of granite with open spaces of grassy sward between them. #RandpolphHarris 9 of 13
There in a certain spot, and always in the same place, she declared that she encountered, every day, a baby with a pale and troubled face, clothed in a little dress of white pique, made with two skirts. The pique was cut slightly Gabriele, and rounded off in the front with scallops, bound with white braid, with a button in each scallop, and ribbon-sash, tied at the left side, with one hand always stretched forth, and the other pressed against her side. “She is my baby,” Mrs. Winchester would say, and she often used to come to her parents house in New Haven; but that which troubled her was, that she had now been dead three years, and she had seen her body laid in the grave at her burial, this that she saw every day must needs be her soul or ghost. The hair of the appearance, sayth Mrs. Winchester, is not like anything alive, but it is so soft and light that it seemth to melt away while you look; but her eyes are set, and never blink—no, not when the sun shineth full upon her face. She maketh no steps, but seemth to swim along the top of the grass; and her hand, which is stretched out alway, seemth to point to something far away, out of sight. It is her continual coming; for she never failth to meet Mrs. Winchester, and to pass on, that hath quenched her spirits; and although she never seeth her by night, yet cannot she get her natural rest. Mrs. Winchester went to see a doctor who told her, “The case is strange but by no means impossible. It is one that I will study, and fear not to handle, if you will be free with me, and fulfill all that I desire.” Mrs. Winchester was overjoyed, but she perceived that the doctor turned pale, and was downcast with some thought which, however, he did not express. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The doctor knew that this might be a doemonium meridianum, the most stubborn spirit to govern and guide that any human can meet, and the most perilous withal. He made an appointment to go with Mrs. Winchester to the spot where she had these encounters. They had hardly reached the accustomed spot, when they both saw her at once gliding towards them; punctually as the ancient writers describe their “lemures, which swoon along the ground, neither marking the sand nor bending the herbage.” The aspect of the baby girl was exactly that which had been related by Mrs. Winchester. There was a pale and stony face, the strange misty hair, the eyes firm and fixed, that gazed, yet not on them, but on something that they saw far, far away; one hand and arm stretched out, and the other grasping the girdle of her waist. She floated along the field like upon a stream, and glided past the spot where they stood, pausingly. But so deep was the awe that came over the doctor, as he stood there in the light of day, face to face with a human soul separate from her bones and flesh, that his heart and purpose both failed him. He had resolved to speak to the spectre in the appointed form of words, but he did not. He stood like one amazed and speechless, until she had passed clean of out sight. When they returned to the house, and after he had said all he could to pacify Mrs. Winchester, he took leave for that time, with a promise that when he had fulfilled certain business elsewhere, when then he alleged, he would return and take orders to assuage these disturbances and their cause. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The doctor later told Mrs. Winchester that he thought it was best that they try an exorcism, but his Church, as is well known, hath abjured certain branches of her ancient powers, on grounds of perversion and abuse. So he referred her to a medium. The medium told Mrs. Winchesters, “There is a danger from the demons, but so there is in the surrounding air every day.” There was a kind of trouble in the air, a soft rippling sound, and all at once the shape appeared, and came towards the medium gradually. She opened her parchment scroll, and read aloud the command. The spirit paused, and seemed to waver and doubt; stood still; then she rehearsed the sentence again, sounding out every syllable like a chant. The spirit then swam into the midst of the circle, and there stood still, suddenly. Her knees shook under her, and the drops of sweat ran down her flesh like rain. But, although face to face with the spirit, the medium’s heart grew calm, and her mind was composed. The spirit then commanded Mrs. Winchester to move West and build a mansion in honour of the spirit killed by the Winchester rifle and “as long as the hammer keep pounding, her heart would continue to beat.” The medium dismissed the troubled ghost, until she peacefully withdrew, gliding towards the west. Mrs. Winchester moved to San Jose, which was near her family Member, Enoch Pardee, an occultist, prominent physician, free mason, and Mayor of Oakland, California USA, had built his family’s mansion in 1868, which is now known as the Pardee House Museum. Masonry has influenced more the modern witchcraft; it has influenced dozens of occult orders. Mrs. Winchester bought a farm house and built a massive mansion. There was something very painful and peculiar in the position of the Winchester mansion through the nineteenth century. The estate in those days was in a transitory state, and Mrs. Winchester, like her formularies, embodied a strange mixture of the old belief with the new interpretation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
However, the mansion is now flanked by a pleasantness, a beautiful garden and lawn, and it is surrounded by a sole grove of palm trees. It has also the aspect of age and of solitude, and looks the very scene of harmony and supernatural events. A legend might well belong to every beautiful glade of grass around, and there must surely be a haunted room somewhere within its walls. The incredible mansion, scenery of the legend still survives, and, like the field of the forty footsteps in another history, the place is still visited by those who take interests in the supernatural tales of old and new. Freemasons supposedly conducted a séance in the mansion in August of 2019. A phantom made an answer willingly. It stated, “before the next Yule-tide, a fearful pestilence will lay waste the land, and myriads of souls will be loosened from the flesh, until our valleys will be full.” The general facts stated in this diary are to these matters of belief accounted a strong proof of the veracity of the Ghost that the plague, fatal to so many millions, did break out in the global village at the close of the year. How sorely must the infidels and heretics of this generation be dismayed when they know that this Black Death, which is now swallowing its thousands in the streets of the great city, was foretold several months before the outbreak, under the séance of a freemason, by a visible and suppliant ghost! And what pleasure and improvements do such deny themselves who scorn and avoid all opportunity of intercourse with souls separate, and the spirits, glad and sorrowful, which inhabit the unseen World! May they who observe the Sabbath and call it a delight, rejoice in Thy Kingdom. May the people who sanctify the seventh day be sated and delighted with Thy bounty. For Thou didst find pleasure in the seventh day, and didst sanctify it, calling it the most desirable of the days, in remembrance of creation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Today is the return of our guided Mansion Tour! The tour guide-led experience allows guests to access areas of the mansion that have been closed since March 2020. Click the link in our bio for more information. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
Nature, in Giving Humans Tears, Bears Witness She Gave Humans the Softest Hearts!
Last year was not all that bad. We led the league in flu shots. Becoming number one is easier than remaining number one. The split-up of production and consumption also created, in all Second Wave societies, a case of obsessive “macrophilia”—a kind of Texas infatuation with bigness and growth. If it were true that long production runs in the factory would produce lower unit costs, then, by analogy, increases in scale would produce economies in other activities as well. “Big” became synonymous with “efficient,” and maximization became the fifth key principle. Cities and nations would boast of having the tallest skyscraper, the largest damn, or the World’s biggest miniature golf course. Since bigness, moreover, was the result of growth, most industrial governments, corporations, and other organizations pursued the ideal of growth frenetically. Japanese workers and managers at the Matsushita Electric Company would jointly chorus each day: “Doing our best to promote production, sending our goods to the people of the World, endlessly and continuously, like water gushing from a fountain. Grow, industry, Grow, Grow, Grow! Harmony and sincerity! Matsushita Electric!” In 1960, as the United States of America completed the stage of traditional industrialism and began to feel the first effects of the Third Wave of change, its fifty largest industrial corporations had grown to employ an average of 80,000 workers each. General Motors alone employed 595,000, and one utility, Vail’s AT&T, employed 736,000 women and men. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
This meant, at an average household size of 3.3 that year, that well over 2,000,000 people were dependent upon paychecks from this one company alone—a group equal to one half the population of the entire country when Hamilton and Washington were stitching it into a nation. (Since then AT&T has swollen to even more gargantuan proportions. By 1970 it employed 956,000—having added 136,000 employees to its work force in a single twelve mother period. By 2020, because of diversification and advanced technology in telecommunications, the company AT&T had 230,000 employees, but is still the largest employer in the U.S. telecommunications industry today, ahead of Verizon, T-Mobile U.S. and Sprint. AT&T was a special case and, of course, Americans were peculiarly addicted to bigness. However, macrophilia was no monopoly of the Americans. In France in 1963 fourteen hundred firms—a mere .0025 percent of all companies—employed fully 38 percent of the work force. Governments in Germany, Britain, and other countries actively encouraged mergers to create even larger companies, in the belief that larger scale would help them compete against the American giants. Nor was this scale maximization simply a reflection of profit maximization. Karl Marx had associated the “increasing scale of industrial establishments” with the “wider development of their material power.” Dr. Lenin, turn, argued that “huge enterprises, trusts and syndicates had brought the mass production technique to its highest level of development.” His first order of business after the Soviet revolution was to consolidate Russian economic life into smallest possible number of the largest possible units. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
Mr. Stalin pushed even harder for maximum scale and built vast new projects—the steel complex at Magnitogorsk, another at Zaporozhstal, the Balkhash copper smelting plant, the tractor plants at Kharkov and Stalingrad. He would ask how large a given American installation was, then order construction of an even larger one. In The Cult of Bigness in Soviet Economic Planning, Dr. Leon M. Herman writes: “In various parts of the USSR, in fact, local politicians became involved in a race for attracting the ‘World’s larges projects.’” By 1938 the Communist party warned against “gigantomania,” but with little effect. Even today Russian and East European communist leaders are victims of what Dr. Herman calls “the addiction to bigness.” Such faith in sheer scale derived from narrow Second Wave assumptions about the nature of “efficiency.” However, the macrophilia of industrialism went beyond mere plants. It was reflected in the aggregation of many different kinds of data into the statistical tool known as Gross National Product (GNP), which measured the “scale” of an economy by totting up the value of goods and services produced in it. This tool of the Second Wave economists had many failings. From the point of view of GNP it did not matter whether the output was in the form of food, education and health services, or munitions. The hiring crew to build a home or to demolish one both added to GNP, even though one activity added to the stock of housing and the other subtracted from it. GNP also, because it measured only market activity or exchanges, relegated to insignificance a whole vital sector of the economy based on unpaid production—child-rearing and housework, for example. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
Despite these shortcomings, Second Wave governments around the World entered into a blind race to increase GNP at all costs, maximizing “growth” even at the risk of ecological and social disaster. The macrophiliac principle was built so deeply into the industrial mentality that nothing seemed more reasonable. Maximization went along with standardization, specialization, and the other industrial ground rules. Finally, all industrial nations developed centralization into a fine art. While the Church and many First Wave rulers knew perfectly well how to centralize power, they dealt with far les complex societies and were crude amateurs by contrast with the men and women who centralized industrial societies from the group floor up. All complicated societies require a mixture of both centralized and decentralized operations. However, the shift from a basically decentralized First Wave economy, with each locality largely responsible for producing its own necessities, to the integrated national economies of the Second Wave led to totally new methods for centralizing power. These came into play at the level of individual companies, industries, and the economy as a whole. The early railroads provide a classic illustration. Compared with other business they were the giants of their day. In the United States of America in 1850 only forty-one factories had a capitalization of $250,000.00 USD ($8,740,097.40 USD in 2021 dollars) or more. By contrast, the New York Central Railroad as early as 1860 boasted a capitalization of $30,000,000.00 USD ($972,993,975.90 USD in 2021 dollars). To run such a gargantuan enterprise, new management methods were needed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
The early railroad managers, therefore, like the managers of the space program in our own era, had to invent new techniques. They standardized technologies, fares, and schedules. They synchronized operations over hundreds of miles. They created specialized new occupations and departments. They concentrated capital, energy, and people. They fought to maximize the scale of their networks. And to accomplish all this they created new forms of organization based on centralization of information and command. Employees were divided into “line” and “staff.” Daily reports were initiated to provide data on car movements, loadings, damages, lost freight, repairs, engine miles, et cetera. All this information flowed up a centralized chain of command until it reached the general superintendent who made the decisions and sent orders down the line. The railroads, as business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr., has shown, soon became a model for other large organizations, and centralized management came to be regarded as an advanced, sophisticated tool in all the Second Wave nations. In politics, too, the Second Wave encouraged centralization. In the United States of America, as early as the late 1780’s, this was illustrated by the battle to replace the loose, decentralist Articles of Confederation with a more centralist Constitution. Generally the First Wave rural interests resisted the concentration of power in the national government, while Second Wave commercial interest led by Hamilton argued, in The Federalist and elsewhere, that a strong central government was essential not only for military and foreign policy reasons but for economic growth. The resultant Constitution of 1787 was an ingenious comprise. Because First Wave forces were still strong, the Constitution reserved important powers to the states rather than the central government. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
