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The Community in the Heavenly Orchard Made History in a Number of Ways!
A great mind said that individualism is a part of being a human being. When the day comes that the mind and body can be separated, what will happen to the soul? No civilization spreads without conflict. Second Wave civilization soon launched a massive attack on the First Wave World, triumphed, and imposed its will on millions, ultimately billions, of human beings. Long before the Second Wave, of course, from the sixteenth century on, European rulers had already begun to build extensive colonial empires. Spanish priests and conquistadors, French trappers, British, Dutch, and Portuguese or Italian adventurers fanned out across the globe, enslaving or decimating whole populations, claiming control of vast lands, and sending tribute home to their monarchs. Compared with what was to follow, however, all this was insignificant. For the treasure these early adventurer and conquerors sent home was, in effect, private booty It financed wars and personal opulence—winter palaces, colourful pageantry, a leisurely workless lifestyle for the court. However, it had little to do with the still basically self-sufficient economy of the colonizing country. Largely outside the money system and the market economy, the serf who scraped a bare living from the sunbaked soil of Spain or the misty heaths of England had little or nothing to export abroad. They scarcely grew enough for local consumption. Nor did they depend on raw materials stolen or purchased in other countries. For them life went on, one way or another. The fruits of overseas conquest enriched the ruling class and the towns rather than the mass of ordinary people who lived as peasant. In this sense, First Wave imperialism was still petty—not yet integrated into economy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The Second Wave transformed this relatively small-scale pilferage into big business. It transformed Petty Imperialism into Grand Imperialism. Here was a new imperialism aimed not at bringing back a few trunkloads of gold or emeralds, spices and silks. Here was an imperialism that ultimately brought back shipload after shipload of nitrates, cotton, palm oil, tin, rubber, bauxite, and tungsten. Here was an imperialism that dug copper mines in the Congo and planted oils rigs in Arabia. Here was an imperialism that sucked in raw material from the colonies, processed them, and very often spewed the finished manufactured goods back into the colonies at huge profit. Here, in short, was imperialism no longer peripheral but so integrated into the basic economic structure of the industrial nation that the jobs of millions of ordinary workers came to depend on it. And not just jobs. In addition to new raw materials, Europe also needed increasing amounts of food. As Second Wave nations turned to manufacturing, transferring rural labour into the factories, they were forced to import more of their foodstuffs from abroad—beef, mutton, grain, coffee, tea, and sugar from India, from China, from Africa, from the West Indies and Central America. In turn, mass manufacturing grew, the new industrial elite needed bigger markets and fresh outlets for investment. In the 1880’s and 1890’s European statesmen were unabashedly open about their objectives. “Empire is commerce,” proclaimed the British politician Joseph Chamberlain. The French premier Jules Ferry was even more explicit: What France needed, he declared, were “outlets for our industries, exports, and capital.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Jolted by cycles of boom and bust, faced with chronic unemployment, European leaders were for generations obsessed by the fear that if colonial expansion stopped, unemployment would lead to armed revolution at home. The roots of Grand Imperialism were, however, more than economic. Strategic considerations, religious fervor, idealism, and adventure all played a part, as did racism, with its implicit assumption of European superiority. Many saw imperial conquest as a divine responsibility. Kipling’s phrase, the “White Man’s burden,” summed up the European’s missionary zeal to spread Christianity and “civilization”—meaning, of course, Second Wave civilization. For the colonizers regarded First Wave civilizations, no matter how refined and complex, as backward and underdeveloped. Rural people, especially if they happened to wear dark skins, were supposedly childlike. They were “tricky and dishonest.” They were “shiftless and lazy.” They did not “value life.” Such attitudes made it easier for the Second Wave forces to justify the annihilation of those who stood in their path. In The Social History of the Machine Gun, John Ellis shows how this new, fantastically deadly weapon, perfected in the nineteenth century, was at first systematically employed against “native” populations and not against pale Europeans, since it was considered unsportsmanlike to kill an equal with it. Shooting colonials, however, was thought to be more like a hunt than a war, so other standards applied. “Mowing down Matabeles, Dervishes or Tibetans,” writes Ellis, “was regarded more as a rather risky kind of ‘shoot’ than a true military operation.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
At Omdurman, across the Nile from Khartoum, this superior technology was displayed with withering effect in 1898 when Dervish warriors led by the Mahdi were defeated by British troops armed with six Maxim machine guns. An eyewitness wrote: “It was the last day of Mahdism and the greatest….It was not a battle but an execution.” In the one engagement twenty-eight British died, leaving behind eleven thousand Dervish dead—392 colonial casualties for every Englishman. Writes Ellis: “It became another example of the triumph of the British spirit, and the general superiority of the White man.” Behind the racist attitudes and the religious and other justifications as the British, French, Germans, Dutch, and others spread around the World, stood a single hard reality. Second Wave civilization could not exist in isolation. It desperately needed the hidden subsidy of cheap resources from the outside. Above all, it needed a single integrated World market through which to siphon those subsidies. The thrust to create this integrated World market was based on the idea, best expressed by David Ricardo, that the division of labour ought to be applied to nations as well as to factory workers. In a classical passage he pointed out that if Britain specialized in the manufacture of textiles and Portugal in making wine, both countries would gain. Each would be doing what it did best. Thus the “international division of labour,” assigning specialized roles to different nations, would enrich everyone. This belief hardened into strict and rigid doctrine in the generations that followed and still prevails today, although its implications often go unnoticed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
For just as the division of labour in any economy created a powerful need for integration and thereby gave rise to an integrational elite, so the international division of labour required integration of a global scale and gave rise to a global elite—a small group of Second Wave nations which, for all practical purposes, took turns dominating large parts of the rest of the World. The success of the drive to create a single integrated World market can be measured in the fantastic growth of World trade once the Second Wave passed through Europe. Between 1750 and 1914 the value of World trade is estimate to have multiplied more than fifty-fold, rising from 700 million dollars ($29,443,203,125.00 in 2021 dollars) to almost 40 billion dollars ($1,076,780,000,000.00 in 2021 dollars). If Ricardo had been right, the advantages of this global trade should have accrued more or less evenly to all aides. In fact, the self-serving belief that specialization would benefit everyone was based on a fantasy of fair competition. It presupposed a completely efficient use of labour and resources. It presupposed deals uncontaminated by threats of political or military force. It presupposed arm’s-length transactions by more or less evenly matched bargainers. They theory, in short, overlooked nothing—except real life. In reality, negotiations between Second Wave merchants and Firs Wave people over sugar, copper, cocoa, or other resources were often totally lopsided. On one side of the table sat money-shrewd European or American traders backed by huge companies, extensive banking networks, powerful technologies, and strong national governments. On the other one might find a local lord or tribal chieftain whose people had scarcely entered the money system and whose economy was based on small-scale agriculture or village crafts. On one side sat the agents of a thrusting, alien, mechanically advanced civilization, convinced of its own superiority and ready to use bayonets or machine guns to prove it. On the other sat representatives of small prenational tribes or principalities, armed with arrows and spears. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Often local rulers or entrepreneurs were simply bought off by the Western, offered bribes or personal gains in return for sweating the native labour force, putting down resistance, or rewriting local laws in favour of the outsiders. Once conquering a colony, the imperial power often set preferential raw-material prices for its own businessmen and erected stiff barriers to prevent the traders of rival nations from bidding prices up. Under such circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the industrial World was able to obtain raw materials or energy resources at less than fair-market prices. Beyond this, prices were often further depressed in the favour of the buyers by what might be termed “The Law of First Price.” Many raw materials needed by Second Wave nations were virtually valueless to the First Wave populations who had them. African peasants had no need for chromium. Arabian sheiks had no use for black gold that they under their desert sands. Where no previous history of trade existed for a given commodity, the prince set in the first transaction was crucial. And this price was often based less on such economic factors as cost, profit, or competition than on relative military and political strength. Typically set in the absence of active competition, almost any price was acceptable to a lord or tribal chief who regarded his local resources as valueless and found himself facing a regiment of troops with Gatling guns. And this First Price, once established at a low level, depressed all subsequent prices. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
As soon as this raw material was shipped back to the industrial nations and incorporated in final products, the low initial price, was for all intents, frozen in place. Example: Suppose Compnay A bought a raw material from Colonia for one dollar a pound, then used I to manufacture widgets selling for two dollars each. Any other company seeking to enter the widget market would strive to keep its own raw-material cost as, or below, that of Company A. Unless it had some technological or other edge, it could not afford to pay significantly more for its raw material and still sell widgets at a competitive price. Thus the initial price set for the raw material, even if arrived at under the shadow of bayonets, became the base for all subsequent negotiation. Eventually, as a World price was gradually established for each commodity, all industrial nations benefited from the fac that the First Price had been set at an “a-competitive” low level. For many different reasons, therefore, despite much imperialist rhetoric about the virtues of free trade and enterprise, the Second Wave nations profited greatly from what was euphemistically called “imperfect competition.” Rhetoric and Ricardo aside, the benefits of expanding trade were not eventually shared. They flowed mainly from the First Wave World to the Second. Many people during the Second Wave also had popular-wisdom reasons for moving to the suburbs. For example, one of the reasons was the filth and crime of the city, and the sharply rising urban taxes, and much higher prices for most goods and services. “White flight” is commonly believed to be a major cause of suburbanization. Two causes of American residential deconcentration were a better quality of life and newer, more affordable housing. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
However, while race, taxes, higher prices for most good and services, crime, or all of these factors doubtlessly were important for individual families, researchers have known for decades that such “commonsense” explanations tend to be overrated as major contributions to postwar suburbanization. In reality, they had little impact on the massive suburbanization that occurred before the late 1960s, when these explanations first became fashionable. This is not to say that race, crime, poor schools, urban decay, and high taxes are not factors in white flight from the city today. However, it is a mistake to project today’s situation back into the past. The fact is that during the 1940s, 1950, and much of the 1960s, cities were doing reasonably well in terms of crime and taxes. Today it is hard to imagine a New York City in which, including family and criminal violence, there were under fifty murders a year, but that was the case during the 1940s. In 1942, for example, there were only forty-four murders in all of New York City. Moreover, white flight to the suburbs was largely irrelevant, because virtually all housing in the United States of America, city and suburban, was de facto segregated. Urban European Americans, particularly those living in the large industrial cities of the North and Middle-West, already lived in segregated, all-European American neighbourhoods. Until the federal open-housing legislation of 1968, city housing was segregated by law in the South and by custom in the North. This meant that African American and European Americans were in separate housing pools. In Northern as well as Southern cities, African Americans could only find housing in segregated African American neighbourhoods. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
New housing units were added to the non-European American communities housing pool through expanding ghastly impoverished communities full of deviance, crime, drugs, disorder, and pests through blockbusting. Blockbusting is the practice of one person of an undesired category buying into a neighbourhood at a higher than market rate price, then persuading other owners to sell property cheaply by making the neighbourhood undesirable for them by making too much noise, having too much traffic, bringing in pests, keeping their house in poor repair, having too many cars parked on the street and in the driveway, selecting odd paint colours for the house, cutting down trees, and having too many people in front of their house, and thus lowering the price of other houses, which causes people to sell before their property values fall too much, and the saboteur then gets their family and friends into a once prestigious community and it begins to decline and become highly undesirable. It is the opposite of gentrification, in this case. However, gentrification is also a form of blockbusting that rehabilitates undesirable communities, driving up prices and making them highly coveted places to life. Currently Harlem, New York is in the process of gentrification. Nonetheless, gentrification is not always bad because as prices increase, people who live in poverty gain equity, can sale, move to another state in experience a higher quality of life. Whereas reverse gentrification is usually always bad, as it makes communities unlivable, undesirable, and brings an increase in crime rates. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
During the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, publicly sanctioned racial segregation kept African Americans confined within specific undesirable deviant neighbourhoods. Established patterns of housing segregation meant that for the vast majority of middle-class European Americans, “White Flight” would have been meaningless. Only during the last fifty years does White flight emerge as a major variable. Following World War II other factors were more important. The mass suburbanization exodus of young couples during the decades immediately following World War II was not caused by flight from the city so much as by the baby boom and by government subsidies for a new suburban housing. The available lower-cost new housing was largely in the suburbs. Research shows that suburbanization in the decades immediately following World War II represented a moment toward the values associated with suburban living, such as privacy, space, cleanliness, and other suburban amenities, rather than a fleeing from perceived urban ills. The suburbs were where young families could find new, affordable, single-family housing subsidized by government loans. Not surprising, young European American families suburbanized in massive numbers. The prototypical example of the tract suburb was Levittown. The Levitt brothers, Bill and Alfred, had a construction company that had built upper-middle-class housing on Long Island dung the late 1930s. Early in World War II, they had obtained a government contract to build 2,350 mass-produced homes for war workers in Norfolk, Virginia USA. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
In the process they had learned just how many things could go wrong, but they also learned how to cut construction costs by standardizing the building process. Bill later served with the Seabees in the Pacific Theatre, where he learned how to invent new ways to put up airfields in minimal time. He came back with ideas about how to revolutionize the housing industry. Instead of building one house at a time, he proposed to mass-produce housing. Instead of building one house at a time, he proposed to mass-produce housing. He did housing construction what Henry Ford had done for automobile manufacture. In 1946 the Levitts began building what was at that time the largest private-housing development in North America on 4,000 acres of potato farms they had purchased some twenty miles from New York City on Long Island. They named it Levittown. The community made in history in a number of ways. First, Levittown was not designed as an upper-middle-class housing development; rather, it was built expressively for young working and middle-class ex-GIs. This originally meant a single housing style having 12-by-16 foot living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bath. Second, the Levitts were the first developers to use mass productions techniques. They did not have an actual assembly line, but they came closer to this approach than any other larger builder of the time. Setting Levittowns apart from other developments was that they were built on a scale not preciously attempted. Most builders then (and now) would build only a handful of houses at a time and use the monies from the sale of one home to purchase materials to build another. The Levitts built hundreds of homes at a time and, in effect, had their own finance company. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Whole areas went up at once. Teams working on specific tasks went from house to house completing each task in assembly line fashion. Construction was broken down into a number of simple steps so it could be done by semiskilled workers who would repeat the same process over and over. Homes were built on identical concrete slabs laid out on identical cookie-cuter 60-foot lots. All the cement foundations in a neighbourhood would be laid at the same time; all the walls went up at the same time; and all the interiors would be finished simultaneously. Even tree planting was routinized. One crew would machine-dig a similar hole in each front lot; another crew would drop a tree off a truckbed near the hole; and a third crew would plant the tree in the hole. Levitt claimed they were able to complete a house every fifteen minutes. To keep down coasts and prevent being stopped by strikes, the Levitts even had their own subsidiary timer company in Oregon. They even owned their own lumber yards and nail works. Levittown revolutionized the housing industry after the World War II by using mass production techniques in the construction of thousands of houses on what had been potato fields. The Levitt brothers claimed their techniques enabled them to complete a house every fifteen minutes. And very importantly, the Levitts did all this at a price well below that of comparable homes while making profit well above that of competitors. They were able to do so because of standardization. Variety, as with the early Fords, was severely limited. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
In fact, originally, all houses were identical 800-square-foot four-room Cape Cods with an unfinished upper floor that could be finished and expanded into two bedrooms as the family grew. The price for all this was only $7,990 ($79,957.92 in 2021 dollars), and a Bendix automatic washer was included. A more expensive rancher mode was later added. A rancher at the new Levitown outside Philadelphia cost the new suburbanites $8,990 in 1954 ($89,965.17 in 2021 dollars). For this home, a veteran would have to put down no payment, and the monthly payment on a thirty-year VA loan would be only $59 ($590.43 in 2021 dollars) a month. This was well below contemporary urban rental costs, much less than other suburban subdevelopments. Total closing costs were only $10 ($100.07 in 2021 dollars). Levittown was designed to be mass suburbia. The original Levittown was planned as an entire community housing over 80,000 people in almost 17,500 single-family homes. Levittown from the first was praised by the popular press and magazines and severely criticized by architects and planners. New York’s intellectual elite scorned its repetitive commonness, and the term “Levittown” entered the language as a derisive term meaning a mass-produced suburb of look-alike homes housing look-alike people. Levittown, however, was an immediate and overwhelming success with the public. Levitt particularly designed his communities for young veterans and growing families. Before its opening, young couples lined up for days to get one of those homes. On one single spring day in 1949, some 1,400 families signed purchase contracts for their own Levittown homes. Mass suburbanization based on subdivisions of detached single-family homes was underway, and suburbia would never be the same. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
We now take the postwar era of building subdivisions for granted, but it was not inevitable that American mass suburbanization would take the form it did. In Great Britain the government sponsored new towns filled with row houses, while in Sweden the emphasis was on suburban high-rise housing. By contrast, in the United States of America, postwar federal government home loan policies and the response of builders like the Levitts virtually assured acre upon acre of identical free-standing homes. Without these government policies and veteran, suburbia today might look far different. Rapid and sustained economic growth following World War II led o rising affluence and optimism regarding the future. For the first time large numbers of Americans had enough money to purchase homes and could also obtain automobiles and household durables such as washing machines, lawn mowers, sewing machines, and more. This era of consumer confidence lasted from the mid-1940s through the 1960s. The decade of the 1970s was one of uncertainty and discontent, but the ethos of prosperity still prevailed. People expected the boom and bust of the 1970s to be an aberration, with prosperity and continual economic expansion to continue. By the 1980s expectations had shrunk to where most consumers simply sought to stay where they were and not fall further behind. The 1990s continue the pattern of uncertainty. Post war suburbanization was fed by economic growth, and median family income adjusted for inflation today is not appreciably higher than that of two decades ago. The real difference is that family income today requires two and sometimes three breadwinners. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Even if interest rates are low, the cost of home ownership is going up. In the mid-1950s, the average thirty-year-old worker could carry a mortgage on a then median-priced home for 14 percent of one’s gross earnings. Three decades later, it took a full 44 percent of the average thirty-year-old worker’s gross earning to purchase the median-priced home. This means that purchase of the average home now requires two incomes (or more) to accomplish what a single income could afford in the 1950s. It is now harder to buy that starter homes in a nice suburb. In 1980, 62 percent of all married couples aged thirty to thirty-five had bought their first home. By 1990, the percent of such couples in their first home had gone down to 52 percent. For younger couples, aged twenty-five to twenty-nine, the decline in homeowning was from 43 to 36 percent. For many young couples the buying of the first home is far more difficult than it had been for their parents. And it does not seem possible, though, that housing cost might decline somewhat during the decade of the 2020s. Declines early in the decade were recession-related, but later in the decade another factor comes increasingly into play. That is the much-heralded aging of the baby boom generation. As boomers age, they are followed by the “baby bust” cohorts. The smaller size of this latter group should result in some weakening demand for housing, and thus some slackening of prices, particularly for first homes. This should be good news for young couples seeking their first home. It will be much less popular with those boomers who bought at peak prices in the late 1980, particularly those boomers who purchased their homes as investment rather than as places to live. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
During the 1980s housing prices rose considerably faster than incomes or inflation. This is less likely to be the pattern of the 2020s. Houses are likely to be purchased more as homes in which to live rather than largely as investment properties. Therefore, a bad deed should never be done, no, not for anything in the World, not even for the love of God or another human being. A good deed sometimes has to be squeezed into the daily routine, especially when it is for the advantage of the poor. The opus interruptum in question would seem to be lost forever, but it is not; it has been converted to a better work. A deed done without charity has no spiritual value. Saint Paul propounded that in his First to the Corinthians (13.3). A deed done with charity, however small or insignificant it may be, is a thoroughly fruitful work. The way God weighs in, it is not what the deed is; humongous does not count. It is the motive, how the deed is done. Done for the love of Jesus Christ is by far the best. He does much who loves much. He does much who does a thing well. He does a thing well who serves his community more than himself. Carnality often mummers as Charity. Human Nature, Selfishness, Retribution, Convenience, they to hide behind the same holy mask, attempting to crash the Final Party. The one who True and Perfect Charity cannot find oneself in the mirror. One desires only that the glory of God flare out in all things. One envies no one; one has no pet peeves, no private toys; one does not rejoice in oneself alone. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
On the contrary, one want to be blessed in God rather than possess all things without God; again, Saint Paul’s First to the Corinthians (13.4). One attributes nothing to anyone, but refers everything to God. One sees all things fluting fountainlike from God. One sees all Saints on the far side of Judgment picnicking in Heavenly Orchard. Charity it is, then, the love for Jesus Christ. From a spark of this True Charity, you would have more than enough light to see that all Earthly things—pressed down, filled to overflowing, beyond all measure, out of all proportion, plentifully, prodigally, extravagantly, superfluously, redundantly, excessively—mount up to nothing at all. It would be just wrong to argue that every physical disease proves a moral fault or mental deformity to exit, as it would be to argue that the absence of such disease proves moral or mental perfection o have been attained. Many other terrestrial beings are quite healthy too! Where physical laws of hygiene have been broken and continue to be broken, where gluttonous or ill-informed eating and intemperate living have led to bodily disturbance, the sufferer must still rectify one’s physical errors whether one’s spiritual healing is successful or not. Nature has implanted true instincts in our body to sustain and protect it. If we, through slavish acceptance of society’s bad habits, pervert those instincts or dull their sensitivity and poison our body, Nature forces us to suffer sickness and pain as the warning consequences of such perversion. Insofar as humans through ignorance fail to observe nature’s laws or through weakness persistently disobeys them, one is everywhere suffering the penalties attached to one’s wrong habits. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The truth is that no human is free to please oneself and eat what one fancies. All human, including all teachers and members of cult which claim this freedom and who trespass against themselves in this matter, will have to pay the penalty in some way or at some time. The human who reveals in one’s sensuality will naturally defend it. However, when some form of great suffering comes to one as a direct consequence, and one see it for the first time as a sin, one will cease doing so. Ill health disturbs the mind, and if prolonged or serious, may bring on neuroses. The way one views oneself and others, one’s life and the World, has too often been affected by chronic disagreeable sensations in a small part of the body, too often been improved by improving the physical condition, to assert that physical cases are unimportant. Why is it that the number of deaths from cancer has been increasing so rapidly in our times, and so disproportionately to the increase in population? Why is it that this is happening in all those parts of the World where civilization has spread? Why is it that those people who live in the most modern way—the Americans—have the most cancer. Is there not a hint here that our present way of living contributes something to its cause? How many people who would never dream of committing murder upon someone else, commit it upon themselves? Health troubles show up the value of good health, since the physical body’s condition has a strong influence upon the mind’s condition. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
It is worth the trouble of studying the body’s true needs to keep it a useful and efficient temple of God. I believe the Earth exists, and in each minim mote of its duty the holy glow of thy candle. Thou unknown I know, thou spirit, giver, lover of making, of the wrought letter, wrought flower, iron, deed, dream. Dust of Earth, help thou my unbelief. Drift of the Earth, help thou my unbelief. Drift, gray become gold, in the beam of vision. I believe with doubt. I doubt and interrupt my doubt with belief. Be, beloved, threatened World. Each minim mote. Not the poisonous luminescence forced out of its privacy, the sacred lock of its cell broken. No, the ordinary glow of common dust in ancient sunlight. Be, that I may believe. Amen. Grant peace, well-being and blessing unto the World, with grace, lovingkindness and mercy for us and for all America, Thy people. Bless us, O our Father, all of us together, with the light of Thy presence; for by that light Thou hast given us, O Lord our God, the Book of Mormon and Holy Bible of life, lovingkindness and righteousness, blessing and mercy, life and peace. O may it be good in Thy sight at all times to bless Thy people America with Thy peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who blessest Thy people America with peace. O Lord, please guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile, and to those who slander me, let me give no heed. May my soul be humble and forgiving unto all. Please open Thou my heart, O Lord, unto Thy sacred Law, that Thy statutes I may know and all Thy truths purse. Please bring to naught designs of those who seek to do me ill; speedily defeat their aims and thwart their purposes for Thine own sake, for Thine own power, for Thy holiness and Law. That Thy loved ones be delivered, answer us, O Lord, and save with Thy redeeming power. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
CRESLEIGH RIVERSIDE AT PLUMAS RANCH
Cresleigh Riverside at Plumas Ranch Residence 3 has a floorplan that is great for a growing family. With up to 5bedrooms, you will have plenty of room for everyone to have space and privacy, yet the open one-level floor plan has nearly 3,000 square feet, which will bring families together, but allows them to have plenty of space. Your stunning kitchen is the heart of the home, and it is perfect for everything from quick weekday dinners to large dinner parties, where your guests will rave about your incredible new home.
You will be hard pressed to a contemporary floorplan that offers this much space. There are four bedrooms, two and one half bathrooms, and a three car garage. Utilize the den as your own private study or convert into an optional fifth bedroom if needed. The Dining Room and Kitchen are well situated to make entertaining a breeze.
The location of the Owner’s Suite makes it feel like a separate wing from the rest of the home allowing for maximum privacy and retreat.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Home Mini! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-3/https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-3/
Many People Feel Alone in the World in a Very Painful Way!
