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Some Things You Will Think of for Yourself, and Others a God Will Put into Your Heart!
Truth is the glue that holds the governments together. Compromise the oil that makes governments go. An aim of civil disobedience is to explain its roles within a constitutional system and to account for its connection with a democratic polity. As always, I assume that the society in question is one that is nearly just; and this implies that it has some form of democratic government, although serious injustices may nevertheless exist. In such a society I assumed that the principles of justice are for the most part publicly recognized as the fundamental terms of willing cooperation among free and equal persons. By engaging in civil disobedience one intends, then, to address the sense of justice of the majority and to serve fair notice that in one’s sincere and considered opinion the conditions of free cooperation are being violated. We are appealing to others to reconsider, to put themselves in our position, and to recognize that they cannot expect us to acquiesce indefinitely in the terms they impose upon us. Now the force of this appeal depends upon the democratic conception of society as a system of cooperation among equal persons. If one things of society in another way, this form of protest may be out of place. For example, if the basic law is thought to reflect the other nature and if the sovereign is held to govern only by divine right as God’s chosen lieutenant, then one’s subjects have only the right of suppliants. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
The citizens can plead their cause but they cannot disobey should their appeal be denied. To do this would be to rebel against the final legitimate moral (and not simply legal) authority. This is not to say that the sovereign cannot be in error but only that the situation is not one for one’s subjects to correct. However, once society is interpreted as a scheme of cooperation among equals, those injured by serious injustice need not submit. Indeed, civil disobedience (and conscientious refusal as well) is one of the stabilizing devices of a constitutional system, although by definition an illegal one. Along with such things as free and regular elections and an independent judiciary empowered to interpret the constitution (not necessarily written), civil disobedience used with due restraint and sound judgement helps to maintain and strengthen just institutions. By resisting injustice within the limits of fidelity to law, it serves to inhibit departures from justice and to correct them when they occur. A general disposition to engage in justified civil disobedience introduces stability into a well-ordered society, or one that is nearly just. It is necessary to look at this doctrine from the standpoint of the persons in the original position. There are two related problems which they must consider. The first is that, having chosen principles for individuals, they must work out guidelines for assessing the strength of the natural duties and obligations, and, in particular, the strength of the duty to comply with a just constitution and one of its basic procedures, that of majority rule. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
The second problem is that of finding reasonable principles for dealing with unjust situations, or with circumstances in which the compliance with just principles is only partial. Now it seems that, given the assumptions characterizing a nearly just society, the parties would agree to the presumptions (previously discussed) that specify when civil disobedience is justified. They would acknowledge these criteria as spelling out when this form of dissent is appropriate. Doing this could indicate the weight of the natural duty of justice in one important special case. It would also tend to enhance the realization of justice throughout the society by strengthening human’s self-esteem as well as their respect for one another. And the contract doctrine emphasizes, the principles of justice are the principles of willing cooperation among equals. To deny justice to another is either to refuse to recognize one as an equal (one in regard to whom we are prepared to constrain our actions by principles that we would choose in a situation of equality that is fair), or to manifest a willingness to exploit the contingencies of natural fortune and happenstance for our own advantage. In either case deliberate injustice invites submission or resistance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Submission arouses the contempt of those who perpetuate injustice and confirms their intention, whereas resistance cuts the ties of the community. If after a decent period of time to allow for reasonable political appeals in the normal way, citizens were to dissent by civil disobedience when infractions of the basic liberties occurred, these liberties would, it seems, be more rather than less secure. For these reasons, then, the parities would adopt the conditions defining justified civil disobedience as a way of setting up, within the limits of fidelity to law, a final device to maintain the stability of a just constitution. Although this mode of action is strictly speaking contrary to law, it is nevertheless a morally correct way of maintaining a constitutional regime. In a fuller account the same kind of explanation could presumably be given for the justifying conditions of conscientious refusal (again assuming the context of a nearly just state). I shall not, however, discuss these conditions here. I should like to emphasize instead that the constitutional theory of civil disobedience rests solely upon a conception of justice. Even the features of publicity and nonviolence are explained on this basis. And the same is true of the account of conscientious refusal, although it requires a further elaboration of the contract doctrine. At no point has a reference been made to other than political principles; religious or pacifist conceptions are not essential. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
While those engaging in civil disobedience have often been moved by convictions of the kind, there is no necessary connection between them and civil disobedience. For this form of political action can be understood as a way of addressing the sense of justice of the community, an invocation of the recognized principles of cooperation among equals. Being an appeal to the moral basis of civic life, it is a political and not a religious act. It relies upon common sense principles of justice that humans can require one another to follow and not upon the affirmations of religious faith and love which they cannot demand that everyone accept. I do not mean, of course, that nonpolitical conceptions have no validity. They may, in fact, confirm our judgement and support our acting in ways known on other grounds to be just. Nevertheless, it is not these principles but the principles of justice, the fundamental terms of social cooperation between free and equal persons, that underlie the constitution. Civil disobedience as defined does not require a sectarian foundation but is derived from the public conception of justice that characterizes a democratic society. So understood a conception of civil disobedience is part of the theory of free government. One distinction between medieval and modern constitutionalism is that in the former the supremacy of laws was not secured by established institutional controls. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
The check to the ruler who in his judgments and edicts opposed the sense of justice of the community was limited for the most part to the right of resistance by the whole society, or any part. Even this right seems not to have been interpreted as a corporate act; an unjust king was simply put aside. Thus the Middle Ages lacked the basic ideas of modern constitutional government, the idea of the sovereign people who have final authority and the institutionalizing of this authority by means of elections and parliaments, and other constitutional forms. Now in much the same way that the modern conception of constitutional government builds upon the medieval, the theory of civil disobedience supplements the purely legal conception of constitutional democracy. It attempts to formulate the grounds upon which legitimate democratic authority may be dissented from in ways that while admittedly contrary to law nevertheless express a fidelity to law and appeal to the fundamental political principles of a democratic regime. Thus to the legal forms of constitutionalism one may adjoin certain modes of illegal protest that do not violate the aims of a democratic constitution in view of the principles by which such dissent is guided. I have tried to show how these principles can be accounted for by the contract doctrine. Some may object to this theory of civil disobedience that it is unrealistic. It presupposes that the majority has a sense of justice, and one might reply that moral sentiments are not a significant political force. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
What moves humans are various interests, the desires for power, prestige, wealth, and the like. Although they are clever at producing moral arguments to support their claims, between one situation and another their opinions do not fit into a coherent conception of justice. Rather their views at even given time are occasional pieces calculated to advance certain interests. Unquestionably there is much truth in this contention, and in some societies it is more truth than in others. However, the essential question is the relative strength of the tendencies that oppose the sense of justice and whether the latter is ever strong enough so that it can be invoked to some significant effect. A few comments may make the account presented more plausible. First of all, I have assumed throughout that we have to do with a nearly just society. This implies that there exists a constitutional regimen and a publicly recognized conception of justice. Of course, in any particular situation certain individuals and groups may be tempted to violate its principles but the collective sentiment in their behalf has considerable strength when properly addressed. These principles are affirmed as the necessary terms of cooperation between free and equal persons. If those who perpetrate injustice can be clearly identified and isolated from the larger community, the convictions of the greater part of society may be of sufficient weight. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Or if the contending parties are roughly equal, the sentiment of justice of those not engaged can roughly equal, the sentiment of justice of those not engaged can be the deciding factor. In any case, should circumstances of this kind not obtain, the wisdom of civil disobedience is highly problematic. For unless one can appeal to the sense of justice of the larger society, the majority may simply be aroused to more repressive measures if the calculations of advantages points in this direction. Court should take into account the civilly disobedient nature of the protester’s act, and the fact that it is justifiable (or may seem so) by the political principle underling the constitution, and on these grounds reduce and in some cases suspend the legal sanction. Yet quite the opposite may happen when the necessary background is lacking. We have to recognize than that justifiable civil disobedience is normally a reasonable and effective form of dissent only in a society regulated to some considerable degree by a sense of justice. There may be some misapprehension about the manner in which the sense of justice is said to work. One may think that this sentiment expresses itself in sincere professions of principle and in actions requiring a considerable degree of self-sacrifice. However, this supposition asks too much. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
A community’s sense of justice is more likely to be revealed in the fact that the majority cannot bring itself to the steps necessary to suppress the minority and to punish acts of civil disobedience as the law allows. Ruthless tactics that might be contemplated in other societies are not entertained as real alternatives. Thus he sense of justice affects, in ways we are often unaware of, our interpretation of political life, our perception of the possible courses of action, our will to resist the justified protest of others, and so on. In spite of its superior power, the majority may abandon its position and acquiesce in the proposals of the dissenters; its desire to give justice weakens its capacity to defends its unjust advantages. The sentiment of justice will be seen as a more vital political force once the subtle forms in which it exerts its influence are recognized, and in particular its role in rendering certain social positions indefensible. In these remarks I have assumed that in a nearly just society there is a public acceptance of the same principles of justice. Fortunately this assumption is stronger than necessary. There can, in fact, be considerable differences in citizens’ conceptions of justice provided that these conceptions lead to similar political judgments. And this is possible, since different premises can yield the same conclusions. In the case there exists what we may refer to as overlapping rather than strict consensus. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
In general, the overlapping of professed conceptions of justice suffices for civil disobedience to be a reasonable and prudent form of political dissent. Of course, this overlapping need not be perfect; it is enough that a condition of reciprocity is satisfied. Both sides must believe that however much their conceptions of justice differ, their views support the same judgment in the situation at hand, and would do so even should their respective positions be interchanged. Eventually, though, there comes a point beyond which the requisite agreement in judgment breaks down and society splits into more or less distinct parts that hold diverse opinions on fundamental political questions. In this case of strictly partitioned consensus, the basis for civil disobedience no longer obtains. For example, suppose those who do not believe in toleration, and who would not tolerate other had they the power, wish to protest their lesser liberty by appealing to the sense of justice of the majority which holds the principle of equal liberty. While those who accept this principle should, as we have seen, tolerate the intolerant as far as the free institutions permits, they are likely to resent being reminded of this duty by the intolerant who would, if positions were switched, established their own dominion. The majority is bound to feel that their allegiance to equal liberty is being exploited by others for unjust ends. #RandolphHaris 10 of 23
This situation illustrates once again the fact that a common sense of justice is a great collective asset which requires the cooperation of many to maintain. The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institution while not doing their share to uphold them. Although those who acknowledge the principles of justice should always be guided by them, in a fragmented society as well as in one moved by group egoisms, the conditions for civil disobedience do not still exist. Still, it is not necessary to have strict consensus, for often a degree of overlapping consensus allows the reciprocity condition to be fulfilled. There are, to be sure, definite risks in the resort to civil disobedience. One reason for constitutional forms and their judicial interpretation is to establish a public reading of the political conception of justice and an explanation of the application of its principles to social questions. Up to a certain point it is better than the law and its interpretation to be settled than that it be settled rightly. Therefore it may be protested that the preceding account does not determine who is to say when circumstances are such as to justify civil disobedience. It invites anarchy by encouraging everyone do decide for oneself, and to abandon the public rendering of political principles. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
They reply to this is that each person must indeed make one’s own decision. Even though humans normally seek advice and counsel, and accept the injunctions of those in authority when these seem reasonable to them, they are always accountable for their deeds. We cannot divest ourselves of our responsibility and transfer the burden of blame to others. This is true on any theory of political duty and obligation that is compatible with the principles of a democratic constitution. The citizen is autonomous yet one is held responsible for what one does. If we ordinarily think that we should comply with the law, this is because our political principles normally lead to this conclusion. Certainly in a state of near justice there is a presumption in favour of compliance in the absence of strong reasons to the contrary. The many free and reasoned decisions of individuals fit together into an orderly political regime. However, while each person must decide for oneself whether the circumstances justify civil disobedience, it does not follow that one is to decide as one pleases. It is not by looking to our personal interests, or to our political allegiances narrowly construed, that we should make up our minds. To act autonomously and responsibly a citizen must look to the political principles that underlie and guide the interpretation of the constitution. One must try to access how these principles should be applied in the existing circumstances. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
If one comes to the conclusion after due consideration that civil disobedience is justified and conducts oneself accordingly, one acts conscientiously. And though one ay be mistaken, one has not done as one pleased. The theory of political duty and obligation enables us to draw these distinctions. There are parallels with the common understandings and conclusions reached in the sciences. Here, too, everyone is autonomous yet responsible. We are to assess theories and hypotheses in the light of the evidence by publicly recognized principles. It is true that there are that there are authoritative works, but these sum up the consensus of many persons each deciding for oneself. The absence of a final authority to decide, and so of an official interpretation that all must accept, does not lead to confusion, but is rather a condition of theoretical advance. Equals accepting and applying reasonable principles need have no established superior. To the question, who is to decide? The answer is: all are to decide, everyone taking counsel with oneself, and with reasonableness, comity, and good fortune, it often works out well enough. In a democratic society, then, it is recognized that each citizen is responsible for one’s interpretation of the principles of justice and for one’s conduct in the light of them. There can be no legal or socially approved rendering of these principles that we are always morally bound to accept, not even when it is given by a supreme court or legislature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Indeed each constitutional agency, the legislature, the executive, and the court, puts forward its interpretation of the constitution and the political ideals that inform it. Although the court may have the last say in settling any particular case, it is not immune from powerful political influences that may force a revision of its reading of the constitution. The court presents its doctrine by reason and argument; its conception of the constitution must, if it is to endure, persuade the major part of the citizens of its soundness. The final court of appeal is not the court, nor the executive, nor the legislature, but the electorate as a whole. The civilly disobedient appeal in a special way to this body. There is no danger of anarchy so long as there is a sufficient working agreement in citizens’ conceptions of justice and the conditions for resorting to civil disobedience are respected. That humans can achieve such an understanding and honour these limits when the basic political liberties are maintained is an assumption implicit in a democratic polity. There is no way to avoid entirely the danger of diverse strife, any more than one can rule out the possibility of profound scientific controversy. Yet if justified civil disobedience seems to threaten civic concord, the responsibility falls not upon those who protest but upon those whose abuse of authority and power justifies such opposition. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
For to employ the coercive apparatus of the state in order to maintain manifestly unjust institutions is itself is a form of illegitimate force that humans in due course have a right to resist. This discussion of the principles of justice has described a scheme of institutions that satisfies these principles and indicates how duties and obligations arise. If the theory of justice put forward matches our considered judgments and extends them in an acceptable way, these things must be done to see. We need to check whether it defines a workable political conception and helps to focus our reflections on the most relevant and basic moral concerns. The account in this part is still highly abstract, but I hope to have provide some guidance as to how the principles of justice apply in practice. However, we should not forget the limited scope of theory presented. For the most part I have tried t develop an ideal conception, only occasionally commenting on the various cases of nonideal theory. To be sure the priority rules suggest directives in many instances if not pressed too far. Even so, they only question of nonideal theory examined in any detail is that of civil disobedience in the special case of near justice. If the ideal theory is worthy of study, it must be because, as I have conjectured, it is the fundamental part of the theory of justice and essential for the nonideal part as well. I shall not purse these matters further. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
We have still to complete the theory of justice by seeing how it is rooted in human thought and feeling, and tied in with our ends and aspirations. Turning to the meaning of that word “inspiration,” what more can one say than that it is “in-breathing”—the in-breathing of a spiritual quality that raises a work or a person above the common order of things? I do not mean a work is inspired when it is cheaply glamorous, or that a human is inspired when one is rhetorically aggressive, or that a mind is inspired when it indulges in clever intellectual jugglery. It is my standpoint that all inspired art is the expression at most or a product at least of spiritual experience, although the latter may not be well understood by its experiencer. The experience must come first. Art is a movement and noise, whereas the spirit out of which it rises is hushed stillness and invulnerable silence. When the goddess Athena, in Greek mythology, says that “some things you will think of for yourself, and others a god will put into your heart,” this is her way of describing what we, more simply, would call inspiration. Only the direct experience of this exalted state will supply the sense of actuality and the feeling of vividness in spiritual writing. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
When this exalted feeling is transferred to the intellect and there turned into thought, whether for expression in words for one’s own understanding or for communication to others, it is termed a truth. In this form it becomes a source of renewed inspiration, a help in darker times, and a guide to live by in ordinary times. Inspiration can come to any person. It is not reserved for artists and mystics alone. When intuition expressed itself through, or enters into, the creative arts, we call it inspiration. The two are the same in root, but different in leaf. It would be absurd to believe that the creative power of inspiration exhausts itself with the arts alone. It can appear in any and every kind of human activity, in the making of a home or of a decision. It is the difference between real beauty and mere prettiness, between divine inspiration and practiced competence, between a flower and the painting of it. There is a hidden light within humans. Sometimes its glow appears in one’s most beautiful art productions, one’s loftiest religious revelations, one’s most irreproachable moral decisions. America is tortured by uncertainty, law and order, race, religion, God, family and self. Nor is the United States of America alone in suffering from a kind of value vertigo. All the techno-societies are caught up in the same massive upheaval. This collapse of the values of the past has hardly gone unnoticed. Every priest, politician, and parent is reduced to a head-shaking anxiety by it. Yet most discussions of value change are barren for they miss two essential points. The first of these is acceleration. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Value turnover is now faster than ever before in history. While in the past a human growing up in a society could expect that its public value system would remain largely unchanged in one’s lifetime, no such assumption is warranted today, expect perhaps in the most isolated of pre-technology communities. This implies temporariness in the structure of both public and personal value systems, and it suggests that whatever the content of values that arise to replace those of the informational age, they will be shorter-lived, more ephemeral than the values of the past. There is no evidence whatsoever that the value system of the techno-societies are likely to return to a “steady state” condition. For the foreseeable future, we must anticipate still more rapidly value change. Within this context, however, a second powerful trend is unfolding. For the fragmentation of societies brings with it a diversification of values. We are witnessing the crack-up of consensus. Most previous societies have operated with a broad central core of commonly shared values. This core is now contracting, and there is little reason to anticipate the formations of a new broad consensus within the decades ahead. The pressures are outward toward diversity, not inward toward unity. This account for the fantastically discordant propaganda that assails the mind in the techno-societies. Home, school, corporations, church, peer group, mass media—and myriad subcults—all advertise varying sets of values. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
The result for many is “anything goes” or “live out loud” attitude—which is, itself still another position. We are a society that has lost its consensus…a society that cannot agree on standards of conduct, language and manners, on what can be seen and heard. Certain people no longer even have to follow the laws and city leaders are pushing to abolish laws that protect citizens. In the San Francisco Bay area, for example, city leaders want to allow people to cross or walk in the street or road unlawfully or without regard for approaching traffic. This picture of a cracked consensus is confirmed by findings of Walter Gruen, social science research coordinator at Rhode Island Hospital, who has conducted a series of statistical studies of what he terms “the American core culture.” Rather than the monolithic system of beliefs attributed to the middle class by earlier investigators, Dr. Gruen found—to his own surprise—that “diversity in beliefs was more striking than the statistically supported uniformities. It is,” he concluded, “perhaps already misleading to talk of an ‘American’ culture complex.” Dr. Gruen suggests that particularly among the affluent, educated group, consensus is giving way to what he calls “pockets” of values. We can expect that, as the number and variety of subcults continues to expand, these pockets will proliferate, too. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Faced with colliding value systems, confronted with a blinding array of new consumer goods, services, educational, occupational and recreational options, the people of the future are driven to make choices in a new way. They begin to “consume” life styles the way people of an earlier, less choice-choked time consumed ordinary products. Some of the seers even call it blasphemy to proclaim or write down a description of the Supreme Divinity. By this they mean that the mind of a consumer cannot bring Truth into any limited thought, so a description would be false. The most appropriate act is silent awestruck reverence. Word circumscribe meaning, confine it by the very act of defining it. However, the Real is infinite, outside all circumscription and beyond all inclusion. If you must express it, you may do so correctly only by silence. However, it is essentially inexpressible. Concepts, thoughts, and words would bring Him down from the plane of Being to that of thinking, which would not only be a descent but also a falsification at worst, or a deformation at best. The human who really believes that one can explain nothing of the highest truth to any other human ought to follow one’s theory into practice. One ought to write nothing and speak nothing about it, create nothing artistically to suggest it. One ought to act as if it does not exist. It is a fundamental error to turn the pure mind into an object of experience in an attempt to reach comprehension. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Mind can know everything else and is the inescapable condition of every experience, for by its light every object and every event is revealed, but it cannot itself be known in the same way that we know everything else. Ordinarily there is a knower and a known, and mind would have to transcend such a relation were it to become away of itself, which means that it would have to transcend thinking itself. Mind itself produces the categories of time, space, and cause which makes World experience possible and knowable—that is, thinkable—which is why it cannot be grasped in the same way. The nature of mind is unique, and before its sublime verity speech trembles into silence. In affirming that the One alone exists, they imply their own existence. The affirmation points to someone who affirms, so one must be added to the One, making Two. The more they prattle about the One, the more they proclaim, by inference, the Two. We may perceive how the highest truth turns all lesser doctrines into illusions and yet admits their validity on their own level. There is a beauty in the infinite reality which outshines whatever beauty there is in the imaginative phantasy. With the lamp of Word, one must go beyond Word. None of us can play with the pen for some years, or wield the painter’s brush, or practice any of the arts, without in time letting our minds dwell on the process of inspiration. The mysteries of human’s being must necessarily occupy us. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
And if we dare to be truly frank in our facing of the self, if we will put aside preconceived notions and ready-made theories in order to watch what really happens during those processes, we discover our feet upon the verge of a great discovery. For we shall discover—if we are both patient enough and yet persistent enough—that there is a Source within us which promises astonishing possibilities to the human race. That Source is loosely called the soul. The part of us that response to the truth and ideals is the best part. Great importance is to be placed on the guidance to be got from what psychoanalysis calls the unconscious elements within the human. How many a prominent orator’s delivery during public speeches shows that when one speaks out of one’s head one is quite undistinguished and uninspiring, whereas when one speaks out of one’s heart, without previous preparation and under the sway of one’s innermost feeling, one strongly impresses and affects one’s audience. It happens on a plane above human’s heads; most of them do not know of it explicitly at the moment. Yet they are truly rendering service through being used as channels. There are moods or periods when the ideas stream through one’s mind in swift succession or come in slow stately revelations. What is true of the World’s work is true of the arts. The secret of inspired action is also the secret of inspired art. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
If one will take the divine path, the temporary inspirations of the artist can become permanent. When genius discovers the mysterious source which inspires it, intermittent inspiration develops ultimately into continuous contact with the sublime. One is as intensely alive in the spirit as most humans are intensely alive in the flesh. King God, my Father in the shining Heaven, my Lord, since the creation of the Universe and beyond, since ancient ties the bringer of comfort, who mourned for your Son the Lord Jesus Christ: please be with me now in my time of loss. Please grieve with me now in my time of loss. Please comfort me now in my time of loss. Please wrap about me your soothing wings, blankets to warm me from sorrow’ cold hands. And Thou hast given us in love, O Lord our God, [Sabbaths for rest,] holidays for gladness, festivals and seasons for rejoicing. Thou hast granted us [this Sabbath day and] this Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Season of our Freedom, this Feast of Weeks, the Season of the Giving of our Grace, this Feast of Tabernacles, the Season of our Gladness, this Eighth Day Feast of Assembly, the Season of our Gladness, as a holy convocation, commemorating our liberation from Egypt. Our God and God of our fathers, may our remembrance and remembrance of our forefathers come before Thee. Please remember the Messiah of the house of David, Thy servant, and America, Thy holy city, and all Thy people, the house of America. Please grant us deliverance and wellbeing, lovingkindness, life and peace on this day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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The Apfelstrudel Which I Ate After the Training Session Was Marvelous!