To prevent overly strong central power it also called for a unique separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. However, the Constitution also contained elastic language that would eventually permit the federal government to extend its reach drastically. As industrialization pushed the political system toward greater centralization, the government in Washington took on an increasing number of powers and responsibilities and monopolized more and more decision-making at the center. Within the federal government, meanwhile, power shifted from Congress and the courts to the most centralist of the three branches—the Executive. By the Nixon years, historian Arthur Schlesinger (himself once an ardent centralizer) was attacking the “imperial presidency.” The pressures toward political centralization were even stronger outside the United States of America. A quick look at Sweden, Japan, Britain, or France is enough to make the United States of America’s system seem decentralized by comparison. Jean-Francois Revel, author of Without Marx or Jesus, makes this point in describing how governments respond to political protest: “When a demonstration is forbidden in France, there is never any doubt about the source of the prohibition. If it is a question of a major political demonstration, it is the [central] government,” he says. “In the United States of America, however, when a demonstration is forbidden, the first question everyone asks is, ‘By whom?’” Dr. Revel points out that it is usually some local authority operating autonomously. The extremes of political centralization were found, of course, in the Marxist industrial nations. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
In 1850 Mr. Marx called for a “decisive centralization of power in the hands of the state.” Mr. Engels, like Mr. Hamilton before him, attacked decentralized confederations as “an enormous step backward.” Latter on the Soviets, eager to accelerate industrialization, proceeded to construct the most highly centralized political and economic structure of all, submitting even the smallest of production decisions to the control of central planners. The gradual centralization of a once decentralization economy was assisted, moreover, by a crucial invention whose very name reveals its purpose: the central bank. In 1694, at the very dawn of the industrial age, while Newcomen was still tinkering with the steam engine, William Paterson organized the Bank of England—which became a template for similar centralist institutions in all Second Wave phase without constructing its own equivalent of this machine for the central control of money and credit. Paterson’s bank sold government bonds; it issued government back currency; it later began to regulate the lending practices of other banks. Eventually it took on the primary function of all central banks today: central control of the money supply. In 1800 the Banque de France was formed for similar purposes. This was followed by the formation of the Reichsbank in 1875. In the United States of America, the collision between First and Second Wave forces led to a major battle over central banking shortly after the adoption of the Constitution. Mr. Hamilton, the most brilliant advocate of the Second Wave policies, argued for a national bank on the English Model. The South and the frontier West, still wedded to agriculture, opposed him. Nevertheless, with the support of the industrializing Northeast, he succeeded in forcing through legislation that created the Bank of the United State—forerunner of today’s Federal Reserve System. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
Employed by government to regulate the level and rate of market activity, central banks introduced—by the back door, as it were—a degree of unofficial short-range planning into capitalist economies. Money flowed through every artery in Second Wave societies, both capitalist and socialist. Both needed, and therefore created, a centralized money pumping station. Central banking and centralized government marches hand in hand. Centralization was another dominating principle of Second Wave civilization. What we see, therefore, is a set of six guiding principles, a “program” that operated to one degree or another in all the Second Wave countries. These half-dozen principles—standardization, specialization—were applied in both the capitalist and socialist wings of industrial society because they grew, inescapably, out of the basic cleavage between producer and consumer and the ever-expanding role of the market. These principles in turn, each reinforcing the other, led relentlessly to the rise of bureaucracy. They produced some of the biggest, most rigid, most powerful bureaucratic organizations the World had ever seen, leaving the individual to wander in a Kafka-like World of looming mega-organizations. If today we feel oppressed and overpowered by them, we can trace our problems to the hidden code that programmed the civilization of the Second Wave. This six principles that formed this code lent a distinctive stamp to Second Wave civilization. Today, as we shall shortly see, every one of these fundamental principles is under attack by the forces of the Third Wave. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
So, indeed, are the Second Wave elites who are still applying these rules—in business, in banking, in labour relations, in government, in education, in the media. For the rise of a new civilization challenges all the vested interests of the old one. In the upheavals that lie immediately ahead, the elites of all industrial societies—so accustomed to setting the rules—will in all likelihood go the way of the feudal lords of the past. Some will be by-passed. Others will be dethroned. Many will be reduced to impotence or shabby gentility. Several—the most intelligent and adaptive—will be transformed and emerge as leaders of the Third Wave civilization. To understand who will run things tomorrow as the Third Wave is becoming dominant, we must first know exactly who is running things today. Modern suburbia is the period of the twentieth century prior to the second World War was one of momentous changes in the volume of suburbanization. This was the era in which the city reached is zenith and suburbs fully came into their own. Cities were booming. The year 1920 was a watershed insofar as it marked the first time the nation was more than half (51.7 percent) urban. The Roaring Twenties exemplified the urban adolescence of a country that was now explicitly being shaped by urban goals and values. As stated during the Depression of the 1930s by the Report of the Urbanization Committee to the National Resources Committee: “The faults of out cities are not those of decadence and impending decline, but of exuberant vitality crowding its way forward under tremendous pressure—the flood rather than the drought. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
“The city is both the great playground and the great battleground of the Nation…An unprecedented mobility arising from the harnessing of stream, electricity, and internal-combustion engine to humans and materials are responsible for this phenomenal urban development. Swifter forms of urban and interurban transportation have further led to suburban migration and caused the emergence of metropolitan districts instead of individual cities as the actual areas of urban life.” Thus, in the period before the second World War, the cities appeared robust and growing in economic and social dominance, not in decline and decay. Suburbs were part of the growth of the urban area, no longer simply a footnote. With some 17 million residents in 1930 (the total American population was 123.1 million), suburbs were becoming a majority component of metropolitan population. Suburban population was already 45 percent as large as the central-city population. Suburbs built between the first and second World Wars (1918-1942) represented the first steps toward mass suburbanization. Elite suburbs of the nineteenth-century model—that is large, large architecturally designed homes—continued to be built. However, such suburbs, as for example, Shaker Heights, east of Cleveland, Ohio; were now more oriented to streetcar lines than railroads. Moreover, the growing upper-middle class use of automobiles for commuting now put a premium on living in a quality suburb not too distant from downtown offices. Thus, across the country, upper-status inner-ring suburbs on the “good side” of the city saw fine homes constructed during the 1920s. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
These pre-World War II suburbs were built to have the best of both Worlds. They could appeal to the long standing antiurbanism of many Americans. They also appealed to those seeking to remove themselves from heavy concentration of new immigrant populations in the central cities. The suburbs could also boas that with their greenery they were closer to nature and thus better places to raise children. All this could be enjoyed while residents remained within a short commute of the city and kept all urban advantages. This meant not only the city’s cultural life and nightlife, but more importantly, the advantages of the city’s gas, electric, and telephone utilities. Inner-ring suburbs might have their own government, run their own schools, and collect their own lower taxes, but they were connected to city gas mains, electric lines, water and sewer systems, and telephones. Affluent suburban residents thus obtained all the practical advantages of living in the city while escaping the costs and problems. No wonder the popular middle-class women’s magazine such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, and Good Housekeeping extolled the benefits of suburban living. You could have the mythical American Pie Life with a beautiful house with the gorgeous roses surrounded by the pristine white picket fence while surrendering none of the urban comforts and advantages. Housing styles in affluent lace curtain between-war suburbs reflected the privileged positions of their owners. Depending on one’s preference, the homeowner could build an ideal home in a Colonial New England style while next door a Grand Queen Anne Victorian and next to an English half-timbered Tutor, and across the Street from a center-entrance Georgian and at the corner a Spanish-Moorish style villa. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
The last style reflected the importance of the expanding Southern California movie industry. Films such as The Sheik created a fad for all things thought to be Moorish Arab, which, when combined with the Spanish influences in Southern California, produced an ersatz Spanish-Moorish style found in places as far from the ocean and sun as Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An excellent example of the ersatz style then called Spanish is expensive Palos Verdes, Estates outside of Los Angeles. The style has come to be known as Californian style; that is, low hacienda-style stucco-sided and red-tiled-roofed homes with terraces and verandas. Overall, if not exciting, Palos Verdes produced a very pleasant and harmonious physical perspective. Architectural styles during the 1920s and early 1930 were often mixed in occasionally bizarre and electric fashions. For example, for a number of years I lived in the suburb of Shorewood, just north of Milwaukee, in a marvelous 1930 Dutch Colonial home that had a living room done in Spanish-Moorish style complete with rounded arches and rough Spanish plaster. The builders of such homes created for themselves far more than housing; they created the romantic idealization of earlier eras. “A man’s home was his castle,” where he could life if not as a lord, at least as a latter-day country gentleman. And all this could be had while benefiting from twentieth-century urban technology of indoor plumbing, central heating, and electricity. In the words of President Herbert Hoover, “To own one’s home is a physical expression of individualism, of enterprise, of independence, and of the freedom of spirit” (Speech quoted in American Home, February 1932, p. 253). #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
It should be remembered that most of the communities in which these “expressions of individualism” were located were deliberately racially, religiously, ethnically, and economically restricted In Palos Verdes, for example, cost restrictions mandated minimum lot sizes, set back requirements, and minimum construction costs. Residential covenants attached to the deeds excluded most groups and religions. An exception was made for live-in servants. The irony of such exclusive housing is that the heritage for the architecture that was so popular came from a community development designed to copy Mexican-style hacienda architecture apparently never occurred to the developers or residents. The feeling of being accepted by someone we love is a basic human need. In the pas 100 years, the United States of America has changed significantly and become far more loving and accepting. Being accepted by good people motivates us. It increases our sense of self-worth and self-confidence. Those who cannot find acceptance from desirable sources often seek it elsewhere. They may look to people who are not interested in their well-being. They may attach themselves to false friends and do questionable things to try to receive the acknowledgement they are seeking. They may seek acceptance by wearing a particular brand of clothing to generate a feeling of belonging or status. For some, striving for a role or a position of prominence can also be a way of seeking acceptance. They define their worth by a position they hold or status they obtain. Even in the Church we are not always free from this type of thinking. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
Seeking acceptance from the wrong sources or for incorrect reasons puts us on a dangerous path—one that is likely to lead us astray and even to destruction. Instead of feeling cherished and self-confident, we will eventually feel abandoned and inferior. However, see that you look to God and live. The ultimate source of empowerment and lasting acceptance is our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. They know us. They love us. They do not accept us because of our title or position. They do not look at our status. They look into our hearts. They accept us for who we are and what we are striving to become. Seeking and receiving acceptance from Them will always lift and encourage us. As we look into our hearts, we screen ourselves. What no one around us knows, we surely know. We know our motives and desires. When we engage in sincere, honest reflection, we do not rationalize or deceive ourselves. As we sincerely and prayerfully ponder he extent to which our hearts are hones and broken, we will be taught by the Holy Ghost. We will receive a sweet confirmation or gentle correction, inviting us to act. At first it would seem that humans in the World, having among themselves no type of moral relations or acknowledged duties, could be neither good nor evil, and had neither vices nor virtues, unless, if we take these words in a physical sense, we call those qualities that can harm an individual’s preservation “vices” in one, and those that can contribute to it “virtues.” In that case it would be necessary to call the one who least resists the simple impulses of nature the most virtuous. However, without departing from the standard meaning of these words, it is appropriate to suspend the judgment we could make regarding such a situation and to be on our guard against our prejudices, until we have examined with scale in hand whether there are more virtues than vices among civilized humans. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
