Dreams of loneliness, like a heartbeat drives you mad in the stillness of remembering what you had and what you lost, fly in the air where one has never been—and yet one knows not. Alan Turning is best remembered as the creator of an imaginary computing device that anticipated, and served as a blueprint for, the modern computer. He was just twenty-four, a recently elected fellow at Cambridge University, when he introduced what would come to be called the Turing machine in a 1936 paper entitle “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” Turning’s intent in writing the paper was to show that there is no such thing as perfect system of logic or mathematics—that there will always be some statement that cannot be proven either true or false, that will remain “uncomputable.” To help prove the point, he conjured up a simple, digital calculator able to follow coded instructions and to read, write, and erase symbols. Such a computer, he demonstrated, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. It was a “universal machine.” In a later paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Turning explained how the existence of programmable computers “has the important consequence that, considerations of speed apart, it is unnecessary to design various new machines to do various computing processes. They can all be done with one digital computer, suitably programed for each case.” What that means, he concluded, is that “all digital computers are in a sense equivalent.” Turning was not the first person to imagine how a programmable computer might work—more than a century earlier, another English mathematician, Charles Babbage, had drawn up plans for an “analytical engine” that would be “a machine of the most general nature”—but Turning seems to have been the first to understand the digital computer’s limitless adaptability. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25

In modern times, we have all these mini-machines and little devices, for things like the phone, the Internet, music, telephone, surveillance, thermostats to control the climate in the house, circuit breakers, sprinkler boxes. However, what many people are looking for is a universal machine to become our medium. Like a mainframe that is built-in to the wall and can control the entire house from lighting and so forth and has little tablet computers also built-in to the wall to control this mainframe so one does not have to go to the universal machine. The goal is to illuminate clutter and to have a machine one does not have to constantly update and replace. One that could be advanced enough to last a lifetime. The speed of computers and data networks has increased at a breakneck pace, and the cost of processing and transmitting data has fallen equally rapidly. Over the past three decades, the number of instructions a computer chip can process every second has doubled about every three years, while the cost of processing those instruction has fallen by almost half every year. Overall, the price of a typical computing task has dropped by 99.9 percent since the 1960s. Network bandwidth has expanded at an equally fast clip, with Internet traffic doubling, on average, every year since the World Wide Web was invented. Computer applications that were unimaginable in Turning’s day are now routine. The way the Web has progressed as a medium replay, with the velocity of a time-lapse film, the entire history of modern media has compressed hundreds of years into a couple of decades. The growth of social media’s influence in our daily digital lives has been astounding over the last few years. The global average time spent using social media platforms per day is 2 hours and 22 minutes. Far higher than the 1 hour and 30 minutes spent in 2012. In fact, people are spending thirty percent of their leisure time online, with the people in China being the most intensive surfers, devoting forty-four percent of their off-work hours to the Net. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25

These figures do not include the time people spend using their mobile phones and other handheld computers to exchange text messages, which also continues to increase rapidly. Text messaging now represents one of the most common uses of computers, particularly for the young. The average American sends or receives an average of 41.5 messages per day, with the median user sending or receiving 10 texts daily. Worldwide, well over two trillion text messages zip between mobile phones every year, far outstripping the number of voice calls. Thanks to our ever-present messaging systems and devices, we never really have to disconnect, which may actually prevent virtual kidnapping or help mask it. The average American over the age of fourteen devoted to reading printed works has fallen to 143 minutes a week. Young adults between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, who are among the most avid Net users, were reading printed works for a total of just forty-nine minutes a week just a few years ago, and that number has now fallen down a precipitous twenty-nine percent. However, because of the ubiquity of text on the Net and our phones, we are almost certainly reading more words today than we did twenty years ago, but we are devoting much less time to reading words printed on paper. Yet, these words we are reading may not be nourishing the soul, which is why so many people are becoming mean, yet so sensitive. That is why the future of knowledge and culture no longer lies in books or newspapers or TV shows or radio programs of CDs. It lies in digital files shot through our universal medium at a speed of light. However, with such rapid technological pace, remember, in the future it is possible that we could have citywide, statewide, countrywide, and even Worldwide shutdowns of the electricity and Internet. So, while electric cars are so popular and digital streaming, you may want to hold on to cars that can use gasoline and your books, CDs, magazines and so forth. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25