The ultimate mystery is one’s own self. Many people believe that children who are loved and have a normal upbringing and who are involved in activities will turn out to be normal, but that is not always the case. Sometimes there are crucial elements that are still missing, which go beyond mental health. Children may sometimes lack a male role model and look for a source of masculine authority in the wrong place. No matter how loving a mother it, it may not be enough to create a balanced human being. Also, children who do not show any signs of sadism in their youth can grow up to become sadist because of a lack of something in their childhood development. Heinrich Himmler was a normal middle-class youth, who had a stable family home, and was active in college and social, but he still went on to admire Adolph Hitler and become the “bloodhound of Europe.” Many people wonder, how could this happen? Well, there are some key factors, including the economy that may have contributed to this behaviour. Mr. Himmler’s submission to a strong fatherly figure was accompanied by a deep and intense dependence on his mother, who loved hum and doted on this son. Mr. Himmler certainly did not suffer from a lack of love from his mother—a cliché to be found in a number of books and articles written about him. One might say, however, that her love was primitive; it lacked insight or vision into what the growing boy needed; it was the love a mother has for an infant, and it did not change its quality as the boy grew up. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Thus Mr. Himmler’s love spoiled him and blocked his growth and made him dependent on her. However, Mr. Himmler, as in so many others, the need for a strong father is generated by his helplessness, which in turn is generated by his remaining a little boy who longs for his mother (or a mother figure) to love him, protect him, comfort him, and not to demand anything from him. Thus he feels not like a man but like a child: weak, helpless, without will or initiative. Hence he will often look for a stronger leader to whom he can submit, who gives him a feeling of strength, and who—in an imitating relationship, becomes a substitute for the qualities he likes. There was a physical and mental flabbiness in Mr. Himmler that is frequently fund in such “mother’s boys” and that he tried to overcome by “practicing his will power”—but mainly by harshness and inhumanity. To him control and cruelty became the substitutes for strength; yet this attempt had to fail since no weakling becomes strong by being cruel; he only hides his weakness temporarily from himself and others, as long as he has the power to control them. There is abundant evidence to show that Mr. Himmler was a typical “mother’s boy.” At the age of seventeen when he was in military training, away from his parents, he wrote in the first month twenty-three letters home, and though he received ten or twelve in reply, he continually complained that the family did not write enough. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
The first sentence of his letter on 24 January 1917 is typical: “Dear Mommy, Many thanks for your dear letter. Finally I received something from you.” Two days later, having received another note from home, he starts off in the same vein and adds, “I have waited a painfully long time for it.” And two letters in three days did not stop him from lamenting on the 29th, “again today I got nothing from you.” His early letter combined pleas for mail with complaints about his living conditions: his room barren and cold, mold grew in the closets, condensations built up on the windows, it was drafty, the carpet was old, the walls were paper thin, and he suffered from the attentions of bedbugs; he found food sparse and uninviting and pleaded for packages of food and enough money to allow him to eat at the canteen or the beer-hall restaurant in town. Trivial mishaps, such as the inadvertent picking up of the wrong clothes at the bath, assumed the dimensions of minor tragedies and were reported in detail to the family. In part these complaints and lamentations were appeals for help from Frau Himmler. In response, his mother dispatched a succession of money orders and of parcels containing food, extra bedding, insect powder, and clean laundry. Apparently much advice and many expressions of worry accompanied the provisions that arrived from Landshut. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Under the impact of these messages, Heinrich, aware that he must maintain his stance as a brave soldier, would sometimes try to react the complaint that had set the whole operation in motion. However, he always waited until he received the package before changing his tune, and his reverse never lasted long. In the matter of food he was completely unashamed and his letters are filled with appreciative remarks about his mother’s cooking (“the Apfelstrudel which I ate after the training session was marvelous”) and with requests for snacks such as apples and cookies. As time went by, Mr. Himmler’s letters home became somewhat less frequent—although never falling below three a week—yet his requests for mail were as insistent as ever. Sometime he could get quite unpleasant when his mother did not write him as much as expected. “Dear Mother,” he began a letter of 23 March 1917, “Many thanks for your nice news (which I didn’t get). It is really mean of you not to have written. This need to share everything with his parents, especially with his mother, remained the same when he worked as a Praktikant (a student of agriculture who does practical work on a farm). Then nineteen years old, he sent home at least eight letters and cards in the first three and half weeks, although he often noted that he was too busy to write. When he fell sick with paratyphoid fever his mother was reduced almost to frenzy; on recovery, he spent a good deal of time in writing her all the details about his state of health, his temperature, bowel movements, aches, and pains. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
At the same time, Mr. Himmler was clever enough not to want to give the impression that he was a crybaby, interspersing his reports with reassurances that he was fine and chiding his mother for worrying. He even began his letters with three or four items of general interest and then added: “Now as to how it goes with me I can see you, dear mother, fidgeting with impatience.” This may have been true, but the sentence is one example of a method Mr. Himmler used throughout his life—to project his desires and fears on others. Thus far we have made the acquaintance of an obsessively orderly, hypochondriacal, opportunistic, narcissistic young man who felt like an infant and yearned for motherly protection while simultaneously attempting to follow and imitate a father image. Undoubtedly Mr. Himmler’s dependent attitude, partly generated by his mother’s overindulgent attitude toward him, was increased by certain real weakness, both physical and menta. Physically, Mr. Himmler was not a very strong child and suffered from ill health from the age of three. At that time he contracted a serious respiratory infection that seems to have settled in his lungs and from which some children have died. His parents were frantic and brought the physician who had delivered the child all the way from Munich to Passau to treat him. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
To give the child the best care, Frau Himmler went with him to a place with a better climate, and the father visited when he could take time from his work. In 1904 the whole family moved back to Munich for the sake of the child’s health. It is worth nothing that the father approved of all these measures, which were costly and inconvenient for him, apparently without protesting. (This is another factor that makes me assume that the father was not such a harsh and frightening disciplinarian as he is sometimes painted.) At the age of fifteen Mr. Himmler had began to have stomach trouble, which was to plague him for the rest of his life. From the whole picture of this illness it is likely that there was a strong psychogenic factor present. While he resented this stomach trouble as a symptom of weakness, it gave him the chance of being constantly occupied with himself and having people around him who listened to his complaints and fussed over him. (When he was in power Mr. Himmler found such a figure in Dr. Kersten, who seems to have had some influence on him, which is not surprising, considering Dr. Kersten’s function as a mother figure.) Another illness of Mr. Himmler’s was an alleged heart trouble that was supposed to have been the result of his work on the farm in 1919. The same Munich physician who had treated him for paratyphoid fever now made the diagnosis of a hypertrophied (enlarged) heart due to overexertion during his military service. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
It was also reported that Mr. Himmler suffered from exertion in the war, and insufficient nourishment and the aftermath of the paratyphoid fever. However, Mr. Himmler’s physical weakness went beyond these three groups of illnesses—lung, stomach, and heart. He had a soft and flabby appearance and was physically awkward and clumsy. For instance, when we got on a bicycle and could accompany his brother Gebhard on his outings, “Heinrich had a penchant for falling off his machine, tearing his clothes, and suffering other mishaps.” The same physical awkwardness showed in school and was probably even more humiliating. When G.W.F. Hallgarten, who later became an out standing historian, and was a co-student with Mr. Himmler during his school years, heard of his rise to power he could hardly imagine that this was the same person who had been his classmate. Mr. Hallgarten describes Mr. Himmler as an extraordinarily milk-faced, plump boy who already wore glasses and often showed a “half-embarrassed, half-vicious smile.” Mr. Himmler was very popular with all teachers and was an exemplary pupil during his school years, with the best qualifications in all essential subjects. In class he was considered to be overambitious (a Streber). There was only one subject in which Mr. Himmler was deficient, and that was gymnastics. Mr. Hallgarten describes in detail how humiliated Mr. Himmler was when he was not able to do relatively simple exercises, and was exposed not only to the ridicule of the teacher but also to that of his classmates, who were happy to see this ambitious boy in a position of inferiority. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
In spite of his orderliness, however, Mr. Himmler lacked discipline and initiative. He was a talker, and he knew it, berated himself for it, and tried to overcome it. Most of all, he almost completely lacked strength of will; thus, not surprisingly, he praised a strong will and hardness as ideal virtues, but never acquired them. He compensated for his lack of willpower by his coercive power over others. Mr. Himmler’s father required him to keep a daily diary and the young man was obsessively clean, consistently bathing. An illustration of his own awareness of his submissiveness and lack of will is an entry in his diary on 27 December 1919: “God will bring everything to a good end but I shall not submit without will, to fate but street it myself as best I can.” This sentence is rather tortuous and contradictory. He starts out acknowledging God’s will (at that time he was still a practicing Catholic); then he asses that he “will not submit,” but qualifies it by adding “without will”—thus solving the conflict between his actual submissiveness and his ideal of having a strong will by the compromise that he will submit but with his will; then he promises himself to steer his own fate, but qualified this “declaration of independence” with the lame addition of “as best I can.” Quite in contrast to Mr. Hitler, Mr. Himmler always remain a weakling, and he knew it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Mr. Himmler’s life was a struggle against this awareness, an attempt to become strong. Mr. Himmler was much like an adolescent who wants to be strong, but has limitations, who feels guilty and weak, accuses himself of his weakness, and is always trying to change and never succeeding. However, the circumstances and his cleverness permitted him to gain a position of such power over others that he could live with the illusion of having become “strong.” At the end of officers’ training, still seventeen, Mr. Himmler’s fear of being sent to the front was allayed, he assumed a position of self-confidence. The obvious question here is why, at this point, he was eager to go to the front when several months earlier he had been so frightened. There are several answers to this seeming contradiction. His brother Gebhard had been promoted in battle to full cadet, and that must have made Mr. Himmler very jealous and eager to show that he, too, was a hero. Mr. Himmler tries to deny his fears and loneliness and dependency by an assertion of his strong will. “Today, inside myself,” he says, “I have cut loose from everyone and now depend on myself alone. If I do not find a girl whose character suits mine and who loves me, I’ll go to Russian alone.” With or without a girl he will live far away from Germany, all by himself, and with this kind of talk he tried to convince himself that he is no longer a “mother’s boy.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Mr. Himmler, at the age of twenty, was in the same position as many others who became Nazis, he not only lacked the money to live the kind of life he wanted, but also the imaginativeness, endurance, and independence, and had nowhere to go socially or professionally, and yet were ambitions and have an ardent desire to rise. With the current COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment of over 20,000,000 Americans, and people being strung along by the government with relief payments that barely meet their needs, many may be understand where some of these Nazis were coming from. (Just an objective opinion, not as justification for tragedies.) Mr. Himmler also became a member of a fraternity and did everything to make himself popular. He visited sick fraternity brothers and sought out members and alumni wherever he went. So he was out going, but he was troubled that he was not very popular with his fellow members, some of whom expressed their lack of confidence in him quite openly. Despite his politicking, and his torment about himself and his future, many of his habits and old way, including church attendance, social calls, fraternity dances and shipments of dirty laundry to Ingolstadt [his mother], still held fast. By 1929, however, Mr. Himmler commanded three hundred men of the Schutz Staffeln, which by 1933 had grown to an army of fifty thousand. What disturbs us so profoundly is not the organization of the SS nor Mr. Himmler’s ultimate position as Reich police chief, but the torture of millions of human beings and extermination of millions more because no direct answer to these questions is to be found in Mr. Himmler’s childhood and youth besides a strong male role model. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
We all go through awkwardness, rejection, and have dreams we are not able to accomplish in our youth. Yet, many of us do not turn into monsters. Mr. Himmler’s sadism probably was deeply rooted in his character structure long before he had the occasion to practice it on the scale that made his name enter history as a bloody monster. We should keep in mind the broad definition of sadism, as the passion for absolute and unrestricted power over another human being; the infliction of physical pain is only one of the manifestations of this wish for omnipotence. We must also no forget that masochistic submissiveness is not the opposite of sadism, but part of the symbiotic system in which complete control and complete submission are manifestations of the same basic vital importance. From the age of twenty-one when Mr. Himmler felt somewhat more independent because he had begun to find new friends and father figures, he began to be slightly condescending toward his father, although he always couched his preaching in appropriate forms while the condescending preaching to his older brother became increasingly vicious. Gebhard was a hero to his brother Heinrich, as a child. However, Gebhard went into the war, was promoted on the battlefield, and received that Iron Cross 1st class. He fell in love and in love with an attractive girl and became engaged to her while his younger brother, possessing neither glory nor love, was awkward, weak, and unpopular. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
The girl did not fit Heinrich’s idea of a shy, retiring, and chaste fiancée, and not only that, but Paula was an attractive and distant cousin of theirs. There was some trouble between Paula and Gebhard, so Gebhard asked Heinrich to help him. After a couple instances of harlotry behaviour, Heinrich called off his brother’s engagement and ruined the young lady’s reputation to protect his family’s name. In a letter he stated: “If your union is to be a happy one for you two and for the health of das Volk—which must be built on sound, moral families—you must control yourself with barbaric [underlined in the original statement] strength. Since you do not handle yourself strongly and firmly, and only control yourself to a small degree, and since your future husband, as I have already said, is too good for you, and possesses too little understanding of people and can’t learn it since this age won’t let it be learned, someone else must do it. Since you both approached me on this affair and drew me in, I feel myself obligated to do it. When Gebhard agreed to go along and allowed the engagement to end, Heinrich was triumphant and at the same time scornful of his brother’s lack of resistance. “It was,” he said, “as if he [Gebhard] had absolutely no soul.” This twenty-four-year-old young mand succeeded in breaking down his father, his mother, his older brother, and in making himself the virtual dictator of the family. At this point the wish to control his brother and parents assumed features of pure sadistic viciousness. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Heinrich wrote a threatening letter to Paul to stop saying nasty things about the Himmler’s and adds the warning that, although he was a nice fellow, “I will be completely different if anyone forces me to it. Then, I will not be stopped by any false sense of pity until the opponent is socially and morally ousted from the ranks of society.” This was the height of vicious control that Mr. Himmler could exert under the circumstances. When by his cunning he was able to use the new political circumstances for his own purposes, he had the possibility to act out his sadism on a historical scale. “The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear,” reports Heinrich Himmler. However, Mr. Himmler witnessed a mass execution in Minsk in the late summer of 1941 and was rather shaken by it. However, he said, “Nevertheless, I think it is right that we looked at this. Who is to decide over life and death must know what dying is like and what he askes the execution commanders to do.” Many of his SS men became sick after these mass executions; some committed suicide, became psychotic, or suffered from other severe mental damage. Nervous breakdowns were one possible consequence of his extermination campaign. However, one cannot speak of Mr. Himmler’s sadistic character without discussing what has often been described as his kindness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
I have already mentioned that he tried to make himself popular by visiting sick fraternity brothers, but he did similar things also on other occasions. He gave an old woman cake and rolls and recorded in his diary: “If I could only do more, but we are ourselves poor devils,” (not true, because Mr. Himmler’s family was a well-to-do-middle-class family and far from being door devils). Mr. Himmler also organized a benefit with his friends and gave the proceeds to Viennese children, and he behaved in a “fatherly” way to his SS men, as many have commented. From the whole picture of Mr. Himmler’s character, however, I get the impression that most of these friendly acts were not expressions of genuine friendliness. He had a need to compensate for his own lack of feeling and cold indifference, and to convince himself and others that he was not what he was, or, to put it differently, that he felt what he did not feel. He had to deny his cruelty and coldness by a show of kindness and concern. Even his aversion to hunting animals, which he described as cowardly, could not have been very serious since he proposed in one of his letters that the hunting of big animals should be facilitated for the SS men as a reward for good conduct. He was friendly to children and animals, but even here skepticism must be permitted, because there is almost nothing this man did that did not have the purpose of furthering his own career. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Of course, even a sadist like Mr. Heinrich Himmler can have some beneficial human traits, like kindness to some people in some situations; one would expect him to have such traits. What makes it so difficult to believe in them in Mr. Himmler is his complete coldness and the exclusive pursuit of his selfish goals. There is also a benevolent type of sadism in which control over the other person does not have the aim of harming one, but is meant to work for one’s own good. It may be that Mr. Himmler has some of this benevolent sadism, which often gives the impression of kindness. However, Mr. Himmler’s end was much in line with his character as his life had been. When it was clear that Germany had lost the war, he was preparing negotiations with the Western powers, through Swedish intermediaries, which would leave him in a leading role, and offered concessions with regard to the fate of the Jews. In these negotiations he surrendered one by one the political dogmas to which he had clung do tenaciously. Of course, simply by initiating the, der treue Heinrich (loyal Heinrich), as he was called, committed the last act of treachery to his idol, Mr. Hitler. That he thought the Allies would accept him as the new German “Fuhrer” was a sign of his mediocre intelligence and lack of political judgment, as well as of his narcissistic grandiosity, which made him think that he was the most important man even in a defeated Germany. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
People in America should be weary about gun control because people like Heinrich Himmler still exist. In fact, one of his beliefs was, “Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA—ordinary citizens don’t need guns, as their having guns doesn’t serve the State. Nonetheless, Mr. Himmler declined the suggestion of General Ohlendorf to surrender to the Allies and to take responsibility for the SS. The man who had preached loyalty and responsibility now showed, true to character, complete disloyalty and irresponsibility. He fled with a black patch over his eye and without his moustache, with false papers, and in the uniform of a corporal. When he was arrested and brought into a prisoner of war camp, his narcissism apparently could not tolerate being treated like thousands of unknown soldiers. He asked to see the commander of the camp and told him, “I am Heinrich Himmler.” Sometime later he bit the cyanide capsule he carried in a hollow tooth. Only a few years earlier, in 1938, he had said in a speech to his officers, “I have no understanding of a person who throws away his life like a dirty shirt because he believes this way, he will evade difficulties. Such a person must be interred like an animal. Often times leaders, because they are in positions of power and wealth hold others to standards, they themselves would not tolerate, in that position. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Thus the circle of his life closed. He had to attain absolute power in order to overcome his own experience of weakness and vital importance. After he had achieved this aim, he tried to cling to this power by betraying his idol. That is why one always has to watch those closet to them, you never know what their true plans are When he was in a prison camps, as an ordinary soldier, one among hundreds of thousands, Mr. Himmler could not bear his reduction to complete powerlessness. He preferred to die, rather than to be thrown back to the role of the powerless man that was for him that of the weakling. Mr. Himmler is an example of the typical anal-hoarding, sadistic, authoritarian character. He was weak (and did not only feel weak); he found a certain sense of security in his orderliness and pedantry, by submitting to strong father images, and eventually he developed a passion for unlimited control over others as the one way to overcome his sense of vital impotence, shyness, uneasiness. He was extremely envious of others whom life had endowed with more strength and self-esteem. His vital impotence and the resulting envy led to the malicious wish to humiliate and destroy the, wither it was his brother Gebhard’s fiancée of the Jews. He was utterly cold and without mercy, which made him feel more isolated and more frightened. His sadistic character may have been due to his early insecurity, unmanliness, cowardice, sense of impotence, and these attributes would indicate the probability of sadistic compensations. #RandolphHaris 17 of 23
There are thousands of Heinrich Himmlers living among us. That is why it is important to have diversity in political power. Socially speaking, they do only minor harm in normal life, although one must not underestimate the number of people whom they damage and make thoroughly unhappy. However, when forces of destruction and hate threaten to engulf the whole body politic, such people become extremely dangerous; they are the ones who yearn to serve the government as its agents for terror, for torture and killing. Many people commit the severe error of believing that one can easily recognize a potential Himmler from far away. One of the purposes of characterological studies is to show that the potential Himmler looks like anyone else, a fallen senator, a wealthy actress, a housewife, a hardworking factory worker, a once prestigious doctor, a beautiful and rich news anchor, a successful police captain, maybe even a president, expect those who have learned to read character and who do not have to wait until circumstances permit the “monster” to show one’s colours. What are the factors that made Mr. Himmler a merciless sadist? Perhaps no one taught him the love of God? We must also consider that there may be genetically determined factors that, while not the source of sadism, are responsible for a disposition toward it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
However, perhaps more than any other factor we must think of the pathogenic influence of the dry, banal, pedantic, dishonest, unalive atmosphere in which the Himmler family lived. There were no values except the insincere profession of patriotism and honesty, there was no hope except that of managing to hold on to their precarious position on the social ladder. There was no fresh air, spiritually or mentally, that could have encouraged the weak little boy to branch out and develop. And there was not only this family. The Himmlers were part of a social class on the lowest fringe of the imperial system that suffered from resentment, impotence, and joylessness. This was the soil on which Himmler grew—and he became increasingly more vicious as the revolution defeated his social status and values, and as it became clearer to him that he had no future in professional terms. “We, however, who must live in this time, wish to prove ourselves worthy, every day and every hour, of gifts which Fate has given us, through the fact that it sent us the Fuhrer, to start with, and after two thousand years, who was, we might say, sent by God. As German men and German women, we wish to be thankful that we were born in precisely this age, that we are able to live in this age,” reports Heinrich Himmler. Love is he measure of our faith, the inspiration for our obedience, and the true altitude of our discipleship. It is our goal to preserve life and love our neighbour’s as ourself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
As children of God, we have a tremendous responsibility to respect all life forms, animate or inanimate. The Saviour Himself provided the answer with this profound declaration: “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” This is the essence of what it means to be a true disciple: those who receive Christ Jesus walk with Him. We must love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind. We have compassion that provides direction not only for our lives but also for the Lord’s Church on both sides of the veil. Because love is the great commandment, it ought to be at the center of all and everything we do in our own family, in our Church callings, and in our livelihood. Love is the healing balm that repairs rifts in personal and family relationships. It is the bound that unites families, communities, and nations. Love is the power that initiates friendship, tolerance, civility, and respect. It is the source that overcomes divisiveness and hate. Love is the fire that warms our lives with unparalleled joy and divine hope. Love should be our walk and our talk. When we truly understand what it means to love as Jesus Christ loves us, the confusion clears and our priorities align. Our walk as disciples of Christ becomes more joyful. Our lives take on new meaning. Our relationship with our Heavenly Father becomes more profound. Obedience becomes a joy rather than a burden. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
God the Eternal Father did not give the first great commandment because He needs us to love Him. His power and glory are not diminished should we disregard, deny, or even defile His name. His influence and dominion extend through time and space independent of our acceptance, approval, or admiration. No, God does not need us to love Him. However, oh, how we need to love God! For what we love determines what we seek. What we seek determine what we think and do. What we think and do determines who we are—and who we will become. We are created in the image of our Heavenly parents; we are God’s spirit children. Therefore, we have a vast capacity for love—it is part of our spiritual heritage. What and how we love not only defines us as individuals; it also defines us as a church. Love is the defining characteristic of a disciple of Christ. Our insight reveals anything communicated can be affirmed in one way or negated in another, therefore it can be quite incorrect. For behind Nature is Mystery beyond all knowing, all thinking, all describing, absolute Being beyond all relativity, that is also Non-Being. All evaluative theories, opinions, judgments, interpretation are assemblages of thoughts. Insofar as religious theories depart from or lack direct insight into the Real, into what is, they are mere thoughts. Where these thoughts enter into the recording, or the communication, of the result of such insight they colour it, add to it, adulterate it. It is when the person attempts to report the Impersonal that this danger exists. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Do not attempt to describe what God is, for whatever you say would limit God, who would then become something inferior to God. This is why Hebrew and Hindu bible alike say he is the Nameless One. However, you may describe what God is not, you may draw illustrations from human mind, capacity, and character to suggest what some aspect of God may be like in a quite different degree and way. Since the beginning of time, love has been the source of both the highest bliss and the heaviest burdens. At the heart of misery from the days of Adam until today, you will find the love of wrong things. And at the heart of joy, you will find the love of good things. And the greatest of all good things is God. Our Father in Heaven has given us, His children, much more than any mortal mind can comprehend. God created this wondrous World we live in. God the Father watches over us, fills our hearts with breathtaking joy, brightens our darkest hours with blessed peace, distills upon our minds precious truths, shepherds us through times of distress, rejoices when we rejoice, and answers our righteous petitions. He offers to His children the promise of a glorious and infinite existence and has provided a way for us to progress in knowledge and glory until we receive a fulness of joy. He has promised us all that He has. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
If all that is not enough reason to love our Heavenly Father, perhaps we can learn from the words of the Apostle John, who said, “We love him, because he first loved us.” In the center of the storm, there is clam. In the center of confusion, there is peace. In the center of exhaustion, there is rest. God, sitting in the midst of the World, please lead me to the center and grant me the calm and peace and rest that is found there. Speedily, even in our days, do Thou establish Thy dwelling in America forever. Mayest Thou be exalted and sanctified in America, Thy city, throughout all generations and to all eternity. O please let our eyes behold the establishment of Thy kingdom, accord to the word that was spoken in the inspired Psalms of David, Thy righteous anointed: The Lord shall reign forever; Thy God, O Zion, shall be Sovereign unto all generations. Hallelujah! Unto all generations we will declare Thy greatness and to all eternity we will proclaim Thy holiness. Our mouth shall ever speak Thy praise, O our God, for Thou art a great and holy God and King. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the holy God. Thou didst choose us for Thy service from among all peoples, loving us and taking delight in us. Thou didst exalt us above all tongues by making us holy through Thy commandments. Thou hast drawn us near, O our King, unto Thy service and hast called us by Thy great and holy name. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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I Am the Resurrection, and the Life—Glory to God in the Shining Heavens and on Earth!
