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A Shower of Glitter Does Not Slake the Thirst of a Soul!
The most persistent threat to freedom, to the rights of Americans, is fear. What would become of the arts without the luxury that feeds them? If there were no tyrants, no wars, no conspirators, what would history become? If each person, consulting only the duties of the human and the needs of nature, had times for nothing but the homeland, the unfortunate, and one’s friends, who would want to spend one’s life in fruitless speculations? Are we destined then to die fastened to the edge of the pit where truth has retreated? In order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles. The misuse of time is a great evil. Other evils that are worse follow after letters and the arts. Luxury, born like them of idleness and human’s vanity, is one such. Luxury seldom thrives without the sciences and the arts, and they never thrive without it. Two famous republics competed for World domination. One was very rich and the other had nothing, and it was the latter which destroyed the former. The Roman Empire, in turn, after having swallowed up all the wealth of the Universe, fell prey to humans who did not even know what wealth was. Every artist wants to be applauded. The praises of one’s contemporaries are the most precious part of one’s reward. What hen will one do to obtain praise, if one has the misfortune to be born among a people and at a time when learned humans, having become fashionable, have placed a frivolous youth in a position to set the tone; when humans have sacrificed their taste to the tyrants of liberty; when because one of the genders dares approve only what is a match for the other’s pusillanimity, masterpieces of dramatic poetry are dropped and harmonic prodigies rejected? #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
What will one do, people? One will lower one’s genius to the level of one’s century and will prefer to compose popular works which are admired during one’s lifetime instead of marvels which would not be admired until long after one’s death. How many manly and strong beauties have been sacrificed to our false delicacy, and how many great things has the spirit if gallantry, so fertile in small things, cost society? In this way the dissolution of mores, a necessary consequence of luxury, leads in turn to the corruption of taste. If perchance there is, among humans of extraordinary talents, someone who has firmness of soul and who refuses to yield to the genius of one’s century and to degrade oneself by childish productions, woe to on! One cannot reflect on mores without taking delight in recalling the image of the simplicity of the earliest times. It is a beautiful shore, adored by the hands of nature alone, toward which one continually turns one’s eyes, and from which one regretfully feels oneself moving away. When innocent and virtuous humans have wanted to the gods as witnesses of their actions, they lived together in hunts. However, having soon become wicked, they wearied of those inconvenient spectators and banished them to magnificent temples. Finally, they chased them from the temples in order to take up residence in themselves, or at least the temples of the gods were no longer distinguishable from the homes of citizens. That period was the height of depravity, and vices were never impelled further than when they were, so to speak, seen propped up on columns of marble and carved on Corinthian capitals at the entrance to the palaces of the great. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
While the conveniences of life increase, the arts are perfected and luxury spreads, true courage is enervated, military virtue disappears, and this too is the work of the sciences and of all those arts which are practiced in the darkness of the study. People brad to me of their bravery on a day of battle, but they do not tell me how they handle overwork, how they withstand the harshness of the seasons and the inclemency of the weather. All that is needed is a bit of sunshine or snow, a lack of a few superfluities, to melt and destroy the best of our armies in a few days. Intrepid warriors, suffer for once the truth you so rarely hear: you are brave, I know. Battles do not always make for success in war, and for generals there is an art superior to that of wining battle. Everywhere I see immense establishments where youths are brough up at great expense to learn everything but their duties. Your children will not know their own language, but will speak others which re nowhere in use. They will know how to compose verses they will scarcely be capable of comprehending. Without knowing how to separate error from truth, they will possess the art of making them unrecognizable to others by means of specious arguments. However, they will not know the meaning of the words magnanimity, fair-mindedness, temperance, humanity, courage. That sweet name homeland will never strike their ear; and if they hear God spoken of at all, it will be less to be in awe of him than to be in fear of him. I know that children need to be kept occupied and that, for them, idleness is the greatest danger to fear. What then should they learn? That is certainly a fine question! Let them learn what they ought to do when they adults, and not what they ought to forget. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
If not from the fatal inequality introduced among humans by the distinction of talents and the degradation of virtues, where do all the abuses in society come from? That is the most evident effect of our studies, and the most dangerous of all their consequences. One no longer asks whether a human has integrity, but whether one has talents; not whether a book is useful, but whether it is well written. Rewards are showered upon the wit, and virtue is left without honour. There are a thousand prizes for fine discourses, none for fine actions. Meanwhile, would someone tell me whether the glory attached to the best discourses that will be crowned in this Academy is comparable to the merit of having established the prize? The wise human does not chase after fortune, but one is not insensitive to glory; and one sees it so ill distributed, that one’s virtue, which a little emulation would have enlivened and made advantageous to society, languishes and dies out in misery and oblivion. This is what, in the long run, the preference for congenial talents over useful ones must everywhere produce, and what experience since the revival of the sciences and the arts has only too well confirmed. We have physicists, geometers, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians, painters; we no longer have citizens. Or if there still are some left to us, dispersed in our abandoned countryside, they perish there indigent and despised. Such is the state to which those who give us bread and our children milk are reduced; such are the sentiments they get from us. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Considering the frightful disorders that the fake news media has already causes in the World, and judging by the progress that the evil makes from one day to the nest, it is easy to foresee that sovereigns will not delay in taking as many pains to banish this terrible art from their states as they took to establish it in them. The fake news media is the height o absurdity. Obstacles teach people to work hard and to exert themselves to cover the immense area they traversed. If a few humans must be permitted to devote themselves to the study of the sciences and the arts, it should only be those who feel the strength to venture forth alone in their footsteps and to overtake them. It is for this small number to raise monuments to the glory of the human mind. However, if we want nothing to be beyond their genius, nothing must be beyond their hopes. That is the only encouragement they need. The soul imperceptibly proportions itself to the objects that occupy it, and it is great events that make great humans. May the obtain the only recompense worth them: that of contributing by their influence to the happiness of the peoples to whom they have taught wisdom. Only then will we see what can be done by virtue, science, and authority, enlivened by a noble emulation and working in concert for the felicity of humankind. However, as long as power is alone on one side, with enlightenment and wisdom alone on the other, learned humans will rarely think about great things, princes will more rarely perform noble deeds, and peoples will continue to be vile, corrupt, and unhappy. For us—ordinary humans to whom Heaven has not distributed such great talents and whom it does not destine for so much glory—let us remain in our obscurity. Even if we had all the qualifications to, let us not chase after a reputation that would escape us and which, in the present state of things, would never return to us what it would have cost us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
If we can find it in ourselves, what good is it to seek our happiness in the opinion of another? Let us leave to others the cares of instructing peoples in their duties, and confine ourselves to fulfilling our own duties well. We have no need to know more than this. O virtue! Sublime science of simple souls, are there so many difficulties and so much preparation necessary in order to know you? Are your principles not engraved in all hearts, and is it not enough, in order to learn your laws, to commune with oneself and, in the silence of the passions, to listen to the voice of one’s conscience? That is the true philosophy; let us know how to be satisfied with it. And without envying the glory of those famous humans who are immortalized in the republic of letters, let us try to place between them and ourselves that glorious distinction observed long ago between two great peoples: that the one knew how to speak well, he other how to act well. It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problem with a mind free from bias. Psychology is morally and ethically neutral. Psychologists hold a wide variety of different moral and ethical views. These widely varying outlooks are often called Worldviews. Science involves more than impersonal, objective, pure facts. We organize observations based on our experience and interests. We decide what to attend to and what to ignore. This subjective element of scientific exploration is even larger in the human sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, and parts of psychology, than in the physical sciences, such as physics and chemistry. Thus psychologists’ Worldviews, which include their personal values, penetrate their work in several subtle and not-so-subtle ways. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Worldviews also influence psychologists’ choice of research topics and their ethical standards in conducting research. Our interest in topics such as aggression, gender, and smoking prevention are motivated by our personal concerns. Worldviews further influence our conceptions of mental and social hygiene, of self-actualization and fulfillment. Is it better to express and act on one’s feelings, or to exhibit self-control? To seek joy in the here and now, or to endure stress now for the sake of future achievement? Little wonder that in one survey, 425 mental-health professionals were almost equally divided on whether it was desirable for people to “become self-sacrificing and unselfish.” Psychologists also are subtly affected by their philosophical and cultural assumptions. Morality is a matter of thinking, and the humanistic individualism of one’s assumption about the “highest” or most mature moral stage is exhibited by those who make moral judgments in accord with their self-chosen convictions. Sometimes people’s moral ideals, for example, can be an articulate liberal secular humanist masquerading as psychological truth. Moral maturity is not so much a matter of abstract ethical principles as of responsible, committed relationships. So Worldviews including hidden values and assumptions do penetrate psychology. They influence psychologists to construct, confirm, and label concepts that support their presuppositions. The Christian psychologist’s obligation is to tell it like it is, knowing that the Author is at our elbow, a silent judge of the accuracy with which we claim to describe the World He has created. In this sense our goal is objective, value free. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
If our limitations, both intellectual and moral, predictably limit our achievement of this ideal, this is something not to be glorified in but in to acknowledged in a spirit of repentance. Any idea that it could justify a dismissal of the ideal of value free knowledge as a “myth” would be as irrational—and as irreligious—as to dismiss the idea of righteousness as a “myth” on the grounds that we can never perfectly attain that. A Christian psychology is one that is faithful to reality. If God has written the book of nature, it becomes our calling to read it as clearly as we can, remembering that we are humble stewards of the creation, answerable to the giver of all data for the accuracy of our observations. Indeed, it is precisely because all our ideas are vulnerable to error and bias—including our biblical and theological interpretations as well as our scientific concepts—that we must be wary of absolutizing any of our theological or scientific ideas. Our religious and scientific ideas are mere approximations of truth that always are subject to test, challenge, and revision. Believing that both the natural and biblical data reveal God’s truth, we can allow scientific and theological perspectives to challenge and inform each other. However, we do so remembering that science and theology operate at different levels of explanation and mindful of the tentative nature of any scientific or theological theory. There is an additional reason why the Christian Bible does not give us completed psychology and why we therefore need psychological science. The Scriptures must embody truth not just for us in our twenty-first-century age but for all the people past, present, and future. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Christianity was never intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts and sciences: it is rather a director which will set them all to the right jobs, and a source of energy which will give the all new life, if only they will put themselves at its disposal. The less we know, the more scrupulous and careful we should be in applying and monitoring what we think we do know. Having lost sight of scientific skepticism and the need for careful research, the “professionals view” has become highly compatible with the New Age view without adherence to the scientific standard of “show me,” professional psychology and psychotherapy become a matter of “views” and “schools,” with the result that they are highly influenced by cultural beliefs and fads: currently the obsession is with “me.” We agree that our values and assumptions cloud the spectacles through careful scientific and biblical scholarship. Christianizers psychology never approach their subject completely free of prior beliefs and prejudices. Thus if Christian psychologists are to be fully serious both as scholars and Christians, they must not wall off their scientific and religious levels of understanding from each other. Instead, they should allow the content of their faith to inform their psychology (and vice versa), much as they also allow their faith to inform their social awareness, politics, and personal relationships. Christian developmental psychologists might want to construct a theory that is rooted in an explicitly Christian understanding of morality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The Christian response to psychology is that it offers the psychological science a limited but useful perspective on human nature that complements the perspective of faith. The issues for the Christian is not some doctrinaire desire to defend the status of psychology as a science but rather to adhere to the commitment to report the way the World is, no the way we would like it to be. Science is, above all else, a reality-driven enterprise. Every active investigator is inescapably aware of this. It creates the pain as well as much of the delight of research. Reality is the overseer at one’s shoulder, ready to rap one’s knuckles or to spring the trap into which one had been led by over confidence, or by too-complacent reliance on mere surmise. Science succeeds precisely because it has accepted a bargain in which even the boldest imagination stands hostage to reality. Reality is the unrelenting angels with whom scientists have agreed to wrestle. This image should be familiar to those who recall Jacob’s encounter with the living God. Whenever a single wave of change predominates in any given society, the pattern of future development is relatively easy to discern. Writers, artists, journalists, and others discover the “wave of the future.” Thus in nineteenth-century Europe many thinkers, business leaders, politicians, and ordinary people held a clear, basically correct image of the future. They sensed that history was moving toward the ultimate triumph of industrialism over premecanized agriculture, and they foresaw with considerable accuracy many of the changes that the Second Wave would bring with it: more powerful technologies, bigger cities, faster transport, mass education, and the like. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