As machines grow more human, we must be weary that we do not become less so. The businessmen, intellectuals, and revolutionaries of the early industrial period were virtually mesmerized by machinery. They were fascinated by steam engines, clocks, looms, pumps, and pistons, and they constructed endless analogies based on the simple mechanistic technologies of their time. It was no accident that man like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were scientists and inventors as well as political revolutionaries. They grew up in the churning culture wake of Sir Isaac Newton’s great discoveries. Newton had searched the Heavens and concluded the entire Universe was a giant clockwork operating with exact mechanical regularity. La Mettrie, the French physician and philosopher, in 1748 declared man himself to be a machine. Adam Smith later extended the analogy of the machine to economic, arguing that the economy is a system and that system “in many respects resembles machines.” James Madison, in describing the debates that led to the United States Constitution, spoke of the need to “remodel” the “system,” to change the “structure” of political power, and to choose officials through “successive filtrations.” The Constitution itself was filled with “checks and balances” like the inner work of a giant clock. Jefferson spoke of the “machinery of government.” American political thinking continued to reverberate with the sound of flywheels, chains, gears, check and balances. Thus Martin Van Buren invented the “political machine” and eventually New York City has its Tweed machine, Tennessee it Crump machines, New Jersey its Hague machine. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Generations of American politicians, right down to the present, prepared political “blueprints,” “engineered elections,” “steam-rollered” or “railroaded” bills through Congress and the state legislatures. In the nineteenth century in Britain, Lord Cromer conceived of an imperial government that would “ensure the harmonious working of the different parts of the machine.” Nor was this mechanistic mentality a produce of capitalism. Lenin, for example, described the state as “nothing more than a machine used by the capitalist to suppress the workers.” Trotsky spoke of “all the wheels and screws of the bourgeois social mechanism” and went on to describe the function of a revolutionary party in similarly mechanical phrases. Terming it a powerful “apparatus,” he pointed out that “as with any mechanism this is in itself static…the movement of the masses has…to overcome dead inertia…Thus, the living force of steam has to overcome the inertia of the machine before it can set the flywheel in motion.” Drenched in such mechanistic thinking, imbued with an almost blind faith in the power and efficiency of machines, the revolutionary founds of Second Wave societies, whether capitalist or socialist, not surprisingly invented political institutions that shared many of the characteristics of early industrial machines. The structures they hammered and bolted together were based on the elemental notion of representation. And in every country they made use of certain standard parts. These components came out of what might be called, only half facetiously, a universal represento-kit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The components were: Individuals armed with the vote, parties for collecting votes, candidates who, by winning votes, were instantly transformed into “representatives” of the voters, legislatures (parliaments, diets, congress, bundestages, or assemblies) in which, by voting, representatives manufactured laws, executives (presidents, prime ministers, party secretaries) who fed raw materials into the lawmaking machine in the form of policies, and then enforced the resulting laws. Votes were the “atom” of Newtonian mechanism. Votes were aggregated by parties, which served as the “manifold” of the system. They gathered votes from many sources and fed the into the electoral adding machine, which blended them in proportion to party strength or mixture, producing as its output the “will of the people”—the basic fuel that supposedly powered the machinery of government. The parts of this kit were combined and manipulated in different ways in different places. In some places everyone over the age of twenty-one was permitted to vote; elsewhere only Caucasian males were enfranchised; in one country the entire process was merely a façade for control by a dictator; in another the elected officials actually wielded considerable power. Here there were two parties, there a multiplicity of parties, elsewhere only one. Nevertheless, the historical pattern is clear. However the parts might be modified or configured, this same basic kit was used in constructing the formal political machinery of all industrial nations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Even though Communists frequently attacked “bourgeois democracy” and “parliamentarianism” as a mask for privilege, arguing that the mechanisms were usually manipulated by the capitalist class for its own private gain, all socialist industrial nations installed similar representational machines as soon as possible. While holding forth a promise of “direct democracy” in some far-off post-representational era, they relied heavily in the meantime on “socialist representative institutions.” The Hungarian Communist Otto Bihari, in a study of these institutions, writes, “in the course of election the will of the working people makes its influence felt in the governmental organs called to life by voting.” The editor of Pravada, V.G. Afanasyev, in his book The Scientific Management of Society defines “democratic centralism” as including “the sovereign power of the working people…the election of governing bodies and leaders and their accountability to the people.” Just as the factory came to symbolize the entire industrial techno-sphere, representative government (no matter how denatured) became the status symbol of every “advanced” nation. Indeed, even many non-industrial nations—under pressure from colonizers or through blind imitation—rushed to install the same formal mechanisms and used the same universal represento-kit. Nor were these “democracy machines” restricted to the national level. They were installed at state, provincial, and local levels as well, right down to the town or village council. Today in the United States of America alone there are at least some five-hundred thousand elected public officials and 85,000 local governmental units in metropolitan areas, each with its own elections, representative bodies, and election procedures. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Thousands of these representational machines are creaking and grinding away in nonmetropolitan regions, and tens of thousands more around the World. In Swiss cantons and French departments, in the counties of Britain and the provinces of Canada, in the vivodships of Poland and the republics of Russia, in Singapore and Haifa, Osaka, and Oslo, candidates run for office and are magically transmuted into “representatives.” It is safe to say that more than one-hundred thousand of these machines are now manufacturing laws, decrees, regulations, and rules in Second Wave countries alone. Apart from governments as such, virtually all the political parties of industrialism, from extreme right to extreme left, routinely went through the traditional motions of choosing their own leaders by vote. Even contests for precinct-level or local cell leadership typically required some form of election, if only for the ratification of choices made from above. And in many countries the ritual of election became a standard part of the life of all sorts of other organizations, from trade unions and churches to Cub Scout packs. Voting became part of the industrial way of life. In theory, just as each huma being and each vote was a discrete, atomic unit, each of these political units—national, provincial, and local—was also regarded as discrete and atomic. Each had its own carefully defined jurisdiction, its own powers, its own rights and duties. The units were wired together in hierarchical arrangements, from top to bottom, from nation to state or region or local authority. However, as industrialism matured and the economy grew increasingly integrated, decisions taken by each of these political units touched off effects outside its own jurisdiction, thereby causing other political bodies to act in response. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
A decision by the Diet regarded the Japanese textile industry could influence employment in North Carolina and welfare services in Chicago. A congressional vote to put quotas on foreign automobiles could make additional work for local governments in Nagoya or Turin. Thus while at one time politicians could make a decision without upsetting conditions outside their own neatly defined jurisdiction, this became less and less possible. By the mid-twentieth century, tens of thousands of ostensibly sovereign or independent political authorities, stretching around the planet, were connected to one another through the circuits of the economy, through vastly increased travel, migration, and communication, so that they continually activated and excited one another. The thousands of representational mechanisms built out of components of the represento-kit thus increasingly came to form a single invisible supermachine: a global law factory. Now it remains only for us to see how the levers and control wheels of this global system were manipulated—and by whom. Born of the liberating dreams of Second Wave revolutionaries, representative government was stunning advance over earlier power systems, a technological triumph more striking in its own way than the steam engine or the airplane. Representative government made possible orderly succession without hereditary dynasty. It opened feedback channels between top and bottom in society. It provided an arena in which the differences among various groups could be reconciled peacefully. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Tied to majority rule and the idea of one-man/one-vote, it helped the poor and weak to squeeze benefits from the technicians of power who ran the integrational engines of society. For these reasons, the spread of representative governments was, on the whole, a humanizing breakthrough in history. Yet from the very beginning it fell far short of its promise. By no stretch of the imagination was it ever controlled by the people, however defined. Nowhere did it actually change the underlying structure of power in industrial nations—the structure of sub-elites, elites, and super-elites. Indeed, far from weakening control by the managerial elites, the formal machinery of representations became one of the key means of integration by which they maintained themselves in power. Thus elections, quite apart from who won them, performed a powerful cultural function for the elites. To the degree that everyone had a right to vote, elections fostered the illusion of equality. Voting provided a mass ritual of reassurance, conveying to the people the idea that choices were being made systematically, with machine-like regularity, and hence, by implication, rationally. Elections symbolically assured citizens that they were still in command—that they could, in theory at least, dis-elect as well as elect leaders. In both capitalist and socialist countries, these ritual reassurances often proved more important than the actual outcomes of many elections. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Integrational elites programmed the political machinery differently in place, controlling the number of parties or manipulating voting eligibility. Yet the electoral ritual—some might say farce—was employed everywhere. The fact that Russia and Eastern European elections routinely produced magical majorities of 99 to 100 percent suggested that the need for reassurance remained at least as strong in the centrally planned societies as in the “free World.” Elections took the steam out of protests from below. Furthermore, despite the efforts of democratic reformers and radicals, the integrational elites retained virtually permanent control of the systems of representative government. Many theories have been advanced to explain why. Most, however, overlook the mechanical nature of the system. If we look at Second Wave political systems with the eyes of an engineer rather than a political scientist, we suddenly are struck by a key factor that generally goes unobserved. Industrial engineers routinely distinguish between two fundamentally different classes of machine: those that function intermittently, otherwise known as “batch-processing” machines, and those that function uninterruptedly, called “continuous-flow” machines. An example of the first is the commonplace punch press. The worker brings a batch of metal plates and feeds them into the machine, one or a few at a time, to stamp them into desired shapes. When the batch is finished the machine stops until a new batch is brought. An example of the second is the oil refinery which, once started up, never stops running. Twenty-four hours a day, oil flows through its pies and tubes and chambers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
If we look at the global law factory, with its intermittent voting, we find ourselves face to face with a classical batch processor. The public is allowed to choose between candidates at stipulated times, after which the formal “democracy machine” is switched off again. Contrast this with the continuous flow of influence from various organized interests, pressure groups, and power peddlers. Swarms of lobbyists from corporations and from government agencies, departments, and ministries testify before committees, serve on blue-ribbon panels, attend the receptions and banquets, toast each other with cocktails in Washington or vodka in Moscow, carry information and influence back and forth, and thus affect the decision-making process on a round-the-clock basis. The elites, in short, created a powerful continuous-flow machines to operate alongside (and often at cross purposes with) the democratic batch processor. Only when we see these two machines side by side can we begin to understand how state power was really exercised in the global law factory. So long as they played the representational game, people had at best only intermittent opportunities, through voting, to feed back their approval or disapproval of the government and its actions. The technicians of power, by contrast, influenced those actions continuously. Finally, an even more potent tool for social control was engineered into the very principle of representation. For the mere selection of some people to represent others created new members of the elite. When workers, for example, first fought for the right to organize unions, they were harassed, prosecuted for conspiracy, followed by company spies, or beaten up by police and goon squads. They were outsiders, unrepresented or inadequately represented in the system. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Once unions established themselves, they gave rise to a new group of integrators—the labour establishment—whose members rather than simply representing the workers, mediated between them and the elites in business and government. The George Meanys and Georges Seguys of the World, despite their rhetoric, became themselves key members of the integrational elite. The fake union leaders in Russia and Eastern Europe never were anything but technicians of power. In theory, they need to stand for re-election guaranteed that representatives would stay honest and would continue to speak for those they represented. Nowhere, however, did this prevent the absorption of representatives into the architecture of power. Everywhere the gap widened between the representative and the represented. Representative government—what we have been taught to call democracy—was, in short, an industrial technology for assuring inequality. Representative government was pseudorepresentative. What we see, then, glancing backward for a moment summary, is a civilization heavily dependent on fossil fuels, factory production, the nuclear family, the corporation, mass education, and the mass media, all based on a widening cleavage between production and consumption—and all managed by a set of elites whose task it was to integrate the whole. In this system, representative government was the political equivalent of the factory. Indeed, it was a factory for the manufacture of collective integrational decisions. Like most factories, it was managed from above. And like most factories, it is now increasingly obsolete, a victim of the advancing Third Wave. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
If Second Wave political structures are increasingly out of date, unable to cope with today’s complexities—part of the trouble, as we shall see, lies in another crucial Second Wave institution: the nation-state. The World War II ex-GIs, and their brides who moved to the new suburban subdevelopments after the war represented the beginnings of the mass suburbanization of North America. This postwar era was a period of economic boom and intense optimism. After all, the Depression was over, and America’s productivity had won the war. That productivity meant that by the mid-1950s America, with 6 percent of the World’s population, was producing half the World’s goods. The postwar prosperity showed in the 1950 census, which indicated that the United States of America now had become a nation of homeowners, with 55 percent of American householders now owning rather than renting. At the end of World War II, the average American family was renting. New housing starts in 1949 went over a million a year—a pace that would be maintained for forty years. The veterans moving to the new suburbs were not only great in number, they also differed from earlier suburbanites insofar as they represented a wide swath of American society. Not all of the veterans obtaining VA loans were middle-class, and many were not WASPs. Suburbia was not only being enlarged, it was also ethically, economically, and religiously being democratized. The newcomers were Catholics and Jews as well as mainline Protestants; they were Irish, Italian, and Polish as well as English or northwest European; they were high paid educated professionals and factory workers as well as professionals and managers. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
While advertisements still stressed that moving out was moving up, the fact was that suburbs were coming to mirror mainstream America. A few boundaries however, remained—those of race, religion, language, and culture. Racially, postwar suburbs looked Art of Thanksgiving by Norman Rockwell. Virtually all the newcomers were Christian, from Europe, spoke English, and kept their homes, inside and out, picture perfect. People who did not fit these standards were not welcomed. There is no question that the new metropolitan-area housing, and lots of it, was needed by the late 1940s. During the Depression new buildings starts for the nation had dropped to as low as 92,000 in 1933. During the war millions of people had been encouraged to migrate into the cities to take jobs in the expanding war industries. However, except for a limited amount of “temporary” housing, little new housing was built for the war workers. This was due in good part to the lobbying of banking and real estate interests such as the National Association of Homebuilders, who strenuously fought the government building defense housing. Real estate builders and sellers felt such housing would be a glut on the market after the war ended. As a result, by 1946 there were hardly any homes for ale or, for that matter, apartments for rent. Some 6 million families, unable to get their own housing, were doubling up with relatives. Something had to happen. What occurred was a government-subsidized mass exodus to new tract suburbs of standardized single-family homes. With city landlords raising rents and landlords not wanting to rent to couples with young children, it is not surprising that middle-class and even working-class families flooded out from the cities to the greener opportunities of the suburbs. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
During the 1950s and 1960, the suburban population of the United States of America dramatically increased from 35 million to 84 million suburbanites. This was a growth rate of 144 percent. By 1970, 37 percent of Americans lived in the suburbs. The 2020 census figure increased to 52 percent. Currently, half the United States of America’s population lives in the suburbs. However, rural communities are also seeing 16 percent growth, especially as people want to get back to nature and keep their families socially distant and out of crowded cities. Many of the new postwar suburbanites settled in the subdivision tract suburbs being erected on the periphery of urban areas. They moved there because that is where new housing was available. Only in the suburbs could the goal of every family having its own home (and mortgage) be realized. “I have not yet reached perfection, but I press on, hoping to take hold of that for which Christ once took hold me of. My friends, I do not reckon myself to have got hold of it yet. All I can say is this: forgetting what is behind me, and reaching out for that which lies ahead, I press towards the goal to win the prize which is God’s call to the life above, in Christ Jesus,” reports Phil. 3.12-14. For we are always traveling, and must leave behind us what we know and possess, and seek for that which we do not yet know and possess. All of us are on a journey along the road of life. It is a journey across time, as we move through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. However, it is also a journey of discovery, as each new being in the road helps us learn more about ourselves, our World, and perhaps the purpose of our journey. Where are you on the road of life? How much progress have you made in your spiritual journey? #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Developmental psychology has given us some tools to help us think about the journey. For example, Erik Erikson describes eight stages or eras in the human life span, and identifies a specific challenge that must be mastered at each stage. The first four stages cover infancy and childhood, as the infant first forms a special bond with the parents, and then spends the childhood years gradually disengaging from the parents, building a sense of individual competence, and preparing for an independent life in adulthood. The journey begins in earnest during adolescence, as each of us struggles to achieve a sense of identity. Who am I? What is important to me? Where am I headed in life? Yogi Berra’s lighthearted approach to life decisions is well known: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” However, most of us recognized as adolescents that there is more wisdom in Robert Frost’s view—that the “road not taken” steadily diverges from the path we chose, leading inevitably to different life outcomes. In part, the identity crisis of the teen years is produced by new ways of thinking, a set of new intellectual tools that Jean Piaget calls formal operational thought. The adolescent can now think much more clearly about abstract ideas and hypothetical possibilities, including options for future careers and relationships. For most of us, career choices flows out of identity formation—and for Christians, part of our identity is our place in God’s plan. The theologian Walter Brueggemann states, “As we move from the question ‘Who am I?’ to the question ‘Whose am I?’, eventually all questions of identity become questions of vocation…Vocation is finding a purpose for being in the World that is related to the purpose of God.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The related question of intimacy soon arises: With whom do I wan to share my life? The theologian Henri Nouwen echoes Erikson’s emphasis on intimacy, arguing that the search for intimacy is a “desire to experience a sense of inner completeness, a sense of inner unity, because many people feel alone in the World in a very painful way.” It is natural and normal to want a partner in the journey of life. However, even the choice of a mate is built on the successful resolution of earlier challenges. Specially, a mature capacity for intimacy is built on the foundation of a secure sense of identity. Dr. Nouwen claims, “For real intimacy to be possible, both husband and wife need to be fully developed human beings…This means that intimacy is only possible for people who have found identity.” What is the next step for the adult who has achieved identity and intimacy? Dr. Erikson claims that mature adults struggle to express their generativity—a concern for the next generation and for the future of society. Those who focus on their own needs and achievements will eventually stagnate, while those who turn outward to make a difference in other people’s lives will find their own lives renewed with vigour and a new sense of purpose. Individual generativity spreads outward like ripples expanding in circles from a stone dropped in a pond, combining with generative impulses from other adults, to foster societal generativity, which enhances the next generation’s development. Finally, as we approach the end of our journey, Dr. Erikson sees a final challenge: to develop a sense of ego integrity—to be able to look back on our life and see that the various pieces and phases of the journey actually fit together to form a meaningful and worthwhile whole. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Ideally, we will be able to acknowledge our mistakes, yet still feel that we did our best with the gifts that God gave us; we will be able to express our regrets about the wrong turns and blind alleys, yet still see the hand of God guiding our path. The metaphour of life as a journey is helpful image, but it is not the only way we can think about the life span or our own development as individuals. The psychologist Dan McAdams prefers the metaphour of life as a story—a personal narrative in which each chapter represents a phase of our life, complete with heroes and villains, unfolding with high drama. From this perspective, each of us constructs the meaning and purpose of our story—initially in adolescence and young adulthood—and this in turn shapes the events in the next chapter of our life. Which of these metaphours do you prefer? Both metaphours have rich connections with biblical themes, but the journey metaphour perhaps captures more of the flavour of the Christian’s walk with God and the sense of movement through the life span. The journey metaphour also echoes in one of the earliest names for Christianity in Greek (as reported in Acts 9.2; 19.23; 24.14, 22): hodos—“the way.” Each of us is “on the way” along the road of life. As Dr. Luther describes it, “we are always traveling, and must leave behind us what we know and possess, and seek for that which we do not yet know and possess.” Each sage of our journey involves leaving behind the baggage of the previous phase, and equipping ourselves for the next phase by realigning ourselves with the compass setting as it points toward our destination, the end point in the journey. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In the words of St. Paul, “forgetting what is behind me, and reaching out for that which lies ahead, I press towards the goal to win he prize which is God’s call to the life above, in Christ Jesus.” If the vision of Light brought union with God, intimacy with God, it did not and could not enabled one to know God as God knows Himself. He could not penetrate His inmost nature and substance. This, the ultimate beyond the Light, is called “the Divine Darkness” by the Fathers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Seeing the Light in front of one is one state; being merged into it is another, and superior. This is the penultimate experience, the last but one of the mystic’s way. One finds oneself totally lost indeed but lost in the most dazzling Light. The ego seems to have vanished: infinity and universality of being have replaced it. Ecstatic rapture fills one. Is it any wonder that the Greek Orthodox Church mystics of the first few centuries believe this was the ultimate experience of pure Spirit, the final union with God? Yet it may not last, cannot last, must come to an end. It may have held one for one or two minutes only or it may have done so for a longer period. It may never recur again in one’s whole lifetime—this is so in most cases—or it may come several times more. However, it stands as a landmark until the end of one’s years. Where the Greek Orthodox Church regards the Light experience as the highest point reachable by humans, the Indian Philosophic Teaching regards it as the highest point reachable by humans, the Indian Philosophic Teaching regards is as the last stage before the highest. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
For anything which is “seen” implies the existence of a “seer” as separate from it. This is not less so even in the case of the Holy Light. Not seeing but be-ing is the final experience according to his Teaching. “You have to go beyond seeing and find out who is ‘I’ who experiences this light,” said Ramana Maharshi to a disciple. Turn your eyes on yourself. Stop judging the faults of others. Why? You snoop about long and hard in the lives of others, and all you come up with is a thimbleful. In the process you leave much wreckage behind even where you found no fault. Make an inventory of your own faults and negligences, and you will come up with a basketful. Yes, it is a matter of the heart, our heart, and we are always in a terrible judgmental state. However, have you noticed? When others commit faults, we harden our hearts against them, excusing little because they should know better. However, when we commit the very same faults, we soften our hearts, excusing much because of the wonderfulness of ourselves. It is a matter of common sense. Resist the rush to judgment. You know it is wrong, and it would not happen so often if God were truly the sole object of your gaze. However, there is no doubt we suffer damage. Something lurks on the inside. Something trips us up on the outside. Unbeknownst to themselves, many people are self-seekers; that is to say, it is themselves they are chasing, and they do not even know it. They seem happy enough when things are going their own way. However, they are not, they run and sit in a corner and cry big tears. How can his happen? Well, with so many of us thinking and holding so many different opinions, there is bound o be a disagreement now and then; and no one, not even the friendly and the civil, the religious and the devout, are exempt from hurt feelings. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Old habits die hard. That is practical wisdom, and so is this: Nobody trusts farther than one can see. Here is some spiritual wisdom. Rely on Jesus Christ as your Lord and Master. If you do no, but rely rather on your own ability to logick your way through life, then you will not be nominated for the Homo Illuminatus award. God sees Himself as creator and sees us as creatures. To the end He wants us to climb above mere human reason. He wans to light our love with the Divine Torch. Both common sense and practical experience inform us that some sicknesses come solely from physical causes. The proper way to treat them is to use physical methods, that is, to find those causes and remove them, and to apply physical remedies. Those who transgress against the body’s law of being and suffer the penalty in ill health, cannot reasonably blame God’s will when they ought to blame their own abuse, neglect, or ignorance. The penalties of violating hygienic laws may in some cases be escaped by spiritual means, but the penalties of continuing to violate them may not. The cause which engenders a malady must be itself removed, or else the removal of the symptoms which are merely its effects will be followed eventually by their reappearance or by those of a different malady. Wisdom here tells us to obey the laws and to regard disease as a warning of our transgression of them. Those who seek healing only to be restored to sensual courses and selfish designs, may commit further errors and be worse off in the end. In protecting the Earth, we found good pine needles and harsh dried wood along with rocks helpful. When you begin to examine our Earth, you find tiny flowers and small grass blades, Ornamented by the chatter of ground squirrels. You find your soil is soft and rocky; it does not permit artificial soil topping. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Our pine trees are diligent, dedicated and graceful; in either life of death they will always perform their duty of pinetreeness, equipped with sap and bark. We find our World of wilderness so refreshing. Along with Summer’s drum, we produce occasional thundershowers, wet and dry messages; we cannot miss the point, since this Earth is so bending and open to us, along with the rocks, we are not shy, we are so proud—we can make a wound in a pine tree and it bleeds sap, and courts us, in spite of the setting-sun shadow; they bend and serve so graciously, whether dead or alive. We love our pines and rocks; they are not covered with the superstitious setting-sun chemical manure of this and that. We are so proud of the sky that we produce on our horizon. Our stars twinkle and wink as if they know us; we have no problem of recognition. Our rocks and pine trees speak for us. O Lord our God, be gracious unto Thy people of America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy Sanctuary and receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worship of Thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. O may our eyes witness Thy return to America. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who restores Thy divine presence unto America. We thankfully acknowledge Thee, O Lord our God, our fathers’ God to all eternity. Our Rock art Thou, our Shield that saves through every generation. We give Thee thanks and we declare Thy praise for all Thy tender care. Our lives we trust into Thy loving hand. Our souls are ever in Thy charge; Thy wonders and Thy miracles are daily with us, evening, morn, and noon. O Thou who art all-good, whose mercies never fail us, Compassionate One, whose lovingkindness never cease, we ever hope in Thee. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
“Open concept” means the freedom to design an interior according to your needs, taste, and style. We love showcasing unfurnished homes, like these pictures of Mills Station Residence 1, so that you can create a mental picture of how it will look when it’s YOURS. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-1/
Where there is No Love, What Use is Beauty?
The most powerful thing we pass along to our children, may not reside in the jeans, but in the soul. Nothing is more confusing to an international business person than the spectacle of an American presidential campaign: the hot-dog gulping, backslapping, and baby kissing, the coy refusal to cast hat in ring, the primaries, the conventions, followed by the manic frenzy of fund raising, whistle-stopping, speechmaking, television commercials—all in the name of democracy. By contrast, Americans find it hard to make sense of the way the French choose their leaders. Still less do they understand the tame British elections, the Dutch free-for-all with two dozen parties, the Australian preferential voting system, or the Japanese wheeling and dealing among factions. All these political systems seem frightfully different from one another. Even more incomprehensible are the one-party elections or pseudo-elections that take place in Russia and Eastern Europe. When it comes to politics, no two industrial nations look the same. Yet once we tear away our provincial blinders, we suddenly discover that a set of powerful parallels lies beneath the surface differences. In fact, it is almost as if the political systems of all Second Wave nations were built from the same hidden blueprint. When Second Wave revolutionaries managed to topple First Wave elites in Franc, in the United States, in Russian, Japan and other nations, they were faces with the need to write constitutions, set up new governments, and deign almost from scratch new political institutions. In the excitement of creation, they debated new ideas, new structures. Everywhere they fought over the nature of representation. Who should represent whom? Should representatives be instructed how to vote by the people—or use their own judgement? Should terms of office be long or short? What role should parties play? #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
In each country a new political architecture emerged from these conflicts and debates. A close look at these structures reveals that they are built on a combination of Old First Wave assumptions and newer ideas swept in by the industrial age. After millennia of agriculture, it was hard for the founders of Second Wave political systems to imagine an economy based on labour, capital, energy, and raw materials, rather tan land. Land had always been at the very center of life itself. No surprisingly, therefore, geography was deeply embedded in our various voting systems. Senator and congress members in America—and their counterparts in Britain and many other industrial nations—are still elected not as representatives of some social class or occupational, ethnic, desirability, or lifestyle grouping, but as representatives of the inhabitants of a particular piece of land: a geographical district. First Wave people were typically immobile, and it was therefore natural for the architects of industrial-era political systems to assume that people would remain in one locality all their lives. Hence the prevalence, even today of residency requirement in voting regulations. The pace of First Wave life was slow. Communications were so primitive that it might take a week for a message from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to reach New York. A speech by George Washington took weeks or months to filter through to the hinterland. As late as 1865 it still took twelve days for London to Learn that President Lincoln had been assassinated. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
On the unspoken assumption that things moved slowly, representative bodies like Congress or the British Parliament were regarded as “deliberative”—having the time and taking the time to think through their problems. Most First Wave people were illiterate and unenlightened. Thus, if drawn from the educated classes, it was widely assumed that the representatives would inevitably make more intelligent decisions than the mass of voters. However, even as they built these First Wave assumptions into our political institutions, the revolutionaries of the Second Wave also cast their eyes on the future. Thus the architecture they constructed reflected some of the latest technological notions of their time. Other fluctuations in American society were reflected in suburban living. By the 1930 housing styles were changing and bungalows were out of fashion as the preferred modest home choice. The term “bungalow” had become a pejorative usage among some housing writers in the same way the term “Levittown” did in the 1960s and 1970s. When he dismissed the plebeian Warren Harding as possessing only “a bungalow mind,” President Woodrow Wilson, who was a cultural patrician, was one of the first to use the term in this way. During the 1930s bungalow styles were replaced by modest “Williamsburg Colonials,” which owed their popularity to the publicity John Davison Rockefeller Sr.’s restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. Following World War II, the charming colonials were largely replaced as the most popular unassuming homes design by Cape Codes. These, in turn, gave way to low-profile ranch homes and, in the 1960s, their successor, the split-levels. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
Postwar one-story ranch houses were built more for economy and utility than style. Since economy of construction was a major factor and space was at a premium, rooms often had multiple functions, such as a living room with a dining room or a combined kitchen and dining area. If the house had a study, it almost certainly doubled as a guest bedroom. Ranch-style homes, with their open floor plans and “family friendly rooms,” were even more informal than the bungalows. The simple one-story design with low-pitched eaves and the picture window suggested a casual and comfortable lifestyle. To make the house seem larger, a sliding glass door commonly opened onto a patio so that the outside seemed an extension of the house. Millions of such ranch-styles homes and their variations were built in the postwar years, as even a cursory viewing of suburban housing demonstrates. Currently, ranch styles are less popular on the east coast, where colonial styles are back in favour. However, modified ranch California styles remain popular on the west coast. Regardless of the preferred housing style, across the country a relaxed family-oriented lifestyle with an emphasis on outdoor activities has become the norm. Today in contemporary homes the emphasis on multiple-use space has resulted in the family room and living room often being replaced by a “great room,” while the dining room has gone the way of the parlour. In recent years master bedrooms and bathrooms have grown far larger, while sun rooms, Florida rooms, California rooms, and decks have become more common. However, in terms of sheer size, in many homes, the largest room is invariably the garage. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
Thus, by the onset of World War II, the patterns for mass suburbanization had been set. Suburbs had already lost their exclusivity as being communities containing homes of only the well-to-do. Suburbs also housed those who were comfortably middle-class. However, in the prewar era, when most Americans were still renters rather than homeowners, and when a typical mortgage was for only half the value of the house and could only be obtained for a period of five years, living in the suburbs was still beyond the hope of the “average” American. No until the coming of the liberal mortgage terms of postwar Veterans’ Administration loads would mass suburbanization of average Americans become a practical reality. Among the passions that agitate the heart of humans, there is an ardent, impetuous one that renders intimate relationships necessary to the other; a terrible passion which braves all dangers, overcomes all obstacles, and which, in its fury, seems fitted to destroy the human race it is destined to preserve. What would become of humans, victimized by this unrestrained and brutal rage, without modesty and self-control, fighting everyday over the object of their passion at the price of their blood? There must first be agreement that the more violent the passions are, the more necessary the laws are to contain them. However, over an above the fact that the disorders and the crimes these passions cause daily in our midst show quite well the insufficiency of the laws in this regard, it would still be good to examine whether these disorders did not come into being with the laws themselves; for then, even if they were capable of repressing them, the least one should expect of them would be that they call a halt to an evil that would not exist without them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
Let us begin by distinguishing between the moral and the physical aspects of the sentiment of love. The physical aspect is that general desire which clines one gender to unite with another. The moral aspect is what determines this desire and fixes it exclusively on one single object, or which at least gives it a greater degree of energy for this preferred object. Now it is easy to se that the moral aspect of love is an artificial sentiment born of social custom, and extolled by women with so much skill and care in order to establish their hegemony and make dominant the general that ought to obey. Since this feeling is founded on certain notions of merit or beauty that a savage is not in a position to have, and on comparisons one is incapable of making, it must be almost non-existent for one. For since one’s mind could not form abstract ideas of regularity and proportion, one’s heart is not susceptible to sentiments of admiration and love, which, even without its being observed come into being from the application of these ideas. One pays exclusive attention to the temperament one has received from nature, and not the taste [aversion] one has been unable to acquire; any women suits one’s purpose. Limited merely to the physical aspect of love, and fortunate enough to be unaware of those preferences which stir up the feeling and increase the difficulties in satisfying it, humans must feel the ardours of the temperament less frequently and less vividly, and consequently have fewer and less cruel conflicts among themselves. Imagination, which wreaks so much havoc among us, does not speak to savage hearts; each human peacefully awaits the impetus of nature, gives oneself over to it without choice, and with more pleasures than frenzy; and once the need is satisfied, all desire is snuffed out. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
Hence it is incontestable that love itself, like all other passions, had acquired only in society that impetuous ardour which so often makes it lethal to humans. And it is all the more ridiculous to represent savages as continually slaughtering each other in order to satisfy their brutality, since this opinion is directly contrary to experience; and since the Caribs, of all existing peoples, are the people that until now has wandered least from the state of nature, they are the people least subject to jealousy, even though they live in a hot climate which always seems to occasion greater activity in these passions. As to any inferences that could be drawn, in the case of several species of animals, from he clashes between males that bloody our poultry yards throughout the year, ad which makes our forests resound in the spring with their cries as they quarrel over a female, it is necessary to begin by excluding all species in which nature has manifestly establish, in the relative power of the genders, relations other than those that exist among us. Hence cockfights do not form the basis for an inference regarding he human species. In species where the proportion is more closely observed, these fights can have for their cause only the scarcity of females in relation to the number of males, or the exclusive intervals during which the female continually rejects the advances of the male, which adds up to the cause just cited. For if each female receives the male for only two months a year, in this respect it is as if the number of females were reduced by five-sixths. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
Now neither of these two cases is applicable to the human species where the number of females generally surpasses the number of males, and where human females, unlike those of other species, have never been observed to have period of heat and exclusion, even among savages. Moreover, among several of these animal species, where the entire species goes into heat simultaneously, there comes a terrible moment that of common ardour, tumult, disorder and combat: a moment that does not happen in the human species where love is never periodic. Therefore one cannot conclude from these combats of certain animals for the possession of female that the same thing would happen to a man in the state of nature. And even if one could draw that conclusion, given that these conflicts do not destroy the other species, one should conclude that they would not be any more lethal for ours. And it is quite apparent that they would wreak less havoc in the state of nature than in society, especially in countries where mores still count for something and where the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of husbands every day give rise to duels, murders and still worse things; where they duty of eternal fidelity serves merely to create adulterers; and where even the laws of continence and honour necessarily spread debauchery and multiply the number of abortions. Let us conclude that, wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without dwelling, with war, without relationships, with no need for one’s fellow humans, and correspondingly with no desire to do them hard, perhaps ever even recognizes any of them individually, savage humans, subject to few passions and self-sufficient, had only the sentiments and enlightenment appropriate to the state; one felt only one’s true needs, took notice of only what one believed one had an interest in seeing; and that one’s intelligence made no more progress than one’s vanity. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