From Watergate we learned what generations before us have known; our Constitution works. And during Watergate years it was interpreted again so as to reaffirm that no one—absolutely no one—is above the law. The total rejection of any religious belief is so contrary to human’s natural instincts and so destructive of one’s peace of mind. However, the French revelation was a conscious effort to replace the Kingdom of God with the kingdoms of man. Thus Grace’s irreligion was soon replaced by a new faith—man’s worship of man. Meanwhile, in the New World a radical experiment opened another chapter in church-state relations. There a group of gentlemen farmers, who were neither naïve about human nature nor pretentious about human society, were drawing up the American Constitution. By refusing to assign redemptive powers to the state or to allow coercive power to the church, the American experiment separated these two institutions for the first time since Constantine. What might be considered the modern phase in church-state history has emerged in out live times. It is an amalgam of elements from the previous eras. The rise of totalitarian regimes has brought back the kind of persecution the church experienced in early Rome; like Herod, modern dictators tolerate no other kinds. In the West secularism has aggressively spread irreligion, turning Europe into a post-Christian culture and America into a battleground with orthodox religion in retreat. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
This is dangerous because of people like Heinrich Himmler, who is an excellent example of a vicious, sadistic character who illustrates what has been said about the connection between sadism and the extreme forms of the anal-hoarding, bureaucratic, authoritarian character. The “bloodhound of Europe,” as he was called by many, Mr. Himmler was, together with Adolph Hitler, responsible for the slaughter of between fifteen and twenty million unarmed and powerless Russians, Poles, and Jews. Mr. Himmler impressed one as of uncanny subalternity, narrow-minded conscientiousness, inhuman methodicalness, blended with an element of an automaton. This sadistic authoritarian character is not the description of a hater or of that of a monster as the latter is usually conceived, but of an extremely dehumanized bureaucrat. Mr. Himmler was the type of a cruel educator of the old school, strict against himself but stricter against others. The signs of compassion and especially friendly tone of his thank you letters were all a fake, as one often finds in clearly cold natures. He could be a tender family father, a correct superior and a good comrade. At the same time he was an obsessed fanatic, an eccentric dreamer and a will-less instrument in Mr. Hitler’s hands to whom he was tied in an ever increasing love/hate. The most extreme example of his submission was that to Mr. Hitler, although one must suspect that his opportunism may have induced him to use a degree of flatter that was not entirely genuine. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Mr. Hitler was for Mr. Himmler the god-man, to be compared to the significance of Christ in the Christian religion or of Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita. He writes of him: “He is destined by the Karma of the universal Germanness, to lead the fight against the east and to save the Germanness of the World; one of the very great figures of light has found its incarnation in him.” Mr. Himmler submitted to the new Krishna-Christ-Hitler as he had to the old Christ/God, except much more fervently. It must be noted, however, that under the circumstances the new gods offered greater opportunities for fame and power. Can we conclude from this cursory overview that the church and the state must inevitably be in conflict? To some extent the answer is yes. Dual allegiances always create tension. And in a sinful World the struggle for power, which inevitably corrupts, is unavoidable. When the church is not being persecuted, it is being corrupted. So as much as anything else, it is human’s own nature that has created centuries of conflict. While they know that they represent different nations each living under the normal circumstances of their own society, its power and strength in comparison with other nations, nor do they know their place in their own society. Once again the contracting parties, in this case representatives of states, are allowed only enough knowledge to make a rational choice to protect their interests but not so much that the more fortunate among them can take advantage of their special situation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, every generation has an obligation to seek anew a healthy relationship between church and state. Both are reflections of human’s nature; both have a role to play. Christ’s teaching clearly delineates these roles. Jesus was remarkably indifferent to those who held political power. He had no desire to replace Caesar or Pilate with His apostles Peter or John. He gave civil authority its due, rebuking both the Zealots and Peter for using the sword. This infuriated the religious right of His day. Eager to discredit Jesus, the Pharisees and Herodians tried trapping Jesus over the question of allegiance to political authority. “Tell us,” they asked, “is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” The question puts Jesus in the middle: If He said no, He would be a threat to the Roman government; if He said yes, He would lose the respect of the masses who hated the Romans. Jesus asked them for a coin. It was a Roman denarius, the only coin that could be used to pay the hated yearly poll tax. On one side was the image of the Emperor Tiberius, around which were written the words Tiberius, Caesar Augusts, son of the divine Augustus. “Whose portrait is this?” Jesus asked, rubbing His finger over the raised features of the Roman ruler. “And whose inscription?” “Caesar’s,” they replied impatiently. “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” replied Jesus, handing the coin back to them. They stared at Jesus in stunned silence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Not only had Jesus eluded the trap, but He has put Caesar in his place. Christ might simply have said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” That is all that was at issue. It was Caesar’s image on the coin, and Caesar had authority over the state. What made Jesus add the second phrase, “Give to God what is God’s”? The answer is found on the reverse face of the coin, which showed Tiberius’s mother represented as the goddess of peace, along with the words highest priest. The blasphemous words commanded the worship of Caesar; they thus exceeded the state’s authority. Jesus’ lesson was not lost on the early church. Government is to be respected, and its rule honoured. “It is necessary to submit to the authorities,” wrote the apostle Paul. “If you owe taxes, pay taxes.” However, worship is reserved solely for God. The distinction Christ made is clear; both the church and state have clear and distinct roles ordained by God. The issue is how to apply these teachings to each institution in today’s volatile World. Christ did not give the keys to of the Kingdom to Caesar nor the sword to Peter. In God’s provision the state is not to seize authority over ecclesiastical or spiritual matters, nor is the church to seek authority over political matters. Yet the constant temptation of each is to encroach upon the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The basic principle of the law of nations is a principle of equality. Independent peoples organized as states have certain fundamental equal rights. This principle is analogous to the equal rights of citizens in a constitutional regime. One consequence of this equality of nations is the principle of self-determination, the right of a people to settle its own affairs without the intervention of foreign powers. Another consequence is the right of self-defense against attack, including the right to form defensive alliances to protect this right. A further principle is that treaties are to be kept, provided they are consistent with other principles governing the relations of states. Thus treaties for self-defense, suitably interpreted, would be binding, but agreements to cooperate in an unjustified attack are void ab initio. Even in a just war certain forms of violence are strictly inadmissible; and where a country’s right to war is questionable and uncertain, the constraints on the means it can use are all the more severe. Acts permissible in a war of legitimate self-defense, when these are necessary, may be flatly excluded in a more doubtful situation. The ai of war is a just peace, and therefore the means employed must not destroy the possibility of peace or encourage a contempt for human life that puts the safety of ourselves and of humankind in jeopardy. The conduct of war is to be constrained and adjusted to this end. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
The representatives of states would recognize that their national interest, as seen from the original position, is best served by acknowledging these limits on the means of war. This is because the national interest of a just state is defined by the principles of justice that have already been acknowledged. Therefore such a nation will aim above all to maintain and to preserve its just institutions and conditions that make them possible. It is not moved by the desire for World power or national glory; nor does it wage war for purposes of economic gain or the acquisition of territory. These ends are contrary to the conception of justice that defines a society’s legitimate interests, however prevalent they have been in the actual conduct of states. Granting these presumptions, then, it seems reasonable to suppose that the traditional prohibitions incorporating the natural duties that protect human life would be chosen. Now if conscientious refusal in time of war appeals to these principles, it is founded upon a political conception, and not necessarily upon religious or other nations. While this form of denial may not be a political act, since it does not take place in the public forum, it is based upon the same theory of justice that underlies the constitution and guides its interpretation. Moreover, the legal order itself presumably recognizes in the form of treaties the validity of at least some of these principles of the law of nations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Therefore if a soldier is ordered to engage in certain illicit acts of war, one may refuse if one reasonably and conscientiously believes that the principles applying to the conduct of war are plainly violated. One can maintain that, all things considered, one’s natural duty not to e made the agent of grave injustice and evil to another outweighs one’s duty to obey. Conscription is a drastic interference with the basic liberties of equal citizenship, it cannot be justified by any needs less compelling than those of national security. Citizens agree to this arrangement as a fair way of sharing in the burdens of national defense. In a well-ordered society anyway, evils arise externally, that is, from unjustified attacks from the outside. It is impossible for just institutions to eliminate these hardships entirely. The most that they can do is to try to make sure that the risks of suffering from these imposed misfortunes are more or less evenly shared by all members of society over the course of their life, and that there is no avoidable class bias in selecting those who are called for duty. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
And, of course, it is unjust and contrary to the law of nations to attack the liberty of other societies without just cause. Therefore if a just case for war does not exist, and this may be sufficiently evident under some circumstances, a citizen is justified in refusing to discharge one’s legal duty. Both the law of nations and the principles of justice for one’s own society uphold one in this claim. It no more challenges the state’s authority than the celibacy of priest challenges the sanctity of marriage. Governments, with rare exceptions, seek to expand their power beyond the mandate to restrain evil, preserve order, and promote justice. Most often they do this by venturing into religious or moral areas. The reason is twofold: the state needs religious legitimization for its polices and an independent church is the one structure that rivals that state’s clam for ultimate allegiance. However, when the state has presumed on God’s role, whether in ancient Rome, in Germany, or modern America, the first liberty, freedom of conscience, suffers. On the other side of the coin, the church, whose principal function is to proclaim the Good News and witness the values of the Kingdom of God, must resist the tempting illusion that it can usher in that Kingdom through political means. Jesus provided the best example for the church in His wilderness confrontation with Satan when the Devil tempted Jesus to worship him and thus take dominion over the kingdom of this World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
No small temptation. With that kind of power, Christ could enforce the Sermon on the Mount; love and justice could reign. He might have reasoned that if He did not accept, someone else would. This rationalization is popular today, right up through the highest councils of government: compromise to stay in power because there you can do more for the common good. However, as the saying goes, “People who lie down with dogs, get flees.” It is just another way of achieving success by compromising one’s morals and yielding to coercive power. And think of the popularity Jesus could have gained. After all, the people wanted a Messiah who would vanquish their oppressors. However, Jesus understood His mission, and it could not be accomplished by taking over the kingdoms of the World in a political coup. The mission of the church is to build the kingdom of God on Earth, and the means of the mission is politics. We live with both good (the wheat) and evil (the tares), and cannot root out the tares. Only God is able to do that and He will—when the Kingdom comes in its final glory. However, citizens of the World have a duty to work through civil authority for the advancement of justice and human good. They may provide critical illumination, personal example and vocational leadership. There are proper ways as well for the institutional church to provide society with its moral vision and hold government to moral account. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Some Christian traditional similarly believe that they can best model Kingdom values not by involvement in politics but by the establishment of alternative communities in which they live out the teachings of the Kingdom. In its proper form, this is not a withdrawal from the World or abandonment of Christian responsibility; nor is it a privatization of Christian values as with those who profess to believe but live as they do not. Instead a different strategy to the same end of providing a witness in the kingdom of man to the values of the Kingdom of God. While I do not agree with the generally negative view of government held by such groups, I respect the faithfulness by which they live their convictions. This split up of the social order is precisely analogous to the process of growth in biology. Embryos differentiate as they develop, forming more and more specialized organs. The entire march of evolution, from the virus to the man, displays a relentless advance toward higher and higher degrees of differentiation. There appears to be a seemingly irresistible movement of living beings and social groups from less to more differentiated forms. Thus it is not accidental that we witness parallel trends toward diversity—in the economy, in politics, in religion, in art, in education and mass culture, in the social order itself. These trends all fit together forming part of an immensely larger historic process. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The Super-age of information Revolution can now be seen for what, in large measure, it is—the advance of human society to its next higher stage of differentiation. This is why it often seems to us that our society is cracking at the seams. It is. This is why everything grows increasingly complex. Where once there stood 1,000 organizational entities, there are now at least 21.6 million in America alone—interconnected by increasingly transient links. Where once there were a few relatively permanent subcults with which a person might identify, there are now thousands of temporary subcluts milling about, colliding, and multiplying. The powerful bonds that integrated industrial society—bons of law, common values, centralized and standardized education and cultural production—are breaking down. All this explains why cities suddenly seem to be “unmanageable” and states “ungovernable.” For the old ways of integrating a society, methods based on uniformity, simplicity, and permanence, are not as effective. For the individual, this leap to a new level of differentiation holds awesome implications. However, not for the ones most people fear. We have been told so often that we are heading for faceless uniformity that we fail to appreciate the fantastic opportunities for individuality that the Super-industrial Revolution brings with it. And we have hardly begun to think about the dangers of over-individualization that are also implicit in it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Therefore keep in mind that the common grace is God’s provision for the welfare of all His created beings, both those who believe in God and those who do not. The human race, far from being flattened into monotonous conformity, will become far more diverse socially than it ever was before. The new society, the super-age of informational society now beginning to take form, will encourage a crazy-quilt pattern of evanescent life styles. The critical dynamic in the church-state tension is separation of institutional authority. Religion and politics cannot be separated—they inevitably overlap—but the institutions of church and state must preserve their separate and distinct roles. In this regard, the American experiment merits closer examination. The Kingdom of God is universal, bound by neither race nor nation. The church was ordained principally for the conversion of men and women—conversion grounded in individual conscience wrought by the supernatural work of a sovereign God upon the soul. So that state could neither successfully establish nor destroy the church, since it could not rule conscience nor transform people’s hearts and soul. Each rational soul has an equal right to judge for oneself, every person has an unalienable right to act in all religious affairs according to the full persuasion of one’s own mind. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Thus two typically mortal enemies, the Enlightenment and the Christian faith, found a patch of common ground on American soil. Both agreed (for different reasons) that the new government should neither establish nor interfere with the church. The religion of every human must be left to the conviction and conscience of every human; and it is the right of every human to exercise it as these may dictate. It was this reasoning, not the right for the news reporters to spread lie, that led to the adoption of the First Amendment, expressly to protect the individual’s right to freedom of conscience and expression, and to prevent the establishment of a state church. However, contrary to the belief of many today, this separation of church and state did not mean that America was to be a nation free of religious influence. From the very beginning the American Revolution itself was seen by many as a rebellion fueled by the conviction that humans are creatures of God, and one’s political life is conditioned by that truth. As James Madison insisted, “This duty [homage to the Creator] is precedent, both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of civil society. Before any human can be considered as a member of civil society, one must be considered as a subject of the governor of the Universe.” A nation under God was no idle phrase. Nor did the separation of church and state mean religion and politics could be separated or religious values removed form the public arena. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
For one’s political life is an expression of values, and religion, by definition, most profoundly influences values. The concept of a “wall of separation,” a phrase incidentally first used by Jefferson fifteen years after the Constitution was adopted, applied to institutions of church and state, not religious and political values. The Founding Father were all aware that the form of limited government they were adopting could only succeed if there was an underlying consensus of values shared by the populace. I am reminded of this when I visit the House of Representatives. A beautiful fresco on the upper walls of the chamber itself contains the portraits of history’s great lawmakers. Standing at the speaker’s desk and looking straight ahead over the main entrance, one’s eyes meet the piercing eyes of the first figure in the series: Moses, the one who recorded the Law from the original Lawgiver. John Adams eloquently acknowledged the understanding of our constitutional framers when in 1798 he wrote: “We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passion unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made only for moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any others. Many of these original American visionaries believed that Christian citizens would actively bring their religious values to the public forum. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
George Washington faintly echoed Augustine when he asserted, “Of all the dispositions and habit which lead to a political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that men claim that tribute of patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great pillars of human happiness.” Thus, when laws were passed reflecting the consensus of Christian values in the land, no one panicked supposing that the Christian religion was being “established” or that a sectarian morality was being imposed on an unwilling people. The point of the First Amendment was that such convictions could only become the law of the land if a majority of citizens could be persuaded (without coercion), whether they shared the religious foundation or nor, of the merits of a particular proposition. Today’s widespread relegation of religion to merely something people do in the privacy of their homes or churches would be unimaginable to the founders of the republic—even those who personally repudiated orthodox Christian faith. Though America has drifted far from the vision of its founders, this system continues to offer one of the World’s most hopeful models in an otherwise contentious history of conflict #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The record of the centuries should not cause despair, however. Tensions between church and state is inherent and inevitable. Indeed, it is perhaps the outworking of one of God’s great mysteries, part of the dynamic by which He governs His Universe. For from the constant tension—the chafing back and forth—a certain equilibrium is achieved. To maintain this balance the church and the state must fulfill their respective role. One cannot survive without the other; yet neither can do the work of the other. Both operate under God’s rule, each in a different relationship to that rule. Certainly one thing is clear. When they fail in their appointed tasks—that is, when the church fails to be the visible manifestation of the Kingdom of God and the state fails to maintain justice and concord—civic order collapses. The consequences can be catastrophic and tumultuous events demonstrate that. To confess that intellectually we know nothing about the Absolute is understandable. However, to say that therefore we should leave its existence entirely out of our intellectual World-view, is not. For although that exact definition and direct explanation of the spirit is unable to catch the whole of this subtle experience within our receiving range because it is turned into ordinary human intellectual, emotional, and physical experience, by studying the spirit we may nevertheless evoke an intuitive recognition of its beauty; we may be able to better understand the world of the soul and the spirit may arouse the first aspirations towards spiritual enlightenment. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Spiritual enlightenment is the topic most worth writing about yet least understood. Whoever has entered into a partial understanding—it would be too much to demand more—of it, bears some responsibility. One must communicate with one’s fellows. Because the Real is beyond the thinking intellect’s grasp, it cannot be formulated into ideas. Yet because we need signpost and a goal to give guidance and direction, we must tentatively and provisionally formulate it. Dear Lord in shining in Heaven, I drop my fears into your ocean and watch them sink from sight. I place my fears on your broad Earth and see them rot away. I put my fears into your hands and they are no more. When you offer your arms to me, Great Father, your hands hold nothing but love. We sanctify Thy name on Earth even as it is sanctified in the shining Heavens above, as described in the vision of Thy Prophet: And the seraphim called one unto another saying: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole Earth is full of His glory. Whereupon the angels in stirring and mighty chorus rise toward the seraphim and with resounding acclaim declare: Blessed be the glory of God from His Heavenly abode. From Thy Heavenly abide, please reveal Thyself, O our King, and reign over us, for we wait for Thee. O when wilt Thy reign in America? Speedily, even in our days, do Thou establish Thy dwelling here forever. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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How Soon Hath Time, the Subtle Thief of Youth, Stolen on His Wing My Three and Twentieth Year!
We are here because we made a promise. We have made other promises in other parts of the World. We must learn to live with frustration, interference, irritation, disappointment, and criticism, as long as one can be sure they do not contribute to failure. Out of these hardships, we will grow and become some of the finest people the World has ever seen. Whether humans are prepared to cope with the increased choice of material and cultural wares available to them is, however, a totally different question. For there comes a time when choice, rather than freeing the individual, becomes so complex, difficult and costly, that it turns into its opposite. There comes a time, in short, when choice turns into overchoice and freedom into un-freedom. To understand why, we must go beyond this examination of our expanding material and cultural choice. We must look at what is happening to social choice as well. The proliferation of subcults is evident in the World of work. Many subcults spring up around occupational specialties. Thus, as the society moves around toward greater specialization, it generates more and more subcultural variety. The scientific community, for example, is splitting into finer and finer fragments. It is crisscrossed with formal organizations and associations whose specialized journals, conferences and meetings are rapidly multiplying in number. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
However, these “open” distinctions according to subject matter are matched by “hidden” distinctions as well. It is not simply that cancer researchers and astronomers do different things; they talk different languages, tend to have different personality types; they think, dress and live differently. (So marked are these distinctions that they often interfere with interpersonal relationships. Says a woman scientist: “My husband is a microbiologist and I am a theoretical physicist, and sometimes I wonder if we mutually exist.”) Scientists within a specialty tend to hand together with their own kind, forming themselves into tight little subcultural cells, to which they turn for approval and prestige, as well as for guidance about such things as dress, political opinions, and life style. As science expands and the scientific population grows, new specialties spring up, fostering more and still more diversity at this “hidden” or informal level. In short specialization breeds subcults. This process of cellular division within a profession is dramatically marked in finance. Wall Street was once a relatively homogeneous community. “It used to be,” says one prominent sociological observer of the money people, “that you came down here from St. Paul’s and you made a lot of money and belonged to the Racquet Club and you had an estate on the North Shore, and your daughters were debutantes. You did it all by selling bonds to your ex-classmates.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The remark is perhaps slightly exaggerated, but Wall Street was, in fact, one big White Anglo-Saxon Protestant subcult, and its members did tend to go to the same schools, join the same clubs, engage in the same churches (Presbyterian and Episcopalian), and vote for the same party (Republican). Anybody who still thinks of Wall Street in these terms, however, is getting one’s ideas from the novels of Auchincloss or Marquand rather than from the new, fast-changing reality. Today, Wall Street has splintered, and a young man entering the business has a choice of a whole clutch of competing subcultural affiliations. In investment banking the old conservative WASP grouping still lingers on. There are still some old-line “white shoe” firms, but they are diverse. Also, in the mutual fund field is becoming more diverse, and have many star employees of various backgrounds. Here the entire style of life, the implicit values of the group, are quite different. Mutual fund people are a separate tribe. “Now everyone even wants to be a WASP anymore,” says a leading financial writer. Indeed, many young, aggressive Wall Streeters, even when they do happen to be WASP in origin, reject the classical Wall Street subcult and identify themselves instead with one or more of the pluralistic social groupings that now swarm and sometimes collide in the canyons of Lower Manhattan. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