This clarity of vision had direct political effects. Parties and political movements were able to triangulate with respect to the future. Preindustrial agricultural interests organized a rearguard action against encroaching industrialism against “big business,” against “union bosses,” against “sinful cities.” Labour and management grappled for control of the main levers of the emergent industrial society. Marginalized because of their race, gender, religion, or ethnicity, people began defining their rights in terms of an improved role in the industrial World, demanded access to jobs, corporate positions, urban housing, better wages, mass public education, and so forth. This industrial vision of the future had important psychological effects as well. People might disagree; they might engage in sharp, occasionally even bloody, conflict. Depression and boom times might disrupt their lives. Nevertheless, in general, the shared image of an industrial future tended to define options, to give individuals a sense not merely of who or what they were, but of what they were likely to become. It provided a degree of stability and a sense of self, even in the midst of extreme social change. In contrast, when a society is struck by two or more giant waves of change, and none is yet clearly dominant, the image of the future is fractured. It becomes extremely difficult to sort out the meaning of the changes and conflicts that arise. The collision of wave fronts creates a raging ocean, full of clashing currents, eddies, and maelstroms which conceal the deeper, more important historic tides. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
In the United States of America today—as in many other countries—the collision of Second and Third Waves creates social tensions, dangerous conflicts, and strange new political wave fronts that cut across the usual divisions of class, race, gender, or party. This collision makes a shambles of traditional political vocabularies and makes it very difficult to separate the progressive from the reactionaries, friends from enemies. All the old polarizations and coalitions break up. Unions and employers, despite their differences, join to fight environmentalist. Groups, once untied in battle against discrimination, become adversaries. In many nations, labour, which has traditionally favoured “progressive” policies such as income redistribution, now holds “reactionary” positions with respect to women’s rights, family codes, immigration, traffic, or regionalism. The traditional “left” is often pro-centralization, highly nationalistic, and antienvironmentalist. At the same time we see politicians espousing “conservative” attitudes towards economic and “liberal” attitudes toward art, morality dealing with pleasures of the flesh, women’s rights, or ecological controls. No wonder people are confused and give up trying to make sense of their World. The media, meanwhile, report a seemingly endless succession of innovations, reversals, bizarre events, assassinations, kidnappings, space shots, governmental breakdown, commando raids, and scandals, all seemingly unrelated. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The apparent incoherence of political life is mirrored in personality disintegration. Psychotherapists and self-actualize do a land-office business; people wander aimlessly amid competing therapies, from primal scream to electroconvulsive shock therapy (EST). They slip into cults and covens or, alternatively, into a pathology privatism, convinced that reality is absurd, insane, or meaningless. Life may indeed be absurd in some large, cosmic sense. However, this hardly proves that there is no pattern in today’s events. In fact, there is a distinct, hidden order the becomes detectable as soon as we learn to distinguish Third Wave changes from those associated with the diminishing Second Wave. An understanding of the conflicts produced by these colliding wave fronts gives us not only a clearer image of alternative futures but an X ray of the political and social forces acting on us. It also offers insight into our own private roles in history. For each of us, no matter how seemingly unimportant, is a living piece of history. The crosscurrents created by these waves of change are reflected in our work, our family life, our attitudes towards pleasures of the flesh and personal morality. They show up in our lifestyle and voting behaviour. For in our personal lives and in our political acts, whether we know it or now, most of us in the rich countries are essentially either Second Wave people committed to maintaining the dying order, Third Wave people constructing a radically different tomorrow, or a confused, self-canceling mixture of the two. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Everyone has natural desire to know things. That is what Aristotle said a long time go in his Metaphysics. I say to you now, what good is all that knowledge unless it is accompanied by fear of God? Certainly better is the humble farmer who serves God than the proud Philosopher who entertains though about the Heavens. At least that is what Augustine noted in his Confessions. The Devout who knows oneself well has proper self-esteem, one that is not swept away by the blustering winds of human praise. If one’s head contained all the knowledge in the World and yet one’s soul was “empty of all charity”—the words of Pal in his First to the Corinthians (13.2)—what leg would he have left to stand on in front of his judge, the Lord God; all He want to know are the facts. Hunt for knowledge, yes, but do not let the hunter become the hunted. That way lies the wrong end of a blunderbuss. Often the studious want not so much to know everything as to be seen swanning about as authority figures. However, many areas oof knowledge have little or nothing to offer to the soul. Yet these are the very ones the harebrained often turn to instead of the topics that truly serve their own spiritual well-being. A shower of glitter does not slake the thirst of the soul. A life well lived, on the other hand, refreshes the mind, and a conscience well formed develops the confidence once needs when it comes to dealing with God. Antsy? Do not get antsy. Stay in line. Do not push others aside just to get ahead. If you do, you will get slapped with a fine by the Final Judge. That is to say, unless you have lived a holy life. Therefore, do not, every time you learn something new about art or science, break into a trompette volontaire! Rather, have some respect for the knowledge you already have. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
You may know a lot, yes, but there is also a lot you do not know. “Do not be wiseacre,” wrote Paul to the Romans (11.20) Admit you re not omniscient. And when it comes to standing in line, what about the people ahead of you? Apparently, they know more than you do. Get used to knowing less than God. Get used to the middle of the line. That is where you belong. What is the most profound, and yet the most practical, lesson you can learn? That you look like an ant! What is the deepest wisdom and yet the highest perfection? That you are an ant! Have no illusions about yourself—that is what Paul laid upon the Romans (11.20). Hold high opinions only about others. If you come upon a couple in flagrante delicito, do not think for a moment that you are better than they. Why? No one is perfect, said the Great Bernard somewhere in his Third Sermon on Christmas Day. We are all crockery. We all break when we hit the floor. And what is more, no one is more of a crock than you! Life consciousness above the plane of the physical World. Immerse thought in the concept of the higher self alone, forgetting its projected personal self. Next, empty the mind as far as possible of all thoughts and seek inward sacred stillness. When in prayer, picture an ethereal aura of pure, white, electrifying Light all around you. Then, imagine this magnificent Light is actually pulling you upright by the top of your head. Its compelling force should, as a result, automatically straighten the spine, and the back of your trunk, neck, and head from a perfectly erect line. Finally, imagine the Light is pervading inside the whole of your body. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
This should give you a feeling of physical refreshment and complete physical relaxation. Try to see and feel that the aura of Lit has an actual substance and that It is becoming part of you, that you are melting into It, becoming one with It. Next, think of it as being the pure essence of Love, especially in the region of the heart. When this Love has been experienced as a sensation of heart-melting happiness, let it then extend outwards to embrace all the World. This should give one a feeling of being in harmony with Nature, the Universe, with all living beings, and with humanity as a part of Nature. Thinking of the white Light as being Nature’s intelligent and recuperative Life-Force is essential to healing. Let it pour in, through the top of your head, passing directly to the solar plexus center, which is the region which must first be worked on and affected if he healing force is to become efficacious. Thence send it to any afflicted area, remaining there. Feel Its benevolent, restorative, and healing presence working upon it. In order to be fully effective, this exercise must be accompanied by intense faith in the recuperative powers of this Light. Astonishing proof of its effectiveness in relieving a troubles organ or curing a diseased part of the body, when preserved in for a sufficient period of weeks or months, has been clearly shown by results. In some cases, paralytics have regained full use of their disabled limbs by having faith in God and prayer. We are often times, so much the victims of custom and usage, of habit and convention, that even where we at once perceive this weakness in other persons, we fail to entirely perceive it in ourselves. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
We hear often of those who live to a ripe old age in health and in strength, but who eat whatever they fancy and drink what they like; they sin against the laws of health and live without any health regimes or disciplinary controls. This is used as an argument against the latter. However, it is a poor argument. For anyone who follows their example takes risks and runs hazards with one’s health, since theirs is a way based on mere chance and complete uncertainty. They were lucky enough to be blessed by nature with bodies strong enough to resist the ill-treatment thus received or favoured by destiny with recuperative powers to ward off its bad effect. If anyone could collect the statistics, they would unquestionably show that for each person who escaped infirmities and lived long in this way, a hundred filed to do so. Whatever humans harm or hurt, one will have to live with for a time until one learns to refrain, until one’s reverence for life is as active here as anywhere else. This is why the horrors of destruction will have to be expiated by the human who caused them. Those who have followed the Quest in previous lives will generally receive a glimpse a least twice during the present one. They will receive it in early life during their teens or around the threshold of adult life. This will inspire them to seek anew. Let the White Light enter the region of the heart reaming there. Form a mental image of the life you would like to lead. Endeavour actually to see the life there in your heart. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
This will bestow a Grace of God. Those aspirants who bemoan the loss of their early glimpse should remind themselves, in hours of depression, that it will recur before they leave the body. In addition to those glimpses which attend the opening and closing years of a lifetime, a number of others may be had during the intervening period as a dirt consequence and reward of the efforts, disciplines, and aspirations, and self-denials practised in the tame. We ought not to mistake this for the exception; it is really the type. Most aspirants have experienced this mystical glimpse, brief and unexpected perhaps, which has started or kept them on this quest. Even those people who assert or lament that they have never had a single glimpse during their whole lifetime will get it at the end. For it is a divinely ordained part of life. When the genuine mystical experiences comes, it present the student with the rare chance to know for oneself a state in the evolution of consciousness which still lies far ahead of humankind generally. Such memorable glimpses of higher state of being, which encourage and reassure one, may occur not only at the beginning of one’s spiritual career but also at the beginning of each new cycle within it. A glimpse is apparently something that humans rarely experience or something most of them never experience. However, the fact is that more people have had it than have recognized it for what it really is. And this has happened through their admiration of Nature or art, through failing in love, through sudden news. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
At present this mystic experience is a fugitive one in the human species. However, because it is also the ultimate experience of that species, there is no reason why it should not become a common one in the course of evolutionary development. The beauty of the trees, the softness of the air, the fragrance of the grass speaks to me. The summit of the mountain, the thunder of the sky, the rhythm of the sea, speaks to me. The faintness of the stars, the freshness of the morning, the dewdrop on the flower, speaks to me. The strength of fire, the taste of salmon, the trail of the sun, and the life that never goes away, they speak to me, and my heart soars. O Lord our God, please be gracious unto Thy people America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy sanctuary and receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worship of Thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. O may our eyes witness Thy return to America. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who restorest Thy divine presence unto America. We thankfully acknowledge Thee, O Lord our God, our father’s God to all eternity. Our Rock art Thou, our Shield that saves through every generation. We give thee thanks and we declare Thy praise for all Thy tender care. Our lives we trust into Thy loving hand. Our souls are ever in Thy charge; Thy wonders and Thy miracles are daily with us, evening, morn and noon. O Thou who art all-good, whose mercies never fail us, Compassionate One, whose lovingkindnesses never cease, we ever hope in Thee. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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You Have Witchcraft on Your Lips!