If by chance one made some discovery, one was all the less able to communicate it to others because one did not even know one’s own children. Art perished with its inventor. There was neither education nor progress; generations were multiplied to no purpose. Since each one always began from the same point, centuries went by with all the crudeness of the first ages; the species was already old, and humans remained ever a child. If I have gone on at such length about the supposition of hat primitive condition, it is because, having ancient errors and inveterate prejudices to the true state of nature, how far even natural inequality is from having as much reality and influence in that state as our writer claim. In fact, it is easy to see that, among the differences that distinguish humans, several of the pass for natural ones which are exclusively the work of habit and of the various sorts of life that humans adopt in society. Thus a robust or delicate temperament, and the strength of weakness that depend on it, frequently derive more from the harsh or effeminate way in which one has been raised than from the primitive constitution of bodies. The same holds for mental powers; and not only does education make a difference between cultivated minds and those that are not, it also augments the differences among he former in proportion to their culture; for were a giant and a dwarf walking on the same road, each step they both would give a fresh advantage to the gain. Now if one compares the prodigious diversity of educations and lifestyles in the different orders of the civil state with the simplicity and uniformity of animal and savage life, where all nourish themselves from the same foods live in the same manner, and do exactly the same things, it will be understood how much less the difference between one human and another must be in the state of nature than in that of society, and how much natural inequality must increase in the human species through inequality occasioned by social institutions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
However, even if nature were to affect, in the affect, in the distribution of her gifts, as many preferences as is claimed, what advantage would the most favoured humans derive from them, to the detriment of others, in a state of things that allowed practically no sort of relationships among them? Where there is no love, what use is beauty? What use is wit for people who do not speak, and ruse to those who have no dealing with others? I always hear it repeated that the stronger will oppress the weaker. However, let me have an explanation of the meaning “oppression.” Some will dominate with violence; others will groan, enslaved to all their caprices. That is precisely what I observe among us; but I do not see how this could be said of savage humans, to whom it would be difficult even to explain what servitude and domination are. A human could well lay hold of the fruit of another has of savage humans, to whom it would be difficult even to explain what servitude and domination are. A human could well lay hold of the fruit another has gathered, the game one has killed, the cave that served as one’s shelter. However, how will he ever succeed in making oneself be obeyed? And what can be the chains of dependence among humans who possess nothing? If someone chases me from one tree, I am free to go to another; if someone torments me in once place, who will prevent me from going elsewhere? Is there a human with strength sufficiently superior to mine and who is, moreover, sufficiently depraved, sufficiently lazy and sufficiently ferocious to force me to provide for one’s subsistence while one remains idle? One must resolve not to take one’s eyes off me for a single instant, to keep me carefully tied down while one sleeps, for fear that I may escape or that I would kill one. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
In other words, one is obliged to expose oneself voluntarily to a much greater hardship than the one he or she wants to avoid and gives me. After all that, were one’s vigilance to relax for an instant, were an unforeseen noise to make one turn one’s head, I take twenty steps into the forest; my chains are broken, and one never see me again for the rest of one’s life’ Without needlessly prolonging these details, anyone should see that, since the bonds of servitude are formed merely from the mutual dependence of human and the reciprocal needs that unite them, it is impossible to enslave a human without having first put one in the position of being incapable of doing without another. This being a situation that did not exist in the state of nature, it leaves each person free of he yoke, and renders pointless the law of the strongest. After having proved that inequality is hardly observable in the state of nature, and that is influence there is almost nonexistent, it remains for me to show is origin and progress in the successive developments of the human mind. After having shown that perfectibility, social virtues, and the other faculties that natural humans had received in a state of potentiality could never develop by themselves, that to achieve this development they required the chance coming together of several unconnected causes that might never have come into being and without which one would have remained eternally in one’s primitive constitution, it remains for me to consider and to bring together the various chance happenings that were able to perfect human reason while deteriorating the species, make a being evil while rendering it habituated to the ways of society, and, from so distant a beginning, finally bring humans and the World to the point where we see them now. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
I admit that, since the events I have to describe could have taken place in several ways, I cannot make a determination among them except on the basis of conjecture. However, over and above the fact that these conjectures become reasons when they are the most probable ones that a person can draw from the nature of things and the sole means that a person can have discovering the truth, the consequences I wish to deduce from mine will not thereby be conjectural, since, on the basis of the principles I have just established, no other system is conceivable that would not furnish me with the same results, and from which I could not draw the same conclusions. This will excuse me from expanding my reflections on the way in which the lapse of time compensates for the slight probability of events; concerning the surprising power that quite negligible causes may have when they ac without interruption; concerning the impossibility, on the one hand, of a person’s destroying certain hypotheses, even though, on the other hand, of a person’s destroying certain hypotheses, even though, on the other hand, one is not in a position to accord them the level of factual certitude; concerning a situation in which two facts given as real are to be connected by a series of intermediate facts that are unknown or regarded as such, it belongs to history, when it exists, to provide the facts that connect them; it belongs to philosophy, when history is unavailable, to determine similar facts that can connect them; finally, concerning how, with respect to events, similarity reduces the facts to a much smaller number of a different class than one might imagine. It is enough for me to offer these objects to the consideration of my judges; it is enough for me to have seen to it that ordinary readers would have no need to consider them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
We have been concerned with thought and imagination, but not with language. I had to picture Euston Station, but I did no need to mention it; the child thought that poison was Horrid Red Things, but she could talk about poison without saying so. However, very often when we are talking about something which is not perceptible by the five senses we use words which, in one of their meanings, refer to things or actions that are. When a human says that one grasps an argument one is using a verb (grasp) which literally means to take something in the hands, but one is certainly not thinking that one’s mind has hands or that an argument can be seized like a Winchester rifle. To avoid the word grasp one may change the form of expression and say, “I see your point,” but one does not mean that a pointe object has appeared in one’s visual field. One may have a third shot and say, “I follow you,” but one does not mean that one is walking behind you along a road. Everyone is familiar with this linguistic phenomenon and the grammarians call it a metaphour. However, it is a serious mistake to think that metaphour is an optional thing which poets and orators may put into their work as a decoration and plain speakers can do without. The truth is that if we are going to talk at all about things which are not perceived by the senses, we are forced to use language metaphorically. Books on psychology or economics or politics are as continuously metaphorical as books of poetry or devotion. There is no other way of talking, as every philologist is aware. Those who wish can satisfy themselves on the point by reading the books I have already mentioned in the past and the other books to which those will lead them on. It is a study for a lifetime and I must here content myself with the mere statement; all speech about supersensible is, and must be, metaphorical in the highest degree. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
We have now three guiding principles before us. First, that thought is distinct from the imagination which it accompanies it. Second, that thought may be in the main sound even when the false images that accompany it are mistaken by the thinker for true ones. Third, that anyone who talks about things that cannot be seen, or touched, or heard, or the like, must inevitably talk as if they could be seen or touched or heard (exempli gratia must talk of “complexes” and “repressions” as if desires could really be tied up in bundles or shoved back; of “growth” and “development” as if institutions could really grow like trees or unfold like flowers; of energy being “released” as if it were an animal let out of a cage). Let us now apply this to the “savage” or “primitive” articles of the Christian creed. And let use admit at once that many Christians (though by no means all) when they make these assertions do have in mind just those crude mental pictures which so horrify the sceptic. When they say that Christ “came down from Heaven” they do have a vague image of something shooing or floating downwards out of the sky. When they say that Christ is the “Son” of “the Father” they may have a picture of two human forms, the one looking rather more mature than the other. However, we now know that the mere presence of these mental pictures does not, of itself, tell us anything about the reasonableness or absurdity of the thoughts they accompany. If absurd images meant absurd thought, then we should all be thinking nonsense all the time. And the Christians themselves make it clear that the images are not to be identified with the thing believed. They may picture the Father as a human form, but they also maintain that He has no body. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
They may picture Him older than the Son, but they also maintain the one did not exist before the other, both having existed from all eternity. I am speaking, of course, about Christian adults. Christianity is not to be judged from the fancies of children any more than medicine from the ideas of the little girl who believed in horrid red things. Although disentangling the effects of genes and experience is no easy matter, it more and more seems that the genetic influence is considerable. The range of genetically influences traits is impressive—from physical traits (such as handedness and obesity-proneness), to intelligence, to aggressiveness, to our vulnerability to depression and schizophrenia. In one study of 850 twin pairs, John Loehlin and Robert Nichols found that, compared with fraternal twins whose parents treated them very similarly were not more alike than those who were treated less similarly. Even twins who are reared apart exhibit amazing similarities of tastes, personalities, and abilities. “In some domains it looks as though our identical twins reared apart are…just as similar as identical twins reared together,” reports the investigator Thomas Bouchard. We must be careful not to oversimply genetic effects. Our genes issue orders for our bodies, but our humanity also embodies nurturance provided or withheld, education given effectively or poorly, love sustained or withdrawn. Moreover, as every student of psychology knows, our personality reflects the interactions of our genes, past experience, and present situation. If a slow-witted, frail, uncoordinated boy experiences failure in the classroom, on the athletic field, and in his relations with intimacy, shall we say his low self-image is due to his genes or his environment? It is due to both, because his environment reacts to his genetically influenced traits. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Studies of adoptive families further restrain our belief in the unilateral power of parenting. The astonishing result of these studies is that the personalities of people who grew up together do not much resemble one another, whether they are biologically related or not. To be sure adoption has some wonderful consequences: it transmits values and attitudes, and it provides a nurturing environment for children who might otherwise be hindered by neglect or abuse. Nevertheless, some dimensions of personality, such as temperamental reactivity, seem not to be greatly affected by normal variations in parenting. The developmental psychologist Sandra Scarr puts it more shockingly: “Our studies suggest that there is virtually no family environment effect on personality. These data say that in any reasonable environment, people will become what they will become.” Although the evidence of parental power tempers Dr. Scarr’s sweeping generalization, there are additional influences over which parents have little voluntary control. In The Nurture Assumption, the psychologist Judith Rich Harris argues that for many aspects of development, direct parental influence is minimal. And it is not just genes, she argues; peer influences are also quite strong. Consider: Preschoolers who, despite parents’ urgings, disdain a certain food will often eat the food if they are put at a table with a group of children who like it. Children exposed to one language accent at home and another in the neighbourhood will invariably end up speaking like their peers, not their parents. To predict whether a teen smokes, ask first not whether a parent smokes but whether the teen has friends who model smoking, who suggest its pleasure, and who offer cigarettes or other tobacco products. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
If genes and peer influences shape children more than direct parent influence, what does this imply? First, it tells us to agonize less about our in-home parenting style and more about the cultural vapours seeping into our children’s lives. To nurture our children well, we must care about the social environment that nurtures all children, and care about all who influence that social environment. As teachers, youth workers, and media producers and artist we must appreciate the significance of our influence upon youth culture. As the psychologist Mary Pipher has said, “Children are much more socialized by the culture than even the most conscious parents realizes.” Second, it cautions us to be less judgmental. Parents typically feel pride in their children’s successes, and guilt or shame over their failures. They beam when folks offer congratulations for the child who wins an award. They wonder where they went wrong with the child who repeatedly is called into the principal’s office Psychiatry and Freudian psychology have at times been the source of such ideas, by blaming problems from asthma to schizophrenia on “bad mothering.” Society reinforces such parent blaming: believing that parents shape their children’s virtues and blame them for their children’s vices. In many communities, parents can now be fined for their child’s misbehaviour (as if parents of troubled children were not already suffering enough). Should we really castigate the parents of Kip Kinkel (and of an accomplished order sister) following his 1998 murder of them and two fellow students in the cafeteria of his Springfield, Oregon, high school? “Good parents usually have god kids. Bad parents usually have bad kids,” explained one Detroit Free Press letter writer. “Do you really think those killer kids came from healthy homes? When parents fail, shame should follow them.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
The well-being of American’s youth rapidly declined after 1960. By the early 1990s, when youth problems had peaked (before beginning to subside), rates of teen suicide, teen violence, and unmarried teen pregnancy all multiple several times over. Human genetics do not explain this swift social recession. What had changed was the social ecology. Family breakdown, parental abandonment, abuse, and neglect were big-bang factors. These macroparenting factors, along with changes in peer and media influences, mattered. The social-science verdicts bears repeating, because it is so important and so little known: normal variations in well-meaning parenting matters less than most people suppose. The social ecology matters more than many suppose. It may be discomforting to realize that having and raising children is a risky business; in procreation a man and a woman shuffle their gene decks and deal a life-forming hand to their children-to-be, who thereafter are subjected to countless influences beyond their parents’ control. However, perhaps we may also take comfort in knowing that we are therefore responsible not for our children’s behaviour, but for having given them our best. “Training up a child in the way one should go,” and then love the person that results. When thinking about particular families, we also do well to remember that the proverbial admonition is complemented by Jesus’ admonition “Judge not.” Remembering that lives are formed by influences under parents’ control and by influences beyond parents’ control, let us be slow to credit parents for their children’s achievements and slower still to blame them for their children’s problems. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
Likewise, let us restrain our vanity when our children succeed and our feelings of guilt when they fail. As parents, let us train up our children in the way they should go, and let us be slow to judge one another. The need to take care of the nature of our thoughts was illustrated by the life-story of Eugene O’Neill. The gloomy themes of his plays, the guant tragedy and overhanging doom with which he deliberately permeated them, brough him down in his later years with an incurable disease. His palsied hand could not write, and dictated material always dissatisfied him. Those who deny the line of relevant connection between his grim thinking and his sickness ignore that fact that he was an ultrasensitive man—so sensitive that a large part of his life was occupied with the search for a solitary place where no people could interrupt him and where he could live entirely with himself. Why is it that in the stage of heavy sleeping trance a hypnotic subject’s nervous system fails to make the usual reactions to a burning match applied to the hand or a pointed pin stuck into the flesh? Why does the usual sensitivity to pain vanish so largely, often completely? If consciousness really lay in the nerves themselves it could never really be divorces from them. It is because consciousness does not arise out of the material body, but out of deeper principle of the immaterial, that it can function or fail to function as the bodily though-series. Hence when the consciousness is turned away from the body, when it is induced to cease holding the nerve system in its embrace, it will naturally cease holding the pleasurable or painful changes within that system too. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
Fear delays digestion; anger hurt the spleen; excessive lust leads to inflammations, infections, or impotence; jealousy creates excessive bile; a shock caused by bad news may turn hair white. The person who holds such negative feelings as chronic gloom and constant fault-finding, who worries self and nags others, is walking the direct path to either a disordered liver or high blood pressure. Vicious mental and speech habits injure the person’s own body and demoralize other people’s feeling. How much is a person’s bitter, rancorous mind, as expressed in one’s bitter, epitheical speeches, responsible for the malady of dyspepsia which afflicts one for so many years? Anger brings liver’s function to a standstill; this throws its bile back into the system, and bilious indigestion follows. The tears which well up in the eyes are physical, yet the self-pity which causes them in plainly mental. The connection between breathing and thinking has been noted by the yoga of physical control. The connection between breathing and feeling also exists. Apoplexy—a fit of chocking, the inability to breathe caches and almost ceases when bad news is suddenly heard. There is a direct line between emotional shocks, fears, or worries, and stomach ulcers. Saliva may become poisonous in anger. Gastric juice may stop flowing in shock of bad news. A Berlin opera singer went to the United States of America on a visit. While there she received the unexpected news of her husband’s death. The shock severely affected her feelings. That same week she became afflicted with an aliment and suffered greatly from it for several years until she died. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
A last medical science is coming to recognize the power of feeling to make disease in the flesh, the contribution of mind and mood to the body’s sickness. You have some other implements, rarely used. Patience and Endurance Paul would include in that number, as he did in Colossians (1.11). It may take a little while, but with these and the help of God, you will triumph amid the tulips. Callousness and Petulance, broken tools both. What is the common wisdom? Impatience cannot be hurried by impatience! In times of temptation, and if you are the tempted, accept all the advice you can get. If someone else is the tempted, do not deal harshly with one. Give one all the consolation one can handle. Like a ship unmoored, the soul is set a drift by temptation. Like a ship without a tiller, the soul is tossed about the waves. Like a mariner without a chart, the soul is tempted every which way. Like a seaman who has a chart but cannot make head or tail out of it, the soul is at the mercy of the sea. Fire proves iron—that is the kind of point Jesus son of Sirach liked to make (31.26)—and temptation fires the just human. Often we do not know what we can do until temptation opens us up to what we are. Stand sentinel in the intellect we must before temptation strikes. Engage the Enemy at the earliest possible moment. In the chapel. In the dining hall. At the gate. On the road. In the field. To his very point a certain ancient Roman writer, Ovid, the amatory poet, had this wheeze: “If you want stop, stop at the start. Have the antidote ready before you drink the poison. Otherwise you will be dead before the saving draft can reach the lips” (Remedies for Love 2.91-92). #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
That is how temptation works. A simple thought enters the mind. A vivid imagination goes to work. After that it is a nudge, a wink, and a nod. Right from the start you should resist strongly. When you do not, the Enemy bearing evils tiptoes in unawares and wins the day. And so it is everyday. The slower your response, the quicker the Devil’s step. The temptations you have to undergo are graver at the beginning of your spiritual life than at then end. However you look at it, they are all mud. For one person it is a wallow all one’s life. For another, it is just an occasional splatter. Whatever the grand total, we notice one thing. Our temptations have been customized. No two are alike. That explains why each one fits perfectly. The Divine Designer, in association with Weights & Measures Supernatural, has seen to that. That explain also why we can shed each temptation that is laid upon us. The Designer fully expects us to. Another garment awaits the Elect. Therefore we should not despair when we are tempted. We should pray more fervently to God. After all, He thinks us worthy of help in every tribulation. According to Paul in First Corinthians, who should know, “God will give us resources enough” (10.13) so that we can overcome. Therefore, let us humble our souls, huddle ourselves, under the hand of God in every trial and tribulation, as the story of Judith encourages us to do (8.17). Why? “He will help the humble in spirit,” the Evangelist Luke has promised (1.51). And at every temptation that is overcome, He will sound the trumpet. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
In trial and tribulations the perfection of Humankind is hammered out. I give you one example—Virtue. The better it is hidden, the more light it gives off, or so the common spiritual wisdom goes. However, if the virtuous cannot recognize a temptation when it kisses them on the cheek, what good is all the devotion and fervour? For these poor souls, though, there is still hope. If they patiently sustain themselves in time of adversity, then they will continue to inch along the spiritual path. Some seem to be protected from the great temptations of life and yet are overwhelmed by the nit-picking of daily routine. However, there is another way of looking at it. They are humbled, hobbled, by their poor, shabby response to the small temptations. Hence, they are no so overconfident about their ability to handle the large ones. How wonderful, O Lord, are the works of your hands! The Heavens declare Your glory, the arch of sky displays Your handiwork. In Your love You have given us the power to behold the beauty of Your World robed in all its splendour. The sun and the stars, and the valleys and hills, the rivers and lakes all disclose Your presence. The roaring breakers of the sea tell of Your awesome might; the beats of the field and the birds of the air bespeak Your wondrous will. In Your goodness You have made us able to hear the music of the World. The voices of loved ones reveal to us that You are in our midst. A divine voice sings through all creation. Our God and God of our fathers, merciful King, have compassion upon us; O Thou good and beneficent One, please inspire us with the desire to seek Thee. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
In Thine abundant compassion return unto us for the sake of our forefathers who did Thy will; please rebuild Thy Temple as of old, and establish Thy Sanctuary upon its ancient site. Please grant that we may see it rebuilt and make us rejoice in its re-establishment. Please restore America to its service of pronouncing the Priestly Blessing, Americans to their song and psalmody, and America to her habitations. There we will make our pilgrimages to Church, and at the Festivals, as it is writing in Thy Scriptures: Every day of the year shall all human appear in prayer before the Lord, your God, in the place where He shall choose; everyone shall appear before the Lord with some offering, each according to one’s means, according to the bounty with which the Lord hath blessed one. O Lord our God, please bestow upon us the blessing of Thy Festivals for life and peace, for joy and gladness, even as Thou hast graciously promised to bless. [Our God and God of our fathers, accept our rest.] Please sanctify us through Thy commandments, and please grant our portion in Thy Scripture; please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and please make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord God, please let us inherit with joy and gladness Thy holy [Sabbath and] festivals and may America, who sanctifies Thy name, rejoice in Thee. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest [the Sabbath and] America and the Festivals. God’s reality is the overwhelming fact of existence. This vision is a gift, a grace, so it may come suddenly, unexpectedly, but more often it comes to someone who has prepared oneself for it by purification and contemplation. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
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O Wicked Wit and Gifts that Have the Power So to Seduce!
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange story. Almost all humans are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a lister’s internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a devil, would have no fear mentioning it; but the same traveller having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before one would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things, as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequences is, that the general stock of experiences in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect. The Devil had been raised among us, and his rage was vehement and terrible; and, when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows. It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain Murder was committed in Boston in 1688, which attracted great attention. We hear more than enough of Murders as they rise in succession to their atrocious eminence, and if I could, I would bury the memory this this atrocious eminence, as hi body was buried, in the Witch House’s basement. When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicious fell—on the man who was afterwards brought to trial. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
As no reference was at the time made to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any description of him at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered. Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it—no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive—in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief observed the absence of the dead body from the bed. As the circumstances of the Murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger and stronger posses of the public mind, I kept them away from mine, by knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the universal excitement. John Hathorne asked most of the questions and established the judicial attitude that was to prevail throughout most of the examinations and the trials. Many people suspected that the devil killed this man and he had been summoned by Sarah Good because she had also been accused of bewitching a few girls in the town. Mr. Hathorne asked the children to look at Sarah God and say whether she was one who afflicted them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
They accused her to her face, “upon which they were all dreadfully tortured and tormented for a short space of time.” When they recovered from their fits, they charged her with causing them, saying that her specter had come and tormented them although her body remained “at a considerable distance from them.” This was spectral evidence, that is, evidence concerning a specter or apparition of the accused, rather than her bodily person. It was eventually to become the central legal issue of the trials, but at the moment we need only see why it seemed initially so convincing to the examining magistrates. Here were girls afflicted with violent physical symptoms which had no known physical cause, but which a physician had attributed to witchcraft. There was a malicious old woman accused of causing them. When the sufferers accused her they were immediately thrown into convulsions. What could be more plausible than that the convulsions were inflicted as revenge for the accusation? Yet such behaviour was still unfamiliar enough in Salem so that one of the recorders noted that “none here see the [specters of the] witches but the afflicted and themselves.” However, the change was so startling that I fully believed the girls derived their impression in some occult manner. For instance, we knew there was something occult going on because the throat of the murdered man had been cut straight across. In the opening speech for the defense, it was suggested that the deceased might have cut his own throat in the dreadful condition referred to. Yet, it would have been impossible for such a wound to be self-inflicted by either hand. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Certainly, Mr. Hathorne was convinced; when the children had recovered and repeated their accusation he turned to the accused woman. “Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have done? Why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you this torment these people children?” Certainly many of her neighbours though her malicious, since they attributed to her a number of inexplicable events, including the death of a cow which perished in a “sudden, terrible and strange unusual manner.” Such testimony was common in witchcraft cases, and it has caused much unseemly hilarity among the modern historians. It is likely, they have asked, that His Satanic Majesty the Devil or any of his minions would stop to concern themselves with the fate of a New England cow? The answer is that nothing is more likely. What else would a fertility god concern himself with but the health or sickness of crops, of animals, and of humans? From the standpoint of a society that still remembered who the Devil was, no testimony could be more relevant. As a matter of fact, the village witches who still exist in rural England are often expert in folk medicines, human and animal, as well as charms, and until recently many of them were midwives. Sarah Osburn also denied that she had hurt anyone, but the girls feel again into fits. Mr. Hathorne asked her how this happened. Perhaps, she said, the Devil went about in her likeness doing harm, but she knew nothing about it. Sarah Osburn was the first at Salem to assert the principle that the Devil can impersonate an innocent person. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Whether the devil could or not was a matter of debate in the seventeenth century, but most Protestant authorities agreed with Goodwife Obsurn that, as Hamlet put it, “The Devil hath power/ to assume a pleasing shape.” However, the principle was not discussed at this hearing, since Sarah Osburn was a likely a suspect as Sarah Good, if for no other reason than her lying. Lying was still considered a serious sin in the seventeenth century, and a crime as well, legally punishable by the courts. Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I believed, had any one in Court. When Mr. Hathorne tried to find out how well Sarah Osburn knew Sarah Good she said she did not know her by name. Mr. Hathorne asked if Sarah Osburn had been tempted by the devil, and she said no. Why then, he asked, had not she been at church? She had been sick, she said, and unable to go. However, her husband and others contradicted her. “She had not been at meeting,” they said, “this year and two months.” To understand why the matter of church attendance was considered so significant one must remember that the seventeenth century saw witchcraft as literal Devil worship, and therefore as a rival religion to Christianity. This is why the magistrates sometimes asked accused persons, as they asked Sarah Good, what God they served. And if the accused person avoided speaking the name of God (as Sarah Good did), they had reason to think it a suspicious circumstance. The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the judge, on the other side of the court. He slowly shook a great grey veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form. Then he collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The examinations of Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn afford grounds for suspicion and for further examination. However, the major event of that first day of March was the examination of Tituba. It began like the others, but it changed very quickly: “Tituba, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?” “None.” “Why do you hurt these children?” “I do not hurt them.” “Who is it then?” “The Devil, for aught I know.” “Did you never see the Devil?” “The Devil,” said Tituba, “came to me and bid me serve him.” She went on, with a minimum of judicia prodding, to provide a detailed confession of witchcraft, the first of approximately fifty that were made during the Salem trials. On March first and second, in her examination, Tituba said that the Devil had come to her in the shape of a man—a tall man in black, with white hair. Other times he had come in the shape of an animal. He had told her he was God, that she must believe him and serve him six years, and he would give her many fine things. He had shown her a book and she had made a mark in it, a mark that was “red like blood.” Many people thought this to be a revelation. “Then I saw another beast, coming out of the Earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon. He exercised all authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to comedown from Heaven to Earth in full view of men. Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“He ordered them to set up an image in honour of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless one had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name,” reports Revelation 13.11-17. Sarah Osburn was to die there on the tenth of May. Tituba, like later confessors, was never brought to trial. She lay in jail until she was sold to pay the jailer’s fees, her master refusing to pay them. Sarah Good was brought to trial. Another reaction to Tituba’s confession was to confirm the community in its fear of witchcraft, and particularly its fear of the three accused women. The night of March First William Allen and John Hughes heard a strange noise; it continued frightening them, but the approached and “saw a strange and unusual beast lying on the ground. Going up to it, the said beast vanished away and in the said place started up two or three women fled, not after the manner of other women but swiftly vanished out of sight, which women we took to be Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The next night William Allen again had hallucinations: “Sarah Good visibly appeared to him in his chamber, said Allen being in bed, and brought an unusual light with her. The said Sarah came and sat upon his foot. The said Allen went to kick at her, upon which she vanished and the light with her.” Notice that in this hallucination as in many others the hallucination stops as soon as the subject is able to move or speak. A curse is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, “curse” may refer to such a wish or pronouncement made effective by a supernatural or spiritual power, such as a god, or gods, a spirit, or natural force, or else as a kind of spell by magic or witchcraft. The Winchester rifle is a handsome gun that legend has it was forged in Hell. Whoever possesses the cursed rife either suffers disaster or fortune. Oliver Fisher Winchester was an American businessman and politician, best known as being the founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Oliver Winchester was born November 30, 1810 and dead December 10, 1880. Oliver Winchester was known for manufacturing and marketing the Winchester repeating rifle, which was a much re-designed descendant of the Volcanic rifle of some years earlier. Mr. Winchester was more learned than his kind in the mysteries of a deep and thrilling lore of peculiar fascination. He was a man highly honoured for his natural gifts and knowledge of learned books which nobody else could read, that was when he took his second orders the bishop gave him a mantle of scarlet silk to wear upon his shoulders in which, and his lordship had put such power into it that, when the parson has it rightly on, he could govern any ghost or evil spirit, and even stop an Earthquake. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Such a powerful man, in combat with supernatural visitations discovered that a division of Smith & Wesson firearms was failing financially with one of their newly patented arms. Having an eye for opportunity, Mr. Winchester assembled venture capital together with other stockholders and acquired the Smith & Wesson division, better known as the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, in 1855. By 1857, Mr. Winchester had positioned himself as the principle stockholder in the company and relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, and changed the name to New Haven Arms Company. After experiencing a slow start, and then a booming success with the Henry rifle, the company reorganized once again and the first Winchester rifle was the Model 1866, which had been nicknamed the Yellow Boy. The gun was called Yellow Boy because it should be remembered that, howsoever strange and singular it may sound to us that a mere lad should formally solicit such a performance at his own hands. Gradually Mr. Winchester amassed a considerable fortune. When Mr. Oliver Winchester died on December 10, 1880, his ownership in the company passed to his son, William Wirt Winchester (who married Sarah Lockwood Pardee in 1862), and died March 7 1881 at the young age of 43. The couple has also had a child, Annie Pardee Winchester, born June 15, 1866, and died 6 weeks later on July 25, 1866. Mrs. Winchester was deeply troubled by the loss of her daughter. In the course of her daily walk, she had to pass a certain heath or down where the road wound along through tall blocks of granite with open spaces of grassy sward between them. #RandpolphHarris 9 of 13
There in a certain spot, and always in the same place, she declared that she encountered, every day, a baby with a pale and troubled face, clothed in a little dress of white pique, made with two skirts. The pique was cut slightly Gabriele, and rounded off in the front with scallops, bound with white braid, with a button in each scallop, and ribbon-sash, tied at the left side, with one hand always stretched forth, and the other pressed against her side. “She is my baby,” Mrs. Winchester would say, and she often used to come to her parents house in New Haven; but that which troubled her was, that she had now been dead three years, and she had seen her body laid in the grave at her burial, this that she saw every day must needs be her soul or ghost. The hair of the appearance, sayth Mrs. Winchester, is not like anything alive, but it is so soft and light that it seemth to melt away while you look; but her eyes are set, and never blink—no, not when the sun shineth full upon her face. She maketh no steps, but seemth to swim along the top of the grass; and her hand, which is stretched out alway, seemth to point to something far away, out of sight. It is her continual coming; for she never failth to meet Mrs. Winchester, and to pass on, that hath quenched her spirits; and although she never seeth her by night, yet cannot she get her natural rest. Mrs. Winchester went to see a doctor who told her, “The case is strange but by no means impossible. It is one that I will study, and fear not to handle, if you will be free with me, and fulfill all that I desire.” Mrs. Winchester was overjoyed, but she perceived that the doctor turned pale, and was downcast with some thought which, however, he did not express. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The doctor knew that this might be a doemonium meridianum, the most stubborn spirit to govern and guide that any human can meet, and the most perilous withal. He made an appointment to go with Mrs. Winchester to the spot where she had these encounters. They had hardly reached the accustomed spot, when they both saw her at once gliding towards them; punctually as the ancient writers describe their “lemures, which swoon along the ground, neither marking the sand nor bending the herbage.” The aspect of the baby girl was exactly that which had been related by Mrs. Winchester. There was a pale and stony face, the strange misty hair, the eyes firm and fixed, that gazed, yet not on them, but on something that they saw far, far away; one hand and arm stretched out, and the other grasping the girdle of her waist. She floated along the field like upon a stream, and glided past the spot where they stood, pausingly. But so deep was the awe that came over the doctor, as he stood there in the light of day, face to face with a human soul separate from her bones and flesh, that his heart and purpose both failed him. He had resolved to speak to the spectre in the appointed form of words, but he did not. He stood like one amazed and speechless, until she had passed clean of out sight. When they returned to the house, and after he had said all he could to pacify Mrs. Winchester, he took leave for that time, with a promise that when he had fulfilled certain business elsewhere, when then he alleged, he would return and take orders to assuage these disturbances and their cause. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The doctor later told Mrs. Winchester that he thought it was best that they try an exorcism, but his Church, as is well known, hath abjured certain branches of her ancient powers, on grounds of perversion and abuse. So he referred her to a medium. The medium told Mrs. Winchesters, “There is a danger from the demons, but so there is in the surrounding air every day.” There was a kind of trouble in the air, a soft rippling sound, and all at once the shape appeared, and came towards the medium gradually. She opened her parchment scroll, and read aloud the command. The spirit paused, and seemed to waver and doubt; stood still; then she rehearsed the sentence again, sounding out every syllable like a chant. The spirit then swam into the midst of the circle, and there stood still, suddenly. Her knees shook under her, and the drops of sweat ran down her flesh like rain. But, although face to face with the spirit, the medium’s heart grew calm, and her mind was composed. The spirit then commanded Mrs. Winchester to move West and build a mansion in honour of the spirit killed by the Winchester rifle and “as long as the hammer keep pounding, her heart would continue to beat.” The medium dismissed the troubled ghost, until she peacefully withdrew, gliding towards the west. Mrs. Winchester moved to San Jose, which was near her family Member, Enoch Pardee, an occultist, prominent physician, free mason, and Mayor of Oakland, California USA, had built his family’s mansion in 1868, which is now known as the Pardee House Museum. Masonry has influenced more the modern witchcraft; it has influenced dozens of occult orders. Mrs. Winchester bought a farm house and built a massive mansion. There was something very painful and peculiar in the position of the Winchester mansion through the nineteenth century. The estate in those days was in a transitory state, and Mrs. Winchester, like her formularies, embodied a strange mixture of the old belief with the new interpretation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
However, the mansion is now flanked by a pleasantness, a beautiful garden and lawn, and it is surrounded by a sole grove of palm trees. It has also the aspect of age and of solitude, and looks the very scene of harmony and supernatural events. A legend might well belong to every beautiful glade of grass around, and there must surely be a haunted room somewhere within its walls. The incredible mansion, scenery of the legend still survives, and, like the field of the forty footsteps in another history, the place is still visited by those who take interests in the supernatural tales of old and new. Freemasons supposedly conducted a séance in the mansion in August of 2019. A phantom made an answer willingly. It stated, “before the next Yule-tide, a fearful pestilence will lay waste the land, and myriads of souls will be loosened from the flesh, until our valleys will be full.” The general facts stated in this diary are to these matters of belief accounted a strong proof of the veracity of the Ghost that the plague, fatal to so many millions, did break out in the global village at the close of the year. How sorely must the infidels and heretics of this generation be dismayed when they know that this Black Death, which is now swallowing its thousands in the streets of the great city, was foretold several months before the outbreak, under the séance of a freemason, by a visible and suppliant ghost! And what pleasure and improvements do such deny themselves who scorn and avoid all opportunity of intercourse with souls separate, and the spirits, glad and sorrowful, which inhabit the unseen World! May they who observe the Sabbath and call it a delight, rejoice in Thy Kingdom. May the people who sanctify the seventh day be sated and delighted with Thy bounty. For Thou didst find pleasure in the seventh day, and didst sanctify it, calling it the most desirable of the days, in remembrance of creation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Today is the return of our guided Mansion Tour! The tour guide-led experience allows guests to access areas of the mansion that have been closed since March 2020. Click the link in our bio for more information. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
Not Even Houdini Could Dismantle it Without Serious and Harmful Consequences!