As specialization continues, as research extends into new fields and probes more deeply into old ones, as the economy continues to create new technologies and services, subcults will continue to multiply. Those social critics who inveigh against “mass society” in one breath and denounce “over-specialization” in the next are simply flapping their tongues. Specialization means a movement away from sameness. Despite much loose talk about the need for “generalists,” there is little evidence that the technology of tomorrow can be run without the armies of highly trained specialists. We are rapidly changing the types of expertise needed. We are demanding more “multi-specialists” (humans who know one field deeply, but who can cross over into another as well) rather than ridged, “mono-specialists.” However, we shall continue to need and breed ever more refined work specialists as the technical base of society increases in complexity. For this reason alone, we must expect the variety and number of subcults in the society to increase. Even if technology were to free millions of people from the need to work in the future, we would find the same push toward diversity operating among those who are left free to play. For we are already producing large numbers of “fun specialists.” We are rapidly multiplying not merely types of work, but types of play as well. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The number of acceptable pastimes, hobbies, games, sports and entertainments is climbing rapidly, and the growth of a distinct subcult built around surfing, for example, demonstrates, that at least for some, a leisure-time commitment can also serve as the basis for an entire life style. The surfing subcult is a signpost pointing to the future. “Surfing has already developed a kind of symbolism that gives it the character of a secret fraternity of a religious order,” write Remi Nadeau. “The identifying sign is a shark’s tooth, St. Christopher medal, or Maltese cross hung loosely about one’s neck. For a long time, the most accepted form of transportation has been a wood-paneled Ford truck.” Surfers display sores and nodules on their knees and feet as proud proof of their involvement. Suntan is de rigeur. Hair is styled in a distinctive way. Members of the tribe spend endless hours debating the prowess of such in-group heroes as J. J. Moon, and his followers buy J. J Moon T-shirts, surfboards, and fan club memberships. Surfers are only one of many such play-based sub-cults. Among skydivers, for example, the name J. J. Moon is virtually unknown, and so are the peculiar rituals and fashions of the wave-cresters. Skydivers talk, instead, about the feat of Rod Pack, who not long ago jumped from an airplane without a parachute, was handed one by a companion in mid-air, put it on, opened it, and landed safely. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Skydivers have their own little World, as do glider enthusiasts, scuba-diver, hot rodders, drag racers and motorcyclists. Each of these represents a leisure-based subcult organized arounds a technological device. As the new technology makes new sports possible, we can anticipate the formation of highly varied new play cults. Leisure-time pursuits will become an increasingly important basis for differences between people, as the society itself shifts from a work orientation toward greater involvement in leisure. In the United States of America, since the turn of the over the past one hundred and twenty years, the society’s measurable commitment to work has plummeted by nearly a third. This is a massive redevelopment of society’s time and energy. As this commitment declines further, we shall advance into an era of breathtaking fun specialism—much of it based on sophisticated technology. We can anticipate the formation of subcults built around space activity, holography, mind-control, deep-sea diving, submarining, computer gaming and the like. We can even see on the horizon the creation of certain anti-social leisure cults—tightly organized groups of people who will disrupt the workings of society not for material gain, but for the sheer port of “beating the system,” like Game Stop did to Wall Street. This development was foreshadowed in such films as Duffy and The Thomas Crown Affair. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Such groups may attempt to tamper with governmental or corporate computer programs, re-route mail (as we saw demonstrated in the election), intercept and alter radio and television broadcasts, perform elaborately theatrical hoaxes, tinker with the stock market, corrupt the rando samples upon which political or other polls are based, and even, perhaps, commit complexly plotted robberies and assassinations. Novelist Thomas Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49 describes a fictional underground group who have organized their own private postal system and maintained it for generations. Science fiction writer Robert Sheckley has gone so far as to propose, in a terrifying short story called The Seventh Victim, the possibility that society might legalize murder among certain “players” who hunt one another and are, in turn, hunted. This ultimate game would permit those who are dangerously violent to work off their aggressions within a managed framework. Bizarre as some of this may sound, it would be well not to rule out the seemingly improbable, for the realm of leisure, unlike that of work, is little constrained by practical considerations. Here imagination has free play, and the mind of humans can conjure up incredible variety of “fun.” Given enough time, money and, for some of these, technical skill, the humans of tomorrow will be capable of playing in ways never dreamed before. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The people of the future may have atypical games for pleasure. They will play games with the mind. They will play games with society. And in so doing, by choosing among the unimaginably broad options, they will form subcults and further set themselves off from one another. Subcults are multiplying—the society is cracking along age lines, too. We are becoming “age specialists” as well as work and play specialists. There was a time when people were divided roughly into children, “young persons,” and adults. It was not until the forties that the loosely defined term “young persons” began to be replaced by the more restrictive term “teenager,” referring specifically to the years thirteen to nineteen. (In fact, the word was virtually unknow in England until after World War II.) Robbed of adult heroes or role models other than their own parents, children of streamlined, nuclear families are increasingly flung into the arms of the only other people available to them—other children. They spend more time with one another, and they become more responsive to the influences of peers than ever before. Rather than idolizing an uncle, they idolize Darke or Britney Spears or whomever else the peer group holds up for a life style model. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Thus we see not only from college students, but of pre-teens and teenagers, each with its own peculiar tribal chrematistics, its own fads, fashions, heroes and villains. We are simultaneously segmenting the adult population along age lines, too. There are suburbs occupied largely by young married couples with small children, or by middle-age couples with teenagers, or by older couples whose children have already left home. We have specially-designed “retirement communities” for retirees. “There may come a day,” Professor Lofland warns, “when some cities will find that their politics revolve around the voting strength of various age categories, in the same way that Chicago politics has long revolved around ethnic and racial enclaves.” This emergence of age-based subcultures can now be seen as part of a stunning historical shift in the basis of social differentiation. Time is become more important as a source of differences among humans; space is becoming less so. Thus communications theorists James W. Carey of the University of Illinois, points out that “among primitive societies and in the earlier stages of western history, relatively small discontinuities in space led to vast differences in culture. Tribal societies separated by a hundred miles could have grossly dissimilar systems of expressive symbolism, myth and ritual.” Within these same societies, however, there was “great continuity over generations, vast differences between societies but relatively little variation between generations within a given society.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Today, he continues, space “progressively disappears as a differentiating factor.” However, if there has been some reduction in regional variation, Dr. Carey takes pains to point out, “one must not assume that differences between groups being obliterated…as some mass society theorists [suggest].” Rather, Dr. Carey points out, “the axis of diversity shifts from a spatial to a temporal or generation dimension.” Thus we get jagged breaks between the generations—and Mario Savio summed it up with the revolutionary slogan, “Do not trust anyone over thirty!” In on previous society could such a slogan have caught on so quickly. Dr. Carey explains this shift from spatial to temporal differentiation by calling attention to the advance of communications and transportation technology which spans great distances, and, in effect, conquers space. Yet there is another, easily overlooked factor at work: the acceleration of change. For as the pace of the inner differences between young and old become necessarily more marked. In fact, the pace of change is already so blinding that even a few years can make a great difference in the life experience of the individual. This is why some brothers and sisters, separated in age by a mere three or four years, subjectively feel themselves to be members of quite different “generations.” It is why among those radicals who participated in the strike at Columbia University, seniors spoke of the “generation gap” that separated them from the sophomores. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The problem of what factors are conducive to the development of sadism is too complicated to find in adequate answer in this paper, but it is possible that it has a lot to do with division. One point, however, must be clear from the beginning: there is no simple relationship between environment and character. This is because the individual character is determined by such individual factors as constitutionally given dispositions, idiosyncrasies of family life, exceptional events in a person’s life. Not only do these individual factors play a role; environmental factors are also much more complex than is generally assumed. Society is not a society. A society is a highly complex system; the old and the new lower middle classes, the new middle classes, the upper classes, decaying elites, groups with or without religious or philosophical-moral traditions, small town and big cities—these are only some of the factors that have to be taken into account; no single isolated factor can account for the understanding of character structure as well as the structure of the society. Therefore, if one wishes to correlate social structure and sadism, nothing short of a thorough empirical analysis of all factors will do. However, at the same time it must be added that the power through which one group exploits and keeps down another tends to generate sadism in the controlling group, even though there will be many individual exceptions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Hence sadism will disappear (except as an individual sickness) only when exploitative control of any class, gender, or marginalized group has been done away with. With the exception of a few small societies this has not yet happened anywhere in history. Nevertheless, the establishment of an order based on law and preventing the most arbitrary use of power has been a step in this direction, even though this development has recently been rested in many parts of the World where it once existed and is threatened even in the United States in the name of “law and order.” A society based on exploitative control also exhibits other predictable features. It tends to weaken the independence, integrity, critical thinking, and productivity of those submitted to it. This does not mean that it does not feed the with all sorts of amusements and stimulations, but only those that restrict the development of personality rather than further it. The Roman Caesars offered public spectacles, mainly of the sadistic nature. Contemporary society offers similar spectacles in the form of newspaper and television reports on crimes, war atrocities; where the contents are not gruesome, they are as unnourishing as the breakfast cereals that are promoted by the same mass media to the detriment of children’s health. This cultural food does not offer activating stimuli, but promotes passivity and sloth. At best it offers fun and thrills, but almost no joy; for joy requires freedom, the loosening of the tight reins of control, which is precisely what is so difficult for the anal-sadistic type to do. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
As to sadism in the individual, it corresponds to the social average, with individual deviations above and below. Individual factors enhancing sadism are all those conditions that tend to make the child or the grownup feel empty and important (If new circumstances occur, a nonsadistic child may become a sadistic adolescent or adult). Among such conditions are those the produce fright, such as terroristic punishment. By this I mean the kind of punishment that is not strictly limited in intensity, related to specific and stated misbehaviour but that is arbitrary, fed by the punisher’s sadism, and of fright-producing intensity. Depending on the temperament of the child, the fear of such punishment can become a dominant motive in one’s life, one’s sense of integrity may be slowly broken down, one’s self-respect lowered, and eventually one may have betrayed oneself so often that one has no more sense of identity, that one is no longer “he” or “she.” The other condition for the generation of vital powerlessness is a situation of psychic scarcity. If there is no stimulation, nothing that awakens the faculties of a child, if there is an atmosphere of dullness and joylessness, the child frees up; there is nothing upon which one can make a dent, nobody who responds or even listens, the child is left with a sense of powerlessness and impotence. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Such a powerlessness does not necessarily result in the formation of the sadistic character; whether or not it does, depends on many other factors. Yet it is one of the main sources that contribute to the development of sadism, both individually and socially. When the individual character deviated from the social character, the social group tends to reinforce all those character elements that correspond to it, while the opposite elements become dormant. If, for instance, a sadistic person lives within a group where the majority are nonsadistic and where sadistic person lives within a group where the majority are nonsadistic and where sadistic behaviour is considered undesirable and unpleasant, the sadistic individua will not necessarily change one’s character, but one will not act upon it; one’s sadism will not disappear, but will “dry up,” as it were, for lack of being fed. Life in the kibbutzim and other intentional communities offers many examples of this, although there are also instances where the new atmosphere produce a real change of character. A person whose character is sadistic will be essentially harmless in an antisadistic society; one will be considered to be suffering from an illness. One will never be popular and will have little, if any, access to positions in which one can have any social influence. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
If it is asked what makes the sadism of a person so intense, one must not think only of constitutional, biological factors, but of the psychic atmosphere that is largely responsible not only for the generation of social sadism but also for the vicissitudes of individual generated, idiosyncratic sadism. It is for this reason that the development of an individual can never be fully understood on the basis of one’s constitution and one’s family background alone. Unless we know the location of the person and one’s family within the social system, and the spirit of this system, we are barred from understanding why certain traits are so persistent and deep-seated. At one time, faithfulness to Christ’s announcement of His Kingdom led to persecution and double-edged sarcasm. An enraged mob in Thessalonica threatened Paul and Silas, shouting, “These men who have caused trouble all over the World are defying Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus.” During the early centuries Christians were martyred not for religious reasons—Rome, after all, was a land of many gods—but because they refused to worship the emperor. Because they would not say, “We have no king but Caesar,” the Roman government saw them as political subversives. Christians who refused to offer incense before the state of the emperor were flogged, stoned, imprisoned, condemned to the mines. Later, when Christianity was officially outlawed, they were tortured mercilessly and fed to the lions, to the delight of bloodthirsty crowds. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
In the second half of the second century, Christians were systematically persecuted. This account of a massacre in the Rhone Valley is not atypical: “Many Christians were tortured in the stocks or in cells. Sanctus, a deacon from Vienna, had red-hot plates applied to his testicles—his poor body was one whole wound and bruise having lost the outward form of a man. Christians who were Roman citizens were beheaded. Others were force through a gauntlet of whips into the amphitheater and then given to the beasts. Severed heads and limbs of Christians were displayed, guarded for six days, then burned, the ashes being thrown into the Rhone. One lady, Blandina, was the worst treated of all, tortured from dawn until evening till her torturers were exhausted and marveled that the breath was still in her body. She was then scoured, roasted in the frying pan and finally put in the basket to be tossed to death by wild bulls,” reports Paul Johnson, History of Christianity (New York: Atheneum, 1979), 72-73. Many Christians went to their death praising their King, and such martyrdom became the church’s most potent witness. Pagan Romans were convinced that Christ has taken away their pains. As has often been said, the church was built on the martyr’s blood. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
With the conversion of Constantine, however, Christianity was legalized in A.D. 313. This marked the end of persecution and ushered in a second phase in church-state relations. “Historians have questioned Constantine’s motives. Some believe it was an effort to say a dying empire, though one contemporary historian has come to a different conclusion. Christianity was practiced only by a small minority. Its universality, the message of Christ Himself, the reliability of written revelation as opposed to myths, began to attract pagan masses, reports Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: Knopf, 1986). In A.D. 381 Christianity became the official religion of Rome, and in an ironic turnabout, church leaders began exploiting their new-found power. “Christian leaders exploited the influential favour they enjoyed even when it meant subordinating the cause of justice to the apparent interest of their religion. They were inclined to allow secular power too much control in church affairs. Where church leaders were able to exercise political as well as spiritual authority, they did not enjoy any marked immunity from the universally corrupting tendency of power,” reports historian F. F. Bruce. Even Augustine, the great church father who provided the classic definition of the roles of the City of God and the city f man, was beguiled by the lure of temporal power; after a wrenching internal struggle he endorsed the suppression of heretics by the state. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Through succeeding centuries the church relied increasingly on the state to punish heresy. By the time of the Byzantine empire in the East, the state had become a theocracy with the church serving as its department of spiritual affairs. In the West both church and state jockeyed for control in an uneasy alliance. In the thirteenth century, for example, Frederick II, the king of Sicily, was first excommunicated for not going on a crusade, then excommunicated for going on one without the Pope’s permission. The state conquered territory, but the Pope distributed the land to the more faithful crusaders. The consequences of this alliance were mixed. Certainly Christianity provided a civilizing influence on Western culture through art, music, literature, morality, and ultimately in government. One eminent historian concluded that “society developed only so fast as religion enlarged its sphere.” One the darker side, however, the excesses of the politicized church created horrors Augustine could not have imagined. The church turned to military conquest through a series of “holy wars” that became more radical than religious. Jews, Muslims, and dark-skinned Christian were massacred alike. The goal was not to convert the populace, but to conquer it. Jesus likened the Kingdom of Heaven to a grain of mustard seed, which was a simile among the Jews for anything exceedingly small. Why did he do so? Because, in its first onset, the Kingdom is not an experience but an intuition—and the latter beings as an exceedingly faint and tiny leading. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Whereas we can reach the intellect only through thinking, we can reach the spirit only through intuition. The practice of prayer is simply deepening, broadening, and strengthening of intuition. A spiritual experience is simply a prolonged intuition. The prettily vauge and poetically general statements of spiritual truth, the woolly, sentimental, or foggy revelations and communications, are heard or intuited only in the outer courts. When the neophyte approaches the central inner court, what one receives is very precise clear and exact. This is so until one reaches the inmost shrine, the holy of holies itself. Here, words must come to an end for here one must “Be still and know that I am God.” It is important that the feeling of “inward drawing” which comes to one at times be at once followed up, whenever possible, by a withdrawal from external affairs for a few minutes and a concentration on what the feeling leads to. This practice is like a thread which, if followed up, will lead to a cord, that to a rope, and so on. Thus one will benefit by the grace which is being shed upon one, and not turn away unheedingly. However, the mind, at the beginning, leaves this intuitional plane all too quickly, so extreme vigilance is called for to bring it back there. What is more private, more intimate, than intuition? It is the only means they possess wherefrom to start to get mystical experience, glimpses, true enlightenment. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Yet, people insist on seeking among those who stand outside them, among the teachers, for that which must be searched after and felt inside themselves. In the dark hour that thou shalt find thy true self, follow God and one will be thy true self, follow God and He will be thy genius, for God holds the secret of thy existence. The teaching that is most worthwhile comes directly from one’s own inner being, not for another’s. To develop these brief intuitions and bring them to maturity in lengthier moods, is one’s task. That which guides one to the God within one’s own being, that slender thread of intuitive feeling and intelligence, may at first appear and disappear at intervals. At first intuition is like a frail thread, almost impalpable, of which one is just faintly aware; but if one heeds it, rivets attention stubbornly to it, the visitations come more and more often. If one follows the thread to its source, the message becomes clearer, stronger precise. If you can attentively trance this subtle feeling back to its own root, you will get a reward immeasurably greater than it seemed to promise. It is only by constant use that intuition can mature into mystical enlightenment. If one learns to cultivate these brief intuitive moments aright, there can develop out of them in time mystical moods of much longer duration and much deeper intensity. Still later, there could come to maturity the ripe fruit of all these moods—an ecstatic experience wherein grace descends with life-changing results. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
If, out of the Silent Mind, words come forth to affirm the consciousness of Consciousness, let it be known that the truth never dies but springs back to life again. We should be glad, enormously happy, that it is so. “And blessed are ye when people shall revile you and persecute, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake; for ye shall have great joy and be exceedingly glad, for great shall be your reward in Heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets who were before you,” reports 3 Nephi 12.10-12. Dear Lord in Heaven, with your soothing grace, please wipe away the lines that worries have etched on our faces. Please surround us with calm, please let us rest in the glow of peace, as if we were encircled with the Moon’s own light. Please let our concerns and tensions drain away from us, pouring as water into your Earth. Please accept our troubles and please transform them into wonders. 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, and 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? Faithful art Thou to grant eternal life to the departed. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who callest the dead to life everlasting. Holy art Thou and holy is Thy name and unto Thee holy beings render praise daily. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the holy God. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Papa—or—His Educational Surrogate—Knows Best!
All illness comes from sin. This everyone must take, whether they like it or not; it comes from sin—where it be of the body, of mind, or of soul. However, it may not be caused by the individual’s sin, but it comes from sin. While certain part of Europe and Japan are still building their first all-purpose supermarkets, the United State of America has already leaped to the next stage—the creation of specialized super-stores that widen still further (indeed, almost beyond belief) the variety of goods available to the consumer. In Washington, D.C., one such store specializes in foreign foods, offering such delicacies as hippopotamus steak, alligator meat, wild snow hare, and thirty-five different kinds of honey. The idea that primitive industrial techniques foster uniformity, while advanced automated techniques favour diversity, is dramatized by recent changes in the automobile industry. The widespread introduction of European, Japanese, and Korean cars into the American market has opened many new options for the buyer—increasing one’s choice from a dozen to nearly 300 car models in 2021. Today even this wide range of choice seems narrow and constricted. Faced with foreign competition, Detroit had to shutdown during the economic crises of 2008. However, Detroit is back to producing General Motors, Ford Motors, and Fiat Chrysler. To increase demand, General Motors, Ford Motors, and Fiat Chrysler are offer 0 percent financing of up to 84 months as well as big discounts on vehicles. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
While United States retail sales were down by about 41 percent during March and April, they have been more resilient than expected during the coronavirus pandemic, according to J.D. Power. When the “stay at home” or “shelter-in-place” orders were initially enacted some expected United States sales to fall by up to 80 percent. “We continue to see evidence that we are over the worst and we are firmly in recover,” reports Thomas Kind, J.D. Power president of data and analytics. They found that customers want cars that will give them the illusion of having-one-of-a-kind. For instance, BMW has an E26 M1 vehicle and only 453 M1 models were manufacture, approximately 54 vehicles are used for the Group 4 Pro Cars series, so they are highly coveted and desirable. BMW also only manufactured 20 examples of the “Frozen Black” E92 M3. These came standard with the Competition Package, DCT transmission, red brake calipers and red contrast stitching among other cosmetic updates. To provide that illusion for the mass consumer, the computerized assembly systems make possible not merely the illusion, but the reality. Thus the beautiful and spectacularly successful Mustang is promoted by Ford as “the one you design yourself,” because, as critic Reyner Banham explains, there “is not a dung-regular Mustang any more,” just a stockpile of options to meld in combinations of 3 (bodies) X 4 (engines) X 3 (transmissions) X 4 (basic sets of high-performance engine modifications) – 1 (rock-bottom six cylinder car to which these modification do not apply) + 2 (Shelby grand-touring and racing set-ups applying to only one body shell and not all engine/transmission combinations).” #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
This does not even take into account the possible variations in colour, upholstery and optional equipment. Both car buyers and auto sales representatives are increasingly disconcerted by the sheer multiplicity of options. The buy’s problem of choice has become far more complicated, the addition of each option creating the need for more information, more decisions and sub-decisions. Thus, anyone who has attempted to buy a car lately, as I have, soon finds that the task of learning about the various brands, lines, models and options (even within a fixed price range) requires days of shopping and reading. The auto industry may soon reach the point at which its technology can economically produce more diversity than the consumer needs or wants. BMW has already started accommodating this trend by alternating production of two of their high-end, large, luxury coupes. Both are very nice and expensive, but experts notice that when the economy is under preforming, BMW tends to produce the 6 Series and cancels the 8 Series, but when the market is doing really well, BMW cancels the 6 Series and produces the slightly more expensive 8 Series. The benefit of this kind of marketing makes these two cars hard to find and highly desirable, and buyers may hold on to their model as they anticipate the release of the next generation. It is also good for the pre-owned market because some buyers fall in love with a body style and do not care if it is not brand it. That is the car they want, no matter the year or cost, they buyer must have that car. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Marshall McLuhan has noted that, “Even today, most United States automobiles are, in a sense, custom-produced. Figuring all possible combinations of styles, options and colours available on a certain new family sports car, for example, a computer expert came up with 25,000,000 different versions of it for a buyer. When automated electronic production reaches full potential, it will be just about as inexpensive to turn out a million differing objects as a million exact duplicates. The only limits on production and consumption will be the human imagination.” We are, in fact, racing toward “over-choice”—the point at which the advantages of diversity and individualization are cancelled by the complexity of the buyer’s decision-making process. Does any of this matter? Some people argue that diversity in the material environment is insignificant so long as we are racing toward cultural or spiritual homogeneity. “It is what is inside that counts,” they say, paraphrasing a well-known burrito commercial. This view gravely underestimates the importance of material goods as symbolic expressions of human personality differences, and it glibly denies a connection between the inner and outer environment. Those who fear the standardization of human beings should warmly welcome the destandardization of goods. For by increasing the diversity of good available to a human we increase the mathematical probability of differences in the way humans actually live. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
More important, however, is the very premise that we are racing toward cultural homogeneity, since a close look at this also suggests that just the opposite is true. It is unpopular to say this, but we are moving swiftly toward fragmentation and diversity not only in material production, but in art education and mass culture as well. One highly revealing test of cultural diversity in any literate society has to do with the number of different books published per million; the more diverse these tastes, the greater the number of titles. The increase or decrease of this figure over time is a significant clue to the direction of cultural change in the society. The more advanced the technology in a country, the greater the likelihood that it would be moving in the direction of literary diversity and away from uniformity. The same push toward pluralism is evident in painting, too, where we find an almost incredibly wide spectrum of production. Representationalism, expressionism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, hardedge, pop, kinetic, and a hundred other styles are pumped into the society at the same time. One or another may dominate the galleries temporarily, but there are no universal standards or styles. It is a pluralistic market. When art was a tribal-religious activity, the painter worked for the whole community. Later one worked for a single small aristocratic elite. Still later the audience appeared as a single undifferentiated mass. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Today one faces a large audience split into a milling mass of sub-groups. According to John McHale: “The most uniform cultural contexts are typically primitive enclaves. The most striking feature of our contemporary ‘mass’ culture is the vast range and diversity of its alternative cultural choices. The ‘mass,’ on even cursory examination, breaks down into many different ‘audiences.’” Indeed, artists no longer attempt to work for a universal public. Even when they think they are doing so, they are usually responding to the tastes and styles preferred by one or another sub-group in the society. Like the manufacturers of pancake syrup and automobiles, artists, too, produce for “mini-markets.” And as these markets multiply, artists output diversifies. The push for diversity, meanwhile, is igniting bitter conflict in education. Every since the rise of industrialism, education in the New World, and particularly in the United States of America, has been organized for the mass production of basically standardized educational packages. It is not accidental that at the precise moment when the consumer has begun to demand and obtain greater diversity, the same moment when new technology promises to make destandardization possible, a wave of revolt has begun to sweep the college campus. Though the connection is seldom noticed, events on the campus and events in the consumer market are intimately connected. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Ne basic complaint of the student is that one is not treated as an individual, that one is served up an undifferentiated gruel, rather than a personalized product. Like the BMW E26 M1 and Mustang buyer, the student wants to design one’s own education. The difference is that while industry is highly responsive to consumer demand, education typically has been indifferent to student wants. (In one case we say, “the customer knows best”; in the other, we insist that “Papa—or his educational surrogate—knows best.”) Thus the student-consumer is forced to fight to make the education industry responsive to one’s demand for diversity. While most colleges and universities have greatly broadened the variety of their course offerings, they are still wedded to complex standardizing systems based on degrees, majors and the like. These systems lay down basic tracks along which all students must progress. While educators are rapidly multiplying the number of alternative path, the pace of diversification is by no means swift enough for the students. This explains why young people have set up “para—universities”—experimental colleges and so-called free universities—in which each student is free to choose what one wishes from a mind-shattering smorgasbord of courses that range from guerrilla tactics and stock market techniques to Christian ethics, morals and values, and “underground theater.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Long before the year 2040 A.D., the entire antiquated structure of degrees, majors, and credits will be a shambles. No two students will move along exactly the same educational track. For the students now pressuring higher education to destandardize, to move toward the super-age of informational diversity, will win their battle. Perhaps corporations will for their own universities and start recruiting kids out of high school, who score well on their standardized test. Perhaps public schools will be divided and sponsored by corporations, which will allow children to choose the type of enrichment material they want to learn, then the corporations will pick the brightest minds, the ones that show the most creativity to educate in their universities, and more than grades will matter. They will truly see who is excelling and genuinely cares about what they learn, even if they do not preform well on tests. That will be a way to diversify education and train people from crib to coffin to be the kind of employee you want. It is significant, for example, that one of the chief results of the student strikes in France was a massive decentralization of the university system. Decentralization makes possible greater regional diversity, local authority to alter curriculum, student regulations and administrative practices. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Many people in America are already demanding that the entire school system be cut up into smaller “community-run” school systems. Some African Americans and other ethnic groups are requesting that their kids are allowed to take history from their culture’s perspective in grade school. Some religious groups want religious based public schools. They want greater parental involvement with the schools than is possible in the present large, bureaucratic and ossified system. It claims, in short, the right to be different. And these might be viable choices. For instance, in the state of Utah, the cities Salt Lake City and Highland may have a large number of Mormons and a public school based on Mormon values may be something that the community wants for their children. Or in Sacramento, California in the Pocket/Greenhaven neighbourhood, history from an Asian American’s perspective might be something that that community desires. Other schools in the Sacramento area may want English classes that have books from African American authors. These types of programs could be a way to build the community, teach the children to appreciate their heritage, increase tax revenue and attendance in certain communities, and improve academic performance. Or children in Rancho Cordova, California may want to attend an architectural high school where the curriculum focuses more calculus and analytic geometry, architectonics, history of architecture, and environments. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Different types of educational and community-based education, in short, claims the right to be different. Of it will require families to be more stable and have an attachment to their community. If they is not always possible for parents, that is were professional parenting may come into play, where people are willing to foster children so they can remain in the community and attend school. Or we may need for organizations in communities like the Ecumenical Institute. Perhaps a corporation can purchase a block of McMansions and they can have professional parents raise children and have the educated and these specialized schools in the community. The essential issue is allowing children to have a safe place, where they can learn, be safe, and have a fair chance at life. Because as it stands, by fixing city-wide standards and curricula, by choosing texts and personnel on a city-wide basis, leaders have imposed considerable uniformity on the schools and if America is going to stay a World Super Power, we need to get each and every student to tune in and work hard. The days of being spoiled and living a leisure life are over. We need students to be interested in their education and they need the help to be successful. We need to generate local variety in public education by turning over control of the schools to community authorities. Otherwise, failure to diversify education within the system will simply lead to the growth of alternative educational opportunities outside the system. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Thus we have today the suggestions of prominent educators and sociologist, including Kenneth B. Clark and Christopher Jencks, for the creatin of new schools outside of, and competitive with, the official public school systems. Mr. Clark has called for regional and state schools, federal schools, schools run by colleges, trade unions, corporations and even military units. Such competing schools would, he contends, help create the diversity that education desperately needs. Simultaneously, in a less formal way, a variety of “para-schools” are already being established by young, successful parents and other groups who find the mainstream educational system too homogenous. We see here, therefore, a major cultural force in the society—education—being pushed to diversify its output, exactly as the economy is doing. And here, exactly as in the realm of material production, the new technology, rather than fostering standardization, carries us toward super-industrial diversity. Computers, for example, make it easier for large school to schedule more flexibly. They make it easier for the school to cope with independent study, with a wider range of course offerings and more varied extracurricular activities. More important, computer-assisted education, programmed instruction and other such techniques, despite popular misconceptions, radically enhance the possibility of diversity in the classroom. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Computer-assisted education techniques permit each student to advance at one’s own purely personal pace. They permit one to follow a custom-cut path toward knowledge, rather than a rigid syllabus as in the traditional industrial era classroom. Aaliyah Haughton, for instance, went to a performing arts high school, scored well and became a successful actor, model, and singer. Moreover, in the educational World of tomorrow, that relic of mass production, the centralized work place, will also become less important. Just as economic mass production required large numbers of students to be assembled in factories, educational mass production required large numbers of students to be assembled in schools. This itself, with its demands for uniform discipline, regular hours, attendance checks and the like, was a standardizing force. Advanced technology will, in the future, make much of this unnecessary. A good deal of education will take place in the student’s own room at home or in a dorm, at hours of one’s own choosing. With vast libraries of data available to one via computerized information retrieval systems, with one’s own tapes and video units, one’s own language laboratory and one’s own electronically equipped study carrel, one will be freed, for much of the time, of the restrictions and unpleasantness that dogged one in the lockstep classrooms. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