Witchcraft dates back to the beginning of time. Biblical character’s Adam and Eve were the first warlock and witch. Eve was the first to follow the serpent, then Adam, and then their children. Since then, witches have existed and passed down their skills and knowledge for many generations. The supernatural was an important aspect of Victorian society. It pervaded all forms of life and art, science and entertainment. Its language and metaphors encroached upon Victorian culture. However, before the Victorian era was brought into fruition, there was Salem—a town where the occult was alive and well. However, I consider the seventeenth century the birth of the Victorian era for it was more than just about architecture, ornate homes, and opulent wealthy—it was also about the supernatural, and Salem is known for supernatural events. The supernatural was as important as the realm of the natural in Victorian times, as is proven by its relevance in political, cultural, and religious history and in the incipient entertainment industry. Etymologically speaking, the term “supernatural” refers to what is superior or above nature. However, here are several interpretations of the word “supernatural” which are generally accepted by the critics: preternatural, spiritual, or paranormal, and supernatural. In Boston, in midsummer of the year 1688, four previously well-behaved children of a “sober and pious” mason, John Goodwin, began to have “strange fits, beyond those that attended an epilepsy, or catalepsy.” The words are those of Cotton Mather. Mr. Mather was a medical student before he was a minister, and a far more careful observer than he has been given credit for. He spent a great deal of his time with the Goodwin children and he has left us a thorough account of their symptoms in his Memorable Providences: “Sometimes they would be deaf, sometimes dumb, and sometimes blind, and often all this at once. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
“One while their tongues would be drawn down their throats; and another while they would be pulled out upon their chins to a prodigious length. They would have their mouths opened unto such a wideness that their jaws went out of joint, and anon they would clap together again with a force like that of a strong spring-lock. The same would happen to their shoulder blades, and their elbows, and hand-wrists, and several of their joints. They would at times lie in a benumbed condition and be drawn together as those that are tied neck and heels [this was one of the few tortures permitted under seventeenth-century English law; neck and heels were chained together so that the body was bent into an exaggerated and painful foetal posture], and presently be stretched out, yea, drawn backwards to such an extent that it was feared the very skin of their bellies would have cracked [this is the arc de cercle of the nineteenth-century French psychiatrists]. They would make most piteous outcries that they were cut with knives, and struck with blows that they could not bear. Their necks would be broken so that their neck-bone would seem dissolved unto them that felt after it, and yet on the sudden it would become again so stiff that there was no stirring of their heads. Yea, their heads would be twisted almost round, and if main force at any time obstructed a dangerous motion which they seemed to be upon, they would roar exceedingly. Thus they lay some weeks most pitiful spectacles.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Again the symptoms are those of the hysteric: the convulsive movements, the distorted postures, the loss of hearing, speech, sight, and so forth. The fits had started immediately after one of the children had quarreled with an Irish washerwoman, whose mothers, Goodwife Glover, “a scandalous old woman” whose late husband had complained about the neighbourhood “that she was undoubtedly a witch,” had “bestowed very bad language upon the girl.” The neighbour advised the family to try white magic, but the pious father, John Goodwin, refused to traffic with the occult. He consulted first with “skillful physicians,” particularly with Dr. Thomas Oakes, who gave his opinion that “nothing but an hellish witchcraft” could be the cause of the children’s afflictions. Next he turned to the Boston clergy, who held a day of prayer at the Goodwin house, after which one of the four children was permanently cured. And finally he entered a complaint against Goodwife Glover with the magistrates. When they examined her she “gave such a wretched account of herself” that they committed her to jail under indictment of witchcraft. Cotton Mather gives a concise account of her trial: “It was long before she could with any direct answers plead unto her indictment, and when she did plead it was with confession rather than denial of her guilt. Order was given to search the old woman’s house, from whence there were brought into the court several small images, or puppets, or babies, made of rags and stuffed with goat’s hair and other such ingredients. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
“When these were produced the vile woman acknowledged that her finger with her spittle and stocking of those little images. The abused children were than present, and the woman still kept stooping and shrinking as one that was almost pressed to death with a mighty weight upon her. However, one of the images being brought unto her, immediately she started up after an odd manner and took it into her hand. However, no sooner taken it than one of the children fell into sad fits before the whole assembly. This the judges had their just apprehensions at, and carefully causing the repetition of the experiment found again the same event of it. They asked her whether she had any to stand by her [id est, as character witnesses]. She replied, she had, and looking very pertly in the air she added, ‘No, He’s gone.’ And then she confessed that she had one who was her Prince, with whom she maintained I know not what communion. For which cause, the nigh after, she was heard expostulating with a Devil for his thus deserting her, telling Him that because He had served her so basely and falsely, she had confessed all. However, to make all clear the court appointed five or six physicians one evening to examine her very strictly, whether she were not crazed in her intellectuals and had not procured to herself by follow and madness the reputation of a witch. Diverse hours did they spend with her, and in all that while no discourse came from her but what was pertinent and agreeable. Particularly, when they asked her what she would become of her soul, she replied, ‘You ask me a very solemn question, and I cannot tell what to say to it.’ #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
“She owned herself a Roman Catholic and could recite her Pater Noster very readily, but there was one clause or two always too hard for her, whereof she said she could not repeat it if she might have all the World. In the upshot the doctors returned her compos mentis, and sentence of death was passed upon her.” There has never been a more clear-cut case of witchcraft. Image magic is the commonest form of black magic. The impulse behind it survives even when the belief in magic is gone (as any one knows who has torn up the photograph of a person with whom they were angry. When they hang or burn someone in effigy, college students are obeying the same impulse, and burning were the means of executing witches. Nobody is ever shot, or stabbed, or garroted in effigy.) The dolls were studded with goat’s hair because it is the goat who is defied in Satan’s horns and cloven hooves. Spittle was applied to them because spittle was believed to have occult power, a belief that still survives in the idea of spitting on one’s hands before undertaking a particularly arduous task. To determine whether or not the plea should be insanity, the defendant was examined by a committee of physicians, who agreed she was sane. Plainly Goodwife Glover believed that she had made a pact with Satan. When she was asked who would stand by her, she attempted to call on Him, and she was overheard at night, in her cell, berating Him for having abandoned her. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
However, what is most important is that her witchcraft plainly worked, and in no indiscriminate fashion. When she was tormented one of her dolls, one of the Goodwin children “fell into sad fits.” When it is remembered that in a society which believes in witchcraft the violent hysterical symptoms to which the Goodwin children were subject not infrequently terminate in death, it cannot be said that the Boston court acted either harshly or unjustly. Indeed, when one considers the ferocity of seventeenth-century English law, simple hanging seems almost a lenient sentence. Cotton Mather visited Goodwife Glover twice in jail after she had been condemned, and made a serious effort to convert her. Her Prince, he told her, had cheated her, to which she answered, “If it be so, I am sorry for that!” He “set before her the necessity and equity of her breaking her convenient with Hell, and giving herself to the Lord Jesus Christ by an everlasting covenant.” She answered the he “spoke a very reasonable thing, but she could not do it.” He asked if Cotton Mather asked again for her permission to pray, and she replied that should could not give it unless her “spirits” would give her leave—“spirits,” or “angels,” or “saints”; she spoke only in Irish, the language she had also used at trial, and the translator told Mr. Mather that the Irish word would bear any of those translations. He prayed for her anyway, and when he was through she thanked him for it. However, he wrote, “I was no sooner out of her sight than she took a stone, a long and slender stone, and with her finger and spittle fell to tormenting it; though whom or what she meant, I had the mercy never to understand.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
During these visits Mr. Mather also asked her “many” questions about her witchcraft. On one occasion she replied that she “would fain give….a full answer” but her spirits would not give her leave. She told him that she used to go to meetings where her “Prince,” who was the Devil, was present along with four other persons, whom she named, including one “whom it might have been thought natural affection would have advised the concealing of”—presumably her daughter. When she, Goodwife Glover, was on her way to the gallows she announced that the children’s afflictions would not cease at her death, because others had a hand in the witchcraft as well as she. The afflictions did continue, but Mr. Mather kept the names the witch had mentioned to himself, presumably on the grounds that one should not accept the testimony against others of a confessed witch. After all, the Devil was, as Mr. Mather often called him, “the Prince of Lies,” and this woman had been his worshipper. The children’s fits continued more violently than ever, except that the body could be given sporadic relief by striking at the specters you could injure the witch, and on one occasion it was reported “that wound was this way given to an obnoxious woman in the town.” Again Mr. Mather refused to make the name public, “for we should be tender in such relations, least we wrong he reputation of the innocent by stories not enough inquired into.” Eventually Mr. Mather took the eldest Goodwin girl into his own home, partly in an attempt to cure her through prayer and fasting, and “also that I might have a full opportunity to observe the extraordinary circumstances of the children, and that I might be furnished with evidence and argument as a critical eye-witness to confute the sadducism of this debauched age.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Mr. Mather was also the scholar; he recognized that this was a classic case and had already determined on publishing account of it in an attempt to convert materialists to the belief in an invisible World. The girl provided a thorough display of symptoms. Most of them we have noticed before, but there were others as well. Her belly would swell “like a drum, and sometimes with croaking noises in it”; on one such occasion Mr. Mather was praying for “mercy on a daughter vexed with a Devil,” and “there came a big, but low voice from her, saying, “There’s two or three of them’ (or us!).” One of her more grotesque hallucinations was riding on a spectral horse. She would go through the motions of riding, and at the conclusion of one such spell she announced that she had been to a witch meeting, and had learned who was the cause of her affliction. There were three of the, she said. She named them “Roubriao, Mariodam, Balbnabaoth,” and then said, “Hear Me, and make all Spirits subject unto Me: so that every Spirit of the Firmament and of the Ether; upon the Earth and under the Earth: on dry Land and in the Water: of Whirling Air, and rushing Fire: and every Spell and Scourge of God may be obedient unto Me.” Then she announced, “if they were out of the way, I should be well.” However, Mr. Mather made no move to put them “out of the way.” After all, this was a girl though whom Devil were speaking, and so once more he kept the names of the accused to himself. The girl was able to get relief from her afflictions in Mr. Mather’s study. She believed, to his mixed embarrassment and pleasure, that God would not permit her Devils to enter there. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
One of her more curious symptoms was “flying”; “she would be carried hither and thither, though not long enough from the ground, yet so long as to exceed the ordinary power of nature in our opinion of it.” There is probably nothing more to this “flying” than the violence of motion we have seen in the fits throughout. Yet it may not be so simple; levitation was reported on another occasion when the record is less easy to explain, and we shall return to the problem in dealing with that occasion. A persistent symptom was her inability to pray, or to hear prayers said on her behalf, or to read Puritan religious works. “A popish book…she could endure very well,” and she was about to read “whole pages” of “a Quaker’s book,” although she could not read the words “God” or “Christ” but skipped over them. “When we urged her to tell what the word was that she missed, she would day, ‘I must not speak it; they say I must not, you know what it is, it’s G and O and God.’” She could not read the Christian Holy Bible, and if someone else read it, even silently, “she would be cast into very terrible agonies.” Puritan catechisms had the same effect: the Assembly’s Catechism or Mr. Mather’s grandfather John Cotton’s catechism for children, Milk for Babes, “would bring hideous convulsions on the child if she looked into them; though she had once learned the with all the love that could be.” It is also interesting to note that Cotton Mather was also a leader in the fight for inoculation against smallpox, incurring popular disapproval. He was introduced to the idea by Onesimus, an enslaved West African man in his household. #RandolphHrris 9 of 21
When Mr. Cotton Mather inoculated his own son, who almost died from the vaccine, the whole community was wrathful, and a bomb was thrown through his chamber window. Satan seemed on the side of his enemies; various members of his family became ill, and some died. Worst of all, his son Increase was arrested for rioting. Also, Cotton Mather was not against the institution of slavery, and he enslaved a number of people in his household. Many Puritans, including members of his own congregation, actively participated in slave trafficking and were involved in the selling of Native Americans overseas and the importation of Africans. He defended the practice as being biblically rooted and famously asserted that the souls of African slaves were washed white with baptism and they become “the Free-men of the Lord,” while still enslaved. However, Mr. Mather also produce a pamphlet called The Negro Christianized in 1706 (a term that may be highly offensive, but was considered politically correct in the eighteenth century), and her urged slave-owners to teach their “servants” Christianity, accepting them as spiritual brethren, and to treat them justly and kindly. Nonetheless, American historians have made themselves merry over some of the symptoms of being bewitched. Suggesting that a Puritan catechism was enough to give anybody convulsions. However, such suggestions only demonstrate the incapacity of these historians to understand a culture whose central concerns were religious. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The bewitched girl we have been speaking about had been piously raised in a religious society and believed herself affected by devils and witches; her inability to speak the name of God or to read the religious books in her society believed in must have been a terrifying ordeal to her; her spelling God’s name and reading Quaker and Catholic books were clearly substitutes. Drs. Breuer and Freud report an exactly parallel case in their Studies in Hysteria: “A very distressed young girl, while anxiously watching at a sick bed, fell into a dreamy state, had terrifying hallucinations, and her right arm, which was at the time hanging over the back of the chair, became numb. This resulted in a paralysis, contracture, and anesthesia of that arm. She wanted to pray, but could find no words [id est, in her native language, German], but finally succeeded in uttering an English children’s prayer. Later, on developing a very grace and most complicated hysteria, she spoke, wrote, and understood only English, whereas her native tongue was incomprehensible to her for a year and a half.” Anyone who has had the common and terrifying dream in which one cannot speak or move will know something of how the elder Goodwin girl felt when she found she could not pray or read the Bible—but only something of it, since the dream last only for a moment and the girl’s symptoms lasted for months. It seems, in fact, to have been prayer that cured her—not her own, but that of Cotton Mather and other well-meaning members of the community who occasionally joined him. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Then, according to Thomas Hutchinson, who published his History of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay in 1750: “The children returned to their ordinary behaviour, lived to adult age, made profession of religion, and the affliction they had been under they publicly declared to be one motive to it. One of them I knew many years after. She had the character of a very sober virtuous woman, and never made any acknowledgement of fraud in this transaction.” I have been very interested in Victorian architecture since I was a child, and the more I study it and its occult connection, the more I seem to notice some interesting things. There is another large Victorian Mansion in Oakland, California, it is 25 percent the size of the Winchester mansion, 19 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms, threes stories, and has a basement. It has been undergoing restoration by several people over the years, but the owners do not seem to occupy it for more than a decade before they relist it. Many people have never lived in Victorian, so even if there is no mention of them being haunted, some still feel like the eyes have walls and they are constantly being watched, which can be disturbing at night, especially the larger the house is. People often have dreams they are possessed by their house and that their bodies are levitating in their sleep, but they are actively in a dream about their traveling through their house in their physical bodies, as if they are possessed by the house. And other than seeing shadow people, they see black orbs traveling up and down the walls and just mark it up to being exhausted and after a few days it stops. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
