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Despair is Not Only a Sin—It is Also Unwarranted!
Success is being able to go to bed at night with your soul at peace. In a time when terrorists play death-games with hostages, as currencies careen amid rumors of a third World War, as embassies flame and storm troopers lace up their boots in many lands, we stare in horror at the headlines. The price of gold—that sensitive barometer of fear—breaks all records. Banks tremble. Crypto currency rides its own bull market. Inflation rages out of control. And the governments of the World are reduced to paralysis or imbecility. Faced with all this, a massed chorus of Cassandra fills the air with doom-song. The proverbial human in the street says the World has “gone mad,” while the expert points to all the trends leading toward catastrophe. However, perhaps there is another view. Maybe it contents that the World has not swerved into lunacy, and that, beneath the clatter and jangle of seemingly senseless events there lies a startling and potentially hopeful pattern. We shall discuss a pattern of hope. The human story is far from ending, it has only just begun. A powerful tide is surging across much of the World today, creating a new, often bizarre, environment in which to work, play, marry, raise children, or retire. In this bewildering context, business people swim against highly erratic economic currents; politicians see their rating bob wildly up and down; universities, hospitals, and other institutions battle desperately against inflation. Value systems splinter and crash, while the lifeboats of family, church, and state are hurled madly about. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Looking at these violent changes, we can regard them as isolated evidences of instability, breakdown, and disaster. Yet, if we stand back for a longer view, several things become apparent that otherwise go unnoticed. To begin with, many of today’s changes are not independent of one another. Nor are they random. For example, the crack-up of the nuclear family, the global energy crisis, the spread of cults, cable television, music streaming, and video streaming, the rise of flextime and new friend-benefit packages, the emergence of separatist movements from Quebec to Corsica, may all seem like isolated events. Yet precisely the reverse is true. These and many other seemingly unrelated events or trends are interconnected. They are, in fact, parts of a much larger phenomenon: the death of industrialism and the rise of a new civilization. So long as we think of them as isolated changes and miss the larger significance, we cannot deign a coherent, effective response to them. As individuals, our personal decisions remain aimless or self-canceling. As government, we stumble from crisis to crash program, lurching into the future without plan, without hope, without vision. Lacking a systematic framework for understanding the clash of forces in today’s World, we are like a ship’s crew, trapped in a storm and trying to navigate between dangerous reefs without compass or chart. In a culture of warring specialisms, drowned in fragmented data and fine-toothed analysis, synthesis is not merely useful—it is crucial. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
There is an old civilization in which many of us grew up in and there is a new comprehensive civilization bursting into being in our midst. So profoundly revolutionary is the new civilization that it challenges all our old assumption. Old ways of thinking, old formulas, strict and rigid doctrines, and ideologies, no matter how cherished or how useful in the past, no longer fit the facts. The World that is fast emerging from the clash of new values and technologies, new geopolitical relationships, new life-styles and modes of communication, demands wholly new idea and analogies, classifications and concepts. We cannot crem the embryonic World of tomorrow into yesterday’s conventional cubbyholes. Now are the orthodox attitudes or moods appropriate. Thus, as the description of this strange new civilization unfolds in these pages, we will find reason to challenge the chic pessimism that is so prevalent today. Despair—salable and self-indulgent—has dominated the culture for a decade or more. Despair is not only a sin, but it is also unwarranted. I am under no Pollyannaish illusions. It is scarcely necessary today to elaborate on the real dangers facing us—from nuclear annihilation and ecological disaster to racial fanaticism or regional violence. War, economic debacle, large-scale technological disaster—any of these could alter future history in catastrophic ways. Nevertheless, as we explore the many new relationships spring up—between changing energy patterns and new forms of family life, or between advanced manufacturing methods and the self-help movement, to mention only a few—we suddenly discover that many of the very same conditions that produce today’s greatest perils also open fascinating new potentials. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
In the very midst of destruction and decay, we can now find striking evidences of birth and life. It shows clearly and, I think, indisputably, that—with intelligence and a modicum of luck—the emergent civilization can be made more sane, sensible, and sustainable, more decent and more democratic than any we have ever known. There are powerful reasons for long-range optimism, even if the transitional years immediately ahead are likely to be stormy and crisis-ridden. However, intelligent people understand that no one—historian or futurist, planner, astrologer, or evangelist—“knows” or can “know” the future. When I say something “will” happen, I assume the individual will make appropriate discount for uncertainty. To have done otherwise would have burdened people with an unnecessary jungle of reservation. Social forecasts, moreover, are never value-free or scientific, no matter how much computerized data they use. We are not an objective forecast, and make no pretense to being scientifically proven. This does not imply ideas that re whimsical or unsystematic. In fact, this work is based on massive evidence and on what might be called a semi-systematic model of civilization and our relationship to it. Even the most powerful metaphor, however, is capable of yielding only partial truth. No metaphor tells the whole story from all sides, and hence no vision of the present, let alone the future, can be complete or final. Many of us have answers that are only partial, one-sided, and obsolete. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
I can appreciate that the right question is usually more important than the right answer to the wrong question. The recognition that no knowledge can be complete, no metaphor entire, is itself humanizing. It counteracts fanaticism. It grants even to adversaries the possibility of partial truth, and to oneself the possibility of error. This possibility is especially present in large-scale synthesis. Yet, to ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding. In a time of exploding change—with personal lives being torn apart, the existing social order crumbling, and a fantastic new way of life emerging on the horizon—asking the very largest of questions about our future is not merely a matter of intellectual curiosity. It is a matter of survival. Whether we know it or not, most of us are already engaged in either resisting—or creating—the new civilization. A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind humans everywhere are trying to suppress it. This new civilization brings with it new family styles; changed ways of working, loving, and living; a new economy; new political conflicts; and beyond all this an altered consciousness as well. Pieces of this new civilization exist today. Millions are already attuning their lives to the rhythms of tomorrow. Others, terrified of the future, are engaged in a desperate, futile flight into the past and are trying to restore the dying World that gave them birth. The dawn of this new civilization is the single most explosive fact of our lifetimes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
This new civilization emerging is the central event—the key to understanding the years immediately ahead. It is an event as profound as the First Wave of change unleased ten thousand years ago by the invention of agriculture, or the earthshaking Second Wave of change touched off by the industrial revolution. We are the children of the next transformation, the Third Wave. We grope for words to describe the full power and reach of this extraordinary change. Some speak of a looming Space Age, Information Age, Electronic Era, or Global Village. We face a technetronic age. This is the post-industrial society. The scientific-technological revolution. However, none of these terms even begins to convey the full force, scope, and dynamism of the changes rushing towards us or of the pressures and conflicts that trigger. Humanity faces a quantum leap forward. It faces the deepest social upheaval and creative restructuring of all time. Without clearly recognizing it, we are engaged in building a remarkable new civilization from the ground up. This is the meaning of the Third Wave. Until now the human race has undergone two great waves of change, each one largely obliterating earlier cultures or civilizations and replacing them with ways of life inconceivable to those who came before. The First Wave of change—the agricultural revolution—took thousands of years to play itself out. The Second Wave—the rise of industrial civilization—took a mere three hundred years. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Today history is even more accelerative, and it is likely that the Third Wave will sweep across history and complete itself in few decades. We, who happen to share the planet at this explosive moment, will therefore feel the full impact of the Third Wave in our own lifetimes. Tearing our families part, rocking our economy, paralyzing our political systems, shattering our values, the Third Wave affects everyone. It challenges all the old power relationships, the privileges and prerogatives of the endangered elites of today, and provides the backdrop against which the key power struggles of tomorrow will be fought. Much in this emerging civilization contradicts the old traditional industrial civilization. It is, at one and the same time, highly technological and anti-industrial. The Third Wave brings with it a genuinely new way of life based on diversified, renewable energy sources; on methods of production that make most factory assembly lines obsolete; on new, non-nuclear families; on a novel institution that might be called the “electronic cottage”; and on radically changed schools and corporations of the future. The emergent civilization writes a new code of behaviour for us and carries us beyond standardization, synchronization, and centralization, beyond the concentration of energy, money, and power. This new civilization, as it challenges the old, will topple bureaucracies, reduce the role of the nation-state, and give rise to the semiautonomous economies in postimperialist World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
This new civilization requires governments that are simpler, more effective, yet more democratic than any we know today. It is a civilization with time, space, logic, and causality. Above all, as we shall see, the Third Wave civilization beings to heal the historic breach between producer and consumer, giving rise to the “prosumer” economics of tomorrow. For this reason, among many, it could—with some intelligent help from us—turn out to be the first truly humane civilization in recorded history. When more subtle inquiries and a more refined taste have reduced the art of pleasing to establish rules, a vile and deceitful uniformity reigns in our mores, and all minds seem to have been cast in the same mold. Without ceasing, politeness makes demands, propriety gives orders; without ceasing, common customs are followed, never one’s own lights. One no longer dares to see what one really is; and in this perpetual constraint, the humans who make up this herd we call society will, if placed in the same circumstances, do all the same things unless stronger motives deter them. Thus no one will ever really know those with whom one is dealing. Hence in order to know one’s friend, it would be necessary to wait for critical occasions, that is, to wait until it is too late, since it is for these very occasions that it would have been essential to know one. What a retinue of vices must attend this incertitude! No more sincere friendships, no more real esteem, no more well-founded confidence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Suspicions, offenses, fears, coldness, reserve, hatred, betrayal will unceasingly hide under that uniform and deceitful veil of politeness, under that much vaunted urbanity that we owe to the enlightenment of our century. The name of the master of the Universe will no longer be profaned with oaths; rather it will be insulted with blasphemies without our scrupulous ears being offended by them. No one will crudely wrong one’s enemy, but will skillfully slander one. National hatreds will die out, but so will love of country. Scorned ignorance will be replaced by a dangerous Pyrrhonism. Some excesses will be forbidden, some vices held in dishonour, but others will be adorned with the name of virtues. One must either have them or affect them. Let those who wish extoll the sobriety of the wise humans of the present. For my part, I see in it merely a refinement of intemperance as unworthy of my praise as their artful simplicity. Such is the purity that our mores have acquired. Thus have we become decent humans. It is for letters, the sciences among us, the perfection of our arts, the seemliness of our theatrical performances, civilized quality of our manners, the affability of our speech, our perpetual display of goodwill, and that tumultuous competition of humans of every age and circumstance who, from morning to night, seem intent on being obliging to one another; that foreigner, I say, would guess our mores to be exactly the opposite of what they are. #RandolphHrris 9 of 21
Where there is no effect, there is no cause to seek out. However, here the effect is certain, the depravation real, and our souls have become corrupted in proportion as our sciences and our arts have advanced toward perfection. Will it be said that this is a misfortune peculiar to our age? No, gentlemen and gentlewomen, the evils caused by our vain curiosity are as old as the World. The daily rise and fall of the ocean’s waters have no been more unvaryingly subjected to the star which provides us with light during the night, than has the fate of mores and integrity been to the progress of the sciences and the arts. Virtue has been seen taking flight in proportion as their light rose on our horizon, and the same phenomenon has bee observed in all times and in all places. Consider Egypt, that first school of the Universe, that climate so fertile beneath a brazen sky, that famous country from which Serositis departed long ago to conquer the World. She became the mother of philosophy and the fine arts, and son thereafter was conquered by Cambyses, then by Greek, Romans, Arabians, and finally Turkish people. Consider Greece, formerly populated by heroes who twice conquered Asia, once at Troy and once on their own home ground. Nascent letters had not yet brought corruption into the hearts of her inhabitants; but the progress of the arts, the dissolution of mores and the Macedonian’s yoke followed closely upon one another; and Greece, ever learned, even voluptuous, and ever the slave, experienced nothing in her revolutions but changes of masters. All the eloquence of Demosthenes could never revive a body which luxury and the arts had enervated. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
It is at the time of the likes of Ennius and Terence that Rome, founded by a shepherd and made famous by fieldworkers, began to degenerate. However, after the likes of Ovid, Catullus, Martial, and that crowd of obscene writers whose names alone offered modesty, Rome, formerly the temple of virtue, became the theater of crime, the disgrace of nations, and the plaything of barbarians. Finally, that capital of the World falls under the yoke which she had imposed on so many peoples, and the day of her fall was the eve of the day when one of her citizens was given the title Arbiter of Good Taste. What shall I say about that capita of the Eastern Empire, which, by virtue of its location, seemed destined to be the capital of the entire World, that refuge of the sciences and the arts banished from the rest of Europe—more perhaps out of wisdom than barbarism. All that is most shameful about debauchery and corruption; blackest in betrayals, assassinations, and poisons; most atrocious in the coexistence of every sort of crime: that is what constitutes the fabric of the history of Constantinople. That is the pure source whence radiates to us the enlightenment on which our century prides itself. However, why seek in remote times proofs of a truth for which we have existing evidence before our eyes? In Asia there is an immense country where acknowledgement in the field of letters leads to the highest offices of the state. If sciences purified mores, if they taught humans to shed their blood for their country, if they enliven their courage, the people of China should be wise, free and invincible. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
However, if there is not a single vice that does not have mastery over them; not a single crime that is unfamiliar to them; if neither the enlightenment of the ministers, not the alleged wisdom of the laws, nor the multitude of the inhabitants of that vast empire have been able to shield her from the yoke of the ignorant and coarse Tartar, what purpose has all her learned men served? What benefit has been derived form the honours bestowed upon them? Could it be to be peopled by slaves and wicked humans? Contrast these scenes with that of the more of the small number of peoples who, protect against this contagion of vain knowledge, have by their virtues brought about their own happiness and the model for other nations. Such were the first Persians, a singular nation in which virtue was learned just as sciences is among us, which subjugated Asia so easily, and which alone has enjoyed the distinction of having the history of its institutions taken for a philosophical novel. Such were the Scythians, about whom we have been left such magnificent praises. Such were the Germans, whose simplicity, innocence, and virtues a pen—weary of tracing the crimes and atrocities of an educated, opulent and voluptuous people—found relief in depicting. Such had been Rome herself in the times of her poverty and ignorance. Such, finally, has that rustic nation shown herself to this day—so vaunted for her courage which adversity could not overthrow, and for her faithfulness which example could not corrupt. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
It is not out of stupidity that these people have preferred other forms of exercise to those of the mind. They were not unaware of the fact that in other lands idle humans spent their lives debating about the sovereign good, about vice and about virtue; and that arrogant reasoners, bestowing on themselves the highest praises, grouped other peoples under the contemptuous name of barbarians. However, they considered their mores and learned to disdain their teaching. Will someone honestly tell me what opinion the Athenians themselves must have held regarding eloquence, when they were so fastidious about banning it from that upright tribunal whose judgments the gods themselves did not appeal? What did the Romans think of medicine, when they banished it from their republic? And when a remnant of humanity led the Spanish to forbid their lawyers to enter American, what idea must they have had of jurisprudence? Could it not be said that they believed that by this single act they had made reparation for all the evils they had brought upon those unfortunate Indians? Could I forget that it was in the very bosom of Greece that there was seen to rise that city as famous for her happy ignorance as for the wisdom of her laws, that republic of demi-gods rather than humans, so superior to humanity did their virtues seem? O Sparta! Eternal shame to a van doctrine! While the vices, led by the fine arts, intruded themselves together into Athens, while a tyrant there gathered so carefully the words of the prince of poets, you drove out from your walls the arts and artist, the sciences and scientists. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The event confirmed this difference. Athens became the abode of civility and good taste, the country of orators and philosophy. The elegance of her buildings paralleled that of the langue. Marble and canvas, animated by the hands of the most capable masters, were to be seen everywhere. From Athens came those astonishing works that will serve as models in every corrupt age. The picture of Lacedaemon is less brilliant. “There,” said the other peoples, “men are born virtuous, and the very air of the country seems to inspire virtue.” Nothing of her inhabitants is left to us except the memory of their heroic actions. Are such monuments worth less to us then the curious marbles that Athens has left us? Some wise humans, it is true, had resisted the general torrent and protected themselves from vice in the abode of the Muses. However, listen to the judgment that the first and unhappiest of them made of the learned humans and artists of their time. “I have,” he says, “examined the poets, and I view them as people whose talent makes an impression on the and on others who claim to be wise, who are taken to be such, and who are nothing of the sort. From poets,” continues Socrates, “I moved on to artists. No one knew less about the arts than I; no one was more convinced that artists possessed some especially fine secrets. Still, I perceived that their condition is no better than that of the poets, and that they are both labouring under the same prejudice. Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty, they view themselves as the wisest of humans. To my way of thinking, this presumption has completely tarnished knowledge. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
“From this it is follows that, as I put myself in the place of the oracle and ask myself whether I would prefer to be what I am or what they are, to know what they have learned or to know that I know nothing, I answered myself and God: I want to remain what I am. We do not know—neither the sophists, not the poets, not the orators, nor the artist, nor I—what is the true, the good, and the beautiful. But there is this difference between us: that although these people know nothing, they all believe they know something. I, however, if I know nothing, at least am not in doubt about it. Thus all that superiority in wisdom accorded me by the oracle, reduces to being convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know.” Here then is the wisest of humans in the judgment of the gods, and the most learned of Athenians in the opinion of all Greece, Socrates, speaking in praise of ignorance! Does anyone believe that, were he to be reborn among us, our learned humans and our artists would make one change one’s mind? No, gentlemen and gentlewomen, this just human would continue to hold our vain sciences in contempt. One would not assist in the enlargement of that mass of books which inundates us from every quarter; and the only precept one would leave is the one left to one’s disciples and to our descendants; the example and the memory of one’s virtue. Thus is it noble to teach humans! Socrates had begun in Athens, Cato the Elder continued in Rome to rail against those artful and subtle Greeks who seduced the virtue and enervated the courage of one’s fellow citizens. However, the sciences, the art, and dialectic prevailed once again. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Rome was filled with philosophers and orators; military discipline was neglected, agriculture scored, sects embraced, and the homeland forgotten. The sacred names of liberty, disinterestedness, obedience to the laws were replaced by the names of Epicurus, Zeno, Arcesilaus. “Ever since learned humans have begun to appear in our midst,” their own philosophers said, “good men have vanished.” Until then the Romans had been content to practice virtue; all was lost when they began to study it. O Fabricius! What would your great soul have thought, if, had it been your misfortune to be returned to life, you had seen the pompous countenance of that Rome saved by your arm and honoured more by your good name than by all her conquests? “Gods” you would have said, “what has become of those thatched roofs and those rustic hearths where moderation and virtue once dwelt? What fatal splendour has followed upon Roman simplicity? What is this strange speech? What are these effeminate mores? What is the meaning of these statues, these paintings, these buildings? Fools, what have you done? You, the masters of nations, have you made yourselves the slaves of the frivolous men you conquered? Do rhetoricians govern you? Was it to enrich architects, painters, sculptors, and actors that you soaked Greece and Asia with your blood? Are the spoils of Carthage the prey of a flute player? Romans make hastes to tear down these amphitheaters; shatter these marbles; burn these paintings; drive out these slaves who subjugate you and whose fatal arts corrupt you. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Let others achieve notoriety by vain talents; the only talent worthy of Rome is that of conquering the World and making virtue reign in it. When Cineas took our senate for an assembly of kings, he was dazzled neither by vain pomp nor by studied elegance. There he did not hear that frivolous eloquence, the focus of study and delight of futile men. What then did Cineas see that was so majestic? O citizens! He saw a sight which neither your riches nor all your arts could ever display; the most beautiful sight ever to have appeared under the Heavens, the assembly of two hundred virtuous men, worthy of commanding in Rome and of governing the Earth.” However, let us leap over the distance of place and time and see what has happened in our countries and before our eyes; or rather, let us set aside odious pictures that offend our delicate sensibilities, and spare ourselves the trouble of repeating the same things under different names. It was not in vain that I summoned the shade of Fabricius; and what did I make that great man say that I could not have placed in the mouth of Louis XII or Henry IV? Among us, it is true, Socrates would not have drunk the hemlock; but he would have drunk from a cup more bitter still: the insulting ridicule and scorn that are a hundred times worse than death. This is how luxury, dissolution and slavery have at all times been the punishment for the arrogant efforts that we have made to leave the happy ignorance where eternal wisdom had placed us. The heavy veil with which she had covered all her operations seemed to give us sufficient warning that she had not destined us for vain inquiries. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
However, is there even one of her lessons from which we have learned to profit, or which we have neglected with impunity? Peoples, know then once and for all that nature wanted to protect you from science just as a mother wrests a dangerous weapon from the hands of her child; that all the secret she hides from you are so many evils from which she is protecting you, and that the difficulty you find in teaching yourselves is not the least of her kindness. Humans are perverse; if they had had the misfortune of being born learned, they would be even worse. How humiliating ae these reflections for humanity! How mortified our pride mut be! What! could probity be the daughter of ignorance? Science and virtue incompatible? What consequences might not be drawn from these prejudices? However, to reconcile these apparent points of conflict, one need merely examine at close range the vanity and the emptiness of those proud titles which overpower us and which we so gratuitously bestow upon human knowledge. Let us then consider the sciences and the arts in themselves. Let us see what must result from their progress; and let us no longer hesitate to be in agreement on all the points where our reasoning will be found to be in accord with historical inductions. Reality is a multi-layered unity. I can perceive another person as an aggregation of atoms, an open biochemical system in interaction with the environment, a specimen of Homo sapiens, an object of beauty, someone whose needs deserve my respect and compassion, a brother for whom Christ died. All are true and all mysteriously coinhere in that one person. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Each of us is a complex system that is part of a larger social system, but also each of us is composed of smaller systems, such as our nervous system and body organs, which are composed of still smaller and smaller systems—cells, biochemicals, atoms, and so forth. Any given phenomenon, such as thinking, can be viewed from the perspective of almost any one of these systems—from social influences on thinking to biochemical influences. The variety of possible perspectives—or levels of analysis, as they are also called—requires that we choose which level we wish to operate from. Each level entails its own questions and its own methods. Each provides a valuable way of looking at behaviour, yet each by itself in incomplete. This each level complements the others; with all the perspectives we have a more complete view of our subject than any one perspective can provide. Take memory: neuropsychologist study the neural networks that store information and the function of particular brain regions for particular kinds of memory. Cognitive psychologists study memory in nonphysical terms, as a partly automatic and partly effortful process of encoding, storing, and retrieving information. Social psychologist study the effects of our moods and social experiences upon our recall. Psychologist working at each of these levels accept that even if their explanations were to become complete in their own terms, this would not invalidate or preempt the other levels of explanation. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The neuropsychological perspective, for example, is extremely valuable for certain purposes, but is not so valuable for understanding, say, social relations. However, an explanation that ay be exhaustive at any one level cannot claim to be a full and exclusive explanation of what is being studied. No scientist has a logical basis for insisting that scientific explanations provide grounds for denying the activity of God in sustaining His creation, or for disproving God’s existence. If is like viewing a masterpiece painting. If you stand right up against it you will understand better how the paint was applied, but you will miss completely the subject and impact of the painting as a whole. To say the paining is “nothing but,” or “reducible to” blobs of paint may at one level be true, but it misses the beauty and meaning that can seen if one steps back and views the painting as a whole. To consider a phone caller’s voice as reducible to electrical impulses on the phone line is extremely useful for some scientific purposes. However, if you view it as nothing more, you will miss its message. For the electrical engineer’s purposes, the message is irrelevant, much as God’s activity is, in one sense, superfluous to a scientific account of the mechanism by which God’s creation operates. Yet for the sorts of questions many agonize over—“Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not unto and destroy?”—we find the “God hypothesis,” the perspective of faith helpful. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Whatever conception of God a human may hold, one’s secret inner connection with God will disclose itself to one, whether in the pre- or post-mortem state, whether in the present or a future birth. This Revelation is one’s human right. The guarantee is that the World-Idea, which includes one too, must realize itself in the fullness of time in its irresistible and imperious course. One is bound to get the Glimpse for oneself and no longer depend on others’ say-so. Every day is a God, each day is a God, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each God, I praise each day splintered down, and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colours spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to lead us joyfully back to our land, and to establish us within its borders where our forefathers prepared the daily offerings and the additional Sabbath offerings, as is written in Thy Torah, through Moses, Thine inspired servant. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to lead us joyfully back to our land, and to establish us within its borders where our forefathers prepared the daily offerings and the additional offerings for the Sabbath day and for the New Moon, as it is written in Thy Torah through Moses, Thine inspired servant. 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 days, in remembrance of creation. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Seek the Virtuous Citizen Who Will Use the Social Contract to Make Virtue Reign!