Or whether all things considered they would not be in a happier set of circumstances if they had neither evil to fear nor good to hope for from anyone, rather than subjecting themselves to a universal dependence and obliging themselves to receive everything from those who do not oblige themselves to give them anything. Above all, let us not conclude with Dr. Hobbes that because humans have no idea of goodness one is naturally evil; that one is vicious because one does not know virtue; that one always refuses to preform service for one’s fellow humans which one reasonably attributes to oneself, to those things one needs, one foolishly imagines oneself to be the sole proprietor of the entire Universe. Dr. Hobbes has very clearly seen the defect of all modern definitions of natural right, but the consequences one draws from one’s own definition show that one takes it in a sense that is no less false. Were he to have reasoned on the basis of the principles he established, Dr. Hobbes should have said that since the state of nature is in the state in which the concern for our self-preservation is the least prejudicial to that of others, that state was consequently the most appropriate for the peace and the best suited for the human race. Dr. Hobbes says precisely the opposite, because he had wrongly injected into the savage human’s concern for self-preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions which are the product of society and which have made laws necessary. The evil human, he says, is a robust child. It remains to be seen whether savage humans are a robust child. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Were we to grant Dr. Hobbes this, what would we conclude from it? That is this human were as dependent on others when one is robust as one is when one is weak, there is no type of excess to which one would not tend: one would not tend: if she was too slow in offering one nourishment, one would disrespect one’s mother; should one find one’s younger brother annoying, one would harm him; should one be assaulted or aggravated by an individual, one would bite that person’s leg. However, being robust and being dependent are two contradictory suppositions in the state of nature. When they are dependent, humans are weak, and when one is emancipated from that dependence before one is robust. Dr. Hobbes did not see that the same cause prevents them at the same time from abusing their faculties, as one oneself maintains. Hence we could say that savages are not evil precisely because hey do not know what it is to be good; for it is neither the development of enlightenment nor the restraint imposed by the law, but the clam of the passions and the ignorance of vices which prevents the from doing evil. So much more profitable to these is the ignorance of vice than the knowledges of virtue is to those. Moreover, there is another principle that Dr. Hobbes failed to notice, and which, having been given to humans in order to mitigate, in certain circumstances, the ferocity of one’s egocentrism or the desire for self-preservation before this egocentrism of one came into being, tempers the ardor one has for one’s own well-being by an innate repugnance o seeing one’s fellow humans suffer. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
I do not believe I have any contradiction to fear in grating the only natural virtue that the most excessive detractor of human virtues was forced to recognize. I am referring to pity, a disposition that is fitting for beings that are as weak and as subject to ills as we are; a virtue all the more universal and the more useful to humans in that it precedes in one any kind of reflection, and so natural that even animals sometimes show noticeable signs of it. Without speaking of the tenderness of mothers for their young and of the perils hey have to brave in order to protect them, one daily observes the repugnance that horses have for trampling a living body with their hooves. An animal does not go undisturbed past a dead animal of its own species. There are even some animals that give them a kind of sepulchre; and the mournful lowing of the cattle entering a slaughterhouse voices the impression they received of the horrible spectable that strikes them. One notes with pleasure the author of The Fable of the Bees, having been forced to acknowledge humans as a compassionate and sensitive being, departing from one’s cold and subtle style in the example one gives, to offer us the pathetic image of an imprisoned human who sees outside one’s cell a ferocious animal tearing a child from its mother’s arms and nourishment, mashing its frail limbs with its murderous teeth, and ripping with its claws the child’s quivering entrails. What horrible agitation must be felt by this witness of an event in which one has no personal interest! What anguish must one suffer at this sigh, being unable to be of any help to the fainting mother or to the dying child. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Such is the pure movement of nature prior to all reflection. Such is the force of natural pity, which the most depraved mores still have difficulty destroy, since everyday one sees in our theaters someone affected and weeping at the ills of some unfortunate person, and who, were one in the tyrant’s place, would intensify the torments of one’s enemy still more; [like the bloodthirsty Sulla, so sensitive to ills he had not caused, or like Alexander of Pherae, who did not dare attend the performance of any tragedy, for fear of being seen weeping with Andromache and Priam, and yet who listened impassively to the cries of so many citizens who were killed every day on his orders. Nature, in giving humans tears, bears witness that she gave the human race the softest hearts.] If nature have not given humans pity to assist their reason, there is a clear awareness that, with all their mores, humans would have never been anything but monsters; but one has not seen that from this quality alone flow all the social virtues that one wants to deny in humans. In fact, what are generosity, mercy, and humanity, if not pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human species in general. Benevolence and even friendship are, properly understood, the products of a constant pity fixed on a particular object; for is desiring that someone not suffer anything but desiring that one be happy? Were it true that the commiseration were merely a sentiment that puts us in the position of the one who suffers, a sentiment that is obscure and power in savage humans, develop but weak in humans dwelling in civil society, what importance would this idea have to the truth of what I say, expect to give it more force? #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
In fact, commiseration will be all the more energetic as the witnessing animal identifies itself more intimately with the suffering animal. Now it is evident that this identification must have been infinitely close in the state of nature than in the state of reasoning. Reason is what engenders egocentrism, and reflection strengthens it. Reason is what engenders egocentrism, and reflection strengthens it. Reason is what turns humans in upon oneself. Reason is what separates one from all that troubles one and afflicts one. For centuries, philosophers have debated what it means to be human. However, the answer has eluded us. Perhaps it is because it is so simple. To be human means to choose. Philosophy is what isolated one and what moves one to say in secret, at the sight of a suffering human, “Perish if you will; I am safe and sound.” No longer can anything but danger to the entire society trouble the tranquil slumber of the philosopher and yank one from one’s bed. One’s fellow humans can be killed with impunity underneath one’s window. One has merely to place one’s hands over one’s ears and argue with oneself a little in order to prevent nature, which rebels within one, from identifying one with the human being assassinated. Savage humans do not have this admirable talent, and for lack of wisdom and reason one is always seen thoughtlessly talent, and for lack of wisdom and reason one is always seen thoughtlessly giving in to the first sentiment of humanity. When there is a riot or a street brawl, the populace gathers together; the prudent human withdraws from the scene. It is the rabble, the women of the marketplace, who separate the combatants and prevent decent people from killing one another. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
It is therefore quite certain that pity is a natural sentiment, which, by moderate in each individual the activity of the love of oneself, contributes to the mutual of the entire species. Pity is what carries us without reflection to the assistance of those we see suffering. Pity is what, in the state of nature, takes the place of laws, mores, and virtue, with the advantage that no one is tempted to disobey its sweet voice. Pity is what will prevent every robust savage from robbing a weak child or an infirm old man of one’s hard-earned subsistence, if one oneself expects to be able to find one’s own someplace else. Instead of the sublime maxim of reasoned justice, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, pity inspires all humans with another maxim of natural goodness, much less perfect but perhaps more useful than the preceding one: Do what is good for you with as little hard as possible to others. In a word, it is in this natural sentiment, rather than in subtle arguments, that one must search for the cause of the repugnance at doing evil that every human would experience, even independently of the maxims of education. Although it might be appropriate for Socrates and minds of his stature to acquire virtue through reason, the human race would long ago have ceased to exist, if its preservation had depended solely on the reasoning of its members. With passions so minimally active and such a salutary restraint, being more wild than evil, and more attentive to protecting themselves from the harm they could receive than tempted to do harm to others, humans were not so subject to very dangerous conflicts. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
Since they had no sort of intercourse among themselves; since, as a consequence, they knew neither vanity, nor deference, nor esteem, nor contempt; since they had not the slightest notion of mine and thine, nor any true idea of justice; since they regarded the acts of violence that could befall them as an easily redressed evil and not as an offense that must be punished; and since they did not even dream of vengeance except perhaps as a knee-jerk response right then and there, like the dog that bites the stone that is thrown at one, their disputes would rarely have had bloody consequences, if their subject had been no more sensitive than food. Likewise, a mother who is overwhelmed by power negative emotions, like anger or grief, while nursing her infant, could be the cause of its spasms and convulsions. Even medical science admits that a depressive kind of emotionalism contributes towards causing hardening of the arteries and hence earlier old age. Whenever Gandhi had an important decision to make, and went through protected self-wrangling in the process, the physician who attended him noted that his blood pressure rose considerably. Once Gandhi went to sleep in such a condition. Next morning the pressure had fallen to normal. During the night he had ended the mental pressure and arrived at a decision! Angina pectoris is recognized by many physicians now as a very serious disease, often fatal and always painful, mostly brought on by extreme nervous tension. The power of the mind over flesh is proved convincingly even by such simple, everyday experiences as the vomiting caused by a horrible sigh, the weeping caused by a tragic one, the loss of appetite of positive indigestion caused by bad news, and the headache caused by quarreling. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
As long as we live in this World, trails and tribulations will dog our steps. Job has it right. “Human life on Earth is just one unending trudge” (7.1). Each one of us, therefore, ought to take care. Do not underestimate the power of a temptation. Do no overestimate your own power of a temptation. Do not overestimate your power to resist a temptation. After all, we do not want the Devil to take us by surprise. He never sleeps. He goes about seeking whom he may devour, as Peter wrote in his First Letter (5.8). What is the moral? No one’s so honied and wholesome that one cannot be deviled for dinner. And at dinner, or so the Gospels would have us believe, the Devil’s the guest from Hell. Yes, temptations are often useful to the human race, whether they come n small packages or large. However, how can this be? They bring us low, purge, scourge, and school us in the fire; that is to say, they scare the living daylights out of us. All the Saints have passed barefoot over the coals and in the process still made some spiritual progress. Alas, those who cannot withstand temptations become the shipwrecked, cast adrift forever. Yes, there is a moral. There is no religious order so lofty or monastery so remote that the Unwanted Visitor cannot slip in and make some mischief. Over time Humankind has not been able to defend itself successfully from the assaults of all temptations. Our common experience tells us that. And the reason why? The source of our temptations has already invaded us; that is to say, we were born in concupiscence, and in concupiscence we thrive. Sad to say, we did not need the Letter of James to remind us that (1.14). #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
We do have some success in the fight. However, as one temptation or tribulations is dispatched, another will soon take its place. We will always have something to whack away at, it seems, for are no we still paying the price for pummeling our Primal Felicity? Many seek to flee he temptations altogether. Alas, the escape route is clogged, and the refugee is destined to succumb! Advancing to the rear, then, is not the answer. We cannot hope to conquer that way. However, through spiritual cunning—that is to say, through Patience and True Humility—we become the stronger, and the tempters have to try harder. If a wildly successful plant—that is to say, a temptation—causes you pain, you will probably take the pruning knife and trim it back. Do that, and it will return the hardier. Pull out its root, however, and it is gone forever. You will feel better, and your spiritual garden will recover its charm. The way we stand, you can see we have grown up this way together, out of the same soil, with the same rains, leaning in the same way toward the Sun. See how we lean together in the same direction. How the dead limbs of one of us rest in the branches of another. How those branches have grown around the limbs. How the two are inseparable. And if you look you can see the different ways we have taken this place into us. Magnolia, loblolly bay, sweet gum, Southern bayberry, Pacific bayberry; whenever we grow there are many of us; Monterey pine, sugar pine, white-bark pine, four-lead pine, single-leaf pine, bristle-cone pine, foxtail pine, Torrey pine, Western red pine, Jeffrey pine, bishop pine. And we are various, and amazing in our variety, and our differences multiply, so that edge after edge of the endlessness of possibility is exposed. You know we have grown this way for years. And to no purpose you can understand. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
Yet what you fail to know we know, and the knowing is in us, how we have grown this way, why these years were not one of them heedless, why we are shaped the way we are, not all straight to your purpose, but to ours. And how we are each purpose, how each cell, how light and soil are in us, how we are in the soil, how we are in the air, how we are both infinitesimal and great and how we are infinitely without any purpose you can see, in the way we stand, each alone, yet none of us separable none of us beautiful when separate but all exquisite as we stand, each moment heeded in this cycle, no detail unlovely. Our God and God of our father and mothers, please remember the merit of our ancestors who, from year to year, appeared before Thee in America, Thy Holy City. How deep was their rejoicing as they brought their offerings before Thee! We pray Thee, imbue us, O Lord our God, with their faith in Thee and their joy in Thy World, their love for Thy Scripture and their yearning for freedom and justice. May we, in their spirit of sacrificial devotion, fulfill our duty toward the rebuilding of Thy Holy Land, the fountain of our life, that we may ever serve Thee in reverence as in days of yore. Because of our sins we were exiled from the Holy Land and removed far away from its sacred soil We cannot therefore make our festival pilgrimages before Tee nor can we fulfill our obligations in Thy chosen House, the great and holy Temple which was called by Thy name, because of the destruction that has come upon Thy Sanctuary. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers and mothers, merciful King, in Thine abundant compassion, again to have mercy upon us and upon Thy Sanctuary. O rebuild it speedily and please enhance its glory. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
Cresleigh Homes
What’s better than the most priceless art in the world? A view like this! The incredible wall of windows in the Mills Station Res 3 model is worth checking out; a home with everything you need, including truly remarkable outdoor living space. It’s truly breathtaking! https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-3/
Specialization Can Get Jobs Done with Less Loss of Time and Labour!