The technology upon which these new freedoms will be based will inevitably spread through the schools in the years ahead—aggressively pushed, no doubt, my major corporations like Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, and Xerox. Within the next 30 years, the educational systems of the United States of America, and several Western European countries as well, will have broken decisively with the mass production pedagogy of the past, and will have advanced into an era of educational diversity based on the liberating power of the new machines. In education, therefore, as in the production of material goods, the society is shifting irresistibly away from, rather than toward, standardization. It is not simply a matter of varies automobiles, detergents, and syrup. The social thrust toward diversity and increased individual choice affects our mental, as well as our material surroundings. One of the functions of intuition is to protect the body against unnecessary sickness by warning the human in it when one is transgressing the laws of its hygiene, or by showing the right road. In this, intuition is pitted against the body’s past habits and animal appetites, the emotional nature’s desires, as well as the mind’s ignorance immaturity and inexperience—a combination of enemies which usually triumphs over it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Another of its functions is to protect the human against avoidable calamity or preventable loss, by consciously moving one out of its reach. However, here it has opposed to it the egoistic desires and habits or the emotional impulses and negative feelings which perceive only the immediate and not the impending, the semblance of things and not the actuality. The intuitive life does not always know how or why it acts, for it is often spontaneous and unconscious. However, when it does become at times intellectually self-conscious, its power in the World to affect humans is heightened, not lessened. Like Socrates we possess an inner warning voice which forbids certain course of action but does not recommend better ones. It is negative and not positive. Intuition—which is called the surest road to truth—eradicates hesitancies. When you are in contact with God in solving a problem, you receive a direct command what to do and you then know it is right. The clouds and hesitancies and vacillations which arise when struggling between contrary points of view, melt. Whereas, if you are not in contact with God, but only being carried along through universal law, then you swing back and forth with emotion or opinion. One is indeed fortunate whose intuition shows itself in one impelling thought strong enough to outclass all other conflicting thoughts. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
The uncomfortable feeling that something is wrong may combat the smooth plausible appearance of everything being right. One can depend on one thing alone to show one the right roads and the right master. It is intuition. If one’s reason governs one’s body and one’s intuition governs one’s reason, a human’s life will be less troubled and one’s happiness more secured. If a human acts according to intuitive wisdom, all will go well with one. This is not to say that one will be free from external misfortunes. However, if they come, they will be of the unavoidable kind and therefore less in number than if they included those of one’s own direct making. And even the others will be turned to profit in some way by the search for their underlying meanings, so that although humanity calls them evil, one will nevertheless gain some inner good from them. If one is sensitive enough and can touch the intuitive element within oneself, either deliberately by sheer power of deeply introspective concentration or spontaneously by immediate acceptance of its suggestive messages, one’s decisions will be filled with utter conviction and followed with resolute determination. One may be sure of this, that whatever action God’s leading causes one to take will always be for one’s ultimate good even thought it may be to one’s immediate and apparent detriment. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
There is the feeling of being led, but not the ability to see where, and to what, one is being led. To the degree that the intuitive element can displace all others for the rulership of one’s inner life, to that degree can a healing and guiding calm displace the emotion of moods and commotion of thought. To say what the Absolute is not, to describe it in negatives, is correct so far as it goes but is not so satisfactory. The terms Void or Space, being more positive, are even better. Space is a good metaphor of Mind. In one aspect it is bounded, in another it is infinite. Mind also is static and dynamic, still active, within Universes yet transcending them all. Where is the being who has ever known the unknowable and indescribable Supreme Godhead? For all humans came into existence after it already was there. However, whoever receives knowledge by tradition, investigation, or intuition, by meditation, revelation or even by science leading into metaphysics, by art or poetry or literature, may acquire the tremendous certitude that it is there. More—it must always have been there. That which transcends even the high Worldly authorities, even World-Mind, is unthinkable and unimaginable. Therefore it is without name or form, beyond all contact with the senses, beginningless and endless, neither growing nor diminishing, indestructible, free from any relations or comparisons—this Undefinable Mystery of Mysteries. Let no one seek it, for one cannot find IT. However, one can know that it is there and, through its manifestations, the God, worship IT. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
All human explanation of the nature of Mind, as all human expositions of the working of the World-Mind, are limited forms of language. This cannot be helped. It is outside time in a Now beyond the successive character of human thinking and incomprehensible to it. Yet intellect, though it cannot enter this Grand Mystery, can at its most brilliant perception infer that it is. Try as it might, the finite thinking mind cannot break through this sound-barrier of mystery which surrounds the Unique Being, That which is ever the same. All thoughts simply pile up, leaving the last one unanswered, if not unanswerable, or else ending in an involved labyrinth from which there is no outlet. IT cannot be investigated, but the fact of its necessary existence can be stated more emphatically than any other of the innumerable or observable facts. Both church and state assert standards and values in society; both seek authority; both compete for allegiance. As members of both the religious and the political spheres, the Christian is bound to face conflict. The conflict is particularly apparent in the Judeo-Christian tradition because of the assertion that the God of both the Old and New Testament Scriptures is King. That has been an offense to some of the proud and powerful since the beginning—and the reason many Jewish and Christians alike have been systematically persecuted. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
The tensions between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of humans runs like an unbroken thread through the history of the past two thousand years. It began not long after Christ’s birth. In the end one will have to confess, as the English hermit Richard Rolle confessed over six hundred years ago, despite one’s deep mystical experiences, that it is not possible to know what God is but only that He is. When the last words have been uttered, the final sentences written down; when the sermons, books, and articles have exhausted all that human intellect and human intuition can explain, suggest, or hint; when the profoundest mystical experience has yielded all that it could reveal, there will still remain an awed feeling before the Grand Mystery that is God, a tremendous humility before Its unknowableness. Because there is nothing quite like it in human experience and because there is no opposite in the entire cosmos from which it can be differentiated, the Absolute Being remains utterly incomprehensible to human intellect. The mystery of That Which Is baffles not only the comprehension of the ordinary mind but also that of the philosophic mind. There is an abyss which no human can cross, a mystery which remains utterly impenetrable to one. This is the transcendent Godhead. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
We can know as much, and as little, of God as the wave dashing against the Californian coastline can know of the immense ocean stretching so many thousand miles to the Australian shore: such is human insignificance in relation to that activity of God which is directed to thus Universe. However, in relation to that non-activity which is God-in-itself, at rest, we can know absolutely nothing. For here is Being without end, Mind without individualization of any kind, and Life without any bottom or top to it. The Unfathomable Mystery of Mind will always remain. Despite all the absurd claims to the contrary, no one has ever interpreted to us the great Mystery of mysteries, the Godhead behind the God active in the Universe. The more righteous a people become the more they are qualified for loving others and rendering them happy. A wicked human can have but little love for one’s wife; while a righteous human, being filled with the love of God, is sure to manifest this Heavenly attribute in every thought and feeling of one’s heart, and in every word and deed. Love, joy, and innocence will radiate from one’s very countenance, and be expressed in every look. This will beget confidence in the love of one’s heart; for love beget love; happiness imparts happiness; and these Heaven born emotions will continue to increase more and more, until they are perfected and glorified in all the fulness of eternal love itself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
True love of one human for another always includes the love of God from whom all good things issue. Without a strong commitment to the Lord, an individual is more prone to have a low level of commitment to a spouse. Weak commitments to eternal covenants lead to losses of eternal consequence. If two people are earnestly and faithfully observing all the ordinances and principles of the gospels, there could not arise any cause for divorce. The joy and happiness pertaining to the marriage relationship will grow sweeter, and spouses will become more and more attached to each other as the days go by. Not only will the husband love the wife and the wide the husband, but children born to them will live in an atmosphere of love and harmony. The love of each for the others will not be impaired, and moreover the love of all towards our Eternal Father and His Son Jesus Christ will be more firmly rooted in their soul. The Lord said, “Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 42.22. This kind of love can be shown for your wives in so many ways. First and foremost, nothing except God Himself takes priority over your wife in your life—not work, not recreation, not hobbies. What does it mean to love someone with all you heart? #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
To love someone with all of your heart means to love that individual with all your emotional feelings and with all your devotion. You cannot demean her, criticize her, find fault with her. What does it mean to cleave unto her? It means to stay close to her, to be loyal and faith to her, to communicate with her, and to express your love for her. It does not mean be like Evan Chambers, a young heir to a media conglomerate, from Greek thr TV show. His mother gave him a multi-million dollar trust fund in college, and a $100,000.00 German sports car, but he had to sign a contract stating he could only drive his car on approved trips and could not marry until he was 25. So, Evan took this as a sign that meant he was not supposed to genuinely love anyone, spend lavishly on his friends, and be a suave playboy. However, love means being sensitive to the feelings of the person you are with. Husbands, recognize your wife’s intelligence and her ability to counsel with you. Give her the opportunity to grow intellectually, emotionally, and socially as well as spiritually. Remember, brethren, love can be nurtured and nourished by little tokens. Flowers on special occasions are wonderful, but so is your willingness to help with the dishes, vacuum the carpet, get up with a crying child in the night, or leave the television or the newspaper to help with dinner. Those are the quiet ways we say, “I love you,” with our actions. They bring rich dividends for such little effort. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
If two people love the Lord more than their own lives and then love each other more than their own lives, working together in total harmony with the gospel program as their basic structure, they are sure to have this great happiness. When a husband and wife go together frequently to the holy temple, kneel in prayer together in their home with their family, go hand and hand to their religious meetings, keep their religious meetings, keep their lives wholly chaste—mentally and physically—so that their whole thoughts and desires and loves are all centered in the one being, their companion and both work together for the upbuilding of the kingdom of God then happiness is at its pinnacle. Moroni tells us that this highest of Christian virtues is more accurately labeled, “The pure love of Christ.” And it endures forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well him [and her]. “Wherefore, pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which he has bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ; that ye may become the sons [and daughters] of God; that when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; that we may be purified even as he is pure,” reports Moroni 7.47-48. True charity, the absolutely pure, perfect love of Christ, has really been known only once in this World—in the form of Christ Himself, the living Son of the living God. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
As in everything, Christ is the only one who got it all right, did it all perfectly, loved the way we are all to try to love. However, even though we fall short, that divine standard is there for us. It is a goal toward which we are to keep reaching, keep striving—and, certainly, a goal to keep appreciating. God of justice, may I not complain at what fate has brought to me. Please cleave my night with your lightning-axe, dividing my troubles into ones I can bear. O Lord, please open my lips and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. May my words of you be as sweet and beautiful as honey and more precious than silver and gold, diamonds and rubies. Praised art Thou, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, mighty, revered and exalted God. Thou bestowest lovingkindness and possesses all things. Mindful of the patriarchs’ love for Thee, Thou wilt in Thy love bring a redeemer to their children’s children, and their children’s children for the sake of Thy name. O King, Thou Helper, Redeemer and Shield, be Thou praised, O Lord, Shield of America. Thou, O Lord art mighty forever. Thou callest the dead to immortal life for Thou art mighty in deliverance. Our solutions to life’s problems are always gospel solutions. Not only are answers found in Christ, but so is the power, the gift, the bestowal, the miracle of giving and receiving those answers. In this matter of love no doctrine could be mor encouraging to us than that. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
Cresleigh Homes
Home is where your story begins. Let It begin with #Meadows Residence 1 at #PlumasRanch. This stunning home includes three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a two car garage plus workshop. Swipe to see the beautiful interiors. 👉👉👉https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/residence-1/
Plumas Lake by Cresleigh Homes offers spacious home designs with flexible floor plans and hundreds of designer options to personalize your home. Enjoy an unparalleled lifestyle of luxury and convenience, with incredible amenities, shopping, and dining.
Residence One at Cresleigh Meadows holds 2,054 square feet of single story living. The open concept design includes three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a two car garage plus workshop. Through the charming front porch enter into the foyer, where two secondary bedrooms lead off to a Jack and Jill bathroom. The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters. The great room is spacious and full of natural light.
The Owner’s suite is nestled in the rear of the home separate from the secondary bedrooms, providing maximum privacy. Enjoy a spa like experience in the Owner’s bathroom with a large walk in shower and large soaking tub.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together! #CresleighHomes
Mighty—Choose a Mighty Theme and Architecture that Speaks to Your Heart and Soul!
Good writing is true. Writing is a suspension of life in order to re-create life. We are in the process of becoming a World in which marriage is temporary rather than permanent, in which family arrangements are diverse and colorful, in which same gender couples are acceptable parents and retirees are starting to raise children—such a World is vastly different from the traditional past. All youth were once expected to find life-long partners. In the World we are becoming, being single is no crime. No longer are couples forced to remain imprisoned, as many were in the past, in marriages that had turned rancid. Divorce has been made easier to arrange, so long as responsible provision is made for children. In fact, the very introduction of professional parenthood is making the possibilities of divorce more conducive to mental and physical health because adults can discharge their parental responsibilities without necessarily remaining in a cage of a hateful marriage. With this powerful external pressure removed, those who stay together are those who wish to stay together, those for whom marriage is actively fulfilling—those, in short, who are in love. The family cycle has been one of the sanity-preserving constants in human existence. However, this cycle is changing. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
When the “mother” can compress the process of birth into a brief visit to an embryo emporium, when by transferring embryos from womb to womb we can destroy even the ancient certainty that childbearing took nine months, children will grow up into a World in which the family cycle, once so smooth and sure, will be jerkily arhythmic. Another crucial stabilizer will have been removed from the wreckage of the traditional order, another pillar of sanity broken. We have it in our power to shape change. We may choose one future over another. We cannot, however, maintain the past. In our family forms, as in our economics, science, technology and social relationships, we shall be forced to deal with the new. The Super-age of information Revolution will liberate humans from many of the barbarisms that grew out of the restrictive, relatively choiceless family patterns of the past and present. It will offer to each a degree of freedom hitherto unknow. However, it will exact a steep price for that freedom. As we hurtle into tomorrow, millions of ordinary men and women will face emotion-packed options so unfamiliar, so untested, that past experience will offer little clue to wisdom. In their family ties, as in all other aspects of their lives, they will be compelled to cope not merely with transience, but with the added problem of novelty as well. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
In such an environment, fast-changing and unfamiliar, we are forced, as we wend our way through life, to make our personal choices from a diverse array of options. And it is to the third central characteristic of tomorrow, diversity, that we must now turn. For it is the final convergence of these three factors—transience, novelty and diversity—that sets the stage for the historic crisis of adaptation that is the subject of this paper: future shock. The Super-age of information Revolution will consign to the archives of ignorance most of what we now believe about democracy and the future of human choice. Today in techno-societies there is an almost ironclad consensus about of freedom. Maximum individual choice is regarded as the democratic ideal. Yet most writers predict that we shall move further and further from this ideal. They conjure up a dark vision of the future, in which people appear as mindless consumer-creatures, surrounded by standardized goods, educated in standardized schools, fed a diet of standardized mass culture, and forced to adopt standardized styles of life. Choice was a real possibility for humans. By contrast, today, the human being is not as much an agent of choice. And, hopefully in the future, humans will not be confined to the role of a recording device. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
If people are robbed of their choice, they will be acted upon, not active. One will live, in a totalitarian state run by a velvet-gloved Gestapo and Sicherheitspolizei. This same theme—the loss of choice—is repeated by hippie gurus to Supreme Court justices, tabloid editorialists and existentialist philosophers. Put in its simplest form, this Theory of Vanishing Choice rests on a crude syllogism: Science and technology have fostered standardization. Science and technology will advance, making the future even more standardized than the present. Ergo: Humans will progressively lose their freedom of choice. If instead of blindly accepting this syllogism, we stop to analyze it, however, we make an extraordinary discovery. For not only is the logic itself faulty, the entire idea is premised on sheer factual ignorance about the nature, the meaning and the direction of the Super-age of information Revolution. Ironically, the people of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice, but from a paralyzing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice. It is a lot like the Vanishing dimensions theory, which suggests that systems with higher energy (more choices) have smaller number of dimensions (choices). #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
There could have been fewer choices in the past, but the number of products has increased so vastly that more producers are having to pack a variety of similar products into smaller spaces that is in actually reducing the variety of their inventory, which is restricting the consumers freedom. So, the only way to accommodate all the products on the market is by making stores larger, but it also overwhelms the consumer and makes competition for brands so fierce that only the biggest and must successful brands will succeed, so it will actually end up restrict freedoms to only certain producers and brands, and we will see fewer independent and unique choices. No person traveling across Europe or the United States of America can fail to be impressed by the architectural similarity of one gas station or airport to another. Any one thirsting for a soft drink will find one bottle of Coca-Cola to be almost identical with the next. Clearly a consequence of mass production techniques, the uniformity of certain aspects of our physical environment has long outraged intellectuals. Some decry the Hiltonization of our hotels; others charge that we are homogenizing the entire human race. Certainly, it would be difficult to deny that industrialism has had a leveling effect. Our ability to produce millions of nearly identical units is the crowing achievement of the industrial age. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
Thus, when intellectuals bewail the sameness of our material goods, they accurately reflected that state of affairs under industrialism. However, industrialism marked such a high period of success because it started when America will still a developing nation and people were escaping poverty. So, suburban communities were all the homes were nice, with well-manicured green lawns and everyone own a new Cadillac, Chevy, Buick of Ford sedan make people feel comfortable because it reflected the American Dream and an end of poverty. In the past, the American motorist took one’s pick of either “regular” or “premium.” Today one drives up to a gasoline station pump and is asked to choose from among eight different blends and mixes, but with more cars moving to electric technology, it will reduce the options and styles of car people will be able to buy. Notice most electric cars have fewer innovative changes in the body style over their lifetime? The number of different soaps and detergent on the American grocery shelf has increased from sixty-five to 200; frozen foods from 121 to 350; baking mixes and flours from eighty-four to 200. Even the variety of pet foods increased from fifty-eight to eighty-one. So we will see only the best selling items on the store shelf, which will actually decrease the variety, unless a certain market has a preference for a different product. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
One major company, Corn Products, produces a pancake syrup called Karo. Instead of offering the same product nationally, however, it sells two different viscosities, having found that Pennsylvanians, for some regional reason, prefer their syrup thicker than other Americans. In the field of office décor and furniture, the same process is at work. There are ten times the new styles and colours there were a decade ago. Every architect wants one’s own shade of green. Companies, in other words, are discovering wide variations in consumer wants and are adapting their production lines to accommodate them. Two economic factors encourage this trend: first, consumers have more money to lavish on their specialized wants; second, and even more important, as technology becomes more sophisticated, the cost of introducing variations declines. However, people are noticing more and more people like the same things because they want to blend in and be accepted and they also want to appeal to the masses for resale value of their homes and cars, personalities and clothes, so they may avoid things the are unique and particular. Primitive technology, it seems, may have allowed for more variety, and modern technology, with transience is leading to more standardization because people know they may have to move at anytime for their career, so they want to make safe choices that others will also like. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
It also many seem like in the past there was more variety, but in America, for example, we are looking at about 200 years of architectural manufacturing, and over certain eras, particular styles of architecture were mass produced, like during the 18th and 19th century, Queen Anne architecture was popular, then with the birth of the suburbs in the 1950s, ranch style homes and farm houses became more popular. So, we are looking at the past and seeing timelines of mass-produced items and believe there was more variety, and with the age of these style increasing, they become more unique and have a cult following. Automation, in a sense, is leading to a path of endless, blinding, mind-numbing diversity that we will only see when we look back. However, many engineers and business experts foresee the day when true diversity will cost no more than uniformity. Yet in the meanwhile, by wiping out thousands of little “mom and pop” businesses, we have without a doubt contributed to uniformity in the architectural environment. Still, the array of goods corporate stores provide for the consumer is incomparably more diverse than any corner store could afford to stock. Thus at the very moment that the economic conditions are encouraging architectural and product sameness they are also fostering gastronomic diversity. This lead many corporations and individuals to see that the future is truly a paradox. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
However, one has to also keep into mind that architectural variety is also strangled by local building codes and conservative trade unions. With more advanced technology, the more cost effective it is to introduce variation in output. We can safely predict, therefore, that when the construction industry catches up with manufacture in technological sophistication gas stations, airports, houses, and hotels, as well as supermarkets, will stop looking as if they had been poured from the same mould. Uniformity will give way to diversity, and we are actually starting to see this in high end boutique housing developments. Certain neighbourhoods are going for more of a Victorian style, others are requesting communities with six different architectural styles, but we are seeing others were people like the predictability of all the houses being the same height and elevation. Because of the desire for diversity, Watergate East, in Washington, DC, which is a Midcentury Modern 14-story, 240-unit historic condominium building that is considered an architectural gem, was produced between 1964 and 1978 at a cost of $78,000,000.00 by Societa Generale Immobilare (SGI). It is a computer-designed apartment house by Italian architect Luigi Moretti. Of the 240 apartments, 167 have different floor pans. And there are no continuous straight lines in the building anywhere. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
The building was modernized in 2019, and features large sunlit lobbies with full-height windows which reflects the architect’s vision of bring the outside inside. As with the lobbies, the recently renovated landscaped yards continue the original plan of noted landscape architect Boris Timchenko—offering views from ground-level walkways and cantilevered balconies looking down onto the green roof and open spaces, and there are flowering trees, and vibrant profusions of seasonal colour. The terraces are smoke free and some reach above the trees where residences can enjoy the foggy mornings. I raise my hands in prayer to God, to Him I pray, Lord of the Earth. He who was the first of any to die, the first of any to be reborn. He who raises with the Sun each day and sets with it each night. Out of my darkness and death, I call and pray to you, Lord of All. Out of my needs, I send my voice with honour and longing, in hope of intercession. Please grant me my prayer, Mighty One, you who know what it is to suffer. Please grant me my prayer, First Born Son of God, you who are the great giver. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our father, to grant our portion in Thy Holy Bible, and may the Temple be rebuilt in our day. There we will serve Thee with awe as in the days of old. O Lord, please open Thou my lips and my mouth shall declare Thy Praise. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
Cresleigh Homes
Welcome home to #MillsStation Residence 1. Designed with tallll ceilings and equally tall windows to allow all of that lovely natural light in. Swipe to see what we mean. 👉👉👉https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-1/
God Will Look to Every Soul Like its First Love Because He is its First Love!