We all wear masks, illusions of what we want people to see. But when we hide our true selves from the people we love, what price do we pay for that deception? In America if someone’s wife looks like a new woman, she probably is, so do not ask personal questions or talk about family. Noble acts and momentous events happen in the same way and produce the same impression as the ordinary facts. Significant intuitionist elements enter into determining the good, and in a teleological theory these are bound to affect the right. The classical utilitarian tries to avoid this consequence by the doctrine of hedonism, but to no avail. We cannot, however, stop here; we must find a constructive solution to the problem of choice which hedonism seeks to answer. Thus we are faced once again with the questions: if there is no single end that determines the appropriate pattern of aims, how is a rational plan of life actually to be identified? Now the answer to this question has already been given: a rational plan is one that would be chosen with deliberative rationality as defined by the full theory of the good. It remains to make sure that, within the context of a contract doctrine, this answer is perfectly satisfactory and that the problems which beset hedonism do not arise. A moral personality is characterized by two capacities: one for a conception of the good, the other for a sense of justice. When realized, the first is expressed by a rational plan of life, the second by a regulative desire to act upon certain principles of right. Thus a moral person is a subject with ends one has chosen, and one’s fundamental preference is for conditions that enable one to frame a mode of life that expressed one’s nature as a free and equal rational being as fully as circumstances permit. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Now the unity of the person is manifest in the coherence of one’s plan, this unity being founded on the higher-order desire to follow, in ways consistent with one’s sense of right and justice, the principles of rational choice. Of course, a person shapes one’s aims not all at once but only gradually; but in ways that justice allows, one is able to formulate and to follow a plan of life and thereby to fashion one’s own unity. The distinctive feature of a dominant-end conception is how it supposed the self’s unity is achieved. Thus in a hedonism the self becomes one by trying to maximize the sum of pleasurable experiences within its psychic boundaries. A rational self must establish its unity in this manner. Since pleasure is the dominant end, the individual is indifferent to all aspects of oneself, viewing one’s natural assets of mind and body, and even one’s natural inclinations and attachments, as so many materials for obtaining pleasant experiences. Moreover, it is not by aiming at pleasure as one’s pleasure but simply as pleasure that gives unity to the self. Whether it is one’s pleasure or that of others as well which is to be advanced raises a further matter that can be put aside so long as we are dealing with one person’s good. However, once we consider the problem of social choice, the utilitarian principle in its hedonistic form is perfectly natural. For if any one individual must order one’s deliberations by seeking the dominant end of pleasure and can secure one’s rational personhood in no other way, then it seems that a number of persons in their joint efforts should strive to order their collective actions by maximizing the pleasurable experiences of the group. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Thus just as one saint when alone is to work for the glory of God, so the members of an association of saints are to cooperate together to do whatever is necessary for the same end. The difference between the individual and the social case is that the resources of the self, its mental and physical capacities and its emotional sensibilities and desires, are placed in a different context. In both instances these materials are in the service of the dominant end. However, depending on the other agencies available to cooperate with them, it is the pleasure of the self or of the social group that is to be maximized. Further, if the same sorts of considerations that lead to hedonism as a theory of first-person choice are applied to the theory of right, the principle of utility seems quite plausible. For let us suppose first that happiness (defined in terms of agreeable feeling) is the sole good. Then, as even intuitionists concede, it is at least a prima facie principle of right to maximize happiness. If this principle is not alone regulative, there must be some other criterion such as distribution which is to be assigned some weight. However, by reference to what dominant end of social conduct are these standards to be balanced? Since this end must exist if judgments of right are to be reasoned and not arbitrary, the principle of utility appears to specify the required goal. No other principle has the features necessary to define the ultimate end of right conduct. I believe that it is essentially this reasoning that underlies Mill’s so-called proof of utility. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Mill’s seems to believe that if he can establish that happiness is the sole good, he has shown that the principle of utility is the criterion of right. What we are given is an argument to the effect that happiness alone is good. Now nothing so far follows about the conception of right, but we can set out all the premises in the light of which Mill thought his argument a proof. Now in justice as fairness a complete reversal of perspective is brought about by the priority of right and the Kantian interpretation. To see this we have only to recall the features of the original position and the nature of the principles that are chosen. The parties regard moral personality and not the capacity for pleasure and pain as the fundamental aspect of the self. They do not know what final aims persons have, and all dominant-end conceptions are rejected. Thus it would not occur to them to acknowledge the principle of utility in its hedonistic form. There is no more reason for the parties to agree to this criterion than to maximize any other particular objective. They think of themselves as beings who can and do choose their final ends (always plural in number). Just as one person is to decide upon one’s plan of life in the light of full information (no restrictions being imposed in this case), so a plurality of persons are to settle the terms of their cooperation in a situation that gives all fair representation as moral beings. The parties’ aim in the original position is to establish just and favourable conditions for each to fashion one’s own unity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Their fundamental interest in liberty and in the means to make fair use of it is the expression of their seeing themselves as primarily moral persons with an equal right to choose their mode of life. Thus they acknowledge the two principles of justice to be ranked in serial order as circumstances permit. We must now connect these remarks with the problem of the indeterminacy of choice with which we began. The main idea is that given the priority of right, the choice of our conception of the good is framed within definite limits. The principles of justice and their realization in social form define the bounds within which our deliberations take place. The essential unity of the self is already provided by the conception of right. Moreover, in a well-ordered society this unity is the same for all; everyone’s conception of the good as given by one’s rational plan is a subplan of the larger comprehensive plan that regulates the community as a social union of social unions. The many associations of varying sizes and aims, being adjusted to one another by the public conception of justice, simplify decision by offering definite ideals and forms of life that have been developed and tested by innumerable individuals, sometimes for generations. Thus in drawing up our plan of life we do not start de novo; we are not required to chose from countless possibilities without given structure of fixed contours. So while there is no algorithm for settling upon our good, no first-person procedure of choice, the priority of right and justice securely constrains these deliberations so that they become more manageable. Since the basic rights and liberties are already firmly established, our choices cannot distort our claims upon one another. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Now given the precedence of right and justice, the indeterminacy of the conception of the good is much less troublesome. In fact, the considerations that lead a theological theory to embrace the notion of a dominant end lose their force. First of all, the purely preferential elements in choice, while not eliminated, are nevertheless confined within the constraints of right already on hand. Since human’s claims on one another are not affected, the indeterminacy is relatively innocuous. Moreover, within the limits allowed by the principles of right, there need be no standard of correctness beyond that of deliberative rationality. If a person’s plan of life meets this criterion, and if one succeeds in carrying it out, and in doing so finds it worthwhile, there are no grounds for saying that it would have been better if one had done something else. We should not simply assume that our rational good is uniquely determined. From the standpoint of the theory of justice, this assumption is unnecessary. Secondly, we are not required to go beyond deliberative rationality in order to define a clear and workable conception of right. The principles of justice have a definite content and the argument supporting them uses only the thin account of the good and its list of primary goods. Once the conception of justice is established, the priority of rights guarantees the precedence of its principles. Thus the two considerations that make dominant-end conceptions attractive for teleological theories are both absent in the contract doctrine. Such is the effect of the reversal of justice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Earlier when introducing the Kantian interpretation of justice as fairness, I mentioned that there is a sense in which the unanimity condition on the principles of justice is suited to express even the nature of a single self. Offhand this suggestion seems to be paradoxical. How can the requirement of unanimity fail to be a constraint? One reason is that the veil of ignorance insures that everyone should reason in the same way and so the condition is satisfied as a matter of course. However, a deeper explanation lies in the fact that the contract doctrines has a structure opposite to that of a utilitarian theory. In the latter each person draws up one’s rational plan without hinderance under full information, and society then proceeds to maximize the aggregate fulfillment of the plans that results. In justice as fairness, on the other hand, all agree ahead of time upon the principles by which their claims on one another are to be settled. These principles are then given absolute precedence so that they regulate social institution without question and each frames one’s plans in conformity with them. Plans that happen to be out of line must be revised. Thus the prior collective agreement sets up from the first certain fundamental structural features common to everyone’s plan. The nature of the self as a free and equal more person is the same for all, and the similarity in basic form of rational plans expresses this fact. Moreover, as shown by the notion of society as a social union of social unions, the members of a community participate in one another’s nature: we appreciate what others do as things we might have done but which they do for us, and what we do is similarly done for them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Since the self is realized in the activities of many selves, relations of justice that conform to principles which would be assented to by all are best fitted to express the nature of each. Eventually then the requirements of a unanimous agreement connects up with the idea of human beings who as member of a social union seek the values of community. It may be thought that once the principles of justice are given precedence, then there is a dominant end that organizes our life after all. Yet this idea is based on a misunderstanding. To be sure the principles of justice are lexically prior to that of efficiency, and the first principle has precedence over the second. It follows that an ideal conception of the social order is set up which is to regulate the direction of change and the efforts of reform. However, it is the principles of individual duty and obligation that define the claim of this ideal upon persons and these do not make it all controlling. Furthermore, I have all along assumed that the proposed dominant end belongs to a teleological theory in which by definition the good is specified independently from the right. The role of this end is in part to make the conception of right reasonably precise. In justice as fairness there can be no dominant end in this sense, nor as we have seen is one needed for this purpose. Finally, the dominant end of a teleological theory is so defined that we can never finally achieve it and therefore the injunction to advance it always applies. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Recall here the earlier remarks as to why the principle of utility is not really suitable for a lexical ordering: the later criteria will never come into play, except in special cases to break ties. The principles of justice, on the other hand, represent more or less definite social aims and restrictions. Once we realize a certain structure of institutions, we are at liberty to determine and to pursue our good within the limits which its arrangements allow. In view of these reflections, the contrast between a teleological theory and the contact doctrine may be expressed in the following intuitive way: the former defines the good locally, for example, as a more or less homogeneous quality or attribute of experience, and regards it as an extensive magnitude which is to be maximized over some totality; whereas the latter moves in the opposite fashion by identifying a sequence of increasingly specific structural forms of right conduct each set within the preceding one, and in this manner working from a general framework for the whole to sharper and sharper determination of its parts. Hedonistic utilitarianism is the classical instance of the first procedure and illustrates it with compelling simplicity. Justice as fairness exemplifies the second possibility. Thus the four-stage sequence formulates an order of agreements and enactments designed to build up in several steps a hierarchical structure of principles, standards, and rules, which when consistently applied and adhered to, lead to a definite constitution for social action. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Now this sequence does not aim at the complete specification of conduct. Rather the idea is to approximate the boundaries, however vague, within which individuals and associations are at liberty to advance their aims and deliberative rationality has free play. Ideally the approximation should converge in the sense that with further steps the cases left unaccounted for become of less and less importance. The notion guiding the entire construction is that of the original positions and its Kantian interpretation: this notion contains within itself the elements that select which information is relevant at each stage, and generate a sequence of adjustments appropriate to the contingent conditions of the existing society. Recalling one phrase or sentence, readers often project their own wishes and anxieties into the text before them and find in it what they had placed there. One must study society through humans, and humans through society: those who will treat politic and ethics separately will never understand either. Humans are naturally good and it is by their institutions alone that they become evil. The modern World rests on contradictions that already emerged. Many Americas believe themselves to be free. They are greatly mistake; they are only free during the election of the members of Congress. Once they are elected, the populace is enslaved; it is nothing. The use of the American people makes of that freedom in the brief moments of its liberty certainly warrants its losing it. The best of good societies will always be a republic unfettered by a hereditary aristocracy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Ceaselessly occupied with Rome and Athens; living, so to speak, with their great men, myself born a Citizen of a Republic, and son of a father whose patriotism was his strongest passion, I took fire from his example; I thought myself Greek or Roman; I became the personage whose life I was reading. A beneficent God has created this World with its laws and then withdrawn from it to leave virtuous humans to discover its moral rules and live according to its dictates. We must respond to the Christian theology, its moral energy, its gospel of usefulness and simplicity, its call for self-discipline and virtue, and its austerity. To be celebrated are the virtues of candour, maturity, simplicity, self-restraint, good health, reason warmed by love and love ennobled by reason. We must be kind to the young and old. It is kindness with a purpose. Children have to be educated in obedience to the Stoical doctrine that humans must live in accord with nature. The consequences of applying this maximum to the training of the young are far-reaching: the child may be father to the man, but he is the child first. The educator must closely consult the child’s capacities and use them to help one grow. Rote learning and forced reading may be nonsensical: they may only produce a child who is a parrot, not a human. However, it is better than nothing and may be the way to awaken the capacity of the human being. Only the educator who enters empathetically into the nature of the growing child’s development and the range of one’s experience can lastingly enrich one. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
The immoral society of today is making immoral humans, incapable of reforming a culture in whose corruption they cannot help but connive. Hence they are compelled to perpetuate that which they should destroy. The one way to break this impasse is to create a new human who can, in turn, create a new society. It is an essential precondition for this work that the young must be rapidly remove from corrupting influences. If humans are born free and everywhere in chains, who but God can do the work of liberation? Once the community of sanity has been formed, it will govern itself calmly, wisely, and generously. The key element in the citizen’s activity is one’s participation in decision-making, and as a sound citizens one will cast one’s vote by listening not to one’s own selfish interests, but to one’s perception of the public weal. Of course, with the best of intentions, one may confound the two. However, then the decision of the majority—not just any majority, but the intelligent, sensible, uncorrupted majority will recall the straying minority to its duty, to it true, larger interest. The closer private will, approximate the general will, the more likely can that will realize itself in actions. We must seek the virtuous citizen, who will use the Social Contract to make virtue reign. The question for the individual has always been: Why, and whom, should I obey? It is not simply a political question or, rather, the political question is a familial question writ large. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
The question of whom should one obey is a question the child may never consciously ask, but it is lodged somewhere in one’s mind. It is a question that the slave, or the subject wholly habituated to unconditional obedience, may never seriously canvass, but it will occur to one in rebellious moments. Freedom must be given as much scope that seems reasonable. Then we can attempt to establish the respective rights of the sovereign and the citizen. However, this tension is not as a relation to be mapped, but as a paradox to be resolved. By employing the Social Contract, humans surrender all their rights without becoming slaves. To find a form of association which defends and protects with the whole common power the person and property of each associate, and in which each, uniting oneself to all, yet obeys oneself alone, and remains as free as before. We must recognize one principle that humans are good. And they can afford to exchange their natural for their civic freedom, to translate their original goodness into social action. I do not condemn all organized society, and I believe that there is one society, one yet to be constructed, that is infinitely preferable to pre-political conditions. Humans can surrender their natural freedom because, while they become subjects, they remain masters. In the god community one essentially obeys oneself. The Social Contract is certainly not without its difficulties. However, the state is never the master, always the servant. For the body to which the individual yields one’s natural rights is not the government but society—a community of beings like oneself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Force does not create rights. However, the government holds the monopoly of force, and therefore is always an agent of the citizens to protect it. Although freedom is advocated, the United States of America is a country that was founded on the belief of God, and God is also a part of our government. And while we do preach religious freedom, must like restaurants do not always require people to tip, it is suggested that humans—all humans must have some religious beliefs that will make, and keep, them moral beings. This means that the sovereign of the good society must devise a purely civil profession of faith, the articles of which it belongs to the sovereign to establish, not exactly as dogmas of religion, but as sentiments of sociability, without which it is impossible to be a good citizen or faithful subject. The strict and rigid doctrines should be simple and few in number, including belief in the existence of a powerful, intelligent, beneficent deity, a life to come, the good fortune of the just and the punishment of the wicked, the sacredness of the social contract and of the laws. Whoever does not believe these strict and rigid doctrines can be banished from the state, and whoever has officially subscribed to them and then acts as if one does not believe in them should be put to death. This harsh set of propositions is not a casual or accidental addition to political thinking; it lies squarely at the heart of our commitment o virtue. The dictatorship of virtue is a strenuous and, in many ways, a dangerous ideal. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Has the reestablishment of the sciences and the arts served to purify or to corrupt manner and morals? As a searing emotional upheaval—this is one of the great and finest questions ever debated. There will always be humans destined to be subjugated by the opinions of their century, their country, their society. Integrity is dearer to good humans than erudition is to the studious. What then have I to fear? The enlightenment of the assembly that listen to me? I admit it; but this is owning to the composition of the discourse and not to the sentiment of the speaker. Fairminded sovereigns have never hesitated to pass judgements against themselves in disputes whose outcomes are uncertain; and the position most advantageous for a just cause is to have to defend oneself against an upright and enlightened opponent who is judge in one’s own case. To this motive which heartens me is joined another which determines me, namely that, having upheld, according to my natural light, the side of truth, whatever my success, there is a prize which I cannot fail to receive; I will find it within the depths of my heart. It is a grand and beautiful sight to see humans emerge somehow from nothing by their own efforts; dissipate, by the light of one’s reason, the shadows in which nature has enveloped one; rise above oneself; soar by means of one’s mind into the Heavenly regions; traverse, like the sun, the vast expanse of the Universe with giant steps; and, what is even grander and more difficult, return to oneself in order to study humans and know one’s nature, one’s duties, and one’s end. All of these marvels have been revived in the past few generations. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
America has relapsed into the barbarism of the first ages. Recently, many of the peoples of this part of the World, who had lived such enlightened lives, now live in a state worse than ignorance. Sone nondescript scientific jargon, even more contemptible than ignorance, has usurped the name of knowledge, and posed a nearly invincible obstacle to its return. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton is a 19th century story of Lily Bart, a wealthy woman who becomes impoverished, but still belongs to New York’s high society. It is a cautionary tale to be careful with your economics and with whom you love, and also maybe not to be so trusting of your family because in the end you will end up financially ruined, and die from a broken heart by death by suicide. Your prince charming, Lawrence Selden, may not come around and realizes he love you until he finds your lifeless body cold. Simon Rosedale, one who is well-off and wants you for your beauty, may never be enough, and Gus Trenor may help you pay off your “dress maker,” but he will always want to talk under your skirt and is a married man. Sometimes it is just be to be prudent and not live too lavishly, establish your own career and maybe do not set your sites on the wrong partner. Someone who can never love you until it is too late. A revolution is needed to bring humans back to common sense. The art of writing must be joined with the art of thinking—a sequence of events that may seem strange, but which perhaps are only too natural. And the chief advantage of commerce with Muses will being to be felt, namely, that of making humans more sociable by inspiring in them the desire to please one another with works worthy of their mutual approval. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
It should not have taken the fall of the throne of Constantinople to bring Italy the debris of ancient Greece. However, if you are not careful, the failure of Congress and the President to protect the American people and their rights will bring China and the Middles East the debris of America. The Whore of Babylon, refers to both a symbolic female figure and place of evil mentioned in the Book of Revelation. “One of the seven Angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, ‘Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits on many waters. With her the kinds of the Earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries.’ Then the Angel caried me away in the Spirit into a desert. There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones, and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. This title was written on her forehead: MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus. When I saw her, I was greatly astonished. Then the Angel said to me: ‘Why are you astonished? I will explain to you the mystery of the woman and the beast she rides, which you saw, once was, now is not, and will come up out of the Abyss and go to his destruction. The inhabitants of the Earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the World will be astonished when they see the beast, because he once was, not is not, and yet will come. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
“‘This calls for a mind with wisdom. The seven heads are seven hills on which the woman sits. They are also seven kinds. Five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; but when he does come, he must remain for a little while. The beast who once was, and now is not, is an eight kind. He belongs to the seven and is going to his destruction. The ten horns you saw are ten kinds who have not yet received a kingdom, but who one hour will receive authority as kings along with the beast. They have one purpose and will give their power and authority to the beast. They will make war against the Lamb, but the Lamb will overcome them because he is Lord of lords and King of kings—and with him will be his called, chosen and faithful follows.’ Then the Angel said to me, “The waters you saw, were the prostitute its, are peoples, multitudes, nations and languages. The beast and the ten horns you saw will hate the prostitute. They will bring her to ruin and leave her naked; they will eat her flesh and burn her with fire. For God has put it into their hearts to accomplish Hi purpose by agreeing to give the best their power to rule, until God’s words are fulfilled. The woman you saw is the great city that rules over the king of the Earth,” reports Revelation 17.1-18. I think the prostitute represent the fake news media dragging the nations of the World into a third World war, for the sake of their ratings and profits and entertainment, and them even making war against Jesus Christ, and the media taking over the government. However, when people wake up and see what a disaster the media has created, they will destroy them and God will take over. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
The reason the media has never been so powerful in the past is because people were proud to be American and voted people in office they thought would do a good job, and not just because of their gender, race, culture, religion, colour, sexual orientation, or celebrity status. The American people trusted the government and they viewed their loyalty to America as sacred as religion. However, today, people want you to be ashamed to be America, they want to put Communists in office and not Patriots, they want to strip you of your rights and guns, so they can lock you in your homes and turn you into slaves, while they tax you, make you poor and give billions of your tax dollars to other nations to make them rich. These communist also want to keep your nation insecure, start race wars and riots, and turn American against Americans and take away your rights to privacy and property. However, be sure to pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, One Nation, Under God, with Liberty and Justice for All! Be proud to be American. Be proud to display your American flag. Love thy Neighbour. And Praise God. The mind has its needs, as does the body. The needs of the latter are the foundations of society; the need of the former make it pleasant. While the government and the laws see to the safety and well-being of assembled people, the sciences, letters and the arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which they are burdened, stifle in them the sense of that original liberty for which they seem to have been born, make them love their slavery, and turn them into what is called civilized people. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Need raised up thrones; the sciences and the arts have strengthened them. Earthly powers, love talents and protect those who cultivate them! Princes always view with pleasure the spread, among their subjects, of the tastes for pleasant arts and luxuries not resulting in the exporting of money. For, in addition to nurturing in them that pettiness of soul so appropriate to servitude, they know very well that all the needs the populace imposes on itself are so many chains which burden it. Alexander, wishing to keep the Ichthyophagi in a state of dependency, forced them to renounce fishing and to eat foods common to other peoples. And the natives of America who go totally in innocence and live off the fruit of their hunting have never been tamed. Indeed, what yoke could be imposed upon humans who need nothing? Civilized peoples, cultivate them! Happy slaves, you owe them that delicate and refined tastes on which your pride yourselves; that sweetness of character and that urbanity in mores which makes relationships among you so cordial and easy; in a word, the appearances of all the virtues without having any. By this sort of civility, all the more agreeable as it puts on fewer airs, Athens and Rome once distinguished themselves in themselves in the much vaunted days of their magnificence and splendour. By it our century and our nation will doubtlessly surpass all times and all peoples. A philosophic tone without pedantry, manners natural yet engaging, equally removed from Teutonic rusticity as from Italian pantomime. These are the fruits of the taste acquired by good schooling and perfected in social interaction. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
If outer appearances were always the likeness of the heart’s dispositions, if decency were virtue, if our maxims served as our rules, if true philosophy were inseparable from the title of philosopher, how sweet it would be to life among us! However, so many qualities are all too rarely found in combination, and virtue seldom goes forth in such great pomp. Expensive finery can betoken a wealth man, and elegance a man of taste. The healthy and robust human is recognized by other signs. It is in the rustic clothing of the fieldworker and not underneath the gilding of the courtier that one will find bodily strength and vigour of the soul. The good human is an athlete who enjoys competing in innocence. One is contemptuous of all those vile ornaments which would impair the use of one’s strength, most of al which were invented merely to conceal some deformity. Before art had fashioned our manners and taught our passions to speak an affected language, our mores were rustic but natural, and differences in behavior heralded, at first glance, difference of character. At base, human nature was no better, but humans found their safety in the ease with which they saw through each other, and that advantage, which we no longer vale, spared them many vices. You may not have the most of everything but you can make the best of everything! God cannot bless ignorance—He blesses by spiritual intelligence. What you do not know can be harmful to you. God is present in each person’s life and this may seem unbelievable to so large a number of us. Yet it is for those of undergoing the experience certitude, not theory. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
God is the ultimate healer of all our hurts! If we keep trying to get other humans to fix us and make us fully human or angelic—we will remain broken. Stop limiting yourself to getting blessed and believe you have been blessed. These glimpses into eternity are rare, but they are more common and frequent than is generally supposed. It is generally believed that hardly more than a few attain it, but as there are degrees of such an attainment one could say that in the lesser ones there are more successes than people generally know. We call upon the spirits of evolution, the miraculous force that inspires rock and dust to weave themselves into biology. You have stood by us for millions and billions of years—do not forsake us now. Empower us and awaken in us pure and dazzling creativity. You that can turn scales into feathers, sweater into blood, electricity into Cryptocurrency, caterpillars to butterflies, metamorphose our species, awaken in us the power that we need to survive the present crisis and evolve into more aeons of our solar journey. Awaken in us a sense of who we truly are: tiny ephemeral blossoms on the Tree of Life. Make the purposes and destiny of that three our own purpose and destiny. Fill each of us with love for our true Self, which includes all of the creature and plants and landscapes of the World. Fill us with a powerful urge for the wellbeing and continual unfolding of this Self. May we speak in all human councils on behalf of the terrestrial beings and plants and landscapes of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
May we shine with a pure inner passion that will spread rapidly through these leaden times. May we all awaken to our true and only nature—none other than the Nature of Gaia, this living planet Earth. We call upon the power which sustains the planets in their orbits, that wheels our Milky Way in its 200-million-year spiral, to imbue our personalities and our relationships with harmony, endurance and joy. Please fill us with a sense of immense time so that our brief, flickering lives may truly reflect the work of vast ages past and also the millions of years of evolution whose potential lies in our trebling hands. O stars, lend us your burning passion. O silence, give weight to our voice. We ask for the presence of the spirit of Gaia. Unto all generations we will declare God’s greatness, and to all eternity we will proclaim Thy holiness. Our mouth shall ever speak Thy praise, O our God, for Thou art a great and holy God and King. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the holy God. (the holy King). Our God and God of our fathers, may there come before Thee the remembrance of our ancestors as they appeared in Thy sacred Temple in the days of yore. How deep was their love of Thee as they brought Thee their offerings each Sabbath day. We pray Thee, please grant us of the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord that lived in their hearts. 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 be a blessing to all the peoples and beings and lifeforms of the Earth. There is a moment in most human’s lives when they are close to an understanding of the World’s real nature. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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The Source of those Accusations Was a Committee of Demons Who Had Infested Her!
The infinite power of God to create is far beyond what we can grasp or understand. If the Almighty devoted so much of His Word to prophecy, it certainly benefits every believer to study it. The study of the prophetic scriptures and their fulfillment attests to the authority of the Word of God. Every soul has cost an infinite price, and how terrible is the sin of turning one soul away from Christ, so that for Him the Saviour’s love and humiliation and agony shall have been in vain. Contrary to popular opinion, New England’s record in regard to witchcraft is surprisingly good, as Governor Thomas Hutchinson pointed out in 1750: “more having been put to death in a single country in England from the first settlement until the present time.” Through most of the seventeenth century the record is really astonishing. While Europe hanged and burned literally thousands, executions in New England were few and far between. (Witches were burned on the Continent and in Scotland, where witchcraft was a heresy, but hanged in England and in New England, where it was a felony. Burning a witch seems not to have been motivated by the wish to inflict a particularly painful death; Scottish witches, for instance, were first garroted by the executioner, who then proceeded to burn the corpse and scatter its ashes. Most probably, burning was an attempt to prevent the resurrection of the body.) There are some fascinating accounts in New England that deal with cases of witchcraft before 1692, and we shall look at a few of these for they will illuminate some interesting aspects of the Salem witch trials. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
The first is that of Mrs. Anne Hibbins. Her husband, who died in 1654, had been a man of importance: Boston merchant, a Colonial Agent, and for several years one of the Assistants. Tradition has it that she was a sister of Governor Bellingham. She was apparently quarrelsome—quarrelsome enough so that her church censured her for it—and one quarrel was her undoing. She seems to have come upon two of her neighbours talking, to have told them she knew they were talking about her, and then to have reconstructed their conversation with enough fidelity to convince the she was possessed of “preternatural” knowledge (something Mrs. Sarah Winchester used to also have the ability to do, and a reason she dismissed so many staff members for gossiping). Nonetheless, Mrs. Hibbins was brought to trail in 1655, and the jury brought her in guilty. However, the presiding magistrates refused to accept the verdict, apparently believing her innocent, and their refusal automatically threw the case into the General Court. There again she was found guilty; the governor pronounced the required sentence of death; and in 1656 she was executed. We have seen that some of the magistrates were not satisfied of her guilt, and apparently the same were true of some of the clergy. To masses of people, death was a dread mystery; beyond was uncertainty and gloom. These people were seeking for truth, and to learn them the Spirit of Inspiration was imparted. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
A surviving letter tells us that the Reverend John Norton “once said at his own table” before the Reverend John Wilson and others that Mistress Hibbins “was hanged for a witch only for having more with than her neighbours. It was his very expression; she having, as he explained it, unhappily guessed that two of her persecutors, whom she saw talking in the street, were talking of her—which cost her her life, not withstanding all he could do to the contrary, as he himself told us.” The Hibbins case shows how slender and how circumstantial were the grounds necessary to bring an accusation of witchcraft against anyone with a reputation for malice. It also shows that the popular elements in society (the jury, and the people’s representatives in the General Court) were far more ready to believe in witchcraft than the leaders of society (the magistrates and ministers.) This latter conclusion is reinforced by the fact that before 1692 there were far more acquittals than convictions in New England; there were more people willing to charge their neighbours with witchcraft than magistrates willing to convict them. A case which took place in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1662 is known in rather more detail than that of Mrs. Hibbins. Anne Cole, “a person esteemed pious,” was taken with “strange fits.” As with the Salem girls, the fits were both violent and public. Extremely violent bodily motions she many times had, even to the hazard of her life in the apprehensions of those that saw them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
And very often great disturbances was given in the public worship of God by her and two other women who had also strange fits. Once in especial, on a day of prayer kept on that account, the motion and noised of the afflicted was so terrible that a godly person fainted under the appearance of it. In some of her fits strange voices came from her, voices that were clearly not her own. Such voices are now known to be a consequence of multiple personality, which is the extreme form of the hysterical fugue. However, the seventeenth-century observers of Anne Cole judged them to be the voices of demons who had entered into her, and that judgment was sensible enough in view of the fact that the voices seemed to be plotting ways in which Anne Cole might be further afflicted. Eventually, seeming to realize that they were being overheard, one of the voices announced, “‘Let us confound her language, [that] she may tell no more tales.’” For some time nothing came from her but “unintelligible mutterings”; then the conversation resumed in a Dutch accent, and this time names were mentioned, names of the witches who were responsible for these afflictions. When Anne Cole was out of her fits, she “knew nothing of those things that were spoken by her” during them, but she was understandably distressed to find she had been speaking things which, to the best of her knowledge, had never been in her mind; it was a “matter of great affliction to her.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
It must have been afflicting to the local magistrates as well; they now had accusations of witchcraft against several persons, but the source of these accusations was not Anne Cole; it was a committee of demons who had infested her. The magistrates investigated further, and imprisoned some (and perhaps all) of the accused on suspicion of witchcraft One of these, a “lewd, ignorant, considerably aged woman” named Rebecca Greensmith sent for the two clergymen who has taken down in writing the demonic conversation issuing from the mouth of Anne Cole. She had the transcript read to er, and then “forthwith and freely confessed those things to be true,” confirming the statement of the voiced “that she (and other persons named in the discourse) had familiarity with the Devil.” She confessed to a number of other things as well, including “that the Devil has frequent use of her body with much seeming (but indeed horrible, hellish) delight to her.” Reports of copulation with demons (including the unpleasantness of the experience) are common in the literature of Continental witchcraft, but this is one of the few known cases in New England. What is involved is apparently an erotic fit in which the woman actually goes through the motions of copulation and achieves a climax; similar fits have been observed in mental patients in the twenty-first century. Thus it appears that in the case of Anne Cole the confessor as well as the afflicted person was an hysteric. This pattern we shall see again at Salem. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Rebecca Greensmith was hanged in 1663. So was her husband Nathaniel, although we do not know the grounds for his conviction; according to Increase Mather he did not confess. “Most” of the other persons accused by the demonic voices “made their escape into another part of the country.” What happened to the others we do not know, but they were apparently not executed. And since at least one of those who made her escape had at first been imprisoned in suspicion of witchcraft (Judith Varlet, a relative of Governor Peter Stuyvesant of New York), it can be assumed that the authorities were reluctant to press the matter further. The evidence they had was, after all, highly suspect, coming from demonic voices on the one hand and a confessed witch on the other. (Confessors are a group of women with the power to make anyone they touch love them. This love, however, is more aptly described as a soul-destroying obsession whose objective is pleasing the Confessor in any way possible. Confessors were created by warlocks to travel Medieval lands and act as law enforcers. The Confessors could possess anyone and make them tell the truth in great detail. There were also a few male Confessors, but they became megalomanics and plunged the entire World into a dark age. As a result, after all the male Confessors were defeated and wiped out, the warlocks and female Confessors took up the tradition of killing all male Confessors shortly after birth.) In any event, after the “execution of some and escape of others” Anne Cole’s fits ceased, and did not return. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Twenty years later, in 1682, the Reverend John Whiting reported that “she yet remains maintaining her integrity.” This together with what the voices said, suggests that Anne Cole’s fits probably were caused by her fear of witchcraft and cured by the removal of the fear. A few other cases are remarkable for a number of reasons, one of them being the exemplary thoroughness with which the symptoms of the affiliated persons are described, which makes it possible to say without question that these were pathological cases of hysteria. The first took place in Groton, Massachusetts, in 1671-1671 and was recorded by the Reverend Samuel Willard, then minister of Groton (during the Salem trials he was a member of the Boston Clergy). On 30 October 1671, Elizabeth Knapp began to behave strangely: “In the evening, a little before she went to bed, sitting by the fire she cried out, ‘Oh! My legs!’ and clapped her hands on them; immediately, ‘Oh! My breast!’ and removed her hands thither; and forthwith, ‘Oh! I am strangled’ and put her hands on her throat.” The similarity to Janet’s twentieth-century description of the onset of a typical hysterical fit is unmistakable; it starts, he writes “with a pain or a strange sensation situated at such or such a point of the body…[It] often begins in the lower part of the abdomen [and] seems to ascend and to spread to other organs. For instance, it very often spreads to the epigastrium, to the breast, then to the throat. There it assumes rather an interesting form, which was for a very long time considered as quite characteristic of hysteria. The patient has the sensation of too big an object, as it were, a ball, rising in her throat and choking her.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The chocking sensation we shall find over and over again; it is the bolus hystericus and is related to the “lump in the throat” felt by normal people in moments of extreme stress. The normal person, like the hysteric, tries to relieve it by swallowing; this is why the comic-strip artist has one’s characters say “Gulp” when they are in trouble. The choking sensations in the throat was followed by “fits in which she was violent in bodily motions, leapings, strainings and strange agitations, scarce to be held in bound by the strength of three or four; violent also in roarings and screamings.” The fits continued until 15 January 1692, the date of Willard’s writings. Several of the details he recorded are worth noting. On 15 November, “her tongue was for many hours together drawn into a semicircle up to the roof of her mouth, and not to be removed, for some tried with the fingers to do it.” On 17 December her tongue was drawn “out of her mouth most frightfully, to an extraordinary length and greatness.” Devils appeared to her, and witches; “Oh,” she cried to one of them, “you are a rouge.” On 29 November she had a particularly grotesque hallucination, when she believed a witch in the shape of a dog with a woman’s head was strangling her. The hallucinations and the woman’s sufferings were terrifyingly convincing; Willard noted that when she thought the witch was strangling her, “she did often times seem to our apprehension as of she would forthwith be strangled.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Elizabeth Knapp’s case is strikingly similar to that of Ler—one of the best-known cases of J.-M. Charcot, the nineteenth-century psychologist. Her fits, he wrote, “are characterized in the first stage by epileptiform and tetaniform convulsions; after this come great gesticulations of a voluntary character, in which the patient, assuming the most frightful postures, reminds one of the attitudes which history assigns to the demoniacs…At this stage of the attack, se is a prey to delirium, and raves evidently of the events which seem to have determined her first seizures. She hurls furious invectives against imaginary individuals, crying out, “villains! robbers! brigands! fire! fire! O, the dogs! I’m bitten!”—Reminiscences, doubtless, of the emotions experienced in her youth.” When the convulsive portion of Ler—’s attack was over other symptoms usually followed, including “hallucination of vision: the patient beholds horrible animals, skeletons, and specters” and “lastly, a more or less marked permanent contracture of the tongue.” Charcot drew this contracture of the tongue; it is quite appalling. Willard was not exaggerating in calling it frightful. Elizabeth Knapp displayed still other symptoms are identifiably hysterical, including loss of speech on some occasions, and on others speaking in voices other than her own; once “she barked like a dog, and bleated like a calf.” Willard noted that her fits did not seem to do her any permanent physical damage: “She hath no ways in body or strength by all these fits, though so dreadful, but gathered flesh exceedingly, and hath her natural strength when her fits are off, for the most part.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
This is typical; as Janet remarks, the “hysteric patient, after howling for several hours, feels rather comfortable; she experiences, as it were, a relaxation, and declares she is out of her fits has often raised the question of whether they are genuine. Willard thought they must be, if only for their violence: “such a strength is beyond the force of dissimulation.” (It should be noted that hysterics are not always well in the intervals between their fits. Some, for instance, lose their appetites and starve themselves. It is probably such cases who are referred to in the statue of James I against witchcraft as being “wasted, consumed, pined.) On 1 November, Elizabeth Knapp named one of her neighbour as the probable cause of her afflictions. The accused woman was sent for, and entered the house while the afflicted girl was in a fit. Her eyes were closed, as they usually were in her fits, yet she could distinguish this neighbour’s touch from all others, “though no voice was uttered.” That would have been quite enough to convict the neighbour in many witchcraft cases. However, fortunately she was permitted to pray with the afflicted girl, and at the conclusions Miss Knapp “confessed that she believed Satan had deluded her.” Willian was happy that “God was pleased to vindicate the case and justify the innocent,” and reported that Miss Knapp never again complained of any “apparition or disturbance from this neighbour.” Instead, she turned to accusing the Devil, who had, she said, been offering her a covenant for several years, a covenant she had frequently been tempted to sign. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The dark shadow that Satan has cast over the World grew deeper and deeper. About a month later Miss Knapp accused another person of witchcraft, this time during a period of hallucinations. Her father brought the woman to the house, and Willard, who had been asked to be present, noted that her fit became particularly violent when this woman entered. However, Willard, wrote, “we made nothing of it” since her fits had been as violent on other occasions. Instead they inquired carefully into the mater and found “two evident and clear mistakes” in the accusation. This was enough to exonerate the second accused woman. Satan had implanted this principle. Wherever it was held, people had no barrier against sin. Elizabeth Knapp was still having fits when Willard wrote about her, and all he could be certain of was that “she is an object of pity.” He did not think she was bewitched, but he did believe she was possessed (that is, that Devils has entered into her). This remained his opinion (and that of most others) when the case was remembered in 1692. He also believed that the girl’s terrible afflictions provided an occasion for the community to examine its collective conscience. Therefore he admonished his congregation in a sermon, “Let us all examine by this Providence [id est, this event] what sins they have been, that have given Satan so much footing in this poor place.” Satan was seeking to shut out from humans a knowledge of God, to turn their attention from the temple of God, and to establish His own kingdom. His strife for supremacy had seemed to be almost wholly successful. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