This happy breed of humans, this little World, this precious stone set in the silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall, or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands. This blessed plot, this Earth, this realm, this America. O! beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on. One of the second great principles that ran through all Second Wave societies: specialization. For the more the Second wave eliminated diversity in language, leisure, and life-style, the more it needed diversity in the sphere of work. Accelerating the division of labour, the Second Wave replaced the casual jack-of-all-work peasant with the narrow, purse-lipped specialist and the worker who did only one task, Taylor-fashion, over and over again. As early as 1720 a British report on The Advantages of the East India Trade made the point that specialization could get jobs done with “less loss of time and labour.” In 1776 Adam Smith opened The Wealth of Nations with the ringing assertion that “the greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour seems to have been the effects of the division of labour.” Dr. Smith, in a classic passage, described the manufacture of a pin. A single old-style workman, performing all the necessary operations by himself, he wrote, could turn out not only a handful of pins each day—no more than twenty and perhaps not even one. By contrast, Dr. Smith described a “manufactory” he had visited in which the eighteen different operations required to make a pin were carried out by ten specialized workers, each performing only one or a few steps. Together they were able to produce more than forty-eight thousand pins per day—over forty-eight hundred per workers. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
By the nineteenth century, as more and more work shifted into the factory, the pin story was repeated again and again on an ever-larger scale. And the human costs of specialization escalated accordingly. Critics of industrialism charged that highly specialized repetitive labour progressively dehumanized the worker. By the time Henry Ford started manufacturing Model T’s in 1908 it took not eighteen different operations to complete a unit but 7,882. In his autobiography, Ford noted that of these 7,882 specialized jobs, 949 required “strong , able-bodied, and practically physically perfect men,” 3,338 needed men of merely “ordinary” physical strength, most of the rest could be performed by “women or older children,” and, he continued coolly, “we found that 670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one-legged men, two by armless men, 715 by one-armed men and 10 by blind men.” Basically, the specialized job required not a whole person, but only a part. No more vivid evidence that overspecialization can be brutalizing has ever been adduced. A practice which critics attributed to capitalism, however, became an inbuilt feature of socialism as well. For the extreme specialization of labour that was common to all Second Wave societies had its roots in the divorce of production from consumption. Russian, Poland, Germany, or Hungary can no more run their factories today without elaborate specialization than can Japan or the United States of America—whose Department of Labour in 1977 published a list of twenty thousand identifiably different occupations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
In both capitalist and socialist industrial states, moreover, specialization was accompanied by a rising tide of professionalizing. Whenever the opportunity arose for some group of specialists to monopolize esoteric knowledge and keep newcomers out of their field, profession emerged. As the Second Wave advanced, the market intervened between a knowledge-holder and a client dividing them sharply into producer and consumer. Thus, health in Second Wave societies came to be seen as a product provided by a doctor and a health-delivery bureaucracy, rather than a result of intelligent self-care (production for use) by the patient. Education was supposedly “produced” by the teacher in the school and “consumed” by the student. All sorts of occupational groups from librarians to salemen began clamouring for the right to call themselves professionals—and for the power to set standards, prices, and conditions of entry into their specialties. By now, according to Michael Pertschuck, Chairman of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, “Our culture is dominated by professionals who call us ‘clients’ and tell us of our ‘needs.’” In Second Wave societies even political agitation was conceived of as a profession. Thus Dr. Lenin argued that the masses could not bring about revolution without professional help. What was needed, he asserted, was an “organization or revolutionaries” limited in membership to “people” whose profession is that of a revolutionary.” Among communist, capitalists, executives, educators, priests, and politicians, the Second Wave produced a common mentality and a drive toward an ever more refined division of Labour. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Like Prince Albert at the great Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, they believed that specialization was “the moving power of civilization.” The Great Standardizers and The Great Specializers marched hand in hand. The widening split between production and consumption also forced a change in the way Second Wave people dealt with time. In a market-dependent system, whether the market is planned or free, time equals money. Expensive machines cannot be allowed to sit idly, and they operate at rhythms of their own. This produced the third principle of industrial civilization: synchronization. Even in the earliest societies work had to be carefully organized in time. Warriors often had to work in unison to trap their prey. Fishermen had to coordinate their efforts in rowing or hauling in the nets. George Thomson, many years ago, showed how various work songs reflected the requirements of labour. For the oarsmen, time was marked by a simple two-syllable sound like O-op! The second syllable indicated the moment of maximum exertion while the first was the time for preparation. Hauling a boat, he noted, was heavier work than rowing, “so the moments of exertion are spaced at longer intervals,” and we see, as in the Irish hauling cry Ho–li–ho–hup!, a longer preparation for the final effort. Until the Second Wave brought in machinery and silenced the songs of the worker, most such synchronization of effort was organic or natural. It flowed from the rhythm of the seasons and from biological processes, from the Earth’s rotation and the beat of the heart. Second Wave societies, by contrast, moved to the beat of a machine. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
As factory production spread, the high cost of machinery and the close interdependence of labour required a much more refined synchronization. If one group of workers in a plan was late in completing a task, others down the line would be further delayed. Thus punctuality, never very important in agricultural communities, became a social necessity, and clocks and watches began to proliferate. By the 1790’s they were already becoming commonplace in Britain. Their diffusion came, in the words of British historian E. P. Thompson, “at the exact moment when the industrial revolution demanded a greater synchronization of labour.” Not by coincidence, children in industrial cultures were taught to tell time at an early age. Pupils were condition to arrive at school when the bell rang so that later on they would arrive reliably at the factory or office when the whistle blew. Jobs were timed and split into sequences measure in fractions of a second. “Nine-to-five” formed the temporal frame for millions of workers. Nor was it only working life that was synchronized. In all Second Wave societies, regardless of profit or political considerations, social life, too, became clock-driven and adapted to machine requirements. Certain hours were set aside for leisure. Standard-length vacations, holidays, or coffee breaks were interspersed with the work schedules. Children began and ended the school year at uniform times. Hospitals woke all their patients for breakfast simultaneously. Transport systems staggered under rush hours. Broadcasters fitted entertainment into special time slots—“prime time,” for example. Every business had its own peak hour or seasons, synchronization arose—from factory expediters and schedulers to traffic police and time-study men. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
By contrast, some people resisted the new industrial time system. And here again gender differences arose. Those who participated in Second Wave work-chiefly men—became the most conditioned to clock-time. Second Wave husbands continually complained h their wives kept them waiting, that they had no regard for time, that it took them forever to dress, that they were always late for appointments. Women, primarily engaged in noninterdepedent housework, worked to less mechanical rhythms. For similar reasons urban populations tended to look down upon rural folk as slow and unreliable. “They do not show up on time! You never know whether they will keep an appointment.” Such complaints could be traced directly to the difference between Second Wave work based on heightened interdependence and the First Wave work centered in the field and the home. Once the Second Wave became dominant even the intimate routines of life were locked into the industrial pacing system. In the United States of America and Russian, in Singapore and Sweden, in France and Denmark, Germany and Japan, families arose as one, ate at the same time, commuted, worked, returned home, went to bed, slept, and even participated in pleasures of the flesh more or less in unison as the entire civilization, in addition to standardization and specialization, applied the principle of synchronization. The rise of the market gave birth to yet another rule of Second Wave civilization—the principle of concentration. First Wave societies lived off widely dispersed sources of energy. Second Wave societies became almost totally dependent on highly concentrated deposits of fossil fuel. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
However, the Second Wave concentrated more than energy. It also concentrated population, stripping the countryside of people and relocating them in giant urban centers. It even concentrated work. While work in First Wave societies took place everywhere—in the home, in the village, in the fields—much of the work in Second Wave societies was done in factories where thousands of labourers were drawn together under a single roof. Nor was it only energy and work that were concentrated. Writing in the British social science journal New Society, Stan Cohen has pointed out that, with minor exceptions, prior to industrialism “the poor were kept at home or with relatives; criminals were fined, whipped or banished from one settlement to another; if they were poor, the insane were kept in their families, or supported by the community.” All these groups were, in short, dispersed throughout the community, instead of segregating them to one location, so they could go unnoticed and the community would remain functional and peaceful. Industrialism revolutionized the situation. The early nineteenth century, in fact, has been called the time of Great Incarcerations—when criminals were rounded up and concentrated in prisons, the mentally ill rounded up and concentrated in “lunatic asylums,” and children rounded up and concentrated in schools, exactly as workers were concentrated in factories. Concentration occurred also in capital flows, so that Second Wave civilization gave birth to the giant corporation and, beyond that, the trust or monopoly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
By the mid-1960s, the average cars costs about $2,752 $(23,518.24 in 2021 dollars), and a gallon of gas was around 31 cents ($2.65 in 2021 dollars). During this same time frame, the Big Three auto companies in the United States of America produced ninety-four percent of all American cars. In Germany five companies—Volkswagen, Daimler-Benz, Opel (GM), Ford-Werke, and Bayerische Motor Werke AG accounted for 91 percent of production. In France, Renault, Citroen, Simca, and Peugeot turned out virtually 100 percent. In Italy, Fiat alone built 90 percent of all autos. Similarly, in the United States of America 80 percent or more aluminum, beer, a tobacco cigarette, and breakfast foods were produced by four of five companies in each field. In Germany 92 percent of all the plasterboard and dyes, 98 percent of photo film, 91 percent of industrial sewing machines, were produced by four or fewer companies in each respective category. The list of highly concentrated industries goes on and on. Socialist managers were also convinced that concentration of production was “efficient.” Indeed, many Marxist ideologues in the capitalist countries welcomed the growing concentration of industry in capitalist countries as a necessary step along the way to the ultimate total concentration of industry under state auspices. Dr. Lenin spoke of the “conversion of all citizens into workers and employees of one’s huge “conversion of all citizens into workers and employees of one huge ‘syndicate’—the whole state. Half a century later the Russian economist Dr. N. Lelyukhina, writing in Voprosy Ekonomiki could report that “the USSR possesses the most concentrated industry in the World.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Whether in energy, population, work, education, or economic organization, the concentrative principle of Second Wave civilization ran deep—deeper, indeed, than any ideological differences between Moscow and the New World. With all this new commerce and the use of the automobile, the idea that government is somehow responsible for providing good roads is not a long-standing historical American belief. Prior to the Civil War, state governments and even localities sometimes became engaged in the building of turnpikes. However, this was most often done not so much as a statement of public policy but as a means of making money. Public corporations offered stock to investors on assumption that the roads would turn a handsome profit. In practice this hope was rarely realized. Even within the city itself the improvement of a street commonly would be done by the city, but at private expense. Property owners facing the street generally paid special tax assessments for street improvements. The assumption was that the owners would benefit from the paving both in conveniences and increased property values, and thus they should be assessed for the improvement. Only in the latter-nineteenth century did business leaders and middle-class city residents become increasingly vocal over the need for municipalities to assume the responsibility for the paving and maintenance of streets in the city. However, what finally tipped the scales in favour of paving in many communities was not the coming of the automobiles, but rather the widespread bicycle craze of the 1890s. Bicycle clubs and enthusiasts provided the extra pressure for well-paved municipal roads. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
By the turn of the century, most large municipalities were well along in replacing gravel, cobblestone, and brick streets with asphalt. Heavily traveled streets and new roads were often constructed with concrete. Beyond the city lines was another matter. Auto travel outside of the city was a major adventure. Roads varied from improved gravel to unimproved cowpath. No national road system existed, and prior to World War I, coast-to-coast auto trips received national newspaper coverage. Completion of such difficult coast-to-coast ordeals, which commonly took months, were used by automobile manufactures to advertise the reliability of their products. Following the first World War, the U.S. Army even sent a convoy of trucks coast to coast across the United States of America to highlight the need for a national road. One of the officers leading the convoy was the then-Captain Dwight Eisenhower, who viewed the publicity stunt as a chance to see the country. The 1919 trip from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco took the army convoy sixty-wo days. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower would sign into law the bill creating our present interstate highway system. In the 1920s, responding to increasing pressure from the motoring public and an effective political lobby of auto dealers, road builders, tire manufactures, and the like, the federal government gradually accepted major responsibility for maintaining roads between major cities. In 1916 the Federal Road Act had provided funds for state to organize higher departments. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The 1921 Federal Road Act got the federal government directly into the highway-building business. A Bureau of Public Roads was established to plan highways to all cities of 50,000 or more, and the federal government agreed to pay half the cost of highways designated as “primary roads.” This was the effective beginning of the national highway system. Some states, particularly the more prosperous ones outside the south, also established major road-building programs of their own. The best-known and most enduring of these state plans was that of New York. The regional planner Robert Moses built a series of landscaped, limited-access parkways radiating from New York City. The regional planner Robert Moses built a series of landscaped, limited-access parkways radiating from New York City north to Westchester Country and Connecticut and east into Long Island. The first of these parkways, designed t allow New Yorkers a pleasant means to escape the city, was the Bronx River Parkway. The parkways were deigned for pleasure driving rather than businesses, so trucks and busses were banned. To prevent anyone from later changing this purpose, Mr. Moses deliberately designed the parkways to have many overpasses too low for trucks to pass under. Although today the various parkways carry several times the traffic for which they were designed, these 1920s parkways are still the most attractive routes into or out of New York City. The period between World Wars also witnessed the construction of many new bridges and tunnels. For example, virtually all of Chicago’s current bridges linking its Loop and downtown with the north and west of the city were constructed during the 1920s. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