We like to be able to find and be transported instantly to relevant data—without having to sort through lots of extraneous stuff. We like to be in touch with friends, family members, and colleagues. We like to feel connected—and we hate to feel disconnected. The Internet does not change our intellectual habits against our will. However, change them it does. Our use of the Net will only grow, and its impact on us will only strengthen, as it becomes ever more present in our lives. Like the clock and the book before it, the computer continues to get smaller, but as stated before people may want one machine to control all the technologies in their house, so they may get bigger, but be just one device. Public schools are strongly urging students to use physical books instead of Internet sources. However, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger referred to them as “antiquated, heavy, expressive textbooks,” and that is not helping matter. Remember how exciting it was on the first day of class to be able to use a brand-new hardcover Houghton Mifflin Social Studies book? We must not rob our youth of these adventures. My favorite books are hardcover additions, think how good they will look in a home library. However, sometimes to reduce costs or because of what is available, I go with paperback books. A particularly striking illustration of how the Net is reshaping our expectations about media can be seen in any library. Although we do not tend to think of libraries as media technologies, they are. The public library is, in fact, one of the most important and influential informational media ever created—and one that proliferated only after the arrival of silent reading and moveable-type printing. Students these days are, in general, nice. They are not always particularly moral or noble. Such niceness is a facet of democratic character when times are good. Neither war not tyranny nor want has hardened them or made demands on them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25

The wounds and rivalries caused by class distinction have disappeared along with any strong sense of class (as it once existed in universities in America and as it still does, poisonously, in England). Students are free of most constraints, and their families make sacrifices for them without asking for much in the way of obedience or respect. Religion and national origin have almost no noticeable effect on their social life or their career prospects. Although few really believe in “the system,” they do not have any burning sentiment that injustice is being done to them. The barbiturates and the pleasures of the flesh once thought to be forbidden are available in the quantities required for sensible use. A few radical people still feel the old-time religion, but most folks are comfortably assured that no much stands in the way of their careers. There is an atmosphere of easy familiarity with their elders, and even of the kind of respect of free young people that Tocqueville asserted equality encourages. Above all, there are none of the longings, romantic or otherwise, that used to make bourgeois society in general, repugnant to the young. The impossible dreams of the sixties proved to be quite possible within the loosened fabric of American life. If not great-souled, students these days are pleasant, friendly, and at least not particularly mean-spirited. Their primary preoccupation is themselves, understood in the narrowest sense. I had a revelatory experience when I chatted quite frankly one evening with a group of bright students at an Ivy League college where I was visiting professor for a short time. I had succeeded in establishing a certain common ground with them in class, for serious reading of Plato frequently has the effect of making students speak, at least for the moment, outside of their conventions. We had a farewell picnic and the atmosphere was easy and conducive to candor. Somewhat disingenuously I introduced some themes into the conversation about which I was eager to know the current state of opinion. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25

I had been primed for this encounter by a conversation I had had the previous evening at a dinner with members of the faculty and the administration. The wife of one of the high officials told me of her son’s activities. He had a law degree, but, she said, he and his friends had little ambition and had moved from one thing to another. She did not seem to be very distressed by his behavior—perhaps even a bit proud of it—a modern parent willing to believe in the superiority of the younger generation to her own, especially when the former is most disrespectful of the latter’s standards. So I asked her why she thought they behaved this way. She responded firmly, quietly and without hesitation, “Fear of nuclear war.” This prompted me to ask my group of students whether they were frightened of nuclear war. The response was a universal, somewhat embarrassed giggle. They knew what their daily thoughts were about, and those thoughts had hardly anything to do with public questions. And they also knew that there are a great many right-thinking adults who expect them to use the nuclear threat as an excuse for demanding a transformation of the World political order and who also want to produce their maimed souls in evidence against our politicians’ mad pursuit of the “arms race.” Students today—and I have now asked the question over and over again—are morally unpretentious, and they look at themselves with irony when it comes to the big moral questions. Some look back with nostalgia at students of the sixties as persons who believed in something. The prospect of being drafted to fight in the Ukraine was really frightening me. However, youngsters today are, with few exceptions, no more take in by the psychological quacks who explain their apathy with respect to nuclear was as “denial,” who enlist science in the service of proving that there are causes without effect, than was the American public by a President who tried to persuade it that he sat around discussing nuclear war on a laptop with drug dealing son. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25

Their concerns lie elsewhere. There is, indeed, a certain listlessness about them, an absence of a broad view of the future, but it was as plausible to attribute that to the lack of frontier to conquer in the American West, or the death of God, as to fear nuclear war It is difficult to say just why this generation tends to be so honest in comparison with the preceding one. And, of course, there are plenty of public posturers among them, as is evident from the vote of the student body at Brown (an institution that was at the forefront of dismantling liberal education in the sixties), which demanded that cyanide be made available by the university in case of nuclear attack. This was a “statement” telling us all about the torment to which we subject young people. However, the great majority of students, although they as much as anyone want to think well of themselves, are aware that they are busy with their own careers and their relationships. There is a certain rhetoric of self-fulfillment that gives a patina of glamor to this that they are busy with their own careers and relationships. There is a certain rhetoric of self-fulfillment that gives a patina of glamor to this life, but they can see that there is nothing particularly noble about it. Survivalism has taken place of heroism as the admired quality. This turning in one themselves is not, as some would have it, a return to normalcy after the hectic fever of the nineties, nor is it preternatural selfishness. It is a new degree of isolation that leaves young people with no alternative to looking inward. The things that almost naturally elicit attention to broader concerns are simply not present. Starvation in California, mass murder in Florida, as well as war in New York and Tennessee, are all real calamities worthy of attention. Because they are immediate, and they are connected to the students’ lives. We have never had war on American social, in modern times, since it had become relatively stable in the 1950s. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25