We rely on others to inform us, but we still cannot be taught, and must decide the truths for ourselves. We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the World we inherit. The question “Who runs things?” is a typically Second Wave question. For until the industrial revolution there was little reason to ask it. Whether ruled by kinds of shamans, warlords, sun gods, or saints, people were seldom in doubt as to who held power over them. The ragged peasant, looking up from the fields, saw the palace or monastery looming in splendor on the horizon. One needed no political scientist or newspaper pundit to sole the riddle of power. Everyone knew who was in charge. Wherever the Second Wave swept in, however, a new kind of power emerged, diffused and faceless. Those in power became the anonymous “they.” Who were “they”? Industrialism, as we have seen, broke society into thousands of interlocking parts—factories, churches, schools, trade unions, prisons, hospitals, and the like. It broke the line of command between church, state, and individual. It fractured knowledge into specialize discipline. It dissembled jobs into fragments. It divided families into smaller units. It doing so, it shattered community life and culture. Somebody had to put things back together in a different form. This need gave rise to many new kinds of specialists whose basic task was integration. Calling themselves executives or administrators, commissars, coordinators, presidents, vice-presidents, bureaucrats, or managers, they cropped up in every business, in every government, and at every level of society. And they proved indispensable. They were the integrators. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
They defined roles and allocated jobs. They decided who got what rewards. They made plans, set criteria, and gave or withheld credentials. They linked production, distribution, transport, and communications. They set the rules under which organizations interacted. Essentially, they fitted the pieces of society together. Without them the Second Wave system could never have run. Karl Marx, in the mid-nineteenth century, thought that whoever owned the tools and technology—the “means of production”—would control society. He argued that, because work was interdependent, workers could disrupt production and seize the tools from their bosses. Once they owned the tools, they would rule society. Yet history played a trick on them. For the very same interdependency gave even greater leverage to a new group—those who orchestrated or integrated the system. In the end it was neither the owners nor the workers who came to power. In both capitalist and socialists nations, it was the integrators who rose to the op. It was not ownership of the “means of production” that gave power. It was control of the “means of integration.” Let us see what that has meant. In business the earliest integrators were the factory proprietors, the business entrepreneurs, the mill owner and ironmasters. The owner and a few assistants were usually able to coordinate the labour of a large number of unskilled “hands” and to integrate the firm into the larger economy. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Since, in that period, owner and integrator were one and the same, it is not surprising that Dr. Marx confused the two and laid so heavy an emphasis on ownership. As production grew more complex, however, and the division of labour more specialized, business witnessed an incredible proliferation of executives and experts who came between the boss and his workers. Paperwork mushroomed. Soon in the larger firms no individual, including the owner or dominant shareholder, could even begin to understand the whole operation. The owner’s decisions were shaped, and ultimately controlled, by the specialists brought in to coordinate the system. Thus a new executive elite arose whose power rested no longer on ownership but rather on control of the integration process. As the manager grew in power, the stockholder grew less important. As companies grew bigger, family owners sold out to larger and larger groups of dispersed shareholders, few of whom knew anything about the actual operations of the business. Increasingly, shareholders had to rely on hired managers not merely to run the day-to-day affairs of the company but even to set its long-range goals and strategies. Boards of directors, theoretically representing the owners, were themselves increasingly remote and ill-informed about the operations they were supposed to direct. And as more and more private investment was made not by individuals but indirectly through institutions like pension funds, mutual funds, and the trust departments of banks, the actual “owners” of industry were still further removed from control. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The new power of the integrators was, perhaps, most clearly expressed by W. Michael Blumenhal, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. Before entering government Mr. Blumenthal headed the Bendix Corporation. Once asked if he would some day like to own Bendix, Mr. Blumenthal replied: “It’s not ownership that counts—it’s control. And as Chief Executive that is what I’ve got! We have a shareholders’ meeting next week, and I’ve got ninety-seven percent of the vote. I only own eight thousand shares. Control is what’s important to me….To have the control over this large animal and to use it in a constructive way, that is what I want, rather than doing silly things that others want me to do.” Business policies were thus increasingly fixed by the hired managers of the firm or by money managers placing other people’s money, but in neither case by the actual owners, let alone by the workers. The integrators took charge. All this had certain parallels in the socialist nations. As early as 1921 Dr. Lenin felt called upon to denounce his own Soviet bureaucracy. Leon Trotsky, in exile by 1930, charged that there were already five to six million managers in a class that “does not engage directly in productive labour, but administers, orders, commands, pardons and punishes.” The means of production might belong to the state, he charged, “But the state… ‘belongs’ to the bureaucracy.” In the 1950’s Milovan Djilas, in The New Class, attacked the growing power of the managerial elites in Yugoslavia. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Josip Broz Tito, who imprisoned Mr. Djilas, himself complained about “technocracy, bureaucracy, the class enemy.” And fear of managerialism was the central theme in Mr. Mao’s China. Mr. Mao, leading the World’s biggest First Wave nation, repeatedly warned against the rise of managerial elites and saw this as a dangerous concomitant of traditional industrialism. Under socialism as well as capitalism, therefore, the integrators took effective power. For without them the parts of the system could not work together. The “machine” would not run. Integrating a single business, or even a whole industry, was only a small part of what had to be done. Modern industrial society, as we have seen, developed a host of organizations, from labour unions and trade associations to churches, school, health clinics, and recreational groups, all of which had to work within a framework of predictable rules. Laws were needed. Above all, the info-sphere, socio-sphere, and techno-sphere had to be brought into alignment with one another. Out of this driving need for the integration of Second Wave civilization came the biggest coordinator of all—the integrational engine of the system: big government. It is the system’s hunger for integration that explains the relentless rise of big government in every Second Wave society. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Again and again political demagogues arose to call for smaller government. Yet, once in office, they very same leaders expanded rather then contracted the size of government. This contradiction between rhetoric and real life becomes understandable the moment we recognize that the transcendent aim of all Second Wave governments has been to construct and maintain industrial civilization. Against this commitment, all lesser differences faded. Parties and politicians might squabble over other issues, but on this they were in tacit agreement. And big government was part of their unspoken program regardless of the tune they snag, because industrial societies depend on government to preform essential integrational tasks. In the words of political columnist Clayton Fritchey, the United State of America’s federal government never ceased to grow, even under three recent Republican administrations, “for the simple reason that not even Houdini could dismantle it without serious and harmful consequences.” Free marketeers have argued that governments interfere with business. However, left to private enterprise alone, industrialization would have come much more slowly—if, indeed, it could have come at all. Governments quickened the development of the railroad. They built harbours, roads, canals, and highways. They operated postal services and build or regulated telegraph, telephone, and broadcast systems. They wrote commercial codes and standardized markets. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Governments applied foreign policy pressures and tariffs to assist industry. They drove farmers off the land and into the industrial labour supply. They subsidized energy and advanced technology, often through military channels. At a thousand levels, governments assumed the integrative tasks that others could not, or would not, perform. For government was the great accelerator. Because of its coercive power and tax revenues, it could do things that private enterprise could not afford to undertake. Government could “hot up” the industrialization process by stepping in to fill emerging gaps in the system—before it became possible or profitable for private companies to do so. Governments could perform “anticipatory integration.” By setting up mass education systems, governments not only helped to machine youngsters for their future roles in the industrial work force (hence, in effect, subsidizing industry) but also simultaneously encouraged the spread of the nuclear family form. By relieving the family of educational and other traditional functions, governments accelerated the adaptation of family structure to the needs of the factory system. At many different levels, therefore, governments orchestrated the complexity of Second Wave civilization. Not surprisingly, as integration grew in importance both the substance and style of government changed. Presidents and prime ministers, for example, came to see themselves primarily as managers rather than as creative social and political leaders. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
In personality and manner, they became almost interchangeable with the men who ran the large companies and production enterprises. While offering the obligatory lip service to democracy and social justice, the Nixons, Carters, Thatchers, Brezhnevs, Giscards, and Ohiras of the industrial World rode into office by promising little more than efficient management. These technicians of power were themselves organized into hierarchies of elites and sub-elites. Every industry and branch of government soon gave birth to its own establishment, its own powerful “They.” Sports…religion…education…each had its own pyramid of power. A science establishment, a defense establishment, a cultural establishment sprang up. Power in Second Wave civilization was parceled out to scores, hundreds, even thousands of such specialized elites. In turn, these specialized elites were themselves integrated by generalist elites whose membership cut across all the specializations. For example, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe the Communist party had members in every field from aviation to music and steel manufacture. Communist party members served as a crucial grapevine carrying messages from one sub-elite to another. Because it has access to all information, it has enormous power to regulate the specialist sub-elites. In the capitalist countries, leading business people and lawyers, serving on civic committees or boards, performed similar functions in a less formal way. What we see, therefore, in all Second Wave nations are specialized groups of integrators, bureaucrats, or executives, themselves integrated by generalist integrators. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
A yet a higher level, integration was imposed by the “super-elites” in charge of investment allocation. Whether in finance or industry, in the Pentagon or in the Russian planning bureaucracy, those who made the major investment allocations in industrial society set the limits within which the integrators themselves were compelled to function. Once a truly large-scale investment decision had been made, whether in Minneapolis or Moscow, it limited future options. Given a scarcity of resources, one could not casually tear out Bessemer furnaces or cracking plants or assembly lines until their cost had been amortized. Once in place, therefore, this capital stock fixed the parameters within which future managers or integrators were confined. These groups of faceless decision-makers, controlling the levers of investment, formed the super-elite in all industrial societies. In every Second Wave society, consequently, a parallel architecture of elites sprang up. And—with local variation—this hidden hierarchy of power was born again after every crisis or political upheaval. Names, slogans, party labels, and candidates might change; revolutions might come and go. New faces might appear behind the big mahogany desks. However, the basic architecture of power remained. Time and again during the past three hundred and seventy years, in one country after another, rebels and reformers have attempted to storm the walls of power, to build a new society based on social justice and political equality. Temporarily, such movements have seized the emotions of millions with promises of freedom. Revolutionists have even managed, now and then, to topple a regime. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Yet each time the ultimate outcomes was the same. Every time the rebels re-created, under their own flag, a similar structure of sub-elites, elites, and super-elites. For this integrational structure and the technicians of power who ruled it were as necessary to Second Wave civilization as factories, fossil fuels, or nuclear families. Industrialism and the full democracy it promised were, in fact, in compatible. Industrial nations could be forced, through revolutionary action or otherwise, to move back and forth across the spectrum from free market o centrally planned. They could go from capitalist to socialist and vice versa. However, like the much-cited leopard, they could not change their sports. They could not function without a powerful hierarchy of integrator. Today, as the Third Wave of change is being implemented in this fortress of managerial power, the first fleeting cracks have appeared in the power system. Demands for participation in management, for shared decision-making, for worker, consumer, and citizen, and for anticipatory democracy are welling up in nation after nation. New ways of organizing along less hierarchical and more ad-hocratic lines are springing up in the most advanced industries. Pressures for decentralization of power intensify. And managers become more and more dependent upon information from below. Elites themselves, therefore, are becoming less permanent and secure. All these were merely early warnings—indicators of the upheaval we are experiencing in the political systems. The Third Wave, already has been battering at these industrial structures, opening fantastic opportunities for social and political renovation. In these times, startling new institutions are replacing our unworkable, oppressive, and obsolete integrational structures. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
It is not just a matter of getting comfortable in the role we have as people with special responsibilities, so far as our personal adequacies are concerned, but rather of accepting the reality of our role, even though we know our inadequacies. Housing styles reflect the social values of particular eras. The planned suburbs of the nineteenth century had been deigned for the affluent railroad commuter. However, by the turn of the century, the elaborate Victorian social customs and housing styles had gone “out of fashion” (became unaffordable). By World War I, the once popular Victorian- and Queen-Anne-style homes, Americana places of great worth were too expensive to recreate because of machines manufacturing replacing human labour and the first taxes were enacted in 1913. Not only that, but the gold rush and force free labour had come to an end, so people were not as affluent and could not afford to build such grand homes. Therefore, the ornateness and flourishes of the late-nineteenth century were supplanted by simpler and more efficient architectural designs. The prototype of this modern form would be the suburban bungalow design. The informality and more relaxed nature of this design could be seen immediately upon entering the front door. The elaborate entrance halls and parlors of the Victorian era were replaced by a simple doorway opening immediately into a less-formal general-purpose living room. Bungalows were built not for the affluent, but for the comfortable middle-class family. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Early in the twentieth century many new suburbs sprang up filled with utilitarian bungalow and other frame models. Rather than being individually designed, these homes were often mass-produced from simple sets of plans. Homes would be individualized by small variations n ornamentation or material. Thus, first the streetcar and then the automobile opened up suburbia as a place of residence for the comfortable middle class. Such simple, moderate-priced, and informal style homes were needed to house this growing suburban population. Most common among these budget-friendly, less exotic designs were the American Foursquare and the bungalow, but there is still a lot to appreciate. The foursquare, as its name suggests, was a basic four-sided, cubed-shape model sometimes knows as the box, the cube, or the classic box. It was an efficient two-and-one-half story high model set on a raised basement with a wide porch across the front reached by raised steps. The foursquare had its two stories caped by a low pyramidal roof containing generally a front, and sometimes a side, dormer. Inside was often incorporated handcrafted “honest” woodwork (unless purchased from a mail-order catalog. The rooms were generally of equal size, wit the stairwell on the side wall near the front door. The foursquare was a solid and stable, in unexcited, style. The basement generally contained a large natural convection furnace or boiler. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The bungalow-style homes, by contrast, looked more “suburban” and was more versatile, permitting greater variation in the arrangement of interior space. External on this house is either single-story or second story built into a sloping roof (usually with dormer windows), and may be surrounded by wide verandas. The external ornamentation could give the bungalow a low colonial, shingle, Tudor, or even Spanish appearance. Often, essentially identical homes on the same street were given different external styles. The bungalow house was relatively little known in 1900s, but by World War I it had become common in the outer reaches of the cities and the developing middle-class suburbs. The bungalow was very much an American creation, combining practicality, economy, and comfort. Bungalows, as noted, also suggested a more informal life-style than the earlier Victorian housing. Over time the term “bungalow” became virtually a generic name for any smaller, cozy, and comfortable home. While Victorian homes had parlors, libraries, and sitting rooms, the bungalows were more modest and utilitarian. Large entrance halls and vestibules were replaced with front doors that entered directly into the living space. In the bungalow, “a pleasant living room with a cozy fireplace, built in bookcases, and an cupboard or two would serve the combined functions of a library, parlor, and sitting room. The bungalow cottage, most often simply called a bungalow, characteristically had a porch, living room, dining room, and kitchen downstairs and three bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
In the bungalow, the front upstairs windows typically were in a dormer extending out from the front roof. The style had limited space but used it very effectively. There were numerous regional variations of the standard bungalow. California bungalows often had only one floor, and in Los Angeles the term “bungalow” came to be used for any low suburban house. In the Midwest the “Chicago bungalows” that covered much of that city’s outlying northerwest suburbs were uniformly single storied (with a room that could be finished upstairs), and all were brick faced. Bungalow homes were well suited for starter homes (some selected them as forever homes) insofar as they were reasonably priced, and they seemed to exude a mood of solid middle-class comfort. For many new families, they suggested upward mobility. Suburban bungalows were efficiently laid out and cold easily be managed by a middle-class housewife without the servants that had been part of the large Victorian houses. Bungalows, many of which are still occupied today, substituted technology for hand power. Bungalows had all the modern convenience of central heating, water heaters, indoor plumbing, and gas ovens and stoves. Bungalows also invariably had residential electric service. This made them very up-to-date residence. Electricity, for example was by no means universally found in homes at the time of World War I. As of 1917 only one-quarter (24.3 percent) of all homes in the United States of America were electrified. Even many city homes were still lit by gas or, if the family was poor, by kerosene. Following the war electric service quickly became the norm. By 1920 the proportion of homes having electric service had jumped to almost half (47.7 percent), and by 1930 it was 85 percent. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The northwest side of Chicago still has miles and miles of virtually identical well-maintained “Chicago bungalows” built in the 1920s. The Chicago bungalows had an unfinished second floor which was reached by entering from the kitchen. Over the years many owners converted the second floors into children’s bedrooms. Suburban bungalows were smaller than earlier Victorian homes, partially because of smaller families and no live-in servants. However, most important in reducing floors space were he rising construction costs of building “modern” homes with built-in central heating, indoor plumbing, and electric sockets for plugging in lamps and modern labor-saving devices such as electric Hoover vacuum cleaners. In the east and Midwest, bungalows commonly had concrete-floored basements with washtubs having running hot and cold water. This was a major advance. Some earlier houses had not had semifinished basements entered from the house, but dirt-floored cellars entered by external lift-up cellar doors. Also, these basements differed from those of earlier years in that they were designed not as much for storage as to be electrically lighted and centrally heated places where the new electric washing machine with ringer could be kept, where the washed clothes could be hung to dry in winter, and where the husband could have a workroom. Following World War II, it became the fad for homeowners to enclose a “family room” in the basement. Often the new television set would be kept in this family room. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Among the “modern” features in some bungalows were faux fireplaces with gas-fired logs. These went out of fashion in the 1940s, and many of the gas systems were disconnected for safety reasons. Ironically, as of the 1900s gas-fired logs are again in style among affluent baby boomers who want a fireplace but do not want the bother of real wood. However, some still enjoy the scent of a burning log in the winter as it is nostalgic of wonderful times. The post-World War housing boom is usually blamed for identical housing styles, but the suburban bungalow had perfected the art of mass-producing suburban homes far before the postwar look-alike subdivisions. Even complete homes with all building material included could be purchased from catalogs. The most long-lived of the mail-order builders was the Aladdin Company, but Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward also were major sellers of prefabricated bungalows. Between 1908 and 1937, Sears sold roughly 100,000 mail-order houses, primarily in the Midwest and the East. Sears, in their catalog, offered several prefabricated homes and all the precut parts. Everything from plans to lumber to doors to fixtures was dropped off at the nearest railway station. Both Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward also pushed appliances and furniture to those purchasing homes, figuring that those who were buying a new house were excellent customers for purchasing household goods. The retailer thus not only sold the home but everything that wen into it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Sears did not leave the mail-order business until 1937, when the Depression forced them out. Sears had made the mistake of not only selling the homes, but also financing them. Sears made too many installment loans to buyers who lost their jobs and thus could not pay their mortgages. “Train children in the right way, and when old they will not stray,” reports Proverbs 22.6. Everyone believes it: by instruction, by discipline, and by example parents shape their children. To be convinced, most of us need look no further than our families. We see ourselves reacting to situations much as our mothers or fathers did. We hear their admonitions echoing in our minds. We relish their approval. We carry forward many of their values. And we see ourselves not only reaching backward into our children, chips off ourselves. Countless research studies seem to confirm the potency of parenting. The extremes of parenting provide the clearest evidence: the abused children who later become abusive, the unloved who become unloving. Orphanage-reared infants who are given minimal custodial care—ample food and a warm bed, but not much else—often become withdrawn, frightened, even speech. By contrast, children who develop an optimistic self-image and a happy, self-reliant manner tend to have been reared by caring parents who are neither permissive nor autocratic, parents who maintain firm standards without depriving their children of a sense of control over their own lives. In many ways we can see the parent in the child. By ten mothers of age, our babbling mirrors the sounds ad intonations of our parents’ language. In childhood, our attitudes, our play, and our ambitions usually look suspiciously like those of our same-gender parent. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
As adolescents, most of us still express the social, political, and religious views of our parents; the generation gap typically involves nothing more than difference in the strength with which we and our parents hold our shared values. So we know both from experience and from the accumulating evidence the parental power that was understood by the writer of Proverbs. How one trains up a child affects how the child relates, talks, dresses, thinks, and believes. Our assumptions about the power of positive parenting lead us to credit parents for their children’s achievements and blame them for their shortcoming. We may think about how we would have handled that troubled child—surely with better results. Some have therefore sought to hold parents responsible for their children’s criminal activities. Likewise, parents take personal pride in their children’s successes and feel guilt over their failures. Parents accept congratulations for the child who is elected class president and feel ashamed by the child who repeatedly is called to the principal’s office. Parents second-guess themselves: Where did we go wrong with him? How should we have handled her? It all makes perfect sense: if parents from children as a potter molds clay, then parents can indeed be praised for their children’s virtues and blamed for their children’s vices. Given our readiness to praise or blame, to feel pride or shame, we had best also to understand the limits of parental influence. For the accumulating evidence further testifies to the ways in which children are shaped by forces over which parents have little control. Once such force lies hidden within our genes, the architectural codes directing biochemical events that, down the line, design our bodies and influence our behaviours. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
By selective breeding of animals, by comparing the similarity of genetically identical twins with that of fraternal twins, and by asking whether adopted children more closely resemble their biological or adoptive parents, psychologist are discovering how our heredity forms us. There is religion in everything around us, a calm and holy religion in the unbreathing things in Nature. It is a meek and blessed influence, stealing in as it were unaware upon the hear; it comes quickly, and without excitement; it has no terror, no gloom; it does not rouse up the passions; I is untrammelled by creeds…it is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star; it is on the sailing could and in the invisible wind; it is among the hills and valleys of the Earth where the shrubless mountain-top pierces the thin atmosphere of eternal winter, or where the mighty forest fluctuates before the strong wind, with its dark waves of green foliage; it spreads out like a legible language upon the broad face of an unsleeping ocean; it is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us….and which opens to our imagination a World of spiritual beauty and holiness. Our Father, our King, do Thou soon make manifest to us the glory of Thy kingdom; please reveal Thyself and establish Thy exalted rule over us in the sight of all living. Assemble our scattered brethren from among that nations, and please gather our dispersed from the ends of the Earth. Please lead us with joyous song unto America Thy city, and with everlasting joy unto the United States of America, the home of Thy Sanctuary, where our forefather prepared unto Thee daily offerings. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19 We rely on others to inform us, but we still cannot be taught, and must de
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Nature, in Giving Humans Tears, Bears Witness She Gave Humans the Softest Hearts!