They robbed God of His glory, and defrauded the World by a counterfeit of the gospel. They had refused to surrender themselves to God for the salvation of the World, and they became agents of Satan for its destruction. They were doing the work Satan designed them to do, taking a course to misrepresent the character of God, and cause the World to look upon Him as a tyrant. The convulsive fits which played so prominent a part in most witchcraft cases, and continued to be one of the most common symptoms of hysteria through the earl years of the twentieth century, have no become relatively rare in Western civilization. D.W. Abse reports fits occurred in only six out of one hundred and sixty-one cases of hysteria treated at a British military hospital during World War II, but that they were the most common symptom among Indian Army hysterics treated at Delhi during the same period. There are a number of possible explanations for this curious fact. Hysterics are notoriously suggestible, so the change may be ascribable to nothing more than the refusal of our culture to give the hysterical fit the respectful and awed attention it used to command. In any case, it seems clear that abnormal behaviour varies with time and place just as normal behaviour does. However, since this particular variation occurred so recently, after the classic studies of hysteria had been completed, it is possible to identify the seventeenth-century Massachusetts fits for what they were. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Mr. William Wirt Winchester, while we were attending lectures, purchased three or four old houses in California, one of which was unoccupied. He resided in the country, and he proposed that he wanted his wife and myself to take up our abode in the untenanted house, so long as it should continue unlet; a move which we would accomplish the double end of settling us nearer alike to our lecture-rooms and to our amusements, and of relieving us from the weekly charge of rent for our lodgings. Our furniture was very scant—our whole equipage remarkably modest and primitive; and in short, our arrangements pretty nearly as simple as those of a bivouac. Mrs. Sarah Winchester’s new plan was, therefore, executed almost as soon as conceived. The front drawing-room was our sitting-room. I had the bedroom over it, and Mrs. Winchester had the back bedroom on the same floor, which nothing could have induced me to occupy. The house to begin with was an incomplete, three-story farm house with a basement. It was very old. Dated back to the sixteenth century, I believe. It had nothing modern about it. The agent who looked into the property titles for Mrs. Winchester told her it was originally sold, along with much other forfeited property in 1702; and it had belonged to John Conduit, whose wife was the niece of Sir Isaac Newton, a father of modern science, although keenly interested in the occult. How old it was then, I cannot say; but, at all events, in had seen years and changes enough to have contracted all the mysterious and saddened air, at once exciting and depressing, which belongs to most old mansions. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
There had been very little done in the way of modernizing details and, perhaps, it was better so; for there was something queer and by-gone in the very walls and ceilings—in the shape of doors and windows—in the odd diagonal site of the chimney-pieces—in the beams and ponderous cornices—not to mention the singular solidity of all the woodwork, from the bannisters to the window-frames, which hopelessly defined disguise, and would have emphatically proclaimed their antiquity through any conceivable amount of modern finery and varnish. An effort had, indeed, been made, to the extent of papering the drawing-rooms; but somehow, the paper looked raw and out of keeping. This woman said, old Judge Sir James Hales (who, having earned the reputation of a particularly ‘hanging judge’, ended by hanging himself, as the corner’s jury found, under an impulse of ‘temporary insanity’, with a child’s skipping-rope, over the massive old bannisters) resided there, entertaining good company, with fine venison and rare old port. In those halcyon days, the drawing-rooms were hung with gilded leather, and, I dare say, cut a good figure, for they were really spacious rooms. The bedrooms were wainscoted, but the front one was not gloomy; and in it the cosiness of antiquity quite overcame its somber associations. However, the back bedrooms, with its two queerly-placed melancholy windows, staring vacantly at the foot of the bed, and with the shadowy recess to be found in most old houses in Dublin, like a large ghostly closet, which, from congeniality of temperament, had amalgamated with the bedchamber, and dissolved the partition. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
At the night-time, this “alcove”—as our “maid” was wont to call it—had, in my eyes, a specially sinister and suggestive character. Mrs. Winchester’s distant and solitary candle glimmered vainly into its darkness. There it was always overlooking her—always itself impenetrable. However, this was only part of the effect. The whole room was, I cannot tell, how repulsive to me. There was, I supposed, in its proportions and features, a latent discord—a certain mysterious and indiscernible relation, which jarred indistinctly upon some secret sense of the fitting and the safe, and raised indefinable suspicious and apprehensions of the imagination. On the whole, as I began saying, nothing could have induced me to pass a night alone in it. We have not been very long in occupation of our respective chambers, when I began to complain of uneasy nights and disturbed sleep. I was, I suppose, the more impatient under this annoyance, as I was usually a sound sleeper, and by no means prone to nightmares. It was not, however, my destiny, instead of enjoying my customary repose, every night to “sup full of horrors.” After a preliminary course of disagreeable and frightful dreams, my troubles took a definite form, and the same vision, without an appreciable variation in a single detail, visited me at least (on average) every second night of the week. Now, this dream, nightmare, or infernal illusion—which you please—of which I was the miserable port, was on this wise: I saw, or thought I saw, with the most abominable distinctness although at the time in profound darkness, every article of furniture and accidental arrangement of the chamber in which I lay. This, as you know, is incidental to ordinary nightmare. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Well, while in this clairvoyant condition, which seemed but the lighting up of the theatre in which was to be exhibited the monotonous tableau of horror, which made my nights insupportable, my attention invariably became, I know not why, fixed upon the windows opposite the foot of my bed; and, uniformly with the same effect, a sense of dreadful anticipation always took slow but sure possession of me. I became somehow conscious of a sort of horrid but undefined preparation going forward in some unknown quarter, and by some unknown agency, for my torment; and, after an interval, which always seemed to me of the same length, a picture suddenly flew up the window, where it remained fixed, as if by an electrical attraction, and my discipline of horror then commenced, to last perhaps for hours. The picture this mysteriously glued to the window-panes, was the portrait of an old man, in crimson flowered silk dressing-gown, the folds of which I could now describe, with countenance embodying a strange mixture of intellect, sensuality, and power, but withal sinister and full of malignant omen. His nose was hooked, like the beak of a vulture; his eyes large, grey, and prominent and lighted up with a more than mortal cruelty and coldness. The features were surmounted by a crimson velvet cap, the hair that peeped from under which was white with age, while the eyebrows retained their original blackness. Well I remember every line, hue, and shadow of that stony countenance, and well I may! The gaze of this hellish visage was fixed upon me, and mine returned it with the inexplicable fascination of nightmare, for what appeared to me to be hours of agony. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
At last—the cock he crew, away then flew, the fiend who had enslaved me through the awful watches of the night and, harassed and nervous, I rose to the duties of the day. I had—I cannot say exactly why, but it may have been from the exquisite anguish and profound impressions of unearthly horror, with which this strange phantasmagoria was associated—an insurmountable antipathy to describing the exact nature of my nightly troubles to Mrs. Winchester. Generally, however, I told her I was haunted by abominable dreams; and, true to the imputed materialism of medicine, we put our heads together to dispel my horrors, not by exorcism, but by a tonic Vin Mariani. However, the evil spirit, who enthralled my senses in the shape of that portrait, may have been just as near me, just as energetic, just as malignant, though I saw him not. Everybody knows how contagious is fear of all sort, but more especially that particular kind of fear under which poor Mrs. Winchester was at that moment labouring. I would not have heard, nor I believe would she have recapitulated, just at that moment, for half the World, the details of the hideous vision which had so unmanned her. “I was sitting in my room,” said Mrs. Winchester “by my fireplace, the door locked when I heard a step on the flight of stairs descending from the attics. It was two o’ clock, and the streets were as silent as a churchyard—the sounds were, therefore, perfectly distinct. There was slow, heavy tread, characterized by the emphasis and deliberation of age, descending by the narrow staircase from above; and, what made the sound more singular, it was plain that the feet which produced it were perfectly bare measuring a descent with something between a pound and a flop, very ugly to hear. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“I knew quite well that you and my attendant had gone away many hours before, and that nobody but myself has any business in the house. It was quite plain also that the person who was coming down stairs had no intention whatever of concealing his movements; but, on the contrary, appeared disposed to make even more noise, and proceed more deliberately, than was at all necessary. When the step reached the foot of the stairs outside my room, it seemed to stop; and I expected every moment to see my door open spontaneously, and give admission to soul killed by the Winchester rifle. I was, however, relieved in a few second by hearing the descent renewed, just in the same manner, upon the stair case leading down to the drawing-rooms, and thence, after another pause, down the next flight, and so on to the hall, whence I heard no more. Now, by the time the sound had ceased, I was wound up, as they say, to a very unpleasant pitch of excitement. I listened, but there was not a stir. I screw up my courage to a decisive experiment—opened my door, and in a stentorian voice bawled over the banisters, ‘Who’s there?’ There was no answer but the ringing of my own voice through the empty old house—no renewal of the movement; nothing short, to give my unpleasant sensations a definite direction. There is, I think, something most disagreeably disenchanting in the sound of one’s own voice under such circumstances, exerted in solitude, and in vain. It redoubled my sense of isolation, and my misgivings increased on perceiving that the door, which I certainly thought I had left open, was closed behind me. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
“In a vague alarm, lest my retreat should be cut off, I got again into my room as quickly as I could, where I remained in a state of imaginary blockade, and very uncomfortable indeed, till morning. Next night brought no return of my barefooted fellow-lodger; but the night following, being in my bed, and in the dark—somewhere, I supposed, about the same hour as before, I distinctly heard the old fellow again descending from the garrets. This time I jumped out of bed, clutched the poker as I passed the expiring fire, and in a moment was upon the lobby. The sound had ceased by this time—the dark and chill were discouraging; and, guess my horror, when I saw, or thought I saw, a monster, whether in the shape of a man or a bear I could not say, standing, with its back to the wall, on the lobby, facing me, with a pair of great greenish eyes shinning dimly out. Now, I must be frank, and confess that the cupboard which displayed our plates and cups stood just there, though at that moment I did not recollect it. At the same time I must never could satisfy myself that I was made the dupe of my own fancy in this matter; for this apparition, after one or two shiftings of shape, as if in the act of incipient transformation, began, as it seemed on second thoughts, to advance upon me in its original form. From an instinct of terror rather than of courage, I hurled the poker, with all my force, at its head; and to the music of a horrid crash made my way into my room, and double-locked the door. Then, in a minute more, I heard the horrid bare feet walk down the stairs, till the sound ceased in the halls, as on the former occasion. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“In a vague alarm, lest my retreat should be cut off, I got again into my room as quickly as I could, where I remained in a state of imaginary blockade, and very uncomfortable indeed, till morning. Next night brought no return of my barefooted fellow-lodger; but the night following, being in my bed, and in the dark—somewhere, I supposed, about the same hour as before, I distinctly heard the old fellow again descending from the garrets. This time I jumped out of bed, clutched the poker as I passed the expiring fire, and in a moment was upon the lobby. The sound had ceased by this time—the dark and chill were discouraging; and, guess my horror, when I saw, or thought I saw, a monster, whether in the shape of a man or a bear I could not say, standing, with its back to the wall, on the lobby, facing me, with a pair of great greenish eyes shinning dimly out. Now, I must be frank, and confess that the cupboard which displayed our plates and cups stood just there, though at that moment I did not recollect it. At the same time I must never could satisfy myself that I was made the dupe of my own fancy in this matter; for this apparition, after one or two shiftings of shape, as if in the act of incipient transformation, began, as it seemed on second thoughts, to advance upon me in its original form. From an instinct of terror rather than of courage, I hurled the poker, with all my force, at its head; and to the music of a horrid crash made my way into my room, and double-locked the door. Then, in a minute more, I heard the horrid bare feet walk down the stairs, till the sound ceased in the halls, as on the former occasion. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“If the apparition of the night before was an ocular delusion of my fancy sporting with the dark outlines of our cupboard, and if tis horrid eyes were nothing but a pair of inverted teacups, I had, at all events, the satisfaction of having launched the poker with admirable effect, and in true ‘fancy’ phrase, ‘knocked its two daylights into one,’ as the commingled fragments of my tea-service testified. I did my best to gather comfort and courage from these evidences; but it would not do. And then what could I say of those horrid bare feet, and the regular tramp, tramp, tramp, which measured the distance of the entire staircase through the solitude of my haunted dwelling, and at an hour when no good influence was stirring? Confound it!—the whole affair was abominable. I was out of spirits, and dreaded the approach of night. It came, ushered ominously in with a thunderstorm and dull torrents of depressing rain. Earlier than usual the streets grew silent; and by twelve o’clock nothing but the comfortless patterning of the rain was to be heard. I made myself as snug as I could. I lighted two candles instead of one. I forswore bed, and held myself in readiness for a sally, candle in hand; for, coute qui coute, I was resolved to see the being, if visible at all, who troubled the nightly stillness of my mansion. I was fidgety and nervous and, tried in vain to interest myself with my books. I walked up and down my room, whistling in turn martial and hilarious music, and listening ever and anon for the dreaded noise.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Do not Grieve. Anything you lose comes around in another form. The child weaned from mother’s milk now drinks cranberry juice. God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed. As roses, up from ground. Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish, now a cliff covered with vines, now a horse being saddled. It hides within these, till one day it cracks them open. There is the light gold of wheat in the sun, and the gold of bread made from wheat. I have neither, I am only talking about them as a town in the desert looks up to stars on a clear night. The Son of God, looking upon the World, beheld suffering and misery. With pity He saw how humans had become victims of satanic cruelty. He looked with compassion upon those who were being corrupted, murdered, and lost. They had chosen a ruler who chained them to his carriage as captives. 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 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 make known in presence of all the living that He will be your God. “I am the Lord your God.” As it is written in holy Scripture: The Lord shall reign forever; Thy God, O America, shall be Sovereign unto all generations. Hallelujah. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
Ghostly tales are bountiful at Sarah Winchester’s Mystery House. What have you experienced? Photos are encouraged!
The Winchester mansion is 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
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“Whoever shadows my every move will not lose me in the dark.” At least that is what Christ says, or what the Evangelist John heard Him say (8.12). He tells us to walk on, through the darkness, with Christ as our only torch. That way, when we mayn’t have gained a step, but we won’t have lost one either. And on into the day we must pursue with dogged tread the life of Jesus Christ. Is this the secret to Mrs. Winchester’s 7-11 staircase?
Affection and Friendship Should Not Interfere with the Fullest Attainment of Our Final End!
Every true American believes with all their hearts that when an American is tired of America, one is tired of life. With certain qualifications, a person is happy when one is in the way of a successful execution (more or less) of a rational plan of life drawn up under (more or less) favourable conditions, and one is reasonably confident that one’s intentions can be carried through. Thus we are happy when our rational plans are going well, our more important aims being fulfilled, and we are with reason quite sure that our good fortune will continue. The achievement of happiness depends upon circumstances and luck, and hence the gloss about favourable conditions. While I shall not discuss the concept of happiness in any detail, we should consider a few further points to brings out the connection with the problem of hedonism. First of all, happiness has two aspects: one is the successful execution of a rational plan (the schedule of activities and aims) which a person strives to realize, the other is one’s state of mind, one’s sure confidence supported by good reasons that one’s success will endure. Being happy involves both a certain achievement in action and a rational assurance about the outcomes. This definition of happiness is objective: plans are to be adjusted to the conditions of our life and our confidence must rest upon sounds beliefs. Alternatively, happiness might be defined subjectively as follows: a person is happy when one believes that one is in the way of a successful execution (more or less) of a rational plan, and so on as before, adding the rider that is one is mistaken or deluded, then by contingency and coincidence nothing happens to disabuse one of one’s misconceptions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
By good luck one is not cast out of one’s fool’s paradise. Now the definition to be preferred is that which best fits the theory of justice and coheres with our considered judgments of value. We have assumed that the parties in the original position have correct beliefs. They acknowledge a conception of justice in the light of general truths about persons and their place in society. Thus it seems natural to suppose that in framing their plans of life they are similarly lucid. Of course none of this is strictly argument. Eventually one has to appraise the objective definition as part of the moral theory to which it belongs. Adopting this definition, and keeping in mind the account of rational plans presented earlier, we can interpret the special characteristics sometimes attributed to happiness. For example, happiness is self-contained: that is, it is chosen solely for its own sake. To be sure, a rational plan will include many (or at least several) final aims, and any of these may be pursed partly because it complements and furthers one or more other aims as well. Mutual support among ends pursued for their own sake is an important feature of rational plans, and therefore these ends are not usually sought solely for themselves. Nevertheless executing the entire plan, and the enduring confidence with which this is done, is something that we want to do and to have only for itself. All considerations including those of right and justice (using here the full theory of good) have already been surveyed in drawing up the plan. And therefore the whole activity is self-contained. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Happiness is also self-sufficient: a rational plan when realized with assurance makes a life fully worthy of choice and demands nothing further in addition. When circumstances are especially favourable and the execution particularly successful, one’s happiness is complete. Within the general conception one sought to follow, there is nothing essential that is lacking, no way in which it could have been distinctly better. So even if the material means that support our mode of life can always be imagined to be greater, and a different pattern of aims might often have been chosen, still the actual fulfillment of the plan itself may have, as compositions, paintings, and poems often do, a certain completeness which though marred by circumstance and human failing is evident from the whole. Thus some become exemplars of human flourishing and models for emulation, their lives being as instructive in how to life as any philosophical doctrine. A person is happy then during those periods when one is successfully carrying through a rational plan and one is with reason confident that one’s efforts will come to fruition. One may be said to approach blessedness to the extent that conditions are supremely favourable and one’s life complete. Yet it does not follow that in advancing a rational plan one is pursuing happiness, not at least as this is normally meant. For one thing, happiness is not one aim among others that we aspire to, but the fulfillment of the whole design itself. However, also, I have supposed first that rational plans satisfy the constraints of right and justice (as the full theory of the good stipulates). #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
To say someone that one seeks happiness does not, it seems, imply that one is prepared either to violate or to affirm these restrictions. Therefore the acceptance of these limits should be made explicit. And secondly, the pursuit of happiness often suggests the pursuit of certain sorts of ends, for example, life, liberty, and one’s own welfare. Thus persons who devote themselves selflessly to a righteous cause, or who dedicate their lives to furthering the well-being of other, are not normally thought to seek happiness. It would be misleading to say this of saints and heroes, or of those whose plan of life is in some marked degree supererogatory. They do not have the kinds of aims that fall under this heading, admittedly not sharply defined. Yet, when their plans succeed, saints and heroes and persons whose intentions acknowledge the limits of right and justice, are in fact happy. Although they do not strive for happiness, they may nevertheless be happy in advancing the claims of justice and the well-being of others, or in attaining the excellences to which they are attracted. However, how in general is it possible to choose among plans rationally? What procedure can an individual follow when faced with this sort of decision? Previously I said that a rational plan is one that would be chosen with deliberative rationality from among the class of plans of all of which satisfy the principles of rational choice and stand up to certain forms of critical reflection. We eventually reach a point though where we just have to decide which plan we most prefer without further guidance from principle. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
There is however one device of deliberation that I have not yet mentioned, and this is to analyze our aims. That is, we can try to find a more detailed or more illuminating description of the object of our desires hoping that the counting principles will then settle the case. Thus it may happen that a fuller or deeper characterization of what we want discloses that an inclusive plan exists after all. Let us consider again the example of planning a holiday. Often when we ask ourselves why we wish to visit two distinct places, we find that all of them can be fulfilled by going to one place rather than the other. Thus we may want to study certain styes of art, and further reflection may bring out that one plan is superior or equally good on all these counts. In this sense we may discover that our desire to go to Paris is more intense than our desire to go to Rome. Often however a finer description fails to be decisive. If we want to see both the most famous church in Christendom and the most famous museum, we may be stuck. Of course these desires too many be examine further. Nothing in the way that most desire are expressed shows whether there exists a more revealing characterization of what we really want. However, we have to allow for the possibility, indeed for the probability, that sooner or later we will reach incomparable aims between which we must choose with deliberative rationality. We may trim, reshape, and transform our aim in a variety of ways as we try to fit them together. Using the principles of rational choice as guidelines, and formulating our desires in the most lucid form we can, we may narrow the scope of purely preferential choice, but we cannot eliminate it altogether. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The indeterminacy of decision seems to arise, then, from the fact that a person has many aims for which there is no ready standard of comparison to decide between them when they conflict. There are many stopping points in practical deliberation and many ways in which we characterize the things we want for their own sake. Thus it is easy to see why the idea of there being a single dominant end (as opposed to an inclusive end) at which it is rational to aim is highly appealing. For if there exists such an end to which all other ends are subordinate, then presumably all desires, insofar as they are rational, admit of an analysis which shows the counting principles to apply. The procedure for making a rational choice, and the conception of such a choice, would then be perfectly clear: deliberation would always concern means to ends, all lesser ends in turn being ordered as means to one single dominant end. The many finite chains of reasons eventually converge and meet at the same point. Hence a rational decision is always in principle possible, since only difficulties of computation and lack of information remain. Now it is essential to understand what the dominant-end theorists wants: namely, a method of choice which the agent oneself can always follow in order to make a rational decision. This there are three requirements: the conception of deliberation must specify: a first person procedure which is generally applicable and guaranteed to lead to the best result (at least under favourable conditions of information and given the ability to calculate). We have no procedures meeting these conditions. A random device provides a general method but it would be rational only in special circumstances. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In everyday life we employ schemes of deliberation acquired from our culture and modified during the course of our personal history. However, there is no assurance that these forms of reflection are rational. Perhaps they only meet various minimum standards which enable us to get by, all the while falling short of the best that we might do. Thus if we seek a general procedure by which to balance our conflicting aims so as to single out, or at least to identify in thought, the best course of action, the idea of a dominant end seems to give a simple and natural answer. Let us consider then what this dominant end might be. It cannot be happiness itself, since this state is attained by executing a rational plan of life already set out independently. The most we can say is that happiness is an inclusive end, meaning that the plan itself, the realization of which makes one happy, includes and orders most implausible to think of the dominant end as a personal or social objective such as the exercise of political power, or the achievement of social acclaim, or maximizing one’s material possessions. Surely it is contrary to our considered judgments of value, and indeed inhuman, to be so taken with but one of these ends that we do not moderate the pursuit of it for the sake of anything else. For a dominant end is at least lexically prior to all other aims and seeking to advance it always takes absolute precedence. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Thus the dominant end is serving God, and by this means saving our soul. Heavenly Father desires that we find true, lasting happiness. Our happiness is the design of all the blessings He gives us—gospel teachings, commandments, priesthood ordinances, family relationship, prophets, temples, the beauties of creation, and even the opportunity to experience adversity. God’s plan for our salvation is often called “the great plan of happiness,” reports Alma 42.8. He sent His Beloved Son to carry out the Atonement so we can be happy in this lie and receive a fulness of joy in the eternities. Furthering the divine intentions is the sole criterion for balancing subordinate aims. It is for this reason alone that we should prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honour to dishonour, a long life to a short one, and, one might add, friendship and affection to hatred and animosity. “Wickedness never was happiness,” reports Alma 41.10. Other seek only to have fun in life. With this as their main goal, they allow temporary pleasure to distract them from lasting happiness. They rob themselves of the enduring joys of spiritual growth, service, and hard work. As we seek to be happy, we should remember that the only way to real happiness is to live the gospel. We will find peaceful, eternal happiness as we strive to keep the commandments, pray for strength, repent of our sins, participate in wholesome activities, and give meaningful service. We must be indifferent to all attachments whatsoever, for these become inordinate once they precent us from being like equalized scales in a balance, ready to take the course that we believe is most for the glory of God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
It should be observed that this principle of indifference is compatible with our enjoying lesser pleasures and for allowing ourselves to engage in play and amusements. For these activities relax the mind and rest the spirit so that we are better fitted to advance more important aims. Thus although Aquinas believes that the vision of God is the last end of all human knowledge and endeavour, he concedes play and amusements a place in our life. Nevertheless these pleasures are permitted only to the extent that the superordinate aim is thereby advanced, or at least not hindered. We should arrange things so that our indulgences in frivolity and jest, in affection and friendship, do not interfere with the fullest attainment of our final end. The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed. Thus if God is conceived (as surely He must be) as a moral being, then the end of serving Him above all else is left unspecified to the extent that the divine intentions are not clear from revelation, or evident from natural reason. Within these limits a theological doctrine of morals is subject to the same problems of balancing principles and determining precedence which trouble other conceptions. Since disputed questions commonly lie here, the solution propounded by the religious ethic is only apparent. And certainly when the dominant end is clearly specified as attaining some objective goal such as political power or material wealth, the underling fanaticism and inhumanity are manifest. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Human good is heterogeneous because the aims of the self are heterogenous. Although to subordinate all our aims to one end does not strictly speaking violate the principles of rational choice (not the counting principles anyway), it still strikes us as irrational, or more likely as mad. The self is disfigured and put in the service of one of its ends for the sake of system. Governments are composed of persons who meet occasionally in a hall to make speeches and to write resolutions; of human studying papers at desks, receiving and answering letters and memoranda, listening to advice and giving it, hearing complaints and claims and replying to them; o clerks manipulating more papers; of inspectors, tax collectors, law enforcement, and soldiers. These officials have to be fed, and often they overeat. They would often rather go fishing, or have pleasures of the flesh, or do anything than shuffle their papers. They have to sleep. They suffer from indigestion and asthma, bile and palpitation, become bored, tired, careless, and have nervous headaches. They know what they happen to learn, they are away of what they happen to observe, they can imagine what they happen to be interested in, they can accomplish only what they can command or persuade an unseen multitude to do. What is so remarkable about America is that millions of people believe more in the power of prayer than in the power of politics; they believe the message to “repent, be converted, and trust Jesus Christ” can topple even an authoritarian leader. They believe their deliverance is spiritual. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Such belief runs counter to the myth that all human problems are political and solvable by all-powerful human institutions. An extreme example was the prominent New Right leader who declared in 1985, after Congress failed to pass his legislative agenda, “The only way to have a genuine spiritual revival is to have legislative reform…I think we have been legislated out of the possibility of a spiritual revival.” Evidently, the work of the Kingdom of God has been defeated by a majority vote in the kingdoms of man. I am sure that individual did not mean to deny the sovereignty of God, but his statement insinuates that nothing can be accomplished except through the government. Jacques Ellul could well have been describing this leader when he wrote that politics has become “the supreme religion of the age.” This political illusion springs from a diminishing belief in God and the growth of big government. What people once expected from the Almighty, they now expect from the almighty bureaucracy. That is bad trade for anyone; but for the Christian, it is rank idolatry. The media encourages the illusion. Stories of spiritual conversion, growth, and revival do not make god thirty-second news spots. While the everyday actions of ordinary citizens lack headline punch, politics offers confrontation, controversy, and scandal. When religion does make the cover of Time or a spot on the network news, it is usually the result of scandal, as extraordinary as the coverage of Jim and Tammy Bakker. That is not a complaint; it I simply the way the news business works, which in turn is merely satisfying the public appetite for sleazy gossip, crime, dramatically suggestive headlines, fiction, outlandish stories, and aggressive reporters. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Although most people claim they do not believe most of what the news reports, yet they are drawn to its promise of insider knowledge and hot scoops about celebrities, politicians, and aliens from outer space. New coverage gravitates to political centers, exalting the momentary, assuring suspense. The public waits expectantly for the next installment in the unfolding political soap opera. On one level media and government are natural antagonists; on another they are natural allies, depending on each other for their influence. News organizations concentrate their resources in political capitals; governments gear their policies and decisions for primetime audiences. The media spotlight politics and political feeds in the media. Because the illusion serves those with the power to perpetuate it, neither side cares to expose it. People watch the news like it a heavy weight fight, listening to reporters give breathless blow-by-blow accounts of propaganda, as they often ignore real news that matters. The view back home sits in front of the TV, like a mindless goldfish, being spoon fed junk news. Thousands of journalist are constantly pounding the pavements, desperate for something to film. Some camera operators shot footage of each other. Others give up and go out for fondue. Much of the news treads perilously close to heresy. If this were the seventh century, many reporters would probably be accused by Dr. William Griggs of having the evil hand upon them. News is a big business, after all, having hundreds of millions riding on Nielsen ratings. National Network personalities hold multimillion dollar contracts, and they, as well as many print journalists, enjoy the handsome rewards of celebrity. Even in nations with public-owned media, the illusion guarantees power, privilege, and access to the elite. These are not willingly surrendered. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
This unwavering focus heightens both the promise and expectations of what government can do. Political rhetoric, therefore, mist offer panaceas to all human ills. If elected, can anyone recall a major candidate who di not claim he or she could solve any problem? However, most politicians know that more than 80 percent of the federal budget—entitlement programs and other congressionally mandated outlays—are beyond their control. Most candidates cannot have a balanced budget and federal judges often strip the president of their power to make changes to the government so society keeps getting worse, instead of improving. Politicians have little choice. Modern technology has reduced all issues to their lowest common denominator. Since there is no time to explain the complexities of the budget process, and since instant perceptions shape voter attitudes, politicians can do no more than create appealing visual impressions. Former Budget Director David Stockman chided Regan aides Baker and Meese for being more interested in the evening network news than in government policy. However, perhaps they were more realistic. Policy has no meaning apart from how it is perceived, and that perception is heavily influenced by newscasters. That is why Lyndon Johnson obsessively watched three evening news programs simultaneously on a three-console television set. He knew public reaction to the televised portrayal of Vietnam would influence opinion far more than battlefield strategies. He was right: the outcome of that war was decided in American living rooms. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
To maintain the illusion, government attempts to shape, even manipulate public perceptions. The White House gives assignments to people to do just that. Staff members work full time studying daily news briefings, monitoring public reactions to presidential speeches, taking daily polls, and feeding positive information to friendly reporters. Often they aggressively try to manipulate public opinion. For example, immediately after every presidential speech, a White House staff member usually unleashes a small army of assistants who will call key leaders in every walk of life. They might make five hundred calls, each following the same script: “The president asked me to call you to find out what your thought of his announced policy.” The reactions are usually collated, typed, and within hours a report surveying the opinions of hundreds of leaders is in the president’s hands. Helpful information, but the staff also influences public reactions toward acceptance of their policy. To be told that the president wants one’s opinion flatters even the cynics. Those called rarely offer a critical reply; most can hardly wait to call their friends and casually mention that “by the way, the president just called” to ask their opinion. So when journalists Tomi Lahren and Yamiche Alcindor has very public interactions with President Trump about their news reports, it was really a big deal to be acknowledged. With the government policy so dependent on public reaction, it is little wonder that the celebrity syndrome has become such a major force in Western politics. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The subtle danger of all this manipulation is that people no longer view their own circumstances as reality. Only what appears in print and on the screen as well. The humans of the present day suffer from acute television intoxication. They do not believe in their own experiences, one’s own judgment and one’s own thought. In their eyes, a fact becomes true when one has read an account of it in the paper, and one measures the importance by the size of the headlines. This has resulted in people giving out false, distorted, or outdated information because no one calls to the agencies involved to verify if. However, people who do not trust the news actually do verify information before they take it as a fact because they know how dangerous disinformation can be. Still, many individuals gradually loses all sense of continuity. Whether a policy is good or bad, a success or a failure, is of no account; all that matters is the emotion its instant image induces. No one remembers from one day to the next. On a Monday a president can say, “The Russians blinked.” Everyone is happy. The next day it is disclosed the Russians did not blink—we did—but no one remembers. So on to the next night. The process is mesmerizing. Images pile on images, day after day, anesthetizing the public so they feel individually important and that all power resides in images they see on their television screens. This eventually erodes their own sense of political responsibility and makes them easy prey to the appetite of an authoritarian state. The consequence is irresistible. The chief characteristic of tyranny is isolation of the individual, denying one access to the public realm where one would show oneself, see and be seen, ear and be heard. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Even democracies need institutions and agencies through which the individual can resist the tendency of all central governments to grow larger, stronger, and more domineering. For the only thing that stands between the multitudes and totalitarianism are the mediating structures of society: families, small groups of citizens, churches, voluntary associations that are independent and resistant to the collective state. If the American experiment is to succeed, it will require the continued help of voluntary associations. Of all these independent institutions, the church should be the one best able to expose the political illusion. For the message of a transcendent reality is resounding warning against the futility of seeking immorality from the instruments and institutions of this life. Mastery of nature through technology has given modern humans the illusions that one has mastered life itself. The message of the Kingdom is that only God is master of life, and attempts to create alternatives to His rule are futile. The fall of the Roman Empire plainly demonstrated that no work of mortal hands can be immortal, and it was accomplished by the rise of the Christian gospel of an everlasting individual life to its position as the exclusive religion of Western humankind. Both together made any striving for an Earthly immortality futile and unnecessary. The Kingdom of God is not dependent on power in the kingdoms of humans. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes. Political kingdoms may rise and fall—but the Kingdom of God goes on forever. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Modern history is replete with similar lessons about the futility of putting ultimate trust in much-vaunted political systems. When a greedy tyrant is overthrown, the idealist replacing him or her promises liberation and hope for the oppressed. The people are jubilant. However, in a short time the “liberator” becomes the oppressor oneself, resplendent in one’s $6,500 designer glasses. When autocracy is replaced by bureaucracy, only the icons change. Ideology, which in so many parts of the World has replaced true religion, is powerless as well. The promised utopias of the twenty-first century., either Marxist of Fascist, are doomed because they accept the essential premises of current civilization and move with its lines of internal development: Thus, utilizing what this World itself offers them, they become slaves, although they think they are transforming it. Even massive weapons of destruction fail to assure anything for today’s mightiest governments. Wars reach no permanent solutions; there is no such things as a lasting peace or, as American so fondly believed, “a war to end all wars.” Terrorists stalk the globe, and government can do little to stop them. Wars proliferate; political solutions fail; frustrations rise. Yet we continue to look to governments to resolve problems beyond their capability. The illusion persists. Nowhere is that more evident than in one troubled corner of the World. However, even there, in the midst of carnage, violence, and hatred, the example of a few people offers hope, pointing the way for civilization to emerge from darkness. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Each of us must gain for oneself the authentic mystical experience. Sugar can be known only by its sweet taste, the Overself only by opening the doors of the mind to consciousness of its presence. Those who have had this overwhelming experience require no arguments to make them believe in the soul. They know that they are the soul. An experience which is so convincing, so real, that no intellectual argument to the contrary can stand against it, is final. Let others say what they will, one remains unswayed. A glimpse is a transitory state of mental enlightenment and emotional exaltation. It I an experience of self-discovery, not the discovery of some other being, whether a guru or a god. These brief flashes bring with them great joy, great beauty, and great uplift. They are, for most people, their first clear vivid awakening to the existence and reality of a spiritual order of being. The contrast with their ordinary state is so tremendous as to shame it into pitiful drabness. The intention is to arouse and stimulate them into the longing for re-entry into the spirit, a longing which inevitably express itself in the quest. In the past these glimpse experiences were regarded as wholly religious. Today the truth about them is better understood. They may be aesthetic, psychological, intellectual, or creative—happening outside the religious circle. All our ordinary experience comes to us through sense responses or intellectual workings. However, here is a kind of experience which does not come through these two channels. It is not a series of sensations nor a series of thoughts. What is it, then? Philosophy says it belongs to the transcendental World. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
The uniqueness of this moment shines out against the relatedness of all other moments. Words only limit it by their precision and their pressure, yet they are all some of us have with which to make a likeness of it to show friends, or to hold before the ardent seekers, or even to return to ourselves in dark and difficult periods. The glimpse may be best compared to a moment of wakefulness in a long existence of sleep. These mystical glimpses have close parallels with the best features of the best types of religious conversion. Indeed, as might be expected, they are deeper and more developed and better controlled forms of them. These glimpses, these transcendental visitations bring joy, serenity, and understanding. No rational explanation has given of the seemingly eccentric characters of these glimpses, no reasonable theory of their why, what, how, and when. The mystical experience may be beyond reasoned analysis but it is not beyond reasonable description. Putting words together on paper to tell how this glimpse lifts one out of the ordinariness of the common existence, is a work anyone must enjoy doing. It is a brief and temporary enlargement of consciousness, in theological language, an improvement of its connection with God. How is one to describe this experience? It is an expansion, and yet also a concentration, of consciousness. It is not enough to say that someone has had a mystical experience. This phrase can over the most opposite, the most widely different experiences. The experience is so beautiful that no description can transfer the feelings it awakens from one heart to another. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
There are the real waking moments of a person’s life: for the rest one is asleep without ever guessing that one is. It is not the highest point of the moral experience, although that approaches it, or can help to being it on, or acts as a preparation for it. It is not the peak of the aesthetic experience, although that fulfills the same services. A long time I have lived with you and now we must be going separately to be together. Perhaps I shall be the wind to blur your smooth waters so that you do not see your face too much. Perhaps I shall be the star to guide your uncertain wings so that you have direction in the night. Perhaps I shall be the fire to separate your thoughts so that you do not give up. Perhaps I shall be the rain to open up the Earth so that your seed may fall. Perhaps I shall be the snow to let your blossoms sleep s that you may bloom in spring. Perhaps I shall be the stream to play a song on the rock so that you are not alone. Perhaps I shall be a new mountain so that you always have a way home. Here are life’s highest processes, an experience beyond thinking and an awareness beyond the sensual. During this period one is in God. These rare moments lift one out of one’s terrestrial self and detach one from one’s lower human self. Only a poet could portray these experiences as they deserve; to write of them with outer photographic exactness only is to half-lose them. In religious language one is in God, and in mystical language God is in one. One has reached a World which is as much beyond good as it is beyond evil. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
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 your life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen. May His great name be blessed for every 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. When I call upon the Lord, ascribe greatness unto our God. O Lord, open Thou lips and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. Praised art Thou, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, Go of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, mighty, revered and exalted God. Thou bestowest lovingkindness and possessest all things. Mindful of the patriarchs’ love for Thee, Thou wilt in Thy love bring a redeemer to their children’s children for the sake of Thy name. Please remember us unto life, O King who delightest in life, and inscribe us in the Book of Life so that we may live worthily for Thy sake, O Lord of life. O King, Thou Helper, Redeemer and Shield, be Thou praised, O Lord, Shield of Abraham. Thou, O Lord, art mighty forever. Thou callest the dead to immortal life for Thou art mighty in deliverance. Thou causest the wind to blow and the rain to fall. Thou sustainest the living with lovingkindness, and in great mercy callest the departed to everlasting life. Thou upholdest the falling, healest the sick, settest free those in bondage, an keepest faith with those that sleep in the dust. Who is like unto Thee, Almighty King, who decreest death and life and bringest forth salvation? God provides an experience of complete security—so rarely found among people in the World today. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!