While owning a Victorian is a dream, people who live in them sometimes get freaked out when their teeth become loose and they spit up blood, only for it to stop days later and everything to be back to normal. People have also seen creatures in these homes that they cannot identify, but can feel a frightening vibe as they watch them move, and are too scared themselves to move, fall asleep and have no idea what happened, only to see them again night after night. And it seems Victorian homes which have undergone the least renovations and are more authentic to the period tend to have more of a soul and more paranormal activity. Victorian homes are important no only because the represent the birth of America, but also because they were built by Africans and financed by the works of their labour, in many cases, and are parts of our history. Not all Victorians are built by slave labour and resources, but it is far more common in the South and on the East Coast. It is very important to preserve these pieces of history because they cannot be replaced, and there is certainly something magical about these homes that are over 100 years old and have seen generations of families, tragedy, joy, birth, death, and withstood so much. They have outlived many people, and you can truly feel these homes have a soul, a history, and that they are alive. Some people who buy a Victorian and start to renovate them have been documented to have changes in personality and seem like different people. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
They do not tell others what they are going through, but usually will list their home, and it is assumed because they were having financial difficulty with the renovations as they tell people, “We are just in the market for something different.” I guess if your sinks kept backing up with black tar, and windows started rattling all night, long it might be a good idea to relocate. Others who have renovated Victorian houses live in fear because they can feel a presence and notice strange things in the homes, and they begin to suffer from neurosis and have to be hospitalized. However, some people love these homes, know what to expect, are not afraid of the dark and are mentally strong enough to deal with unusual occurrences. They may find the spirits more palatable than dealing with people. Nonetheless, Thomas Hutchinson was a typical eighteenth-century rationalist, who thought all witchcraft was a matter of fraud, so his testimony to the woman’s later character is particularly valuable. In an early draft of his account of this case he tells us that she was one of his tenants, but unfortunately he does not ell us whether she was the child who had been under the care of Cotton Mather. The Glover case was classic. While it was still going on Joshua Moody wrote to Increase Mather: “It was an example in all parts of it, not to be paralleled.” Cotton Mather took the occasion to preach to his congregation a “Discourse on Witchcraft,” in which a central concern was to demonstrate that prayer, faith, and a good life rather than charms were the proper “preservatives” against witchcraft. More important, how was his use of the case as ammunition in the war of the pious against the philosophical materialism. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Books, and the reading of them, were raised to new heights in Victorian culture and in the home in particular. The Christian Bible, above all, was a prominent book in many Victorian homes. Works on travel and self-improvement were popular, along with novels by Washington Irving, Henry James, and Charles Dickens. People actually ready essays, most notably of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Books were expensive until machine-made paper made them affordable to middle-class readers. Not all houses had the luxury of devoting a separate room for a library, so books were displayed in bookcases in the parlor. However, an effort was made to create a home library, partly as a symbol of a family’s intellectual curiosity. Libraries had always exited in the homes of the wealthy and traditionally tended to be the domain of the man of the house, as reflected by the décor. Wood paneling, dark coloured wallpaper or other wall treatment advertised the serious purpose of the room. Built-in bookcases, or freestanding ones, some with glass doors, a desk, and comfortable furniture for reading were basic elements of the library or study. It was also a place where the gentlemen retired to after dinner for their treasured smoke and nightcap. Many people who have stayed in the Winchester mansion have grew into a sort of subdued accompaniment to all the fantastic and horrible speculations which chase one another through their brains. Silence grows more silent, and darkness darker. Until there is nothing but the sound of a rising wind, which has succeeded the thunderstorm that travels over the mountains quite out of hearing. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
In the middle of this great mansion, I began to feel myself alone with nature, and Heaven knows what beside. My courage was ebbing. Just in time to hear with tolerable nerve and firmness the lumpy, flabby, naked feet deliberately descending the stairs again. I took a candle, no without a tremor. As I crossed the floor I tried to extemporize a prayer, but stopped short to listen, and never finished it. The steps continued. I confess I hesitated for some seconds at the door before I took heart of grace and opened it. When I peeped out the lobby was perfectly empty—there was no monster standing on the staircase; and as he detested sound ceased, I was reassured enough to venture forward nearly to the banisters. Horror of horrors! within a stair or two beneath the spot where I stood the unearthly tread smote the floor. My eye caught something in motion; it was about the size of Goliath’s foot—it was grey, heavy, and flapped with a dead weight from one step to another. As I am alive, it was the most monstrous great rat I ever beheld or imagined. Shakespeare says—“Some men there are cannot abide a gaping pig, and some that are made if they behold a cat.” I went well-nigh out of my wits when I beheld this rat; for, laugh at me as you may, it fixed upon me, I thought, perfectly human expression of malic; and, as it shuffled about and looked up into my face almost from between my feet, I saw, I could swear it—I felt in then, and know it now, the infernal gaze and the accursed countenance of my old friend in the haunting portrait, transfused into the visage of a bloated vermin before me. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
I bounced into my room again with feeling of loathing and horror I cannot describe, and locked and bolted my door as if a lion had been at the other side. Damn him or it; curse the portrait and its original! I felt in my soul that the rat—yes, the rat, the RAT I had just seen, was that evil being in masquerade, and rambling through the house upon some infernal night lark. Next morning I was early trudging through the miry fields of San Jose; and, among other transactions, posted a peremptory note recalling Lewis on my way home. On my return, however, I found a note from my absent “chum,” announcing his intent to return the next day. I was doubly rejoiced at this, because I had succeeded in getting rooms; and because the change of scene and return of my comrade were rendered specially pleasant by the last night’s half ridiculous half horrible adventure. I spelt extemporaneously in my new quarters in Oakland that night, and the next morning returned for breakfast to the haunted mansion, where I was certain Lewis would alert me immediately on his arrival. Hebe was in a corner of the room, packing our cracked delft tea and dinner-services in a basket. She soon suspended operations. I was lying in the attitude of sleep, in that lumbering old bed. I hate to think of it. I was really wide awake, though I had put out my candle, and was lying quietly as if I had been asleep; and although accidentally restless, my thoughts were running in a cheerful and agreeable channel. I think it must have been two o’clock at least when I thought I heard a sound in that—that odious dark recess at the far end of the bedroom. It was as if someone was drawing a piece of cord slowly along the floor lifting up, and dropping it softy down again in coils. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
I sat up once or twice in my bed, but could see nothing, so I concluded it must be mice in the wainscot. I felt no emotion graver than curiosity, and after a few minutes ceased to observe it. While laying in this state, strange to say; without at first a suspicion of anything supernatural, on sudden I saw an old man, rather stout and square, in a sort of roan-red dressing-gown, and with a black cap on his head, moving stiffly and slowly in a diagonal direction, from the recess, across the floor of the bedroom, passing my bed at the foot, and entering the lumber-closet at the left. He had something under his arm; his head hung a little at one side; and, merciful God! when I saw his face. That awful countenance, which living or dying I never can forget, disclosed what he was. Without turning to the right or left, he passed beside me, and entered the closet by the bed’s head. While this fearful and indescribable type of death and guilt was passing, I felt that I had no more power to speak or stir than if I had been myself a corpse. For hours after it had disappeared, I was too terrified and weak to move. As soon as daylight came, I took courage and examined the room, and especially the course which the frightful intruder had seemed to take, but there was not a vestige to indicate anybody’s having passed there; no sign of any disturbing agency visible among the lumber that strewed the floor of the closet. I now began to recover a little. I was fagged and exhausted, and at last, overpowered by a feverish sleep. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
I came down late; and was out of spirits. I did not care to recall the infernal vision. In fact, I was trying to persuade myself that the whole thing was an illusion, and I did not like to revive in their intensity the hated impressions of the past night—or, to risk the constancy of my scepticism, by recounting the tale of my sufferings. It required some nerve, I can tell you, to go to my haunted chamber next night, and lie down quietly in the same bed. I did so with a degree of trepidation, which, I am not ashamed to say, a very little matter would have sufficed to stimulate to downright panic. This night, however, passed off quietly enough, as also the next; and so too did two or three more. I grew more confident, and began to fancy that I believed in the theories of spectral illusions, with which I had at first vainly tried to impose upon my convictions. The apparition had been, indeed, altogether anomalous. It has crossed the room without any recognition of my presence: I had not disturned it, and it has no mission to me. What, then, was the imaginable use of its crossing the room in a visible shape at all? Of course it might have been in the closet instead of going there, as easily as it introduced itself into the recess without entering the chamber in a shape discernible by the senses. Besides, how the deuce had I seen it? It was a dark night; I had no candle; there was no fire; and yet I saw it as distinctly, in colouring and outline, as ever I beheld human form! A cataleptic dream would explain it all; and I was determined that a dream it should be. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
One of the most remarkable phenomena connected with the practice of mendacity is the vast number of deliberate lies we tell ourselves, whom, of all persons, we can least expect to deceive. I so hoped to win myself over at last to a comfortable scepticism about the ghost. He had not appeared a second time—that certainly was a comfort; and what, after all, did I care for him, and his queer old toggery and strange looks? Not a fig! I was nothing the worse for having seen hi, and a good story the better. So I tumbled into bed, put out my candle, and cheered by a loud drunken quarrel in the fields, went fast asleep. From this deep slumber I awoke with a start. I knew I had had a horrible dream; but what it was I could not remember. My heart was thumping furiously; I felt bewildered and feverish; I sat up in the bed and looked bout the room. A broad flood of moonlight came in through the window; everything was as I had last seen it. In my uncomfortable half-sleep, for hour long, I cannot conjecture. I found myself at last muttering, “dead as a door-nail, so there was the end”; and something like another voice within me, seemed to say, very faintly, but sharply, “dead! dead! dead!” and may the Lord have mercy on your soul!” and instantaneously I was wide awake, and staring right before me the pillow. I saw the same accursed figure standing full front, and gazing at me with its stony and fiendish countenance, not two yards from beside. I was grateful for the clear daylight and resumed to bustle out the doors. For about three seconds only I saw it plainly; then it grew indistinct; but for a long time, there was something like a column of dark vapour where it had been standing, between me and the wall; and I felt sure that he was still there. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
After a good while, this appearance went too. I took my clothes downstairs to the halls, and dressed there, with the door half open; then went out into the street, and walked about town till morning, when I came back, in the miserable state of nervousness and exhaustion. For many nights after this last experience, I did not go to my room at all. I used to sit up for a while in the drawing-room; and then steal down softly to the hall-door, to let myself out, and sit in the Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton until morning. For more than a week I never slept in bed. I had absolutely no regular sleep. I was quite resolved that I should get into another house; but I could not bring myself to tell anyone the reason, and I somehow put it off from day to day, although my life was, during every hour of this procrastination, rendered as miserable as that of a felon with the constables on his track. I was growing absolutely ill from this wretched mode of life. One afternoon I determined to enjoy an hour’s sleep upon the maid’s bed. I hated mine; so that I have never, except in a stealthy visit every day to unmake it, lest Stella should discover the secret of my night absence, entered the ill-omened chamber. Our God and God of our fathers, please accept our rest. On this Sabbath day please renew the New Moon unto us for well-being and for blessing, for joy and gladness, for salvation and comfort, for sustenance and abundance, for life and peace, for the pardon of sin and forgiveness of iniquity. Choosing They people America from among all nation, Thou hast made Thy Holy Sabbath known unto them and prescribed statues regarding the observance of the New Moon. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who sanctifiest the Sabbath, America, and the New Moon. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
This rare view from Mrs. Winchester’s Gardens shows the estate sometime before the 1906 earthquake – notice the nine-story tower, and the lack of a door-to-nowhere. Why do you think Sarah added the door-to-nowhere?
Winchester Mystery House
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
Love is the God-Given Goal of Human Relationships!