Last year was not all that bad. We led the league in flu shots. Becoming number one is easier than remaining number one. The split-up of production and consumption also created, in all Second Wave societies, a case of obsessive “macrophilia”—a kind of Texas infatuation with bigness and growth. If it were true that long production runs in the factory would produce lower unit costs, then, by analogy, increases in scale would produce economies in other activities as well. “Big” became synonymous with “efficient,” and maximization became the fifth key principle. Cities and nations would boast of having the tallest skyscraper, the largest damn, or the World’s biggest miniature golf course. Since bigness, moreover, was the result of growth, most industrial governments, corporations, and other organizations pursued the ideal of growth frenetically. Japanese workers and managers at the Matsushita Electric Company would jointly chorus each day: “Doing our best to promote production, sending our goods to the people of the World, endlessly and continuously, like water gushing from a fountain. Grow, industry, Grow, Grow, Grow! Harmony and sincerity! Matsushita Electric!” In 1960, as the United States of America completed the stage of traditional industrialism and began to feel the first effects of the Third Wave of change, its fifty largest industrial corporations had grown to employ an average of 80,000 workers each. General Motors alone employed 595,000, and one utility, Vail’s AT&T, employed 736,000 women and men. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
This meant, at an average household size of 3.3 that year, that well over 2,000,000 people were dependent upon paychecks from this one company alone—a group equal to one half the population of the entire country when Hamilton and Washington were stitching it into a nation. (Since then AT&T has swollen to even more gargantuan proportions. By 1970 it employed 956,000—having added 136,000 employees to its work force in a single twelve mother period. By 2020, because of diversification and advanced technology in telecommunications, the company AT&T had 230,000 employees, but is still the largest employer in the U.S. telecommunications industry today, ahead of Verizon, T-Mobile U.S. and Sprint. AT&T was a special case and, of course, Americans were peculiarly addicted to bigness. However, macrophilia was no monopoly of the Americans. In France in 1963 fourteen hundred firms—a mere .0025 percent of all companies—employed fully 38 percent of the work force. Governments in Germany, Britain, and other countries actively encouraged mergers to create even larger companies, in the belief that larger scale would help them compete against the American giants. Nor was this scale maximization simply a reflection of profit maximization. Karl Marx had associated the “increasing scale of industrial establishments” with the “wider development of their material power.” Dr. Lenin, turn, argued that “huge enterprises, trusts and syndicates had brought the mass production technique to its highest level of development.” His first order of business after the Soviet revolution was to consolidate Russian economic life into smallest possible number of the largest possible units. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
Mr. Stalin pushed even harder for maximum scale and built vast new projects—the steel complex at Magnitogorsk, another at Zaporozhstal, the Balkhash copper smelting plant, the tractor plants at Kharkov and Stalingrad. He would ask how large a given American installation was, then order construction of an even larger one. In The Cult of Bigness in Soviet Economic Planning, Dr. Leon M. Herman writes: “In various parts of the USSR, in fact, local politicians became involved in a race for attracting the ‘World’s larges projects.’” By 1938 the Communist party warned against “gigantomania,” but with little effect. Even today Russian and East European communist leaders are victims of what Dr. Herman calls “the addiction to bigness.” Such faith in sheer scale derived from narrow Second Wave assumptions about the nature of “efficiency.” However, the macrophilia of industrialism went beyond mere plants. It was reflected in the aggregation of many different kinds of data into the statistical tool known as Gross National Product (GNP), which measured the “scale” of an economy by totting up the value of goods and services produced in it. This tool of the Second Wave economists had many failings. From the point of view of GNP it did not matter whether the output was in the form of food, education and health services, or munitions. The hiring crew to build a home or to demolish one both added to GNP, even though one activity added to the stock of housing and the other subtracted from it. GNP also, because it measured only market activity or exchanges, relegated to insignificance a whole vital sector of the economy based on unpaid production—child-rearing and housework, for example. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
Despite these shortcomings, Second Wave governments around the World entered into a blind race to increase GNP at all costs, maximizing “growth” even at the risk of ecological and social disaster. The macrophiliac principle was built so deeply into the industrial mentality that nothing seemed more reasonable. Maximization went along with standardization, specialization, and the other industrial ground rules. Finally, all industrial nations developed centralization into a fine art. While the Church and many First Wave rulers knew perfectly well how to centralize power, they dealt with far les complex societies and were crude amateurs by contrast with the men and women who centralized industrial societies from the group floor up. All complicated societies require a mixture of both centralized and decentralized operations. However, the shift from a basically decentralized First Wave economy, with each locality largely responsible for producing its own necessities, to the integrated national economies of the Second Wave led to totally new methods for centralizing power. These came into play at the level of individual companies, industries, and the economy as a whole. The early railroads provide a classic illustration. Compared with other business they were the giants of their day. In the United States of America in 1850 only forty-one factories had a capitalization of $250,000.00 USD ($8,740,097.40 USD in 2021 dollars) or more. By contrast, the New York Central Railroad as early as 1860 boasted a capitalization of $30,000,000.00 USD ($972,993,975.90 USD in 2021 dollars). To run such a gargantuan enterprise, new management methods were needed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
The early railroad managers, therefore, like the managers of the space program in our own era, had to invent new techniques. They standardized technologies, fares, and schedules. They synchronized operations over hundreds of miles. They created specialized new occupations and departments. They concentrated capital, energy, and people. They fought to maximize the scale of their networks. And to accomplish all this they created new forms of organization based on centralization of information and command. Employees were divided into “line” and “staff.” Daily reports were initiated to provide data on car movements, loadings, damages, lost freight, repairs, engine miles, et cetera. All this information flowed up a centralized chain of command until it reached the general superintendent who made the decisions and sent orders down the line. The railroads, as business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr., has shown, soon became a model for other large organizations, and centralized management came to be regarded as an advanced, sophisticated tool in all the Second Wave nations. In politics, too, the Second Wave encouraged centralization. In the United States of America, as early as the late 1780’s, this was illustrated by the battle to replace the loose, decentralist Articles of Confederation with a more centralist Constitution. Generally the First Wave rural interests resisted the concentration of power in the national government, while Second Wave commercial interest led by Hamilton argued, in The Federalist and elsewhere, that a strong central government was essential not only for military and foreign policy reasons but for economic growth. The resultant Constitution of 1787 was an ingenious comprise. Because First Wave forces were still strong, the Constitution reserved important powers to the states rather than the central government. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
To prevent overly strong central power it also called for a unique separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. However, the Constitution also contained elastic language that would eventually permit the federal government to extend its reach drastically. As industrialization pushed the political system toward greater centralization, the government in Washington took on an increasing number of powers and responsibilities and monopolized more and more decision-making at the center. Within the federal government, meanwhile, power shifted from Congress and the courts to the most centralist of the three branches—the Executive. By the Nixon years, historian Arthur Schlesinger (himself once an ardent centralizer) was attacking the “imperial presidency.” The pressures toward political centralization were even stronger outside the United States of America. A quick look at Sweden, Japan, Britain, or France is enough to make the United States of America’s system seem decentralized by comparison. Jean-Francois Revel, author of Without Marx or Jesus, makes this point in describing how governments respond to political protest: “When a demonstration is forbidden in France, there is never any doubt about the source of the prohibition. If it is a question of a major political demonstration, it is the [central] government,” he says. “In the United States of America, however, when a demonstration is forbidden, the first question everyone asks is, ‘By whom?’” Dr. Revel points out that it is usually some local authority operating autonomously. The extremes of political centralization were found, of course, in the Marxist industrial nations. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
In 1850 Mr. Marx called for a “decisive centralization of power in the hands of the state.” Mr. Engels, like Mr. Hamilton before him, attacked decentralized confederations as “an enormous step backward.” Latter on the Soviets, eager to accelerate industrialization, proceeded to construct the most highly centralized political and economic structure of all, submitting even the smallest of production decisions to the control of central planners. The gradual centralization of a once decentralization economy was assisted, moreover, by a crucial invention whose very name reveals its purpose: the central bank. In 1694, at the very dawn of the industrial age, while Newcomen was still tinkering with the steam engine, William Paterson organized the Bank of England—which became a template for similar centralist institutions in all Second Wave phase without constructing its own equivalent of this machine for the central control of money and credit. Paterson’s bank sold government bonds; it issued government back currency; it later began to regulate the lending practices of other banks. Eventually it took on the primary function of all central banks today: central control of the money supply. In 1800 the Banque de France was formed for similar purposes. This was followed by the formation of the Reichsbank in 1875. In the United States of America, the collision between First and Second Wave forces led to a major battle over central banking shortly after the adoption of the Constitution. Mr. Hamilton, the most brilliant advocate of the Second Wave policies, argued for a national bank on the English Model. The South and the frontier West, still wedded to agriculture, opposed him. Nevertheless, with the support of the industrializing Northeast, he succeeded in forcing through legislation that created the Bank of the United State—forerunner of today’s Federal Reserve System. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
Employed by government to regulate the level and rate of market activity, central banks introduced—by the back door, as it were—a degree of unofficial short-range planning into capitalist economies. Money flowed through every artery in Second Wave societies, both capitalist and socialist. Both needed, and therefore created, a centralized money pumping station. Central banking and centralized government marches hand in hand. Centralization was another dominating principle of Second Wave civilization. What we see, therefore, is a set of six guiding principles, a “program” that operated to one degree or another in all the Second Wave countries. These half-dozen principles—standardization, specialization—were applied in both the capitalist and socialist wings of industrial society because they grew, inescapably, out of the basic cleavage between producer and consumer and the ever-expanding role of the market. These principles in turn, each reinforcing the other, led relentlessly to the rise of bureaucracy. They produced some of the biggest, most rigid, most powerful bureaucratic organizations the World had ever seen, leaving the individual to wander in a Kafka-like World of looming mega-organizations. If today we feel oppressed and overpowered by them, we can trace our problems to the hidden code that programmed the civilization of the Second Wave. This six principles that formed this code lent a distinctive stamp to Second Wave civilization. Today, as we shall shortly see, every one of these fundamental principles is under attack by the forces of the Third Wave. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
So, indeed, are the Second Wave elites who are still applying these rules—in business, in banking, in labour relations, in government, in education, in the media. For the rise of a new civilization challenges all the vested interests of the old one. In the upheavals that lie immediately ahead, the elites of all industrial societies—so accustomed to setting the rules—will in all likelihood go the way of the feudal lords of the past. Some will be by-passed. Others will be dethroned. Many will be reduced to impotence or shabby gentility. Several—the most intelligent and adaptive—will be transformed and emerge as leaders of the Third Wave civilization. To understand who will run things tomorrow as the Third Wave is becoming dominant, we must first know exactly who is running things today. Modern suburbia is the period of the twentieth century prior to the second World War was one of momentous changes in the volume of suburbanization. This was the era in which the city reached is zenith and suburbs fully came into their own. Cities were booming. The year 1920 was a watershed insofar as it marked the first time the nation was more than half (51.7 percent) urban. The Roaring Twenties exemplified the urban adolescence of a country that was now explicitly being shaped by urban goals and values. As stated during the Depression of the 1930s by the Report of the Urbanization Committee to the National Resources Committee: “The faults of out cities are not those of decadence and impending decline, but of exuberant vitality crowding its way forward under tremendous pressure—the flood rather than the drought. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
“The city is both the great playground and the great battleground of the Nation…An unprecedented mobility arising from the harnessing of stream, electricity, and internal-combustion engine to humans and materials are responsible for this phenomenal urban development. Swifter forms of urban and interurban transportation have further led to suburban migration and caused the emergence of metropolitan districts instead of individual cities as the actual areas of urban life.” Thus, in the period before the second World War, the cities appeared robust and growing in economic and social dominance, not in decline and decay. Suburbs were part of the growth of the urban area, no longer simply a footnote. With some 17 million residents in 1930 (the total American population was 123.1 million), suburbs were becoming a majority component of metropolitan population. Suburban population was already 45 percent as large as the central-city population. Suburbs built between the first and second World Wars (1918-1942) represented the first steps toward mass suburbanization. Elite suburbs of the nineteenth-century model—that is large, large architecturally designed homes—continued to be built. However, such suburbs, as for example, Shaker Heights, east of Cleveland, Ohio; were now more oriented to streetcar lines than railroads. Moreover, the growing upper-middle class use of automobiles for commuting now put a premium on living in a quality suburb not too distant from downtown offices. Thus, across the country, upper-status inner-ring suburbs on the “good side” of the city saw fine homes constructed during the 1920s. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
These pre-World War II suburbs were built to have the best of both Worlds. They could appeal to the long standing antiurbanism of many Americans. They also appealed to those seeking to remove themselves from heavy concentration of new immigrant populations in the central cities. The suburbs could also boas that with their greenery they were closer to nature and thus better places to raise children. All this could be enjoyed while residents remained within a short commute of the city and kept all urban advantages. This meant not only the city’s cultural life and nightlife, but more importantly, the advantages of the city’s gas, electric, and telephone utilities. Inner-ring suburbs might have their own government, run their own schools, and collect their own lower taxes, but they were connected to city gas mains, electric lines, water and sewer systems, and telephones. Affluent suburban residents thus obtained all the practical advantages of living in the city while escaping the costs and problems. No wonder the popular middle-class women’s magazine such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, and Good Housekeeping extolled the benefits of suburban living. You could have the mythical American Pie Life with a beautiful house with the gorgeous roses surrounded by the pristine white picket fence while surrendering none of the urban comforts and advantages. Housing styles in affluent lace curtain between-war suburbs reflected the privileged positions of their owners. Depending on one’s preference, the homeowner could build an ideal home in a Colonial New England style while next door a Grand Queen Anne Victorian and next to an English half-timbered Tutor, and across the Street from a center-entrance Georgian and at the corner a Spanish-Moorish style villa. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
The last style reflected the importance of the expanding Southern California movie industry. Films such as The Sheik created a fad for all things thought to be Moorish Arab, which, when combined with the Spanish influences in Southern California, produced an ersatz Spanish-Moorish style found in places as far from the ocean and sun as Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An excellent example of the ersatz style then called Spanish is expensive Palos Verdes, Estates outside of Los Angeles. The style has come to be known as Californian style; that is, low hacienda-style stucco-sided and red-tiled-roofed homes with terraces and verandas. Overall, if not exciting, Palos Verdes produced a very pleasant and harmonious physical perspective. Architectural styles during the 1920s and early 1930 were often mixed in occasionally bizarre and electric fashions. For example, for a number of years I lived in the suburb of Shorewood, just north of Milwaukee, in a marvelous 1930 Dutch Colonial home that had a living room done in Spanish-Moorish style complete with rounded arches and rough Spanish plaster. The builders of such homes created for themselves far more than housing; they created the romantic idealization of earlier eras. “A man’s home was his castle,” where he could life if not as a lord, at least as a latter-day country gentleman. And all this could be had while benefiting from twentieth-century urban technology of indoor plumbing, central heating, and electricity. In the words of President Herbert Hoover, “To own one’s home is a physical expression of individualism, of enterprise, of independence, and of the freedom of spirit” (Speech quoted in American Home, February 1932, p. 253). #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
It should be remembered that most of the communities in which these “expressions of individualism” were located were deliberately racially, religiously, ethnically, and economically restricted In Palos Verdes, for example, cost restrictions mandated minimum lot sizes, set back requirements, and minimum construction costs. Residential covenants attached to the deeds excluded most groups and religions. An exception was made for live-in servants. The irony of such exclusive housing is that the heritage for the architecture that was so popular came from a community development designed to copy Mexican-style hacienda architecture apparently never occurred to the developers or residents. The feeling of being accepted by someone we love is a basic human need. In the pas 100 years, the United States of America has changed significantly and become far more loving and accepting. Being accepted by good people motivates us. It increases our sense of self-worth and self-confidence. Those who cannot find acceptance from desirable sources often seek it elsewhere. They may look to people who are not interested in their well-being. They may attach themselves to false friends and do questionable things to try to receive the acknowledgement they are seeking. They may seek acceptance by wearing a particular brand of clothing to generate a feeling of belonging or status. For some, striving for a role or a position of prominence can also be a way of seeking acceptance. They define their worth by a position they hold or status they obtain. Even in the Church we are not always free from this type of thinking. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
Seeking acceptance from the wrong sources or for incorrect reasons puts us on a dangerous path—one that is likely to lead us astray and even to destruction. Instead of feeling cherished and self-confident, we will eventually feel abandoned and inferior. However, see that you look to God and live. The ultimate source of empowerment and lasting acceptance is our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. They know us. They love us. They do not accept us because of our title or position. They do not look at our status. They look into our hearts. They accept us for who we are and what we are striving to become. Seeking and receiving acceptance from Them will always lift and encourage us. As we look into our hearts, we screen ourselves. What no one around us knows, we surely know. We know our motives and desires. When we engage in sincere, honest reflection, we do not rationalize or deceive ourselves. As we sincerely and prayerfully ponder he extent to which our hearts are hones and broken, we will be taught by the Holy Ghost. We will receive a sweet confirmation or gentle correction, inviting us to act. At first it would seem that humans in the World, having among themselves no type of moral relations or acknowledged duties, could be neither good nor evil, and had neither vices nor virtues, unless, if we take these words in a physical sense, we call those qualities that can harm an individual’s preservation “vices” in one, and those that can contribute to it “virtues.” In that case it would be necessary to call the one who least resists the simple impulses of nature the most virtuous. However, without departing from the standard meaning of these words, it is appropriate to suspend the judgment we could make regarding such a situation and to be on our guard against our prejudices, until we have examined with scale in hand whether there are more virtues than vices among civilized humans. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
Or whether all things considered they would not be in a happier set of circumstances if they had neither evil to fear nor good to hope for from anyone, rather than subjecting themselves to a universal dependence and obliging themselves to receive everything from those who do not oblige themselves to give them anything. Above all, let us not conclude with Dr. Hobbes that because humans have no idea of goodness one is naturally evil; that one is vicious because one does not know virtue; that one always refuses to preform service for one’s fellow humans which one reasonably attributes to oneself, to those things one needs, one foolishly imagines oneself to be the sole proprietor of the entire Universe. Dr. Hobbes has very clearly seen the defect of all modern definitions of natural right, but the consequences one draws from one’s own definition show that one takes it in a sense that is no less false. Were he to have reasoned on the basis of the principles he established, Dr. Hobbes should have said that since the state of nature is in the state in which the concern for our self-preservation is the least prejudicial to that of others, that state was consequently the most appropriate for the peace and the best suited for the human race. Dr. Hobbes says precisely the opposite, because he had wrongly injected into the savage human’s concern for self-preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions which are the product of society and which have made laws necessary. The evil human, he says, is a robust child. It remains to be seen whether savage humans are a robust child. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Were we to grant Dr. Hobbes this, what would we conclude from it? That is this human were as dependent on others when one is robust as one is when one is weak, there is no type of excess to which one would not tend: one would not tend: if she was too slow in offering one nourishment, one would disrespect one’s mother; should one find one’s younger brother annoying, one would harm him; should one be assaulted or aggravated by an individual, one would bite that person’s leg. However, being robust and being dependent are two contradictory suppositions in the state of nature. When they are dependent, humans are weak, and when one is emancipated from that dependence before one is robust. Dr. Hobbes did not see that the same cause prevents them at the same time from abusing their faculties, as one oneself maintains. Hence we could say that savages are not evil precisely because hey do not know what it is to be good; for it is neither the development of enlightenment nor the restraint imposed by the law, but the clam of the passions and the ignorance of vices which prevents the from doing evil. So much more profitable to these is the ignorance of vice than the knowledges of virtue is to those. Moreover, there is another principle that Dr. Hobbes failed to notice, and which, having been given to humans in order to mitigate, in certain circumstances, the ferocity of one’s egocentrism or the desire for self-preservation before this egocentrism of one came into being, tempers the ardor one has for one’s own well-being by an innate repugnance o seeing one’s fellow humans suffer. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
I do not believe I have any contradiction to fear in grating the only natural virtue that the most excessive detractor of human virtues was forced to recognize. I am referring to pity, a disposition that is fitting for beings that are as weak and as subject to ills as we are; a virtue all the more universal and the more useful to humans in that it precedes in one any kind of reflection, and so natural that even animals sometimes show noticeable signs of it. Without speaking of the tenderness of mothers for their young and of the perils hey have to brave in order to protect them, one daily observes the repugnance that horses have for trampling a living body with their hooves. An animal does not go undisturbed past a dead animal of its own species. There are even some animals that give them a kind of sepulchre; and the mournful lowing of the cattle entering a slaughterhouse voices the impression they received of the horrible spectable that strikes them. One notes with pleasure the author of The Fable of the Bees, having been forced to acknowledge humans as a compassionate and sensitive being, departing from one’s cold and subtle style in the example one gives, to offer us the pathetic image of an imprisoned human who sees outside one’s cell a ferocious animal tearing a child from its mother’s arms and nourishment, mashing its frail limbs with its murderous teeth, and ripping with its claws the child’s quivering entrails. What horrible agitation must be felt by this witness of an event in which one has no personal interest! What anguish must one suffer at this sigh, being unable to be of any help to the fainting mother or to the dying child. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Such is the pure movement of nature prior to all reflection. Such is the force of natural pity, which the most depraved mores still have difficulty destroy, since everyday one sees in our theaters someone affected and weeping at the ills of some unfortunate person, and who, were one in the tyrant’s place, would intensify the torments of one’s enemy still more; [like the bloodthirsty Sulla, so sensitive to ills he had not caused, or like Alexander of Pherae, who did not dare attend the performance of any tragedy, for fear of being seen weeping with Andromache and Priam, and yet who listened impassively to the cries of so many citizens who were killed every day on his orders. Nature, in giving humans tears, bears witness that she gave the human race the softest hearts.] If nature have not given humans pity to assist their reason, there is a clear awareness that, with all their mores, humans would have never been anything but monsters; but one has not seen that from this quality alone flow all the social virtues that one wants to deny in humans. In fact, what are generosity, mercy, and humanity, if not pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human species in general. Benevolence and even friendship are, properly understood, the products of a constant pity fixed on a particular object; for is desiring that someone not suffer anything but desiring that one be happy? Were it true that the commiseration were merely a sentiment that puts us in the position of the one who suffers, a sentiment that is obscure and power in savage humans, develop but weak in humans dwelling in civil society, what importance would this idea have to the truth of what I say, expect to give it more force? #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
In fact, commiseration will be all the more energetic as the witnessing animal identifies itself more intimately with the suffering animal. Now it is evident that this identification must have been infinitely close in the state of nature than in the state of reasoning. Reason is what engenders egocentrism, and reflection strengthens it. Reason is what engenders egocentrism, and reflection strengthens it. Reason is what turns humans in upon oneself. Reason is what separates one from all that troubles one and afflicts one. For centuries, philosophers have debated what it means to be human. However, the answer has eluded us. Perhaps it is because it is so simple. To be human means to choose. Philosophy is what isolated one and what moves one to say in secret, at the sight of a suffering human, “Perish if you will; I am safe and sound.” No longer can anything but danger to the entire society trouble the tranquil slumber of the philosopher and yank one from one’s bed. One’s fellow humans can be killed with impunity underneath one’s window. One has merely to place one’s hands over one’s ears and argue with oneself a little in order to prevent nature, which rebels within one, from identifying one with the human being assassinated. Savage humans do not have this admirable talent, and for lack of wisdom and reason one is always seen thoughtlessly talent, and for lack of wisdom and reason one is always seen thoughtlessly giving in to the first sentiment of humanity. When there is a riot or a street brawl, the populace gathers together; the prudent human withdraws from the scene. It is the rabble, the women of the marketplace, who separate the combatants and prevent decent people from killing one another. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
It is therefore quite certain that pity is a natural sentiment, which, by moderate in each individual the activity of the love of oneself, contributes to the mutual of the entire species. Pity is what carries us without reflection to the assistance of those we see suffering. Pity is what, in the state of nature, takes the place of laws, mores, and virtue, with the advantage that no one is tempted to disobey its sweet voice. Pity is what will prevent every robust savage from robbing a weak child or an infirm old man of one’s hard-earned subsistence, if one oneself expects to be able to find one’s own someplace else. Instead of the sublime maxim of reasoned justice, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, pity inspires all humans with another maxim of natural goodness, much less perfect but perhaps more useful than the preceding one: Do what is good for you with as little hard as possible to others. In a word, it is in this natural sentiment, rather than in subtle arguments, that one must search for the cause of the repugnance at doing evil that every human would experience, even independently of the maxims of education. Although it might be appropriate for Socrates and minds of his stature to acquire virtue through reason, the human race would long ago have ceased to exist, if its preservation had depended solely on the reasoning of its members. With passions so minimally active and such a salutary restraint, being more wild than evil, and more attentive to protecting themselves from the harm they could receive than tempted to do harm to others, humans were not so subject to very dangerous conflicts. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
Since they had no sort of intercourse among themselves; since, as a consequence, they knew neither vanity, nor deference, nor esteem, nor contempt; since they had not the slightest notion of mine and thine, nor any true idea of justice; since they regarded the acts of violence that could befall them as an easily redressed evil and not as an offense that must be punished; and since they did not even dream of vengeance except perhaps as a knee-jerk response right then and there, like the dog that bites the stone that is thrown at one, their disputes would rarely have had bloody consequences, if their subject had been no more sensitive than food. Likewise, a mother who is overwhelmed by power negative emotions, like anger or grief, while nursing her infant, could be the cause of its spasms and convulsions. Even medical science admits that a depressive kind of emotionalism contributes towards causing hardening of the arteries and hence earlier old age. Whenever Gandhi had an important decision to make, and went through protected self-wrangling in the process, the physician who attended him noted that his blood pressure rose considerably. Once Gandhi went to sleep in such a condition. Next morning the pressure had fallen to normal. During the night he had ended the mental pressure and arrived at a decision! Angina pectoris is recognized by many physicians now as a very serious disease, often fatal and always painful, mostly brought on by extreme nervous tension. The power of the mind over flesh is proved convincingly even by such simple, everyday experiences as the vomiting caused by a horrible sigh, the weeping caused by a tragic one, the loss of appetite of positive indigestion caused by bad news, and the headache caused by quarreling. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
As long as we live in this World, trails and tribulations will dog our steps. Job has it right. “Human life on Earth is just one unending trudge” (7.1). Each one of us, therefore, ought to take care. Do not underestimate the power of a temptation. Do no overestimate your own power of a temptation. Do not overestimate your power to resist a temptation. After all, we do not want the Devil to take us by surprise. He never sleeps. He goes about seeking whom he may devour, as Peter wrote in his First Letter (5.8). What is the moral? No one’s so honied and wholesome that one cannot be deviled for dinner. And at dinner, or so the Gospels would have us believe, the Devil’s the guest from Hell. Yes, temptations are often useful to the human race, whether they come n small packages or large. However, how can this be? They bring us low, purge, scourge, and school us in the fire; that is to say, they scare the living daylights out of us. All the Saints have passed barefoot over the coals and in the process still made some spiritual progress. Alas, those who cannot withstand temptations become the shipwrecked, cast adrift forever. Yes, there is a moral. There is no religious order so lofty or monastery so remote that the Unwanted Visitor cannot slip in and make some mischief. Over time Humankind has not been able to defend itself successfully from the assaults of all temptations. Our common experience tells us that. And the reason why? The source of our temptations has already invaded us; that is to say, we were born in concupiscence, and in concupiscence we thrive. Sad to say, we did not need the Letter of James to remind us that (1.14). #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
We do have some success in the fight. However, as one temptation or tribulations is dispatched, another will soon take its place. We will always have something to whack away at, it seems, for are no we still paying the price for pummeling our Primal Felicity? Many seek to flee he temptations altogether. Alas, the escape route is clogged, and the refugee is destined to succumb! Advancing to the rear, then, is not the answer. We cannot hope to conquer that way. However, through spiritual cunning—that is to say, through Patience and True Humility—we become the stronger, and the tempters have to try harder. If a wildly successful plant—that is to say, a temptation—causes you pain, you will probably take the pruning knife and trim it back. Do that, and it will return the hardier. Pull out its root, however, and it is gone forever. You will feel better, and your spiritual garden will recover its charm. The way we stand, you can see we have grown up this way together, out of the same soil, with the same rains, leaning in the same way toward the Sun. See how we lean together in the same direction. How the dead limbs of one of us rest in the branches of another. How those branches have grown around the limbs. How the two are inseparable. And if you look you can see the different ways we have taken this place into us. Magnolia, loblolly bay, sweet gum, Southern bayberry, Pacific bayberry; whenever we grow there are many of us; Monterey pine, sugar pine, white-bark pine, four-lead pine, single-leaf pine, bristle-cone pine, foxtail pine, Torrey pine, Western red pine, Jeffrey pine, bishop pine. And we are various, and amazing in our variety, and our differences multiply, so that edge after edge of the endlessness of possibility is exposed. You know we have grown this way for years. And to no purpose you can understand. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
Yet what you fail to know we know, and the knowing is in us, how we have grown this way, why these years were not one of them heedless, why we are shaped the way we are, not all straight to your purpose, but to ours. And how we are each purpose, how each cell, how light and soil are in us, how we are in the soil, how we are in the air, how we are both infinitesimal and great and how we are infinitely without any purpose you can see, in the way we stand, each alone, yet none of us separable none of us beautiful when separate but all exquisite as we stand, each moment heeded in this cycle, no detail unlovely. Our God and God of our father and mothers, please remember the merit of our ancestors who, from year to year, appeared before Thee in America, Thy Holy City. How deep was their rejoicing as they brought their offerings before Thee! We pray Thee, imbue us, O Lord our God, with their faith in Thee and their joy in Thy World, their love for Thy Scripture and their yearning for freedom and justice. May we, in their spirit of sacrificial devotion, fulfill our duty toward the rebuilding of Thy Holy Land, the fountain of our life, that we may ever serve Thee in reverence as in days of yore. Because of our sins we were exiled from the Holy Land and removed far away from its sacred soil We cannot therefore make our festival pilgrimages before Tee nor can we fulfill our obligations in Thy chosen House, the great and holy Temple which was called by Thy name, because of the destruction that has come upon Thy Sanctuary. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers and mothers, merciful King, in Thine abundant compassion, again to have mercy upon us and upon Thy Sanctuary. O rebuild it speedily and please enhance its glory. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
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Specialization Can Get Jobs Done with Less Loss of Time and Labour!