Cresleigh offers enchanting homes that have all the amenities you have come to expect in a grand home.
This is the Beginning, When People Will Be Opening their Eyes!
Nothing is quite as funny as the unintended humour of reality. The original position is designed to be a fair and impartial point of view that is to be adopted in our reasoning about fundamental principles of justice. In taking up this point of view, we are imagining ourselves in the position of free and equal persons who jointly agree upon and commit themselves to the principles of social and political justice. The main distinguishing feature of the original position is “the veil of ignorance”: to insure impartiality of judgment, the parties are deprived of all knowledge of their personal characteristics and social and historical circumstances. The two principles of justice guarantee the equal basic rights and liberties needed to secure the fundamental interests of free and equal citizens and to pursue a wide range of conceptions of good. The second principle provides fair equality of education and employment opportunities enabling all to fairly compete for powers and positions of office; and it secures for all a guaranteed minimum of the all-purpose means (including income and wealth) that individuals need to pursue their interests and to maintain their self-respect as free and equal persons. Persons in the original position give pride of place to their interest in the equal freedoms. The intuitive idea behind the precedence of liberty is that if the persons in the original position assume that their basic liberties can be effectively exercised, they will not exchange a lesser liberty for an improvement in the economic well-being, at least not once a certain level of wealth has been attained. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
It is only when social conditions do not allow the effective establishment of these rights that one can acknowledge their restriction. Only if it is necessary to enhance the quality of civilization so that in due course the equal freedoms can be enjoyed by all can the denial of equal liberty can be accepted. The lexical ordering of the two principles is the long-run tendency of the general conception of justice consistently pursued under reasonably favourable conditions. Eventually there comes a time in the history of a well-ordered society beyond which the special form of the two principles takes over and holds from then on. What must be shown then is the rationality of this ranking from the standpoint of the parties in the original position. Clearly the conception of goodness as rationality and the principles of moral psychology have a part in answering this question. Now the basis for the priority of liberty is roughly as follows: as the conditions of civilization improve, the marginal significance for our god of further economic and social advantages diminishes relative to their interests of liberty, which become stronger as the conditions for the exercise of the equal freedoms are more fully realized. Beyond some point it becomes and then remains irrational from the standpoint of the original position to acknowledge a lesser liberty for the sake of greater material means and amenities of office. This is so because as the general level of well-being raises (as indicated by the index of primary goods the less favoured can expect) only the less urgent wants remain to be met by further advances, at least insofar as human’s wants are not largely created by institutions and social forms. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
At the same time the obstacles to the exercise of the equal liberties decline and a growing insistence upon the right to pursue our spiritual and cultural interests assert itself. Increasingly it becomes more important to secure the free internal life of the various communities of interests in which persons and groups seek to achieve, in modes of social union consistent with equal liberty, the ends and excellences to which they are drawn. In addition humans come to aspire to some control over the laws and rules that regulate their association, either by directly taking part themselves in its affairs or indirectly through representatives with whom they are affiliated by ties of culture and social situation. To be sure, it is not the case that when the priority of liberty holds, all material wants are satisfied. Rather these desires are not so compelling as to make it rational for the persons in the original position to agree to satisfy them by accepting a less than equal freedom. The account of the good enables the parties to work out a hierarchy among their several interests and to note which kinds of ends should be regulative in their rational plans of life. Until the basic wants of individuals can be fulfilled, the relative urgency of their interest in liberty cannot be firmly decided in advance. It will depend on the claims of the least favoured as seen from the constitutional and legislative stages. However, under favourable circumstances the fundamental interest in determining our plan of life eventually assumes a prior place. One reason for this I have discussed in connection with liberty of conscience and freedom of thought. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
And a second reason is the central place of the primary good of self-respect and the desire of human beings to express their nature in a free social union with others. Thus the desire for liberty is the chief regulative interest that the parties must suppose they all will have in common in due course. The veil of ignorance forces them to abstract from the particulars of their plans of life, thereby leading to this conclusion. The serial ordering of the two principles then follows. Now it might seem that even though the desire for an absolute increase in economic advantages declines, human’s concern for their relative place in the distribution of wealth will persist. In fact, if we suppose that everyone wishes a greater proportionate share, the result could be a growing desire for material abundance all the same. Since each strives for an end that cannot be collectively attained, society might conceivably become more and more preoccupied with raising productivity and improving economic efficiency. And these objectives might become so dominant as to undermine the precedence of liberty. Some have objected to the tendency to equality on precisely this ground, that it is thought to arouse in individuals an obsession with their relative share of social wealth. However, while it is true that in a well-ordered society there is most likely a trend to greater equality, its members take little interest in their relative position as such. As we have seen, they are not much affected by envy and jealousy, and for the most part they do what seems best to them as judged by their own plan of life without being dismayed by the greater amenities and enjoyments of others. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Thus there are no strong psychological propensities prompting them to curtail their liberty for the sake of greater absolute or relative economic welfare. The desire for a higher relative place in the distribution of material means should be sufficiently weak that the priority of liberty is not affected. Of course, it does not follow that in a just society everyone is unconcerned with matters of status. The account of self-respect as perhaps the main primary good has stressed the great significance of how we think others value us. However, in a well-ordered society the need for status is met by the public recognition of just institutions, together with the full and diverse internal life of the many free communities of interest that equal liberty allows. The basis for self-esteem in a just society is not then one’s income share but the publicly affirmed distribution of fundamental rights and liberties. And this distribution being equal, everyone has a similar and secure status when they meet to conduct the common affairs of the wider society. No one is inclined to look beyond the constitutional affirmation of equality for further political ways of securing one’s status. No one is inclined to look beyond the constitutional affirmation of equality for further political position from a strategic point of view. It would also have the effect of publicly establishing their inferiority as defined by the basic structure of society. This subordinate ranking in the public forum experienced in the attempt to take part in political and economic life, and felt in dealing with those who have a greater liberty, would indeed be humiliating and destructive of self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
And so by acquiescing in a less than equal liberty one might lose on both counts. This is particularly likely to be true as society becomes more just, since equal rights and public attitudes of mutual respect have an essential place in maintaining a political balance and in assuring citizens of their own worth. Thus while the social and economic differences between the various sectors of society, the noncomparing groups as we may think of them, are not likely to generate animosity, the hardships arising from political and civic inequality, and from culture and ethnic discrimination, cannot be easily accepted. When it is the position of equal citizenship that answers to the need for status, the precedence of equal liberties becomes all the more necessary. Having chosen a conception of justice that seeks to eliminate the significance of relative economic and social advantages as supports for human’s self-confidence, it is essential that the priority of liberty be firmly maintained. So for this reason too the parties are led to adopt a serial ordering of the two principles. In a well-ordered society then self-respect is secured by the public affirmation of the status of equal citizenship for all; the distribution of material means is left to take care of itself in accordance with the idea of pure procedural justice. Of course doing this assumes the requisite background institutions which narrow the range of inequalities so that excusable envy does not arise. Now this way of dealing with the problem of status has several noteworthy features which may be brought out as follows. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Suppose to the contrary that how one is valued by others depends upon one’s relative place in the distribution of income and wealth. In this case, having a higher status implies having more material means than a larger fraction of society. Thus not everyone can have the highest status, and to improve one person’s position is to lower that of someone else. Social cooperation to increase the conditions of self-respect is impossible. The means of status, so to speak, are fixed, and each human’s gain is another’s loss. Clearly this situation is a great misfortune. Persons are set at odds with one another in the pursuit of their self-esteem. Given the preeminence of this primary good, the parties in the original position surely do no want to find themselves so opposed. If not impossible, it would tend, for one thing, to make the good of social union difficult to achieve. Moreover, if the means of providing a good are indeed fixed and cannot be enlarged by cooperation, as mentioned in the discussion of envy, then justice seems to require equal shares, ceteris paribus. However, an equal division of all primary gods in irrational in view of the possibility of bettering everyone’s circumstances by accepting certain inequalities. Thus the best solution is to support the primary good of self-respect as far as possible by the assignment of the basic liberties that can indeed be made equal, defining the same status for all. At the same time, distributive justice as frequently understood, justice in the relative shares of material means, is relegated to a subordinate place. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Thus we arrive at another reason for factoring the social order into two parts as indicated by the principles of justice. While these principles permit inequalities in return for contributions that are for the benefit of all, the precedence of liberty entails equality in the social bases of esteem. Now it is quite possible that this idea cannot be carried through completely. To some extent human’s sense of their own worth may hinge upon their institutional position and their income share. If, however, the account of social envy and jealousy is sound, then, with the appropriate background arrangements, these inclinations should not be excessive, at least not when the priority of liberty is effectively upheld. However, if necessary, theoretically we can include self-respect in the primary goods, the index of which defines expectations. Then in applications of the difference principle this index can allows for the effects of excusable envy; the expectations of the less advantaged are lower the more severe these effects. Whether some adjustment for self-respect has to be made is best decided from the standpoint of the legislative stage where the parties have more information about social circumstances and the principle of political determination applies. Admittedly this problem is an unwelcome complication. Since simplicity it itself desirable in a public conception of justice, the conditions that elicit excusable envy should if possible be avoided. Expectations of the less advantaged can be understood so as to include the primary good of self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Now some may want to object to this account of the priority of liberty that societies have other ways of affirming self-respect and of coping with envy and other disruptive inclinations. Thus in a feudal or in a caste system each person is believed to have one’s allotted station in the natural order of things. One’s comparisons are presumably confined to within one’s own estate or caste, these ranks becoming in effect so many noncomparing groups established independently of human control and sanctioned by religion and theology. Humans resign themselves to their position should it ever occur to them to question it; and since all may view themselves as assigned their vocation, everyone is held to be equally fated and equally noble in the eyes of providence. This conception of society solves the problem of social justice by eliminating in thought the circumstances that give rise to it. The basic structure is aid to be already determined, and not something for human beings to affect. On this view, it misconceives human’s place in the World to suppose that the social order should match principles which they would as equals consent to. Now to this idea, parties re to be guided in their choice of a conception of justice by a knowledge of the general facts about society. They take for granted than that institutions are not fixed but change overtime, altered by natural circumstances and the activities and conflicts of social groups. The constraints of nature are recognized, but humans are not powerless to shape their social arrangements. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
This assumption is likewise part of the background of the theory of justice. It follows that certain ways of dealing with envy and other aberrant propensities are closed to a well-ordered society. For example, it cannot keep them in check by promulgating false or unfounded beliefs. For our problem is how society should be arranged if it is to conform to principles that rational persons with true general beliefs would acknowledge in the original position. The publicity condition of requires the parties to assume that as members of society they will also know the general facts. The reasoning leading up to the initial agreement is to be accessible to public understanding. Of course, in working out what the requisite principles are, we must rely upon current knowledge as recognized by common sense and the existing scientific consensus. However, there is no reasonable alternative to doing this. We have to concede that as established beliefs change, it is possible that the principles of justice which it seems rational to choose may likewise change. Thus when the belief in a fixed natural order sanctioning a hierarchical society is abandoned, assuming here that this belief is not true, a tendency is set up that points in the direction of two principles of justice inertial order. The effective protection of the equal liberties becomes increasingly of first importance. When God wants to punish people, he gives the unjust leaders. So the answer is for the people to repent, turn from their ways, be converted, and seek God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Some people only care about power and what they can do with power. May the Lord come down to protect our people. Democracy is not prescribed in the Bible, and Christians can and do live under other political systems. However, Christians can hardly fail to love democracy, because of all systems it best assures human dignity, the essence of our creation in God’s image. If a candidate wins by cheating, he or she can only be forgiven by God if one renounced the office one has obtained by fraud. There will be no divine forgiveness for this act of injustice without a previous decision to repay the damage done. However, apparently God’s forgiveness is unimportant to some ruling. When politicians rig the vote, it means all the passion for democracy and all the prayers of the people are meaningless. A government that assumes or maintains power through fraudulent means has no moral basis. If it does not of itself freely correct the evil it has inflicted on the people, then it is our serious moral obligation as a people to make it do so. Nonetheless, there is enormous sin attached to fratricidal strife. As moral outrage grows, it is important to study the Bible. God has ordained government to preserve order, but even a bad government is better than no government—which results in chaos. Government’s authority comes from God; it is a delegation. Therefore, governments—all governments—whether they acknowledge it or not, rule under God. However, does God give an unrestricted delegation? Certainly not. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
As Jesus Christ made clear with the coin, there are two realms—and Caesar is not to usurp what belongs to God. Any government that violates the law that is higher than its own is exceeding the legitimate authority God has granted. Government must always be respected, otherwise anarchy results; but the nation may attempt to venerate a culture or race. “When the state is made to serve the aspirations of race or nation instead of the cause of justice for all, it becomes a demonic state warranting resistance and rejection by the Christian faith,” reports Donald Bloesch, Crumbling Foundations (Grand Paris, Mich.: Zondervan, 1984), 183. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, “If government persistently and arbitrarily violates its assigned task, then the divine mandate lapses.” In that case the state becomes evil incarnate, as in Nazi Germany. Instead of acting as God’s instrument for preserving life and order, it does the reverse, destroying life and order. Then the church must resist. Though as argued earlier, the church’s primary function is evangelization and ministering to spiritual needs; as the principle visible manifestation of the Kingdom of God, it must be the conscience of society, the instrument of moral accountability. Richard Neuhaus eloquently wrote that “the church can and should subject to moral questioning every political agenda or cause, thus keeping the entirety of human politics under the transcendent judgement of God.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
The church’s first duty then would be to publicly expose the state’s immorality. The government should not be involved in corruption, oppression, the deprivation of civil liberties, nor the taking of innocent lives. As a second step the church should refuse to have any part in the state’s immorality. The church must take the next more severe measures of resistance lest its words be rendered hollow. The great evangelist Charles Finney refused communion to slave-holders. Others organized the underground railroad and rescued fugitive slaves from prison. Many ministers broke the law, were arrested, and some imprisoned. However, that state’s evil, even as egregious as slavery, does not give an unrestricted license to disobey any law; only the unjust law can properly be contested. While active resistance may succeed, as it did with slavery and the Civil-Rights Movement, it may not, however, be enough in the face of the raw power modern totalitarian states have achieved. So, when all peaceable means fail, what does the Christian do? Is revolution ever justified? Scottish reformation theologians like John Knox and Samuel Rutherford believed they could be, advocating the right of Christians to rise up against ungodly rulers. Many ministers in the colonies agreed as well; when they preached that the people had the authority to resist the king when the king violated God’s commands, they were setting the stage for the American Revolution. After dumping tea in Boston Harbour the next step of resistance was the musket. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
A Boston preacher said that for a people to “arise unanimously and resist their prince, even to dethrone him, is not criminal but a reasonable way of vindicating their liberties and just rights.” John Adams observed, “The revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people, a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.” Some Christian activists today loosely call for a new American Revolution just as the young radical youth movements did in the sixties. However, history reveals, revolution most often results, after the bodies are buried, in one form of tyranny replacing another. G.K. Chesterton summed it up well: “The real case against revolution is this: That there always seems to be much more to be said against the old regime than in favour of the new regime.” So for the Christian, revolution is never to be lightly regarded. It is the most extreme form of disobedience. It could only be contemplated on the same justification as a just war; that is, that there must be a better alterative as a result of the revolution. Its advantages must outweigh the suffering, and the evil employed in the revolution must prevent a far greater evil than the status quo. This was the reasoning that caused Albert Einstein to abandon his pacifism in the face of a dictator’s rise to power. “To prevent the greater evil, it is necessary that the lesser—the hated military—be accepted for the time being,” Einstein contended. It was this reasoning the caused Bonhoeffer to patriciate in the plot to assassinate this dictator. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
For Christians to justify participation in revolution, therefore, they would have to be convinced that the state had become totally opposed to the purposes of God for the state and there was no other recourse to prevent massive evil. The Exodus from Egypt is often cited as a model for political action by liberation theologians, but they ignore the fact that in the Exodus, God did not overthrow the political system in Egypt. He extracted His own people from that system, taking them to Mount Sinai that they might worship Him. In the light of this, then, what about America? What lessons are to be drawn from it? We must be aware to prevent a regime’s refusal to allow free elections, the suspensions of civil liberties, the massive corruption of the governmental process, the trampling of human rights, and a leader’s own blasphemous, at times messianic pretensions, which give the church a mandate to act. The church should be mobilized to say no to evil. The first stage of an individua approach should be entirely biblical. By preaching repentance and conversion, one can encourage outbreaks of spiritual revival all across America. One should call for people to pray for their country. A courageous cardinal and ordinary citizens can open a crack of light in the dark canopy that envelops so much of planet Earth. Through peaceful actions and resistance to evil, the Kingdom of God will be made visible again. The Late Francis Schaeffer once wrote, “If here is no place for civil disobedience, then the government has been made autonomous, and as such, it has been put in the place of the living God.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The belief that government is autonomous, the ultimate repository of power, the solution to all of society’s ills, is the greatest imposter of the twenty-first century. Christians and the church have no higher calling than to expose it by every legitimate means. To some people the great trouble about any argument for the Supernatural is simply the fact that argument should be needed at all. If so stupendous a thing exists, ought it not be obvious as the sun in the sky? It is not intolerable, and indeed incredible, that knowledge of the most basic of all Facts should be accessible only by wire-drawn reasonings for which the vast majority of humans have neither leisure nor capacity? I have great sympathy with this point of view. However, we must notice two things. When you are looking at a garden from a room upstairs it is obvious (once you think about it) that you are looking through a window. However, if it is the garden that interests you, you may look at it for a long time without thinking of the window. When you are reading a book, it is obvious (once you attend to it) that you are using your eyes: but unless your eyes begin to hurt you, or the book is a text book on optics, you may read all evening without once thinking of eyes. When we talk we are obviously using langue and grammar: and when we try to talk a foreign language we may be painfully aware of the fact. However, we are talking English, we do not notice it. When you shout from the top of the stirs, “I am in half a moment,” you are usually conscious that you have made the singular am agree with the singular I. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
There is indeed a story told about a Native American who, having learned several other languages, was asked to write a grammar of the language used by his own tribe. He replied, after some thought, that it had no grammar. The grammar he had sued all his life had escaped his notice all his life. He knew it (in once sense) so well that (in another sense) he did not know it existed. All these instances show that the fact, and through which alone you have access to all the other facts, may be precisely the one that is most easily forgotten—forgotten not because it is so remote or abstruse but because it is so near and so obvious. And that is exactly how the Supernatural has been forgotten. The Naturalists have been engaged in thinking about Nature. They have not attended to the fact that they were thinking. The moment one attends to this it is obvious that one’s own thinking cannot be merely a natural event, and that therefore something other than Nature exists. The Supernatural is not remote and abstruse: it is a matter f daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing. Denial of it depends on a certain absent-mindedness. However, this absent-mindedness is in on way surprising. You do not need—indeed you do not wish—to be always thinking about windows when you are looking at gardens or always thinking about eyes when you are reading. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
In the same way the proper procedure for all limited and particular inquiries is to ignore the fact of your own thinking, and concentrate on the object. It is only when you stand back from particular inquiries and try to form a complete philosophy that you must take it into account. For a complete philosophy must get in all the facts. In it you turn away from specialized or truncated thought to total thought: and one of the facts total thought must think about is Thinking itself. There is thus a tendency in the study of Nature to make us forget the most obvious first of all. And since the Sixteenth Century, when Science was born, the minds of humans have been increasingly turned outward, to know Nature and to master her. They have been increasingly engaged on those specialized inquiries for which truncated thought is the correct method. It is therefore not in the least astonishing that they should have forgotten the evidence for the Supernatural. The deeply ingrained habit of truncated thought—what we call the “scientific” habit of mind—was indeed certain to lead to Naturalism, unless this tendency were continually corrected from some other source. However, no other source was at hand, for during the same period humans of science were coming to be metaphysically and theologically uneducated. That brings me to the second consideration. The state of affairs in which ordinary people can discover the Supernatural only by abstruse reasoning is recent and, by historical standards, abnormal. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
All over the World, until quite modern times, the direct insight of the mystics and the reasonings of the philosopher percolated to the mass of the people by authority and tradition; they could be received by those who were no great reasoners themselves in the concrete form of myth and ritual and the whole pattern of life. In the conditions produced by a century or so of Naturalism, plain humans are being forced to bear burdens which plain humans were never expected to bear before. We must get the truth for ourselves or go without it. There may be two explanations for this. It might be that humanity, in rebelling against tradition and authority, has made a ghastly mistake; a mistake which will not be less fatal because the corruptions of those in authority rendered it very excusable. On the other hand, it may be that the Power which rules our species is at this moment carrying out a daring experiment. Could it be intended that the whole mass of the people should now move forward and occupy for themselves those heights which were once reserved only for the sages? Is the distinction between wise and simple to disappear because all are now expected to become wise? If so, our present blunderings would be but growing pains. However, let us make no mistake about our necessities. If we are content to go back and become humble plain humans obeying a tradition, well. If we are ready to climb and struggle on till we become sages ourselves, better still. However, the human who will neither obey wisdom in others nor adventure for her oneself is fatal. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live: a society where all were seers could live even more fully. However, a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go; to stay here is death. One other point that may have raised doubt or difficulty is the advanced reasons for believing that a supernatural element in present in every rational human. The presence of human rationality in the World is therefore a Miracle. Human Reason an Morality have been mentioned not as instances of Miracle (at least, not of the kind of Miracle you wanted to hear about) but as prods of the Supernatural: not in order to show that Nature ever is invaded but that there is a possible invader. Whether you choose to call the regular and familiar invasion by human Reason a Miracle or not is largely a matter of words. Its regularity—the fact that it regularly enters by the same door, human pleasures of the flesh—may incline you not to do so. It looks as if it were (so to speak) the very nature of Nature to suffer this invasion. However, then we might later find that it was the very nature of Nature to suffer Miracles in general. Fortunately the course of our argument will allow us to leave this question of terminology on one side. We are going to be concerned with other invasions of Nature—with what everyone would call Miracles. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Our question could, if you liked, be put in the form, “Does Supernature every produce particular results in space and time except through the instrumentality of human brains acting on human nerves and muscles?” I have said “particular results” because, on our view, Nature as a whole is herself one huge result of the Supernatural: God created her. God pierces her wherever there is a human mind. God presumably maintains her in existence. The question is whether He ever does anything else to her. Does God, beside all this, ever introduce into her events of which it would not be true to say, “This is simply the working out of the general character which God gave to Nature as a whole in creating her”? Such events are what are popularly called Miracles: and it will be in this sense only that the word Miracle will be used from now on. Do not stand at my grace and weep, I am not there. I do not sleep. I am a though rays of light that glow. I am the diamond glint on snow. I am the moonlight on the shinning sea. I am the gentle autumn rain. When you wake in the morning hush, I am the swift, uplifting rush or quiet birds in circling flight. I am the soft starlight at night. Do not stand at my grace and weep. I am not there. I do not sleep. Our God and God of our fathers, we thank Thee for Thy Torah, our priceless heritage. May the portion we have ready today inspire us to do Thy will and to seek further knowledge of Thy word. Thus our minds will be enriched and our lives endowed with purpose. May we take to heart Thy laws by which humans truly live. Happy are all who love Thee and delight in Thy commandments. Amen. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Wise Humans, Good Humans, Patriotic Humans are to be Found in All Communities!