Fashionable men and women do not just put on fashionable clothes. The truly fashionable are beyond fashion. Ageism, which refers to discrimination or prejudice based on age, can oppress the young as well as seniors. For instance, a person applying for a job may just as well be told, “You are too young” as “You are too old.” In some societies, ageism is based on respect for the elderly. In japan, for instance, aging is seen as beneficial, and greater age brings with it more status and respect. In most nations in the New World, however, ageism tends to have a negative impact on older individuals. Usually, it is expressed as a rejection of the elderly. The concept of “oldness” is often to expel people from useful work: Too often, retirement is just another name for dismissal and unemployment. Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest. You have almost certainly encountered ageism in one way or another. Stereotyping is a major facet of ageism. Popular stereotypes of the “dirty old man,” “meddling old woman,” ‘senile old fool,” and the like, help perpetuate the myths underlying ageism. Contrast such as images to those associated with youthfulness: The young are perceived as fresh, whole, attractive, energetic, active, emerging, and appealing. Yet, even good stereotypes can be a problem. For example, if older people are perceived as financially well off, wise, or experienced, it can blind others to the real problems of the elderly. The important point is that age-based stereotypes are often wrong. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
A tremendous diversity exists among the elderly—ranging from the infirm and demented to aerobic-dancing grandmothers. The Lord knows and love the elderly among His people. It has always been so, and upon them He has bestowed many of His greatest responsibilities. In various dispensations He has guided His people through prophets who were in their advancing years. God has needed the wisdom and experience of age, the inspired direction from those with long years of proven faithfulness to His gospel. Two apparently contrasting images of the future grip the popular imagination today. Most people—to the extent that they bother to think about the future at all—assume the World they know will last indefinitely. They find it difficult to imagine a truly different way of life for themselves, let alone a totally new civilization. Of course they recognize that things are changing. However, they assume today’s changes will somehow pass them by and that nothing will shake the familiar economic framework and political structure. They confidently expect the future to continue the present. This straight-line thinking comes in various packages. At one level it appears as an unexamined assumption lying behind the decisions of business people, teachers, parents, and politicians. At a more sophisticated level it comes dressed up in statistics, computerized data, and forecasters’ jargon. Either way it adds up to a vision of a future World that is essentially “more of the same”—Second Wave industrialism writ even larger and spread over more of this planet. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Recent events have severely shaken this confident image of the future. As crisis after crisis has crackled across the headlines, as Israel erupted, as Dictator Lukashenko is considered out of control, as oil prices skyrocket, as inflation runs wild, as terrorism spreads, and governments seem helpless to stop it, a bleaker vision has become increasingly popular. Thus, large numbers of people—feed on a steady diet of bad and fake news, disaster movies, apocalyptic Bible stories, and nightmare scenarios issued by prestigious think tanks—have apparently concluded that today’s society cannot be projected into the future because no future. For them, Armageddon is only minutes away. The Earth is racing toward its final cataclysmic shudder. On the surface these two visions of the future seem very different. Yet both produce similar psychological and political effects. For both lead to the paralysis of imagination and will. If tomorrow’s society is simply an enlarged, Cinerama version of the present, there is little we need do to prepare for it. If, on the other hand, society is inevitably destined to self-destruct within out lifetime, there is noting we can do about it. In short, both these ways of looking at the future generate privatism and passivity. Both freeze us into inaction. Yet, in trying to understand what is happening to us, we are not limited to this simpleminded choice between Armageddon and More-of-the-Same. There are many more clarifying and constructive ways to think about tomorrow—ways that prepare us for the present. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
The revolutionary premise assumes that, even though the decades immediately ahead are likely to be filled with upheavals, turbulence, perhaps even widespread violence, we will not totally destroy ourselves. It assumes that the jolting changes we are now experiencing are not chaotic or random but that, in fact, they form a sharp, clearly discernible pattern. It assumes, moreover, that these changes are cumulative—that they add up to a giant transformation in the way we live, work, play, and think, and that a sane and desirable future is possible. In short, what follows begins with the premise that what is happening now is nothing less than a global revolution, quantum jump in history. Put differently, we are working with the assumption that we are the final generation of an old civilization and the first generation of a new one, and that much of our personal confusion, anguish, and disorientation can be traced directly to the conflict within us, and within our political institutions, between the dying Second Wave civilization and the emergent Third Wave civilization that is thundering in to take it place. When we finally understand this, many seemingly senseless events become suddenly comprehensible. The broad patterns of change begin to emerge clearly. Action for survival becomes possible and plausible again. In short, the revolutionary premise liberates our intellect and our will. We Devouts know more about Christ than we do about the Saints. For example, whoever finds the spirit of Christ discovers in the process many “unexpected delights,” if I may use the expression of the Apostle John’s from the Last Book of the New Testament (2.17). #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
However, that is not often the case. Many who have heard the Gospel over and over again thin they know it ll. If there is more to the story, they have little desire to discover it. That is because, as the Apostle Paul diagnosed it in his Letter to the Romans (8.9), “they do not have the spirit of Christ. On the other hand, whoever wants to understand the words of Christ and fully and slowly savour their sweetness has to work hard at making oneself another Christ. if you are not humble, you make the Trinity nervous, and that wretched state what possible good do you get out of standing up in public and disputing to high Heaven about the Trinity as an intellectual entity? The real truth, if only you would learn it, is that highfalutin words do not make us Saints. Only a virtuous life can do that, and only that can make God care for us. “Contemplation” is a good example. The School people at the University—that is to say, the Philosophers and the Theologians—could produce lengthy, perhaps even lacy, definitions of this holy word, but that would not move them one inch closer to the Gate of Heaven. The humble Devout, on the other hand, who can neither read nor write, might very well have experienced compunction every day of one’s life; one’s the one, whether one knows it or not, who will find oneself already waiting at that very gate when the Final Day comes. By the way, I do know what compunction means, and so should you: a prickling or stinging of the conscience. If I may put it the way Paul did in his First Letter to the Corinthians (13.3), are you any the richer for knowing all the proverbs of the Bible and all the axioms of Philosophers, when you re really all the poorer for not knowing the charity and the grace of God? #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
“Vanity of vanities, and everything is vanity,” says the Ancient Hebrew Preacher in Ecclesiastes (1.2). The only thing that is not vanity is loving God and, as Moses preached to the Israelites in Deuteronomy, serving him alone (6.13). That is the highest wisdom, to navigate one’s courses, using the contempt of the World as a chart, toward that Heavenly Port. Just what is vanity? Well, it is many things. A portfolio of assets that are bound to crash. A bird breast of medals and decorations. A brassy solo before an unhearing crowd. Alley-catting one’s “carnal desires,” as Paul so lustily put it to the Galatians (5.16), only to discover that punishment awaits further up and father in. Pining for a long life and at the same time paying no attention to the good life. Focusing both eyes on the present without casting an eye toward the future. Marching smartly in the passing parade instead of falling all over oneself trying to get back to that reviewing stand where Eternal Joy is queen. Do not forget the horary wisdom of the Ancient Hebrew Preacher: “The eye is never satisfied by what they it sees; nor the ears by what they hear” (1.8). With that in mind, try to transfer your holdings from the visible market into the invisible one. The reason? Those who trade in their own sensualities only muck up their own account and, in the process, muddy up God’s final account. To say the changes we face will be revolutionary, however, is not enough. Before we can control or channel them we need a fresh way to identify and analyze them. Without this we are hopelessly lost. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
One powerful new approach might be called social “wavefront” analysis. It looks at history as a succession of rolling waves of change and asks where the leading edge of each wave is carrying us. It focuses our attention not so much on the continuities of history (important as they are) as on the discontinuities—the innovations and breakpoints. It identifies key change patterns as they emerge, so that we can influence them. Beginning with the very simple idea that the rise of agriculture was the first turning point in human social development, and that the industrial revolution was the second great breakthrough, it views each of these not as a discrete, one-time event but as a wave of change moving at a certain velocity. Before the First Wave of change, most humans lived in small, often migratory groups and fed themselves by foraging, fishing, hunting, or herding. At some point, roughly ten millennia ago, the agricultural revolution began, and it crept slowly across the planet spreading villages, settlements, cultivated land, and a new way of life. This First Wave of change had no yet exhausted itself by the end of the seventeenth century, when the industrial revolution broke over Europe and unleashed the second great wave of planetary change. This new process—industrialization—began moving much more rapidly across nations and continents. Thus two separate and distinct change processes were rolling across the Earth simultaneously, at different speeds. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Today the First Wave has virtually subsided. Only a few tiny tribal populations, in South America or Papua New Guinea, for example, remain to be reached by agriculture. However, the force of this great First Wave has basically been spent. Meanwhile, the Second Wave, having revolutionized life in Europe, North America, and some other parts of the globe in a few short centuries, continues to spread, as many countries, until now basically agricultural, scramble to build steel mills, auto plants, textile factories, railroad, and food processing plants. The momentum of industrialization is still felt. The Second Wave has not entirely spent its force. However, even as this process continues, another, even more important, has begun. For as the tide of industrialism peaked in the decades after World War In, a little-understood Third Wave began to surge across the Earth, transforming everything it touched. Many countries, therefore, are feeling the simultaneous impact of two, even three, quite different waves of change, all moving at different rates of speed and with different degrees of force behind them. For our purposes, we shall consider the First Wave era to have begun sometime around 8000 B.C. and to have dominated the Earth unchallenged until sometime around A.D. 1650-1750. From this moment on, the First Wave lost momentum as the Second Wave picked up steam. Industrial civilization, the product of the Second Wave, then dominated the planet in its turn until it, too, created. This latest historical turning point arrived in the United States during the decade beginning around 1955—the decade that saw white-collar and service workers outnumber blue-collar workers for the first time. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
That same decade, which started in 1955 saw widespread introduction of the computer, commercial jet travel, oral contraceptives, and many other high-impact innovations. It was precisely during this decade that the Third Wave began to gather its force in the United States of America. Since then it has arrived—at slightly different dates—in most of the other industrial nations, including Britain, France, Sweden, Germany, Russian, and Japan. Today all the high-technology nations are reeling from the collision between the Third Wave and the obsolete, encrusted economies and institutions of the Second. Understanding this is the secret to making sense of much of the political and social conflict we see around us. A tool that can help us cope with these changes is psychology. What is true of psychology is also true of the other academic disciplines, each of which provides a perspective from which we can study nature and our place in it. These range from the scientific fields that study the most elementary building blocks of nature up to philosophy and theology, which address some of life’s global questions. Which perspective is pertinent depends on what you want to talk about. Take romantic love, for example. A physiologist might describe love as a state of arousal. A social psychologist would examine how various characteristics and conditions—good looks, similarity of partners, sheer repeated exposure to one another—enhance the emotion of love. A poet would express the sublime experience that love can sometimes be. A theologian might describe love as the God-given goal of human relationship. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
Since love can often be described simultaneously at various levels, we need not assume that one level is causing the other—by supposing for example, that a brain state is causing the emotion of love or that the emotion is causing the brain state. The emotional and physiological views are simply two complementary perspectives. There is a Partial Hierarchy of Disciplines. The disciplines range from basic sciences that study nature’s building blocks up to more integrative disciplines that study whole complex systems. Successful explanation of human functioning at one level need not invalidate explanation at other levels. At the Top of the scale at the disciplines that are considered Integrative Explanation and at the bottom are Elemental Explanation. Those that fall lower and in between the two extremes are a specific degree combination of the two explanations. At starts off with: Theology, and as we work our way down the scale, we see Literature and Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, and at the very bottom Physics. The hierarchy on the scale does not make one explanation more valuable than another. Nature is, to be sure, all of a piece. For convenience, we necessarily view it as multilayered, but it is actually a seamless unity. Thus the different ways of looking at a phenomenon like romantic love (or belief or consciousness) can sometimes be correlated, enabling us to build bridges between different perspectives. Attempts at building bridges between religion and the human sciences have sometimes proceeded smoothly. A religious explanation of the incest taboo (in terms of divine will or a moral absolute) is nicely complemented by biological explanation (in terms of the genetic penalty that offsprings pay for inbreeding) and sociological explanation (in terms of preserving the marital and family units). #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Other times the bridge-building efforts extending from both sides see not to connect in the middle, as when a conviction that God performs miracles in answer to prayers is met with scientific skepticism and psychological explanation of how people form illusory beliefs. To say that religious and scientific levels of explanation can be complementary does not mean there is never conflict or that any unsupported idea is to be welcomes as truth. It just means that different types of explanation may actually fit coherently together. In God’s World, all truth is one. So we arrive at a simple but basic point that resolves a good deal of fruitless debate over whether the religious or the psychological account of human nature is preferable: different levels of explanation can be complementary. The methods of psychology are appropriate, and appropriate only, for their own purposes. Psychological explanation has provided satisfying answers to many important questions regarding why people think, feel, and act as they do. However, it does not even pretend to answer life’s ultimate questions. Let us therefore celebrate and use psychology for what it offers us, remembering that it is but one aspect of the larger whole. From the admission that God exists and is the author of Nature, it by no means follows that miracles must, or even can, occur. God Himself might be a being of such a kind that it was contrary to His character to work miracles. Or again, He might have made Nature the sort of thing that cannot be added to, subtracted from, or modified. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
Accordingly, the case against Miracles relies on two different grounds. You either think that the character of God excludes them or that the character of Nature excludes them. We will begin with the second which is the more popular ground. The first Red Herring is this. Any say you may hear a human (and not necessarily a disbeliever in God) say of some alleged miracle, “No. Of course I do not believe that. We know it is contrary to the laws of Nature. People could believe it in olden times because they did not know that laws of Nature. We know now that it is a scientific impossibility.” By the “laws of Nature” such a human means, I think, the observed course of Nature. If one means anything more than that one is not the plain human I take one for but a philosophic Naturalist and will be dealt with in later discussions. The human I have in this view believes that mere experience (and specially those artificially contrived experiences which we call Experiments) can tell us what regularly happens in Nature. And one thinks that what we have discovered excludes the possibility of Miracle. This is a confusion of mind. Granted that miracles can occur, it is, of course, for experience to day whether one has done so on any given occasion. However, mere experience, even if prolonged for a million years, cannot tell us whether the thing is possible. Experiment finds out what regularly happens in Nature: the norm or rule to which she works. Those who believe in miracles are not denying that there is such a norm or rule: they are only saying that it can be suspended. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
A miracle is by definition an exception. How can the discovery of the rule tell you whether, granted a sufficient cause, the rule can be suspended? If we said that the rule was A, then experience might refute us by discovering the it was B. If we said that there was no rule, then experience might refute us by observing that there is. However, we are saying neither of these things. We agree that there is a rule and that the rule is B. What has that got to do with the question whether the rule can be suspended? You replay, “But experience shows that it never has.” We reply, “Even if that were so, this would not prove that it never can. However, does experience show that it never has? The World is full of stories of people who say they have experienced miracles. Perhaps the stories are false: perhaps they are true. However, before you can decide on that historical question, you must first discover whether the things is possible, and if possible, how probable.” The idea that the progress of science has somehow altered this question is closely bound up with the idea that people in ancient time believed in them because they did not know the laws of Nature. Thus you will hear people say, “The early Christians believed that Christ was the son of a virgin, but we know that this is a scientific impossibility.” Such people seem to have an idea that belief in miracles arose at a period when humans were so ignorant of the cause of nature that they did not perceive a miracle to be contrary to it. A moment’s thought shows this to be nonsense: and the story of the Virgin Birth is a particularly striking example. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