This happy breed of humans, this little World, this precious stone set in the silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall, or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands. This blessed plot, this Earth, this realm, this America. O! beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on. One of the second great principles that ran through all Second Wave societies: specialization. For the more the Second wave eliminated diversity in language, leisure, and life-style, the more it needed diversity in the sphere of work. Accelerating the division of labour, the Second Wave replaced the casual jack-of-all-work peasant with the narrow, purse-lipped specialist and the worker who did only one task, Taylor-fashion, over and over again. As early as 1720 a British report on The Advantages of the East India Trade made the point that specialization could get jobs done with “less loss of time and labour.” In 1776 Adam Smith opened The Wealth of Nations with the ringing assertion that “the greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour seems to have been the effects of the division of labour.” Dr. Smith, in a classic passage, described the manufacture of a pin. A single old-style workman, performing all the necessary operations by himself, he wrote, could turn out not only a handful of pins each day—no more than twenty and perhaps not even one. By contrast, Dr. Smith described a “manufactory” he had visited in which the eighteen different operations required to make a pin were carried out by ten specialized workers, each performing only one or a few steps. Together they were able to produce more than forty-eight thousand pins per day—over forty-eight hundred per workers. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
By the nineteenth century, as more and more work shifted into the factory, the pin story was repeated again and again on an ever-larger scale. And the human costs of specialization escalated accordingly. Critics of industrialism charged that highly specialized repetitive labour progressively dehumanized the worker. By the time Henry Ford started manufacturing Model T’s in 1908 it took not eighteen different operations to complete a unit but 7,882. In his autobiography, Ford noted that of these 7,882 specialized jobs, 949 required “strong , able-bodied, and practically physically perfect men,” 3,338 needed men of merely “ordinary” physical strength, most of the rest could be performed by “women or older children,” and, he continued coolly, “we found that 670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one-legged men, two by armless men, 715 by one-armed men and 10 by blind men.” Basically, the specialized job required not a whole person, but only a part. No more vivid evidence that overspecialization can be brutalizing has ever been adduced. A practice which critics attributed to capitalism, however, became an inbuilt feature of socialism as well. For the extreme specialization of labour that was common to all Second Wave societies had its roots in the divorce of production from consumption. Russian, Poland, Germany, or Hungary can no more run their factories today without elaborate specialization than can Japan or the United States of America—whose Department of Labour in 1977 published a list of twenty thousand identifiably different occupations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
In both capitalist and socialist industrial states, moreover, specialization was accompanied by a rising tide of professionalizing. Whenever the opportunity arose for some group of specialists to monopolize esoteric knowledge and keep newcomers out of their field, profession emerged. As the Second Wave advanced, the market intervened between a knowledge-holder and a client dividing them sharply into producer and consumer. Thus, health in Second Wave societies came to be seen as a product provided by a doctor and a health-delivery bureaucracy, rather than a result of intelligent self-care (production for use) by the patient. Education was supposedly “produced” by the teacher in the school and “consumed” by the student. All sorts of occupational groups from librarians to salemen began clamouring for the right to call themselves professionals—and for the power to set standards, prices, and conditions of entry into their specialties. By now, according to Michael Pertschuck, Chairman of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, “Our culture is dominated by professionals who call us ‘clients’ and tell us of our ‘needs.’” In Second Wave societies even political agitation was conceived of as a profession. Thus Dr. Lenin argued that the masses could not bring about revolution without professional help. What was needed, he asserted, was an “organization or revolutionaries” limited in membership to “people” whose profession is that of a revolutionary.” Among communist, capitalists, executives, educators, priests, and politicians, the Second Wave produced a common mentality and a drive toward an ever more refined division of Labour. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Like Prince Albert at the great Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, they believed that specialization was “the moving power of civilization.” The Great Standardizers and The Great Specializers marched hand in hand. The widening split between production and consumption also forced a change in the way Second Wave people dealt with time. In a market-dependent system, whether the market is planned or free, time equals money. Expensive machines cannot be allowed to sit idly, and they operate at rhythms of their own. This produced the third principle of industrial civilization: synchronization. Even in the earliest societies work had to be carefully organized in time. Warriors often had to work in unison to trap their prey. Fishermen had to coordinate their efforts in rowing or hauling in the nets. George Thomson, many years ago, showed how various work songs reflected the requirements of labour. For the oarsmen, time was marked by a simple two-syllable sound like O-op! The second syllable indicated the moment of maximum exertion while the first was the time for preparation. Hauling a boat, he noted, was heavier work than rowing, “so the moments of exertion are spaced at longer intervals,” and we see, as in the Irish hauling cry Ho–li–ho–hup!, a longer preparation for the final effort. Until the Second Wave brought in machinery and silenced the songs of the worker, most such synchronization of effort was organic or natural. It flowed from the rhythm of the seasons and from biological processes, from the Earth’s rotation and the beat of the heart. Second Wave societies, by contrast, moved to the beat of a machine. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
As factory production spread, the high cost of machinery and the close interdependence of labour required a much more refined synchronization. If one group of workers in a plan was late in completing a task, others down the line would be further delayed. Thus punctuality, never very important in agricultural communities, became a social necessity, and clocks and watches began to proliferate. By the 1790’s they were already becoming commonplace in Britain. Their diffusion came, in the words of British historian E. P. Thompson, “at the exact moment when the industrial revolution demanded a greater synchronization of labour.” Not by coincidence, children in industrial cultures were taught to tell time at an early age. Pupils were condition to arrive at school when the bell rang so that later on they would arrive reliably at the factory or office when the whistle blew. Jobs were timed and split into sequences measure in fractions of a second. “Nine-to-five” formed the temporal frame for millions of workers. Nor was it only working life that was synchronized. In all Second Wave societies, regardless of profit or political considerations, social life, too, became clock-driven and adapted to machine requirements. Certain hours were set aside for leisure. Standard-length vacations, holidays, or coffee breaks were interspersed with the work schedules. Children began and ended the school year at uniform times. Hospitals woke all their patients for breakfast simultaneously. Transport systems staggered under rush hours. Broadcasters fitted entertainment into special time slots—“prime time,” for example. Every business had its own peak hour or seasons, synchronization arose—from factory expediters and schedulers to traffic police and time-study men. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
By contrast, some people resisted the new industrial time system. And here again gender differences arose. Those who participated in Second Wave work-chiefly men—became the most conditioned to clock-time. Second Wave husbands continually complained h their wives kept them waiting, that they had no regard for time, that it took them forever to dress, that they were always late for appointments. Women, primarily engaged in noninterdepedent housework, worked to less mechanical rhythms. For similar reasons urban populations tended to look down upon rural folk as slow and unreliable. “They do not show up on time! You never know whether they will keep an appointment.” Such complaints could be traced directly to the difference between Second Wave work based on heightened interdependence and the First Wave work centered in the field and the home. Once the Second Wave became dominant even the intimate routines of life were locked into the industrial pacing system. In the United States of America and Russian, in Singapore and Sweden, in France and Denmark, Germany and Japan, families arose as one, ate at the same time, commuted, worked, returned home, went to bed, slept, and even participated in pleasures of the flesh more or less in unison as the entire civilization, in addition to standardization and specialization, applied the principle of synchronization. The rise of the market gave birth to yet another rule of Second Wave civilization—the principle of concentration. First Wave societies lived off widely dispersed sources of energy. Second Wave societies became almost totally dependent on highly concentrated deposits of fossil fuel. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
However, the Second Wave concentrated more than energy. It also concentrated population, stripping the countryside of people and relocating them in giant urban centers. It even concentrated work. While work in First Wave societies took place everywhere—in the home, in the village, in the fields—much of the work in Second Wave societies was done in factories where thousands of labourers were drawn together under a single roof. Nor was it only energy and work that were concentrated. Writing in the British social science journal New Society, Stan Cohen has pointed out that, with minor exceptions, prior to industrialism “the poor were kept at home or with relatives; criminals were fined, whipped or banished from one settlement to another; if they were poor, the insane were kept in their families, or supported by the community.” All these groups were, in short, dispersed throughout the community, instead of segregating them to one location, so they could go unnoticed and the community would remain functional and peaceful. Industrialism revolutionized the situation. The early nineteenth century, in fact, has been called the time of Great Incarcerations—when criminals were rounded up and concentrated in prisons, the mentally ill rounded up and concentrated in “lunatic asylums,” and children rounded up and concentrated in schools, exactly as workers were concentrated in factories. Concentration occurred also in capital flows, so that Second Wave civilization gave birth to the giant corporation and, beyond that, the trust or monopoly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
By the mid-1960s, the average cars costs about $2,752 $(23,518.24 in 2021 dollars), and a gallon of gas was around 31 cents ($2.65 in 2021 dollars). During this same time frame, the Big Three auto companies in the United States of America produced ninety-four percent of all American cars. In Germany five companies—Volkswagen, Daimler-Benz, Opel (GM), Ford-Werke, and Bayerische Motor Werke AG accounted for 91 percent of production. In France, Renault, Citroen, Simca, and Peugeot turned out virtually 100 percent. In Italy, Fiat alone built 90 percent of all autos. Similarly, in the United States of America 80 percent or more aluminum, beer, a tobacco cigarette, and breakfast foods were produced by four of five companies in each field. In Germany 92 percent of all the plasterboard and dyes, 98 percent of photo film, 91 percent of industrial sewing machines, were produced by four or fewer companies in each respective category. The list of highly concentrated industries goes on and on. Socialist managers were also convinced that concentration of production was “efficient.” Indeed, many Marxist ideologues in the capitalist countries welcomed the growing concentration of industry in capitalist countries as a necessary step along the way to the ultimate total concentration of industry under state auspices. Dr. Lenin spoke of the “conversion of all citizens into workers and employees of one’s huge “conversion of all citizens into workers and employees of one huge ‘syndicate’—the whole state. Half a century later the Russian economist Dr. N. Lelyukhina, writing in Voprosy Ekonomiki could report that “the USSR possesses the most concentrated industry in the World.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Whether in energy, population, work, education, or economic organization, the concentrative principle of Second Wave civilization ran deep—deeper, indeed, than any ideological differences between Moscow and the New World. With all this new commerce and the use of the automobile, the idea that government is somehow responsible for providing good roads is not a long-standing historical American belief. Prior to the Civil War, state governments and even localities sometimes became engaged in the building of turnpikes. However, this was most often done not so much as a statement of public policy but as a means of making money. Public corporations offered stock to investors on assumption that the roads would turn a handsome profit. In practice this hope was rarely realized. Even within the city itself the improvement of a street commonly would be done by the city, but at private expense. Property owners facing the street generally paid special tax assessments for street improvements. The assumption was that the owners would benefit from the paving both in conveniences and increased property values, and thus they should be assessed for the improvement. Only in the latter-nineteenth century did business leaders and middle-class city residents become increasingly vocal over the need for municipalities to assume the responsibility for the paving and maintenance of streets in the city. However, what finally tipped the scales in favour of paving in many communities was not the coming of the automobiles, but rather the widespread bicycle craze of the 1890s. Bicycle clubs and enthusiasts provided the extra pressure for well-paved municipal roads. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
By the turn of the century, most large municipalities were well along in replacing gravel, cobblestone, and brick streets with asphalt. Heavily traveled streets and new roads were often constructed with concrete. Beyond the city lines was another matter. Auto travel outside of the city was a major adventure. Roads varied from improved gravel to unimproved cowpath. No national road system existed, and prior to World War I, coast-to-coast auto trips received national newspaper coverage. Completion of such difficult coast-to-coast ordeals, which commonly took months, were used by automobile manufactures to advertise the reliability of their products. Following the first World War, the U.S. Army even sent a convoy of trucks coast to coast across the United States of America to highlight the need for a national road. One of the officers leading the convoy was the then-Captain Dwight Eisenhower, who viewed the publicity stunt as a chance to see the country. The 1919 trip from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco took the army convoy sixty-wo days. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower would sign into law the bill creating our present interstate highway system. In the 1920s, responding to increasing pressure from the motoring public and an effective political lobby of auto dealers, road builders, tire manufactures, and the like, the federal government gradually accepted major responsibility for maintaining roads between major cities. In 1916 the Federal Road Act had provided funds for state to organize higher departments. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The 1921 Federal Road Act got the federal government directly into the highway-building business. A Bureau of Public Roads was established to plan highways to all cities of 50,000 or more, and the federal government agreed to pay half the cost of highways designated as “primary roads.” This was the effective beginning of the national highway system. Some states, particularly the more prosperous ones outside the south, also established major road-building programs of their own. The best-known and most enduring of these state plans was that of New York. The regional planner Robert Moses built a series of landscaped, limited-access parkways radiating from New York City. The regional planner Robert Moses built a series of landscaped, limited-access parkways radiating from New York City north to Westchester Country and Connecticut and east into Long Island. The first of these parkways, designed t allow New Yorkers a pleasant means to escape the city, was the Bronx River Parkway. The parkways were deigned for pleasure driving rather than businesses, so trucks and busses were banned. To prevent anyone from later changing this purpose, Mr. Moses deliberately designed the parkways to have many overpasses too low for trucks to pass under. Although today the various parkways carry several times the traffic for which they were designed, these 1920s parkways are still the most attractive routes into or out of New York City. The period between World Wars also witnessed the construction of many new bridges and tunnels. For example, virtually all of Chicago’s current bridges linking its Loop and downtown with the north and west of the city were constructed during the 1920s. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
New York City dramatically improved its automobile access when the Holland Tunnel opened in 1927 and the George Washington Bridge opened four years later. Philadelphia’s Ben Franklin Bridge, opened in 1926, greatly simplified access to that city, while on the west coast a decade later the San Francisco Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge assured San Francisco’s continued development. The Golden Gate Bridge is today an internationally recognized symbol for San Francisco. The importance of the Bay Bridge to the economic activity of the city was dramatically emphasized in 1990 when the bridge had to be closed for months because of Earthquake damage. It is easy to forget just how dependent contemporary life is upon truck transport. Trucks in many ways did for goods what the automobile did for people. Unlike railroads, trucks were free of fixed routes and fixed schedules. Their use eliminated the necessity of being on a railway right-of-way. Trucks were far more flexible; they could make door-to-door pickups and deliveries. Motor truck deliveries were also much faster than rail for short hauls. Moreover, motor trucks had no need of elaborate terminal facilities on valuable inner-city land. Truck registrations more than tripled during the 1920s, from one to three and a half million. Although it was not recognized at the time, the breakaway from reliance on central-city rail-accessible factories had begun. As truck transport grew, a central-city rail-accessible factories had begun. As truck transport grew, a central-city plant location next to the railroad line became less of a necessity. Increasingly, the more important factor was easy access to an interstate highway. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
During the nineteenth and early-twentieth century period of industrialization, factories had located in an inner-city industrial belt surrounding the central business district. This had occurred largely out of necessity since raw materials and goods could not be transported without rail access. Steam-driven industrial plants also relied on the trains to being the coal that powered he factories. The cost of inner-city land and congestion of an inner-city location were seen as inevitable prices of doing business. However, while moving goods by horse drawn wagon was difficult and expensive in the city, it was impossible for intercity cartage. Prior to the 1920s, there was no alternative to the railroad. The technology of the truck changed this. Trucks could easily haul five to six times the weight a wagon could, and they could do it at ten times the speed. This mean an inner-city factory or warehouse location might no longer be a necessity. This widespread use of electric motors to replace steam generators also meant that the factory no longer needed to be dependent on coal delivered by rail for its power. Electric power lines could cleanly and efficiently accomplish what previously required large coal-fed steam generators. The 1920s and 1930s, however, did not see trucks replace rail as the major form of interurban transport. That would occur after the building of the publicly funded interstate highway system following World War II. The truck’s initial advantage was in the short haul. The 1937 report of the National Resources Committee showed that motor trucks had a lower costs per mile within the first 250 miles of the city. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Lower equipment and maintenance costs indicated that motor cartage was superior in cost and speed for the short haul. Rail transport, however, retained a major advantage in both cost and efficiency for longer-distance travel. The longer trip, the lower cost per mile for rail transport. Also, the motor trucks of the interwar years were not able to carry the largest or heaviest loads. Nor were the highways suitable for carrying large loads at high speeds. Finally, the railroads continued to benefit from the fact that existing industrial plants were located along rail lines and from the history of shipping goods by rail. The continuation of old patterns was not seriously challenged during the Depression of the 1930s, since few new plants were built either in the cities’ industrial zones or on more peripheral locations. Only the second World War, with its demand for huge war plants that could be located on open suburban land, would demonstrate the feasibility of locating new commercial plants in peripheral locations. Our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ have shown us by Their examples and teachings that work is important in Heaven and on Earth, and that is why transportation and home life are important to so many people. God created the Heavens and the Earth. He caused the seas to gather in one place and the dry land to appear. He caused grass, herbs, and trees to grow on the land. He created the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars. God created every living thing in the sea or on the land. Then He placed Adam and Eve on the Earth to take care of it and to have dominion over all living things. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The child’s mind is not simply that of a miniature adult. First, as parents, teachers, or Christian educators we may wish to be sensitive to children’s limitations. Hard as it is for the adult to appreciate, preschoolers may be forming mostly misconceptions—which must later be reversed—of the meaning of Bible stories that adults love to teach them. Young primary school children may be incapable of grasping the analogy on which the object lesson of the children’s sermon is based. When we try to pour gallon-sized concepts into pint-sized minds, we should not be surprised when our children come home and tell us about “Gladly, the cross eyed bear.” As children’s minds develop, so do their conceptions of God. They put away childish things such as their conceptions of Santa Clauslike deity—which may not be exactly what they were taught but rather what they thought they were taught. Some revert to alternative simplistic images of God and the World. “We try to domesticate God,” observes Madeleine L’Engle, “to make his might actions comprehensible to our finite minds.” Others will struggle—with the competing claims of various religions, with the problem of evil and the suffering of the innocent, with the clash between scientific findings and literal interpretations of biblical texts—and will reject their childish faith. If God’s thoughts and ways are higher than our own (as a jet flies higher than a bird), then God is to us as we are to the preschooler, only more so. Just as the preschooler cannot fathom adult logic, indeed is baffled by mysteries and paradoxes that are, perhaps, were simplicities to God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Our position before God is rather like that of the occupant of a two-dimensional flatland trying to understand our three-dimensional World, or like our trying to conceptualize a World with four dimensions. Try as we might, we can no more think our way through things that are to us ultimate riddles than a four-year-old can do calculus. If God is all-powerful and all-good, then why does evil exist? (It is the classic dilemma. Either God cannot abolish evil or He will not. If He cannot, He is not all-powerful; if He will not, He s not all-good.) However, we have to live peaceably with the mysteries of faith “For My thoughts are not your thoughts neither are your ways My ways,” says the Lord. “For as the Heavens are higher than the Earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts,” reports Isaiah 55.8-9. Also, try this one: If God is the sovereign Creator and sustainer of all history, what room is there for human freedom? If there is even an ounce of human freedom, enabling history to be deflected this way or that at different forks in the road, how can God be its sovereign Lord? If, on the other hand, God is ultimately in control of everything, even of our choices, how can we humans be deemed responsible? Such issues—called contradictions by nonbelievers and paradoxes by persons of faith—are indeed troubling, but less so once we realize that if God’s thoughts and ways were like our own, God would not be God, or else we would be gods, too. Imagine a dog caught in a trap or a child with a thorn in a finger. To assist either we must ask them to trust what their limited intelligence cannot comprehend: that moving the law father back into the trap is the way to get it out, that hurting the finger more may be the way to stop it hurting. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
We can only hope that, based on noting besides their confidence in us, the dog and the child will have faith. Sometimes, because of their unbelief, we can do no mighty works. Nevertheless, if human life is in fact ordered by a beneficent being whose knowledge of our real needs and of the way in which they can be satisfied infinitely exceeds our own, we must expect a priori that His operations will often appear to us far from beneficent and far from wise, and that it will be our highest prudence to give Him our confidence in spite of this. Make no mistake about what we are suggesting. We are not saying, “Give up the struggle, do not doubt, stop trying to turn childish beliefs into more mature ones.” The Old Testament heroes of faith were people who dared admit their bafflement, who even dared argue with God. To immediately shrug off every difficult question by saying that we cannot know God’s thoughts is not so much intellectual humility as it is a cop-out. Some baffling issues may be neither inherent contradictions nor paradoxes, but simple unresolved puzzles that will eventually yield to careful, patient analysis. However, if having pondered, searched, and struggled, we remain baffled, we can relax. To our finite minds some philosophical puzzles seem impenetrable. At such points, science may actually be an assistance to faith, both by reminding us of the immaturity of our cognition (on a divine scale) and by suggesting that irreconcbale concepts may, from our perspective, be an essential characteristic of nature. Light is a wave and light is a particle, the physicists tell us. “There are trivial truths and great truths,” said the physicist Niels Bohr. “The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
After grappling with the paradoxes and contradictions of faith we are left a frightful decision. The choice is between unbelief, which sees sheer madness the divine wisdom. To love with the mysteries of faith requires that we do not demand of God that we be able to comprehend His being. We must in the last analysis accept that as the Heavens are higher than the Earth or as a mature adult’s understanding is higher than a toddler’s, so God’s ways are higher than our own. It is good to be dumped on. How often? Occasionally. Why? It is a reminder. Of what? That this is not our World; that we are exiles somewhere between this World and the next. It is all right to hope, but not to put hope in this World. It is not so bad to be lied about. How often? Every now and then. Why? It is an experience. It draws us toward humility and shields us against vainglory. By and large we Devouts are virtuous gents. However, to be vilified in the marketplace, crucified in the monastery! That is what often happens, but who knows the real story? God knows. He is our witness. He will vouch for us when the Final Times comes. What happens when a person plants oneself firmly in Go? One learns one does not have to stay far for nourishment. What happens when that same person is tried and tested or besieged with bad thoughts? One comes to understand there is nothing without God, as John has written (15.5), and that one needs more. What happens when that person cries, groans, and puts to prayer all the miseries one suffers? It wears one down to the point that one desires death to come, that “one can be dissolved and be with Christ,” as Saint Paul wrote to the Philippians (1.23). #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
One or all these calamities will help the person of goodwill to take note. Perfect Security and Plentiful Peace—these commodities cannot be had, at least in this World. However, when we feel the great power of God, there will be a transformation rather than a loss. If humans live only wholly in beneficial harmonious feelings, if one consistently rejects all negative and destructive ones, the result must certainly be that one will enjoy better health in the body as one already enjoys the best in mind des have at the very leas a limited influence upon the body. This is proven by mental shock hastening the heartbeat; by worry acting on the nervous system and affecting the flow of secretions, thus contributing towards indigestion; by violent anger raising the blood pressure. Because fear liberates toxic poisons, the expression “died of fright” may be literally true. If one emotion brings a blush of blood to the face, another takes the blood away and leaves pallor. In the first case, it has led the minute arteries of the skin to expand; in the second case, it has led them to contract. If this is what a momentary state of mind can do to the body, imagine what a persistent state can do! Intense happiness felt on hearing some important good news will start a smile on the face. Intense anxiety wrinkles the forehead and depressed the mouth; if it becomes habitual and chronic, the bowels become constipated. These two facts about wholly opposite moods are known to nearly everyone, because the line of causality is straight, obvious, and universally witnessed. What is less known because harder to discern is the third fact that selfish inconsiderate stubbornness and constant hatred create the poison of uric acid in the bloodstream and his indirectly lead to rheumatism. What is first felt mentally is also most immediately reflected physically. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The Old World system lists the following inner causes of functional sickness: fear and untruthfulness weaken the kidneys; anger affects the liver; depression and worry affect the lungs; excessive joy affects the heart; overactive mentality affect the stomach; timidity, indecision, and cowardice affect the liver by producing insufficient bile. Consider the life of trees. Aside from the axe, what trees acquire from humans is inconsiderable. What humans may acquire from trees is immeasurable. From their mute forms there flow a poise, in silence; a lovely sound and motion in response to wind. What peace comes to those aware of the voice and bearing of trees! Trees do not scream for attention. A tree, a rock, has no pretence, only a real growth out of itself, in close communion with the universal spirit. A tree retains a deep serenity. It establishes in the Earth not only its root system but also those roots of its beauty and is unknown consciousness. Sometimes one may sense a glisten of that consciousness, and with such perspective, feel that humans are not necessarily the highest form of life. Thou didst choose us for Thy service from among all peoples, loving us and taking delight in us. Thou didst exalt us above all tongues by making us holy though Thy commandments. Thou hast drawn us near, O our King, unto Thy service and hast called us by Thy great and holy name. And Thou hast given us in love, O Lord our God, [Sabbaths for rest,] holidays for gladness, festivals and seasons for rejoicing. Thou hast granted us [this Sabbath day, and] this Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Season of our Freedom, this Feast of Weeks, the Season of the Giving of our Blessings, this Feast of Tabernacles, the Season of our Gladness, this Eighth Day Feast of Assembly, the Season of our Gladness, as a holy convocation, commemorating our liberation from shackles. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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If Nature Herself Proves Artificial, Where Will You Go to Seek Wildness?