If Americans could be made to believe that their sufferings were for some remote, high sacrificial end, perhaps it would be possible for them to become reconciled to their plight; but sharing the culture that condemns them, and seeing that lust for trash is what blinds the nation to their claims, is what sets storms rolling in the soul of America. The United State of America is so unique from other nations because it is a nation of laws, not a nation of humans. A nation of laws means that legal decrees, not people rule. Whether it be the most common American members or members of Congress, high-ranking bureaucrats or the president of the United States of America, everyone is governed by the same laws, regardless of their station. All must be held to the just laws of America. America’s founds extolled a nation of laws, for they knew that only a fairly enforced legal system could protect liberty and property against corruption and tyranny. God is in fact the author of liberty and to retain it, the inhabitant of the land must be protected by His might hand. There is no other power that can protect that liberty. In order for us to enjoy this protection of His might, we must accept God as our God and keep His commandments. “Behold, this America is a choice land, and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall be free from bondage, and from captivity, and from all other nations under Heaven, if they will but serve the God of the land, who is Jesus Christ,” reports Ether 2.12. The God of this land is also the King of the land. And this is true. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Manifest Destiny is a phenomenon. Jesus spoke here in America, and He proclaimed, “This lad shall be a land of liberty, and there shall be no kings upon it. For I, the Lord, the king of Heaven, will be their king, and I will be light unto them forever, that hear my words. For it is a choice land, saith God, wherefore I will have all humans that dwell thereon that they shall worship me,” reports 2 Nephi 10.11-19. The alternative to enjoying this liberty and happiness through acceptance of and obedience to Jesus Christ is made clear by Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny is a tangible blessing from God that has created American history. It is a systematic body of concepts and beliefs that powers American life and culture. The right of our manifest destiny to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development and great creation of liberty and federative development of self government entrusted to us is a promise that we shall flourish. “Whoso should possess this land of promise, from that time henceforth and forever, should serve him, the true and only God, or they should be swept off when hey are ripened in iniquity,” reports Ether 2.8-9. It is as a right that we serve God and obey the laws as that of the tree to the space of air and the Earth be suitable for the full expression of its principle and destiny of growth. When people follow the guidance of God of the land, they reach great heights. The Lord in the very beginning revealed to Adam a perfect form of government for the benefit of humans. We believe that governments are instituted of God. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Individual freedom is necessary. No law shall be passed that takes away from a human the right of free choice. Free agency is fundamental as law of human conduct. Humans have a right to obey or disobey that laws as they please, and take the consequences. That government is best which has as its aim the administration of justice, social well-being and the promotion of prosperity among its members. We must recognize that property rights are essential to human liberty. The individual has three great rights, equally sacred from arbitrary interference: the right to one’s life, the right to one’s liberty, and the right to one’s property. The three rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a human one’s life, but to deny one one’s liberty, is to take from one all that makes life worth living. To give one liberty, but take from one the property which is the fruit and badge of one’s liberty, is to still leave one a slave. Laws are enacted for the protection of society, and have no value except when they are administered in righteousness and justice. If dishonest humans occupy administrative offices, laws cannot be so administered in righteousness and justice. The Lord says, “When the wicked rule, the people mourn.” Wise humans, good humans, patriotic humans are to be found in all communities, in all political parties, among all creeds. None but such humans should be chosen. Without beneficent laws, righteously administered, the foundations of civilization crumble, anarchy reigns, decay and dissolution follow. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
We call upon all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints throughout the World to honour the laws of God, and obey and uphold the law of the land; and we appeal to good humans everywhere, regardless of creed, party affiliation, race, culture, or condition to join with us in an effort to put into operation the words of President Lincoln, the great emancipator, that our country may continue to be a light to the World, a loyal, law-abiding, God-fearing nation. We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience; and allow all humans the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may. However, we claim absolutely no right, no prerogative whatever, to interfere with any other people. A good government must secure for every citizen the free exercise of conscience. Matters of belief or religious practice should not be interfered with, unless they oppose laws formulated for the common good. There should be no mingling of religious influence with the civil governments. We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honouring, and sustaining the laws. The main psychological root of the liability to envy is a lack of self-confidence in our own worth combined with a sense of impotence. Our way of life is without zest and we feel powerless to alter it or to acquire the means of doing what we still want to do. This creation the notion of resentment. By contrast, someone sure of the worth of one’s plan of life and one’s ability to carry it out is not given to rancor nor is one jealous of one’s good fortune. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
Even if one could, one has no desire to level down the advantages of others at some expense to oneself. This hypothesis implies that the least favoured tend to be more envious of the better situation of the more favoured the less secure their self-respect and the greater their feeling that they cannot improve their prospects. Similarly the particular envy aroused by competition and rivalry is like to be stronger the worse one’s defeat, for the blow to one’s self-confidence is more severe and the loss may seem irretrievable. It is general envy, however, that mainly concerns us here. There are three conditions that encourage hostile outbreaks of envy. The first of these is the psychological condition we have just noted: persons lack a sure confidence in their own value and in their ability to do anything worthwhile. Second (and one of two social conditions), many occasions arise when this psychological condition is experienced as painful and humiliating. The discrepancy between oneself and others is made visible by the social structure and style of one’s society. The less fortunate are therefore often forcibly reminded of their situation, sometimes leading them to an even lower estimation of themselves and their mode of living. And third, they see their social position as allowing no constructive alternative to opposing the favoured circumstances of the more advantaged. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
To alleviate their feelings of anguish and inferiority, they have no choice but to impose a loss on those better placed even at some cost to themselves, unless of course they are to relapse into resignation and apathy. Now, if not to present these conditions, many aspects of a well-ordered society of to mitigate. It is clear that, although it is a psychological state, social institutions are a basic instigating cause. However, the contract conception of justice supports the self-esteem of the citizens generally more firmly than other political principles. In the public forum each person is treated with the respect due to a sovereign equal; and everyone has the same basic rights that would be acknowledged in an initial situation regarded as fair. The members of the community have a common sense of justice and they are bound by ties of civic friendship. Obedience implies a higher attitude than mere submission, for obedience has its root in good intent; submission may spring from selfishness or meanness of spirit. Though obedience and submission both imply restraint on one’s own will, we are obedient only from a sense of right; submissive from a sense of necessity. Honour expressed an act or attitude of an inferior towards a superior. When applied to things it is taken in the sense of holding honour. Thus, in honouring the law, we look upon it as something which is above selfish desires or indulgences. To sustain signifies to hold up; to keep from falling. To sustain the law, therefore, is to refrain from saying or doing anything which will weaken it or make it ineffective. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
We obey the law from a sense of right. We honour the law because of its necessity and strength to society. We sustain law by keeping it in good repute. This is in our connection with stability. The greater advantages of some are in return for compensating benefits for the less favoured; and no one supposes that those who have a larger share are ore deserving from a moral point of view. Happiness according to virtue is rejected as a principle of perfection: regardless of the excellences that persons or associations display, their claims to social resources are always adjudicated by principles of mutual justice. For all these reasons the less fortune have no cause to consider themselves inferior and the public principles generally accepted underwrite their self-assurance. The disparities between themselves and others, whether absolute or relative, should be easier for them to accept than in other forms of polity. Turning to the second condition, both the absolute and the relative differences allowed in a well-ordered society are probably less than those that have often prevailed. Although in theory the difference principle permits indefinitely large inequalities in return for small gains to the less favoured, the spread of income and wealth should not be excessive in practice, given the requisite background institutions. Moreover the plurality of associations in a well-ordered society, each with its secure internal life, tends to reduce the visibility, or at least the painful visibility, of variations in human’s purposes. For we tend to compare our circumstances with others in the same or in a similar group as ourselves, or in positions that we regard as relevant to our aspirations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
The various associations in society tend to divide it into so many noncomparing groups, the discrepancies between these divisions not attracting the kind of attention which unsettles the lives of those less well placed. And this ignoring of differences in wealth and circumstances is made easier by the fact that when citizens do meet one another, as they must in public affairs at least, the principles of equal justice are acknowledged. Moreover in everyday life the natural duties are honoured so that the more advantaged do not make an ostentatious display of their higher estate calculated to demean the condition of those who have less. After all, if the disposing conditions for envy are removed, so probably are those for jealousy, grudgingness, and spite, the converses of envy. When the less fortunate segments of society lack the one the more fortunate will lack the other. Taken together these features of a well-ordered regime diminish the number of occasions when the less favoured are likely to experience their situation as impoverished and humiliating. Even if they have some liability to envy, it may never be strongly envoked. Finally, considering the last condition, it would seem that a well-ordered society as much as any other offers constructive alternatives to hostile outbreaks of envy. The problem of general envy anyway does not force us to reconsider the choice of the principles of justice. As for particular envy, to a certain extent it is endemic to human life; being associated with rivalry, it may exist in any society. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
The more specific problem for political justice is how pervasive are the rancor and jealousy aroused by the quest for office and position, and whether it is likely to distort the justice of institutions. It is difficult to settle this latter in the absence of the more detailed knowledge of social forms available at the legislative stage. However, there sees to be no reason why the hazards of particular envy should be worse in a society regulated by justice as fairness than by any other conception. The principles of justice again seems relatively stable. A question has been asked man times. In the case of a conflict between requirements made by the law revealed by the word of God, and those imposed by the secular law, which of these authorities would members of the Church be bound to obey? The word of God is to come first. So essentially, God should be in and influence the government because the number one rule of God is to be honest and if one cannot honestly enforce the law, they have no right in government. In all civilized nations the people are accorded the right to pray, and this right is assured by what maybe properly called a common law of humankind. No earnest soul is cut off from communion with one’s God; and with such an open channel of communication, relief from burdensome laws and redress from grievances may be sought from the power that holds control of nations. “Bad laws, if they exist, should be repleaded as soon as possible; still, while they continue in force, they should be religiously observed,” reports President Abraham Lincoln. This is the view of the Church. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
While there are many forms of equality, and egalitarianism admits of degrees, there are conceptions of justice that are recognizably equalitarian, even though certain significant disparities are permitted. The two principles of justice fall under this heading. The different conception of equality which they define is acknowledged on the supposition that envy does not exist. For behold, you should not fear humans more than God, you should be faithful and God will extend His arm, and He will be with you in every time of trouble. Children of God are chosen to do the work of the Lord. Repent of that which thou hast done, and thou art still chosen, and art again called to the world. Except thou doest this, thou shalt become as other humans, and have no more gift. When thou delivers up that which God has given thee sight and power to translate thou delivers up that which is sacred into the hands of a wicked human who depends upon one’s own judgment, and boasts in one’s own wisdom; and this is the reason that thou will lose thy privileges for a season. Nevertheless, God’s work shall go forth, for, inasmuch as the knowledge of the Saviour has come unto the World, through the testimony of the Jewish people, even so shall the knowledge of a Saviour come unto our people, and to the Americans through the testimony of their fathers. And this testimony shall come to the knowledge of all. For this very purpose are these plates preserved that the promises of the Lord might be fulfilled, which He made to His people. And the Americans might come to the knowledge of their fathers, and they might know the promise of the Lord. And they may believe the gospel and rely upon the merits of Jesus Christ, and be glorified through faith in his name and through their repentance they might be saved. I cancel every demonic assignment against you and your purpose. The plans of the enemy will not prevail. In Jesus’ name, Amen. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Joseph Smith was very sorry he had been unfaithful, and he humbled himself before God, determining to try harder to keep all of the Lord’s commandments. Later, within a month, the gift and the plates were returned to Joseph, but he was not allowed to translate the same record again. By revelation Joseph was told that wicked people had the lost manuscript. The Lord, Jesus Christ said; Behold, Satan, has put it into their hearts to alter the words, because they have altered the words, they read contrary from that which you translated and caused to be written. On this wise the Devil has sought to lay a cunning plan, the he may destroy this work. Verily I say unto you, that I will not suffer that Satan shall accomplish his evil design in this thing. Behold, they say and think in their hearts, We will see if God has given him power to translate, if so, he will also give him power again; and if he bringeth forth the same words, behold, we have the same with us, and we have altered them. Therefore, they will not agree, and we will say that he has lied in his words, and that he has no gift, and that he has no power; therefore, we will destroy him, and also the work. Behold, I say unto you, that you shall not translate again those words which have gone forth out of your hands. For, behold, if you should bring forth the same words, they will say that you have contradicted yourself. And, behold, they will publish his, and Satan will harden the hearts of the people to stir them up to anger against you, that they will not believe my words. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
The Lord told Joseph that the part of the record he had translated which had been lost (about one hundred and sixteen pages) was a shorted story of the Nephite record; and that the golden plates also contained the complete story. Joseph was told he should translate the full record rather than the shortened one he had previously translated: the Lord said: I will not suffer that they shall destroy my work; yea, I will show unto them that y wisdom is greater than the cunning of the Devil. Behold, I am Jesus Christ, the Son of God. I came unto my own, and my own received me not. I am He who said, Other sheep have I which are not of this fold, unto my disciples, and many there were that understood me not. And I will show unto this people, that I had other sheep, and I will also bring to light my gospel, which was ministered unto them. And this I do, that I may establish my gospel, that there may not be so much contention. Yea, Satan doth stir up the hearts of the people to contention, concerning the points of my doctrine; and in these things they do err, for they do wrest the Scriptures, and do not understand them. Therefore, I will unfold unto them this great mystery; for behold, I will gather them as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, if they will not harden their hearts. Behold, this is my doctrine: Whosoever repenteth and cometh unto me, the same is my church Whosoever is of my church, and endureth of my church to the end, one will I establish upon my Rock. And now, remember the words of your Redeemer, your Lord, and your God. Amen. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
The important of separating envy from the moral feelings can be seen from several examples. Suppose first that envy is held to be pervasive in poor less affluent societies. The reason for this, it may be suggested, is the general belief that the aggregate of social wealth is more or less fixed, so that one person’s gain is another’s loss. The social system is interpreted, it might be said, as a naturally established and unchangeable zero-sum game. Now actually, if this belief were widespread and the stock of goods were generally thought to be given, then a strict opposition of interests would be assumed to obtain. In this case, it would be correct to think that justice requires equal shares. Social wealthy is not viewed as the outcome of mutually advantageous cooperation and so there is no fair basis for an unequal division of advantages. What is said to be envy may in fact be resentment which might or might not prove to be justified. Dr. Freud’s speculations about the origin of the sense of justice suffer from the same defect. He remarks that this sentiment is the outgrowth of envy and jealousy. As some members of the social group jealously strive to protect their advantages, the less favoured are moved by envy to take them away Eventually everyone recognizes that they cannot maintain their hostile attitudes toward one another without injury to themselves. Thus as a compromise they settle upon the demand of equal treatment. The sense of justice is a reaction-formation: what was originally jealousy and envy is transformed into a social feeling, the same sense of justice that insists upon equality for all. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
Dr. Freud believes that this process is exemplified in the nursey and in many other social circumstances. Yet the plausibility of one’s account assumes that the initial attitudes are correctly described. With a few changes, the underlying features of the example he depicts correspond to those of the original position. That persons have opposing interests and seek to advance their own conception of the god is not at all the same thing as their being moved by envy and jealousy. As we have seen, this sort of opposition gives rise to the circumstances of justice. Thus if children compete for the attention and affection of their parents, to which one might say they justly have an equal claim, one cannot assert that their sense of justice springs form jealousy and envy. Certainly children are often envious and jealous; and no doubt their moral notions are so primitive that the necessary distinctions are not grasped by them. However, waiving these difficulties, we could equally well say that their social feelings arise from resentment, from a sense that they are unfairly treated. And similarly one could say to conservative writers that it is mere grudgingness when those better circumstances reject the claims of the less advantaged to greater equality. However, this contention also calls for careful argument. None of these charges and countercharges can be given credence without first examining the conceptions of justice sincerely held by individuals and their understanding of the social situation in order to see how far these claims are indeed founded on these motives. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
None of these remarks is intended to deny that the appeal to justice is often a mask for envy. What is said to be resentment may really be rancor. However, rationalizations of this sort present a further problem. In addition to showing that a person’s conception of justice is not itself founded on envy, we must determine whether the principles of justice cited in one’s explanation are sincerely held as this is shown in their being applied by one to other cases in which one is not involved, or even better, in which one would suffer a loss from their being followed. Dr. Freud means to asset more than the truism that envy and jealousy, and that without this energy, there would be no (or much less) desire to give justice. Conceptions of justice have few attractions for us other than those deriving from these and similar feelings. It is claim that is supported by erroneously conflating envy and resentment. Unhappily the problem of the other special psychologies must go untouched. They should in any case be treated in much the same way as envy. One tries to assess the configuration of attitudes toward risk and uncertainty, domination and submission, and the like, that just institutions are likely to generate, and then to estimate whether they are likely to render theses institutions unworkable or ineffective. We also need to ask whether, from the point of view of the persons in the original position, the conception chosen is acceptable or at least tolerable whatever our special proclivities may turn out to be. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
The most favourable alternative is that which allows a place for all these different tendencies insofar as they are likely to be encouraged by a just basic structure. There is a division of labour so to speak between persons with contrary inclinations. Of course some of these attitudes may earn a premium in the way that certain trained abilities do, as for example the willingness to be adventuresome and to take unusual risks. However, if so, the problem is o all fours with the return to natural assets and it is covered by the discussion of distributive shares. What a social system must not do clearly is to encourage propensities and aspirations that it is bound to repress and disappoint. So long as the pattern of special psychologies elicited by society either supports its arrangements or can be reasonably accommodated by them, there is no need to reconsider the choice of a conception of justice. I believe, though I have not shown, that the principles of justice as fairness pass this test. When people can measure the extent of their freedom in two or three paces, and realize for the first time in their lives they have nothing else to do, but sit on a bunk, as they say passes into night and they continue to sit there because they are in prison—that is when it dawns on them how important freedom is. Even the children of a wealthy family, children of charismatic, gregarious politicians may suddenly find themselves stripped of everything that has propped up their egos. All their plans, friends, their busy work schedule, all their carefully cultivated followers will be gone, and replaced by the sheer loneliness and boredom of the prison cell and the venomous hostility of their guards. And they will keep waiting for justice, for a deal. Surely the United States Constitution could not simply leave them to rot in prison! #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
Imagine half a year going by before you are confronted with any charges. Then a fraudulently concocted murder case is brought, and a rigged military court condemns you to death. This is a bad dream, for the real reason for your imprisonment is the President is a communist and has lust for money and greed for power. Then imagine within his or her two-term limit as president due to expire in a few short weeks, the president declares martial law, granting him or herself almost unlimited powers. Then he or she can have you and other political opponents thrown into prison. The president may never intend to leave office—and may be determined never to let a popular rival out to silence him or her. Prison has the bewildering effect on many, which causes them to lose all sense of direction and perspective. One may become better not only at the president, but at the World, even at God. Injustice causes some to hate everyone and their prison guard may goad on an individual. Imagine if sometimes they put your dinner plate on the ground and let a mongrel dog wolf part of it down; then, kicking the dog aside, they give you what and left, and if you do not eat it, you get placed on suicide watch. In a matter of weeks, this could cause an individual to lose forty pounds, suffer two heart attacks. And when you are not longing for revenge, you want to die. However, much like Joseph Smith, if you keep your faith in God, He will show you that such losses are not in vain as you find your true life in Christ. What is this suffering is what draws you closer to the Lord and saves you from a life of eternal flames in the pits of hell? Therefore, continue to search for meaning in life. Find great inspiration in the Holy Bible to motivate your life and struggle for your country. Then, even if your prison is physical, or only in your mind, kneel in your jail cell and give your life to Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
Even if you are overcome with grief for your anger towards God, please beg for forgiveness. There is a close connection between frequent and solid spiritual experiences between us and the development of faith in the elaborate and creative purposes of God. This is derived from the close connection between Father and child because we are here with God now, needing Him and He says, “I am thinking of you,” and even though we may not be able to see God, we are having Him as part of our current experience, even when we are unaware. The fortune individual will have had many times when one was with God but not are of Him except for the security of knowing that He was there when needed. We are fortune because our environment is fulfilling one of the essentials needed if one is to have highly developed creativity. Because we have somehow had God there when He was not an obvious part of our experience, one can discover the Lord after we think He is absent (from experience) for a while. The individual will have had the experience of tolerating God’s absence without having to feel the terror that He might be lost forever. As we build our faith our experience will flicker between “God here when He is not here,” and “God not here when He is here.” One has thereby discovered that one can hold on to a concept—the symbol—which stands for the available God—has become pleasantly and interestingly established. We can play peekaboo with it. We can make the symbol happen while waiting for God to come along. The symbol can fill the interval of waiting, a small space of time. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
The symbol stands for God—it stands for “You who normally come soon after I realize that I need You. Something arouses in my mind, an anticipation, a phantasy of something good. Then there is a small gap an absence, an interval of time. Then You came.” All one’s viewpoints, one’s life, most of all one’s bitterness—all will change. One will have a sense that life has suddenly moved into a different channel with another purpose. It is for our doubting hearts to believe that spiritual power—which is peaceful, prayerful, humane, forgiving, willing to suffering on the side of the poor and oppressed—can change society. We know that the gospel affects the lives of individuals, but can it make an impact on institutions and governments, where the heartless realities of power pierce like a knife? It is hard to fathom this. Nevertheless, it can happen. It does happen. One can never quite calculate how one conversation in a mental or physical prison cell may set in motion a train of events to shake a nation. Many people in prisons want to die. However, when they find Christ, they acquire a new maturity, and, though one may also retain their natural ebullience, a relative serenity that have never had before manifests. Some people will sense an individual has undergone something like a religious conversion as a result of years of injustice inflicted in a cell or in their own community. And indeed they have, but it will take away none of their heartfelt concern for their nation. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
In countries that suffer from communism, the president uses martial law as a cover while they rape the country. Leaders and their business cronies have been known to bleed nations dry, making huge profits through monopoly powers and putting the money into New York real estate and Swiss banks. Meanwhile, half the working population cannot find jobs. The ugly scabs of the slums, many without running water or flushing toilets, spread across Sacramento and other cities. Marxist guerrillas are quickly gaining around, and the some in positions of authority, riven by corruption, seem unable to stop them. They may find it easier to savage poor peasants than to fight the Communists. Things may even reach a pint where anyone who helps the poor will be under suspicion. Army units have arrested, killed, and tortured even Catholic priests and nuns who have chosen to work with the desperately poor in other countries. While in America, some people, even the rich and famous, are given bonuses and jobs to help extort those suffering injustices. A few Catholics have, it is true, take the side of the Marxists, but the vast majority simply minister in the name of Jesus to those in need. Between the Marxist insurgency and a president who becomes a dictator, there is little room in the middle. Some people, even many in America, have seen the ruthless side of communism—after all they suffer and lose their lives just because of who they are. It is true, one can fight hatred with a greater hatred, but it is more effective to fight hatred with greater Christian love. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
Do much soul searching and pursue your freedom struggle through the path of nonviolence, fully cognizant that this ay be the longer and more arduous road. And you may suffer solitary confinement once again, and possibly death. However, by taking the road of revolution, how many lives, other then one’s, will have to be sacrificed? Humans are ordained to eternal life through the providence of God, it likewise is part of that providence to permit some to fall away from that end; this is called reprobation. Thus, as predestination is a part of providence, in regard to those ordained to eternal salvation, so reprobation is a part of providence in regard to those who turn aside from that end. Hence reprobation includes the will to permit a person to fall into sin, and to impose the punishment of damnation on account of that sin. Symbols can stand for what will come. However, equally, they can stand for what may come, what may not come, or what will not come again. All kinds of conceptual processes can fill the interval between the moment when we have phantasy of something and the moment of finding something. Transitional objects and other symbols appear where there had been either nothing, or an experience of something not there. God loves all humans and all creatures, inasmuch as He wishes them all some good; but He does not wish every good to them all. So far, therefore, as He does not wish this particular good—namely, eternal life—He is said to hate or reprobate them. Reprobation different in its causality from predestination. This atter is the cause of what is expected in the future life by predestined—namely, glory—and of what is received in this life—namely grace. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Reprobation, however, is not the cause of what is in the present, namely sin; but it is the cause of abandonment by God. It is the cause, however, of what is assigned in the future—namely, eternal punishment. However, guilt proceeds from the free-will of the person who is reprobated and deserted by grace. In this way, the word of the prophet is true—namely, “Destruction is thy own, O Israel.” Reprobation by God does not take away from the power of the person reprobated. Hence, when it is said that the reprobated cannot obtain grace, this must not be understood as implying absolute impossibility: butt only conditional impossibility: as was said above does not do away with the liberty of choice. Whence, although anyone reprobated by God cannot acquire grace, nevertheless, that one falls into this or that particular sin comes from the use of one’s free will. Hence is rightly imputed to one as guilt. It is as if it were illuminated through a succession of continuously changing filters. You discover that the first phase of your involvement was no more than a prelude or an overture before the curtain vanished. You come to see that sin began by enticing you with an illusion—the illusion of a light-filled hedonistic joy, evil disguised by sun-drenched window—and to accept that what you are in fact confronted with is nothing more or less than the successive layers of the thinnest of honey-comb marks laid down gently in whispers of lies upon the canvas surface. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
However, when the curtain has risen and the any the painting of lies continues to such your eyes into itself, it will engulf your soul with its entertainment. The uniform skin of God’s grace evaporates in part because in tenuous existence came about only through the adhering to God’s commandments and your organization of forms of faith, which was a shimmering ray of love inviting the Holy Ghost in your temple. However, as this shimmer disintegrates, it gives way to billowing and boundless hazes of black smoke, to seemingly limitless vistas of your soul space. It is the duty of citizens of any country to remember that they have individua responsibilities, and that they must operate within the law of the country in which they have chosen to live. No member of the Church can be accepted as in good standing whose way of life is one of rebellion against the established order of decency and obedience to law. We cannot be in rebellion against the law and be in harmony with the Lord, for He has commanded us to “be subject to the powers that be, until He reigns whose right it is to reign,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 58.22. And one of these days He is going to come. The exception to this principle would be when the Lord directs His people through His prophets to take an opposing stand to government. Otherwise they recognize the established authority of government. Remember that the Lord holds all of us responsible for our conduct here. He held our father Adam responsible for his conduct, but no more than He does us, in proportion to the station we hold. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
The kings of the Earth will have to give an account to God, for their conduct in a kingly capacity. Kings are heads of nations, governors are heads of provinces; so are fathers or husbands governors of their own houses, and should act accordingly. Because some regard the theory and practice of one’s subject from the inside, they mystic can discuss it with a correctness and authority which most critics do not possess because they are outside it. They are largely in the dark about it—one is actually in the light. Those who has never felt it in themselves nor seen in demonstrated in others cannot understand the blessedness of such a state. Because they are unready for it, they cannot endure such an experience. The peace it imparts is too impersonal and would suffocate them. The detachment which it creates makes the Worldly life seem less important and is too frightening. The recognition that this experience does happen is increasingly rapidly in Western counties but in the East, it has never been doubted. The criticism that mystical experience is subjective and illusory is being dropped, as it ought to be Those who have never experienced this state yet venture to criticize it as illusory are dealing with mere words, not facts. If the ordinary human seldom gets these subtler experiences it is because one’s nature is too coarse, one’s mind too physically based, one’s focus too personal to permit one to receive them. Deep within one’s own heart, hidden within one’s own consciousness, every person carries all the evidence for the truth of these teachings that one is ever likely to need. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
That arrogance which denies Heaven to the unorthodox does not trouble the mystic. One finds Heaven here in this life, now before the transition of death. At such times, unexpected and unsought though they are, one feels the nearness of God, the love of God, the reality of God. Whoever ventures to call them delusions s oneself deluded. Those who are dead are never gone: they are there in the shimmering light. The dead are not under the Earth: they are there in the blue sky, they are in the clouds that drift above, they are in the rain that falls, they are in the sun that shines, they are in the moon the beams, they are in the trees that provide shade, they are in the crowd, the dead are not dead. Those who are dead are never gone, they are in your heart, they are in the eyes of an innocent child, they are in the flames in your fireplace. They are in the forest, they are in the house, they are not dead. When the Ark rested, Moses said: Mayest Thou, O Lord, dwell among the myriads of the families of America. Arise, O Lord, unto Thy sanctuary, Thou, and the Ark of Thy strength. Let Thy priest be clothed with salvation; and Thy faithful ones exult. For the sake of David, Thy servant, reject not Thine anointed. I have given your good teaching; forsake not My Torah. It is a Tree of Life to them that hold fast to it, and everyone who upholds it is happy. Its ways are ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace. Turn us unto Thee, O Lord, and we shall return; renew our days as of Heaven. This nation and all nations, together with president, queens, kings, emperors, judges, and all humans, righteous and wicked, have go to go into the spirit World and stand before the bar of God. They have got to give an account of the deeds done in the body. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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Even the Truth Can Spread and Not Only the Popular Lie!