The affairs of daily life, however, now involve concerns for a larger community in such a way as to make the public and private merge in one’s thought. It is not merely that one is free to participate or not to participate, that there is no need to do so, but that everything militates against one’s doing so. Tocqueville describes the tip of the iceberg of advanced egalitarianism when he discusses the difficulty that a man without family lands, or family tradition for whose continuation he is responsible, will have in avoiding individualism and seeing himself as an integral part of a past and a future, rather than as an anonymous atom in a merely changing continuum. The modern economic principle that private vice makes public virtue had penetrated all aspects of daily life in such a way that there seems to be no reason to be a conscious part of civic existence. Public virtue can be kind of a ghost town into which the highest investor can move and declare oneself mayor, governor, or president, which is probably why the Clinton’s started globalization. To become rich, suppress wages, especially the minimum wage, and make the United States of America dependent and divided, rather than independent and united, which allowed them to keep taxes high and make the country look like it was profiting, which is why the national deficit is $30.3 trillion. They sold the country and we are borrowing money to rent it back. Then Arnold Schwarzenegger stepped in and started liquidating federal and state assets, which is common in bankrupt countries. Country, religion, family, ideas of civilization, all the sentimental and historical forces that stood between cosmic infinity and the individual, providing some notion of a place within the whole, have been rationalized and have lost their compelling force. America is experienced not as a common project but as a framework within which people are only individuals, where they are left alone. To the extent that there is a project, it is to put those who are said to be disadvantaged in a position to live as they please too. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25

The advanced Left talks about self-fulfillment; the Right, in its most popular form, is Libertarian, id est, the right-wing form of the Left, in favor of everybody’s living as one pleased. The only forms of intrusion on the private-life characteristic of liberal democracies—taxes and military service—are not now present in the American students’ life. If there is an inherent political impulse in man, it is certainly being frustrated. However, this impulse has already been so attenuated by modernity that it is hardly experienced. Students may indeed feel a sense of impotence, a sense that they have little or no influence over the collective life, but essentially they live comfortably within the administrative state that has replaced politics. Nuclear war is indeed a frightening prospect, but only when it appears imminent does it cross their minds. Even such a powerful, concerted effort as the nuclear-freeze commotion, with its attendant entertainment like The Day After, has nothing to do with the lives students lead and is little more than a distraction. If the students actually do enter politics, it is by accident, very few of them are destined for a political life, and does not follow from their early training or expectations. For almost no such families remain, in these universities, there are almost no students born of families that have inherited the privilege and responsibility of public service. Neither duty nor pleasure involves students with the political life and that is why there is a disappearance of citizens and statesmen and women. Politics is so taboo, but talking about pleasures of the flesh and other people’s business is so popular and socially accepted because that is what the news and reality shows are programing people to think is normal. Life out loud, act insane, party, harass people, cry to the police, but above all else, ignore your civic, religious, family, and financial responsibilities! Just steal from your family and neighbors and hustle your friends to get ahead in life. Grind all day long on that no dose and coffee. Just do not flip bricks to get ahead, which will actually make a lot of money and is risky, because the feds might catch you at the dock with a flock of snow. Then you will be looking 40 in the 740. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25

The petty personal interests of youth—“making it,” finding a place for oneself—preserve throughout life. The honesty of this generation of students causes them to laugh when asked to act as though they were powerful agents in World history. They know the truth that in democratic societies, each citizen is habitually busy with the contemplation of a very petty object, which is oneself, a contemplation now intensified by a greater indifference to the past and the loss of a national view of the future. The only common project engaging the youthful imagination is the exploration of space, which everyone knows to be empty. The resulting inevitable individualism, endemic to our regime, has been reinforced by another unintended and unexpected development, the decline of the family, which was the intermediary between individual and society, providing quasi-natural attachments beyond the individual that gave men and women unqualified concern for at least some others and created an entirely different relation to society from that which the isolated individual has. Parents, husbands, wives and children are hostages to the community. They palliate indifference to it and provide a material stake in its future. This is not quite instinctive love of country, but it is love of country for love of one’s own. It is the gentle form of patriotism, one that flows most easily out of self-interest, without the demand for much self-denial. The decay of the family means that community would require extreme self-abnegation in an era when there is no good reason for anything but self-indulgence. Apart from the fact that many students have experienced the divorce of their parents and are informed by statistic that there is a strong possibility of divorce in their futures, they hardly have an expectation that they will have to care for their parents or any other blood relatives, or that they will even see much of them as they grow older. With Social Security going bankrupt, people will probably choose to abort disabled fetuses because they cannot afford to take care of them, which is why so much money is being poured into gene editing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25