When Saint Joseph discovered that his fiancée was going to have a baby, he not unnaturally decided to repudiate her. Why? because he knew just as well as any modern gynaecologist that in the ordinary course of nature women do not have babies unless they have lain with men. No doubt the modern gynaecologist knows several things about birth and begetting which Saint Joseph did not know. However, those things do not concern the main point—that a virgin birth is contrary to the course of nature. And Saint Joseph obviously knew that. In any sense in which it is true to say now, “The thing is scientifically impossible,” he would have said the same: the thing always was, and was always known to be, impossible unless the regular processes of nature were, in this particular case, being over-ruled or supplemented by something from beyond nature. When Saint Joseph finally accepted the view that his fiancée’s pregnancy was not due to unchastity but to a miracle, he accepted the miracle as something contrary to the known order of nature. All records of miracles teach the same thing. In such stories the miracles excite fear and wonder (that is what the very word miracle implies) among the spectators, and are taken as evidence of supernatural power. If they were not known to be contrary to the laws of nature how could they suggest the presence of the supernatural? How could they be surprising unless they were seen to be exceptions to the rules? And how can anything be seen to be an exception till the rules are know? If there were ever humans who did not know the laws of nature at all, they would have no idea of a miracle and feel no particular interest in one if it were performed before them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary. Belief in miracles, far from depending on an ignorance of the laws of nature, is only possible in so far as those laws are known. We must now add that you will equally perceive no miracles until you believe that nature works adducing to regular laws. If you have not yet noticed that the sun always rises in the East you will see nothing miraculous about his rising one morning in the West. If the miracles were offered us as event that normally occurred, then the process of science, whose business is to tell us what normally occurs, would render belief in them gradually harder and finally impossible. The progress of science has in just this way (and greatly to our benefit) made all sorts of things incredible which our ancestors believed; human-eating ants and gryphons in Scythia, humans with one single gigantic foot, magnetic islands that draw all ships towards them, mermaids and fire-breathing dragons. However, those things were never put forward as supernatural interruptions of the course of nature. They were put forward as items within her ordinary course—in fact as “science.” Later and better science has therefore rightly removed them. Miracles are in a wholly different position. If there were fire-breathing dragons our big-game hunters would find them: but no one ever pretended that the Virgin Birth or Christ’s walking on the water could be reckoned on to recur. When a thing professes from the very outset to be a unique invasion of Nature by something from outside, increasing knowledge of Nature can never make it either more or less credible that it was at the beginning. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
In this sense it is mere confusion of thought to suppose that advancing science has made it harder for us to accept miracles. We always knew they were contrary to the natural course of events; we know still that if there is something beyond Nature, they are possible. Those are the bare bones of the question; time and progress and science and civilization have not altered them in the least. The grounds for belief and disbelief are the same today as they were two thousand—or ten thousand—years ago. If Saint Joseph had lacked faith to trust God or humility to perceive the holiness of one’s spouse, one could have disbelieved in the miraculous origin of her Son as easily as any modern human; and any modern human who believes in God can accept the miracles as easily as Saint Joseph did. You and I my not agree, no matter what I say, as to whether miracles happen or not. However, at least let us not talk nonsense. Let us not allow vague rhetoric about the march of science to fool us into supposing that the most complicated account of birth, in terms of genes and spermatozoa, leaves us any more convinced than we were before that nature does not send babies to young women who “know not a man.” The second Red Herring is this. Many people say, “They could believe in miracles in olden times because they had a false conception of the Universe. They thought the Earth was the largest thing in it and Man the most important creature. It therefore seemed reasonable to suppose that the Creator was specially interested in Man and might even interrupt the course of Nature for his benefit. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
“However, now that we know the real immensity of the Universe—now that we perceive our own planet and even the whole Solar System to be only a speck—it becomes ludicrous to believe in them any longer. We have discovered our insignificance and can no longer suppose that God is so drastically concerned in our petty affairs.” Whatever its value my be as an argument, it ay be stated at once that this view is quite wrong about facts. The immensity of the Universe is not a recent discovery. More than seventeen hundred years ago Ptolemy taught that in relation to the distance of the fixed stars the whole Earth must be regarded as a point with no magnitude. His astronomical system was universally accepted in the Dark and Middle Ages. The insignificance of Earth was as much a commonplace to Boethius, King Alfred, Dante, and Chaucer as it is to Mr. H. G. Wells, or Professor Haldane. Statements to the contrary in modern books are due to ignorance. The real question is quite different from what we commonly suppose. The real question is why the spatial insignificance of Earth, after being asserted by Christian philosophers, sung by Christian poets, and commented on by Christian moralist for some fifteen centuries, without the slightest suspicion that it conflicted with their theology, should suddenly in quite modern times have been set up as a stock argument against Christianity and enjoyed, in that capacity, a brilliant career. I will offer a guess at the answer to this question presently. For the moment, let us consider he strength of this stock argument. When the doctor at post-mortem looks at the dead human’s organs and diagnoses poison one has a clear idea of the different state in which the organs would have been if the human had died a natural death. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
If from the vastness of the Universe and the smallness of Earth we diagnose that Christianity is false we ought to have a clear idea of the sort of Universe we should have expected if it were true. However, have we? Whatever space may really be, it is certain that our perceptions make it appear three dimensional; and to a three-dimensional space no boundaries are conceivable. By the very forms of our perceptions therefore we must feel as if we lived somewhere in infinite space: and whatever size the Earth happens to be, it must of course be very small in comparison with infinite. And this infinite space must either be empty or contain bodies. If it were empty, if it contained noting but our own Sun, then that vast vacancy would certainly be used as an argument against the very existence of God. Why, it would be asked, should He create one speck and leave all the rest of space to nonentity? If, on the other hand, we find (as we actually do) countless bodies floating in space, they must be either habitable or uninhabitable. Now the odd thing is that both alternatives are equally used as objections to Christianity. If the Universe is teeming with life other than ours, then this, we are told, makes it quite ridiculous to believe that God should be so concerned with the human race as to “come down from Heaven” and be made man for its redemption. If, on the other hand, our planet is really unique in harbouring organic life, then this is thought to prove that life is only an accidental by-product in the Universe and so again to disprove our religion. We treat God as the policeman in the story treated the suspect; whatever he does “will be used in evidence against Him.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
This kind of objection to the Christian faith is not really based on the observed nature of the actual Universe at all. You can make it without waiting to find out what the Universe is like, for it will fit any kind of Universe we choose to imagine. The doctor here can diagnose poison without looking at the corpse for one has a theory of poison which one will maintain whatever the state of the organs turns out to be. The reason why we cannot even imagine a Universe so built as to exclude these objections is, perhaps, as follows. Man is a finite creature who has sense enough to know that he is finite: therefore, on any conceivable view, he finds himself dwarfed by reality as a whole. He is also a derivative being: the cause of his existence lies not in himself but (immediately) in his parents and (ultimately0 either in the character of Nature as a whole or (if there is a God) in God. However, there must be something, whether it be God or the totality of Nature, which exists in its own right or goes on “of its own accord”; not as the product of causes beyond itself, but simply because it does. In the face of that something, whichever it turns out to be, man must feel his own derived existence to be unimportant, irrelevant, almost accidental. There is no question of religious people fancying that all exists for man and scientific people discovering that is does not. Whether the ultimate and inexplicable being—that which simply is—turns out to be God or “the whole show,” of course it does not exist for us. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
On either view we are faced with something which existed before the human race appeared and will exist after the Earth has become uninhabitable; which is utterly independent of us though we are totally dependent on it; and which, through vast ranges of its being, has no relevance to our own hopes and fears. For no human was, I suppose, ever so mad as to think that man, or all creation, filled the Divine Mind; if we are a smaller thing to God. It is profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and ever the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensations there is no religion. Many a human, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realise for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to humans, and who perhaps abandons one’s religion on that account, may at that moment be having one’s first genuinely religious experience. Christianity does not involve the belief that God loves humans and for their sake became man and died. I have not yet succeeded in seeing how what we know (and have known since the days of Ptolemy) about the size of the Universe affects the credibility of this doctrine one way or the other. The sceptic asks how we can believe that God so “came down” to this one tiny planet. If we knew that there are rational creatures on any of the other bodies that float is space; that they have, like us, fallen and need redemption; that their redemption must be in the same mode as ours; and that redemption in this mode has been withheld from them, the questions would be embarrassing. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
The Universe may be full of happy lives that never needed redemption. It may be full of lives that have been redeemed in the very same mode as our own. It may be full of things quite other than life in which God is interested though we are not. If it is maintained that anything so small as the Earth must, in any event, be too unimportant to merit the love of the Creator, we reply that no Christian ever supposed we did merit it. Christ did not die for human because they were intrinsically worth dying for, but because He is intrinsically love, and therefore loves infinitely. And what, after all, does the size of a World or a creature tell us about its “importance” or value? There is no doubt that we feel the incongruity of supposing, say, that the planet Earth might be more important than the Great Nebula in Andromeda. On the other hand, we are all equally certain that only a lunatic would think a man six-feet high necessarily more important than a man five-feet high, or a horse necessarily more important than a man, or a man’s legs than his brain. In other words this supposed ratio of size to importance feels plausible only when one of the sizes to importance feels plausible only when one of the sizes involved is very great. And that betrays the true basic of this type of thought. When a relation is perceived by Reason, it is perceived to hold good universally. If our Reason told us that size was proportional to importance, then small differences in size would be accompanied by small differences in importance just as surely as great differences in size were accompanied by great differences in importance. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Your six-foot man would have to be slightly more valuable than the man of five feet, and your leg slightly more important than your brain—which every knows to be nonsense. The conclusion is inevitable: the importance we attach to great differences of size is an affair not of reason but of emotion—of that peculiar emotion which superiorities in seize begin to produce in us only after a certain point of absolute size has been reached. We are inveterate poets. When a quantity is very great we cease to regard it as a mere quantity. Our imaginations awake. Instead of mere quantity, we now have a quality—the Sublime. However, for this, the merely arithmetical greatness of the Galaxy would be no mor impressive than the figures in an account book. To a mind which did not share our emotions and lacked our imaginative energies, the argument against Christianity from the size of the Universe would be simply unintelligible. It is there for from ourselves that the material Universe derives its power to overawe us. Humans of sensibility look up on the night sky with awe: brutal and stupid humans do not. When the silence of the eternal spaces terrified Pascal, it was Pascal’s own greatness that enabled them to do so; to be frightened by the bigness of the nebulae is, almost literally, to be frightened at our own shadow. For light years and geological periods are mere arithmetic until the shadow of human, the poet, the maker of myths, falls upon them. As a Christian I do not say we are wrong to tremble at that shadow, for I believe it to be the shadow of an image of God. However, if the vastness of Nature ever threatens to overcrowd our spirits, we must remember that it is only Nature spiritualized by human imaginations. #RandolphHaris 22 of 25
This suggest a possible answer to the question raised recently—why is the size of the Universe, known for centuries, should first in modern times become an argument against Christianity? Has it perhaps done so because in modern times the imagination has become more sensitive to bigness? From this point of view the argument from size might almost be regarded as a by-product of the Romantic Movement in poetry. In addition to the absolute increase of imaginative vitality on this topic, there has pretty certainly been a decline on others. Any reader of old poetry can see that brightness appealed to ancient and medieval humans more than bigness, and more than it does to us. Medieval thinkers believed that the stars must be somehow superior to the Earth because they looked bright and it did not. Moderns think that the Galaxy ought to be more important than the Earth because it is bigger. Both states of mind can produce good poetry. Both can supply mental pictures which rouse very respectable emotions—emotions of awe, humility, or exhilaration. However, taken as serious philosophical argument both are ridiculous. The atheist’s argument from size is, in fact, an instance of just that picture-thinking to which, as we shall later discover, the Christian is no committee. It is the particular mode in which picture-thinking appears in the twenty-first century: for what we fondly call “primitive” errors do not pass away. They merely change their form. The glimpse in its most elementary form does not come only to specially gifted persons. It belongs to the portrait of every human being as natural and no a mysterious part of one’s life-experience. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
It is simply a part of the feeling for Nature, to whose systems one belongs, and for the Sun which is Nature’s supreme expression. The Sun’s glory, beauty, power, and benignity arouse reverence. Old World faiths mostly recognized this and made prayers obligatory at dawn and twilight. The point which has yet to be made is that these glimpses are no supernatural superhuman and solely religious experiences. When scientific psychology has advanced to the point where it really understands the human being in all one’s height and depth, and not merely one’s surface, it will see this. Although one is normally quite unconscious of this connection with the Overself, once at least in a lifetime there is a flash which visits one and break the unconsciousness. One has a glimpse of one’s highest possibility. However, the clearness of intensity of this glimpse depends upon one’s receptivity. They may amount to little or much. Many people without pretensions to mystical knowledge or belief have had this experience, this glimpse of timeless loveliness, through Nature, art, music or even for no apparent reason at all. And I though over again my small adventures as with a shore-wind I drifted out in my yacht, and thought I was in danger, my fears, those small ones that I thought so big for all the vital things I have to get and to reach. And yet, there is only one great thing; to live to see in hunts and on journeys the great day that dawns, and the light that fills the World. Our God and God of our fathers, accept our rest. Sanctify us through Thy commandments, and please grant our portion in Thy Torah. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
Can the true reason we fear the unknown, be that we know ourselves too well? Please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and please make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord our God, please grant that Thy holy Sabbath be our joyous heritage, and may America who sanctifies Thy name, rest thereon. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest the Sabbath. 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. May human beings begin to think of and dwell upon he One Infinite Life-Power, filling all space and pervading the entire Universe, existing everywhere, containing and permeating all creatures, all humanity, including one’s self. Accept and stress God’s existence. Next, call on God’s help, then concentrate on the truth of His recuperative power, which develops and sustains every cell of the body from birth, heals its wounds and knits its bones. Imagine God’s power to be flowing into you as White Light. Mentally draw the current into the body, through the forehead, the palms, and the solar plexus. Lastly, bring it to the part of the body that needs healing and concentrate it there. Think of the whole body as being manifestation of Creative Intelligence and as a projection of the higher self. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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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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And the Loves that May Hurt the Least are Not the Best Loves!