It is easy enough to praise humans for the courage of their convictions. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the bravery of this confusion. The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any. We all learn by experience but some of us have to go to summer school. The malignant forms of aggression—sadism and necrophilia—are not innate; hence, they can be substantially reduced when the socioeconomic conditions are replaced by conditions that are favourable to the full development of human’s genuine needs and capacities: to the development of human self-activity and human’s genuine need and capacities: to the development of human self-activity and human’s creative power as its own end. Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple human self-activity and all factors that make humans into a psychic cripple turn one also into a sadist or a destroyer. Humans, have in our day become a source of suspicion and distrust of all against all. Credulity is one our worst enemies, but that is the makeshift the neurotic always resorts to in order to quell the doubter in one’s own heart or to conjure one out of existence. The result is that modern humans know oneself only in so far as one can become conscious of oneself—a capacity largely dependent on environment conditions, knowledge and control of which necessitated of suggested certain modifications of one’s original instinctive tendencies. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Their consciousness therefore orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating the World around one, and it is to the latter’s peculiarities that one must adapt one’s psychic and technical resources. This task is so exacting, and its fulfilment so profitable, that one forgets oneself in the process, losing sight of one’s instinctual nature and putting one’s own conception of oneself in place of one’s real being. In this way one slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual World where the products of one’s conscious activity progressively take the place of reality. The Communist revolution has debased humans far lower than collective psychology has done, because it robs one of one’s freedom not only in the social but in the moral and spiritual sphere. Aside from the political difficulties, this entailed a great psychological disadvantage for the West that had already made itself unpleasantly felt in the days of German Nazism: we can now point a finger at the shadow. Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair. If one truly responds to humans and their future, id est, concernedly and “responsibly,” one can respond only by faith or by despair. Rational faith as well as rational despair are based on the most thorough, critical knowledge of all the factors that are relevant for the survival of humans. The basis of rational faith in humans is the presence of a real possibility for one’s salvation; the basis for rational despair would be the knowledge that no such possibility can be seen. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Most people are quite ready to denounce faith in human’s improvement as unrealistic; but they do not recognize that despair is often just as unrealistic. It is easy to say: “Humans have always been killer.” However, the statement nevertheless is not correct, for it neglects to take into account the intricacies of history of destructiveness. It is equally easy to say, “The desire to exploit others is just human nature”; but again, the statement neglects (or distorts) the facts. In brief, that statement, “Human nature is evil,” is not a bit more realistic than the statement, “Human nature is good.” However, the first statement is much easier to make; anyone who wants to prove human’s evilness finds followers most readily, for one offers everybody an alibi for one’s own sins—and seemingly risks nothing. Yet the spreading of irrational despair is in itself destructive, as all untruth is; it discourages and confuses. Preaching irrational faith or announcing false Messiahs is hardly destructive—it seduces and then paralyzes. The attitude of the majority is neither that of faith nor that of despair, but, unfortunately, that of complete indifference to the future of humans. With those who are not entirely indifferent, the attitude is that of “optimism” or of “pessimism.” They are accustomed to identifying human achievement with technical achievement, human freedom with freedom from direct coercion and the consumer’s freedom to choose between many allegedly different commodities. The dignity, cooperativeness, kindness of the primitive do not impress them; technical achievement, wealth, toughness do. Centuries of rule over technically backward people of different colour have left their stamp on the optimists’ minds. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
How could a “savage” be human and equal, not to speak of superior, to the humans who can fly to the moon—or by pushing a button, destroy millions of living beings? The optimists live well enough, at least for the moment, and they can afford to be “optimists.” Or at least that is what they think because they are so alienated that even the threat to the future of their grandchildren does not genuinely affect them. The “pessimists” are really not very different from the optimists. They live just as comfortably and are just as little engaged. The fate of humanity is as little their concern as it is the optimists’. They do not feel despair; if they did, they would not, and could not, live as contentedly as they do. And while their pessimism functions largely to protect the pessimists from any inner demand to do something, by projecting the idea that nothing can be done, the optimists defend themselves against the same inner demand by persuading themselves that everything is moving in the right direction anyway, so nothing needs to be done. To have faith means to dare, to think the unthinkable, yet to act within the limits of the realistically possible; it is the paradoxical hope to expect the Messiah every day, yet not to lose heart when He has not come at the appointed hour. This hope is not passive and it is not patient; on the contrary, it is impatient and active, looking for every possibility of action within the realm of real possibilities. Least of all is it passive as far as the growth and the liberation of one’s own person are concerned. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
There are several limitations to personal development determined by the social structure. However, those alleged radicals who counsel that no personal change is possible or even desirable within present-day society use their revolutionary ideology as an excuse for their personal resistance to inner change. The situation of humankind today is too serious to permit us to listen to the demagogues—least of all demagogues who are attacked to destruction—or even to the leaders who use only their brains and whose hearts have hardened. Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality humans are endowed with—the love of life. Hate, as a relation to objects is older than love. It derives from the narcissistic ego’s primordial repudiation of the external World. It really seems as though it is necessary for us to destroy some other thing or person in order not to destroy ourselves, in order to guard against the impulsions to self-destruction. A sad disclosure indeed for the moralist! Humans are looked upon as an isolated system, driven by two impulses: one to survive (ego instinct) and one to have pleasure by overcoming the tensions that in turn were chemically produced within the body and localized in the “erogenous zones.” However, there is no need for psychoanalysis to be ashamed to speak of love, for religion itself said: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” This, however, is more easily said than done. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Emotional bonds are means of identification. Whatever leads humans to share important interests produces this community of feeling, these identifications. And the structure of human societies is to a large extent based on them. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” It is known throughout the World and is undoubtedly older than Christianity, which puts it forward as its proudest claim. Yet it is certainly not very old; even in historical times it was still strand to humankind. Let us adopt a naïve attitude towards it, as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment. Why should we do it? What good will it do us? However, above all, how shall we achieve it? How can it be possible? My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection It imposes duties on me for whose fulfillment I must be ready to make sacrifices. If I love someone, one must deserve it in some way. (I leave out of account the use one may be to me in important ways that I an love myself in one; and one deserves it if one is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in one. Again, I have to love one if one is my friend’s son, since the pain my friend would feel if any harm came to one would be my pain too—I should have to share it. However, if one is a stranger to me and if one cannot attract me by any worth of one’s own or any significance that one may already have acquired for my emotional life, it would be for hard for me to love one. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Indeed, I should be wrong to do so, for my love is valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on a par with them. However, I am to love one (with this universal love) merely because one, too, is an inhabitant of this Earth, like an insect, and Earth-worm or a grass-snake, then I fear that only a small modicum of my love will fall to one’s share—not by any possibility as much as, by the judgment of my reason, I am entitled to retain for myself. The contradiction between death instinct and Eros (fundamental and creative love) confronts humans with a real and truly trading alternative. A real alternative because one can decide to attack and wage war, to be aggressive, and to express one’s hostility because one prefers to do this rather than to be sick. That this alternative is a tragic one hardly needs to be proven. And now we are struck by the significance of the possibility that the aggressiveness may not be able to find satisfaction in the external World because it comes up against real obstacles. If this happens, it will perhaps retreat and increase the amount of self-destructiveness holding sway in the interior. Holding back aggressiveness is in general unhealthy and leads to illness. However, science and learning to control the environment and making is more palatable for habitation and cultivation of agriculture, along with religion and psychology is good for humans. Humans are freed from the tragic choice between destroying either others or oneself, because the energy of destructive instinct is used for the control over nature. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
However, we must ask, can this really be so? Can it be true that destructiveness becomes transformed into constructiveness? What can “control over nature” mean? Taming and breeding animals, gathering and cultivating plants, weaving cloth, building huts, manufacturing pottery, and many more activities including the construction of machines, railroads, airplanes, and skyscrapers. All these acts of constructing, building, unifying, synthesizing, and, indeed, if one wanted to attribute them to one of the two basic instincts, they might be considered as being motivated by Eros rather than by the death instinct. With the possible exception of the killing animals for their consumption and killing humans in war, both of which could be considered as rooted in destructiveness, control, and mastery over nature is not destructive but constructive. The death instinct turns into the destructive instinct when, with the help of special organs, it is directed outwards, on to objects. However, civilization leads to the holding back of aggressiveness and results in physical illness, and this is why so many people go to church, are in therapy, and on psychotropic drugs. Many human beings want to deal with their aggression in health ways and have a peaceful, well-behaved community. The forlorn state of consciousness in our World is due primarily to loss of instinct, and the reason for this lies in the development of the human mind over the past aeon. The more power humans have over nature, the more one’s knowledge and skill went to one’s head, and the deeper became one’s contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for all irrational data—including the objective psyche, which is everything that consciousness in not. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The Church recommends, in order to maintain society, that we develop more faith. Faith is a gift of grace and depends on human’s good will and pleasure. The seat of one’s faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual’s faith into immediate relation with God. Here each of us must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd? To this question there is an optimistic answer only when the individual is willing to fulfil the demands of rigorous self-examination and self-knowledge. If one does this, one will not only discover some important truths about oneself but will also have gained a psychological advantage: one will have succeeded in deeming oneself worthy of serious attention and sympathetic interests. One will have set one’s hand, as it were, to a declaration of one’s own dignity and taken the first step towards the foundations of one’s consciousness—that is, towards the unconscious, the only available source of religious experiences. This is certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in His place. It is simply the medium from which religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such experience may be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem. When it comes to answering the crucial question that hangs over our time like a threat, the religious person enjoys a great advantage. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The religious person has a clear idea of the way one’s subjective existence is grounded in one’s relation to “God.” God is an anthropomorphic idea whose dynamism and symbolism are filtered through the medium of the unconscious psyche. Anyone who wants to can at least draw near to the source of such experiences, no matter whether one believes in God or not. Exotic races have ceased to be peepshows in ethnological museums. They have become our neighbours, and what was yesterday the private concern of the ethnologist is today a political, social, and psychological problem. We may hope for humans of understanding and humans of good will, and must therefore not grow weary of reiterating those thoughts and insights which are needed. Even the truth can spread and not only the popular lie. Only a fool can permanently disregard the conditions of one’s own nature. In fact, this negligence is the best means of making one an instrument of evil. Harmless and naivete are as little helpful as it would be for a cholera patient and those in one’s vicinity to remain unconscious of the contagiousness of the disease. One the contrary, they lead to the projection of the unrecognized evil in the “other.” This strengthens the opponent’s position in the most effective way, because the projection carries the fear which we involuntarily and secretly feel for our own evil over to the other side and considerably increases the formidableness of one’s threat. What is even worse, our lack of insight deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil. Here, of course, we come up against ne of the main prejudices of the Christian tradition, and one that is a great stumbling block to our policies. We should, so we are told eschew evil and, if possible, neither touch for mention it. For evil is also the thing of ill omen, that which is tabooed and feared. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
This apotropaic attitude toward evil, and the apparent circumventing of it, flatter the primitive tendency in us to shut our eyes to evil and drive it over some frontier or other, like the Old Testament scapegoat, which was supposed to carry the evil into the wilderness. However, if one can no longer avoid the realization that evil, without human’s ever having chosen it, is lodged in human nature itself, then it bestrides the psychological stage as the equal and opposite partner of good. This realization leas straight to a psychological dualism, already unconsciously prefigured in the political World schism and in the even more unconscious dissociation in modern humans. The dualism does not come from this realization; rather, we are in a split condition to begin with it. It would be an insufferable thought that we had to take personal responsibility for so much guiltiness. We therefore prefer to localize the evil in individual criminals or groups of criminals, while washing our hands in innocence and ignoring the general proclivity to evil. This sanctimoniousness cannot be kept up in the long run, because the evil, as experience shows, lies in humans—unless, in accordance with the Christian view, one is willing to postulate a metaphysical principle of evil. The great advantage of this view is that it exonerates human’s conscience of too heavy a responsibility and foists it off on the devil, in correct psychological appreciation of the fact that humans are much more the victims of their psychic constitution than its inventor. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Considering that the evil of our day puts everything that has ever agonized humankind in the deepest shade, one must ask oneself how it is that, for all our progress in the administration of justice, in medicine and in technology, for all our concern with life and health, monstrous engines of destruction have been invented which could easily exterminate the human race. No one will maintain that the atomic physicists are a pack of criminals because it is to their efforts that we owe that peculiar flower of human ingenuity, the hydrogen bomb. The vast amount of intellectual work that went into the development of nuclear physics was put forth by humans who dedicated themselves to their task with the greatest exertion and self-sacrifice, and whose moral achievement could therefore just as easily have earned them the merit of inventing something useful and beneficial to humanity. However, even though the first step along the road to a momentous invention may be the outcome of a conscious decision, here, as everywhere, the spontaneous idea—the hunch or intuition—plays an important part. In other words, the unconscious collaborates too and often makes decisive contributions. So it is not the conscious effort alone that is responsible for the result; somewhere or other the unconscious, with its barely discernible goals and intentions, has its finger in the pie. If it puts a weapon in your hand, it is aiming at some kind of violence. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Knowledge of the truth is the foremost goal of science, and if in pursuit of the longing for light we stumble upon an immense danger, then one has the impression more of fatality than of premeditation. It is not that present-day humans are capable of greater evil than the humans of antiquity or the primitive. One merely has incomparably more effective means with which to realize one’s propensity to evil. As one’s consciousness has broadened and differentiated, so one’s moral nature has lagged behind. That is the great problem before us today. Reason alone no loner suffices. If only because of their dangerousness, in theory, in lies within the power of reason to desist from experiments of such hellish scope as nuclear fission. However, fear of evil which one does not see in one’s own bosom but always in somebody else’s checks reason every time although everyone knows that the use of this weapon means the certain end of our present human World. The fear of universal destruction may spare us the worst, yet the possibility of it will nevertheless hang over us like a dark cloud so long as no bridge is found across the World-side psychic and political split—a bridge as certain as the existence of the hydrogen bomb. It is in the nature of political bodies always to see evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything one does not know and does not want to know about oneself by foisting it off on somebody else. The perfect have no needs of others, but weakness has, for it seeks support and does not confront its partner with anything that might force one into an inferior position and even humiliate one. When high idealism plays too prominent a role, this humiliation may happen only too easily. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Whenever unjust is uncertain and police spying an terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator State, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units. To counter this danger, the free society needs a bond of an affective nature, a principle of a kind like caritas, the Christian love of your neighbour. However, it is just this love for one’s fellow humans that suffers most of all from the lack of understanding wrought by projection It would therefore by very much in the interest of the free society to give some thought to the question of human relationship from the psychological point of view, for in this resides its real cohesion and consequently its strength. Where love stop, power begins, and violence, and terror. What our age thinks as the “shadow” and inferior part of the psyche contains more than something merely negative. The very fact that through self-knowledge, that is, by exploring our own souls, we come upon the instincts and their World of imagery should throw some light on the powers slumbering in the psyche, of which we are seldom aware so long as all goes well. We are living in what the Greeks called the right moment for a metamorphosis of the gods, of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious within us who is changing. If humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science, coming generations will have to take to account of this momentous transformation. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
As at the beginning of the Christian era, so again today we are faced with the problem of general moral backwardness which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical, and social progress. So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern humans. Are they capable of resisting the temptation to use their powers of the purpose of staging a World conflagration? Are humans conscious of the path they are treading, and what the conclusions are that must be drawn from the present World situation and their own psychic situation? Do they know that they are on the point of losing the life-preserving myth of the inner human which Christianity has treasured up for one? Does one realize what lies in store should this catastrophe ever befall one? Is one even capable of realizing that this would in fact be a catastrophe? And finally, does the individual know that one is the makeweight that tips the scales? Happiness and contentment, equability of mind and meaning—fulness of life—these can be experienced only by the individual and not by a State, which, on the one hand, is nothing but a convention agreed to by independent individuals and, on the other, continually threatens to paralyse and suppress the individual. The psychiatrist is one of those who know most about the conditions of the soul’s welfare, upon which so infinitely much depends in the social sum. The social and political circumstances of the time are certainly of considerable significance, but their importance for the weal or woe of the individual has been boundlessly overestimated in so far as they are taken for the sole deciding fact. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
In this respect all our social goals commit the error of overlooking the psychology of the person for whim they are intended and—very often—of promoting only one’s illusions. I hope, therefore that a psychiatrist, who in the course of a long life has devoted oneself to the causes and consequences of psychic disorders, may be permitted to express one’s opinion, in all the modesty enjoined upon one as an individua, about the questions raised by the World situation today. I am neither spurred on by excessive optimism nor in love with high ideals, but am merely concerned with the fate of the individual human being—that infinitesimal unit on whom a World depends, and in whom, if we read the meaning of the Christian message aright, even God seeks His goal. Testimony to the existence and reality of the glimpse will be found in the literatures of all peoples through all times. It is not a newly manufactured idea, nor a newly manufactured fancy. A human who denies it is foolish so to limit one’s own possibilities, but one may learn better with time. These glimpses cannot rightly be dismissed by the scientist as merely self-suggested or wholly hallucinatory. Nor can they properly be regarded by the metaphysician as valueless for truth. As human beings we live by experience, and they are personal experiences which help to confirm the truth of the impersonal bases underneath them and which encourage us to continue on the same path. The Overself is a living reality. If the quest were merely an intellectual conception or an emotional fancy, nobody would waste one’s years, one’s endeavours, and one’s energies it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
The Overself is not only a necessary conception of logical thought. It is also a beautiful fact of persona experience. There are three signs, among others, of the Soul’s presence in a Soul-denying generation. They are: moral conscience, artistic imagination, and metaphysical speculation. Criticism which knows only sensuous and intellectual experience can be litter valid here if, indeed, it is not entirely irrelevant. When a human confuses the nature of the mind with its own thoughts, when one is unable properly to analyse consciousness and memory, when one has never practised introspection and meditation successfully, one can know nothing of the soul and may well be sceptical of its existence. That the Overself is not the product of an inflated imagination but has a real existence, is a truth which any human who has the required patience and submits to the indispensable training may verify oneself. It is not a dim abstraction but a real presence. Not a vauge theory but a vital fact. To the human of insight there is something strange, ironic, and yet pathetic in the spectable of those who turn the consciousness and the understanding derived from the Overself against the acknowledgement of Its existence. If one can shed the mummy wrappings of acquired notions, complacent bigotries, and superstitious customs, and look at a problem with fresh eyes, one is more likely to succeed in one’s quest for truth. If one can re-examine the whole meaning of it as though it were a newly discovered problems, one is more likely to move towards it correct solution. If one will refuse to be intimidated by dietary precedent, and begin to rethink the whole matter of eating’s why and wherefore, one will reach astonishing results. For much nonsense about diet has come down to us by ignorant tradition and unthinking inheritance. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
As one draws closer to the soul of things, one comes more into harmony with Nature. And if one is true to one’s instincts, one will eat one’s food more and more as Nature herself produces it. Inferior and even harmful foods have been eaten for so long that most people have become addicted to them and, through habitual use, come to like them. It is true that several of these food have been part of a civilized diet for generations, but the duration of an error does not make it less an error, and does not justify its continuance. It is a fact worthy speculating upon that many groups of early Christians were mystical and had a special diet. Had they not been ousted by the Emperor Constantine—whose imperialistic political purpose they did not serve—from the official Christianity which he (and not Jesus) established, we might today have seen half the Christian World holding a faith in mystical beliefs and eating special diets. The France of Louis XII saw some remnants of those early sects, such as the Albigenses, Montanists, and Camisards—and no less than one third of total population of the country—living on special diets. Luigi Cornaro lived to a hundred in Italy on a strictly limited daily quantity of food. Dr. Josiah Oldfield was nearing his hundred year when I last visited England and attributed the fact to avoiding eating too much, which he termed “the great evil.” He is also an enthusiastic advocate of special diets. In the moment when you feel that actual contact with the One Infinite Life-Power has been made, draw it into the body and let it permeate every part, every organ, and every atom. It will tend to dissolve sickness and drive out disease. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Healing powers are like prayers, they can cross oceans and traverse continents as readily and as speedily as can radio waves or thought. Telepathy is a fact and the basis of this operation. The ministrations of absent healing are most successful when the individual is passive and receptive to them. Hence the work of its power is most effective when the sufferer is sleeping or relaxing. I am the family of the Universe, and with all of us together I do not fear being alone; I can reach out and touch a rock or a hand or dip my feet in water Always there is some body close by, and when I speak I am answered by a plane’s roar or the bird’s whistling or the voice of others in conversation far apart from me When I lie down to sleep, I am in the company of the dark and the starts. Breathe to me, sheep in the meadow. Sun and moon, my father and my fathers brother, shine your light on me. My sister, Earth, hold me up to be blessed. Sun and moon, I smile at you both and spread my arms in affection and lay myself down at full length of the Earth to know I love it too and am never to be separated from it In no way shall death part us. Life up your heads, O ye gates, yea, lift them up, ye everlasting doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is the King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Life up your hears, O ye gates, yes, lift the up, ye everlasting doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who then is the King of glory? The Lord of hosts; He is the King of glory. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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They Shared the Feelings and Belief of the Best Hearts and Wisest Heads of the Seventeenth Century!
As far as aggression is biologically given in human genes, it is not spontaneous, but a defense against threats to human vital interests, that of one’s growth and one’s species’ survival. This defensive aggression was relatively small under certain primitive conditions—when no human was much of a threat to another human. Humans have gone through an extraordinary development since then. It is legitimate to imagine that humans will complete the full circle and construct a society in which no one is threatened: not the child by the parent; not the parent by the superior; no social class by another; no nation by a superpower. To achieve this aim is tremendously difficult for economic, political, cultural, and psychological reasons—and the added difficulty that the nations of the World worship idols—and different idols—and thus do not understand each other, even though they understand each other’s languages. To ignore these difficulties is folly; but if the political and psychological roadblocks are removed, the empirical study of all data shows that a real possibility exists to build such a World in the foreseeable future. The malignant forms of aggression, on the other hand—sadism and necrophilia—are not innate; hence, they can be substantially reduced when the socioeconomic conditions are replaced by conditions that are favourable to the full development of human’s genuine needs and capacities: to development of human self-activity and human’s creative power as its own ends. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple humans, and all factors that make humans into psychic cripples turn the also into a sadist or a destroyer. Witchcraft and sorcery are taboo subject matter. However, witchcraft actually did exist and was widely practiced in seventeenth-century New England, as it was in Europe at that time (and still is, for that matter, among the unlearned majority of humankind). It worked then as it works now in witchcraft societies like those of the West Indies, through psychogenic rather than occult means, commonly producing hysterical symptoms as a result of the victim’s fear, and sometimes, when fear was succeeded by a profound sense of hopelessness, even producing death. The behaviour of the afflicted person was not fraudulent but pathological. They were hysterics, and in the clinical rather than the popular sense of that term. These people were not merely overexcited; they were mentally ill. Furthermore, they were ill long before any clergyman got to them. The general populace did reach that state of public excitement inaccurately called “mass hysteria,” but this was due to the popular fear of witchcraft rather than to the preachings of the clergy. The public excitement continued well after the leadership, both clerical and secular, had called a halt to the witchcraft proceedings. In fact the clergy were, from beginning to end, the chief opponents to the events at Salem, Massachusetts USA. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
In particular, Cotton Mather was anything but the wild-eyed fanatic of tradition. Throughout most of the proceedings, Mr. Mather was a model of restraint and caution, and at one point he went further than any of his colleagues dared go in proposing a method to protect the innocent. The executions at Salem were by no means unique. Belief in witchcraft was quite as common among seventeenth century Anglicans, Quakers, Lutherans, and Catholics as it was among Puritans. Executions for witchcraft reached their height in Western civilization during the seventeenth century and continued in Europe until the end of the following century, more than a hundred years after the outbreak at Salem. Many writers have taken exception to one point or another in the traditional interpretation. The point raised most often has been that witchcraft trials were not at all unusual in the seventeenth century; that they were in fact typical of Western civilization at the time. The Salem outbreak was not due to Puritanism; it is not assignable to any particular temper on the part of our New England ancestors; it is no sign of exceptional bigotry or abnormal superstition. Our forefathers believed in witchcraft, not because they were Puritans, not because they were Colonials, but because they were New Englanders,–but because they were men of their time. They shared the feelings and beliefs of the best hearts and wisest head of the seventeenth century. What more can be asked of them? #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
It is hard to satisfy modern writers on witchcraft, who insist on censuring the sixteenth and seventeenth century on a basis of modern rationalism. If some of these who now sit in judgement on the witch-prosecutors had been witch judges, it is quite certain that no defendant would have escaped. The common scholar as well as the common human has continued to believe that there was something peculiarly puritanical about the Salem trials. Most significantly, a few persons have recognized that image magic was actually employed in Massachusetts, and at least two have wondered whether there might not have been something behind the charges of witchcraft after all. The belief in the supernatural has even led some people to believe that perhaps Adolph Hitler, the most powerful man in Europe, who was admired by many Germans (and not few other people), had special talents and gifts. There are many reports mentioning the magnetic qualities of Hitler’s eyes. People often said that they saw a particular glitter in his eyes that gave them the appearance of great intensity, otherworldliness, and devotion that allowed him to whip up the audience’s emotions, and open the floodgates of his hate. Well-educated and intelligent people were fascinated by him and his extremely wide range of subjects on which Hitler talked with such self-assurance. It was these qualities that entranced a nation and that is why people felt that he may have had some supernatural powers, much like the women in Salem. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
David R. Proper, formerly librarian of Essex Institute, tells us that English professor George Lyman Kitteridge of Harvard University suspected that there might have been witchcraft practiced at Salem. Early in the year 1692 several girls of Salem Village (now Danvers), Massachusetts, began to sicken and display alarming symptoms. The most disturbing and most frequent of these symptoms was convulsive fits: fits so grotesque and so violent that eyewitnesses agreed the girls could not possibly be acting. “Their motions in the fits,” wrote Reverend Deodat Lawson, “are so preternatural, both as to the manner, which is so strange as a well person could not screw their body into; and as to the violence also it is preternatural, being much beyond the ordinary force of the same person when they are in their right mind.” The Reverend John Hale of Beverly confirmed Lawson’s description. “Their arms, necks, and back,” he wrote, “were turned this way and that way, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any epileptic fits, or natural disease to effect.” There were other symptoms almost equally alarming: temporary loss of hearing, speech, and sight; loss of memory, so that some girls could not recall what had happened to them in their fits; a choking sensation in the throat; loss of appetite. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Later there were terrifying hallucinations; they saw spectors who tormented them in a variety of ingenious and cruel ways. They felt themselves pinched and bitten, and often there were actual marks upon their skin. Dr. William Griggs of Salem Village—produced a diagnosis. “The evil hand,” he announced, “is upon them”; the girls were victims of malefic witchcraft. The diagnosis was in no way unusual. The overwhelming majority of seventeenth-century physicians, like other learned men, believed in witchcraft and considered it the cause of some of the diseases. Sir Thomas Brown shared the same opinion, “That these swooning fits were natural, and nothing else but what they call the mother, but only heightened to a great excess by the subtlety of the Devil, co-operating with the malice of these which we term witches, at whose instance he doth these villainies.” “The mother” was the common abbreviation for “the suffocation of the mother,” one of the seventeenth-century English terms for hysteria; it referred to the choking sensation in the throat that was one of the commoner systems. Thus, Sir Thomas Browne was entirely correct in his identification of the illness, and it is quite possible that Dr. Griggs, too, was right in whatever identification he made of the Salem symptoms. What is more surprising is that Dr. Griggs was probably also correct in his identification of the cause. It does seem to have been witchcraft that was responsible for the girls’ afflictions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Witchcraft is not easy to define, because it is not, like the major formal religions, a coherent body of belief. However, in the New World civilization since prehistoric times there has been a loosely grouped body of magical lore—charms, spells, and so forth—having to do primarily with fertility and infertility, and with healthy and sickness, as well as a series of more marginal concerns, including the foretelling of the future. If tenuous, such lore has obvious connections with pre-Christian fertility worship, whose tutelary deity was a fertility god. Probably the commonest of such gods has been the deified sun, but the next most common was the deified herd animal, the cow, or, more often (because of his reputation for lechery) the goat. Half human and half bestial, with horns and cloven hooves, he appeared as Dionysus or Bacchus, the chief fertility god of the classical World, and was also to be found in the pantheons of northern Europe. Apparently the early Christians thought him the most abominable of all the pagan deities; they gave his attributes, his horns and cloven hooves, to the Devil, adding to these the wings of the fallen Angel. That he was once an extraordinarily powerful god cannot be doubted; there are instances of his survival in pre-Christian form as late as the twentieth century. A traveler in southern Ireland during the nineteen thirties reported seeing villagers dance in a ring around a goat those horns and hooves had been painted gold. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
They informed him that on the coming Sunday they would roast and eat the goat, because “they had done it always.” I myself have seen one survival of the horned god: the Austrian Krampus. He has now degenerated into a bogeyman for children. Black and furry, with horns and a contorted face, he is the companion of St, Nicholas, and attends to bad children while St. Nicholas attends the good. The horned god’s power may also be seen in the fact that medieval and renaissance artists frequently forgot to give him his Christian attribute, the fallen Angel’s wins, but never forgot his horns, the attribute that made him a fertility god. This is true not only of provincial works of art but also of those created for the centers of Western civilization. In the dome of the baptistery at Florence for example, is a mosaic “Last Judgment,” and at the center of its Hell sits Devil who is wingless but conspicuously horned. The same is trye of the Devil in Giotto’s “Last Judgment” in the Arena Chapel in Padua. If the tutelary deity of witchcraft was deified herd animal, this does not mean that everyone who has used a charm was a formal worshipper of Satan. Nevertheless, not much more than two centuries ago everyone who used a charm believed one was making an appeal to dangerous occult forces, and at possible peril to one’s soul. However, the degree of peril was relative, and proportionate to the degree of witchcraft which like murder, comes in three degrees. The first is the practice of white magic—charms or spells used for benevolent purposes. Carrying a rabbit’s foot (the rabbit, like the goa, is notorious for its fertility) is white magic. So is nailing a horseshoe over the door (the open end must be upward, so the shape will suggest the horns of the herd animal). #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Since the intention was innocent, the practice of white magic was seldom a cause for official concern. It was, of course, an appeal to occult forces that were specifically non-Christian, and as such it could, and sometimes did, draw a stern verbal rebuke from the clergy. However, that was all. The second degree of witchcraft is black magic—magic used maliciously—and in the seventeenth century black magic was very serious indeed; it was an appeal to the Prince of Evil in order to accomplish evil. The third degree is pact, where the witch is no longer merely invoking the Devil’s assistance through one’s charms and spells, but actually believes one has made a contract to serve him. The penalties for witchcraft were relatively light in the early years of Christian history. In the seventh century Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his Liber Poentientialis, considered the penance appropriate to a person who has been imitating “a stage or a bull; that is, making oneself into a wild animal and dressing in the skin of a herd animal, and putting on the heads of beasts.” To “those who in such wise transform themselves into the appearance of a wild animal” he assigned “penance for three years because this is devilish.” At this time paganism was still so widespread and Christianity so new that, according to the Venerable Bede, King Redwald of East Anglia “had in the same temple an altar to sacrifice to Christ and another to offer victims to demons.” Elements of paganism remained strong throughout the Middle Ages, inside the church as well as out. In 1282 the priest of Inverkeithing led a fertility dance around the churchyard. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