Death is a metaphor; nobody dies to oneself. I believe that humans will not merely endure; they will prevail. My picture of the good sheepdog in the good homestead does not, of course, cover wild animals nor (a matter even more urgent) ill-treated domestic animals. However, it is intended only as an illustration drawn from one privileged instance—which is, also, in my view the only normal and unperverted instance—of the general principles to be observed in framing a theory of animal resurrection. I think Christians may justly hesitate to suppose any beasts immortal, for two reasons. Firstly because they fear, by attributing to beasts a “soul” in the full sense, to obscure that difference between beast and humans which is as sharp in the spiritual dimension as it is hazy and problematical in the biological. And secondly, a future happiness connected with the beast’s present life simply as a compensation for suffering—so many millenniums in the happy pastures paid down as “damages” for so many years of pulling carts—seems a clumsy assertion of Divine goodness. We, because we are fallible, often hurt a child or an animal unintentionally, and then the best we can do is to “make up for it” by some caress or tid-bit. However, it is hardly pious to imagine omniscience acting in that way—as though God trod on the animals’ tails in the dark and then did the best He could about it! #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
In such a botched adjustment I cannot recognize the master-touch; whatever the answer is, it must be something better than that. The theory I am suggesting tries to avoid both objections. It makes God the center of the Universe and humans the subordinate center of terrestrial nature: the beasts are not co-ordinate with humans, but subordinate to them, and their destiny is through and through related to ones. And the derivative immorality suggested for them is not a mere amende or compensation: it is part and parcel of the new Heaven and new Earth, organically related to the whole suffering process f the World’s fall and redemption. Supposing, as I do, that the personality of the tame animals is largely the gift of humans—that their mere sentience is reborn to soulhood in us as our mere soulhood is reborn to spirituality in Christ—I naturally suppose that very few animals indeed, in their wild state, attain to “self” or ego. However, if any do, and if it is agreeable to the goodness of God that they should live again, their immortality would also be related to humans—not, this time, to individual masters, but to humanity. That is to say, if in any instance the quasi-spiritual and emotional value which human tradition attributes to a beast (such as the “innocence” of the lamb or the heraldic royalty of the lion) has a real ground in the beast’s nature, and is not merely arbitrary or accidental, then it is that capacity, or principally in that, that the beast may be expected to attend on risen humans and make part of one’s “train.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Or if the traditional character is quite erroneous, then the beast’s Heavenly life would be in virtue of the real, but unknown, effect it has actually had on humans during their whole history: for if Christians cosmology is in any sense (I do not say, in a literal sense) true, then all that exists on our planet is related to humans, and even the creatures that were extinct before humans existed are then only seen in their true light when they are seen as the unconscious harbingers of humans. When we are speaking of creatures so remote from us as wild beasts, and prehistoric beasts, we hardly know what we are talking about. It may well be that they have no selves and no sufferings. It may even be that each species has a corporate self—that Lionhood, not lions, has shared in the travail of creation and will enter into the restoration of all things. And if we cannot imagine even our own eternal life, much less can we imagine the life the beasts may have as our “members.” If the Earthly lion could read the prophecy of that day when one shall eat hay like an ox, one would regard it as a description not of Heaven, but of hell. And if there is nothing in the lion but carnivorous sentience, then one is unconscious and one’s “survival” would have no meaning. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, if there is a rudimentary Leonine self, to that also God can give “body” as it pleases Him—a body no longer living by the destruction of the lamb, yet richly Leonine in the sense that is also expresses whatever energy and splendour and exulting power dwelled within the visible lion on this Earth. I think, under correction, that the prophet used an eastern hyperbole when he spoke of the lion on this Earth. I think, under correction, that the prophet used an eastern hyperbole when he spoke of the lion and the lamb lying down together. That would be rather impertinent of the lamb. To have lions and lambs that so consorted (except n some rare celestial Saturnalia of topsy-turvydom) would be the same as having neither lambs nor lions. I think the lion, when one has ceased to be dangerous, will still be awful: indeed, that we shall then first see that of which the present fangs and claws are a clumsy, and satanically perverted, imitation. There will still be something like the shaking of a golden mane: and often the good Duke will say, “Let him roar again.” It is required you do awake your faith. Then all stand still; or those that think it is unlawful business I am about, let them depart. Plunged in thy depth of mercy let me die the death that every soul that lives desires. “I reckon,” said St Paul, “that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us,” reports Romans 8.18. If this is so, a book on suffering which says nothing of Heaven, is leaving out almost the whole of one side of the account. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Scripture and tradition habitually put the joys of Heaven into the scale against the sufferings of Earth, and no solution of the problem of pain which does not do so can be called a Christian one. We are very sky nowadays of even mentioning Heaven. We are afraid of the jeer about “pie in the sky,” and of being told that we are trying to “escape” from the duty of making a happy World here and now into dreams of a happy World elsewhere. However, either there is “pie in the sky” or there is not. If there is not, then Christianity is false, for this doctrine is women into its whole fabric. If there is, then this truth, like any other, must be faced, whether it is useful at political meetings or no. Again, we are afraid that Heaven is a bribe, and that is we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in Heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A human’s love for a woman is not mercenary because one wants to marry her, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object. You may think that there is another reason for our silence about Heaven—namely, that we do not really desire it. However, that may be an illusion. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
What I am now going to say is merely an opinion of my own without the slightest authority, which I submit to the judgment of better Christians and better scholars than myself. There have been times when I think we do not desire Heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw—but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to one, that one is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of—something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Are not all lifelong friendships born at them moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have every deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that dies away just as they caught your ear. However, if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all. I am not, of course, suggesting that these immortal longings which we have from the Creator because we are humans, should be confused with the gifts of the Holy Spirit to those who are in Christ. We must not fancy we are holy because we are human. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
This signature on each soul may be a product of heredity and environment, but that only means that heredity and environment are among the instruments whereby God creates a soul. I am considering now how, but why, He makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one. Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to God; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. If you never had a key, the mould in which a key is made would a strange thing. And if you have never seen a lock, the key itself would be a strange thing. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a kay to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you—you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another’s. All that you are sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction. The Brocken spectre “looked to every man like his first love,” because she was a cheat. However, God will to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in Heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
It is from this point of view that we can understand hell in its aspect of privation. All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The say is coming when you will awake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever. This may seem a perilously private and subjective notion of the pearl of great price, but it is not. The thing I am speaking of is not an experience. You have experienced only the want of it. The thing itself has never actually been embodied in any thought, or image, or emotion. Always it has summoned you our of yourself. And if you will not go out of yourself to follow it, if you sit down to brood on the desire and attempt to cherish it, the desire itself will evade you. The door into life generally opens behind us, and the only wisdom for one haunted with the scent of unseen roses, is work. This secret fire goes out when you use the bellows: bank it down with what seems unlikely fuel of dogma and ethics, turn your back on it and attend to your duties, and then it will blaze. The World is like a picture with a golden background, and we the figures in that picture. Until you step off the plane of the picture into the large dimensions of death you cannot see the gold. However, we have reminders of it. To change our metaphor, the blackout is not quite complete. There are errors. At times the daily scene looks big with its secret. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Such is my opinion; and it may be erroneous. Perhaps this secret desire also is part of the Old Man and must be crucified before the end. However, this opinion has a curious trick of evading denial. The desire—much more the satisfaction—has always refused to be fully present in any experience. Whatever you try to identify with it, turns out to be not it but something else: so that hardly any degree of crucifixion or transformation could go beyond what the desire itself leads us to anticipate. Again, if this opinion is not true, something better is. However, “something better”—not this or that experience, but beyond it—is almost the definition of the thing I am trying to describe. The thing you long for summon you away from the self. Even the desire for the thing lives only if you abandon it. This is the ultimate law—the seed dies to live, the bread must be cast upon the waters, one that loses one’s soul will save it. However, the life of the seed, the finding of the bread, the recovery of the soul, are as real as the preliminary sacrifice. Hence it is truly said of Heaven, in Heaven there is no ownership. If any there took upon one to call anything one’s own, one would straightway be thrust out into hell and become an evil spirit. However, it is also said, “To one that overcometh I will give a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no human knoweth saving one that receiveth it,” reports Revelation 2.17. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
What can be more a human’s own than this new name which even in eternity remains a secret between God and one? And what shall we take this secrecy to mean? Surely, that each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the Divine beauty better than any other creature can. Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should love each differently? And this difference, so far from impairing, floods with meaning the love of all blessed creatures for one another, the communion of the saints. If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note. Aristotle has told us that a city is a unity of unlikes, and St Paul that a body in a unity of different members. Heaven is a city, and a Body, because the blessed remain eternally different: a society, because each has something to tell all the others—fresh and ever fresh news of “My God” whom each finds in Him whom all praise as “Our God.” For doubtless the continually successful, yet never complete, attempt by each soul to communicate its unique vision to all others (and that by means whereof Earthly art and philosophy are but clumsy imitations) is also among the ends for which the individual was created. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
For union exists only between distincts; and, perhaps, from this point of view, we catch a momentary glimpse of the meaning of all things. Pantheism is a creed not so much false as hopelessly behind times. Once, before creation, it would have been true to say that everything was God. However, God created: He causes things to be other than Himself that, being distinct, they might learn to love Him, and achieve union instead of mere sameness. Thus He also cast His bread upon the waters. Even within the creation we might say that inanimate matter, which has no will, is one with God in a sense in which humans are not. However, it is no God’s purpose that we should go back into that old identity (as, perhaps, some Pagan mystics would have us do) but that we should go on to the maximum distinctness there to be reunited with Him in a higher fashion. Even within the Holy One Himself, it is not sufficient that the Word should be God, it must also be with God. The Father eternally begets the Son and the Holy Ghost proceeds: deity introduces distinction within itself so that the union of reciprocal loves may transcend mere arithmetical unity or self-identity. However, the eternal distinctness of each soul—the secret which makes of the union between each soul and God a species in itself—will never abrogate the law that forbids ownership in Heaven. As to its fellow-creatures, each soul, we suppose will be eternally engaged in giving away to all the rest that which it receives. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
And as to God, we must remember that the soul is but a hollow which God fills. Its union with God is, almost by definition, a continual self-abandonment—an opening, an unveiling, a surrender, of itself. A blessed spirit is a mould ever more and more patient of the bright metal poured into it, a body ever more completely uncovered to the meridian blaze of the spiritual sun. We need not suppose that the necessity for something analogous to self-conquest will ever be ended, or that eternal life will not also be eternal dying. It is in this sense that, as there may be pleasures in hell (God shield us from them), there may be something not unlike pains in Heaven (God grant us soon to taste them). For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being. For the Eternal Word also gives Himself in sacrifice; and that not only on Calvary. For when He was crucified He did that in the wild weather of His outlying provinces which He had done at home in glory and gladness. From before the foundation of the World He surrenders begotten Deity back to begetting Deity in obedience. And as the Son glorifies the Father, so also the Father glorifies the Son. And, with submission,, as become a layman, I think it was truly said “God loveth not Himself as Himself but as Goodness; and if there were aught better than God, He would love that and not Himself,” reports Theol. Germ., xxxii. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
From the highest to the lowest, self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes the more truly self, to be thereupon yet the more abdicated, and so forever. This is not a Heavenly law which we can escape by remaining Earthly, nor an Earthly law which we can escape by being saved. What is outside the system of self-giving is not Earth, nor nature, nor “ordinary life,” but simply solely hell. Yet even hell derives from this law such as reality as it has. That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality; the negative shape which the outer darkness takes by surrounding and defining the shape of the real, or which the real imposes on the darkness by having a shape and positive nature of its own. The golden apple of selfhood, thrown among the false god, became an apple of discord because they scrambled for it. They did not know the first rule of the holy game, which is that every player must by all means touch the ball and then immediately pass it on. To be found with it in your hands is a fault: to cling to it, death. However, when it flies to and fro among the player too swift for eye to follow, and the great master Himself leads the revelry, giving Himself eternally to His creatures in the generation, and back to Himself in the sacrifice, of the Word, then indeed the eternal dance makes heaven drowsy with the harmony. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
All pains and pleasures we have known on Earth are early initiations in the movements of that dance: but the dance itself is strictly incomparable with the sufferings of this present time. As we draw nearer to its uncreated rhythm, pain, and pleasure sink almost out of sight. There is joy in the dance, but it does not exist for the sake of joy. It does not even exist for the sake of good, or of love. It is Love Himself, and Good Himself, and therefore happy. It does not exist for us, but we for it. The size and emptiness of the Universe which frightened us at the outset should awe us still, for though they may be no more than a subjective by-product of our three-dimensional imagining, yet they symbolize great truth. As our Earth is to all the stars, so doubtless are we humans and our concerns to all creation; as all the stars are so space itself, so are all creatures, all thrones and powers and mightiest of the created gods, to the abyss of the self-existing Being, who is to us Father and Redeemer and indwelling Comforter, but of whom no human nor angel can say nor conceive what He is in and for Himself, or what is the work that he maketh from the beginning to the end. For they are all derived and unsubstantial things. Their vision fails them and they cover their eyes from the intolerable light of utter actuality, which was and is and shall be, which never could have been otherwise, which has no opposite. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Pain is a common and definite event which can easily be recognized: but the observation of character or behaviour is less easy, less complete, and less exact, especially in the transient, if intimate, relation of doctor and patient. In spite of this difficulty certain impressions gradually take form in the course of medical practice which are confirmed as experience grows. A short attack of severe physical pain is overwhelming while it lasts. The sufferer is not usually loud in one’s complaints. One will be for relief but does not waste one’s breath on elaborating one’s troubles. It is unusual for one to lose self-control and to become wild and irrational. It is rare for the severest physical pain to become in this sense unbearable. When short, severe, physical pain passes it leaves no obvious alteration in behaviour. Long-continued pain has more noticeable effect. It is often accepted with little or no complain and great strength and resignation are developed. Pride is humbled or, at times, results in a determination to conceal suffering. Women with rheumatoid arthritis show a cheerfulness which is so characteristic that it can be compared to the spes phthisica of the consumptive: and is perhaps due more to a slight intoxication of the patient by the infection than to an increased strength of character. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Some victims of chronic pain deteriorate. They become querulous and exploit their privileged position as invalids to practice domestic tyranny. However, the wonder is that the failures are so few and the heroes so many; there is a challenge in physical pain which most can recognize and answer. One the other hand, a long illness, even without pain, exhausts the mind as well as the body. The invalid gives up the struggle and drifts helplessly and plaintively into a self-pitying despair. Even so, some, in a similar physical state, will preserve their serenity and selflessness to the end. To see it is a rare but moving experience. Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, to some, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.” Yet if the cause is accepted and faced, the conflict will strengthen and purify the character and in time the pain will usually pass. Sometimes, however, it persists and the effect is devastating; if the cause it not faced or not recognized, it produces the dreary state of the chronic neurotic. However, some by heroism overcome even chronic mental pain. They often produce brilliant work and strengthen, harden, and sharpen their character till they become like tempered steel. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
In actual insanity the picture is darker. In the whole realm of medicine there is nothing so terrible to contemplate as a human with chronic melancholia. However, most of the insane are not unhappy or, indeed, conscious of their condition. In either case, if they recover, they are surprisingly little changed. Often they remember nothing of their illness. Pain provides an opportunity of heroism; the opportunity is seized with surprising frequency. God walks at my side, armed with sword and staff, and in the darkest of nights, my fears fly before Him. He looks into my eyes, sitting with empty hands and in the brightest of days, my cares are as nothing. O Lord, please guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile, and to those who slander me, please let me give no heed. May my soul be humble and forgiving unto all. Please open Thou my heart, O Lord, unto Thy sacred Law, that Thy statutes I may know and all Thy truths pursue. Please bring to naught designs of those who seek to do me ill; please speedily defeat their aims and thwart their purposes for Thine own sake, for Thine own power, for Thy holiness and Law. That Thy loved ones be delivered, please answers us, O Lord, and save with Thy redeeming power. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Thou who establishest peace in the Heavens, please grant peace unto us and unto all America. Amen. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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With Our Backs to the Wall We Must Believe in the Justice of Our Cause!
There are only two kinds of politics…the politics of fear and the politics of trust. One says: you are encircled by monstrous dangers. The other says: the World is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of humans. We tend to experience ourselves, our identity, our soul, our ego, as located somewhere within the temple, also known as our body, that God has blessed us with. Our skin is a limiting membrane which covers our bodies all over. Some of us feel we live behind our eyes; others feel they live beyond their rib-cage, in the solar plexus, in their private regions, or just all over. Still each individual “I” is normally experienced inside while the rest of the World is felt to be outside. And the other way round also: what is inside my skin is me, what is outside is not me. The skin surface does help to establish a sense of where self ends and not-self begins, but it can lead to a dangerous metaphor, tempting us to use language which cannot accurately describe our experiences. The idea that our boundaries are experienced mainly when we encounter others has been in the background of the developing narrative of our discussion. It solves some theoretical problems, and, though it creates others, the new problems seem to me more manageable, more interesting, and more productive of further insights. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
We experience boundaries in so many different ways: with love, with frustration, with shock—as obstacles, as opportunities, as absences, as stone walls, as bridges. What an interesting difficulty to work with! It seems to suggest, for instance, that boundaries are kinds of relationships: that people are defined, enriched, frustrated, and delimited by their boundaries with others. The boundary between me and a person I love and trust is very different from the boundary between me and someone I experience as indifferent or intrusive. People who love and trust each other feel identified, so that the other person’s well-being feels almost like their own. People in such a relationship will think of themselves as “we.” Then, though you and I are individuals, the boundary between us is very different from the boundary between us and them. The boundary between me and you-who-are-one-of-us is very different from the boundary between me and those-people-over-there: their well-being is not identified with mine. They are different and the boundary is different because the relationship between them and us is different. In an intimate relation, the two concerned are each using the other’s public present in controlling their own irrational desires and fears. To lose a friend is to lose part of one’s public presence: to lose an intimate is to lose part of the bulwark that protects us from our own helplessness. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Each cell we create with the people we are close to consists, then, of a unique combination of intimate relations. We are what we share with those close to us—our parents, our spouses, our children. Experience leave memory-traces—neural processes organized in structures which reflect the experience. Concepts form when similar patterns of experiences repeatedly leave similar structures of memory-traces. Each time a patterned stimuli reappear, the concept will be stronger and clearer. Repeated similar experiences develop simple concepts. Eventually further experiences develop these concepts into more complex organizations. These are to some extent records of the past: more central or higher order processes, and eventually maps. A time comes when these records of the past, built up from experiences, themselves affect new experiences, creating expectations, directing attention, and so on. Phantasies is the word used for such concepts in psycho-analytic circles. To find out what is natural, we must study specimens which retain their nature and not those which have been corrupted. Thus far of humans suffering; but all this time “a plaint of guiltless hurt doeth pierce the sky.” The problem of animal suffering is appalling; not because the animals are so numerous (for, as we have seen, no more pain is felt when a million suffer than when one suffers) but because the Christian explanation of human pain cannot be extended to animal pain. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
So far as we known beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue: therefore they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it. At the same time we must never allow the problem of animal suffering to become the center of the problem of pain; not because it is unimportant—whatever furnishes plausible grounds for questioning the goodness of God is very important indeed—but because it is outside the range of our knowledge. God has given us data which enables us, in some degree, to understand out own suffering: He has given us no such data about beast. We know neither why they were made nor what they are and everything we say about them is speculative. From the doctrine that God is good we may confidently deduce that the appearance of reckless Divine cruelty in the animal kingdom is an illusion—and the fact that the only suffering we know at first hand (our own) turns out not to be a cruelty will make it easier to believe this. After that, everything is guesswork. We may begin by ruling out some of the pessimistic bluff that is common knowledge. The fact that vegetable lives “prey upon” one another and are in a state of “ruthless” competition is of no moral importance at ll. Life in the biological sense has nothing to do with good and evil until sentience appears. The very words “prey” and “ruthless” are mere metaphors. Wordsworth believed that every flower “enjoyed the air it breathes,” but there is no reason so suppose he was right. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
No doubt, living plants react to injuries differently from inorganic matter; but an anaesthetized human body reacts more differently still and such reactions do not prove sentience. We are, of course, justified in speaking of the death or thwarting of a plant as if it were a tragedy, provided that we know we are using a metaphor. To furnish symbols for spiritual experiences may be one of the functions of the mineral and vegetable Worlds. However, we must not become the victims of our metaphor. A forest in which half the trees are killing the other half may be a perfectly “good” forest: for its goodness consists in its utility and beauty and it does not feel. When we turn to the beasts, three questions arise. There is, first, the question of fact; what do animals suffer? There is, secondly, the question of origin; how did disease and pain enter the animal World? And, thirdly, there is the question of justice; how can animal suffering be reconciled with the justice of God? In the long run the answer to the first question is, We do not know; but some speculations may be worth setting down. We must begin by distinguishing among animals: for if the ape could understand us, he would take it very ill to be lumped along with the oyster and the earthworm in a single class of “animals” and contrasted to humans. Clearly in some ways the ape and humans are much more like each other than either is like a worm. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
At the lower end of the animal realm, we need not assume anything we could recognize as sentience. Biologists in distinguishing animal from vegetable do not make use of sentience or locomotion or other such characteristics as a layman would naturally fi upon. At some point, however (though where, we cannot say), sentience almost certainly comes in, for the higher animals have nervous systems very like our own. However, at this level we must still distinguish sentience from consciousness. If you happen never to have heard of this distinction before, I am afraid you will find it rather startling, but it has great authority and you would be ill-advised to dismiss it out of hand. Suppose that three sensations follow one another—first A, then B, then C. When this happens to you, you have the experience of passing through the process ABC. However, note what this implies. It implies that there is something in you which stands sufficiently outside A to notice A passing away, and sufficiently outside B to notice B now beginning and coming to fill the place which A has vacated; and something which recognizes itself as the same through the transition from A to B and B to C, so it can say, “I have had the experience ABC.” Now this something is what I call Consciousness or Soul and the process I have just described is one of the proofs that the soul, though experiencing time, is not itself completely “timeful.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The simplest experience of ABC as succession demands a soul which is not itself a mere succession of states, but rather a permanent bed along which these different portions of the stream of sensation roll, and which recognizes itself as the same beneath them all. Now it is almost certain that the nervous system of the higher animals presents it with successive sensation. It does not follow that it has any “soul,” anything which recognizes itself as having had A, and now having B, and now marking how B glides away to make room for C. If it had no such “soul,” what we call the experience ABC would never occur. There would, in philosophic language, be “a succession of perceptions”; that is, the sensations would, in fact, occur in that order, and God would know that they were so occurring, but the animal would not know. There would not be “a perception of succession.” This would mean that if you give such a creature two blows with a whip, there are, indeed, two pains: but there is n co-ordinating self which can recognize that “I have had two pains.” Even in the single pain, there is no self to say “I am in pain”—for if it could distinguish itself from the sensation—the bed from the stream—sufficiently to say “I am in pain,” it would also be able to connect the two sensations as its experience. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The correct description would be “Pain is taking place in this animal”; not, as we commonly, say, “This animal feel pain,” for the words “this” and “feels” really smuggle in the assumption that it is a “self” or “soul” or “consciousness” standing above the sensations and organizing them into an “experience” as we do. Such sentience without consciousness, I admit, we cannot imagine: not because it never occurs in us, but because, when it does, we describe ourselves as being “unconscious.” And rightly. The fact that animals react to pain much as we do is, of course, no proof that they are conscious; for we may also react under chloroform, and even answer questions while asleep. How far up the scale such unconscious sentience may extend, I will not even guess. It is certainly difficult to suppose that the apes, the elephant, and the higher domestic animals, have not, in some degree, a self or soul which connects experiences and gives rise to rudimentary individuality. However, at least a great deal of what appears to be animal suffering need not be suffering in any real sense. It may be we who have invented the “sufferers” by the “pathetic fallacy” of reading into the beasts a self for which there is no real evidence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The origin of animal suffering could be traced, by earlier generations, to the Fall of man—the whole World was infected by the uncreating rebellion of Adam. This is now impossible, for we have good reason to believe that animals existed long before humans. Carnivorousness, with all that it entails, is older than humanity. Now it is impossible at this point not to remember a certain sacred story which, though never included in the creeds, has been widely believed in the Church and seems to be implied in several Dominical, Pauline, and Johannie utterances—I mean the story that humans were not the first creature to rebel against the Creator, but that some older and mightier being long since because apostate and is now the emperor of darkness and (significantly) the Lord of this World. Some people would like t reject all such elements from Our Lord’s teaching: and it might be argued that when He emptied Himself of His glory He also humbled Himself to share, as humans, the current superstitions of His time. And I certainly think that Christ, in the flesh, was not omniscient—if only because a human brain could not, presumably, be the vehicle of omniscient consciousness, and to say that Our Lord’s thinking was not really conditioned by the size and shape of His brain might be to deny the real incarnation and become a Docetist. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Thus, if Our Lord had committed Himself to any scientific or historical statement which we knew to be untrue, this would not disturb my faith in His deity. However, the doctrine of Satan’s existence and fall is not among the things we know to be untrue: it contradicts not the facts discovered by scientists but the mere, vague “climate of opinion” that we happen to be living in. Now I take a very low view of “climates of opinion.” In one’s own subject every human knows that all discoveries are made and all errors corrected by those who ignore the “climate of opinion.” It seems to me, therefore, a reasonable supposition, that some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material Universe, or the solar system, or, at least, the planet Earth, before ever humans came on the scene: and that when man fell, someone had, indeed, tempted him. This hypothesis is not introduced as a general “explanation of evil”: it only gives a wider application to the principle that evil comes from the abuse of free will. If there is such a power, as I myself believe, it may well have corrupted the animal creation before humans appeared. The intrinsic evil of the animal World lies in the fact that animals, or some animals, live by destroying each other. That plants do the same I will not admit to be an evil. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The Satanic corruption of the beasts would therefore be analogous, in one respect, with the Satanic corruption of humans. For one result of man’s fall was that his animality fell back from the humanity into which it had been taken up but which could no longer rule it. In the same way, animality may have been encouraged to slip back into behaviour proper to vegetables. It is, of course, true that the immense morality occasioned by the fact that many beasts live on beasts is balanced, in nature, by an immense birthrate, and it might seem, that if all animals had been herbivorous and healthy, they would mostly starve as a result of their own multiplication. However, I take the fecundity and the death rate to be correlative phenomena. There was, perhaps, no necessity for such an excess of the sexual impulse: the Lord of this World thought of it as a response to carnivorousness—a double scheme for securing the maximum amount of torture. If it offends less, you may say that the “life-force” is corrupted where I say that living creatures were corrupted by an evil angelic being. We mean the same thing: but I find it easier to believe in a myth of gods and demons than in one of hypostatized abstract nouns. And after all, our mythology may be much nearer to literal truth than we suppose. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Let us not forget that Our Lord, on one occasion, attributes human disease not to God’s wrath, not to nature, but quite explicitly to Satan. If this hypothesis is worth considering, it is also worth considering whether humans, at their first coming into the World, had not already a redemptive function to perform. Humans, even now, can do wonders to animals: my bird and dog live together in my house and seem to like it. It may have been one of human’s functions to restore peace to the animal World, and if one had not joined the enemy one might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable. Finally, there is the question of justice. We have seen reason to believe that not all animals suffer as we think they do: but some, at least, look as if they had selves, and what shall be done for these innocents? And we have seen that it is possible to believe that animal pain is not God’s handiwork but begun by Satan’s malice and perpetuated by human’s desertion of one’s post: still, if God has not caused it, He has permitted it, and once again, what shall be done for these innocents? I have been warned not even to raise the question of animal immorality, least I find myself in company with nature lovers. However, I believe maybe that animals are reborn into human form, but then, they would be missed in Heaven. Only God knows. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Nonetheless, the complete silence of Scripture and Christian tradition on animal immortality is a more serious objection; but it would be fatal only if Christian revelation showed any signs of being intended as a systeme de la nature answering all questions. However, it is nothing of the sort: the curtain has been rent at one point only, to reveal our immediate practical necessities and not to satisfy our intellectual curiosity. If animals were, in fact, immortal, it is unlikely, from what we discern of God’s method in the revelation, that He would have revealed this truth. Even our own immortality is a doctrine that comes late in the history of Judaism. The argument from silence is therefore very weak. The real difficulty about supposing most animals to be immortal is that immortality has almost no meaning for a creature which is not “conscious” in the sense explained above. However, thinking animals are reborn as humans is, in a way, a belief that being human is a blessing, and an assumption that animals would like the freedom of being human. Yet, for all we know, they may consider their own forms a blessing and just mimic human traits because they are around humans and terrestrial beings also. If the life of a newt is merely a succession of sensations, what should we mean by saying that God may recall to life the newt that died today? #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
It would not recognize itself as the same newt; the pleasant sensation of any other newt that lived after its death would be just as much, or just as little, a recompense for its Earthly suffering (if any) as those of its resurrected—I was going to say “self,” but the whole point is that the newt probably has no self. The thing we have to try to say, on this hypothesis, will not even be said. There is, therefore, I take it, no question of immortality for creatures that are merely sentient. Nor do justice and mercy demand that there should be, for such creatures have no painful experience. Their nervous system delivers all the letters, A, P, N, I, but sine they cannot read they never build it up to the word PAIN. And all animals may be in that condition. If, nevertheless, the strong conviction which we have of a real, though doubtless rudimentary, selfhood in the higher animals, and specially in those we tame, is not an illusion, their destiny demands a somewhat deeper consideration. The error we must avoid is that of considering themselves. Humans are to be understood only in their relation to God. The beats are to be understood only in their relation to humans and, through humans, to God. Let us here guard against one of those untransmuted lumps of atheistical thought which often survive in the minds of modern believers. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Atheists naturally regard the co-existence of humans and the animals as a mere contingent result of interacting biological facts; and the taming of an animal by a human as a purely arbitrary interference of one species with another. The “real” or “natural” animal to them is the wild one, and the tame animal is an artificial or unnatural thing. However, a Christian must not think so. Humans were appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything a human does to an animal is either a lawful exercise, or a sacrilegious abuse, of an authority by Divine right. The tame animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only “natural” animal—the only one we see occupying the place it was made to occupy, and it is on the tame animal that we must base all our doctrine of beasts. Now it will be seen that, in so far as the tame animal has a real self or personality, it owes this most entirely to its master. If a good sheepdog seems “almost human” that is because a good shepherd has made it so. I have already noted the mysterious force of the word “in.” I do not take all the sense of it in the New Testament to be identical, so that humans are in Christ and Christ in God and the Holy Spirit in the church and also in the individual believer in exactly the same sense. They may be sense that rhyme or correspond rather than a single sense. I am now going to suggest—though with great readiness to be set sight by real theologians—that there may be a sense, corresponding, though not identical, with these, in which those beasts that attain a real self are in their masters. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
That is to say, you must not think of a beast by itself, and call that a personality and then inquire whether God will raise and bless that. You must take the whole context in which the beast acquires its selfhood—namely “The-goodman—and—the—goodwife—ruiling—their—children—and—their—beasts—in—the—good—homestead.” That whole context may be regarded as a “body” in the Pauline (or a closely sub-Pauline) sense; and how much of that “body” may be raised along with the goodman and the goodwife, who can predict? So much, presumably, as is necessary for not only the glory of God and the beatitude of the human pair, but for that particular glory and that particular beatitude which is eternally coloured by that particular terrestrial experience. And in this way it seems to me possible that certain animals may have an immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality of their masters. And the difficulty about personal identity in a creature barely personal disappears when the creature is thus kept in its proper context. If you ask, concerning an animal thus raised as a member of the whole Body of the homestead, where its personal identity resides, I answer “Where its identity always did reside even in the Earthly life—in its relation to the Body and, specially, to the master who is the dead of that Body.” In other words, the human will know one’s dog: the body will know its master and, in knowing one, will be itself. To ask that the dog should, in any other way, know itself, it probably to ask for what has no meaning. Animals are not like that, and do not want to be. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The utter incomprehensibility of the ultimate Source makes it impossible for any religion to offer more than its own symbols to the human mind. From them humans create their own mental pictures. However, one does not and cannot touch the Untouchable. God is unpicturable by human imagination, truth is unattainable by human thinking. There is a grand mystery at the heart of things. Why then degrade the Unique by confounding its symbols or traditions (in all religions) with its reality? If, remembering the infinitude of the Ultimate Reality, we refuse to personify it and refuse to worship such a personification, we lift ourselves from the exclusively religious to the integrally religio-mystical-philosophic stand point. In ancient Mexico, the Highest Godhhead was the Idea that could not be reproduced and no personification or representation of it of any kind was allowed. However, this doctrine only for upper classes and he intellectually cultivated. The masses were given a God who was visible and comprehensible. The ultimate reality cannot be represented with any fidelity nor can the ultimate truth be communicated with any accuracy. Let no one confuse this grand concept of the Absolute, the Unbounded, the Timeless, with the lesser concept of a God made in a semi-human image. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
We may not personalize the Absolute except at the terrible cost of utterly deceiving ourselves. So philosophy holds that no words can ever describe, no concept ever express, no human leader ever incarnate the ineffable truth, and that all assertion to the contrary merely defile truth. IT cannot be confined. It is totally incommunicable, but thoughts about it can be communicated in words or formed into pictures. It is totally incommunicable, but thoughts about it can be communicated in words or formed into pictures. So far as truth can appear in words, this is so. However, on the ultimate level, that is but an echo of an echo infinitely multiplied. It is merely a statement about reality, but it is not reality itself. It is a sound in the air (if voiced) or a mark on paper (if printed) but not truth. Nothing that words could say could give any proper description of That Which Is, for it belongs to a totally different dimension. So this is God, or more correctly, as near as humans can get to Go. No one can describe the Absolute, or speak on its behalf, for that would impose one’s human consciousness upon it and merely create a private imagination about it. The Real cannot be put under any label or classification because it is what it is of itself. Yet it pervades all things. We must separate, in our human thought, Mind as passive reality (the void) from Mind as active being (World-Mind). #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
All our understanding and interpretation of such words as are affixed to this state, by they Overself, Divine Being, Absolute, or Reality, is inevitably drawn from, and associated with, our experience in the World of time-space and relativity. It is what these words mean for our minds, not what they mean in themselves, that constitutes our use of them. We easily fall into self-deception about them, for the meaning given them is what we imagine, not what we know. Being especially above all relationships and contrasts that the intellect can make or the imagination can create, it cannot be rightly called “The One” as it so often has been, for that implies that a second or a third entity of the same kind could be added to it, which is false. The intellect may attempt the task during its highest flights, but in the end what does it produce? Only more thoughts! This is the Godhead, of which, in nearly all the ancient religious Mysteries, lawfully humans may make no image and to which one may give no name. This is simply because all names attached to it and all descriptions made of it cannot help being incomplete. Each word which can be used for the first goal tells of some particular aspect, be it knowledge, awakening, or enlightenment. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Beyond that incomplete description words cannot go, except negatively. The last thought that intelligence can make is about this divine mystery which lies beyond everything thinkable: but it will necessarily have to be a negative thought, that is, it can only say what the Godhead is not, deny any and every affirmation about it, unknow all that it has previously known about Go. Every attempt at understanding the Great Mystery, and very much more at representing it, merely leads to self-deception. It is not only the Uncontradictable, but also the Unapproachable. We may ascribe no attributes to Mind nor confine it within any limitations. The great mysterious emptiness—that is all humans can know of God. Although nothing can be written about IT that is truly descriptive, everything can be written about what leads up to the revelation of IT; that can be written with precision and luminosity. The inside must forever elude words, but the outside need not. The greatest of questions, “What is Truth?” is answered best by Silence; this answer is inherent in the question. Metaphysics and poetry may provide a medium for clues and hints, symbols and images. One will find, if one accepts this intuitive leading, that although the unfavourable circumstances may remain the same, unchanged, one’s attitude towards them does not. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Out of this inner change there will be given one the strength to deal with them, the calm t deal with them unmoved, and the wisdom to deal with them properly. There is no single pattern that an intuitively guided life must follow. Sometimes one will see in a flash of insight both course and destination, but at other times one will see only the next step ahead and will have to keep an open mind both as to the second step and as to the final destination. May I not forget in the midst of despair that all things are born from God, so that even the trials that come to afflict me are the children of those who are my blessed parents. Grant peace, well-being and blessings unto the Word, with grace, loving kindness and mercy for us and for all America, Thy people. Please bless us, O our Father, all of us together, with the light of Thy presence; for by that light Thou hast given us, O Lord our God, the Bible of life, loving kindness and righteousness, blessing and mercy, life and peace. O may it be good in Thy sight at all times to bless Thy people America with Thy peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who blesses Thy people America with peace. In the book of life, blessing, peace and ample sustenance, may we, together with all Thy people, the house of America, be remembered and inscribed before Thee for a happy life and for peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who establishest peace. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Love, as Defined by the Lord, Elevates, Protects, Respects, and Enriches Another!