If you want to make beautiful music, you must play rhythm and blues together the way Minnie Riperton, The Isley Brothers, Debarge, Diana Ross, Anita Baker, or Patti LaBelle did. As you sit reading this page, receptors for touch and pressure in the seat of your pants are sending nerve impulses to your brain. Although these sensations have been present all along, you were probably not aware of them until just now. This “seat-of-the-pants phenomenon” is an example of selective attention (voluntarily focusing on a specific sensory input). We are able o “tune in on” a single sensory message while excluding others. Another familiar example of the is the “cocktail party effect.” When you are in a group of people, surrounded by voices, you can still select and attend to the voice of the person you are facing. Of if that person gets dull, you can eavesdrop on conversations all over the room. (Be sure to smile and nod your head occasionally!) Actually, if you hear your own name spoken somewhere in the room, no matter how interesting your companion may be, your attention will probably shift away. We do find what others say about us to be very interesting, do we not? One of the things that held me back from Supernaturalism was a deep repugnance to the view of Nature, which, as I thought, Supernaturalism entailed. I passionately desired that Nature should exist “on her own.” The idea that she had been made and altered, by God, seemed to take from her all that spontaneity which I found so refreshing. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
In order to breathe freely I wanted to feel that in Nature one reached at last something that simply was: the thought that she had been manufactured or “put there,” and put there with a purpose, was suffocating. I wrote a poem in those days about a sunrise, I remember, in which, after describing the scene, I added that some people liked to believe there was a Spirit behind it all and that this Spirit was communicating with them. And face it, when there is a summer lightning storm, people still feel like primitive people did, that they did something to upset God. Nonetheless, the poem was not much good and I have forgotten most of it: but it ended up by saying how much rather I would feel: “That in their own right Earth and Sky continually do dance for their own sakes—and here crept I to watch the World by chance.” “By chance!”—one could not bear to feel that the sunrise had been in any way “arranged” or had anything to do with oneself. To find that it had not simply happened, that it had been somehow contrived, would be as bad as finding that the fieldmouse I saw beside some lonely hedge was really a clockwork mouse put there to amuse me, or (worse still) to point some moral lesson. The Greek poet asks, “If water sticks in your throat, what will you wash it down?” I likewise asked, “If Nature herself proves artificial, where will you go to seek wilderness? Where is the real out-of-doors?” To find that all the woods, and small streams in the middle of the woods, and odd corners of mountain valleys, and the wind and the grass were only a sort of scenery, only backcloths for some kind of play, and that play perhaps one with a moral—what flatness, what an anticlimax, what an unendurable bore! #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
The cure of this mood began years ago: but I must record that the cure was not complete until I began to study this question of Miracles. At every stage in my discovery, I have found my idea of Nature becoming more vivid and more concrete. I set out on a work which seemed to involve reducing her status and undermining her walls at every turn: the paradoxical result is a growing sensation that if I am not very careful, she will become the heroine of my story. She has never seemed to me more great or more real than at this moment. The reason is not far to seek. As long as one is a Naturalist, “Nature” is only a word for “everything.” And Everything is not a subject about which anything very interesting can be said or (save by illusion) felt. One aspect of things strikes us and we talk of the “peace” of Nature; another strikes us and we talk of the “peace” of Nature; another strikes us and we talk of her cruelty. And then, because we falsely take her for the ultimate and self-existent Fact and cannot quite repress our high instinct to worship the Self-existent, we are all at sea and our moods fluctuate and Nature means to us whatever we please as the moods select and slur. However, when we recognize that Nature is a creature, a created thing, with its own particular tang or flavour, everything becomes different. There is no need any longer to select and slur. It is not in her, but in Something far beyond her, that all lines meet and all contrasts are explained. It is no more baffling that the creature called Nature should be both fair and cruel than the first man you meet in the train should be a dishonest grocer and a kind husband. For she is not the Absolute: she is one of the creatures, with her good points and her bad points and her own unmistakable flavour running through them all. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
To say that God has created her is not to say that she is unreal, but precisely that she is real. Would you make God less creative than Dr. Shakespeare or Dr. Dickens? What He creates is created in the round: it is far more concrete than Falstaff or Sam Weller. The theologians certainly tell us that He created Nature freely. They mean that He was not forced to do so by any external necessity. However, we must not interpret freedom negatively, as if Nature were a mere construction of parts arbitrarily stuck together. God’s creative freedom is to be conceived as the freedom of a poet: the freedom to create a consistent, beneficial thing with its own inimitable flavour. Dr. Shakespeare need not create Mr. Falstaff: but if he does, Mr. Falstaff must be above average weight. God need not create this Nature. He might have created others, He may have created others. However, granted this Nature, then doubtless no smallest part of her is there except because it expresses the character He chose to give her. It would be a miserable error to suppose that the dimensions of space and time, the death and re-birth of vegetation, the unity in multiplicity of organisms, the union in opposition of genders, and the colour of each particular apple in Herefordshire this autumn, were merely a collection of useful devices forcibly welded together. They are the very idiom, almost the facial expression, the smell or taste, of an individual thing. The quality of Nature is present in them all just as the Latinity of Latin is presented in every inflection or the “Correggiosity” of Correggio in every stroke of the brush. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Nature is by human (and probably by Divine) standards partly good and partly evil. We Christians believe that she has been corrupted. However, the same tang or flavour runs through both her corruptions and her excellences. Everything is in character. Mr. Falstaff does not sin in the same way as Mr. Othello. Mr. Othello’s fall bears a close relation to his virtues. If Mrs. Perdita had fallen she would not have been bad in the same way as Lady Macbeth: if Lady Macbeth has remained good her goodness would have been quite different from that of Mrs. Perdita. The evils we see in Nature are, so to speak, the evils proper to this Nature. Her very character decreed that is she were corrupted the corruption would take this form and not another. The horrors of parasitism and the glories of motherhood are good and evil worked out of the same basic theme or idea. I spoke just now about the Latinity of Latin. It is more evident to us than it can have been to the Romans. “Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as I depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay says the Lord. On the contrary: ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him (or her); if he (or she) is thirsty, give him (or her) something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his (or her) head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good,’” reports Romans 12.17-21. The Englishness of English is audible only to those who know some other language as well. In the same way and for the same reason, only Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little way from her, and then turn round, and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the World before you can be distinctly conscious of hot, salty tang of Nature’s current. To treat her as God, or as Everything, is to lose the whole pith and pleasure of her. Come out, look back, and then you will see…this astonishing cataract bears, babies and bananas: this immoderate deluge of atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, canaries, fleas, gases, tornadoes and toads. How could you ever have thought that it was merely a stage-set for the moral drama of men and women? She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her. If we are immortal, and if she is doomed (as the scientists tells us) to run down and die, we shall miss this half-shy and half-flamboyant creates, this ogress, this hoyden, this incorrigible fairy, this dumb witch. (However, mother Nature does not die out as long as the plant still exists. She produces polar opposites and extremes and usually, one extreme wins out, either hot or cold, dark or light.) The theologians tell us that she, like ourselves, is to be redeemed. The “vanity” to which she was subjected was her disease, not her essence. She will be cured, but cured in character: no tamed (Heaven forbid) nor sterilized. We shall still be able to recognise our old enemy, friend, playfellow and foster-mother, so perfected as to be not less, but more, herself. And that will be a merry meeting. When the Earth is left to is natural fertility and covered with immense forests that were never mutilated by the axe, it offers storehouses and shelters at every step to animals of every species. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
Humans, dispersed among animals, observe and imitate their industry, and thereby raise themselves to the level of animal instinct, with the advantage that, whereas each species has only its own instincts, humans, who may perhaps have none that belongs o them, appropriates all of them to oneself, feeds oneself equally well on most of the various foods which the other animals divine among themselves, and consequently finds one’s sustenance more easily than any of the rest can. Accustomed from childhood to inclement weather and the rigours of the seasons, acclimated to fatigue, and forced, naked and without arms, to defend their lives and their prey against other ferocious beasts, or to escape them by taking flight, humans develop a robust and nearly unalterable temperament. Children enter the World with the excellent constitution of their parents and strengthen it with the same exercises that produced it, thus acquiring all the vigour that the human race is capable of having. Nature treats them precisely the way the law of Sparta treated the children of its citizens: it renders strong and robust those who are well constituted and makes all the rest perish, thereby differing from our present-day societies, where the state, by making children burdensome to their parents, kills them indiscriminately before their birth. Since the savage human’s body is the only instrument one knows, one employs it for a variety of purposes that, for lack of practice, our are incapable of serving. #RandolphHarri 7 of 22
And our industry deprives us of the force and agility that necessity obliges one to acquire. If one had had an axe, would one’s wrists break such strong branches? If one had had a sling, would one throw a stone with so much force? If one had had a ladder, would one climb a tree so nimbly? If one had had a horse, would one run so fast? Give a civilized man time to gather all his machines around him, and undoubtedly one will easily overcome a savage man. However, if you want to see an even more unequal fight, pit them against each other naked or disarmed, and you will soon realize the advantage of constantly having all of one’s forces at one’s disposal, of always being ready for any event, and of always carrying one’ entire self, as it were, with one. Dr. Hobbes maintains that humans are naturally intrepid and seeks only to attack and to fight. On the other hand, an illustrious philosopher thinks, and Cumberland and Pufendorf also affirm, that nothing is as timid as humans in the state of nature, and that one is always trembling and ready to take flight at the slightest sound one hears or at the slightest movement one perceives. That may be the case with regard to objects with which one is not acquainted. And I do not doubt that one is frightened by all the new sights that present themselves to one every time one can neither discern the physical good and evil one may expect from them nor compare one’s forces with the dangers one must one: rare circumstances in the state of nature, where everything takes place in such a uniform manner where the face of the Earth is not subject to those sudden and continual changes caused by the passions and inconstancy of peoples living together. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
However, since savage humans live dispersed among the animals and, finding oneself early on in a position to measure oneself against them, one soon makes the comparison; and, aware that one surpasses them in skillfulness more than they surpass one in strength, one learns not to fear them anymore. Pit a bear or a wolf against a savage who is robust, agile, and courageous, as they all are, armed with stones and a hefty cudgel, and you will see that the danger will be at least equal on both sides, and that after several such experiences, ferocious beasts, which do not like to attack one another, will be quite reluctant to attack a human, having found one to be as ferocious as themselves. With regard to animals that actually have more strength than humans have skillfulness, one is in the same position as other weaker species, which nevertheless subsist. Humans have the advantage that, since they are no less adept than they at running and at finding almost certain refuge in trees, one always has the alternative of accepting leaving the encounter and the choice of taking flight or entering into combat. Moreover, it appears that no animal naturally attacks humans, except in the case of self-defense or extreme hunger, or shows evidence of those violent antipathies towards one that seem to indicate that one species is destined by nature to serve as food for another. [No doubt these are the reasons why some marginalized groups and savages bother themselves so little about the ferocious beast they may encounter in the woods. In this respect, the Caribs of Venezuela, among others, live in the most profound security and without the slightest inconvenience. Although they are practically naked, says Francisco Coreal, they boldly expose themselves in the forest, armed only with bow and arrow, but no one has ever heard of one of them being devoured by animals.] #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
All human groups, from primitive times to today, depend on face-to-face, person-to-person communication. However, systems were needed for sending messages across time and space as well. The ancient Persians are said to have set up towers or “call-posts,” placing humans with shrill loud voices atop them to relay messages by shouting from one tower to the next. The Romans operated an extensive messenger service called the cursus publicus. Between 1305 and the early 1800’s, the House of Taxis ran a form of pony express service all over Europe. By 1628 it employed twenty thousand humans. Its couriers, clad in blue and silver uniforms, crisscrossed the continent carrying messages between princes and generals, merchants and money lenders. During First Wave civilization all these channels were reserved for the rich and powerful only. Ordinary people had no access to them. Attempts to send letter by other means were looked upon with suspicion or forbidden by the authorities. In short, while face-to-face information exchange was open to all, the newer systems used for carrying information beyond the confines of a family or a village were essentially closed and used for purposes of social or political control They were, in effect, weapon of the elite. The Second Wave, as it moved across country after country, smashed this communications monopoly. This occurred not because the rich and powerful grew suddenly altruistic but because Second Wave technology and factory mass production required “mass-ive” movements of information that the old channels simply could no longer handle. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
The information needed for economic production in primitive and First Wave societies is comparatively simple and usually available from someone near at hand. It is mostly oral or gestural in form. Second Wave economies, by contrast, required the tight coordination of work done at many locations. Not only raw materials but great amounts of information had to be produced and carefully distributed. For this reason, as the Second Wave gained momentum every country raced to build a postal service. The post office was an invention quite as imaginative and socially useful as the cotton gin or the spinning jenny and, to an extent once forgotten, but becoming more popular in modern times as people question the security and privacy of electronic messages, look to be more humane and send handwritten notes, and also are doing more commerce online and like to have packages delivered by the post office so they can access locked buildings and communities. The American orator Edward Everett declared: “I am compelled to regard the Post-office, next to Christianity, as the right arm of our modern civilization.” For the post office provided the first wide open channel for industrial-era communications. By 1837 the British Post Office was carrying not merely messages for an elite but some 88 million pieces of mail a year—an avalanche of communications by the standards of the day. By 1960, at about the time the industrial era peaked and the Third Wave began its surge, that number had already climbed to 10 billion. That same year the U.S. Post Office was distributing 355 pieces of domestic mail for every man, woman, and child in the nation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
The surge in postal messages that accompanied the industrial revolution merely hints, however, at the real volume of information that began to flow in the wake of the Second Wave. An even greater number of messages poured through what might be called “micro postal systems” within large organizations. Memos are letters that never reach the public communications channels. In 1955, as the Second Wave crested in the United States of America, the Hoover Commission peeked inside the files of three major corporations. It discovered, respectively, thirty-four thousand, fifty-six thousand, and sixty-four thousand documents and memos on file for each employee on the payroll! Nor could the mushrooming informational needs of industrial societies be met in writing alone. Thus the telephone and telegraph were invented in the nineteenth century to carry their share of the ever-swelling communications load. By 1960 Americans were placing some 256 million phone calls per day—over 93 billion a year—and even the most advanced telephone system and networks in the World were often overloaded. All these were essentially systems for delivering message from one sender to one receiver at a time. However, a society developing mass production and mass consumption needed ways to send mass messages, too—communications from one sender to many receivers simultaneously. If need be, unlike the preindustrial employer, who could personally visit each of one’s handful of employees in their own homes, the industrial employer could not communicate with his thousands of workers on a one-by-one basis. Still less could the mass merchandiser or distributor communicate with one’s customer one by one. Second Wave society needed—and not surprisingly invented—powerful means for ending the same message to many people at once, cost effectively, rapidly, and reliably. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Postal services could carry the same message to millions—but not instantly. Yet in the year 2020, the United States Post Office had an annual operating revenue of $73.1 billion, 495,941 career employees, and mail volume of 129.2. In addition, with cyber security concerns and President Trump being banned from social media, this reminds people of the freedom the post office and telephone still provide as a means communicate with the country. Although the post office cannot deliver messages instantly at this time, telephones have the ability carry massages in an instant—but not always legally to millions of people simultaneously. This gap came to be filled by the mass media. Today, of course, the mass circulation newspaper and magazine are so standard a part of daily life in every one of the industrial nations that they are taken for granted. Yet the rise of these publications on a national level reflected the convergent development of many new industrial technologies and social forms. Thus, they were made possible by the coming together of trains to transport the publications throughout a [European-size] country in a single day; rotary presses capable of turning out dozens of millions of copies in several hours; a network of telegraphs and telephones…above all a public taught to read by compulsory education, and industries needing to mass distribute their products. In the mass media, from newspaper and radio to movies and television, we find once again an embodiment of the basic principle of the factory. All of them stamp identical messages into millions of brains, just as the factory stamps out identical products for use in millions of homes. Standardized, mass-manufactured “fact,” counterparts of standardized, mass-manufactured products, flow from a few concentrated image-factories out to millions of consumers. Without this vast, powerful system for channeling information, industrial civilization could not have taken form or functioned reliably. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Thus there sprang up in all industrial societies, capitalist and socialist alike, an elaborate info-sphere—communication channels through which individual and mass messages could be distributed as efficiently as goods or raw materials. This info-spere intertwined with and serviced the techo-sphere and the socio-sphere, helping to integrate economic production with private behaviour. Each of these spheres performed a key function in the larger system, and could not have existed without the others. The techno-sphere produced and allocated wealth; the socio-sphere, with its thousands of interrelated organizations, allocated role to individuals in the system. And the info-sphere allocated the information necessary to make the entire system work. Together they formed the basic architecture of society. We see here in outline, therefore, the common structures of all Second Wave nations—regardless of their cultural or climatic difference, regardless of their ethnic and religious heritage, regardless of whether they call themselves capitalist or communist. These parallel structures, as basic in Russia and Hungary as in Germany, France, or Canada, set the limits within which political, social, and cultural differences were expressed. They emerged everywhere only after bitter political, cultural, and economic battle between those who attempted to preserve the older First Wave structure and those who recognized that only a new civilization could solve the painful problems of the old. The Second Wave brought with it a fantastic extension of human hope. For the first time men and women dared to believe that poverty, hunger, disease, and tyranny might be overthrown. Utopian writers and philosophers, from Abbe Morelly and Robert Owen to Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Edward Bellamy, and scores of others, saw in the emerging industrial civilization the potential for introducing peace, harmony, employment for all, equality of wealth or of opportunity, the end of privilege based on birth, the end of all those conditions that seemed immutable or eternal during the hundreds of thousands of years of primitive existence and the thousands of year of agricultural civilization. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
If today industrial civilization seems to us something less than utopian—if it appears, in fact, to be oppressive, dreary, ecologically precarious, war-prone, and psychologically repressive—we need to understand why. We will be able to answer this question only if we look at the gigantic wedge that split the Second Wave psyche into two warring parts. Cities of the pre-Civil War era were compact walking cities. The radius of even the largest cities did not extend over three miles. Even in New York a walk of an hour would bring the stroller from the central city to open countryside. If one were adventurous and could afford it, a three-quarters-of-an-hour ride from Wall Street on the new horse-drawn streetcars would bring one to the norther boundary of the city, where a swampy area of suburban shacks was being transformed into what would become Central Park. Not that many people rode in private or even public transportation. While the streets evidenced many carriages, owning such was a privilege restricted to the upper and some of the upper middle classes. Maintaining a horse and carriage in the city—with keeping the coachman and stable hands that were part of such ownership—was an expense beyond the means of ordinary citizens. Most cities, by the 1850s, had public omnibuses for middle-class usage. Omnibuses were essentially overcrowded urban stagecoaches. The poor qualities of urban streets, however, made the omnibuses uncomfortable as well as crowded, slow, and expensive. Thus, before the advent of horse-pulled streetcars in the 1850s, most middle-class urban dwellers got where they were going by walking. In good weather it was both faster and more comfortable than riding the omnibuses. The poor, regardless of weather or distance, always walked. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
The decades prior to the Civil War (1861-1865) saw the rapid expansion of existing cities and the founding of many new ones. All were densely packed walking cities. In the two score of years prior to 1860, cities grew at a pace faster than they grew before or ever since. Of the fifty largest cities today, only seven were incorporated before 1816; thirty-nine were incorporated between 1816 and 1876; and only four have been incorporated since 1876. The effect of environmental factors on the growth of pre-Civil War cities is evident from the fact that of the nine cities that had surpassed a population of 100,000 by 1860, eight were major ports. The one exception really was not ana exception. It was Brooklyn, which was an independent city until 1898, when it was incorporated into New York. Brooklyn, of course, shared the best natural harbour on the east coast with New York. New York was by far the most important American city of the eve of the Civil War. It had a population of over 1 million in 1860 (only London and Paris were larger); it was the financial center of the nation; and its docks handled a third of the country’s exports and a full two-thirds of its imports. However, in spite of its tremendous growth, even New York retained many preindustrial-city characteristics. The urban economy was still in a commercial rather than industrial stage. Business people were primarily merchants, although they intermittently took on subsidiary functions such as manufacturing, speculating, and banking. In spite of the ready availability of land, the eighteenth—and nineteenth-century American city was remarkably densely packed. An examination today of the old central area of cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, or Charleston reveals block after block of tightly packed town houses. Lots were commonly only twenty feet wide and occasionally even narrower, with houses built right on the lot line. Front yards were nonexistent, with houses even of the wealthy fronting on the sidewalk, which in turn was immediately adjacent to the street. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
This tight housing pattern was in part a carryover of the European pattern. European cities were tightly packed in part because of the existence of city walls. Cities in North America were not constrained by external ramparts as were the cities in Europe. Where longwall fortifications had once existed, such as Wall Street in New York or Fort Dearborn in Chicago, they were rapidly dismantled once the surrounding Indian populations had been extinguished and the threat of Indian attack eliminate. The Canadian exceptions of the stone-walled cities of Montreal and Quebec reflected a French rather than English tradition. They were exceptions that proved the rule. A hundred and fifty years ago affluent town houses abutting Fifth Avenue in New York City represented the ideal of urban life. In upper-class neighbourhoods, there was minimal traffic, but a lot of congestion in the central business district. The high density did not occur in United States of America cities as a result of crowding within the walls for defense purposes. Far more important was the maintenance of high-density neighbourhoods because of custom and fashion. The new homes of the wealthy in Georgian London were built cheek to jowl, and the eastern seaboard cities of the United State of America followed the London fashion. The existence of nearby open land did not, at first, sway American cities from following the European pattern. Even small towns built housing side by ide while surrounded by mile upon mile of vacant land. Overall, the American city mixed commercial, residential, and even manufacturing activities, but each large city had a few blocks of home of wealthy residents crowded near the center of the city. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Often these elite homes were only a block or two from far more humble housing. Traces of this preindustrial walking city pattern of centrally located elite areas can still be seen in Beacon Hill in Boston, Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, and Washington Square in New York. Having a central location was a sign of social and economic achievement. It was fashionable to have a central core address. Thus small central-city lots were extremely valuable, while within walking distance there was unbuilt-upon open land. Cities were also densely packed as a matter of practicality. Before the era of rapid and inexpensive mass transit, it was a major inconvenience to be outside of the central area. Thus, peripheral areas were given over largely to the less affluent and those on the fringes of society. In an era of slow, uncomfortable, and expensive transportation, the families of means took the center, and the poor were more likely to be relegated to the periphery. Within the city one walked to work in the morning, walked home for lunch, walked back to work, and then walked home again in the evening. This was not a major chore, since home and business were never far removed. They might, in fact, be in the same building: The first floor was given over to commerce, the second and third reserved for family and clerks, and the fourth perhaps for storage. People lived and worked in the same house or at last in the same neighbourhood. The separation of workplace and residence that was to become a hallmark of the industrial city was limited in the preindustrial American city. Virtually everyone lived in less than a mile from their place of work. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The result of all of the above was that the walking city had little spatial separation of economic activities and residential areas. Nor was there the sharp division and spatial separation of socioeconomic status that we associate with contemporary urban areas. The wealthy clearly lived far more comfortable lives and on better blocks than the urban poor, but they did not live in neigbourhoods that were physically far removed from the poor. Spacial and social separation of socioeconomic classes would be a product of the technologies of the post-Civil War industrial era. O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain; for purple mountains’ majesty, above the fruited plain. America, America, God shed His grace on thee, and crown Thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea. Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom during the days of out life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen. May His great name be blessed for ever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, bleed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessing that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. The light streaming from a table lamp proves the existence of electricity. The light streaming into the mind in these exalted moments proves the existence of the Soul. Whoever approaches the Divine Source of all things comes into the aura of its Power and the perception of its Light. This is not ordinary light: it is holy, transcendental, and awe-inspiring. #RandolphHaris 19 of 22
The experience of divine Light is no hallucination but an actuality, an entirely real one, even a thrilling one. If the Light is not resisted, by timidity, ignorance, or egoism, it will work upon the entire human being, radically transforming one’s outlook, life, and consciousness. In its Light human beings to see what one has not seen with the body’s eyes, the intellect’s understanding. If one can hold oneself in the Light steadily and unfalteringly, one’s consciousness will be raised to a higher plane. The inner light will give one a glimpse of an ennobled and purified life and inspire one with the urge to realize it. Generally the seeing of light during prayer is a favourable sign of present experience or good omen of future experience. It indicates that prayer in depth is being attained or will be later. The light may seem spread out in space or as a thin ray alone. It may appear as a tiny black-centered sun or as a large round ball. There are still other forms—such as lightning and stars. Generally, too, there will be a living dynamic quality in it, a movement, a winking, and a fiery flickering. Light manifestations: (a) throbbing with Energy, (b), as Overself, (c) thought-free Peace or Joy. Without a prayer is anyone who put one’s hope in anthropoids and hominoids, said Jeremiah (17.5). One should put it in Jesus Chris, for the love of whom one should serve the poor and even be mistaken for the poor. What shame can there be in that? asked Saint Paul in his Second Letter to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 4.5). #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Do not rise above your station. Just place your hope in God who is above all stations. Do what you think you should do, and God will be the witness of your goodwill. Do not rely on your own counsel or seek the counsel of another. Rely instead on the grace of God, who helps the humble and humbles those who think they have no need of help. That is the encouragement of the Letter of James (4.6). Do not glory in wealth, said the pauperous Jeremiah (9.23), especially if you have a stash. Do not brag about your friends, especially if they have positions of importance. If you have to glory at all, then take great pride in God, who surpasses all created things and desires above all else to give Himself as a gift. That is what Saint Paul urged the First Corinthians to do (1.31). Do not boast about your magnitude or your pulchritude! It takes only a sniffle to snuff your life out, corrupt your corpse, bury your bones. Do not whistle at the snappiness of your talent or the snazziness of your attire. God will not like that, and He is the whole of whim you are only a part. Do not think better of yourself than others. Why? Because at that very moment God might just think you worse than others. He, if anybody, should know what stuffings are found in Humankind, as the Gospel of John has hinted (2.15). Do not be proud of your good works. Why? Because your judgments are not necessarily God’s. What tickles your fancy might make God sneeze, and then who would say Gesundheit? #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
If you do something god, believe better in others; that they will keep your humility fresh. Prefer others to yourself to another, and there is no telling which of your legs God will break first. The humble soul’s vista is shimmering with peace. The heart of the proud soul, however, is frequently clouded with jealousy or rage. The piers are pummeled by the waves; in a lonely field the rain lashes an abandoned train; outlaws fill the mountain caves. Fantastic grow the evening gowns; agents of the Fisc purse absconding tax-defaulters through the sewers of provincial towns. Caesar’s double-bed is warm as an unimportant clerk writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK on a pink official form. Unendowed with wealth or pity, little bird with scarlet legs, sitting on their speckled eggs, eye each flu-infected city Altogether elsewhere, vast herds of reindeer move across miles and miles of golden moss, silently and very fast. The clouds of adverse fortune and ill health pass and change over the Earth of human’s body. In that body there is ultimately reflected one’s own mental and emotional reactions to them. The human being is whole, but has different aspects. What manifests itself as an emotional disturbance in one aspect may also manifest itself later as a bodily sickness. The body’s health and the ego’s fortune eventually match the good or ill shape of the ego’s thought. To overlook the psychological factor in the cause of sickness and to concentrate solely on the physical factor is much too narrow-mined and not truly scientific. At the present stage of human knowledge, it is too simple and naïve an attitude to cover all cases. Mental causes cannot be put in a test tube and examined; this is one reason why they have been overlooked. If you prejudge everyone, you will end up losing yourself and becoming one of “them,” but still be rational and use great discernment. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together! https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/
What Kind of Soul is it that Can Eat, Drink, and be Marry?
Sometimes it is necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly. In all Second Wave societies a third institution arose that extended the control of the first two. This was the invention known as the corporation. Until then, the typical business enterprise had been owned by an individual, a family, or a partnership. Corporations existed, but were extremely rare. Even as late as the American Revolution, according to business historian Arthur Dewing, “no one could have concluded” that the corporation—rather the partnership or individual proprietorship—would become the main organizational form. As recently as 1800s there were only 335 corporations in the United States of America, most of them devoted to such quasi-public activities as building canals or running turnpikes. The rise of mass production changed all this. Second Wave technologies required giant pools of capital—more than a single individual or even a small group could provide. So long as proprietors or partners risked their entire personal fortunes with every investment, they were reluctant o sink their money in vast or risky ventures. To encourage them, the concept of limited liability was introduced. If a corporation collapsed, the investor stood to lose only the sum invested and no more. This innovation opened the investment floodgates. Moreover, the corporation was treated by the courts as an “immortal being”—meaning it could outlive its original investors. This meant, in turn, that it could make very long-range plans and undertake far bigger projects then ever before. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
By 1901 the World’s first billion-dollar corporation—United States Steel—appeared on the scene, a concentration of assets unimaginable in any earlier period. By 1919 there were half a dozen such behemoths. Indeed, large corporations became an in-built feature of economic life in all the industrial nations, including socialist and communist societies, where the form varied but the substance (in terms of organizations) remained very much the same. Together these three—the nuclear family, the factory-style school, and the gain corporation—became the defining social institutions of all Second Wave societies. And, throughout the Second Wave World—in Japan as well as in Switzerland, Britain, Poland, the United States of America, Russian—most people followed a standard life trajectory: reared in a nuclear family, they moved en masse through factorylike schools, then entered the service of a large corporation, private or public. A key Second Wave institution dominated each phase of the lifestyle. Around these three core institutions a host of other organizations sprang up. Government ministries, sports clubs, churches, chambers of commerce, trade unions, professional organizations, political parties, libraries, ethnic associations, recreational groups, and thousands of others bobbed up in the wake of the Second Wave, creating a complicated organizational ecology with each group servicing, coordinating, or counterbalancing another. At first glance, the variety of these groups suggests randomness or chaos. However, a closer look reveals a hidden pattern. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
In one Second Wave country after another, social inventors, believing the factory to be the most advanced and efficient agency for production, tried to embody its principles in other organizations as well. Schools, hospitals, prisons, government bureaucracies, and other organizations thus took on many of the characteristics of the factory—its division of labour, its hierarchical structure and is metallic impersonality. Even in the arts we find some of the principles of the factory. Instead of working for a patron, as was customary during the long reign of agricultural civilization, musicians, artist, composers, and writers were increasingly thrown on the mercies of the marketplace. More and more they turned out “products” for anonymous consumers. And as this shift occurred in every Second Wave country, the very structure of artistic production changes. Music provides a striking example. As the Second Wave arrived, concert halls began to crop up in London, Vienna, Paris, and elsewhere. With them came the box office and the impresario—the businessman who financed the production and then sold tickets to culture consumers. The more tickets he could sell, naturally, the more money he could make. Hence more and more seats were added. In turn, however, larger concert halls required louder sounds—music that could be clearly heard in the very last tier. The result was a shift from chamber music to symphonic forms. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Says Curt Sachs in his authoritative History of Musical Instruments, “The passage from an aristocratic to a democratic culture, in the eighteenth century, replaced the small salon by the more and more gigantic concert halls, which demanded greater volume.” Since to technology existed yet to make this possible, more and more instruments and players were added to produce the necessary volume. The result was the modern symphony orchestra, and it was for this industrial institution that Beethoven, Mendelson, Schubert, and Brahms wrote their magnificent symphonies. The orchestra even mirrored certain features of the factory in its internal structure. At first the symphony orchestra was leaderless, or the leadership was casually passed around among players. Later the players, exactly like workers in a factory or bureaucratic office, were divided into departments (instrumental sections), each coordinated from above by a manager (the conductor) or even, eventually, a straw boss farther down the management hierarchy (the first violinist or the section head). The institution sold its product to a mass market—eventually adding phonograph records to its output. The music factory had been born. The history of the orchestra offers only one illustration of the way the Second Wave socio-sphere arose, with its three core institutions and thousands of varied organizations, all adapted to the needs and style of the industrial techno-sphere. However, a civilization is more than simply a techno-sphere and a matching socio-sphere. All civilizations also require an “info-sphere” for producing and distributing information, and here, too, the changes brought by the Second Wave were remarkable. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the advantages of the city and the difficulties of commutation insured that commuters were not a significant proportion of the populations of most cities. The historian Henry Binford argues that early suburbs, rather then being appendages or outgrowths from the city, were freestanding, thinly settled, semirural communities. Such communities included manufacturing and commercial activity related to the city, but the limited mobility of persons and goods meant that contact with the city was sporadic rather than daily. Going into the city just took too much effort. Before the late 1840s travel required considerable energy, time, and expense. In their social life and political organization, early suburbs were more villages than smaller clones of the central city. Only when transportation improved, would fringe areas be transformed into commuter suburbs. In the meantime, fringe locations would be hybrid communities. Even before the era of mass transportation and the period when the suburbs would have regular contact with the city, the suburban fringe had already begun to change in significant ways. First, the suburbs had become more diverse villages, with a mixture of newcomers, some of whom had links to the central city and some of whom had economic and other links to the country. Secondly, partially as a consequence of the increased population diversity, there was increased social complexity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
As the populations of the suburban villages became more diverse, their social organizations became more complex, with overlapping circles of interests and involvement. Boundaries became more varied and flexible. People’s social, religious, business, and political networks were increasingly likely to vary from individual to individual. Finally, the villages were changing politically. Newer and younger men had a wider range of interests, and they were more open to the growth of local government and its evolution from village to suburban forms. However, not all American suburban areas of a century and a half ago were impoverished, housing only the poor and outcast. Outer areas had open land, and America’s Jeffersonian agrarian heritage contributed to an ideology that encouraged open space while viewing cities as source of discord and social evils. Since virtue (and affordably land) increased as one approached rural life, the goal of some urbanites was to be in the city, but just barely. Thus suburban development of Brooklyn as an independent suburban community, across the harbour from Manhattan, indicated how the dilemma of continuing urban business without abandoning the city could be resolved using the technology of the ferryboat. Living in Brooklyn, across the harbour from Manhattan, provided the prototype compromise. Brooklyn was the first commuter suburb. With its ferryboat connection to Manhattan, Brooklyn Heights had easy access to the city while at the same time retaining the suggestion of a bucolic community. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