Catholics have a lot to think about because it seems that there will be a day when social services become extinct, not only because of the corruption and data breaches by CBS, ABC, NBC, and every other media entity willing to oil the mayor, or governors palm to break the laws and micromanage an individual, while violating their rights, but because the money will no longer be there, in many cases from the harm inflicted by these special interests groups which drive of costs and injure vulnerable citizens. And who knows what is going to happen to old people and their children when they did not invest in private retirement and medical care and their own families do not have the financial support, or are unwilling and unable to let them into their own homes to live. Perhaps the mental hospitals will start to flourish to take care of the poor and disabled and elderly before there were taxes and Social Security. That is why so many are advocating anti-racism, reading, writing, and education. Life is not going to be like it was. Spiritually, the family is pretty empty, anyway, and new objects fill their field of vision as the old ones fade. American geography plays a role in this separation. This is not as large of a country as it was in the 1950s and 1960s, and people are very mobile, particularly since 2000 and the expansion of air travel and public transportation. Practically no student knows where one is going to live when one has completed one’s education. Very likely it will be far away from their parents and their birthplace. Mexico is actually pretty expensive when it comes to real estate. They may have to move to Cambodia. Even if the same fundamental cultural winds are blowing, in Canada and France, by contrast, the same fundamental cultural winds are blowing, people have no place to go. The United States of America may have to make new laws that allow the disabled and those on welfare to move to another country where they can actually afford to rent a home so they can have stability. Low-income and middle-income Americas might just be placeholders for immigrants who need asylum and rich immigrants. When a place is needed, they will start sending you to jail or making you flee your own country.  #RandolphHarris 11 of 25

For an English-speaking Canadian born in Toronto there is, practically speaking, only Vancouver as an attractive alternative, and for a Parisian there is no alternative whatsoever. The unlimited, or dissolving, horizon, which is the hallmark of our age, is in these places somewhat less visible. People are not really more rooted in them, but they are stuck. Hence they continue to see their relatives and all the people they grew up with. Their landscape is unchanging. However, a young American really begins all over again, and everything is open. One can live in the North, South, East or West, in the city, the suburbs, or the country—as long as you are a professional or have a high income. There are arguments for each, and one is absolutely unconstrained in one’s choice. The accidents of where one finds a job and of variable inclinations are likely to take one far away from all one has been connected with, and one is psychically prepared for this. One’s investments in one’s past and those who peopled it are necessarily limited. This indeterminate or open-ended future and the lack of a binding past mean that the souls of young people are in a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature—spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone. They can be anything they want to be, but they have no particular reason to want to be anything in particular. Not only are they free to decide their place, but they are also free to decide whether they will believe in God or be atheists, or leave their options open by being agnostic; whether they will be heterosexual or homosexual, or, again, keep their options open; whether they will marry and whether they will stay married; whether they will have children—and so on endlessly. There is no necessity, no morality, no social pressure, no sacrifice to be made that militates going in or turning away from any of these directions, and there are desires pointing toward each, with mutually contradictory arguments to buttress them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25

The young are exaggerated various of Plato’s description of the young in democracies: [The democratic youth] lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to one, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending one’s time as though one were occupied with philosophy. Often one engages in politics and, jumping up, says and does whatever chances to come to one; and if one admires any soldiers, one turns in that direction; and if it is moneymakers, in that one, and there is neither order nor necessity in one’s life, but calling it sweet, free and blessed, one follows it throughout.] Why are we surprised that such unfurnished person should be preoccupied principally with themselves and with findings means to avoid permanent free fall? No wonder that the one novel that remains continuously popular with students is Camus’s The Stranger. That is also why the popular films starring Josh Hartnett The Faculty, O, and Pearl Harbor remain so relevant. It is essential for the intelligent performances of forbidden deeds to keep them under your hat and not have too many accomplices. However, then, how can we know how many gifted kids are performing how man misdemeanors? And would it not be better for less affluent and middle-class delinquents, who have committed non-violent crimes, and petty theft not end up in juvenile hall, or reform schools but in military academies and other schools that promise “to make a man of your boy.” From this point of view, it must be said that the essential property of juvenile delinquency as defined is: such personality and behavior as guarantee getting caught, punished, and tabulated. I do not think that this property is a tautology: it has important content that distinguishes the delinquency of doing-the-forbidden-and-defiant from the delinquency to-get-caught. Getting caught is guaranteed by: compulsive repetition of a behaviour because it is not really giving satisfaction. This tends to allay the alertness and prudence of the routine tries, as well as to multiply the chances of being caught. And it leads to: Raising the ante, in order to force feeling. This must result in disaster. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25