New York City dramatically improved its automobile access when the Holland Tunnel opened in 1927 and the George Washington Bridge opened four years later. Philadelphia’s Ben Franklin Bridge, opened in 1926, greatly simplified access to that city, while on the west coast a decade later the San Francisco Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge assured San Francisco’s continued development. The Golden Gate Bridge is today an internationally recognized symbol for San Francisco. The importance of the Bay Bridge to the economic activity of the city was dramatically emphasized in 1990 when the bridge had to be closed for months because of Earthquake damage. It is easy to forget just how dependent contemporary life is upon truck transport. Trucks in many ways did for goods what the automobile did for people. Unlike railroads, trucks were free of fixed routes and fixed schedules. Their use eliminated the necessity of being on a railway right-of-way. Trucks were far more flexible; they could make door-to-door pickups and deliveries. Motor truck deliveries were also much faster than rail for short hauls. Moreover, motor trucks had no need of elaborate terminal facilities on valuable inner-city land. Truck registrations more than tripled during the 1920s, from one to three and a half million. Although it was not recognized at the time, the breakaway from reliance on central-city rail-accessible factories had begun. As truck transport grew, a central-city rail-accessible factories had begun. As truck transport grew, a central-city plant location next to the railroad line became less of a necessity. Increasingly, the more important factor was easy access to an interstate highway. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
During the nineteenth and early-twentieth century period of industrialization, factories had located in an inner-city industrial belt surrounding the central business district. This had occurred largely out of necessity since raw materials and goods could not be transported without rail access. Steam-driven industrial plants also relied on the trains to being the coal that powered he factories. The cost of inner-city land and congestion of an inner-city location were seen as inevitable prices of doing business. However, while moving goods by horse drawn wagon was difficult and expensive in the city, it was impossible for intercity cartage. Prior to the 1920s, there was no alternative to the railroad. The technology of the truck changed this. Trucks could easily haul five to six times the weight a wagon could, and they could do it at ten times the speed. This mean an inner-city factory or warehouse location might no longer be a necessity. This widespread use of electric motors to replace steam generators also meant that the factory no longer needed to be dependent on coal delivered by rail for its power. Electric power lines could cleanly and efficiently accomplish what previously required large coal-fed steam generators. The 1920s and 1930s, however, did not see trucks replace rail as the major form of interurban transport. That would occur after the building of the publicly funded interstate highway system following World War II. The truck’s initial advantage was in the short haul. The 1937 report of the National Resources Committee showed that motor trucks had a lower costs per mile within the first 250 miles of the city. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Lower equipment and maintenance costs indicated that motor cartage was superior in cost and speed for the short haul. Rail transport, however, retained a major advantage in both cost and efficiency for longer-distance travel. The longer trip, the lower cost per mile for rail transport. Also, the motor trucks of the interwar years were not able to carry the largest or heaviest loads. Nor were the highways suitable for carrying large loads at high speeds. Finally, the railroads continued to benefit from the fact that existing industrial plants were located along rail lines and from the history of shipping goods by rail. The continuation of old patterns was not seriously challenged during the Depression of the 1930s, since few new plants were built either in the cities’ industrial zones or on more peripheral locations. Only the second World War, with its demand for huge war plants that could be located on open suburban land, would demonstrate the feasibility of locating new commercial plants in peripheral locations. Our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ have shown us by Their examples and teachings that work is important in Heaven and on Earth, and that is why transportation and home life are important to so many people. God created the Heavens and the Earth. He caused the seas to gather in one place and the dry land to appear. He caused grass, herbs, and trees to grow on the land. He created the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars. God created every living thing in the sea or on the land. Then He placed Adam and Eve on the Earth to take care of it and to have dominion over all living things. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The child’s mind is not simply that of a miniature adult. First, as parents, teachers, or Christian educators we may wish to be sensitive to children’s limitations. Hard as it is for the adult to appreciate, preschoolers may be forming mostly misconceptions—which must later be reversed—of the meaning of Bible stories that adults love to teach them. Young primary school children may be incapable of grasping the analogy on which the object lesson of the children’s sermon is based. When we try to pour gallon-sized concepts into pint-sized minds, we should not be surprised when our children come home and tell us about “Gladly, the cross eyed bear.” As children’s minds develop, so do their conceptions of God. They put away childish things such as their conceptions of Santa Clauslike deity—which may not be exactly what they were taught but rather what they thought they were taught. Some revert to alternative simplistic images of God and the World. “We try to domesticate God,” observes Madeleine L’Engle, “to make his might actions comprehensible to our finite minds.” Others will struggle—with the competing claims of various religions, with the problem of evil and the suffering of the innocent, with the clash between scientific findings and literal interpretations of biblical texts—and will reject their childish faith. If God’s thoughts and ways are higher than our own (as a jet flies higher than a bird), then God is to us as we are to the preschooler, only more so. Just as the preschooler cannot fathom adult logic, indeed is baffled by mysteries and paradoxes that are, perhaps, were simplicities to God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Our position before God is rather like that of the occupant of a two-dimensional flatland trying to understand our three-dimensional World, or like our trying to conceptualize a World with four dimensions. Try as we might, we can no more think our way through things that are to us ultimate riddles than a four-year-old can do calculus. If God is all-powerful and all-good, then why does evil exist? (It is the classic dilemma. Either God cannot abolish evil or He will not. If He cannot, He is not all-powerful; if He will not, He s not all-good.) However, we have to live peaceably with the mysteries of faith “For My thoughts are not your thoughts neither are your ways My ways,” says the Lord. “For as the Heavens are higher than the Earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts,” reports Isaiah 55.8-9. Also, try this one: If God is the sovereign Creator and sustainer of all history, what room is there for human freedom? If there is even an ounce of human freedom, enabling history to be deflected this way or that at different forks in the road, how can God be its sovereign Lord? If, on the other hand, God is ultimately in control of everything, even of our choices, how can we humans be deemed responsible? Such issues—called contradictions by nonbelievers and paradoxes by persons of faith—are indeed troubling, but less so once we realize that if God’s thoughts and ways were like our own, God would not be God, or else we would be gods, too. Imagine a dog caught in a trap or a child with a thorn in a finger. To assist either we must ask them to trust what their limited intelligence cannot comprehend: that moving the law father back into the trap is the way to get it out, that hurting the finger more may be the way to stop it hurting. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
We can only hope that, based on noting besides their confidence in us, the dog and the child will have faith. Sometimes, because of their unbelief, we can do no mighty works. Nevertheless, if human life is in fact ordered by a beneficent being whose knowledge of our real needs and of the way in which they can be satisfied infinitely exceeds our own, we must expect a priori that His operations will often appear to us far from beneficent and far from wise, and that it will be our highest prudence to give Him our confidence in spite of this. Make no mistake about what we are suggesting. We are not saying, “Give up the struggle, do not doubt, stop trying to turn childish beliefs into more mature ones.” The Old Testament heroes of faith were people who dared admit their bafflement, who even dared argue with God. To immediately shrug off every difficult question by saying that we cannot know God’s thoughts is not so much intellectual humility as it is a cop-out. Some baffling issues may be neither inherent contradictions nor paradoxes, but simple unresolved puzzles that will eventually yield to careful, patient analysis. However, if having pondered, searched, and struggled, we remain baffled, we can relax. To our finite minds some philosophical puzzles seem impenetrable. At such points, science may actually be an assistance to faith, both by reminding us of the immaturity of our cognition (on a divine scale) and by suggesting that irreconcbale concepts may, from our perspective, be an essential characteristic of nature. Light is a wave and light is a particle, the physicists tell us. “There are trivial truths and great truths,” said the physicist Niels Bohr. “The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
After grappling with the paradoxes and contradictions of faith we are left a frightful decision. The choice is between unbelief, which sees sheer madness the divine wisdom. To love with the mysteries of faith requires that we do not demand of God that we be able to comprehend His being. We must in the last analysis accept that as the Heavens are higher than the Earth or as a mature adult’s understanding is higher than a toddler’s, so God’s ways are higher than our own. It is good to be dumped on. How often? Occasionally. Why? It is a reminder. Of what? That this is not our World; that we are exiles somewhere between this World and the next. It is all right to hope, but not to put hope in this World. It is not so bad to be lied about. How often? Every now and then. Why? It is an experience. It draws us toward humility and shields us against vainglory. By and large we Devouts are virtuous gents. However, to be vilified in the marketplace, crucified in the monastery! That is what often happens, but who knows the real story? God knows. He is our witness. He will vouch for us when the Final Times comes. What happens when a person plants oneself firmly in Go? One learns one does not have to stay far for nourishment. What happens when that same person is tried and tested or besieged with bad thoughts? One comes to understand there is nothing without God, as John has written (15.5), and that one needs more. What happens when that person cries, groans, and puts to prayer all the miseries one suffers? It wears one down to the point that one desires death to come, that “one can be dissolved and be with Christ,” as Saint Paul wrote to the Philippians (1.23). #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
One or all these calamities will help the person of goodwill to take note. Perfect Security and Plentiful Peace—these commodities cannot be had, at least in this World. However, when we feel the great power of God, there will be a transformation rather than a loss. If humans live only wholly in beneficial harmonious feelings, if one consistently rejects all negative and destructive ones, the result must certainly be that one will enjoy better health in the body as one already enjoys the best in mind des have at the very leas a limited influence upon the body. This is proven by mental shock hastening the heartbeat; by worry acting on the nervous system and affecting the flow of secretions, thus contributing towards indigestion; by violent anger raising the blood pressure. Because fear liberates toxic poisons, the expression “died of fright” may be literally true. If one emotion brings a blush of blood to the face, another takes the blood away and leaves pallor. In the first case, it has led the minute arteries of the skin to expand; in the second case, it has led them to contract. If this is what a momentary state of mind can do to the body, imagine what a persistent state can do! Intense happiness felt on hearing some important good news will start a smile on the face. Intense anxiety wrinkles the forehead and depressed the mouth; if it becomes habitual and chronic, the bowels become constipated. These two facts about wholly opposite moods are known to nearly everyone, because the line of causality is straight, obvious, and universally witnessed. What is less known because harder to discern is the third fact that selfish inconsiderate stubbornness and constant hatred create the poison of uric acid in the bloodstream and his indirectly lead to rheumatism. What is first felt mentally is also most immediately reflected physically. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The Old World system lists the following inner causes of functional sickness: fear and untruthfulness weaken the kidneys; anger affects the liver; depression and worry affect the lungs; excessive joy affects the heart; overactive mentality affect the stomach; timidity, indecision, and cowardice affect the liver by producing insufficient bile. Consider the life of trees. Aside from the axe, what trees acquire from humans is inconsiderable. What humans may acquire from trees is immeasurable. From their mute forms there flow a poise, in silence; a lovely sound and motion in response to wind. What peace comes to those aware of the voice and bearing of trees! Trees do not scream for attention. A tree, a rock, has no pretence, only a real growth out of itself, in close communion with the universal spirit. A tree retains a deep serenity. It establishes in the Earth not only its root system but also those roots of its beauty and is unknown consciousness. Sometimes one may sense a glisten of that consciousness, and with such perspective, feel that humans are not necessarily the highest form of life. Thou didst choose us for Thy service from among all peoples, loving us and taking delight in us. Thou didst exalt us above all tongues by making us holy though Thy commandments. Thou hast drawn us near, O our King, unto Thy service and hast called us by Thy great and holy name. And Thou hast given us in love, O Lord our God, [Sabbaths for rest,] holidays for gladness, festivals and seasons for rejoicing. Thou hast granted us [this Sabbath day, and] this Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Season of our Freedom, this Feast of Weeks, the Season of the Giving of our Blessings, this Feast of Tabernacles, the Season of our Gladness, this Eighth Day Feast of Assembly, the Season of our Gladness, as a holy convocation, commemorating our liberation from shackles. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
Expertly designed, the kitchen at Brighton Station Res 1 almost glows with possibilities! The gleaming appliances and endless cabinets combine to make meal preparation a dream. Even if you’re not a chef, it’s a kitchen like this that will convert you!