And Giraldus Cambrensis (ca. 1146-ca. 1220) reported, “though I say it with tears,” that there were priests who celebrate “masses over images of wax, to curse someone.” The remedy for such an appalling situation, Giraldus thought was to ordain fewer priests and more care in their selection. His advice, of course, was not followed, and members of the clergy continued to practice black arts as late as the eighteenth century. Toward the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance both church and state began to take witchcraft more seriously. The crucial century was the fifteenth, which saw a number of important trials, including those of Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais, and the Duchess of Gloucester. At the end of this century, in 1490, Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) was published. The authors were James Sprenger and Henry Kramer, two German Dominicans, and their book published with the Papal Bull by which Innocent VIII gave them jurisdiction as Inquisitors for the Germanic countries. Malleus gave a thorough definition of witchcraft with rules on how to investigate, try, and judge cases of witchcraft. It remained an important work for more than two hundred years; Increase Mather knew of it and referred to it. The publication of Malleus Maleficarum gives us a convenient date for opening of that general war against the Devil which occupied all Christendom during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The full horror of that warfare will never be known in all of its detail. Even the statistics of convicted witches who were executed vary widely from one authority to another. However, it is clear that the battle reached its height during the first half of the seventeenth century, when, for example, approximately nine hundred witches were burned in the single city of Bamberg, and approximately five thousand in the single province of Alsace. It was Boyle who proposed that English miners be interviewed as to whether they “meet with any subterraneous demons; and if they do, in what shape and manner they appear; what they portend, and what they do. Newton, the greatest scientist of his age, spent more of his time on the occult than he did in the study of physics. He explicated, for example, apocalyptic passages in the Bible, and interpreted the measurements of Solomon’s temple, hoping in both cases that a mystic reading of the scriptures would lead him to the inmost secrets of the Universe. We should remember also that the seventeenth century firmly believed in a dualistic Universe: in a material or visible World, and a spiritual or invisible Worlds as well. Heaven was still a concrete reality, as were the Angels who inhabited it; so was Hell and its Devil. As John Locke argued in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding: “If this notion of immaterial spirit may have, perhaps, some difficulties in it not easily to be explained, we have therefore no more reason to deny or doubt the existence of such spirits, than we have to deny or doubt the existence of body; because the notion of body is cumbered with some difficulties very hard, and perhaps impossible to be explained or understood by us.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Like other learned men of his time, Locke not only believed in a World of spirits, but that the spirits can appear in this material World: “that Spirits can assume to themselves bodies of different bulk, figure, and conformations of parts.” To be sure, Locke warned that “universal certainty” concerning the World of spirits was beyond us; we could know it, he thought, only as it impinges on our senses. However, that, of course, is precisely what was thought to happen in witchcraft. Thomas Hobbes was a skeptic, but his skepticism was rather different in character from that of the nineteenth or twentieth century. “As for witches,” he wrote in his Leviathan, “I think not that their witchcraft is any real power; but yet that they are justly punished, for the false belief they have that they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it if they can; their trade being nearer to a new religion than to a craft or science.” (The last clause is remarkably perceptive, although it was, of course, survivals of old religion rather than anything new that were to be found in witchcraft.) If you had been sticking pins in your neighbour’s image or casting spells on his cow, you would not have wanted Thomas Hobbes to be your judge. He would not have believed in your occult powers, but he would have hanged you anyway, for your heresy and malice. We must bear in mind that in a society which believes in witchcraft, it works. If you believe in witchcraft and you discover that someone has been melting your wax image over a slow fire or muttering charms over your nail-parings, the probability is that you will get extremely sick. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
To be sure, your symptoms will be psychosomatic rather than organic. However, the fact that they are obviously not organic will make them only more terrible, since they will seem the result of malefic and demonic power. So it was in seventeenth-century Europe, and so it was in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. The hideous convulsive fits were thought to be the result of witches and demons wrenching the bodies of their victims into tortuous postures. The loss of hearing, speech, sight, appetite, and memory were deprivations caused by Satan himself. The contradiction of the throat—the globus hystericus—was seen as an attempt by demons to make the victim swallow occult poisons. And when she swallowed rapidly and her belly welled (what s actually involved here is a kind of accelerated ulcer formation), it was thought the demons had succeeded. When blisters appeared upon the skin (many skin diseases are functional rather than organic), they were thought to have been raised by brimstone out of Hell. Many of these symptoms, including the skin lesions, would pass fairly rapidly. Cotton Mather, who was a Fellow of the Royal Society, a former medical student, and a thorough and careful observer, remarked more than once on the surprising rapidity with which “witch-wounds” healed. However, other symptoms would persist. And a new fit would bring a repetition of the old afflictions, or new ones equally alarming. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The cause of these hysterical symptoms, of course, was not witchcraft itself but the victim’s fear of it, and that is why so many innocent persons were executed. It is impossible now, and was in many instances impossible then, to tell how many of the persons executed for witchcraft were actually guilty of practicing it. It is surely no exaggeration to say that the majority, even the vast majority, were innocent victims of hysterical fears. However, we should again be wary of converting a statistical truth into a general principle. While it is clearly true that the majority of persons executed for witchcraft were innocent, it is equally true that some of them, in Massachusetts and elsewhere, were guilty. For those who look back on it, the Victorian age seems to be invested with a peculiar quality of difference—heightened by tis relative proximity in time—that is reflected in its ghost. It was an age shaped, perhaps more than any other previous period, by the forces of transition. In 1884, Mrs. Winchester left New Haven, Connecticut, and the graves of her husband and only child, moved to San Jose, California, and began the obsession that was to last for the rest of her life. She purchased an unfinished eight-room farmhouse outside the small agricultural town, and for the next 38 years, the sound of construction on Mrs. Winchester’s mansion never stopped. With the shadow of change falling across virtually every area of life and thought, the receding past became a focus for anxiety, and in literature the ghost story offered a way of anchoring the past to an unsettled present by operating in a continuum of life and death. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Mrs. Winchester hired carpenters to work around the clock building and rebuilding room after room, as the spirits—or her mood—directed. The house was furnished with the finest materials and was a showcase of Victorian elegance and taste. Mrs. Winchester passed away peacefully in her sleep on September 5, 1922, and work on the still uncompleted mansion stopped. Why did Mrs. Winchester build the World’s most beautiful and bizarre mansion? Was she following the advice of psychics who told her to provide a home for the spirits of those killed by the Winchester rifles? Was she told she would live forever, so long as construction never stopped? We may never know Mrs. Winchester’s real motivations, since she took the secret with her to her grace. So we leave to you to decide for yourself the mystery of the Winchester Mystery House. In the ghost story, obligations do not cease with death, and the past is never a closed book. What has been can be again, though often terribly transformed. For a progressive age (progressing to what?), the idea of a vindictive past held an especial potential for terror. In personal terms, ghosts were obvious, though still potent, images of the lost past—past sins, past promises, past attachments, past regrets—and could be used to confront, and exorcize, the demons of guilt and fear. We know that we are to be shown a climatic interaction between the living and the dead, and usually expect to be unsettled by the experience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Mrs. Winchester’s mansion was said to be a very grand place. Driving up to the mansion, it was like one left all signs of a town, or even a village, and were then inside the gates of a large Victorian park—not like the parks here in the north, but with rocks, and the noise of running water, and beautiful thorn-trees, and old oaks, all white and peeled with age. The road went up about two miles, and then one would see a great and stately house, with many trees close around it, so close that in some places their branches dragged against the walls when the wind blew. The great oval drive was without a weed and two palm trees, in plain view a 7 story tower, along with two statues of a Greek goddesses, at the many-windowed front; at both sides of which a wing projected, which were each the ends of other side fronts; for the house was grander than most expected. There was also a little old-fashioned flower-garden. When people rode up to the great front entrance of Winchester mansion in their carriage, and went into the hall they thought they should be lost—it was so large, and vast, and grand. There was a chandelier all of bronze, hanging down from the middle of the ceiling; and many have never seen one before, and looked at it all in amaze. Then, at once end of the hall, was a great fireplace, as large as the sides of the houses in many countries, with massy andirons and Greek goddesses to hold the wood; and by it were heavy French provincial sofas. At the opposite end of the hall, to the left as you went in—on the western side—was an organ built into the wall, and so large that it filled up the best part of that end. Beyond it, on the same side, was a door; and opposite, on each side of the fireplace, were also doors leading to the east front; but those I never went through as long as I stayed in the house, so I cannot tell you what lay beyond. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Mrs. Winchester held very tight to me, as if she were scared and lost in that great place, and for myself, I was not much better. The west drawing-room was very cheerful-looking, with a warm fire in it, and plenty of good, comfortable future about it. So we went out of that great drawing-room, and into another sitting-room, and out of that, and then up a great flight of stairs, and along a broad gallery—which was something like a library, having books all down one side, and windows and writing-tables all down the other—till we came to the room I would be staying in, which I was not sorry to hear was just over the kitchens; for I began to think I should be lost in that wilderness of a house. The great old house was a famous place for Mrs. Winchester. She made expeditions all over it, with me at her heels; all except the east wing, which was never opened, and whither we never thought of going. However, in the western and northern part was many a pleasant room; full of things that were curiosities to guests. The windows were darkened by the sweeping boughs of the trees, and ivy which had overgrown them: but, in the green gloom, we could manage to see old China jars and carved ivory boxes, and great heavy books, and, above all, the old pictures. They were all portraits of some of the Winchester family, though Mrs. Winchester could not tell us the names of every one. We had gone through most of the 180 rooms, when we came to the old state drawing-room over the all, and there was a picture of Mrs. Winchester. She was such a beauty! She had a dress on, the like of which I had never seen before. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Mrs. Winchester said there were some places about the house she was half frightened at. As winter drew closer and day grew shorter, I was sometimes almost certain that I heard noises as if someone was playing on the great organ in the hall. I did not hear it ever evening; but certainly, I did very often; usually when I was sitting with Mrs. Winchester. Even after she went to bed, I used to hear it booming and swelling in the distance. The first night I went down to my supper, I asked Mrs. Winchester who had been playing music, and the butler said very short that I was a gowk to take the wind soughing among the trees for music: but I saw Mrs. Winchester look at him very fearfully, and the kitchen-maid, said something beneath her breath, and went quite white. I saw they did not like my question. They had heard the very strange noise, and had heard it many a time, but most of all on winter nights, and before storms; and folks did say it was the old lord playing on the great organ in the hall, just as he used to do when he was alive. The days grew shorter and shorter; and the old lord, if it was he, played more and more stormily and sadly on the great organ. The doors in the east wing were always locked, and Mrs. Winchester always had the keys. I wondered what was hidden there. One fearful night, just after the New Year had come in, when the rain was thick and deep, and it was still falling—fast enough to blind anyone who might be out and abroad—there was a great and violent noise heard, and the old lord’s vice above all, cursing and swearing awfully—and the cries of a little child—and a fierce woman—the sound of a blow—and a dead stillness—and moans and wailings dying away. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Suddenly Mrs. Winchester went towards the door, and I durst not be left, though my heart almost stopped beating for fear. In the hall the screams were louder than ever; they sounded to come from the east wing—near and nearer—close on the other side of the locked-up doors—close behind them. Then I noticed that the great bonze chandelier seemed all alight, though the hall was dim, and that a fire was blazing in the vast in the vast hearth-place, though it gave no heat; and I shuddered up with terror. The east door shook, and Mrs. Winchester cried, “I must go! My little girl is there; I hear her; she is coming! I must go!” As if torn open in a violent passion, all at once the east door gave way with a thundering crash and there came into that broad mysterious light, the figure of a tall man, with red hair and gleaming eyes. He drove before him, with many a restless gesture of abhorrence, a stern and beautiful woman, with a little baby in her arms. “It’s the lady! the lady from the garden; and my little girl is with her. They are drawing me to them I feel them—I feel them I must go!” cried Mrs. Winchester. Again she almost convulsed by her effort to go towards them; but I held her tighter and tighter, till I feared I should do her a hurt; but rather that then let her go towards those terrible phantoms. They passed along toward the great hall-door, where the winds howled and ravened for their prey. And Mrs. Winchester was torn by a power stronger than mine and writhed in my arms, and sobbed (for by this time the poor darling was growing faint). #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“They want me to go with them—they are drawing me to them. Oh, my little girl!” said Mrs. Winchester. But just then I saw—we saw—another phantom shape itself, and grow clear out of the blue and misty light that filled the hall; we had not seen her till now, for it was another lady who stood by the man, with a look of relentless grief and triumphant scorn. That figure was very beautiful to look upon, with a soft white hat drawn down over the proud brows and a red and curling lip. It was dressed in a gown of blue stain. I had seen the figure before. It was the likeness of Mrs. Winchester in her youth; and the phantom moved on, regardless of Mrs. Winchester’s wild entreaty. But at that moment the dim lights, and the fire that gave no heat, went out of themselves, and Mrs. Winchester lay at my feet stricken down by the palsy—death stricken. Yes! She was carried to her bed that night never to rise again. She lay with her face to the wall muttering low but muttering alway; “Alas! alas! what is done in youth can never be undone in age! What is done in youth can never be undone in age!” In recognition to Mrs. Winchester’s contribution to San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley, the Winchester Mansion was designated California Register of Historic Place in 1974. The mansion was also designated a San Jose Historic Landmark in 1996. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Winchester Mystery House
Ever-changing and evolving, Mrs. Winchester’s Llanada Villa once stood seven-stories tall before the 1906 earthquake forced the top three floors to be removed. How do you think it felt to stand in the tower and look across the land that would eventually become a technology hub?
Self-Guided Mansion Tour:
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Humans Never Ask Who is Paying for this Paradise?
Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the stage to write an autobiography. Today unconscious adaption is no longer adequate. Faced with the power to alter the gene, to create new species, to populate the planets or depopulate the Earth, humans must now assume conscious control of evolution itself. As the number of social components grows and change and makes the whole system less stable, it becomes less and less possible to ignore the demands of political minorities. The best way to deal with angry or recalcitrant minorities is to open the system further, bringing them into it as full partners, permitting them to participate in social goal-setting, rather than attempting to ostracize or isolate them. Young people forced into prolonged adolescence and deprived of the right to partake in social decision-making will grow more and more unstable until they threaten the overall system. In short, in politics, in industry, in education, goals set without the participation of those affected will be increasingly hard to execute. The continuation of top-down technocratic goal-setting procedures will lead to greater and greater social instability, less and less control over the forces of change; an ever-greater danger of cataclysmic, human-destroying upheaval. To master change, we shall therefore need both a clarification of important long-range social goals and a democratization of the way in which we arrive at them. And this means nothing less than the next political revolution in the techno-societies—a breathtaking affirmation of popular democracy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Avoiding future shock as one rides the waves of change, one must master evolution, shaping tomorrow to human need. Instead of rising in revolt against it, one must, from this historic moment on, anticipate and design the future. Our first and most pressing need, therefore, before we can begin to gently guide our evolutionary destiny, before we can build a humane future, is to halt the runaway acceleration that is subjecting multitudes to the threat of future shock while, at the very same moment, intensifying all the problems they must deal with—war, ecological incursions, racism, the obscene contrast between rich and poor, the revolt of the young, and the rise of a potentially deadly mass irrational. There is no facile way to treat this wild growth, this cancer in history. There is no magic medicine, either, for curing the unprecedented disease it bears in its rushing wake: future shock. We must take radically curative procedures for the society—new social services, a future-facing education system, new ways to regulate technology, and a strategy for capturing control of change. Other ways must also be found. Yet the basic thrust is diagnosis. For diagnosis precedes cure, and we cannot begin to help ourselves until we become sensitively conscious of the problem. By making imaginative use of change to channel change, we cannot only spare ourselves the trauma of future shock, we can reach out and humanize distant tomorrows. When the light of truth seems to depart from humans, there will be souls looking for light, and who are filled with perplexity and sorrow. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Seeking salvation, people will be thirsting for the knowledge of the living God, for some assurance of life beyond the grave. A rational individual is not subject to envy, at least when the differences between oneself and others are not thought to be the result of injustice and do not exceed certain limits. Nor are the parties influenced by different attitudes toward risk and uncertainty, or by various tendencies to dominate or to submit, and the like. These special psychologies I have also imagine to be behind the veil of ignorance along with the parties’ knowledge of their conception of the god. One explanation for these stipulations is that as far as possible, the choice of a conception of justice should not be affected by accidental contingencies. The principles adopted should be invariant with respect to differences in these inclinations for the same reason that we want them to hold irrespective of individual preferences and social circumstances. These assumptions tie in with the Kantian interpretation of justice as fairness and greatly simplify the argument from the standpoint of the original position. The parities are not swayed by individual differences in these propensities, thereby avoiding the complications in the bargaining process that would result. If any, without rather definite information about which configuration of attitudes existed, one might not be able to say what agreement would be reached. In each case it would be contingent upon the particular hypothesis laid down. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Unless we could show some distinctive merit from a moral point of view in the postulated array of special psychologies, the principles adopted would be arbitrary, no longer the outcome of reasonable conditions. And if possible, since envy is generally regarded as something to be avoided and feared, at least wen it becomes intense, it seems desirable that the choice of principles should not be influenced by this trait. Therefore, for reasons both of simplicity and moral theory, I have assumed an absence of envy and lack of knowledge of the special psychologies. Nevertheless these inclinations do exist and in some way they must be reckoned with. First of all, we proceed on the presumptions just mentioned, and it is illustrated by most of the argument so far; secondly, we must ask whether the well-ordered society corresponding to the conception adopted will actually generate feelings of envy and patterns of psychological attitudes that will undermine the arrangements it counts to be just. At first we reason as if there is no problem of envy and the special psychologies; and then having ascertained which principles would be settled upon, we check to see whether just institutions so defined are likely to arouse and encourage these propensities to such an extent that the social system becomes unworkable and incompatible with human good. If so, the adoption of the conception of justice must be reconsidered. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
However, should the inclinations engendered support just arrangements, or be easily accommodated by them, the first part of the argument is confirmed. The essential advantage of the two-step procedure is that no particular constellation of attitudes is taken as given. We are simply checking the reasonableness of our initial assumptions and the consequences we have drawn from them in the light of the constraints imposed by the general facts of our World. The reasons why envy poses a problem, namely the fact that the inequalities sanctioned by the difference principle may be so great as to arouse envy to a socially dangerous extent. The envy experienced by the least advantaged towards those better situated is normally general envy in the sense that they envy the more favoured for the kinds of good and not for the particular objects they possess. The upper classes say are envied for their greater wealthy and opportunity; those envying them want similar advantages for themselves. By contrast, particular envy is typical of rivalry and competition. Those who lose out in the quest for office and honour, or for the affections of another, are liable to envy the success of their rivals and to covet the same thing that they have won. Our problem then is whether the principles of justice, and especially the difference principle with fair equality of opportunity, is likely to engender in practice too much destructive general envy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
The definition of envy that seems appropriate for this question deals with fixed ideas. Suppose that the necessary interpersonal comparisons are made in terms of the objective primary goods, liberty, and opportunity, income and wealth, which for simplicity I have normally used to define expectations in applying the difference principle. Then we may think of envy as the propensity to view with hostility the greater good of others even though their being more fortunate than we are does not detract from our advantages. We envy persons whose situation is superior to ours (estimated by some agreed index of goods as noted above) and if it is necessary to five up something of ourselves, we are willing to deprive them of their greater benefits. When others are aware of our envy, they may become jealous of their better circumstances and anxious to take precautions against the hostile acts to which our envy makes us prone. So understood envy is collectively disadvantageous: If only the discrepancy between them is sufficiently reduced, the individual who envies another is prepared to do things that make them both worse off. Thus Kant, whose definition I have pretty much followed, quite properly discusses envy as one of the vices of hating humankind. Envy and spite are passions; their names already imply badness. As Kant observers, there are many occasions when we openly speak of the greater good of others as enviable. Thus we may remark upon the enviable harmony and happiness of a marriage or a family. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
Similarly, one might say to another that one envies one’s greater opportunities or attainments. In these cases, those of benign envy, there is no ill will intended or expressed. We do not wish, for example, that the marriage or family should be less happy or harmonious. By these conventional expressions we are affirming the value of certain things that others have. We are indicating that, although we possess no similar good of equal value, they are indeed worth striving for. Those to whom we address these remarks are expected to receive them as a kind of praise and not as a foretaste of our hostility. A somewhat different case is that of emulative envy which leads us to try to achieve what others have. The sight of their greater good moves us to strive in socially beneficial ways for similar things for ourselves. Thus envy proper, in contrast with benign envy which we freely express, is a form of rancor that tends to hard both its object and its subject. It is what emulative envy may become under certain conditions of defeat and sense of failure. A further point is that envy is not a moral feeling. No moral principle need be cited in its explanation. It is sufficient to say that the better situation of others catches our attention. We are downcast by their good fortune and no longer value as highly what we have; and this sense of hurt and loss arouses our rancor and hostility. Thus one must be careful not to conflate envy and resentment. For resentment is a moral feeling. If we resent our having less than others, it must be because we think that their being better off is the result of unjust institutions, or wrongful conduct on their part. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
Those who express resentment must be prepared to show why certain institutions are unjust or how others have injured them. What marks off envy from the moral feelings is the different way in which it is accounted for, the sort of perspective from which the situation is viewed. We should note also the nonmoral feelings connected with envy but not to be mistake for it. In particular, jealousy and grudgingness are reverse, so to speak, to envy. A person who is better off may wish those less fortunate than one to stay in their place. One is jealous of one’s superior position and begrudges them the greater advantages that would put them on a level with oneself. And should this propensity extend to denying them benefits that one does not need and cannot use oneself, then one is moved by spite. Spite is characterizes as being pleased at the bad fortune of others, whether deserved or not. For the idea that jealousy, grudgingness, and spite are the reverse of envy, the feelings of those who envied and who possess what is wanted. These inclinations are collectively harmful in the way that envy is, since the grudging and spiteful human is willing to give up something to maintain the distance between oneself and others. Envy and grudgingness are vices. As we have seen, the moral virtues are among the broadly based traits of character which it is rational for persons to want in one another as associates. Thus vices are broadly based traits that are not wanted, spitefulness and envy being clear cases, since they are to everyone’s detriment. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
He parties will surely prefer conceptions of justice the realization of which does not arouse these propensities. We are normally expected to forbear from the actions to which they prompt us and to take the steps necessary to rid ourselves of them. Yet sometimes the circumstances evoking envy are as compelling that given human beings as they are no one can reasonably be asked to overcome one’s rancorous feelings. A person’s lesser position as measured by the index of objective primary goods may be so great as to wound one’s self-respect; and given one’s situation, we my sympathize with one’s sense of loss. Indeed, we can resent being made envious, for society may permit such large disparities in these goods that under existing social conditions these differences cannot help but cause a loss of self-esteem. For those suffering this hurt, envois feelings are not irrational; the satisfaction of their rancor would make the better off. When envy is a reaction to the loss of self-respect in circumstances where it would be unreasonable to expect someone to feel differently, this is excusable. Since self-respect is the main primary good, the parties would not agree, I shall assume, to count this sort of subjective loss as irrelevant. Therefore the question is whether a basic structure which satisfies the principles of justice is likely to arouse so much excusable envy that the choice of these principles should be reconsidered. As the dialectical discussion proceeds, a point is reached when an evaluation of these individual impulses becomes necessary. By that time the individual should have acquired enough certainty of judgment to enable one to act on one’s own insight and decision and not from the mere wish to copy convention—even if one happens to agree with the collective opinion. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Unless one stands firmly on one’s own feet, the so-called objective values profit one noting, since they then only serve as a substitute for character and so help to suppress one’s individuality. Naturally, society has an indisputable right to protect itself against arrant subjectivisms, but, in so far society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individuals. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes—it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individua personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A millions zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally shortsighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the World has seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman. Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have penetrated very far—and our blindness is extremely dangerous. People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans. Curiously enough, the Churches too want to avail themselves of mass action in order to cast of the devil with Beelzebub—the very Churches whose care is the salvation of the individual soul. They do not appear to have heard of the elementary axiom of mass psychology that the individual becomes morally and spiritually inferior in the mass, and for this reason they do not bother themselves overmuch with their real task of helping the individual to achieve a metanoia, a rebirth of the spirit—Deo concedente. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
If the individual is not truly a regenerated spirit, it is, unfortunately, only too clear that society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. I can therefore see it only as a delusion when the Churches try—and they apparently do—to rope the individual into some social organization and reduce one to a condition of diminished responsibility, instead of raising one out of the torpid, mindless mass and making clear to one that one is the one important factor and that the salvation of the World consists in the salvation of the individual soul. It is true that mass meetings parade these ideas before one and seek to impress them on one’s mind by dint of mass suggestion, with the melancholy result that once the intoxication has worn off the mass human promptly succumbs to another even more obvious and still louder slogan. One’s individual relation to God would be an effective shield against these pernicious influences. Did Christ, perchance, call his disciples to him any followers who did not afterwards cry with the rest, “Crucify him!” when even the rock named Peter showed signs of wavering? And are not Jesus and Paul prototypes of those who, trusting their inner experience, have gone their individual ways in defiance of the World? This argument should certainly not cause us to overlook the reality of the situation confronting the Church. When the Church tries to give shape to the amorphism mass by uniting individuals into a community of believers and to hold such an organization together with the help of suggestion, it is not only performing a great social service, but it also secures for the individual the inestimable boon of a meaningful form life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
These, however, are gifts which as a rule only confirm certain tendencies and do not change them. As experience unfortunately shows, the inner human remains unchanged however much community one has. One’s environment cannot give one as a gift something which one can win for oneself only with effort and suffering. On the contrary, a favourable environment merely strengthens the dangerous tendency to expect everything from outside—even that metamorphosis which external reality cannot provide. By this I mean a far-reaching change of the inner man, which is all the more urgent in view of the mass phenomena of today and the still greater problems of overpopulation looming in the future. It is time we asked ourselves exactly what we are lumping together in mass organizations and what constitutes the nature of the individual human being, id est, of the real human not the statistical human. This is hardly possible except by a new process of self-reflection. All mass movements, as one might expect, slip with the greatest ease down an incline plane made up of large numbers. Where the many are, there is security; what the many believe must of course be true; what the many want must be worth striving for, and necessary, and therefore good. In the clamour of the many resides the power to snatch wish-fulfilments by force; sweetest of all, however, is that gentle and painless slipping back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care, into happy-go-luckiness and irresponsibility. All the thinking and looking after are done from the top; to all questions there is an answer, and for all needs the necessary provision is made. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
The infantile dream state of the mass human is so unrealistic that one never thinks to ask who is paying for this paradise. The balancing of accounts is left to a higher political or social authority, which welcomes the task, for its power is thereby increased; and the more power it has, the weaker and more helpless the individual becomes. Whenever social conditions of this type develop on a large scale, the road to tyranny lies open and the freedom of the individual turns into spiritual and physical slavery. Since every tyranny is ipso facto immoral and ruthless, it has much more freedom in the choice of its methods than an institution which still takes account of the individual. Should such an institution come into conflict with the organized State, it is soon made aware of the very real disadvantage of its morality and therefore feels compelled to avail itself of the same methods as its opponent. In this way the evil spreads almost of necessity, even when direct infection might be avoided. The danger of infection is greater when decisive importance is attached to larger numbers and to statistical values, as is everywhere the case in our New World. The suffocating power of the mases is paraded before our eyes in one form or another every day in the newspapers, and the insignificance of the individual is rubbed into one so thoroughly that one loses all hope of making oneself heard. The outworn ideals of liberte, egalite, fraternite help one not at all, as one can direct this appeal only to one’s executioners, the spokesman of the masses. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the person who is as well organized in one’s individuality as the mass itself. I fully realize that his proposition must sound well-neigh unintelligible to the human of today. The helpful medieval view that humans are a microcosm, a reflection of the great cosmos in miniature, has long since dropped away from one, although the very existence of one’s World-embracing and World-conditioning psyche might have taught one better. Not only is the image of the macrocosm imprinted upon one’s psychic nature, but one also creates this image for oneself on an ever-widening scale. One bears this cosmic “correspondence” within one by virtue of one’s reflecting consciousness on the one hand, and, on the other, thanks to the hereditary, archetypal nature of one’s instincts, which bind one to one’s environment. However, one’s instincts not only attach one to the macrocosm, they also, in a sense, tear one apart, because one’s desires pull one in different directions. In this way one falls into continual conflict with oneself and only very rarely succeeds in giving one’s life an undivided goal—for which, as a rule succeeds in giving one’s life an undivided goal—for which, as a rule, one must pay very dearly by repressing other sides of one’s nature. One often has to ask oneself whether this kind of single-mindedness is worth forcing at all, seeing that the natural state of the human psyche consists in a jostling together of its components and their contradictory behaviour—that is, in a certain degree of dissociation. The Buddhist name for this is attachment to the “ten thousand things.” Such a condition cries out for order and synthesis. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Just as the chaotic movements of the crowd, all ending in mutual frustration, are impelled in a definite direction by a dictatorial will, so the individual in one’s dissociated state needs a directing and ordering principle. Ego-consciousness would like to let its own will play this role, but overlooks the existence of powerful unconscious factors which thwart its intentions. If it wants to reach the goal of synthesis, it must first get to know the nature of these factors. It must experience them, or else it must possess a numinous symbol that expresses them and leads to their synthesis. A religious symbol that comprehended and visibly represented what is seeking expression in modern humans might possibly do this; but our conception of the Christian symbol to date has certainly not been able to do so. On the contrary, that frightful World split runs right through the domains of the “Christian” American man, and our Christian outlook on life has proved powerless to prevent the recrudescence of an archaic social order like Communism. This is not to day that Christianity is finished. I am, on the contrary, convinced that it is not Christianity, but our conception and interpretation of it, that has become antiquated in the face of the present World situation. The Christian symbol is a living thing that carries in itself the seeds of further development. It can go on developing; it depends only on us, whether we can make up our minds to mediate again, and more thoroughly, on the Christian premises. This requires a very different attitude towards the individual, towards the microcosm of the self, from the one we have adopted hitherto. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
That is why nobody knows what ways of approach are open to humans, what inner experiences one could still pass through and what psychic facts underlie the religious myth. Over all this hangs so universal a darkness tat no one can see why one should be interested or to what end one should commit oneself. Before this problem we stand helpless. This is not surprising, since practically all the trump cards are in the hands of our opponents. They can appeal to the big battalions and their crushing power. Politics, science, and technology stand ranged on their side. The imposing arguments of science represent the highest degree of intellectual certainty yet achieved by the mind of humans. So at least it seems to the human of today, who has received hundred-fold enlightenment concerning the backwardness and darkness of past ages and their superstitions. That one’s teachers have themselves gone seriously astray by making false comparisons between incommensurable factors never enters one’s head. All the more so as the intellectual elite to whom one puts one’s questions are almost unanimously agreed that what science regards as impossible today was impossible at all other times as well. Above all, the facts of faith, which might give one the chance of an extramundane standpoint, are treated in the same context as the facts of science. Thus, when the individual questions the Churches and their spokesperson, to whom is entrusted the cure of souls, one is informed that to belong to a church—a decidedly Worldly institution—is more or less de rigueur; that the facts of faith which have become questionable for one were concrete historical events; that certain ritual actions produce miraculous effects; and that the sufferings of Christ have vicariously saved one from sin and its consequences (id est, eternal damnation). #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
If, with the limited means at one’s disposal, one begins to reflect on these things, one will have to confess that one does not understand them at all and that only two possibilities remain open to one: either to believe implicitly, or to reject such statements because they are flatly incomprehensible. Whereas the humans of today can easily think about and understand all the “truth” dished out to one by the State, one’s understanding of religion is made considerably mire difficult owing to the lack of explanations. (“Do you understand what you re reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” Acts 8.30.) If, despite this, one has still not discarded all one’s religious convictions, this is because the religious impulse rests on an instinctive basis and is therefore a specifically human function. You can take away human’s gods, but only to give one others in return. The leaders of the mass State could not help being deified, and wherever crudities of this kind have not yet been put over by force, obsessive factors arise in their stead, charged with demonic energy—money, work, political influence and so forth. When any natural human function gets lost, id est, is denied conscious and intentional expression, a general disturbance results. Hence, it is quite natural that with the triumph of the Goddess of Reason a general neuroticizing of modern humans should set in, a dissociation of personality analogous to the splitting of the World today by the Iron Curtain. This boundary line bristling with barbed wire runs through the psyche of modern humans, no matter on which side one lives. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