Good-bye, good night. Merry Christmas. God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth. What seems to be reasonable conditions for engaging in civil disobedience, and can we connect these conditions more systematically with the place of civil disobedience in a state of near justice? Of course, the conditions enumerated should be taken as presumptions; no doubt there will be situations when they do not hold, and other arguments could be given for civil disobedience. The first point concerns the kinds of wrongs that are appropriate objects of civil disobedience. Now if one views such disobedience as a political act addressed to the sense of justice of the community, then it seems reasonable, other things equal, to limit it to instances of substantial and clear injustice, and preferably to those which obstruct the path to removing other injustices. For this reason there is a presumption in favour of restricting civil disobedience to serious infringements of the first principle of justice, the principle of equal liberty, and to blatant violations of the second part of second principle, the principle of fair equality of opportunity. Of course, it is not always easy to tell whether these principles are satisfied. Still, if we think of them as guaranteeing the basic liberties, it is often clear that these freedoms are not being honoured. After all, they impose certain strict requirements that must be visibly expressed in institutions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Thus when certain marginalized members of the population are denied the right to vote or to hold office, or to own property and to move from place to place, or when certain religious groups are repressed and others denied various opportunities, these injustices may be obvious to all. They are publicly incorporated into the recognized practice if not the letter, of social arrangements. The establishment of these wrongs does not presuppose an informed examination of institutional effects. By contrast infractions of the difference principle are more difficult to ascertain. There is usually a wide range of conflicting yet rational opinion as to whether this principle is satisfied. The reason for this is that is applied primarily to economic and social institutions and policies. A choice among these depends upon theoretical and speculative beliefs as well as upon a wealth of statistical and other information, all of this seasoned with shrewd judgement and speculative beliefs as well as upon a wealth of statistical and other information, all of this seasoned with shrewd judgment and plain hunch. In view of the complexities of these questions, it is difficult to check the influence of self-interest and prejudice; and even if we can do this in our own case, it is another matter to convince others of our good faith. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Thus unless tax laws, for example, are clearly designed to attack or to abridge a basic equal liberty, they should not normally be protested by civil disobedience. The appeal to the public’s conception of justice is not sufficiently clear. The resolution of these issues is best left to the political process provided that the requisite equal liberties are secure. In this case a reasonable compromise can presumably be reached. The violation of the principle of equal liberty is, then, the more appropriate object of civil disobedience. This principle defines the common status of equal citizenship in a constitutional regime and lies at the basis of the political order. When it is fully honoured the presumption is that other injustices, while possibly persistent and significant, will not get out of hand. A further condition for civil disobedience is the following. We may suppose that the normal appeals to the political majority have already been made in good faith and that they have failed. The legal means of redress have proved of no avail. Thus, for example, the existing political parties have shown themselves indifferent to the claims of the minority or have proved unwilling to accommodate them. Attempts to have the laws repealed have been ignored and legal protests and demonstrations have had no success. Since civil disobedience is a last resort, we should be sure that it is necessary. Note that it has been said, however, tat legal means have been exhausted. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
At any rate, further normal appeals can be repeated; free speech is always possible. However, if past actions have shown the majority immovable or apathetic, further attempts may reasonably be thought fruitless, and a second condition for justified civil disobedience is met. This condition is, however, a presumption. Some cases may be so extreme tat there may be no duty to use first only legal means of political opposition. If, for example, the legislature were to enact some outrageous violations of equal liberty, say by forbidding the religion of a weak and defenseless minority, we surely could not expect that sect to oppose the law by normal political procedures. Indeed, even civil disobedience might be much too mild, the majority having already convicted itself of wantonly unjust and overtly hostile aims. The third and last condition being considered is rather complicated. It arises from the fact that while the two preceding conditions are often sufficient to justify civil disobedience, this is not always the case. In certain circumstances the natural duty of justice may require a certain restraint. We can see this as follows. If a certain minority is justified in engaging in civil disobedience, then any other minority is relevantly similar circumstances is likewise justified. Using the two previous conditions as the criteria of relevantly similar circumstances, we can say that, other things equal, two minorities are similarly justified in resorting to civil disobedience if they have suffered for the same length of time for the same degree of injustice and if their equally sincere and normal political appeals have likewise been to no avail. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
It is conceivable, however, even if it is unlikely, that there should be many groups with an equally sound case (in the sense just defined) for being civilly disobedient; but that, if they were all to act in this way, serious disorder would follow which might well undermine the efficacy of the just constitution. I assume here that there is a limit in the extent to which civil disobedience can be engaged in without leading to a breakdown in the respect for law and the constitution, thereby setting in motion consequences unfortunate for all. There is also an upper bound on the ability of the public forum to handle such forms of dissent; the appeal that civilly disobedient groups wish to make can be distorted and their intention to appeal to the sense of justice of the majority lost sight of. For one or both of these reasons, the effectiveness of civil disobedience as a form of protest declines beyond a certain point; and those contemplating it must consider these constraints. The ideal solution from a theoretical point of view calls for cooperative political alliance of the minorities to regulate the overall level of dissent. For consider the nature of the situation: there are many groups each equally entitled to engage in civil disobedience. Moreover they all wish to exercise this right, equally strong in each case; but if they all do so, lasting injury may result to the just constitution to which they each recognize a natural duty of justice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Now when there are many equally strong claims which if taken together exceed what can be granted, some fair plan should be adopted so that all are equitably considered. In simple cases of claims to goods that are indivisible and fixed in number, some rotation or lottery scheme may be the fair solution when the number of equally valid claims is too great. However, this sort of device is completely unrealistic here. What seems called for is a political understanding among the minorities suffering from injustice. They can meet their duty to democratic institutions by coordinating their actions so that while each has an opportunity to exercise its right, the limits on the degree of civil disobedience are not exceeded. To be sure, an alliance of this sort is difficult to arrange; but with perceptive leadership, it does not appeal impossible. Certainly the situation envisaged is a special one, and it is quite possible that these sorts of consideration will not be a bar to justified civil disobedience. There are not likely to be many groups similarly entitled to engage in this form of dissent while at the same time recognizing a duty to a just constitution. One should not, however, that an injured minority is tempted to believe its claims as strong as those of any other; and therefore even if the reasons that different groups have for engaging in civil disobedience are not equally compelling, it is often wise to presume that their claims are indistinguishable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Adopting this maxim, the circumstances imagined seems more likely to happen. This kind of case is also instructive in showing that the exercise of the right to dissent, like the exercise of rights generally, is sometimes limited by others having the very same right. Everyone’s exercising this right would have deleterious consequences for all, and se equitable plan is called for. Suppose that in the light of the three conditions, one has a right to appeal one’s case by civil disobedience. Thus injustice one protests is a clear violation of the liberties of equal citizenship, or of equality of opportunity, this violation having been more or less deliberate over an extended period of time in the face of normal political opposition, and any complications raised by the question of fairness are met. These conditions are not exhaustive; some allowance still has to be made for the possibility of injury to third parties, to the innocent, so to speak. However, I assume that they cover the main points. There is still, of course, the question whether it is wise or prudent to exercise this right. Having established the right, one is now free, as one is not before, to let these matters decide the issue. If our conduct only serves to provoke the harsh retaliation of the majority, we may be acting within our rights but nevertheless unwisely. To be sure, in a state of near justice, vindictive repression of legitimate dissent is unlikely, but it is important that the action be properly designed to make an effective appeal to the wider community. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Since civil disobedience is a mode of address taking place in the public forum, care must be taken to see that it is understood. Thus the exercise of the right to civil disobedience should, like any other right, be rationally framed to advance one’s ends or the ends of those one wishes to assist. The theory of justice has nothing specific to say about these practical considerations. In any event questions of strategy and tactics depend upon the circumstances of each case. However, the theory of justice should say at what point these matters are properly raised. Now in this account of the justification of civil disobedience I have not mentioned the principle of fairness. The natural duty of justice is the primary basis of our political ties to a constitutional regime. As we noted before only the more favoured members of society are likely to have a clear political obligation as opposed to a political duty. They are better situated to win public office and find it easier to take advantage of the political system. And having done so, they have acquired an obligation owed to citizens generally to uphold the just constitution. However, members of subjected minorities, say, who have a strong case for civil disobedience will not generally have a political obligation of this sort. This does not mean, however, that the principle of fairness will not give rise to important obligations in their case. For not only do many of the requirements of private life derive from this principle, but it comes into force wen persons or groups come together for common political purposes. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Just as we acquire obligations to others with whom we have joined in various private associations, those who engage in political action assume obligatory ties to one another. Thus while the political obligation of dissenters to citizens generally is problematical, bonds of loyalty and fidelity still develop between them as they seek to advance their cause. In general, free association under a just constitution give rise to obligations provided that the ends of the group are legitimate and its arrangements fair. This is as true of political as it is of other associations. These obligations are of immense significance and they constrain in many ways what individuals can do. However, they are distinct from an obligation to comply with a just constitution. My discussion of civil disobedience is in terms of the duty of justice alone; a fuller view would note the place of these other requirements. When religion is allowed to invade public life, things have come to a pretty pass when. Slavery, for instance, was a very unjust institution. People were packed into a dark bottom of a ship, barely able to breathe because of the stench of human waste and vomit, as they lay chest to back, legs drawn into a fetal position, feet resting on the heads of those in the next row. Some were taken prisoner during tribal wars. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Others were jailed as petty criminals; and many had been unsuspecting dinner guests of Englishmen visiting their country. However, all had been forcibly enslaved and held in a stockade on the African coast until sold to the highest bidder. That bidder was the captain in the cabin above. Once purchased they had been branded and rowed to the schooner waiting offshore, their screams and cries ignored by the seamen who hoisted them abroad and chained them in the stinking hold. For the women, however, there was a further torture. The crew, diseases and ill-treated themselves, claimed the one sordid privilege of their trade—the pick of the slave women. Once under way, the ship had become half bedlam, half brothel. Now, several weeks into the voyage, sixty slaves had already died. Fever had taken some. Others, driven insane by the horror of their lot, had been killed by the crew. Each morning when the lower decks were opened, several dead or near-dead bodies were thrown to the sharks trailing the ship. The captain cursed as the bodies hit the choppy water. Each body overboard meant lost profits. For those who survived the hellish three-month journey, an equally gruesome future awaited. They would be auctioned naked in the marketplace to planter who would work them to death on their Caribbean plantations. Never again would these African men and women see their homeland. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Thousands of miles to the north, in a country that profited richly from this human misery, another man sat at his desk. He too gazed into darkness still filled his second-floor library at Number 4 Old Palace Yard, London. Only his piercing blue eyes reflected the turmoil of his thoughts as he eyed the jumble of pamphlets on his cluttered desk. He ran his hand through his wavy hair and opened his Bible to begin the day, as was his custom, with Scripture reading and prayer. However, his thoughts kept returning to the pamphlets, grisly accounts of human flesh sold like mutton for the profit of his countrymen. No matter how be tried, William Wilberforce could not wipe these scenes from his mind. William Wilberforce was the only son of prosperous merchant parents. High society revolved around romantic intrigue and adulterous affairs. An upper-class couple might not be seen together in public for weeks during the social season, for no popular hostess would invite a husband and wife to the same event. The poor, of course, had no such opportunity to escape from one another. Crammed together in shabby dwellings, they were cogs grinding out a living in the Empire’s emerging industrial machines. Pale children worked eighteen hours a day in cotton mills or coal mines to bring homes a few shillings a month to parents who often wasted in on inexpensive gin. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
London was a city where unchecked passions and desires ran their course. Few raised their voice in opposition. So it is not surprising that few argued against one of the nation’s most bountiful sources of wealth—the slave trade. In fact, the trade was both a successful business and a national policy. Political alliances revolved around commitments to it. It became known euphemistically as “the institution,” the “pillar and support of British plantation industry in the West Indies.” In a celebrated case in England’s high court only four years earlier, slaves had been seemed “goods and chattels.” Corruption in government was so widespread that few members of Parliament thought twice about accepting bribes for their votes. Planters and other gentlemen involved in the slave trade paid three to five thousand pounds to “buy” boroughs, which sent their representatives to the House of Commons. The same attitude reigned in the House of Lords. Their political influence in Parliament grew until a large bloc was controlled by the vested influence of the slave trade. The horrors of the trade were remote and unseen, the cotton and sugar profits they yielded very tangible. So most consciences were not troubled about the Black men and women suffering far away on the high sea or on remote plantations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Many people say that some used Christianity and the Bible to incorrectly justify slavery, but that was not always the case. John Newton, son of a sailor, had been impressed into the Royal Navy when he was eleven. He deserted, was caught in West Africa, flogged, and placed into service on a slave ship. Eventually he became involved in the slave trade and in 1750 was given command of his own ship. On one especially stormy passage to West Indies, however, Mr. Newton was converted to faith in Jesus Christ. He renounced slaving and expressed his wonder at the gift of salvation in his famous hymn, “Amazing Grace.” Some people become so absorbed in politics that they never give themselves time for due reflection on religion. God wants to being compassion to the oppressed as well as oppose the oppressors. Almighty God has set before His people even today, two great objectives. The abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. Slaver is so enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable, and an iniquity such as this, because it still happens today, must be abolished. We still live in a time, even in American, where the country’s economic strength depends on slavery at home and abroad. There are different forms from forced labour to human trafficking. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
An estimated 25 million victims are trapped in modern-day slavery. Of these, 16 million (64 percent) were exploited for labour, and approximately 5 million (19 percent) were exploited for pleasures of the flesh, 4 million (17 percent) were exploited in state-imposed forced labour. Forced labour takes place in many different industries. Therefore, private faith that does not act in the face of oppression is no faith at all. Slavery is a subject, in which the interest, not of this country, nor of Europe alone, but of the whole World, and of posterity, are involved. It is impossible for me not to feel both terrified and concerned at our leader’s inadequacy to abolish slavery in their communities before taking hold of state, nation, or international positions. However, as a race—the human race—as a nation, and as citizens of God’s Kingdom, we must fight for the total abolition of the slave trade. This is bigger than climate change, bigger than COVID-19, and much bigger than any jobs report because without human life, we have nothing. I mean not to accuse anyone for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority. We are all guilty—we ought all to plead guilty, and not to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others. This evidence cannot be ignored. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Never, never will we desist till we extinguish every trace of this bloody traffic, which our posterity, looking back to the history of these enlightened ties, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonour to this country. The courts, law enforcement, and your employers have a duty to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America! For instance Amendment IV of the Constitution states people have a right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the person or things to be seized. Our sister, Breonna Taylor, an innocent young lady in the prime of her life was murdered in her own home, on 13 March 2020, while she lay in bed resting, so she could return to her job as a nurse in the morning, and because the police killed her by accident, no one is being held responsible for the crime, but so many are fighting to keep our boarders open and floor the streets with illegal immigrants, when we will not even protect our own citizens. How humane is that? Amendment VIII states the excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted. However, our brother George Perry Floyd was killed by the police on 25 March 2020, while telling the officer he could not breath because the officer had his knee on the man’s neck. How cruel and unusual is that! #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Amendment XVI states that all persons born or naturalized in the United States of America, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, but innocent 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was gunned down after buying some candy because someone did not like the way he looked. There are just a few laws that ought to be observed and we must never take our freedom for granted, nor allow criminals to roam the streets without answering for their crimes. That is why Amendment VI of the United States Constitution states in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against one; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in one’s favour, and to have the assistance of counsel for one’s defense. We do not want chaos on our streets, we do not want people becoming law enforcement agents to get away with murder, and we do not want people taken into custody without being read their Miranda rights or being allowed to have a trial. It should not be easier for those in public office or law enforcement to break the laws than it is to enforce it. The laws and law enforcement are there to protect us, not facilitate and help crime to fester. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Just remember, slavery is still a reality and in was not long ago, in the year 1788 in a ship destined for the slave trade, out of 650 persons on board, 155 died. In another, 405 were on board, out of whom were lost 200. In another there were on board 402, out of whom 73 died. When Captain Charles Wilson was asked the causes of this mortality, he replied that the slaves had a fixed melancholy and dejection; that they wished to die; that they refused sustenance, till they were beaten in order to compel them to eat; and that when they had been so beaten, they looked in the faces of their captures and said, piteously, “Soon we will be no more.” Now, I am sure you know someone who was happy and full of life who has suffered some adverse circumstances and is emotionally, physically, or born so worn down that they no longer want to live, and you know that is not them talking, but the endless pain and torment they so badly want to escape from and cannot. Often times, it is much harder for victims to get help than people know. It is not that they do not want to be saved, it is however, that the system is set up to make victims of those they want to harm. How else did Larry Nassar go on abusing hundreds of girls from 1992 until 2015? How did Jerry Sandusky go on abusing young boys from 1994 until 2011? Because people in positions of authority liked him and protected him, until they could not. Nonetheless, countless lives were ruined while these innocent children were enslaved. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Even the vested economic interests of the West Indian bloc could not gloss over the appalling facts nor ignore the public support the abolitionists were gaining. However, in modern times, the force of the people has to be involved in stopping slavery. We cannot allow radicals to continue to fan the flames of this reign of terror. Unless the Divine power has raised you up to be as Athanasius contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of humans and devils, but if God be for you who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? Oh, be not weary of well-doing. Go on in the name of God, and in the power of His might, till even modern American slavery, the vilest thing currently under the Sun, shall vanish away before it. That God that has guided you from your youth up may continue to strengthen in this and all things, is my prayer. Be not weary of well-doing. We must issue a proclamation at the deluge of every kind of vice which, to the scandal of our holy religion, and to the evil example of our loving subject, have broken upon this nation. The only wat to reform morals is to ruin purses. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Make them pay. How can you sleep while the fate of men, women, and children are in the hand of abusers should be rushing to your minds, and the guilt of our wicked land. If one really loves another, one would rather die for that person than to injure the individual. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nor height, nor depth, not any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” reports Romans 8.35, 39. If we would truly seek to be more like our Saviour and Master, learning to love as He loves should be our highest goal. Love is the foundation of marriage, but love itself is a product of law and lives by law. True love is law-abiding, for the highest satisfaction come to a law-abiding life. To those who are sealed to each other for all existence, love is ever warm, more hopeful, believing, courageous, and fearless. Such people live the richer, more joyful life. To them happiness and the making of it have no end. Above physical charm, love is begotten by qualities, often subtle, of mind and spirit. The beautiful face may hide an empty mind; the sweet voice may utter coarse words; the lovely form may be ill-mannered; the person of radiant beauty and the ne of kingly form may be intolerable bores on nearer acquaintanceship. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
The person who looks attractive may really have no faults, may excel us in knowledge and courtesy, yet one is not of our kind, one’s ways are not ours. Under either condition, love wilts in its first stage. “Falling in love” is always from within, rather than from without. That is, if true love is to be born and have long life, physical attractiveness must be reinforced with mental and spiritual harmony. There must be common ideals and standards. There must be a great devotion and companionship. Love is cleanliness and progress and sacrifice and selflessness. This kind of love never tires nor wanes, but lives through sickness and sorrow, poverty and privation, accomplishment and disappointment, time and eternity. Love cannot be forced, it comes out of Heaven, unasked and unsought. This respect comes of recognition that each of us is a son or daughter of God, endowed with something of one’s divine nature that each is an individual entitled to expression and cultivation of individual talents and deserving of forbearance, of patience, of understanding, of courtesy, of thoughtful consideration. True love is not so much a matter of romance as it is a matter of anxious concern for the well being of one’s companion. The World is filled with too many of us who are inclined to indicate our love with an announcement or declaration. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
True love is a process. True love requires personal action. Love must be continuing to be real. Love takes time. Too often expediency, infatuation, simulation, persuasion, or lust are mistaken for love. If our love is no deeper than the arousal of momentary feeling or the expression in words of what is more lasting than the time it takes to speak them, how hollow, how empty. We must at regular and appropriate intervals speak and reassure others of our love and the long time it takes to prove it by our actions. Real love does take time. The Great Shepherd had the same thoughts in mind when he taught, “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” reports Jon 14.15. If you love me, feed my sheep,” reports John 21.16. If it is to be continuing, love demands action. Love is a process, not a declaration. Love is not an announcement. Love is not a passing fancy. Love is not an expediency. Love is not convenience. God-given proclamations should remind us we can often best show our love through the process of feeling and keeping. Love of God takes time. Love of family takes time. Love of country takes tie. Love of neighbour takes time. Love of companion takes time. Love in courtship takes time. Love of self takes time. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
One who loves has and feels responsibility. If we look at love between two who are preparing for a temple marriage, we see the elements of sacrifice and of serving each other’s best interest, not a shortsighted “me” interest. True love and happiness in courtship and marriage are based upon honesty, self-respect, sacrifice, consideration, courtesy, kindness, and placing “we” ahead of “me.” Perfect love is perfectly patient. Unlike our love, Jesus’ love consists of active restraint as well as pressing encouragement. His perfect love of each and all spares Him the need to accept us as we now are for He knows perfectly what we have the possibility to become. Love, as defined by the Lord, elevates, protect, respects, and enriches another. It motivates one to make sacrifices for another. At the hour of sin, pure love is pushed out of one door while lust sneaks in the other. Affection has then been replaced with desire of the flesh and uncontrolled passion. Accepted has been the doctrine which the devil is so eager to establish, that illicit relations in pleasures of the flesh that are justified. Dear Lord in Heaven, with your quick-sent lightning and penetrating rain, please make the Earth fertile, storm-rider, hammer-wielder. Please wield the lightening on my side, Thunderer, and I will ensure that my cause is just. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Wilder of the hammer, red-bearded one, God, protector, to you I call. I stand in the midst of a storm, and ask your protection. You who bear the flaming hammer, to you I pray: please fight on my side against all my opponents. For with you on my side, who can stand before me? Please remember my devotion to you, Lord of Thunder. As I work to your honour, may you work also to mine. Thou didst thus make Thy greatness and holiness known in Thy World, and didst bring great deliverance to America. Then Thy children came into Thy dwelling place, cleansed the Temple, purified the Sanctuary, kindled lights in Thy sacred courts, and they designated these days for giving thanks and praise unto Thy great name. For all this, Thy name, O our King, shall be blessed and exalted for ever and ever. O, please inscribe all the children of Thy covenant for a happy life. May all the living do home unto Thee forever and praise Thy name in truth, O God, who art our salvation and our help. Please blessed be Thou, O Lord, Beneficent One, unto whom our thanks are due. Our God and God of our fathers, please bless us with threefold blessing written in the Torah of Moses, Thy servant, and spoken by Aaron and his sons, Thy consecrated priests: May the Lord bless thee and keep thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord make His countenance to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord turn His countenance unto thee and give thee peace. So may it be His will. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
Mills 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 Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse. Homes range in size from approximately 2,000 to 3,000 square feet.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
The Act of Creation is a Miracle of Which One Hears, but in Which One Does Not Believe!