To those who fail to heed their own words–be warned–you never know who is listening. Loved people are loving people. Reality is a nuisance to whose who want to make it up as they go along. When you make a World tolerable for yourself, you make a World tolerable for others. One should cloak oneself in the love of God. One gets out of the spiritual life only what one puts into it, but sometimes one gets rather more, like inner consolation. Jesus is in dialog with the willing soul; even with the unwilling soul He is always trying to start a conversation. All the good soul needs to survive imprisonment in the body is food and light; that is to say, Sacrament and Scripture. We are to practice things like humanity of Christ, prayer, knowledge of self, fulfillment of obligations, the practice of virtue, the avoidance of vice, retirement from the World, devotional reading of the Scriptures, and a prickly restlessness with intellectuality for its own sake. When you receive Sacrament, Spiritual Grace is conferred, and Virtue dimmed is restored to its original beauty. Once covered with soot and sin, the pallid soul will soon blush into a full palette of colours. I am free, I am bound to nobody’s word, except to those inspired by God; if I oppose these in the least degree, I beseech God to forgive me my audacity of judgment, as I have been moved not so much by longing for some opinion of my own as by love for the freedom of science. What is the relation between faith and science? Many people—Christians and non-Christians alike—answer, “Conflict.” Reason must be assisted by observation and experiment in matters of science, and by spiritual revelation in matters of faith. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
As God’s creatures, we are dependent upon God’s sustaining power, moment by moment. Our dependence upon and allegiance to God frees us from bondage to anybody’s word, except to what we find in God’s books. We are freed even to investigate that most marvelous wonder of nature—human nature. What the Christian Bible urges upon us is a complete transformation in our relations to God and our fellow creatures, and to the World that God has made. This transformation means a liberation from old superstitious bonds and from any kind of idolatry, including the idols of common opinion and official doctrines. We who have been touched by the Spirit may respect human authorities in church, state, or science, but we will not be so deeply impressed by them that we give up our independence. Our liberation implies also a new obedience by which we must be willing to submit all our prejudices and all our prior criteria of reasonableness to test of divine revelation, including the reality of the Universe around us. Even to ordinary persons moments can come which can pass very easily into glimpses. However, their importance is not recognized and so the opportunities are missed. It is pitiful and pathetic that anyone should be so close to the diviner self and not take advantage of the propinquity by a pause of activity and a surrender to the delicate feeling which would develop of itself into a glimpse. It is pathetic, because these moments are in the nature of clues leading to the inward way; pitiful, because such people are living in a kind of blind alley and must one day retrace their steps. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
This kind of thing is supposed to lie outside common experience, but the fact is that it comes more often through Nature, art, or music than most people suspect. There is a moment in most human’s lives when they are close to an understanding of the World’s real nature. The concepts of justice and goodness are linked with distinct principles and the question of congruence is whether these two families of criteria fit together. More precisely, each concept with its associated principles defines a point of view from which institutions, actions, and plans of life can be assessed. A sense of justice is an effective desire to apply and to acts from the principles of justice and so from the point of view of justice. This what is to be established is that it is rational (as defined by the thin theory of the good) for those in a well-ordered society to affirm their sense of justice as regulative of their plan of life. It remains to be shown that this disposition to take up and to be guided by the standpoint of justice accords with the individual’s good. Whether these two points of view are congruent is likely to be a crucial factor in determining stability. However, congruence is not a foregone conclusion even in a well-ordered society. We must verify it. Of course, the rationality of choosing the principles of justice in the original position is not in question. The argument for this decision has already been made; and if it is sound, just institutions are collectively rational and to everyone’s advantage from a suitably general perspective. It is also rational for each to urge others to support these arrangements and to fulfill their duties and obligations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
The problem is whether the regulative desire to adopt the standpoint of justice belongs to a person’s own good when viewed in the light of the thin theory with no restriction on information. We should like to know that this desire is indeed rational; being rational for one, it is rational for all, and therefore no tendencies to instability exist. More precisely, consider any given person in a well-ordered society. One knows, I assume, that institutions are just and that others have (and will continue to have) a sense of justice similar to one’s, and therefore that they comply (and will continue to comply) with these arrangements. We want to show that on these suppositions it is rational for someone, as defined by the thin theory, to affirm one’s sense of justice. The plan of life which does this is one’s best reply to the similar plans of one’s associates; and being rational for anyone, it is rational for all. It is important not to confuse this problem with that of justifying being a just human to an egoist. An egoist is someone committed to the point of view of one’s own interests. One’s final ends are related to oneself: one’s wealth and position, one’s pleasures and social prestige, and so on. Such a human may act justly, that is, do things that a just human would do; but so long s one remains an egoist, one cannot do them for the just human’s reasons. Having these reasons is inconsistent with being an egoist. It merely happens that on some occasions the point of view of justice and that of one’s own interests lead to the same course of action. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Therefore I am not trying to show that in a well-ordered society an egoist would act from a sense of justice, nor even that one would act justly because so acting would best advance one’s ends. Nor, again, are we to argue that an egoist, finding oneself in a just society, would be well advised, given one’s aims, to transform oneself into a just human. Rather, we are concerned with the goodness of the settled desire to take up the standpoint of justice. I assume that the members of a well-ordered society already have this desire. The question is whether this regulative sentiment is consistent with their good. We are not examining the justice or the moral worth of actions from certain points of view; we are assessing the goodness of the desire to adopt a particular point of view, that of justice itself. And we must evaluate this desire not from the egoist’s standpoint, whatever this might be, but in the light of the thin theory of the good. Human actions spring from existing desires and these can be changed only gradually. We cannot just decide at a given moment to alter our system of ends. We act know as the sort of person we are and from the wants we have now, and not as the sort of person we might have been or from desires we would have had if earlier we had only chosen differently. Regulative aims are especially subject to this constraint. Thus we decide well in advance whether to affirm our sense of justice by trying to assess our situation over a frilly extensive future. We cannot have things bot ways. We cannot preserve a sense of justice and all that this implies while at the same time holding ourselves ready to act unjustly should not doing so promise some personal advantage. A just person is not prepared to do certain things, and if one is tempted too easily, one was prepared after all. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
Our question concerns then only those with a certain psychology and system of desires. It would obviously be demanding too much to require that stability should not depend upon definite restrictions in this respect. Now on one interpretation the question has an obvious answer. Supposing that someone has an effective sense of justice, one will then have a regulative desire to comply with the corresponding principles. The criteria of rational choice must take this desire into account. If a person wants with deliberative rationality to act from the standpoint of justice above all else, it is rational for one so to act. Therefore in this form the question is trivial: being the sorts of persons they are, the members of a well-ordered society desire more than anything to act justly and fulfilling this desire is part of their good. To do justly means acting honourably with God and other people. We act honourably with others by loving mercy. As followers of Jesus Christ, we strive—and are encouraged to strive—to do better and be better. Without the blessings that come from Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, we can never do enough or be enough by ourselves. The good news, though, is that because of and through Jesus Christ we can become enough. All people will be saved from physical death by the grace of God, through the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. And if we turn our hearts to God, salvation from spiritual death is available to all through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, by obedience to the laws and ordinance of the Gospel. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
We can be redeemed from sin to stand clean and pure before God. Once we acquire a sense of justice that is truly final and effective, as the precedence of justice requires, we are confirmed in a plan of life that, insofar as we are rational, leads us to preserve and to encourage this sentiment. Since this fact is public knowledge, instability of the first kind does not exist, and hence neither does that of the second. The real problem of congruence is what happens if we imagine someone to give weight to one’s sense of justice only to the extent that it satisfies other descriptions which connect it with reasons specified by the thin theory of the good. We should not rely on the doctrine of the pure conscientious act. Suppose, then, that the desire to act justly is not a final desire like that to avoid pain, misery, or apathy, or the desire to fulfill the inclusive interests. The theory of justice supplies other descriptions of what the sense of justice is a desire for; and we must use these to show that a person following the thin theory of the good would indeed confirm this sentiment as regulative of one’s plan of life. For the grounds of congruence to be established, as the contract doctrine requires, the principles of justice are public: they characterize the commonly recognized moral convictions shared by the members of a well-ordered society. We are not concerned with someone who is questioning these principles. By hypothesis, one concedes as everyone else does that they are best choice from the standpoint of the original position. (Of course, this can always be doubted but it raises an entirely different matter.) #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
Now since others are assumed to have (and continue to have) an effective sense of justice, our hypothetical individual is considering in effect a policy of pretending to have certain moral sentiments, all the while being ready to act as a free-rider whenever the opportunity arises to further one’s personal interest. Since the conception of justice is public, one is debating whether to set out on a systematic course of deception and hypocrisy, professing without belief, as it suits one’s purpose, the accepted moral views. That deception and hypocrisy are wrongs does not, I assume, bother one; but one will have to reckon with the psychological cost of taking precautions and maintaining one’s pose, and the loss of spontaneity and naturalness that results. In most societies as things are, such pretensions may no have a high price, since the injustice of institutions and the often squalid behaviour of others renders one’s own deceits easier to endure; but in a well-ordered society there is not this comfort. These remarks are supported by the fact that there is a connection between acting justly and natural attitudes. Given the content of the principles of justice and the laws of moral psychology, wanting to be fair with our friends and wanting to give justice to those we care for is as much a part of these affections as the desire to be with them and to feel sad at their loss. Assuming therefore that one needs these attachments, the policy contemplated is presumably that of acting justly only towards those whom we are bound by tires of affection and fellow feeling, and of respecting ways of life to which we are devoted. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
However, in a well-ordered society these bonds extend widely, and include ties to intuitional forms, assuming here that all three psychological laws are fully effective. In addition, we cannot in general select who is to be injured by our unfairness. For example, if we cheat on paying our taxes, or if we find some way to avoid doing our fair share for the community, everyone is hurt, our friends and associates along with the est. To be sure, we might consider covertly passing on part of our gains to those we especially like, but this becomes a dubious and involved affair. Thus in a well-ordered society where effective bonds are extensive both to persons and to social forms, and we cannot select who is to lose by our defections, there are strong grounds for preserving one’s sense of justice. Doing this protects in a natural and simple way the institutions and persons we care for and leads us to welcome new and broader social tires. Another basic consideration is this: it follows from the Aristotelian Principle (and its companion effect) that participating in the life of a well-ordered society is a great good. This conclusion depends upon the meaning of the principles of justice and their precedence in everyone’s plans as well as upon the psychological features of our nature. It is the details of the contract view which establish this connection. Because such a society is a social union of social unions, it realizes to a preeminent degree the various forms of human activity; and given the social nature of humankind, the fact that our potentialities and inclinations far surpass what can be expressed in any one life, we depend upon the cooperative endeavours of others not only for the means of well-being but to bring to fruition our latent powers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
And with a certain success all around, each enjoys the greater richness and diversity of the collective activity. Yet to share fully in this life we must acknowledge the principles of its regulative conception, and this means that we must affirm our sentiment of justice. To appreciate something as ours, we must have a certain allegiance to it. What binds society’s efforts into one social union is the mutual recognition and acceptance of the principles of justice; it is this general affirmation which extends the ties of identification over the whole community and permits the Aristotelian Principles to have its wider effect. Individual and group accomplishments are no longer seen as just so many separate personal goods. Whereas not to confirm our sense of justice is to limit ourselves to a narrow view. Finally, there is the reason connected with the Kantian interpretation: acting justly is something we want to do as free and equal rational beings. The desire to act justly and the desire to express our nature as free moral persons turn out to specify what is practically speaking the same desire. When someone has true beliefs and a correct understanding of the theory of justice, these two desires move one in the same way. They are both dispositions to act from precisely the same principle: namely, those that would be chosen in the original position. Of course, this contention is based on a theory of justice. If his theory is unsound, the practical identity fails. However, since we are concerned only with the special case of a well-ordered society as characterized by the theory, we are entitled to assume that its members have a lucid grasp of the public conception of justice upon which their relations are founded. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Let us supposed that these are the chief reasons (or typical thereof) which the thin account of the good allows for maintaining one’s sense of justice. The question now arises whether they are decisive. Here we confront the familiar difficulty of a balance of motives which in many ways is similar to a balance of first principles. Sometimes the answer is found by comparing one balance of reasons with another, for surely if the first balance clearly favours one course of action then the second will also, should its reasons supporting this alternative be stronger and its reasons supporting the other alternatives be weaker. However, arguing from such comparisons presupposes some configurations of reasons which evidently go one way rather than another to serve as a bench mark. Failing these, we cannot get beyond conditional comparisons: if the first balance favours a certain choice, then the second does also. Now at this point it is obvious that the content of the principles of justice is a crucial element in the decision. Whether it is for a person’s good that one have a regulative sense of justice depends upon what justice requires of him. The congruence of the right and the good is determined by the standards by which each concept is specified. Utilitarianism is more strict than common sense in demanding the sacrifice of the agent’s private interests when this is necessary for the greater happiness of all. It is also more exacting than the contract theory, for while beneficent acts going beyond our natural duties are good actions and evoke our esteem, they are not required as a matter of right. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Utilitarianism may seem to be a more exalted ideal, but the other side of it is that it may authorize the lesser welfare and liberty of some for the sake of a greater happiness of others who ma already be more fortunate. A rational person, in framing one’s plan, would hesitate to give precedence to so stringent a principle. It is likely both to exceed one’s capacity for sympathy and to be hazardous to one’s freedom. Thus however improbable the congruence of the right and the good in justice as fairness, it is surely more probable than on the utilitarian view. The conditional balance of reasons favours the contract doctrines. A somewhat different point is suggested by the following doubt: namely, that while the decision to preserve our sentiment of justice might be rational, we may in end suffer a very great loss or even be ruined by it. As we have seen, a just person is not prepare to do certain things, and so in the face of evil circumstances one may decide to chance death rather than to act unjustly. Yet although it is true enough that for the sake of justice a human may lose one’s life where another would live to a later day, the just human does all things considered one most want; in this sense one is not defeated by ill fortune the possibility of which one foresaw. The question is on a par with the hazards of love; indeed, it is simply a special case. Those who love one another, or who acquire strong attachments to persons and to forms of life, at the same time become liable to ruin: their love makes them hostages to misfortune and the injustice of others. Friends and lovers take great chances to help each other; and members of families willing to do the same. Their being so disposed belongs to their attachments as much as any other inclination. Once we love we are vulnerable: there is no such thing as loving while being ready to consider water to love, just like that. And the loves that may hurt the least are not the best loves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