This show-stopping home is the perfect place to gather with family and friends. Come and see why Cresleigh is America’s favourite! https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-1/
There is something oh so special about coming home. Something so special that people even write songs about it.
#CresleighHomes
#CresleighRanch
Father God, I am at Peace Today Because I Know You are in Control!
We should live our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon. God desires to dwell in the midst of His redeemed people on His own terms and His own grounds. That is, Divine holiness having dealt with human’s sinfulness. “As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. However, just as one who called you is holy, be holy in all you do; for it is written: ‘By holy, because I am holy,’” reports 1 Peter 1.14-15. The same giant wedge that split producer from consumer in Second Wave societies also split work into two kinds. This had an enormous impact on family life, gender roles, and on our inner live as individuals. One of he most common gender stereotypes in industrial society defines men as “objective” in orientation, and women as “subjective.” If there is a kernel of truth here, it probably lies not in some fixed biological reality but in the psychological effects of the invisible wedge. In Firs Wave societies most work was performed in the fields or in the home, with the entire household toiling together as an economic unit and with most production destined for consumption within the village or manor. Work life and home life were fused and intermingled. And since each village was largely self-sufficient, the success of the peasants in one place was not dependent upon what happened in another. Even within the production unit most workers performed a variety of tasks, swapping and shifting roles as demanded by the season, by sickness, or by choice. The preindustrial division of labour was very primitive. As a result, work in First Wave agricultural societies was characterize by low levels of interdependency. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
The Second Wave, washing across Britain, France, Germany, and other countries, shifted work from field and home to factory, and introduced a much higher level of interdependency. Work now demanded collective effort, division of labour, coordination, the integration of many different skills. Its success depended upon the carefully scheduled cooperative behaviour of thousands of far-flung people, many of whom never laid eyes on one another. The failure of a major steel mill or glass factory to deliver needed supplies to an auto plant could, under certain circumstances, send repercussions throughout a whole industry or regional economy. The collision of low- and high-interdependency work produced severe conflict over roles, responsibilities, and rewards. The early factory owners, for example, complained that their workers were irresponsible—that they cared little about the efficiency of the factory, that they went fishing when most needed, engaged in horseplay, or turned up drunk and could not pony up their rent money because they blew it at the tavern. In fact, most of the early industrial workers were rural folk who were accustomed to law interdependency, and had little or no understanding of their own role in the overall production process or of the failures, breakdowns, and malfunctions occasioned by their “irresponsibility.” Moreover, since most of them earned pitiful wages, they had little incentive to care. However, Mrs. Winchester, at the time, paid her workers triple the market rate, and provided them housing, not in the main mansion, but in other Victorian farm houses located on the original 768 acres she owned. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
In the clash between these two work systems, the new forms of work seemed to triumph. More and more production was transferred to the factory and office. The countryside was stripped of population. Millions of workers became part of high-interdependence networks. Second Wave work overshadowed the old backward form associated with the First Wave. This victory of interdependence over self-sufficiency, however, was never fully consummated. In one place the older form of work stubbornly held on. This place was the home. Each home remained a decentralized unit engaged in biological reproduction, in child-rearing, and in cultural transmission. If one family failed to reproduce, or did a poor job of rearing it children and preparing them for life in the work system, its failures did not necessarily endanger the accomplishment of those tasks by the family next door. Housework remained, in other words, a low-interdependency activity. The housewife continued, as always, to perform a set of crucial economic functions. She “produced.” However, she produced for Sector A—for the use of her own family—not for the market. As the husband, by and large, marched off to do the direct economic work, the wife generally stayed behind to do the indirect more advanced form of work; the woman was left behind to take care of the other, more backward form of work. He moved, as it were, into the future; she remained in the past. This division produced a split in personality and inner life. The public or collective nature of factory and office, the need for coordination and integration, brought with it an emphasis on objective analysis and objective relationships. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
Men, prepared from boyhood for their role in the shop, where they would move in a World of interdependencies, were encouraged to become “objective.” Women, prepared from birth for the tasks of reproduction, childrearing; and household drudgery, performed to a considerable degree in social isolation, were taught to be “subjective”—and were frequently regarded as incapable of the kind of rational, analytic thought that supposedly went with objectivity. Not surprisingly, women who did leave the relative isolation of the household to engage in interdependent production were often accused of having been defeminized, of having grown cold, tough, and—objective. Gender differences and gender role stereotypes, moreover, were sharpened by misleading indemnification of men with production and woman with consumption, even though men also consumed and women also produced. In short, while women were oppressed long before the Second Wave began to roll across the Earth, the modern “war of the roses” can be traced in large measure to the conflict between two work-styles, and beyond that to the divorce of production and consumption. The split economy deepened the gender split as well. What we have seen so far, therefore, is that once the invisible wedge was hammered into place, separating producer from consumer, a number of profound changes followed: A market had to be formed or expanded to connect the two; new political and social conflicts sprang up; new gender roles were defined. However, the split implied far more than this. It also meant that all Second Wave societies would have to operate in similar fashion—that they would have to meet certain basic requirements. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
Whether the object of production was profit or not, whether the “means of production” were public or private, whether the market was “free” or “planned,” whether the rhetoric was capitalist or socialist made no difference. So long as production was intended for exchange, instead of use, so long as it has to flow through the economic switchboard or market, certain Second Wave principles had to be followed. Once these principles are identified, the hidden dynamics of all industrial societies are laid bare. Moreover, we can anticipate how Second Wave people typically think. For these principles added up to the basic rules, the behaviour code book, of Second Wave civilization. It is difficult to fully understand the tremendous importance of the electric streetcar to the development of American suburbs. The electric streetcar literally changed the physical shape of metropolitan areas. It also contributed mightily to the modern residential pattern where one’s area of residence tells a great deal about one’s socioeconomic status. Electric streetcars permitted the construction of economically and socially homogenous suburbs. There had been numerous attempts to build an electric streetcar, but the first successful—that is, reliable—system was put into operation in Richmond, Virginia USA, in 1888. The system was designed by Frank Sprague, an inventor and electrical engineer who had earlier worked under Thomas Edison. Dr. Frank Sprague’s system was relatively straightforward. Electric current was transferred from an overhead line to the electric motor powering the wheels by means of a troller, or trolley, that was held against the overhead line by means of a spring. However, when Dr. Sprague signed the Richmond contract in 1887, much of the necessary equipment had yet to be designed, much less built and tested. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
Moreover, Dr. Sprague’s contract specified that unless he could build a fully working system within a year that was acceptable to the Richmond officials, they would pay nothing. Dr. Sprague assumed the full cost of designing and building the entire system. To the delight of the city fathers and mothers, the system worked as specified. Dr. Sprague’s design was clearly superior to any of the experimental systems that had been tested elsewhere and found unreliable. Dr. Sprague’s system proved to be both safe and reliable. Within a year twenty other cities had brought Dr. Sprague’s system and he was both a famous and rich man. Dr. Sprague’s new electric streetcars were adopted in city after city with remarkable speed. Horse-drawn car lines, which accounted for two-third of all streetcar lines in 1890, the remainder being mostly cable system, had virtually vanished a mere decades later. Seldom has any invention so completely replaced its predecessors in such a short period. Electric streetcars had clear advantage over the earlier cable and horse-drawn systems. Electric streetcars could average 15 miles per hour, which was a least double and sometimes triple the speed of its cable and horse-drawn competitors. Moreover, the trolleys had over three times the carrying capacity of the horse-drawn cars without any of the pollution. The electric systems also cost far less to build and operate than cable systems. By 1902 electric trolleys accounted for 97 percent of all streetcar milage, with 2 percent still operated by cable care lines and only 1 percent of horse cars. #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
The electric streetcars, which provided comparatively high-speed transit for a modest 5-cent fare, changed the way urban-area dwellers lived. There no longer was any necessity for middle-class families to live within walking distance of their place of work. Industrialization was making residence near one’s work less attractive, while the streetcar meant it was not possible for middle-class employees to live in suburbs (Municipal Statistic Areas) as far as 10 or even 12 miles from the central business district and commute both rapidly and inexpensively. Within a short period, new middle-class residential suburbs were being constructed along the right-of-way of the streetcar lines. The burgeoning streetcar suburbs made it possible for the middle class to live in new housing areas on the city’s fringe while still being able to commute within thirty minutes to downtown offices and even shop at downtown department stores. From 1890 to 1920, the streetcar dominated metropolitan transport. The very shape of the metropolitan area changed. Previously, outer growth had occurred more or less everywhere on the periphery where growth was not constrained by geography. The electric streetcar, by contrast, restricted growth to narrow, fingerlike development along the streetcar tracks. Real estate developers built homes paralleling the tracks, but only to a depth of a few blocks on either side. The interstitial areas remained undeveloped. The special configuration of the American city changed from that of a compact city to that of a star-shaped metropolitan area. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
The streetcar lines, which opened up outlying sites for development, often also made the existing city homes of the well to do and the upper-middle class living along major city thoroughfares less desirable. Living along an electric streetcar line was extremely noisy. Streetcars, in those days, made a great deal of clamour with squealing wheels and changing bells, and their constant passage created major noise pollution for those living in homes adjacent to the trolly line. On a hot summer’s night, with all the windows open, the jarring sound of screeching metal on metal made sleep difficult. Once-quiet residential streets became noisy streetcar lines. As a consequence, those who could afford to move o quieter and more sedate surroundings—usually further out. Because a location along the streetcar line was good for business, retail stores frequently opened stores in what were previously residences. A common pattern was for a storefront extension to be built out to the sidewalk on what was originally the front yard of a home. This pattern consisting of a shop in front with the original house behind can still be seen in many older cities today. Middle-class residents of turn-of-the-century streetcar suburbs also found that their new homes had practical advantages beyond that of fast transportation to the city. Sewer lines, water lines, and gas lines tended to be installed along the street right-of-way, while electric and telephone poles paralleled the tracks. This was comparatively inexpensive for the utilities (usually private companies) to do, since it did not involve ripping up already-paved streets. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
Suburbanites, being well-off, were also ideal customers from the business standpoint. Thus, outlying streetcar suburbs often received the services of the new utilities well before hey came to working-class areas of the city. Outer areas built at the turn of the century had from their time of construction “modern” advantages such as toilets and electricity. By contrast, some poor city neighbourhoods still had to use outhouses and light their homes with kerosene. At the time of World War I, three-quarters of American homes still did not have electric service. Even more important than the physical and quality-of-life differences between the city and the suburbs were the emerging social differences. Simply put, the suburban trolley lines allowed the upper-middle and middle class to move out. The technology of the steam railroad had allowed the well-to-do of earlier decades to separate their place of work from their place of residence. Now the technology of the streetcar allowed the middle class to do the same. The new suburban areas were almost exclusively middle class. The poor were excluded from the new subdivisions. Homogeneous economic and social communities replaced the more mixed pattern of the earlier walking city. Segregation of population as well as of land uses was becoming the norm. By providing the means for the middle class to move out of the city, the trolley provided a physical inheritance of housing type and distribution that we can still see throughout North America. Newer and more affluent homes on larger lots were built in outlying areas. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