The individual choice of garnishment of a burger can be an important point to the consumer in this day when individualism, in my mind, is an increasingly important thing to people. You may give us your symptoms. We will make the diagnosis. And we, the Establishment—for which I make no apologies for being part of—will implement the solution. Not only is darkness known through light, but conversely, light is known through darkness. As only that which works is real, so only good is real in the sense of exiting. Good is tantamount to convenient, sufficient, appropriate, suitable. One ought therefore to translate “omne agens agit propter bonum” as: “Every agent works for the sake of what suits it.” That is what the devil does too, as we all know. He too has an “appetite” and strives after perfection—not in good but in evil. Even so, one could hardly conclude from this that his striving is “essentially good.” However, not every situation where a person or a group has uncontrolled power over another generates sadism. Many—perhaps most—parents, prison guards, school teachers, and bureaucrats are not sadistic. For any number of reasons, the character structure of many individuals is not conducive to the development of sadism even under circumstances that offer an opportunity for it. Persons who have a dominantly life-furthering character, will not easily be seduced by power. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
What matters is the intensity of the sadistic passion within the character structure of a given person. There are many in whose characters sadistic elements can be found, but balanced by such strong life-furthering trends that they cannot be classified as sadistic characters. Not rarely in such individuals the internal conflict between the two orientations results in an enhanced sensitivity toward sadism and in the reactive formation of allergic reactions against all its forms. (Traces of their sadistic tendences may still show up in unimportant, marginal behaviour, slight enough to escape awareness.) There are others with a sadistic character in whim sadism is at least balanced by countervailing forces (not merely repressed), and while they may feel a certain amount of enjoyment in the control of helpless people, they would not participate in or get pleasure from actual torture and similar atrocities (except under extraordinary circumstances, such as mass frenzy). This can be demonstrated by the attitude of the Hitler regime toward the sadistic atrocities it ordered. It had to keep the extermination of Jews and Polish and Russians civilians a close secret known only to a small group of the SS elite, but kept from the vast majority of the German population. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
In many speeches by Himmler and other executors of atrocities, it was stressed that the killings must be done in a “humane” way, without sadistic excesses, sine otherwise it would be too repugnant even to the SS men. In some instances orders were given that Russian and Polish civilians who were to be killed had to be put through a short, formal trial in order to give their executors the feeling that the shooting was “legal.” While all this sounds absurd in its hypocrisy, it is nevertheless a proof that the Nazi leaders believed that large-scale sadistic acts would be revolting to most otherwise loyal adherents of the regime. A great deal of material has come to light since 1945, but a systematic investigation of the degree to which the majority of Germans were attracted by sadistic acts—even though they avoided knowing about them—has not yet been made. If one isolates them from the whole character structure, sadistic character traits can never be understood. They are part of a syndrome that has to be understood as a whole. For the sadistic character everything living is to be controllable; living beings become things. Or, still, more accurately, living beings are transformed into living, quivering, pulsating objects of control. Their responses are forced by the one who controls them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The sadist wants to become the master of life, and hence the quality of life should be maintained in one’s victim. This is, in fact, what distinguishes one from the destroying persons. The destroyer wants to do away with a person, to eliminate one, to destroy life itself; the sadist wants the sensation of controlling and choking life. Another trait of the sadist is that one is stimulated only by the helpless, never by those who are strong. It does not cause any sadistic pleasure, for instance, to inflict a wound on an enemy in a fight between equals, because in this situation the infliction of the wound is not an expression of control. For the sadistic character there is only one admirable quality, and that is power. One admires, loves, and submits to those who have power, and one despises and wants to control those who are powerless and cannot fight back. The sadistic character is afraid of everything that is not certain and predictable, that offers surprises which would force one to spontaneous and original reactions. For this reason, one is afraid of life. Life frightens one precisely because it is by its very nature unpredictable and uncertain. It is structured but it is not orderly; there is only one certainty in life: that all humans die. Love is equally uncertain. To be loved requires a capacity to be loving oneself, to arouse love, and it implies always a risk of rejection and failure. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Because love and unpredictable and may be unrequited, this is why the sadistic character can “love” only when one controls, id est, when ne has power over the object of one’s love. The sadistic character is usually xenophobic and neophobic—one who is strange constitutes newness, and what is new arouses fear, suspicion, and dislike, because a spontaneous, alive, and not-routinized response would be required. Another element is the syndrome is the submissiveness and cowardice of the sadist. It may sound like a contradiction that the sadist is a submissive person, and yet not only is it not a contradiction—it is, dynamically speaking, a necessity. One tries to compensate for this lack by having power over others, by transforming the worm one feels oneself to be into a god. However, even the sadist who has power suffers from one’s human impotence. One may kill and torture, but one remains loveless, isolated, frightened person in need of a higher power to whom one can submit. For those one step below Hitler, the Fuhrer was this highest power; for Hitler himself, it was Fate, the laws of Evolution. This need to submit is rooted in masochism. Sadism and masochism, which are invariably linked together, are opposites in behavioristic terms, but they are actually two different facets of one fundamental situation: the sense of vital impotence. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Both the sadist and the masochist need another being to “complete” them, as it were. The sadist makes another being an extension of oneself; the masochist makes oneself the extension of another being. Both seek a symbiotic relationship because neither has one’s center in oneself. While it appears that the sadist is free of one’s victim, one needs the victim in a perverse way. Because of the close connection between sadism and masochism it is more correct to speak of a sadomasochistic character, even though the one or the other aspect will be more dominant in a particular person. The sadomasochist has also been called the “authoritarian character,” translating the psychological aspect of one’s character structure into terms of a political attitude. This concept finds its justification in the fact that persons whose political attitude is generally described as authoritarian (active and passive) usually exhibit (in our society) the traits of the sadomasochistic character: control of those below and submission to those above. The sadomasochistic character cannot be fully understood without reference to Dr. Freud’s concept of the “anal character,” enlarged by one’s disciples, especially by K. Abraham and Ernest Jones. Dr. Freud (1908) believed that the anal character manifested itself in a syndrome of character traits: stubbornness, orderliness, and parsimony, to which punctuality and cleanliness were added later. He assumed that this syndrome was rooted in the “anal libido” that has its sources in the anal erogenous zone. The character traits of the syndrome were explained as reaction formations or sublimation of the aims of this anal libido. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Various traits of the syndrome are manifestations of the distance-keeping, controlling, rejecting, and hoarding mode of relatedness (“hoarding character”). This does not imply that Dr. Freud’s clinical observations with respect to the particular role of everything pertaining to feces and bowel movement was not correct. On the contrary, in decades of psychoanalytic observation of individuals, I have found Dr. Freud’s observations full confirmed. The difference lies, however, in the answer to the following: Is the anal libido the source of the preoccupation with feces and, indirectly, of the anal character syndrome, or is the syndrome the manifestation of a special mode of relatedness? In the latter case, the anal interest has to be understood as another, but symbolic expression of the anal character, not as its cause. Feces are, indeed, a very fitting symbol: they represent that which is eliminate from the human life process and which no longer serves human’s life. Those wishing to speculate might consider that the fascination with feces and smells constitutes a kind of neurophysiological regression to an evolutionary stage in which the animal was oriented more by smell than by sight. The hoarding character is orderly with things, thoughts and feelings, but one’s orderliness is sterile and rigid. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The hoarder cannot endure things to be out of place and has to put them in order; in this way one controls space; by irrational punctuality one controls time; by compulsive cleanliness one undoes the contact one had with the World which is considered dirty and hostile. (Sometimes, however, when no reaction-formation or sublimation has developed, one is not overclean but tends to be dirty.) The hoarding character experiences oneself like a beleaguered fortress; one must present anything from going out and save what is inside the fortress. One’s stubbornness and obstinacy is a quasi-automatic defense against intrusion. The hoarder tends to feel that one possesses only a fixed quantity of strength, energy, or mental capacity, and that this stock is diminished or exhausted by use and can never be replenished. One cannot understand the self-replenishing function of all living substance, and that activity and the use of our powers increases our strength while stagnation weakens it; to one, death and destruction have more reality than life and growth. The act of creation is a miracle of which one hears, but in which one does not believe. One’s highest values are order and security; one’s motto: “There is nothing new under the sun.” In one’s relationship to others intimacy is a threat; either remoteness or possession of a person means security. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The hoarder tends to be suspicious and to have a special sense of justice that in essence says: “Mine is mine and yours is yours.” The anal-hoarding character has only one way to feel safe in one’s relatedness to the World: by possessing and controlling it, since one is incapable of relating oneself by love and productivity. That the anal-hoarding character has the close relationship to sadism described by classic psychoanalysts is amply borne out by the clinical data, and it makes little difference whether one interprets this connection in terms of the libido theory or in terms of the relatedness of humans to the Word. It is also evidenced by the fact that social groups with an anal-hoarding character tend to exhibit a marked degree of sadism. Roughly equivalent to the sadomasochistic character, in a social rather than a political sense, is the bureaucratic character. In speaking here of bureaucrats, I refer to the old-fashioned, cold, authoritarian bureaucrats as they are still found in many old-fashioned schools, hospitals, prisons, railroads, and post offices. Big industry, which is also a highly bureaucratic organization, has developed an entirely different character-type—the friendly, smiling, “understanding” bureaucrat who has perhaps taken a course in “human relations.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The reasons for this change lie in the nature of modern industry, its need for teamwork, for avoiding friction, for better labour relations, and a number of other factors. It is not as if the new friendly bureaucrats were insincere, as if they were really sadist who smile instead of showing their real faces; in fact, the old-fashioned sadist is not very suited to be a modern bureaucrat, for the reasons just mentioned. The modern bureaucrat is not a sadist turned friendly, but one is a thing to oneself, just as other people are things for one. One feels little, either for them or for oneself, and one’s friendly treatment, while not false, is so superficial and thin as to become false. However, even this is not quite fair, because nobody really expects it to be more than superficial and thin, except perhaps for the short moment when they both smile and indulge in the delusion that this is human contact. Two extended and thorough studies of the character of the modern manager will confirm or correct these impressions. In the bureaucratic system every person controls the one below one and is controlled by the one above. Both sadistic and masochistic impulses can be fulfilled in such a system. Those below, the bureaucratic character will hold in contempt, those above, one will admire and fear. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
One only has to look at the facial expression and the voice of a certain type of bureaucrat criticizing one’s subordinate, or frowning when one is a minute late, or insisting on behaviour that at least symbolically expresses that during office hours one “belongs” to the superior. Or one might think of the bureaucrat being the post office window and watch one’s hardly noticeable thin little smile as one shuts one’s widow at 5.30 P.M. sharp, while the last two people who have already been waiting for half an hour have to leave and come back the next day. The point is not that one stops selling stamps at 5.30 P.M. sharp: the important aspect of one’s behaviour is the fact that one enjoys frustrating people, showing them that one controls them, a satisfaction that is expressed in one’s facial expression. Needless to say, not all old-fashioned bureaucrats are sadistic. Only a depth psychological study could show what the incidence of sadism among this group is compared with nonbureaucrats or modern bureaucrats. To mention only some outstanding examples, General Marshall and General Eisenhower, both among the highest ranking members of the military bureaucracy during the second World War, were conspicuous of their lack of sadism and their genuine humane concern for the life of heir soldiers. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
On the other hand, a number of both German and French generals in the first World War were conspicuous for the ruthlessness and brutality with which they sacrificed the lives of their soldiers for no adequate strategic purpose. In many cases the sadism is camouflaged by kindness and what looks like benevolence toward certain people in certain circumstances. However, it would be erroneous to think that the kindness is simply intended to deceive, or even that it is only a gesture, not based on any genuine feeling. To understand this phenomenon better, it is necessary to consider that most sane people wish to preserve a self-image that makes them out to be human in at least some respects. To be completely inhuman means to be completely isolated, to lose any sense of being part of humanity. Hence it is not surprising that there are many data which makes one assume that the complete absence of any kindness, friendliness, or tenderness to any human being creates, in the long run, intolerable anxiety. There are reports of cases of insanity and psychic disorders, for instance, among humans who were in the Nazi special formations and who had to kill thousands of people. Under the Nazi regime a number of the functionaries who had to carry out the orders for the mass killings suffered nervous breakdowns that were called Funktinarskrankheit (“functionaries’ disease”). #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
I have used the words “control” and “power” in reference to sadism, but one must be clearly aware of their ambiguity. Power can mean power over people, or it can mean power to do things. What the sadist is striving for is power over people, precisely because one lacks the power to be. Many writers, unfortunately, make use of this ambiguous meaning of the words “power” and “control,” and in order to smuggle in the praise of “power over” they identify it with “power to.” Moreover, lack of control does not mean lack of any kind of organization, but only of those kinds in which the control is exploitative and the controlled cannot control the controllers. There are many examples from primitive societies and contemporary intentional communities in which there is rational authority based on rea—not manipulated—consent of all, and where relations of “power over” do not develop. To be sure, the one who has no power to defend oneself also suffers characterologically. One may become submissive and masochistic instead of sadistic. However, one’s realistic powerlessness may also be conducive to the development of virtues like solidarity and compassion, as well as to creativity. Being powerless and hence in danger of being enslaved, or having power and hence being in danger of becoming dehumanized, are two evils. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Which is to be shunned the most is a matter of religious and moral or political convictions. Buddhism, the Jewish tradition starting with the Prophets, and the Christian Gospels makes a clear decision, contrary to contemporary thinking. It is quite legitimate to make subtle differences between power and nonpower, but one danger is to be avoided: that of using the ambiguous meaning of certain words to recommend serving God and Caesar simultaneously, or still worse to identify them. Obviously evil can be represented as a diminution of good, but with this kind of logic one should just as well say: The temperature of the Arctic winter, which freezes our noses and ears, is relatively speaking only a little below the eat prevailing at the equator. For the Arctic temperature seldom falls much lower than 230 degrees Celsius above absolute zero. All things on Earth are “warm” in the sense that nowhere is absolute zero even approximately reached. Similarly, all things are more or less “good,” and just as cold is nothing a diminution of warmth, so evil is nothing but a diminution of good. The privatio boni argument remains a euphemistic petitio princippii no matter whether evil is regarded as a lesser good or as an effect of the finiteness and limitedness of created things. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The false conclusion necessarily follows from the premise “Deus = Summum Bonum,” since it is unthinkable that the perfect food could ever have created evil. It merely created the good and the less good (which last is simply called “worse” by laymen). Just as we freeze miserably despite a temperature of 230 degrees Celsius above absolute zero, so there are people and things that, although created by God, are good only to the minimal and bad to the maximal degree. It is probably from this tendency to deny any reality to evil that we get the axiom “Omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine.” This is a contradiction of the truth that one who crated the heat is also responsible for the cold (“the goodness of the less good”). We can certainly hand it to Augustine that all natures are good, yet just not good enough to prevent their badness from being equally obvious. One could hardly call the things that have happened, and still happen, in the concentration camps of the dictator states an “accidental lack of perfection”—it would sound like mockery. Psychology does not know what good and evil are in themselves; it knows them only as judgments about relationships. “Good” is what seems suitable, acceptable, or valuable from a certain point of view; evil is its opposite. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
If the things we call good are “really” good, then there must be evil things that are “real” too. It is evident that psychology is concerned with a more or less subjective judgment, id est, with a psychic antithesis that cannot be avoided in naming value relationships: “good” denotes something that is not bad, and “bad” something that is not good. There are things which from a certain point of view are extremely evil, that is to say dangerous. There are also things in human nature which are very dangerous and which therefore seem proportionately evil to anyone standing in their line of fire. It is pointless to gloss over these evil things, because that only lulls ne into a sense of false security. Human nature is capable of an infinite amount of evil, and the evil deeds are as real as the good ones so far as human experience goes and so far as the psyche judges and differentiates between them. Only unconsciousness makes no difference between good and evil. Inside the psychological realm one honestly does not know which of them predominates in the World. We hope, merely, that good does—id est, what seems suitable to us. No one could possibly say what the general good might be. No amount of insight into the relativity and fallibility of our moral judgment can deliver us from these defects, and those who deem themselves beyond good and evil are usually the worst tormentors of humankind, because they are twisted with pain and fear of their own sickness. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Today as never before it is important that human beings should not overlook the danger of the evil lurking within them. It is unfortunately only too real, which is why psychology must insist on the reality of evil and must reject any definition that regards it as insignificant or actually non-existent. Psychology is an empirical science and deals wit realities. As a psychologist, therefore, I have neither the inclination nor the competence to mix myself up with metaphysics. Only, I have to get polemical when metaphysics encroaches on experience and interprets it in a way that is not justified empirically. My criticism of the privatio boni holds only so far as psychological experience goes. From the scientific point of view the privatio boni, as must be apparent to everyone, is founded on a petitio principii, where what invariably comes out at the end is what you put in at the beginning. Arguments of this kind have no power of conviction. However, the fact that such arguments are not only used but are undoubtedly believed is something that cannot be disposed of so easily. It proves that there is a tendency, existing right from the start, to give priority to “good,” and to do so with all the means in our power, whether suitable or unsuitable. So if Christian metaphysics clings to the privatio boni, it is giving expression to the tendency always to increase the good and diminish the bad. The privatio boni may therefore be a metaphysical truth. I presume to no judgment on this matter. I must only insist that in our field of experience white and black, light and dark, good and bad, are equivalent opposites which always predicate one another. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
The Infinite Reality cannot be reasoned with, but only reasoned about. It cannot even be adequately symbolized, for regarding it as a mental image, a pictured thought, is only a more refined form of idol-worship. It can only be designated. The true Godhead is unconditioned, formless, not picturable. No individual worship can reach what is utterly beyond all individual existence. No name can be given that will properly stand for what is without attributes and without limitations. In the ultimate reality there are and can be no distinctions and no differences no grades and no change. Striker, axe-bearer, splitter, hammerer: please protect me. Bolt-caster, cleaver, smasher, way-clearer: please protect me. Warrior, victor, overcomer, protector: please protect me. Please break their shields, hammerer: please dissolve their defenses, stormer; please remove their courage, thunderer. Please fight beside me as my comrade, please win through with me to victory. Tyrannical power rose up against Thy people America to compel them to forsake Thy Word, and to force them to transgress Thy commandments. In Thine abundant mercy Thou didst stand by them in time of distress. Thou didst rise to their defense and didst vindicate their cause. Thou didst bring retribution upon the evil doers, delivering the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few, the wicked into the hands of the just, and the arrogant into the hands of those devoted to Thy Scripture. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Believe it or not the key to the massive front door was made of solid gold and the keys for the other 2,000 doors of the Eighth Wonder of the World fill two water buckets. We hear stories about dark things creeping out of the shadows, about people being possessed and doing unnatural, evil things to each other. If you are like me, you have tried to see inside yourself, to find in you what you see in others. If you are like me, you have only ever seen darkness where others have light. You believe you have no soul. You believe you have no goodness in you. However, you are made of God like everyone else. I was told I have no further permission from them to make use of any records I compiled while I was in the dead center of the 160-room catacomb—spellbound by the perplexity leavened by extravagant Victorian beauty scattered along each crooked path of exploration. However, I think it is important to share these srories. There is a dim-lit storeroom stacked entirely with never-used furnishings, displays rare hand-wrought elegance from another era, finest productions of forgotten craftsmen. Here are specially designed priceless stained-glass doors and windows, some set with jewel stones; concave-convex Belgium optical cut-glass panels furnished by Tiffany; a delicate inlaid spiderweb window designed personally by the Mystery Lady of the House. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
One sees exquisite sets of daisy pattern windows from Austria and rolls of quarter-inch thick, embossed French wall-paper. No causal visitor can see it all. Palatial elegance unfolds with each turn. One gazes through oval lens windows now only magnifying the pandemonium of Winchester Boulevard. But God, I swear it, in my soul of soul, it is not greed to live again, it is that the tale is unfinished, the demon continues, and I die. I would help, I would be an angel of the Lord somehow. It was a terrifying display of power. And I realized I felt possessed. I felt she was my Queen. I was displaying possession! The Queen had the Mind Gift and opened the many doors for me that lay between us. There was something so remarkable that it was painful for me to reveal it. No one human ever knows what lies beyond true death. Sarah Winchester admired her quiet gardens, sprouting fountains and blossoming orchards. The massive, flawless mirror still stands in the reception room, now counting expressions of a million perplexed faces. Spirits can come very close to knowing; they can see bright stairways to Heaven, they can see the fruit trees of paradise, they can talk to the dead in various forms, they can glimpse the light of God, on, that is forever happening, these glimpses and glimpses of light, but they cannot really know what lies beyond true death! No one who really escapes the Earth and its Earthbound spirits ever comes back. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
They may appear to you. They may talk to you. However, you cannot make them come from beyond death. Once they are dead, it is in their hands or God’s hands whether they appear here or not. So do not ever believe anyone who tells you one knows all about Heaven. All of the realms of the spirits and angels that will ever be known to you or to me are of the Earth, not beyond Death. You understand? People are fascinated by the ghost of a man said to have broken his neck while attempting to flee the mansion. There is sometimes a big shadow in the darkness, smelling of the winter cold, and then his warm trembling hands will wrap around your neck. There is a ghost dressed in armor who walks around the house at night. There are cold spots and objects that move from room to room of their own volition. Marvelous parqueted floors are everywhere, their intricate designs highlight optical illusion patterns assembled from as many as six different rare hardwoods, their tiny, apparently jointless segments forming polished mirror sweep of elegant harmony. Once seen it is easy to believe such a floor required the work of one man for a solid year. Connecting hallways of inlaid linoleum, trod by two million shuffling feet, show little wear. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 