Conversely, in place of mischief or the attraction of the forbidden or rebelliousness or even malice, the caught delinquent exhibits a profound fatalism, indicating an unconscious need to be saved from his compulsive round or not worthwhile experience and brought back into the “meaningful” structure of authority and punishment. It looks as though the caught delinquent has done the forbidden and defiant deed in order to tease and provoke the authority, to compel his attention. Psychologically, then, though he thinks and operates on his own, he is not “independent.” (Let it be mentioned the touching case of an English boy who stole a watch and then returned it, saying he had found it, “in order that somebody should say he was a good boy.” The next best thing is for somebody to say that one is a bad boy.) The gang is used as a structure for psychological support. However, running with the gang also guarantees getting caught, both because it is conspicuous and because its in-group concentration and habits soon get quite out of touch with the surrounding mores. Aping his friends, a lad forgets what safe behavior is, what ought to be concealed because people are outraged by it. A lad who is infinitely secretive and suspicious gives oneself away by his slouching, his clothes, and every word he utters. Also, they dare one another to excesses that each individual would avoid. Naturally this is all the worse with cultural people who are less affluent, who do not know the “right” behavior to begin with; exempli gratia, some body might be badly judged for behavior that to them is perfectly acceptable. We propose that these four guarantees of getting caught make juvenile delinquency an interesting cultural study. For it is: the powerless struggling for life within, not resigned from, an unacceptable World. At first inspection, this does not seem a promising lesson. However, on reflection, we see that this fatalism is a deeply religious position, bit far from what Dostoevski was tying to tell us. Many of his characters are adult delinquent culture a powerful thought and poetry. The fatalism of juvenile delinquency is a kind of adolescent religious crisis, with a religious passion and content, whereas the conventional religion is empty. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25

On the streets, they feel worthless-and-abandoned; in the reformatory, they are accepted back home. This fatalism in the face of the overwhelming and unacceptable is a commentary on the poignant remark of the criminologist: “It must be confessed that it is much easier and hence more “practical” to deal with superficial symptomatic behavior or its immediately observable causes than to strive to cut the deeper roots of delinquency. When those deeper roots are made evident, however, we have to ask ourselves how deep we wish to go in the attack on crime. Are we willing, for example, to sacrifice many of our material satisfactions or to give up our racial prejudices?” reports Donald Taft. The process of going insane begins long before it is detected. It often starts when life is moved from nature into cities. One’s ride from the woods to city is a ride from connection to disconnection, from reality to abstraction, a history of technology, setting the conditions for the imposition of reconstructed realties by a single powerful force. The central technique of oppression is the absolute control of all kinds of information. Perhaps George Orwell’s 1984, was actually a metaphor for what happens when the Internet replaces books and people stop books, but only get information from the web. It will cause hundreds and thousands of years of real knowledge to be destroyed as if by fire. That will lead to a suffocatingly narrow language, Newspeak, which has no vocabulary other than “crazy,” or “unbelievable,” to express ideas and human feelings, and without expression, they begin to atrophy. The danger of a digital society is anything can be altered at any time, and it would take a highly paid lawyer to discover that. Essentially, everything a person says or was guaranteed will become a conflict of opinions with the corporation or government being the authority, which then becomes nearly impossible to dispute because you have no paper record. Many already see this happening, the new on TV today, directly contradicts the news of a month ago. Since it is impossible to prove this contradiction, because democracy no longer exists, it is pointless to try. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25

Already, people are being told to focus on their own satisfaction and limit their need to those that could be conveniently satisfied by the social engineers. This precludes discontent. However, it is true that in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. We already see that to many, human feelings and any wilderness experience are complicated and unwieldy, and that is what makes them dangerous to those who do not support democracy. So that is the reason society is producing people ridiculing and eliminating all experiences that make people feel kind and human. Natural experience is being replaced with nonhuman realities. When the TV news media is able to control your mind and whatever research you obtain and tell you what reality is, they are effectively leaving society deprived for their senses, appropriately confused and receptive, and the TV can speak directly into them without interference. The people who are spoken to are precondition to accept what they hear. Technology plays a critical role in this process because it creates standardized arbitrary forms of physical and mental confinement. Television is the ideal tool for such purposes because it both confines experience and implants simple, clear idea. Seen in this way, a new fact emerges. Autocracy need not come in the form of a person at all, or even as an articulated ideology or conscious conspiracy. The autocracy can exist in the technology itself. The technology can produce its own subordinated society, as though it were alive. The TV, TV News Media, and Internet could be the anti-Christ, depending on how you use it. The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on one page of a newspaper. And the World cannot be understood in one page. Of course, there is a good deal of truth in this. However, the language of pictures differs radically from oral and written language, and the differences are crucial for understanding television news. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25