When we love we accept the danger of injury and loss. In view of our general knowledge of the likely course of life, we do not think these risks so great as to cause us to cease loving. Should evils occur, they are the object of our aversions, and we resist those whose machinations bring them about. If we are loving we do not regret our love. Now if these things are true of love as the World is, or very often is, then a fortiori they would appear to be true of loves in a well-ordered society, and so of the sense of justice too. For in a society where others are just our loves expose us mainly to the accidents of nature and the contingency of circumstances. And similarly for the sentiment of justice which is connected to these affections. Taking as a bench mark the balance of reasons that leads us to affirm our loves as things are, it seems that we should be ready once we become of age to maintain our sense of justice in the more favourable conditions of a just society. One special feature of the desires to express our nature as moral persons strengthens this conclusion. With other inclinations of the self, there is a choice of degree and scope. Our policy of deception and hypocrisy need not be completely systematic; our affective ties to institutions and to other persons can be more or less strong, and our participation in the wider life of society more or less full. There is a continuum of possibilities and not an all or nothing decision, although for simplicity I have spoken pretty much in these terms. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
However, the desire to express our nature as a free and equal rational being can be fulfilled only by acting on the principles of right and justice as having first priority. This is a consequence of the condition of finality: since these principles are regulative, the desire to act upon them is satisfied only to the extent that it is likewise regulative with respect to other desires. It is acting from this precedence that expresses our freedom from contingency and happenstance. Therefore in order to realize our nature we have no alternative but to plan to preserve our sense of justice as governing our other aims. If it is compromised and balanced against other ends as but one desire among the rest, this sentiment cannot be fulfilled. It is desire to conduct oneself in a certain way above all else, a striving that contains within itself its own priority. Other aims can be achieved by a plan that allows a place for each, since their satisfaction is possible independent of their place in the ordering. However, this is not the case with the sense of right and justice; and therefore acting wrongly is always liable to arouse feelings of guilt and shame, the emotions aroused by the defeat of our regulative moral sentiments. Of course, this does not mean that the realization of our nature as a free and rational being is itself an all or nothing affair. To the contrary, how far we succeed in expressing our nature depends upon how consistently we act from our sense of justice as finally regulative. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
What we cannot do is express our nature by following a plan that views the sense of justice as but one desire to be weighed against others. For this sentiment reveals what the person is, and to compromise it is not to achieve for the self free reign but to give way to the contingences and accidents of the World. One last question must be mentioned. Suppose that even in a well-ordered society there are some persons for whom the affirmation of their sense of justice is not a good. Given their aims and wants and the peculiarities of their nature, the thin account of the good does not define reasons sufficient for them to maintain this regulative sentiment. It has been argued that to these persons one cannot truthfully recommend justice as a virtue. And this is surely correct, assuming such a recommendation to imply that rational grounds (identified by the thin theory) counsel this course for them as individuals. However, then the further question remains whether those who do affirm their sense of justice are treating these persons unjustly in requiring them to comply with just institutions. Now unhappily we are not yet in a position to answer this query properly, since it presupposes a theory of punishment and I have said very little about this part of the theory of justice. I have assumed strict compliance with any conception that would be chosen and then considered which one on the list presented would be adopted. However, we may reason much as we did in the case of civil disobedience, another part of partial compliance theory. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Thus granting that adherence to whatever conception is acknowledged will be imperfect if left completely voluntary, under what conditions would the persons in the original position agree that stabilizing penal devices can be employed Would they insist that a person can be required to do only what is to one’s advantage as defined by the thin theory? It seems clear, in the light of the contract doctrine as a whole, that they would not. For this restriction amounts in effect to general egoism which, as we have seen, would be rejected. Moreover, the principles of right and justice are collectively rational; and it is in the interest of each that everyone else should comply with just arrangements. It is also the case that the general affirmation of the sense of justice is a great social asset, establishing the basis for mutual trust and confidence from which all normally benefit. Thus in agreeing to penalties that stabilize a scheme of cooperation the parties accept the same kind of constraint on self-interest that they acknowledge in choosing the principle of justice in the first place. Having agreed to these principles in view of the reasons already surveyed, it is rational to authorize the measures need to maintain just institutions, assuming that the constraints of equal liberty and the rule of law are duly recognized. Those who find that being disposed to act justly is not a good for them cannot deny these contentions. It is, of course, true that in their case just arrangements do not fully answer to their nature, and therefore, other things equal, they will be less happy than they would be if they could affirm their sense of justice. However, here one can only say: their nature is their misfortune. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
The main point then is that to justify a conception of justice we do not have to contend that everyone, whatever one’s capacities and desires, has a sufficient reason (as defined by the thin theory) to preserve one’s sense of justice. For our good depends upon the sorts of persons we are, the kinds of wants and aspirations we have and are capable of. It can even happen that there are many who do not find a sense of justice for their good; but if so, the forces making for stability are weaker. Under such conditions penal devices will play a much larger role in the social system. The greater the lack of congruence, the greater the likelihood, other things equal, of instability with its attendant evils. Yet none of this nullifies the collective rationality of the principles of justice; it is still to the advantage of each that everyone else should honour them. At least this holds true so long as the conception of justice is not so unstable that some other conception would be preferable. However, what I have tried to show is that the contract doctrine is superior to its rivals on this score, and therefore that the choice of principles in the original position need not be reconsidered. In fact, granted a reasonable interpretation of human sociability (provided by the account of how a sense of justice is acquired and by the idea of social union), justice as fairness appears to be a sufficiently stable conception. The hazards of the generalized prisoner’s dilemma are removed by the match between the right and good. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Of course, under normal conditions public knowledge and confidence are always imperfect. So even in a just society it is reasonable to admit certain constraining arrangements to insure compliance, but their main purpose is to underwrite citizens’ trust in other another. These mechanisms will seldom be invoked and will comprise but a minor part of the social scheme. Congruence allows us to complete the sequence of applications of the definition of goodness. We can say first that, in a well-ordered society, being a good person (and in particular having an effective sense of justice) is indeed a good for that person; and second that this form of society is a good society. The first assertation follows from congruence; the second holds since a well-ordered society has the properties that it is rational to want in a society from the two relevant points of view. Thus a well-ordered society satisfies the principles of justice which are collectively rational from the perspective of the original position; and from the standpoint of the individual, the desire to affirm the public conception of justice as regulative of one’s plan of life accords with the principles of rational choice. These conclusions support the values of community, and in reaching them my account of justice as fairness is completed. Humankind has a moral nature. Justifying grounds do not lie ready to hand: they need to be discovered and suitably expressed, sometimes by lucky guesses, somethings by noting the requirements of theory. For publicity allows that all can justify their conduct to everyone else (when their conduct is reasonable and in according with the laws of God) without self-defeating or other disturbing consequences. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Moral elements of the original position in the form of general conditions and the veil of ignorance and the like are important to employ because they allow us to see more clearly how justice requires us to go beyond a concern for our own interest. Only if humans have a sense of justice and do therefore respect one another, will the principles of justice be effective; the notion of respect or of inherent worth of persons is not a suitable basis for arriving at these principles. It is precisely these ideas that call for interpretation. The situation is analogous to that of benevolence: without the principles of right and justice, the aims of benevolent and the requirements of respect are both undefined; they presuppose these principles already independently derived. Once the conception of justice is on hand, however, the ideas of respect and of human dignity can be given a more definite meaning. Among other things, respect for persons is shown by treating them in ways that they can see to be justified. However, more than this, it is manifest in the content of the principles to which we appeal. Thus to respect persons is to recognize that they possess an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. It is to affirm that the loss of freedom for some is not made right by a greater welfare enjoyed by others. The lexical priorities of justice represent the value of persons that is beyond all price. Justice is the first virtue of social institutions. The feelings connecting with the primacy of justice allows us to understand that justice as fairness is the outcome of a rational society because it articulates the principles in the United States Constitution. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
The theory of justice is a viable systematic doctrine and the idea of maximizing the good does not hold sway by default. Thus what we are doing is to combine into one conception the totality of conditions that we are ready upon due reflection to recognize as reasonable in our conduct with regard to one another. One we grasp this conception, we can at any time look at the social World from the required point of view. It suffices to reason in certain ways and to follow the conclusions reached. This standpoint is also objective and expresses our autonomy. Without conflating all persons into one but recognizing them as distinct and separate, it enables us to be impartial, even between persons who are not contemporaries but who belong to many generations. Thus to see our place in society from the perspective of this position is to see it sub specie aeternitatis: it is to regard the human situation not only from all social but also from all temporal points of view. The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the World, not the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the World. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as one lives by the, each from one’s own standpoint. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
To the ancients, as well as to many contemporary seekers, the World is alive with spirit. The surrounding landscape is infused with creativity and meaning and each place speaks to us of the divine. If one could attain it, purify of heart would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from the point of view of justice as fairness. Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for sin and salvation from spiritual death are available to all. As we receive the Saviour’s cleansing, healing, and strengthening power, we not only walk justly and humbly with God, we also learn to love mercy the way that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. Every day is a God, each day is a God ad holiness holds forth in time. The Earth is more than real estate and if we have a wonderful sense of the divine it is because we live amid such awesome magnificence. God is in the arched sky; He looks out from every stary. God is spread out like a legible language upon the beautiful face of the unsleeping ocean. God is the poetry of Nature; He is that which uplifts the spirit within us. Earth is a bountiful community of living beings of which we are only one part. And each living being has an inner presence and dignity apart from any value we humans may place upon it. While certain places always have been recognized for the powerful presence of their unique localities or landforms, these places are not isolated entities. All the physical things that make up our daily life share a common spiritual reality—as such they are all to be revered and respect. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Lord, the air smells good today, straight from the mysteries within the inner courts of God. A grace like new clothes thrown across the garden, free medicine for everybody. The trees in their prayer, the birds in praise, the first blue violets kneeling. Whatever came from Being is caught up n being, drunkenly forgetting that way back. Thou didst establish the Sabbath and didst accept it offerings, prescribing the order of its service. They that delight in the Sabbath have a glorious heritage; they who partake of it, merit life’s highest joy, and they that love its observance have thus chosen true distinction. At Sinai our forefathers were commanded to keep the Sabbath; and Thou didst ordain, O Lord our God, that they bring the additional Sabbath offering as set forth in the Torah. Thou didst create the World from old completing Thy work by the seventh day. Loving us and exalting us above all tongues, Thou didst sanctify us by Thy commandments, and didst bring us near unto Thy service, O our King, calling us by Thy great and holy name. As a token of Thy love, O Lord our God, Thou didst also give us Sabbaths for rest and New Moons for forgiveness. Because we and our forefathers sinned against Thee, our city America has been laid waste, our Sanctuary is desolate, our splendour has gone into exile, and the glory has been removed from the abode of our life. Therefore we cannot fulfill our obligations in Thy chosen House, the great and holy Temple, which was called by Thy name, because of the destruction that has become upon Thy Sanctuary. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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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 👻
🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
“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.
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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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Randolph Harris II International Institute 