As one would ride the streetcar from center to suburb, there would be a clear upgrading in the size and quality of residences. When traveling the old street car routes, even over a century later, the patterns can still be clearly through the cities of the east coast and middle west today. Many of what were new middle-class neighbourhoods at the turn of the century became residences of the metropolis’ working class and poor, but now they are becoming the neighbourhoods of the affluent due to expanding businesses and economic growth, and a lot of people are dying to get their hands on old building, Brownstones, Victorians and redevelop them or find land near the city to copy these designs. Essentially the pattern of an inverse relationship between the centrality of residence and socioeconomic status of those occupying the property reverted to its original target group. While the electric streetcar lines certainly did not invent social and economic exclusivity, the trolleys did facilitate the separation of the city into homogenous socioeconomic, ethnic, and racial enclaves. The suburbs, in addition to being heavily middle class, also differed in ethic composition from the central city. The turn of the century was the high tide of southern and eastern European immigration to the United States of America. Ellis Island received over a million immigrants a year during the first decade to the twentieth century. The industrial cities of the east and Midwest were the principal destinations of these Italian, Polish, Slavic, and Jewish immigrants. As of 1900, over three-quarters of the population of cities such as New York, Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago were listed by the Bureau of the Census as being of foreign stock. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
That is, the census listed the cities as being foreign because most of their population was born outside of the United States of America, or their parents were born outside of the United States of America. Suburbs, by contrast, were overwhelmingly WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant). The new suburbs allowed those who feared the menace of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” to escape to segregated neighbourhoods. Those who were uncomfortable living in a city teeming with foreign immigrants now had a convenient and comfortable alternative. Additionally, the suburbs offered middle-class WASPs the opportunity to remove themselves and their families from both the taxes and immigrant-dominated political machines of the city. Suburban enclaves were essentially homogeneous in social, economic, and ethnic composition. By the time of World War I, the pattern of a segregated urban area had become the norm. The poor and ethic working class lived in the central city, while the affluent and middle-class nonethnics increasingly commuted from out-city and suburban areas. However, in capital cities like Sacramento, California USA, some politicians built mansions near and around the state capitol so they could walk to work. Developers also created apartment buildings on N Street and a senator’s hotel on 15th street for political to live in. Were we to want to suppose a savage human as skilled in the art of thinking as our philosophers make one out to be; were we, following their example, to make one full-fledged philosophers, discovering by oneself the most subline truths, and, by chains of terribly abstract reasoning, forming for oneself maxims of justice and reason drawn from the love of order in general or from the known will of one’s Creator. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
In a word, we were to supposed there was in one’s mind as much intelligence and enlightenment as one needs, and is in fact found to have dullness and stupidity, what use would the species have for all that metaphysic, which could not be communicated and which would perish with the individual who would have invented it? What progress could the human race make, scattered in the woods among animals? And to what extent could humans mutually perfect and enlighten one another, when, with neither a fixed dwelling nor any need for one another, they would hardly encounter one another twice in their lives, without knowing or talking to one another. Let us consider how many ideas we owe to the use of speech; how much grammar trains and facilitates the operations of the mind. And let us think of the inconceivable difficulties and the infinite amount of time that the first invention of languages must have cost. Let us join their reflections to the preceding ones, and we will be in a position to judge how many thousands of centuries would have been necessary to develop successively in the human mind the operations of which it was capable. May I be permitted to consider for a moment the obstacles to the origin of languages. First of all, how could have languages become necessary; for since humans had no communication among themselves nor any need for it, I fail to see either the necessity of this invention or its possibility, if it were not indispensable. I might well say, as do many other, that languages were born in the domestic intercourse among fathers, mothers, and children. #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
However, aside from the fact that this would not resolve the difficulties, it would make the mistake of those who, reasoning about the state of nature, intrude into it ideas taken from society. They always see the family gathered in one and the same dwelling, with its members maintaining among themselves a union as intimate and permanent as exists among us, where so many common interests unite them. However, the fact of the matter is that in that primitive state, since nobody had houses or huts or property of any kind, each one bedded down in some random spot and often for only one night. Males and females came together fortuitously as a result of chance encounters, occasion, and desire, without there being any great need for words to express what they had to say to one another. They left one another with the same nonchalance. The mother at first nursed her children for her own need; then, with habit having endeared them to her, she later nourished the for their own need. Once they had the strength to look for their food, they did not hesitate to leave the mother herself. And since there was practically no other way of finding one another than not to lose sight of one another, they were soon at the point of not even recognizing one another. It should also be noted that, since the child had all one’s needs to explain and consequently more things to the mother than the mother to the child, it is the child who must make the greatest effort toward inventing a language, and that the language one uses should in large part be of one’s own making, which multiplies languages as many times as there are individuals to speak them. This tendency was abetted by a nomadic and vagabond life, which does not give any idiom time to gain a foothold. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
For claiming that the mother teaches her child the words one ought to use in asking her for this or that is a good way of showing how already formed languages are taught, but it does not tell us how languages are formed. Let us suppose this first difficulty has been overcome. Let us disregard for a moment the immense space that there must have been between the pure state of nature and the need for languages. And, on the supposition that they are necessary, let us inquire how they might have begun to be established. Here we come to a new difficulty, worse still than the preceding one. For if human needed speech in order to learn to think, they had a still greater need for knowing how to think in order to discover the art of speaking. And even if it were understood how vocal sounds had been taken for the conventional expression of our ideas, it would still remain for us to determine what could have been conventional expressions for ideas that, not having a sensible object, could not be indicated either by gesture or by voice. Thus we scarcely able to form tenable conjectures regarding the birth of this art of communicating thought and establishing intercourse between minds, a sublime art which is already quite far from its origin, but which the philosopher sill sees at so prodigious a distance from is perfection that there is no human so foolhardy as to claim that it will ever achieve it, even if the sequences of change that time necessarily brings were suspended in its favour, even if prejudices were to be barred from the academies or be silent before them, and even if they were able to occupy themselves with that thorny problem for whole centuries without interruption. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
Human’s first language, the most universal, the most energetic and the only language one needed before it was necessary to persuade humans assembled together, is the cry of nature. Since this cry was elicited only by a kind of instinct in pressing circumstances, to beg for help in great dangers, or for relief of violent ills, it was not used very much in the ordinary courses of life, where more moderate feelings prevail. When the ideas of human begin to spread and multiply, and closer communication was established among them, they sought more numerous signs and a more extensive language. They multiplied vocal inflections and combined them with gestures, which by their nature, are more expressive, and whose meaning is less dependent on a prior determination. They therefore signified visible and mobile objects by means of gestures, and audible ones by imitative sounds. However, since a gesture indicates hardly anything more than present or easily described objects and visible actions; since its use is not universal, because darkness or the interposition of a body renders it useless; and since it requires rather than stimulates attention, humans finally thought of replacing them with vocal articulations, which, while not having the same relationship to certain ideas, were better suited to represent all ideas as conventional signs. Such a substitution could only be made by a common consent and in a way rather difficult to practice for humans whose crude organs had as yet no exercise, and still more difficult to conceive in itself, since that unanimous agreement had to have had a motive, and speech appears to have been necessary in order to establish the use of speech. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
Research on the “theory of mind” began with David Premack and Guy Woodruff’s 1978 description of animals that understand the minds of other animals. Theory of mind refers to an animal’s (or a person’s) ability to respond not just to another’s behaviour but also according to what it assumes about the other’s beliefs and desires. As a species’ brain cortex volume increases, so does its ability to read minds—to infer others’ mental states—and even to deceive others and to invent tools. For example, the psychologists Andre Whiten and Richard Byrne repeatedly saw one young baboon pretending to have been attacked by another as a tactic to get its mother to drive the other baboon away from its food. When observing monkey-human similarities in abilities such as mind reading, it becomes tempting to say that humans are therefore “nothing but” complex primates, and to ignore the distinctiveness of the ethical, moral, and religious aspects of human though and behaviour. However, primate abilities, including primates’ mind-reading capacity, may get overplayed. Dr. Byrne notes: “It is tempting, but may be utterly wrong, to assume that an animal….has some idea of the effect its behaviour is having on the mind of another.” Actually, one warns, the explanation may be simpler: “Rapid learning in social circumstances, a good memory for individuals and their different characteristics, and some simple genetic tendencies are capable of explaining much that has impressed observers as intelligent in simian primates.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
Dr. Frans de Waal similarly cautions against exaggerated claims: “Even if animals other than ourselves act in ways tantamount to moral behaviour, their behaviour does not necessarily rest on deliberations of the kind we engage in. It is hard to believe that animals weigh their own interests against the rights of others, that they develop a view of the greater good of society or that they feel lifelong guilt about something they should not have done….To communicate intentions and feelings is one thing; and to clarify what is right, and why, and what is wrong, and why, is quite something else. Animals are no moral philosophers.” Despite the concern of some Christian about apparently narrowing gap between ourselves and nonhuman primates, we see no great issues at stake in this research. We welcome developments in evolutionary psychology. As Dr. Byrne and Dr. de Waal illustrate, scholars are often dismayed by the excited interpretations of their findings in the popular media. If Christians are more discerning, they will be able to glimpse fresh pointers to the Creator’s greatness in the wonders of creation. They will also be able to draw on the findings of evolutionary psychology as they exercise stewardship for the creation and compassion for humanity. Research on theory of mind, for example, has expanded our understanding of autistic children, who have difficulty in reading others’ minds and therefore in responding appropriately. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
When I think about London, I usually see a mental picture of Euston Street. However, when I think (as I do) that London has several million inhabitants, I do not mean that there are several million images of people contained in my image of Euston Station. Nor do I mean that several millions of real people live in the real Euston Station. In fact though I have the image while I am thinking about London, what I think or say is not about that image, and would be manifest nonsense if it were. It makes sense because it is not about my own mental pictures but about the real London, outside my imagination, of which no one can have an adequate mental picture at all. Or again, when we say that the Sun is ninety-odd million miles away, we understand perfectly clear what we mean by this number; we can divide and multiply it by other numbers and we can work out how long it would take to travel that distance at any given speed. However, this clear thinking is accompanied by imagining which is ludicrously false to what we know that the reality must be. To think, then, is one thing, and to imagine is another. What we think or say can be, and usually is, quite different from what we imagine or picture; and what we mean may be true when the mental images that accompany it are entirely false. It is, indeed, doubtful whether anyone except an extreme visualist who is also a trained artist ever has mental images which are particularly like the things one is thinking about. #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