To begin with, the grammar of pictures is weak in communicating past-ness and present-ness. When terrorists want to prove to the World that their kidnap victims are still alive, they photograph them holding a copy of a recent newspaper (which does not really mean anything with all the technology we now have). The dateline on the newspaper was supposed to provide the proof that the photograph was taken on or after that date. Without the help of the written word, film and videotape cannot portray temporal dimensions with any precision. Consider a film clip showing an aircraft carrier at sea. One might be able to identify the ship as Russian or American, but there would be no way of telling where in the World the carrier was, where it was headed, or when the pictures were taken. It is only through language—words spoken over the pictures or reproduced in them—that the image of the aircraft carrier takes on meaning as a portrayal of a specific event. Still, it is possible to enjoy the image of the carrier for its own sake. One might find the hugeness of the vessel interesting; it signifies military power on the move. There is a certain drama in watching the planes come in at high speeds and skid to a stop on the deck. Supposed the ship where burning: that would be even more interesting. This leads to a second point about the language of pictures. The grammar of moving pictures favors images that change. That is why violence and destruction find their way onto the television so often. When something is destroyed violently its constitution is altered in a highly visible way: hence the entrancing power of fire. Fire gives visual form to the ideas of consumption, disappearance, death—the thing which is burned is actually taken away by fire. It is at this very basic level that fires make a good subject for television news. Something was here, now it is gone, and the change is recorded on film. #RandolphHarrs 17 of 25

Earthquakes and typhoons have the same power: before the viewers eyes in the World is take apart. If a television viewer has relatives in Tokyo, Japan, and an Earthquake occurs there, then one may take an interest in the images of destruction as a report from a specific place and time. That is, one may look to television news for information about an important event. However, if the viewer cares nothing about the event itself, film of an Earthquake can still be interesting. Which is only to say that there is another way of participating in the news—as a spectator who desires to be entertained. Actually to see buildings topple is exciting, no matter where the buildings are. The World turns to dust before our eyes. Those who produce television news in America know that their medium favors images that move. That is why they despise “talking heads,” people who simply appear in front of a camera and speak. That is why the news is into making fake new. They track and terrorize certain people so they can produce a saga that gets rating, people emotional, and can sell books and movies and prefilmed interviews to go with their manipulating “breaking news.” The news really is broken and, in some cases, a criminal business. When talking heads appear on television, there is nothing to record or document, no change in process. On a movie screen, close-ups of a good actor speaking dramatically can be sometimes interesting to watch. When Josh Hartnett narrows his eyes and challenges his rival to shoot first, the spectator sees the cool rage of the Hartnett character take visual form, and the narrowing of the eyes is dramatic. However, much of the effect of this small movement depends on the size of the movie screen and the darkness of the theater, which makes Hartnett and his every action “Larger than life.” The television screen is smaller than life. It occupies about 15 percent of the viewer’s visual field (compared to about 70 percent of the movie screen). It is not set in a darkened theater closed off from the World but in the viewers ordinary living space. This means that visual changes must be more extreme and more dramatic to be interesting on television. A narrowing of the eyes will not do. A car crash, an Earthquake, a burning factory, or someone who is out of their mind and on a rampage are much better. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25

That is why TV news media like to terrorize people. They have low budgets, and typically it does not cost much to drive a person insane, record it and make millions off of the footage, like the shooting in Florida, Dylan Strom Roof, or Elliot Rodger. It is possible that these were good boys the media terrorized to get them to lose their minds, so they could make profits. “If it bleeds, it leads.” I am surprised there has been no federal investigation into the TV news media’s ethics. No required ratings. No statements that about it not necessarily being factual, but is a source of entertainment. In 1737, Philip V of Spain suffered from such relentless and chronic depression that his wife, Elisabeth Farnese, feared he would die. To stave off death, she engaged the superb opera singer Carlo Broschi, known only as Farinelli, to enchant her melancholy husband. Each night, the Italian would sing four songs and Philip would listen, entranced. Perhaps because of this, Philip survived another nine years. What manner of music was it that could save a life? Imagine a voice as sweet as a flute and with tones as subtle as the human larynx can produce, a voice that soars upward through the air “like a lark…intoxicated with its own flight.” Imagine a voice that transforms emotion into sound as glorious as a soul rising upward with it, clinging to its wings. Imagine, finally, “a clam, sweet, solemn, and sonorous musical language” that leaves its audience thunderstruck, transported into ecstasy by the power and grace of the most splendid music under the Heavens. This was the soprano or contralto voice that combined the power of the male lungs and physical bulk with a woman’s high, sweet range. This was the voice of a castrato, a gelded boy grown into manhood after years of intensive opera training in the finest conservatories. This jeweled musical miracle did not, however, come cheap, even for the castrati who enjoyed splendid careers in the opera. The cost included a slew of boys killed by botched surgeries explained away as accidents and even more live boys ruined for normal life but equally unsuited for opera. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25