And just as the typical neurotic is unconscious of one’s shadow in one’s neighbour or in the human beyond the great divide. It has even become a political and social duty to apostrophize the capitalism of the one and the communism of the other as the very devil, so as to fascinate the outward eye and prevent it from looking within. However, just as the neurotic, despite unconsciousness of one’s other side, has a dim premonition that all is not well with one’s psychic economy, so Western humans have developed an instinctive interest in one’s psyche and in “psychology.” Thus it is that the psychiatrist is summoned willy-nilly to appear on the World stage, and questions are addressed to one which primarily concern the most intimate and hidden life of the individual, but which in the last analysis are the direct effects of the Zeitgeist. Because of its personal symptomatology this material is usually considered to be “neurotic”—and rightly so, since it is made up of infantile fantasies which ill accord with the contents of an adult psyche and are therefore repressed by our moral judgment, in so far as they reach consciousness at all. Most fantasies of this kind do not, in the nature of things, come to consciousness in any form, and it is very improbable, to say that the least of it, that they were ever conscious and were consciously repressed. Rather, they seem to have been present from the beginning or, at any rate, to have arisen unconsciously and to have persisted in that state until the psychologist’s intervention enabled them to cross the threshold of consciousness. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The activation of unconscious fantasies is a process that occurs when consciousness find itself in a situation of distress. Were that not so, the fantasies would be produced normally and would then bring no neurotic disturbances in their train. In reality, fantasies of this kind belong to the World of childhood and give rise to disturbances only when prematurely strengthened by abnormal conditions of conscious life. This is particularly likely to happen when unfavourable influences emanate from the parents, poisoning the atmosphere and producing conflicts which upset the psychic balance of the child. When a neurosis breaks out in an adult, the fantasy World of childhood reappears, and one is tempted to explain the onset of neurosis causally, as due to the presence of infantile fantasies. However, that does not explain why the fantasies did not develop any pathological effects during the interim period. These effects develop only when the individual is faced with a situation which one cannot overcome by conscious means. The resultant standstill in the development of personality opens a sluice for infantile fantasies, which, of course, are latent in everybody but do not display any activity so long as the conscious personality can continue on its way unimpeded. When the fantasies reach a certain level of intensity, they begin to break through into consciousness and create a conflict situation that becomes perceptible to the individual oneself, splitting one into two personalities with different characters. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
The dissociation, however, had been prepared long before in the unconscious, when the energy flowing off from consciousness (because unused) reinforced the negative qualities of the unconscious and particularly the infantile traits of the personality. Since the normal fantasies of a child are nothing other, at bottom, than the imagination of instincts, and may thus be regarded as preliminary exercises in the use of future conscious activities, it follows that the fantasies of the neurotic, even though pathologically altered and perhaps perverted by the regression of energy, contain a core of normal instinct, the hallmark of which is adaptedness. A neurotic illness always implies an unadapted alteration and distortion of normal dynamisms and of the “imagination” proper to them. Instincts, however, are highly conservative and of extreme antiquity as regards both their dynamism and their form. Their form, when represented to the mind, appears as an image which expressed the nature of the instinctive impulse visually and concretely, like a picture. If we could look into the psyche of the yucca moth, for instance, we would find in it a pattern of idea, of a numinous or fascinating character, which not only compels the moth to carry out its fertilizing activity on the yucca plant but helps it to “recognize” the total situation. Instinct is anything but a blind and indefinite impulse, since it proves to be attuned and adapted to a definite external situation. This latter circumstance gives it its specific and irreducible form. Just as instinct is original and hereditary, so, too, its form is age-old, that is to say, archetypal. It is even older and more conservative than the human form. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
These biological considerations naturally apply also to Homo sapiens, who still remain within the framework of general biology despite the possession of consciousness, will, and reason. The fact that our conscious activity is rooted in instinct and derives from it its dynamism as well as the basic features of its ideational forms has the same significance for human psychology as for all other members of the animal kingdom. Human knowledge consists essentially in the constant adaptation of the primordial patterns of ideas that were given us a priori. These need certain modifications, because in their original form, they are suited to an archaic mode of life but not to the demands of a specially differentiated environment. If the flow of instinctive dynamism into our life is to be maintained, as is absolutely necessary for our existence, then it is imperative that we should remould these archetypal forms into ideas which are adequate to the challenge of the present. The Overself is not something imagined or supposed. Its presence is definitely felt. If a human asks why one can find no trace of God’s presence in oneself, I answer that one is fully of evidence, not merely traces. God is present in one as consciousness, the state of being aware; as thought, the capacity to think; as activity, the power to move; and as stillness, the condition of ego, emotion, intellect, and body which finally and clearly reveals what these other things simply point to. “Be still, and know that I am God” is a statement of being whose truth can be tested by experiment and whose value can be demonstrated by experience. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
When we realize that the intellect can put forth as man arguments against this theme as for it, we realize that there is in the end only one perfect proof of the Overself’s existence. The Overself must prove itself. This can come about faintly through the intuition or fully through the mystical experience. Whoever needs proofs of the authenticity of this experience has not had it. The difficulty of collecting and studying, sifting and describing the varieties of mystical experience which may be found is a barrier to the expansion of scientific psychology. For those persons who are most eager to talk about their own experiences are the most dubious and unreliable source. Those who are the least eager, feeling the matter to be too private, personal, intimate, and sacred, are able to offer valuable evidence. The human whose mind is rounded out to perfection knows full well truth cut in half and things do not exist apart from the mind. We know ourselves to be made from this Earth. We know this Earth is made from our bodies. For we see ourselves. And we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature. The Earth is the Lord’s and all its fulness, the World, and they that dwell thereon. For He hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods. Who shall ascend the mountains of the Lord? And who shall stand in His holy place? One that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not set one’s mind on what is false, and hath not sworn deceitfully. One shall receive a blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of one’s salvation. Such is the generation of them that seek God, that seek the presence of the God of Jacob. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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The fine women of Salem had some extracurricular activities that were hardly orthodox. Men have been burned at the stake for speaking ill of the Christian creed. People fought, not only verbally but physically, over their religious beliefs. Most people of that day used alcohol liquors. In almost every home liquor could be found. If a man was drunk it was not considered indecent, nor was his reputation injured by such conduct. Ministers, as well as doctors, were given a drink whenever they made a call at a home. It was almost impossible for them to make their daily calls without becoming intoxicated. Wine was generously served at religious ceremonies–marriages, christenings, funerals, and ordinations. Joseph Smith might have noted the conduct of members in a revival meeting. People would come from miles around to attend these meetings, camping in cabins and tents. At daybreak a trumpet was sounded to awaken the people. Services were held almost all day long, scarcely allowing time to eat, and giving no time at all for recreation and play. Singing and shouting during sermons was common. Men, women, children often fell to the floor in trances, sometimes barking like dogs. Now and then some would get what was know as the “jerks” and their heads would jerk back and forth rapidly. There seemed no way to stop these “jerks” though persons would run, dance, pray to escape them. As they listened to the thundering voice of the evangelist, many would cry and scream. Some ministers believed that the wilder the crowd became the more successful was the revival. Meantime, the FBI could find no DNA material from the site which matched the material of any current missing persons. Nevertheless, they were deeply courteous about having been called in, and they did confirm that the DNA of several persons was present in the evil morass and that the whole resembled an antiquated but gruesome crime scene. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Were these some of the things which were displeasing in the sight of the Lord? Were these people drawing near to God with their lips but keeping their hearts from them. Undoubtedly these were puzzling questions of fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith. Listening to the bird’s sing on this cool spring morning, I was reminded of how excitement used to fill this time of the year because it was near the end of a school year, and ever closer to graduation and adult life. Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentations, laughter—to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the World of unrest to the World of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water. The work and the worry that fell to my lot through the practical interest I took in organ building, made me sometimes wish that I had never troubled myself about it, but if I do not give it up, the reason is that the struggle for the good organ is to me a part of the struggle for truth. An organ is like a cow; one does not look at its horns so much as its milk. God is with us. The light of the knowledge of glory of God is seen in the face of Jesus Christ. From the days of eternity, the Lord Jesus Christ was one with the father; He was the image of God, the image of His greatness and majesty, the outshining of His glory. It was it was to manifest this glory that He came into our World. To this sin-darkened Earth He came to reveal the light of God’s love–to be God with us. Therefore it was prophesied of Him. By coming to dwell with us, Jesus Christ was to reveal God both to humans and to angels. He was the Word of God—God’s thoughts made audible. If we are not grateful to God, we can never see the greatness in our lives. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
When we start to appreciate, we will begin to elevate! Some people regard logical thinking as the deadest and driest of our activities and may therefore be repelled by the privileged position. However, logical thinking—Reasoning—is valid and no one can deny it (philosophically speaking). You cannot, as we already know, prove that there are no proofs. However, if you wish to regard all human ideals as illusions and all human love as biological by-products, you can. That is, you can do so without running into flat self-contradiction and nonsense. Whether you can do so without extreme umplausibility—without accepting a picture of things which no one really believes—is another matter. Besides reasoning about matters of fact, humans also make moral judgments—“I ought to do this”—“I ought not to do that”—“This is good”—“That is evil.” Two views have been held about moral judgments. Some people think that when we make them we are not using our Reason, but are employing some different power. Other people think that we make them by our Reason. I myself hold this second view. That is, I believe that the primary moral principles on which all others depend are rationally perceived. We “just see” that there is no reason why my neighbour’s happiness should be sacrificed to my own, as we “just see” that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. If we cannot prove either axiom, that is not because the irrational but because they are self-evident and all proofs depend on them. Their intrinsic reasonableness shines by its own light. It is because all morality is based on such self-evident principles that we say to a human, when we would recall one to right conduct, “Be reasonable.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
However, this is by the way. For our present purposes it does not matter which of these two views you adopt. The important point is to notice that moral judgments raise the same sort of difficulty for Naturalism as any other thoughts. We always assume in discussions about morality, as in all other discussions, if they can be fully accounted for by some non-moral and non-rational cause, that the other human’s views are worthless. When two humans differ about good and evil we soon hear tis principle being brought into play. “Mr. William Wirt Winchester believes in the sanctity of property because he is a millionaire”—“He believes in Pacifism because he is a coward”—“He approves of corporal punishment because he is a necrophile.” Such taunts may often be untrue: but the mere fact that they are made by the one side, and hotly rebutted by the other, shows clearly what principle is being used. Neither side doubts that if they were true, they would decisive. No one (in real life) pays attention to any oral judgment which can be shown to spring from non-moral and non-rational causes. The Freudian and the Marxist attack traditional morality precisely on this ground—and with wide success. All humans accept the principle. However, of course, what discredits particular moral judgments must equally discredit moral judgments as a whole. If that fact that humans have such ideas as ought and ought not at all can be fully explained by irrational and non-moral causes, then those ideas are an illusion. The Naturalist is ready to explain how the illusion arose. Chemical conditions produce life. Life, under the influence of natural selection, produces consciousness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Conscious organisms which behave in one way live longer than those which behave in another. Living longer, they are more likely to have offspring. Inheritance, and sometimes teaching as well, pass on their mode of behaviour to their young. Thus in every species a pattern of behaviour is built up. In the human species conscious teaching plays a larger part in the building it up, and the tribe further strengthens it by killing individuals who to not conform. They also invent gods who are said to punish departures from it. Thus, in time, there comes to exist a strong human impulse to conform. However, since this impulse is often at variance with the other impulses, a mental conflict arises, and the human expresses it by saying “I want to do A but I ought to do B.” This account may (or may not) explain why humans do in fact make moral judgments. It does not explain how they could be right in making them. It excludes, indeed, the very possibility of their being right. For when humans say “I ought” they certainly think they are saying something, and something true about the nature of the proposed action, and not merely about their own feelings. However, if Naturalism is true, “I ought” is the same sort of statement as “I itch” or “I am going to be sick.” In real life when a human says “I ought” we may reply, “Yes. You are right. That is what you ought to do,” or else, “No. I think you are mistaken.: However, in a World of Naturalists (if Naturalist really remembered their philosophy out of school) the only sensible reply would be, “Oh, are you?” All moral judgments would be statements about the speaker’s feelings, mistaken by him for statements about something else (the real moral quality of actions) which does not exist. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
Such a doctrine, I have admitted, is not flatly self-contradictory. The Naturalist can, if one chooses, brazen it out. One can day, “Yes. I quite agree that there is no such thing as wrong and right. I admit that no moral judgment can be ‘true’ or ‘correct’ and, consequently, that no one system of morality can be better or worse than another. All ideas of good and evil are hallucinations—shadows cast on the outer World by the impulses which we have been conditioned to feel.” Indeed many Naturalists are delighted to say this. However, then they must stick to it; and fortunately (though in consistently) most real Naturalists do not. A moment after they have admitted that good and evil are illusion, you will find them exhorting us to work for posterity, to educate, revolutionise, liquidate, live and die for the good of the human race. A Naturalist like Mr. H. G. Wells spent a long life doing so with passionate eloquence and zeal. However, surely this is very odd? Just as all the books about spiral nebulae, atoms and cave men would really have led you to suppose that the Naturalists claimed to be about to know something, so all the books in which Naturalists tell us what we ought to do would really make you believe that they thought some ideas of good (their own, for example) to be somehow preferable to others. For they write with indignation like humans proclaiming what is good in itself and denouncing what is evil in itself, and not at all like humans recording that they personally like concentrated cranberry juice, but some people prefer sweetened cranberry juice. Yet if the “oughts” of Mr. Wells and, say, Franco are both equally the impulses which Nature has conditioned each to have and both tell us nothing about any objective right or wrong, whence is all the fervour? Do they remember while they are writing thus that when they tell us we “ought to make a better World” the words “ought” and “better” must, on their own showing, refer to an irrationally conditioned impulse which cannot be true or false any more than a vomit or a yawn? #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
My idea is that sometimes they do forget. That is their glory. Holding a philosophy which excludes humanity, they yet remain human. At the sight of injustice they throw all their Naturalism to the winds and speak like humans and like human of genius. They know far better than they think they know. However, at other times, I suspect, they are trusting in a supposed way of escape from their difficulty. It works—or seems to work—like this. They say to themselves, “Ah, yes. Morality”—or “bourgeois morality” or some such addition—“Morality is an illusion. However, we have found out what modes of behaviour we are pressing you to adopt. Pray, do not mistake us for moralists. We are under an entirely new management” …just as if this would help. It would help if only we grant, firstly, that life is better than death and, secondly, that we ought to care for the lives of our descendants as much as, or more than, for our own. And both these are moral judgments which have, like all others, been explained away by Naturalism. Of course, having been conditioned by Nature in a certain way, we do feel thus about life and about posterity. However, the Naturalists have cured us of mistaking these feelings for insights into what we once called “real value.” Now that I know that my impulse to serve posterity is just the same kind of thing as my fondness for cheese—now that its transcendental pretensions have been exposed for a sham—do you think I shall pay much attention to it? When it happens to be strong (and it has grown considerably weaker since you explained to me its real nature) I suppose I shall obey it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
When it is weak, I shall put my money into cheese. There can be no reason for trying to whip up and encourage the one impulse rather than the other. Not now that I know what they both are. The Naturalists must not destroy all my reverence for conscience on Monday and expect to find me still venerating it on Tuesday. There is no escape along these lines. If we are to continue to make moral judgments (and whatever we say we shall in fact continue) then we must believe that the conscience of humans is not a product of Nature. Only if it is an offshoot of some absolute “on its own” and is not a product of non-moral, non-rational Nature. We must acknowledge the supernatural source for our ideas of good and evil. In other worse, we now know something more about God. If you hold that moral judgment is a different thing from Reasoning you will express tis new knowledge by saying “We now know that God has at least one other attribute than rationality.” If, like me, you hold that moral judgment is a kind of Reasoning, then you will say, “We now know more about the Divine Reason.” And with this we are almost ready to begin our main argument. However, before doing so it will be well to pause of the consideration of some misgivings of misunderstandings which may have already arisen. Happiness is related to good and bad life events, but the impact is smaller than you might imagine. The reason for this is that happiness tends to come from within a person. Subjective well-being is affected by our goals, choices, emotions, values, and personality. The way you perceive, interpret, and manage events is as important as the nature of the events themselves. People who are good a dodging the life’s rough, unsparing treatment (hard knocks) tend to create their own “luck.” As a result, they are happier and seem to negotiate life’s demands more smoothly. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
It is tempting to think that wealth brings happiness. However, does it? To a small degree wealthier people are happier than poorer people. Yet, the overall association between money and happiness is weak. In fact, people who win lotteries are often less happy than they were before, and imagine how much unhappier ill begotten gain might make them. Instant riches usually bring new stresses into a person’s life that tend to cancel out any beneficial effects of wealth. Essentially, money can make it possible to buy the good things in life, but money cannot buy a good life. Happiness usually must become from other sources More educated people tend to be a little happier than the less educated. However, this is most likely just another way of saying that there is a small connection between wealth and happiness. Higher education generally results in higher income and more social status. As education levels rise, more parents ae intellectually equipped to assume some responsibilities now delegated to schools. With the move toward knowledge-based industy and the increase of leisure, we can anticipate a small but significant tendency for highly educated parents to pull their children at least partway out of the public education systems, offering them home instruction instead. This trend will be sharply encouraged by improvements in computer-assisted education, Cisco Telepresence, electronic video recording, holography and other technical fields. Parents and students might sign short-term “learning contracts” with the nearby school, committing them to teach-learn certain courses or course modules. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Students might continue going to school for social and athletic activities or for subjects they cannot learn on their own or under the tutelage of parents or family friends. Mobile education is also a proposal, which would take students out of the classroom not merely to observe but to participate in significant community activity. Curricula would be shaped by students and community groups as well as professional educators. The former United States Commissioner of Education, Harold Howe, II, has also suggested the reverse: bringing the community into the school so that local stores, beauty parlors, prints shops, architecture firms, be given free space in the schools in return for free lessons by the adults who run this. President Trump and other want to keep the schools and class rooms open, so children are being supervised by adults during work hours, which allows the parents to work and the kids to get an education. This reduces crime rates and helps increase income earnings in the future for students. School also serves as a nice social club for children where they make life long friends and memories. Also, school provides nutrition for students and proper nutrition helps to raise the IQ of students and keeps them healthy. Children also learn how to respect authority figures and learn that behaviour has bad consequences, whereas good behaviour and hard work is rewarded. People who live in the age of information must have new skills in three crucial areas: learning, relating, and choosing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Students will need an enhanced human adaptability. By instructing students how to learn and unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the person who cannot read; one will be the human who has not learned how to learn. By speeding the turnover of people in our lives, we allow less time for trust to develop, less time for friendships to ripen. Thus we witness a search for ways to cut through the polite “public” behaviour directly to the sharing of intimacy. Presented with numerous alternatives, an individual chooses the one most compatible with one’s values. As overchoice deepens, the person who lacks a clear grasp of one’s own values (whatever these may be) is progressively disabled. Worse yet, students are seldom encouraged to analyze their own values and those of their teachers and peers. Millions pass through the education system without once having been forced to search out the contradictions in their own value systems, to probe their own life goals deeply, or even to discuss these matters candidly with adults and peers. Students hurry from class to class. Teachers and professors are harried and grow increasingly remote. Even the “bull session”—informal, extra-curricular discussion about pleasures of the flesh, politics, or religion that helps participants identify and clarify their values—grown less frequent and less intimate as transience rises. Married people report a greater happiness than people who are divorces, separated, or single. It could be that happiness people are simply more likely to get married than to remain sleepless in Seattle. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
However, better explanation for this association is that marriage partners can act as emotional and economic buffers against the hardships of life and a faithful marriage also helps keep people chaste in the eyes of the Lord, in most cases, as long as you are not sleeping with the enemy. There is a beneficial association between happiness and holding spiritual beliefs. Religious beliefs may add to feelings of purpose and meaning in life, resulting in greater happiness. Marriage between partners is a vital part of God’s plan. The Lord has said, “Whoso forbiddeth to marry is not ordained of God, for marriage is ordained of God unto man,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 49.15. Since the beginning, marriage has been a law of the gospel. Marriages are intended to last forever, not just for our mortal lives. Adam and Eve were married by God before there was any death in the World. They had an eternal marriage. They taught the law of eternal marriage to their children and their children’s children. As the years passed, wickedness entered the hearts of the people and the authority to perform this sacred ordinance was taken from the Earth. Through the Restoration of the gospel, eternal marriage has been restored to Earth. Many people in the World consider marriage to be only a social custom, a legal agreement between two people in love together. However, to Latter-day Saints, marriage is much more. Our exaltation depends on marriage, along with other principles and ordinances, such as faith, repentance, baptism, and receiving the gift of the holy Ghost. We believe that marriage is the most sacred relationship that can exist between two loving people. This sacred relationship affects our happiness now and in the eternities. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Heavenly Father has given us the law of eternal marriage so we can become like Him. The Lord has said: “In the celestial glory there are three Heavens or degrees: and in order to obtain the highest, a human must enter into this order of the priesthood [meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage]; and if one does not, one cannot obtain it,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 131.1-3. Another possibility is that church membership may simply provide social support that softens that impact of life’s negative events. Incubation is the term applied to the sleeping in a temple—usually a special shrine or sanctuary used for healing and healing-dreams and dream-oracles alone—as a means of healing. This was practiced by ancient Greek and Babylonians. It was also frequently practiced in ancient Egypt at the temples of Isis and Serapis with effects similar to those of hypnotism. Five hundred years before Christ at the temple of Epidaurus, where the inspiring spirit or god was Aesculapius (the patron saint of modern medicine still), sick patients were put to sleep by priests at the foot of the Aesculapius’ statue. In many cases, they awoke suddenly cured. That the real effectiveness of incubation was not the work of a departed spirit but of Nature in the sleep state combined with the sufferer’s faith, was shown by the custom which still prevails in Greece. Here sleep in a temple of Aesculapius was simply replaced by sleep in the church associated with a Christian saint. Consider a cut had and how Nature at once sets to work to repair the damage. The anatomist tells us that the leucocytes in the blood automatically build a bridge of tissue over the wound’s surface. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
However, what orders the leucocytes to make the needed adjustments? What shows them how to make it? There is obviously an intelligence behind them, a mind within the body outside and apart from the conscious mind. There are miracles in Nature, and at this time, happenings to which science possesses no key. The human consciousness, for instance, is capable of manifesting power which contradict psychological knowledge, just as the human body is capable of manifesting phenomena which contradict medical knowledge. Both powers and phenomena may seem miraculous, but they really issue forth from the hidden laws of human’s own being. The process take pace in the dark only to us. This life-force, this invisible energy, is behind and within, around and above the physical body. Under certain circumstances its rea can be seen and traced out and its recuperative healing power drawn upon. It forms an aura, the etheric or vital body of light, but not the still more elusive and subtle divine body of Light nor the aura of various colours, the astral body. The stereotype of the crotchety antiquated person who id dissatisfied with everything is inaccurate. Life satisfaction and happiness generally do not decline with age. People are living longer and staying healthier, which has greatly delayed age-related declines. When declines do occur, mature people seem better able to cope with them. The hindrances which wrong bodily regimes put in one’s Quest are not only physical but also psychic, emotional, and mental. The condition of a human’s health, the medical state of one’s body, may contribute to one’s spiritual outlook, may enfeeble or enliven one’s faith. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
If union with the Overself-consciousness is to be achieved, or progress to that goal made, the body ought also to share in the benefits received. It too ought to be freer from discordant elements, organs, or operations. The wise student will recognize that one gains more than one loses by such sacrifices as this discipline of the body calls for. The benefits of resisting custom’s dominance are both disproportionate and durable, with a value so high as to make the discipline bearable and the sacrifices smaller. Wen one hears about these ascetic-sound regimes a chill sets in. However, what is it that rebels against them? It is the ego, the weakness of human will. Yet the rebellion is ill-founded, for the body is not tortured by being brought under control—only its perverted, exaggerated, or enslaving appetites suffer by doing so. The regimes themselves are sensible and are not fantastical fads. They are simply indication of the quester’s need to live more carefully than other people, and to change habits which are bad. They are hygienic recommendations offered to those who want to advance their spiritual journey more quickly. The bodily cells are so pervaded with toxic materials, clogged with them, so contaminated by them, that this purificatory work is an essential preliminary to the mystical work, proper for most aspirants except those who have the inborn capability of quickly rising to an intense concentration which frees the cells from such poisons. There is a mass of improperly digested, half-decayed food material lying in the intestines in a fermenting condition, while farther on here are accumulated deposits of petrified impurities on the lining of the colon and the membrane of the bowels. These substances are rejected by they body, which suffers by their presence but is unable to free itself from the without conscious and willing co-operation on the part of its owner. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
The body’s physiological processes are clogged and encumbered by them and its nervous system and brain organ polluted by the inferior blood brought to nourish them. To achieve this aim, a certain preparation as well as purification of the body is required. The spine must be cleared of adhesions, congestions, distortions, shrinkings, and nerve branch pressures. The tissues and blood have to be cleansed of the toxic material accumulated in them. The salvation which frees a human from enslavement to one’s lower nature is necessary and good, but it goes only part of the way to fulfilling one’s needs. One’s fleshly body also requires salvation. It ought to be freed from its poisoned, clogged, and unnatural condition. If it is saturated wit destructive acids or clogged wit decaying material, the body cannot respond so freely to the subtle forces, nor can the brain and nervous system respond so freely if they are stupefied by alcohol or drugs. As the consciousness evolves to a higher level, so the body it functions through must become more refined in quality and purified in nature. Mental equilibrium, deep prayer, cannot be attained without changing the habits which obstruct it. Even if the requisite purification of the body’s cells and blood from all toxins has been achieved, a human must still refrain from starting on those ways which caused toxemia. There is a common error that drugs and medicines are enough to keep us in good health. They are not. The only things that can do so are correct living habits, righting thinking habits, and proper eating habits. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
A knowledge of personal hygiene will keep us in better health than a hundred boxes of pills. We must learn to conform to the laws of hygienic living—mental and physical—if we want to achieve a sound mind in a should body. We may not break those laws with impunity, nor believe that because we have been spiritually healed once we are exempt from the always. The desire to gain purity must provide the power to follow the regimes needed for it. The sediment of egotism in the mind and animality in the flesh cannot be cleared out unless this desire grows strong and remains enduring. The mental courage to cast out those wrong habits of living which unenlightenment of spiritual hygiene has allowed one to pick up, must show itself. People who are satisfied with their jobs tend to be happier, but the association is weak. If fact, it probably just reflects the fact that job satisfaction is a large part of greater life satisfaction. With respect to happiness and personality, it may be fair to paraphrase Paris Hilton, “I am a star and I was born to shine. I am happy, powerful, strong and confident.” To a degree, some people are more temperamentally disposed to be happy, regardless of life events. In general, happier people also tend to be extraverted (outgoing), optimistic, and worry-free. This combination probably influences the balance of beneficial and negative emotions. In general, if they are meeting their personal goals, people tend to be happy. If you feel you are making progress, on a day-to-day basis, on smaller goals that relate to long-term, life goals, this is especially true. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
However, achieving one’s goals does not always lead to happiness. Consider the highly successful person who is absorbed in one’s accomplishments. All it may take is a crisis, like a child’s illness or the death of a friend, to make life feel meaningless. However, if the person begins to act with integrity, meaning can be restored and the crisis resolved. Thus, optimal human functioning involves integrity as well as an ability to accomplish goals. “Doing well,” they say, is associated with happiness. In contrast, “being yourself” is associated with leading a meaningful life. In short, if we are to live with integrity, the goals we purse must express our core interests and values. Examples of the kinds of personal projects (short-term goals) and long-term goals that occupy us: for architect’s the job is usually spent on location. When a project is located nearby, architect may leave the office periodically to stop by the project site. Some short-term goals involved checking in with building developers and engineers to ensure the client’s objectives are met, review projects, and check on any potential obstacles in construction. Many architects believed that if they did great work, somehow society would recognize the contributions and value they were making to the World and reward them with an endless stream of passion projects to grow their firm. However, the truth when it comes to long term goals, running an architecture firm is exactly the same as running any other business. You have to work just as hard to win business as you do to deliver it. An important long-term goal to remember is that your costs of running a business increase over the years. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Your money goals should define the revenues and profits you will need to accommodate these increased costs, and support the growth you want. Also another long-term goal should be to become innovative and sometimes that requires a history lesson. For an architecture firm, stepping back into the past the Victorian America and seeing what was popular back them, like butler’s pantries, multiple parlors, patio spaces, and yards with green spaces, mixed with some modern style designs is a long-term way to stay relevant. People goals typically focus on who you want to work with. This can include the employees you want on your staff, and it may also include the type of clients you want to attract. Sometimes working with non-profits has provided some firms with not only a great sense of fulfillment but also a deeper connection to their local community. Working with one firm allowed the nonprofit client to connect with an ideal prospect and close a $6,000,000 group up non-profit project, at the height of the COVID-19 crisis pandemic. Who we work with can greatly affect our enthusiasm and motivation on the job, so setting goals around who we choose to work with can have an immense impact on our attitude towards our work. Such goals are crucial because overall well-being is a combination of happiness and meaning. Pursuing goals that are inconsistent with personal interests and values can leave a person feeling uneasy, bothered, and uncomfortable. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Happier persons tend to be married, comfortable with their work, extraverted, religious, optimistic, and generally satisfied with their lives. They also are making progress toward their goals. However, attain goals that do not express our deeper interests and values may add little to happiness. When, then, makes a good life? Purpose and meaning are important sources of well-being at any point in life. As we have seen, a good life is one that is happy and meaningful. We are most likely to experience a meaningful life when we act with integrity. It is interesting that while achievement and external goals may preoccupy younger persons, integrity becomes increasingly important later in life. “To thine own self be true” may seem like a cliché, but it is actually not a bad place to begin a search for a happy and a satisfying life. “God is not the author of confusion, but of peace. Let all things be done decently and in order,” reports 1 Corinthians 14.33 and 40. Our little World is the lesson book of the Universe. God’s wonderful purpose of grace, the mystery of redeeming love, is the theme into which “angels desire to look,” and it will be their study throughout endless ages. Both the redeemed and the unfallen beings will find in the cross of Christ their science and their song. It will be seen that the glory shining in the face of Jesus is the glory of self-sacrificing love. In the light from Calvary it will be seen that the law of self-renouncing love is the law of life for Earth and Heaven; that the love which “seeketh not her own” has its source in the heart of God; and that in the meek and lowly One is manifested the character of Him who dwelleth in the light which no human can approach unto. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Sometimes, when a bird cries out, or the wind sweeps through a tree, or an angel whispers in a far-off farm, I hold still and listen a long time. My World turns and goes back to the place where, a thousand forgotten years ago, the bird and the blowing wind were like me, and were my brothers. My soul turns into a tree, and an animal, and a cloud bank. Then changed and odd it comes home and asks me questions. What should I reply? Faithful art Thou, O Lord our God, and faithful are Thy words, for no word of thine shall remain unfulfilled. Thou art a faithful and merciful God and King. Blessed art Thou, O Lord God, who art faithful in fulfilling Thy words. Please be merciful unto America, for it is the fountain of our life, and mayest Thou soon in our day deliver Zion that is grieved in spirit. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who makest America rejoice with her children. Make us rejoice, O Lord our God, with Elijah the prophet, Thy servant, and with the kingdom of the house of David, Thine anointed. Soon may Elijah come and bring joy to our hearts. May no stranger occupy David’s throne and may no usurper inherit his glory. For by Thy holy name Thou hast promised unto one that one’s light will never be extinguished. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the Shield of America. We give Thee thanks and bless Thee, O Lord our God, for the Torah, and for the worship of this day and for the prophets, as well as for this Sabbath day which Thou, O Lord our God, hast given us for holiness and for rest, for glory and delight. Evermore may Thy name be continually praised by every living being. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest the Sabbath. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Winchester Mystery House
It’s May 1st which means it’s halfway to Halloween! We are hard at work dreaming up a new experience for Halloween 2021 that will feature a projection mapped show on the front of the mansion. Stay tuned for more details coming soon!
“Lord God,” said Mrs. Sarah Winchester, as the flames rose and the fire crackled. “We got a dead girl, a huge mansion that is too big to heat, too big to maintain, too expensive to sale, a bunch of weird books, and a regular tomb of gold with an empty iron coffin in it, and a half-ghost boy standing here. Now this translation just arrived. ‘Here sleeps Annie Winchester, whose mortal hands once made the most beautiful cameos, even for emperors and and kings. Guard me, ye gods and goddesses whose images I render so well. A curse on those who attempt to disturb my resting place.'”
Watch your step in the séance room! There are three exits in this room, The main door, a secret passageway leading into an unfinished closet, and this door that opens to an 8-ft drop into the kitchen below.
Self-Guided Mansion Tour:
👉 Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com
Randolph Harris II International Institute 