In these examples the mental image is not only unlike the reality but is known to be unlike it, at least after a moment’s reflection. I know that London is not merely Euston Station. Let us now go on to a slightly different predicament. I once heard a lady tell her young daughter that you would die if you are too many tablets of aspirin. “But why?” asked the child, “it is not poisonous.” “How do you know it is not poisonous?” said the mother. “Because,” said the child, “when you crush an aspirin tablet you do not find horrid red things inside it.” Clearly, when this child though of poison she had a mental picture of Horrid Red Things, just as I have a picture of Euston when I think of London. The difference is that whereas I know my image to be very unlike the real London, the child through that poison was really red. To that extent she was mistaken. However, this does not mean that everything she thought or said about poison was necessarily nonsensical. She knew perfectly well that a poison was something which killed you or made you ill if you swallowed it; and she knew, to some extent, which of the substances in her mother’s house were poisonous. If a visitor to that house had been warned by the child, “Do not thin that. Mother says it is poison” he would have been ill advised to neglect the warning on the ground that “This child has a primitive idea of poison as Horrid Red Things, which my adult scientific knowledge has long since refuted.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
Thinking may be sound in certain respect where is it accompanied not only by false images but by false images mistake for true ones. What the Old Testament writers called the shekinah is a sacred and luminous appearance. More than a hundred years ago, Konko Daijin founded a new religion in Japan. Called Konkokyo, “the religion of the golden light,” it enjoined its followers to live in dependence on “the God of Heaven’s brightness.” One of the states of samadhi in Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism is called “Pure Light.” One of the Attained Ones in this religion is Amita, or Amitabha, the “Buddha of Boundlessly Diffused Light.” That there is actually a light emitted by the divine World of being is indicated by the following excerpt from, I believe, a Mahayana Buddhist: “There are four successive stages of piercing in reality, identical in sleep and dying. The first, ‘Revelation,’ is experienced in the earliest period of sleep, and appears as a moonlit cloudless sky. The drowsiness deepens and ‘Augmentation’ is reached. It appears as brilliant clear sunlight. Few can go beyond this into the third stage, ‘Immediate Attainment.’ Here there is total darkness. It vanishes when sleep gets deeper still; then the Void is penetrated, called ‘Innate Light,’ the first clear radiance. The student thus passes into Reality and Enlightenment, whether in the nightly death of sleep or the end of human life.” The Quakers believe that what they call the Inner Light is a supernatural thing. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26
Saint Brendan saw, while at ceremonial prayer in the presence of other celebrated ancient Irish holy men, a bright flame-like light rising above his head and continuing until the end of the ceremony. If God is to be seen, then it must happen in a Light, as God Himself is Light. LIGHT: The seventeenth-century Welsh poet Henry Vaughan expressed the same idea in his lines: I saw Eternity the other night, like a great Ring of pure and endless light. If the grains, fruits, cereals, and vegetables which we eat are themselves undernourished because the soil in which they grow is deficient in minerals or otherwise exhausted then we in turn will not really receive from our food the proper nourishment we believe it is giving nor will the cattle pastured on such depleted soil. Nor is this all If the foods derived from unbalanced soil are our mainstay for a lengthy period of years, the unbalance will be reflected in our body as some kind of sickness or malfunction. Wherever and whenever people are properly nourished and housed in safe and clean locations, as the rule, and not the rarity that it is today for a certain segment of the population, we may expect violence and crime to abate markedly. The change our to proper nourishment creates in some cases a feeling of bodily weakness. This will be limited to the transition period only, which may be a matter of days or months, depending on the individual. Such persons should make the changeover gradually. Many others have made the change quite abruptly without any fatigue or any hard. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
The person who is afraid to alter one’s living habits, and especially one’s eating and drinking habits, because one is afraid that other persons may regard one as queer, eccentric, or fanatic forgets that the ownership of one’s body, the responsibility for its well-being, belongs to one, not them. Theory left unapplied is only one-third of knowledge. A surgeon knew and taught that anger would raise the pressure of the blood and strain the heart in proportion to its severity. Yet it was anger that eventually killed him. The influence of body on mind is shown by the efficacy—in his case at least—of Socrates’ method of smiling at himself when counterattacking a negative emotion while it was ye in is slender beginning. There is a corrective purpose in the existence of disease. Any cure which removed the symptoms but fails to correct the inner mental or physical cause of them is merely a temporary expedient, not a real cure. It serves the ego’s present convenience. However, the future must necessarily be menaced by a reappearance of the same disease, or of a different one which will also express the cause. And this may happen either in the same lifetime or in the next. A disease whose origin is physical will not need more than a physical remedy to cure it. However, one of a physical, mental, or moral nature can be reached and overcome only by corresponding means. The long walk which might fatigue your strength and become difficult drudgery becomes easy and endurable if, at the dame time, your mind is deeply absorbed in concentration on some lofty matter. Why? Because you are not then thinking of your ego. Such is the power of mind over the body. #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
If one lives only and wholly in an optimistic harmonious feeling, if one consistently rejects all negative and destructive ones, the result must certainly be that ne will enjoy better health in the body as one already enjoys the best in mind. Shun the madding crowd. Turn a deaf ear to the histories of the World. Whether original works or just condensation, they crow out our knowledge of the World of the spirit. And the vanity in these volumes—a light dusting at first, but before you know it, it is snowing soot! Many is the time I wish I had not gone outside the walls. All I did was talk. I yammered and listened to the yammerings of others, but when it was time to return to the realm of silence, my ears were battered the colour of plum. Tittlers and tattlers I suppose we all are when it comes to our bruised hearts; talk helps, and someone needs to listen. However, why is it that jokes and japes are so good a relieving the stress, the depression? Well, it must be the magpies in us, and though I hesitate to say it, it is not so bad every now and then to give them voice to jabber and to chatter and to tell you what the matter is with you. These klatches outside the walls, they are such a pain! At best, in vain. At worst, inane. They are for exterior consolation only, for they clash with the very consolation that is interior and divine. Inside the walls we Devouts must watch and pray, as the Gospel of Matthew urges us (26.41), that none of our time is spent idly. However, if we have to speak and to have the permission, we should do so but only about bonda fide Edifables; St. Paul would have the Ephesians do just that (4.29). Otherwise, abuse of this rule in particular and negligence of our own spiritual progress in general will lead us to lose control of our tongue. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
Nevertheless, because you are in a religious community devoted to the Lord, conversational topics related to spiritual progress should come up from time to time. As Joseph and Oliver worked together on the translation of the golden plates, they learned many things. They were much interested in what was written about baptism for the remission of sins. They talked about it, studied about it from the Bible, and desired very much to be baptized as Christ taught in the golden book. One day they went into the woods to pray, asking God to explain baptism to them. It was a beautiful spring day, May 15, 1829. As they prayed near the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, an Angel came to them in a cloud of light saying he was John the Baptist of whom they had read in the New Testament. He said that he had been sent Saints Peter, James, and John, who has been apostles with Jesus when He lived on Earth. The Angel laid his hands upon them, saying, “Upon you, my fellow servants, in the name of Jesus, I confer the priesthood of Aaron, and his shall never again be taken from the Earth until the son of Levi do offer again an offering unto the Lord in righteousness.” The Angel explained that humans having the Aaronic priesthood may do much of the work in the church. He told them, however, that the Aaronic priesthood does not carry the authority for laving on of hands for the gift of the Holy Spirit. This power should be given to them later. Then he said, “God and be baptized.” Joseph and Oliver went into the water of the Susquehanna River. Joseph firs baptized Oliver, and then Oliver baptized Joseph. Then the Angel told them to ordain each other. As the two came out of the water they were so filled with the power of the Holy Spirit that they understood things they had been unable to understand previously, and many things were shown them about the Lord’s work which they were to do. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
It is a wonderful experience for these two young men to hear the voice of an Angel speaking the words of the Lord. With great joy they returned to their work of translating. They old some of the family and closest friends about this wonderful experience and what God was about to do. Samuel and Hyrum Smith, two of Joseph’s brothers, believed and were baptized. Hyrum, the older brother, was a quiet and gentle man who loved Joseph very much. He was very happy about the wonderful message of Jesus, and he wanted to go out at once to tell everyone about it. Though he understood little about the things he heard and saw, he wanted to preach to the World. However, it was not the right time for men to preach, for the work of translating the golden plates had not been finished, and no one fully understood the teaching of Christ. Jesus Christ spoke by revelation through Joseph telling Hyrum to wait a little longer, then he could preach. The words of the Lord to Hyrum were: “Behold, I say unto you, Keep my commandments, and seek to bring forth and established the cause of Zion. Seek not for riches, but for wisdom. Put thy trust in that Spirit which leadeth to do good; yea, to do justly, to walk humbly, to judge righteously; and this is my Spirit. I will impart unto you of my Spirit, which shall enlighten your mind, which shall fill your soul with joy. By this shall you know all things whatsoever you desire of me. You need not suppose that you are called to preach until you are called. Wait a little longer, until you shall have my word, my rock, my church, and my gospel, that you may know of a surety my doctrine. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
“Then, behold, according to your desires, yea, even according to your faith, shall it be done unto you. However, now hold your peace; study my word which has gone forth among the children of humans, and also study my word which shall come forth among the children of humans, or that which is now translating. Treasure up in your hearts until the time which is in my wisdom that you shall go forth.” With these instructions the men continued their study and work so they might bring to all people the wonderful message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Earth, adored with heights and gentle slopes and plains, bears plants and herbs of various healing powers. May she spread wide for us, afford us joy! On whom are ocean, river, and all waters, on whom have sprung up food and ploughman’s crops, on whom moves all that breaths and stirs aboard—Earth, may she grant to us the long first draught! Whatever I dig up of you, O Earth, may you have quick replenishment! O purifying One, may my thrust never reach right into your vital points, your heart! O Earth, O Mother, dispose my lot in gracious fashion that I may be at ease, and in harmony with your powers. God’s glory pervades the Universe; His ministering Angels inquire of one another: Where is the place of His glory? In response they give praise. Praised be the glory of the Lord from His Heavenly abode. From His Heavenly abode may He turn in mercy and bestow grace unto the people who, reciting in the Shema evening and morning, twice daily, proclaim in love the unity of His name, saying: Hear, O America: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. He is our God; He is our Father, our Sovereign and our Deliverer. In His mercy He will again make known in the presence of all the living that He will be your God. “I am the Lord your God. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
WE BUILD THE PLACES WHERE LIFE’S BEST MOMENTS CAN HAPPEN
Within each Cresleigh neighborhood, you’ll find new homes thoughtfully designed to suit the needs of any generation and any lifestyle, with energy efficiency and reliability at their core.
Every Cresleigh team member is passionate about building a new home that you can rely on and a new home that helps you to focus on what truly matters: creating memories with the people you love.
Welcome to the neighborhood. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-ranch/
Randolph Harris II International Institute 