These pitiful rejects, whose talents failed to meet the rigorous standard of operatic maestors and demanding audiences, were cast aside to live as they could, sexually mutilated and untrained for any trade. The few truly successful castrati, however, were catapulted from ordinariness to glorious achievement, endless adulation, and careers replete with personal and professional satisfaction, material wealth, and secure retirements. Farinelli, perhaps the greatest of all, epitomized the triumphant consequences that genital surgery could coax out of natural musical brilliance. “One God, one Farinelli!” groaned a fashionable admirer, unwittingly coining her hero’s most memorable epitaph. The origins of the castrati are so hazy, but the cause is not—the prohibition against women singing in church and appearing onstage. Until the fifteenth century, high-voiced boys had substituted. The Spaniards devised a way of singing that forced light male voices into trilling warbles that strained vocal cords but produced femalelike sounds. These “falsettists” performed the new a cappella compositions that became wildly popular in the mid-fifteenth century and created greater expectations in musical range and timbre. By 1600, castrati began to appear, and in considerable numbers. (Some speculate that earlier falsettists had actually been disguised castrati. This is plausible but unprovable.) In 1599, the first castrati were admitted into the Vatican Church choir, despite the official Church ban on castration. In the seventeenth century came the invention of Italian opera, a popular, quasi-international style of entertainment that required contingents of singer with the voice of angels, but to me, many of the sound like ghosts. Since women were still banned from the stage, castrati were the perfect solution. Indeed, until the late eighteenth century, Italian opera and castrati were indistinguishable concepts, and 70 percent of male opera singers were castrati. In the eighteenth century, castrato Filippo Balatri composed a witty and poetic account of his life as a revered soprano. Balatri’s was an ironic commentary tinged by bitterness about his fate and was the first public revelation about the life castrati were compelled to lead. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25

By the nineteenth century, Balatri’s keen sense of the indignity of his castration was seeping into the collective conscience of opera lovers. Choirmasters and guilty parents began to lie about how perpetual make sopranos in their charge had been created: “A pig attacked and injured his privates, necessitating the operation” was a typical explanation. Eventually, after two hundred entrancing years, it ended. Opera no longer demanded gelding, though the Vatican chapel and other Roman choirs continued to employ castrati especially maimed for the purpose. The last known castrato was Alessandro Moreschi, who made recordings as late as 1903 and performed in the Sistine Chapel until 1913. Most castrati (but not Farinelli) were poor boys whose parents aspired to greater things. The first stage was a visit to a conservatory for a voice evaluation. A positive response gave the nod to castration, and the parents rushed to make private arrangements. Doctors specializing in the illegal operation were centered in Bologna. The child was drugged with opium or another narcotic and seated in a tub of very hot water until he was nearly unconscious. Then the surgeon pared off the ducts leading to the testicles, which later shriveled and dried up. Surviving patients were admitted to music conservatories, where they studied for up to ten years. Because they were considered delicate, they were given better food and warmer rooms than sexually unmutilated music students, and their health was carefully monitored. However, many hated the school and ran away. Others, though sopranos, proved to have indifferent voices. The real problem was probably the intensity and quantity of the work: six hours daily of lessons, plus additional hours of harpsichord practice and music composition. Somewhere between the ages of fifteen and twenty, after he had passed a series of tests, the successful castrato made his operatic debut—as a woman. His immaturity, slightly effeminate physique, and wondrous voice earned him instant adoration. Fans mobbed him, and both ladies and gentlemen fell in love with him. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25

Casanova, for example, described his first impression of a certain castrato: “In a well-made corset, he had the waist of a nymph, and, what was almost incredible, his breast was in no way inferior, either in form or in beauty, to any woman’s; and it was above all by this means that the monster made such ravages.” Furthermore, castrati were superbly trained and musically knowledgeable. Nonetheless, some did not make the grade and were relegated to touring provincial opera houses. However, do not get it twisted, most castrati were boy or men and dressed as boy or men, but had the voice of a little boy, or sometimes the voices of six-year-old boys with an echo of death and just a pinch of man. There was a soft voice, that sounded hallow, with a male undertone. Despite star status, castrati faced considerable resentment, even hatred. Jealous colleagues and the general public disdained their neutered state, accused them of luring other men into homosexuality, and detested their arrogance and conceit because many of them did not seem to age nor gain weight. Yet many castrati were famous paramours with legions of female followers eager to make love with a man who could not impregnate her and curious to see what their famous, much discussed genitalia looked like. All this attention, of course, did not improve the castrati’s image with fully sexed men. From the castrati’s own perspective, these sexual conquests were bittersweet, for they were forbidden by law to marry, and at least one died brokenhearted because of this ban. What about celibate castrati? They were rare indeed, though the brilliant Farinelli was likely chaste, perhaps because of shame. Castrator Filippo Balarti, too, opted for celibacy. He feared a woman would soon find him sexually inadequate and tire of him, and he explained in his own ironic words why he never married: “By the grace of God, by my industry, and thanks to surgeon Accoramboni of Lucca, I never took a wife, who after loving me for a little would have started screaming at me.” #RandolphHarris 22 of 25

Balatri also specified in his will that his corpse was not to be bathed in the customary way, “not only for the indecency I see in it but because I do not want them to amuse themselves by examining me, to see how sopranos are made.” The operatic castrati were a unique kind of eunuch. Unlike the Chinese Ottoman, and some Byzantine eunuchs and the true hijras, they were seldom celibate, and chastity was never mentioned as one of their qualities. What mattered was the timbre, range, and power of their voices, not their lives outside the opera house. Though they were often scored for their incompleteness and, like all eunuchs, legally proscribed from marrying because of their inability to procreate, most were as sexually active as other men. Nonetheless, they belong in this account of castrated celibacy because of their great fame. In fact, the castrati are proof par excellence that unless castration is so severe that is kills the sexual drive, its victims seldom voluntarily opt to abstain from whatever sort of sexual relations their mutilated condition permits. Even then, there must be a combination of important rewards to maintain celibacy and strong disincentives for violating it.  If they were not indulge, most castrati, partial castrates with little motivation to remain chaste and no punishment, in about the same measure as other male entertainers with retinues of adoring and available women (and a few men). Science is different from all the other trust-test criteria. It is the only one that itself depends on rigorous testing. Yet of all these various criteria, science is probably the one we least rely on in our daily lives. We do not, as a rule, choose a puppy because he passes some scientific test; we just fall in love with him. We do not perform lab tests to decide what movie to watch. Or what friends to make. Among all our daily personal—and business—decisions, those that are made scientifically are no more than a trace element. Yet among the six truth criteria, none in recent centuries has had a greater impact on wealth. And one, as we will see, is more endangered. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25

Science is not a collection of facts. It is a process—often messy and non-sequential—for testing ideas. The ideas must be testable, at least in principle, and, some would add, falsifiable. The tests involve observation and experiment. Results must be reproducible. Knowledge that has not met these tests is not scientific. Even the most persuasive scientific findings are, therefore, held to be incomplete and tentative—always subject to further investigation, revision and dismissal in the light of new scientifically tested discoveries.  This make science the only one of the six truth filters that is inherently opposed to fanaticism of any kind, religious, political, nationalist, racist or otherwise. It is fanatic certainty that breeds persecution, terrorism, inquisition, suicide bombings and other atrocities. And it is fanatic certainty that science replaces with a recognition that even the most entrenched scientific findings are at the best partial or temporary truths and hence uncertain. This idea—that every scientific finding could and should be improved or thrown out—puts science in a class by itself. Thus among all the other main truth filters, whether consensus, consistency, authority, revelation or durability, only science is self-correcting. While the other five criteria have been in use since the beginnings of time and reflect the static or change-resistant character of agrarian societies, science swung the door wide open to change. The pursuit of scientific inquires was by no means always a well-coordinated, disciplined activity, with a clear and share sense of method…Science was still sorting out what the activity really involved, and there were many competing methods, theories and systems in almost all areas, right on down through the eighteenth and even early-nineteenth centuries. There is a heated debate as to whether America is more advanced from China when it comes to science. Many people think America is not because much of their technology is out of date, they are borrowing money from China and sending their jobs to China. It makes the people in China think there is something wrong with Americans mentally because that equation seems irrational. Why can they not do their own work when they have the technology? Globalization also has suppressed minimum wage which should be hovering around $30 an hour by now. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25

Only gradually, then, did the elements of empirical observation, experiment, quantification, dissemination of result, replication or disconfirmation, come together, along with randomized blind controls and other techniques so widely used today. The invention of scientific method was the gift to humanity of a new truth filter or test, a powerful meta-tool for probing the unknown and—it turned out—for spurring technological change and economic progress. As we have noted, among all the decisions made in the economy on any given day, only a minute amount can be said to have been made scientifically. Yet that tiniest trace has transformed the World’s capacity to make and expand wealth. If we let it–it will continue to do so in the future. Continue to labor, and make sweet floods to run and noble and abundant fruits to spring. Take this food and drink and carry it to Go as your true worship. You body is one with the Earth. God will put His spirit within us, and cause us to talk in His statutes, and we shall keep His ordinances and do them. For His ordinances which He commands us are not too difficult for us, neither are they far off. His laws are not high in the Heavens that we should say, “Who shall go up and bring them down?” Neither are they beyond the sea that we should say, “Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring them unto us, that we may hear them and do them?” Neither are they beyond the sea that we should day, “Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring them unto us, that we may hear them and do them?” Behold, God’s ordinances are nigh unto us, in our very heart that we may do them. The day will come when God will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the land, and He will make all to lie down safely, and all people shall know God, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, and all shall be His people, and God will be our God. “A happy heart is good medicine and a cheerful mind works healing, but a broken spirit dries up the bones. A wicked man receives a bribed out of the bosom (pocket) to pervert the ways of justice,” reports Proverbs 17.22-23. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25

Cresleigh Homes

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