By 1841 half of the householders who had bought land in Brooklyn Heights commuted to offices in Manhattan. By no stretch could these commuters be characterized as social outcasts or those on the margins of society. Hezekiah Beers Pierrepoint developed Brooklyn Heights as a community, noting “Gentlemen whose business or profession required daily attendance into the city cannot better, or with less expense, secure the health and comfort of their families.” Here in his comments were the themes that would be used to promote and advertise suburban living for the next century and a half. Suburbia claimed to offer a superior lifestyle, was a more healthful place to live, and was less expensive in the bargain. There are two kinds of inequality in the human species: one which I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature and consists in the difference of age, health, bodily strength, and qualities of mind or soul. The other may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention and is established, or at least authorized, by the consent of humans. This latter type of inequality consists in the different privileges enjoyed by some at the expense of other, such as being richer, more honoured, more powerful than they, or even causing themselves to be obeyed by them. There is no point in asking what the source of natural inequality is, because the answer would be found enunciated in the simple definition of the word. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
There is still less of a point in asking whether there would not be some essential connection between the two inequalities, for that would amount to asking whether those who command are necessarily better than those who obey, and whether strength of body or mind, wisdom or virtue are always found in the same individuals in proportion to power or wealth. Perhaps this is a good question for slabs to discuss within earshot of their masters, but it is not suitable for reasonable and free people who seek the truth. Precisely what, then, is the subject of this discourse? To mark, in the progress of things, the moment when, right taking the place of violence, nature was subjected to the law. To explain the sequence of wonders by which the strong could resolve to serve the weak, and the people to buy imaginary repose at the prince of real felicity. The philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt the necessity of returning to the state of nature, but none of them has reached it. Some have not hesitated to ascribe to human in that state the notion of just and unjust, without bothering to show that one had to have that notion, or even that it was useful to one. Others have spoken of the natural right that everyone has to preserve what belongs to one, without explaining what they mean by “belonging.” Others started out by giving authority to the stronger over the weaker, and immediately brought about government, without giving any thought to the time that had to pass before the meaning of the words “authority” and “government” could exist among humans. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Finally, all of them, speaking continually of need, avarice, oppression, desire, and pride, have transferred to the state of nature the ideas they acquired in society. They spoke about savage humans, and it was civil humans they depicted. It did not even occur to most of our philosophers to doubt that the state of nature had existed, even though it is evident from reading the Holy Scriptures that the first man, having received enlightenment and precepts immediately from God, was not himself in that state; and if we give the writings of Moses the credence that every Christian owes them, we must deny that, even before the flood, men were every in the pure state of nature, unless they had fallen back into it because of some extraordinary event: a paradox that is quite awkward to defend and utterly impossible to prove. Let us therefore begin by putting aside all the facts, for they have no bearing on the question. The investigations that may be undertaken concerning this subject should not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better suited to shedding light on the nature of things than on pointing out their true origin, like those our physicists make everyday with regard to the formation of the World. Religion commands us to believe that since God Himself drew humans out of the state of nature, they are unequal because He wanted them to be so; but it does not forbid us to form conjectures, drawn solely from the nature of humans and the beings that surround them, concerning what the human race could have become, if it had been left to itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Humans, whatever country you may be from, whatever your opinions may be, listen: here is your history, as I have thought to read it, not in the books of your fellowmen, who are liars, but in nature, who never lies. Everything that comes from nature will be true; there will be nothing false except what I have unintentionally added. The times about which I am going to speak are quite remote: how much you have changed from what you were! It is, as it were, the life of your species that I am about to describe to you according to the qualities you have received, which your education and your habits have been able to corrupt but have been unable to destroy. There is, I feel, an age at which an individual human would want to stop. You will seek the age at which you would want your species to have stopped. Dissatisfied with your present state for reasons that protend even greater grounds for dissatisfaction for your unhappy posterity, perhaps you would like to be able to go backwards in time. This feeling should be a hymn in praise of your first ancestors, the criticism of your contemporaries, and the dread of those who have the unhappiness of living after you. Without having recourse to the supernatural knowledge we have on this point, and without taking note of changes that must have occurred in the internal as well as the external conformation of humans, as they applied their limbs to new purposes and nourished themselves on new foods, I will suppose one to have been formed from all time as I see them today: walking on two feet, using their hands as we use ours, directing their gaze over all of nature, and measuring with their eyes the vast expanse of the Heavens. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Like the Old Testament, the New Testament sees human nature as a psychophysical unity. Although Jesus Christ and the apostles spoke Aramaic, their words have been handed down to us in New Testament Greek, which, depending on its frames of reference, uses any of several interchangeable terms for referring to persons. Whether we are admonished to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind or to present our bodies “as living sacrifice,” the meaning is the same: commit your whole person to God. The Greek word psyche parallels the Hebrew nephesh and is frequently translated as “soul.” In many cases its meaning is clearly not that of an immaterial soul. When Joseph brought his father, Jacob, and seventy-five “souls” into Egypt (as narrated in Acts 7.14), he did not leave their bodies behind in Canaan. The rich farmer dreams of harvests so great that one can say to one’s psyche, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” The biblical scholar Frank Stagg wonders aloud, “What kind of soul is it that can eat, drink, and be merry? A soul is a self, a person. In Romans 2.9, every “human being” who does evil and suffers for it is a psyche and in Romans 13.1 every “person” to be subjected to persons who govern is likewise a psyche. The whole [person] sins and the whole [person] is called to responsible citizenship. Saint Paul, true to his Hebrew heritage, here thins of man as a unity. The Biblical teaching is not that one has a soul but that one is a soul.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
That is exactly it. You do not have a soul, you are a soul. A soul comes from God. Nothing created can exist without a soul. God is omnipresent, we are emanations of God. He is our soul. Spirituality, as reflected in the Greek words translated as “spirit” and “flesh,” similarly has not to do with the whole person in relationship with God and other persons. The theologian Bruce Reichenbach suggests that to recapture this sense of spirituality we ought to drop the term soul from our religious vocabulary: “Such an approach, far from destroying faith in the spiritual aspect of humans, will assist in clarifying precisely wherein the spiritual lies, that is, that it lies not in the possession of an entity, but in the style of life one leads insofar as it manifests a relation to God and to one’s fellow human.” We also see the Hebrew-Christian understanding of psychophysical unity in the New Testament teaching concerning life after death. Oscar Cullmann beings his classic book, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? by observing that if we were to ask ordinary Christians what they conceive to be the New Testament teaching concerning our fate after death, “with few exceptions we should get the answers: The immortality of the soul. Yet this widely accepted idea is one of the greatest misunderstandings of Christianity.” Scripture promises us not immortality of the soul, but resurrection to eternal life as an “embodied spirit”—a very different proposition. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
For Jesus, unlike Socrates, death was no friend. At the grace of his friend Lazarus, Jesus wept. Death mattered. It was, in the apostle Paul’s words, “the great enemy.” Death is real, and I is an enemy precisely because we do not have within our own natures a guaranteed immortality. At the end of our lives we do not, as Socrates assumed, “pass away”; rather, we die. However, there is hope, a hope rooted not in our nature but in God’s love and faithfulness. Christians believe that God created and values human lives and that God will re-create them after death, giving us, on that “great gettin’-up morning,” what, apart from divine love, we do not have—eternal life. The hope that Christians proclaim in the Apostle’s Creed—“I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”—is a hope grounded in God’s initiative, not in our nature. To use a crude but modern analogy, after the plug is puled on our computing machinery, the divine programmer promises to re-create our software on a new, error-free, piece of hardware. (Contrast this view with the pre-Christian idea of Seneca, who viewed himself as a “mixture of body and soul, of divine and human; my body I will leave where I found it, my soul I will restore to Heaven.”) If we have immortal souls, it must not have been the case the Christ was the first to defeat death nor did he need to force open a door that until then had been locked. However, Christians believe that it was and He did. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
However, if the Psychical Researchers succeeded in proving “survival” and showed that the Resurrection was an instance of it, they would not be supporting the Christian faith but refuting it. (In fact, the founders or parapsychology were mostly people who had lost their faith in God and were searching for another basis for believing in the meaning of life and the possibility of life after death.) This claim embodies the Christian concept of resurrection containing the belief that our lives will be followed not by eternal extinction but by a renewal of life, with our individual identities intact, perhaps rather as a beautiful flower preserves the identity of the human seed that precedes it. (From this, all Christians, whether they hold to an immortal soul or not, derive equal comfort when confronting death.) Second, the New Testament image of a restored and perfected mind-body unit reinforces the other biblical images of human nature as a psychophysical unity. We must be wary of yoking biblical ideas to the details of any currently prevailing scientific theory. However, it is noteworthy that this unified image is consistent with the emerging scientific image of humans as a mind-body unity. Fundamentally, both views assume that without our bodies we are nobodies, and that we had best therefore be good to our bodies. Rather than despising the body as that which “fills us with passions, and desires, and fears, and all sorts of fancies, and foolishness,” as Socrates declare, Christians regard the body as “the temple of the Holy Spirit.” #RandolphHarrs 14 of 22
Indeed, we do not have bodies rather, we are bodies, bodies alive with minds. That being so, we should care about people’s whole selves—body and all. And that is indeed why people of faith have been on the forefront of efforts to take medicine to the developing World, to alleviate hunger, and to combat debilitating racism. The biblical accounts of human nature are, in a very profound sense, timeless. They made sense to our forebears long before science appeared, and they are relevant today. That should warn us against misconstruing them today by trying to impose on their vocabulary a precision, familiar to us today within science, that they were never intended to have. We discover that their main concern is with what God thinks about humans. The biblical account is a God-centered view and is pre-occupied with relationships—first and foremost the relationship of God to humanity, but also of person to person, and of humankind to the created order, of which it both a part and a steward. It provides advice and enduring truths on how to live our lives day by day. However, humankind today is not as God created it. An event described as the fall occurred, in which humankind’s obedience to God turned to disobedience. Seen in this way the fall is interpreted primarily as a break in the relationships of God, humans, and nature. The fall is often described as having “marred” or “obscured” God’s image, which can be restored in Christ. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
However, our physical existence has continued without interruption despite the fact that unredeemed humankind has been “dead in trespasses and sins” since then. Thus, while biological and spiritual life can be distinguished from each other, we must not overemphasize this possibility, since they are part of a whole. The rich fabric of the total picture given to us in Scripture brings to mind the similarly rich complexity of the total picture of human nature given to us through the scientific endeavour today. Both emphasize the complexity of human nature, the need to understand and study it from many diverse aspects or perspectives, and the need to recognize that human nature is a unity—a unity now in this present life and, by the grace of God, a unity in the life to some. The person who lusts for something breaks out into hives. The person who is proud produces pouches under one’s eyes. The person who is greedy develops hollows in one’s cheeks. The persons who has not died to oneself is easy game for the Enemy’s guile. Whoever finds oneself flooded with weakness and clinging to the flesh is mired in desire. One can still extract oneself from this sort of life, but only with the greatest difficulty. When a person like this holds oneself back, one grows sad. When someone else holds one back, one flies off into a rage. By way of contrast, the person who is poor and the one who is humble in spirit may seem to live a humdrum life; nonetheless they experience a measure of control and even a modicum of concord. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
You may go for the gusto, that is to say, aggressively pursue something you lust for; but when you grab it, it will grab you and twist you to the floor. By allowing a thousand rich such small passions to enslave you, you will never find True Peace of Heart. If you ever hope to escape, you must resist, fight back to fund what you are looking for. In the same way anyone who reveals and drivels one’ life away cannot find True Peace; only the fervent and spiritual know where to look for that. If one cares enough for the Quest and understand enough about the relation between it and diet, one will come sooner or later to choose one’s food with more resistance to habit. There is an opportunity to strengthen one’s will, overcome a bad habit and show one’s determination to quicken progress by dropping a negative practice of behaviour or action altogether from the first day. Do not sin against your health. Somethings humans partake in is poisonous physically and morally. Not all sickness and all disease are caused by wrong thinking in this present reincarnation but some of them are. How great or how small that part is depends entirely upon the individuals concerned. With some, it is a very high proportion, with others it is a small one. In the former case, therefore, we must look back to anterior lives for the wrong thought or wrong conduct which produced the sickness of the present physical body as bad karma. The practice of Christian Science is one part of the means to be applied in the hope of relieving the suffering and restoring normalcy to the physical, mental, and spiritual. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
We have inherited a body which, after ages of mistreatment, degradation, and wrong feeding, cannot quickly change itself and accept the new habits and the new feeding with its organs in their present condition. If the millions spent on research for cancer have so far failed, and if a simple change of faulty thought, belief, conduct, and goal cures it, the worth of this method is thereby demonstrated. Bodily healing is an occasional by-product of the healing of thought and feeling, or the re-education of moral character; it is not at all the invariable result of such processes. If wrong living breaks hygienic laws and provokes disease, wrong-doing also breaks Universal laws and provokes disease, as one form of retribution out of several possible forms. A hereditary affliction would obviously be of a universal origin. The individual mind and the cosmic mind are indissoluble connection, an out of their combined activity the human World-idea is produced. It would be correct to say that the redirection of thought and feeling would largely help to eliminate disease. As the race learns to substitute healing and caring thoughts for negative thoughts, aspiration for passion, and concentration for distraction, it will inevitably throw off many maladies that originate in wrong attitudes. Certain maladies in the physical being may quite easily be directly traced to evil impulses in the mental being. It is not only human’s diseases which are the consequence of their bad thinking, however, but also human’s misfortunes. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
If one is healthy in body one may be unhealthy in fortune. The Universal law of retribution expresses itself in a variety of ways. It is a mistake to narrow this linking of wrong thinking and ill feeling with the body’s sicknesses alone. They are to be linked with all forms of life experience. States of mind are directly or indirectly connected with states of health. A mind sinking under the heavy weight of responsibilities, or filled with the heavy stresses and pressures of business, or depressed by frustration, unhappiness or unrest, or shaken by the ending of a close relationship, may soon or late reflect itself in disease, sickness, psychosis, or neurosis. Wrong thinking expresses itself in the end in wrong functioning of some organ of the body. The nature of the thoughts and the nature of the malady correspond to each other. The individual who gives oneself up to negative destructive thoughts or feverish tempo of living for years and, later, find oneself sick or diseased, usually fails to think there is any mutual connection between the mental thoughts or unrelaxed way of life and the physical state. One does not even dream that one has been called to account. Quite clearly, it is as disorders of the various organs, as functional troubles, or as functional troubles, or as abnormal conditions in one or another part of the body that emotional, nervous, and mental disharmonies firs show themselves physically. Definitions: A sickness develops into an ailment, which if not cured becomes a disease. There is dissension between heart and head, between feeling and reasoning, and there is disease in the body itself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
There is an undesirable physical reaction for every undesirable emotional activity. Most people are careless about their mental habits because these seem of trivial importance by contrast with their physical habits. They do not know that sinning against the mind’s hygiene may manifest in the physical body itself. The body’s organs are affected by the mind’s states. Worry or fear or shock or excessive emotion may disturb, reduce, increase, or even paralyze their working for a time—in some cases for all time. Humans can cease to become human, and become God; but humans cannot be God and human at the same time. One can hold oneself in this egoless state for a brief while only. The ego soon raises up again and the glorious presence retires, for the two are incompatible. Such periods are short and uncommon but they lift us up and draw us in. Even if they are not immediate actualities, we feel then that there is peace and joy for us as ultimate possibilities. It is true that the felicity and freedom of such glimpses are too often too momentary. Yet immense forces lie hidden beneath their brief but intense existence. All glimpses are not of equal duration nor of equal degree. One or other or both may differ from person to person. These glimpses of Reality which wake us out of the World or illusion come to us only at intervals. We cannot hold them, but we can repeat them. The glimpse may past only an instant, or it may last a year. The glimpse lasts a moment, a minute, an hour, or a week—who can say, for it is a mysterious grace? However, in that while, the oscillation of human thoughts is stilled and time takes a rest. It cannot be shared with others—although they may notice or sense some of its fruits—and to that extent it is a private experience. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
It comes to us only in gleams whose disappointing brevity is balanced by their overwhelming beauty. Such moments rarely come to flower in the arid wildness of a human’s life today. There will even be rare and brief times when these serene glimpses will dissolve into wonderful ecstasies. The glimpses are usually quite short in duration, quite sudden in onset. The splendour of lightning, they disappear within the twinkling of an eye. Such experiences can be sustained only in small homeopathic doses. However, glimpses, as charming to the mind as scented blossoms to the nose, are fugitive. They cannot be kept. They are ephemeral. These glimpses are rarely sustained and should be accepted without surprise or disappointment for the short events they usually are. During the years when I investigated such matters—collecting data from several hundred cases, including my own experience, and combining it with the more authoritative teachings of highly attained and highly respected top-rank persons—I found that in large percentage of persons who feel too preoccupied with the work of starting to build a career, earn their livelihood, and build a family, the initial glimpse may have been the first and last for a long period of many years. However, in some cases they say in this period of disinterest because of disillusionments. The bliss of the glimpse must pass—and often quickly: its confirmation of unworldly values must diminish. One does not expect to feel often these great moments when one passes through an archway opening on the infinity and enjoys the Best. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
These glimpses are fitful and their content is fragmentary. It is true that the glimpse comes seldom to most people, but it is all the better remembered for that rarity. The fleeting beauty of these moments veils the harsh greyness of the long periods between them. These moments of spiritual nearness shine in one’s life, but the glorious feeling they induce does not stay. However, the glimpse comes to an end. The glorious new identity which one took on for a while will be shed. These glimpses are often unexpected, usually isolated, and only brief. A brief release from the burdens of living, peace-bestowing and mentally illumining, a healing suspense of all negative traits—but soon gone. These moments are rare and beautiful. They can never come too soon nor stay too long. The energy which appears to us as light is the basis of the Universe, the principle from which all things are made. The first aspect of God is Light; the first contact of human the Supreme Being is Light. If seen in vision, the pure and primal life-force appears as golden sunshine. You ask why I perch on a jade green mountain? I laugh but say nothing my heart free like a peach blossom in the flowing stream going by in the depths in another World not among humans. 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. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to grant our portion in your Kingdom and may the Temple be rebuilt in our day. There we will serve Thee with awe as in days of old. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Next to Life and Liberty, We Consider Education the Greatest Blessing!
We had a sense of importance that would have led us to risk our lives for our rhetoric. The precondition of any civilization, old or new, is energy. First Wave societies drew their energy from “living batteries”—human and animal muscle-power—or from sun, wind, and water Forests were cut for cooking and heating. Waterwheels, some of them using tidal power, turned milestones. Windmills creaked in the fields. Animals pulled the plow. As late as the French Revolution, it has been estimated, Europe drew energy from an estimated 14 million horses and 24 million oxen. All First Wave societies thus exploited energy sources that were renewable. Nature could eventually replenish the forests they cut, the wind that filled their sails, the rivers that turned their paddle wheels. Even animals and people were replaceable “energy slaves.” All Second Wave societies, by contrast, began to draw their energy from coal, gas, and oil—from irreplaceable fossil fuels. This revolutionary shift, coming after Newcomen invented a workable steam engine in 1712, meant that for the first time a civilization was eating into nature’s capital rather than merely living off the interest it provided. This dipping into the Earth’s energy reserves provided a hidden subsidy for industrial civilization, vastly accelerating its economic growth. And from that day to this, wherever the Second Wave passed, nations built towering technological and economic structures on the assumptions that cheap fossil fuels would be endlessly available. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
In capitalist and communist industrial societies alike, in East and West, this same shift has been apparent—from dispersed to concentrated energy, from renewable to non-renewable, from many different sources and fuels to a few. Fossil fuels formed the energy base of all Second Wave societies. The leap to a new energy system was paralleled by a gigantic advance in technology. First Wave societies had relied on what Vitruvius, two thousand years ago, called “necessary inventions.” However, these early winches and wedges, catapults, winepresses, levers, and hoists were chiefly used to amplify human or animal muscles. The Second Wave pushed technology to a totally new level. It spawned gigantic electromechnical machines, moving parts, belts, hoses, bearings, and bolts—all clattering and ratcheting along. And these new machines did more than augment raw muscle. Industrial civilization gave technology sensory organs, creating machines that could hear, see, and touch with greater accuracy and precision than human beings. It gave technology a womb, by inventing machines designed to give birth to new machines in infinite progression—id est, machine tools. More important, it brought machines together in interconnected systems under a single roof, to create the factory and ultimately the assembly line within the factory. On this technological base a host of industries sprang up to give Second Wave civilization its defining stamp. At first there were coal, textiles, and railroads, then steel, auto manufacture, aluminum, chemicals, and appliances. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Huge factory cities leaped into existence: Lille and Manchester for textiles, Detroit for automobiles, Essen and—later—Magnitogorsk for steel, and a hundred others as well. From these industrial centers poured million upon endless millions of identical products—shirts, shoes, automobiles, watches, toys, soap, shampoo, camera, machine guns, and electric motors. The new technology powered by the new energy system opened the door to mass production. Mass production, however, was meaningless without parallel changes in the distribution system. In First Wave societies, goods were normally made by handcraft methods. Products were created one at a time on a custom basis. The same was largely true of distribution. It is true that large, sophisticated trading companies had been built up by merchants in the widening crack of the old feudal order in the West. These companies opened trade routes around the World, organized convoys of ships, and camel caravans. They sold glass, paper, silk, nutmeg, tea, wine and wool, indigo and mace. Most of these products, however, reached consumers through tiny stores or on the backs of wagons of peddlers who fanned out into the countryside. Wretched communications and primitive transport drastically circumscribed the market. These small-scale shopkeepers and itinerant vendours could offer only the slenderest of inventories, and often they were out of this or that item for months, even years, at a time. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The Second Wave wrought changes in this creaking, overburdened distribution system that were as radical, in their ways, as the more publicized advances made in production. Railroads, highways, and canals opened up the hinterlands, and with industrialism came “palace of trade”—the first department stores. Complex networks of jobbers, wholesalers, commission agents, and manufacturers’ representatives sprang up, and in 1871 George Huntington Hartford, whose first store in New York was painted vermilion and had a cashier’s cage sharped like a Chinses pagoda, did for distribution what Henry Ford later did for the factory. He advanced it to an entirely new stage by creating the World’s first mammoth chain-store system—The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. Customer distribution gave way to the mass distribution and mass merchandising that became as familiar and central a component of all industrial societies as the machine itself. What we see, therefore, if we take these changes together, is a transformation of what might be called the “techno-sphere.” All societies—primitive, agricultural, or industrial—use energy; they make things; they distribute things. In all societies energy system, the production system, and the distribution system are interrelated parts of something larger. This larger system is the technosphere, and it has a characteristic form at each stage of social development. As the Second Wave swept across the planet, the agricultural techno-sphere was replaced by an industrial techno-sphere: non-renewable energies were directly plugged into mass production systems which, in turn, spewed goods into a highly developed mass distribution system. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
This Second Wave techno-sphere, however, needed an equally revolutionary “socio-sphere” to accommodate it. It needed radically new forms of social organization. Before the industrial revolution, for example, family forms varied from place to place. However, wherever agriculture held sway, people tended to live in large, multigenerational households, with uncles, aunts, in-laws, grandparents, or cousins all living under the same roof, all working together as an economic production unit—from the “joint family” in India to the “zadruga” in the Balkans and the “extended family” in Weser Europe. And the family was immobile—rooted to the soil. This is why the Victorian homes were so large, often three and four stories, with an average of 5,000 square feet, and several acres of land; so the families could live at home, have their own space without overcrowding the house, and farm to grow their food and meat. As we are now experiencing a global pandemic in 2021, houses are getting larger again, more people are living in multigenerational households, and even growing their own food. As the Second Wave began to move across First Wave societies, family felt the stress of change. Within each household the collision of wave fronts took the form of conflict, attacks on patriarchal authority, altered relationship between children and parents, new notions of propriety. As economic production shifted from the field to the factory, the family no longer worked together as a unit. To the free workers for factory labour, key functions of the family were parceled out to new, specialized institutions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Education of the child was turned over to schools. Care of the aged was turned over to poorhouses or old-age homes or nursing homes. Above all, the new society required mobility. It needed workers who would follow jobs from place to place. Burdened with elderly relatives, the sick, the disabled, and a large brood of children, the extended family was anything but mobile. Gradually and painfully, therefore, family structure began to change. Torn apart by the migration to the cities, battered by economic storms, families stripped themselves of unwanted relatives, grew smaller, more mobile, and more suited to the needs of the new techno-sphere. The so-called nuclear family-father, mother, and a few children, with no encumbering relatives—became the standard, socially approved, “modern” model in all industrial societies, whether capitalist or socialist. Even in Japan, where ancestor worship gave the elderly an exceptionally important role, the large, close-knit, multigenerational household began to break down as the Second Wave advanced. More and more nuclear unis appeared. In short, the nuclear family became an indentifable feature of all Second Wave societies, marking them off from First Wave societies just as surely as fossil fuels, steel mills, or chain stores. As work shifted out of the fields and the home, moreover, children had to be prepared for factory life. The early mine, mill, and factory owners of industrializing England discovered, as Andrew Ure wrote in 1835, that it was “nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, whether drawn from rural or from handicraft occupations, into useful factory hands.” #RandolpHarris 6 of 21
If young people could be prefitted to the industrial system, it would vastly ease the problems of industrial discipline later of on. The result was another central structure of all Second Wave societies: mass education. Built in the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the “overt curriculum.” However, beneath it lay an invisible or “covert curriculum” that was far more basic. It consisted—and till does in most industrial nations—of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work. Factory labour demanded workers who showed up on time, especially assembly-line hands. It demanded workers who would take orders from a management hierarchy without questioning. And it demanded men and women prepared to slave away at machines or in offices, performing brutally repetitious operations. Thus from the mid-nineteenth century on, as the Second Wave cut across country after country, one found a relentless educational progression: children started school at a younger and younger age, the school year became longer and longer (in the United States of America it climbed 35 percent between 1878 and 1956), and the number of years of compulsory schooling irresistibly increased. Mass pubic education was clearly a humanizing step forward. As a group of mechanic and workingmen in New York City declared in 1829, “Next to life and liberty, we consider education the greatest blessing bestowed upon mankind.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Nevertheless, Second Wave schools machined generation after generation of young people into a pliable, regimented work force of the type required by electromechanical technology and the assembly line. Taken together, the nuclear family and the factory-style school formed part of a single integrated system for the preparation of young people for roles in industrial society. In this respect, too, Second Wave societies, capitalist or communist, North or South, were all alike. For many decades the ecological model was “the” model of urban growth. However, during recent decades it has increasingly come under attack by the scholars favouring neo-Marxian or political economy models. These models challenge the mainstream urban ecology perspective by emphasizing that urban patterns are not the result of “hidden hand” economic forces, but rather that urban patterns are deliberately shaped for private profit by elites in business and government. Thus, unlike ecological approaches, which explain suburbanization as occurring as a consequence of technological factors such as street-car or automobile, political economy, or neo-Marxian, views stress the role played by corporate and real estate interests in manipulating land usage and markets. Suburbia is not a consequence of individuals homeowner choice, but a consequence of a deliberate decision by elites to disinvest in the cities. These elites are composed of “the industrial executives, developers, bankers, and their political allies. This approach is sometimes also identified as the “new urban sociology.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The new urban sociology is usually based on assumptions of neo-Marxism and conflict theory. The term “new urban sociology” is a bit of a misnomer, since advocates of this approach or paradigm often are geographers, urban planners, or political scientists rather than sociologists. Although these perspectives differ in specifics, they all stress that urban development is a consequence of capitalist modes of production, capital accumulation, exploitation of he powerless, and conflictual class relations. Societies are specified according to their mode of production. In the United States of America and Western Europe as well as elsewhere societal development is dominated by the capital accumulation process. A central role in the process of accumulation is assigned to labour power—its use, management, and reproduction. Social spatial relationships, particularly the relationship between capitalistic processes and space, are an intrinsic part of social development. Methodological individualism is overcome through specification of structure and its relationship to the agency, although the articulation of this relationship varies among the new urbanists. Real-estate and its supporting infrastructure constitute a “second circuit” of capital. Certain assumptions are common to the new critical urbanists. These are: Societal interaction is dominated by antagonistic social relationships. Consequently society is not a unified biotic community that experiences change from the outside, but a stratified and highly differentiated form of organization characterized by its own fissures, contradictions, and patterns of uneven development—features that flow from the (for example, the capitalistic) mode of production itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Social development is unstable in societies with antagonistic owner relationships. Contradictions of development and inequalities of growth fuel antagonism and define the nature of political activities. Power inequality is a basic element in societal relationships and the exercise of power can be a factor in societal development. No society can be adequately analyzed without reference to either its long-term history or its global context. Urban sociology has become captive of its own comfortable assumptions and resonates strongly with younger academics. Some also believe strongly that the social inequality, social conflict, and social problems in many American cities is the predictable consequences of capitalist political economy determining real estate and land usage because certain groups of people had their homes red tagged (scheduled for demolition) as cities were planning to redevelop them. This led to many years of generational wealth being lost for certain groups of people are these homes appreciated to become worth millions just 40 to 40 years later. However, capitalists tend to be republican, but some of these policies that led to certain groups of people being displaced from the homes they owned and robbed of future equity, for example, were policies created by the governors Pat Brown and his son Jerry Brown, who are both democrats. Even today as California brags about having a nearly $40 billion budget surplus, there is a major homeless crisis that is being overlooked by democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and the TV news media, but they can conjure up sports complexes and have them operational in two years, but no move being made on the construction and management of affordable housing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
However, there is a conflict about affordable housing because many of their buildings tend to rent to people and do not manage them and there is a lot of violence, crime, rule breaking, and noise, so people do not want income based, or low-income properties in their community because rules are not enforced and it makes the community unlivable for people who pay market rate and often well above market rate prices for their homes. Yet, the answer is not to leave people on the streets to endure unhygienic and unsafe conditions. Well have to acknowledge and deal with gentrification, displacement, and neighbourhood revitalization. We also have to acknowledge the opposite of gentrification is happening: middle- and upper-income residents are moving out, and lower-income residents moving in. Urban space (as well as space at other scales) is the specific effect of the kind of society in which this urban space is developed and the capitalist city is developed according to a logic that is internal to capital itself. The trend of the affluent moving out of their communities has implications for millions of Americans who own a home or are thinking of buying one. In a neighbourhood that is losing its more affluent residents, home prices are likely to underperform, just as they tend to outperform in areas that are gentrifying, as incomes rise. As a buyer, you may value new construction and/or home prices that appreciate above all, and thus be attracted only to rising-income areas where the lawns are all manicured, houses are nice and well-maintained, and not too many cars on the street and in the driveway. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
As a systematic statement of how non-Marxian new sociology political economy approach can be used to study how property markets work as social phenomena is done by understanding that place is valued in two ways: first, as an object of exchange to be bought and sold, and second, when it is used to do business in or live in. In the latter case place has a sentimental and symbolic value associated with jobs, neighbourhood, hometown, and community. However, the urban growth machine of corporate political elites is interested in land strictly as an investment and commodity to be bought and sold. Their interest is in creating a good business environment so that investments and new residents will come to the area and increase market value of the land, and aggregate rent levels will increase. This governmental and corporate emphasis on growth is at the expense of the interest of local residents and their communities. The needs of the general public are captive to the “growth machine” whose principal interest is in the transfer of wealth rentier groups. Use values of the majority are sacrificed for the exchange values of a few. Thus, community groups that advocate slow growth or neighbourhood preservation are fought by the business elites that profit from maintaining the growth machines. For how can the source of the inequality among humans be known unless one begins by knowing humans themselves? And how will humans be successful in seeing themselves as nature formed one, through all the changes that the succession of time and things must have produced in one’s original constitution, and in separating what one derives from one’s own wherewithal from what circumstances and one’s progress have added to or changed in one’s primitive state? #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Like the Winchester mansion, which time, sea, earthquakes, humans, and storms have caused wear and damage to while the owners and historians fight to preserve this priceless treasure some consider a god, the human soul, altered in the midst of society by a thousand constantly recurring causes, by the acquisition of a multitude of bits of knowledge and errors, by changes that to place in the constitution of bodies, by the constant impact of the passions, as, as it were, changed its appearance to the point of being nearly unrecognizable or not fully displaying its original intent. And instead of a being active always by certain and invariable principles, instead of that Heavenly and majestic simplicity whose mark its author had left on it, one no longer finds anything but grotesque contrast of passion which thinks I reasons and an understanding in a state of delirium. What is even more cruel is that, since all the progress of the human species continually moves away from its primitive state, the more we accumulate new knowledge, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all. Thus, in a sense, it is by dint of studying humans that we have rendered ourselves incapable of knowing them. It is easy to say that it is in these successive changes of the human constitution that we must seek the first origin of the differences that distinguish humans, who, by common consensus, are naturally as equal among themselves as were the terrestrial beings of each species the varieties we now observe among some of them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
In effect, it is inconceivable that these first changes, by whatever means they took place, should have altered all at once and in the same manner all the individuals of the species. However, while some improved or declined and acquired various good and bad qualities which were not inherent in their nature, the others remained longer in their original state. And such was the first source of inequality among humans, which it is easier to demonstrate thus in general than to assign with precision its true causes. Let my readers not imagine, then, that I dare flatter myself with having seen what appears to me so difficult to see. I have begun some lines of reasoning; I have hazarded some guesses, less in the hope of resolving the question than with intention of clarifying it and of reducing it to its true state. Others will easily be able to go farther on this same route, though it will not be easy for anyone to reach the end of it. For it is no light undertaking to separate what is original from what is artificial in the present nature of humans, and to have a proper understanding of a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, which probably never will exist, and yet about which it is necessary to have accurate notions in order to judge properly our own present state. One who would attempt to determine precisely which precautions to take in order to make solid observations on the subject would need even more philosophy than is generally supposed; and a good solution of the following problem would not seem to me unworthy of the Aristotles and Plinys of our century: What experiments would be necessary to achieve knowledge of natural man? And what are the means of carrying out these experiments in the midst of society? #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Far from undertaking to resolve this problem, I believe I have meditated sufficiently on the subject to dare respond in advance that the greatest philosophers will not be too good to direct these experiments, nor the most powerful sovereigns to carry them out. It is hardly reasonable to expect such a combination, especially with the perseverance or rather the succession of understanding and good will needed on both sides in order to achieve success. These investigations, so difficult to carry out and so little thought about until now, are nevertheless the only means we have left of removing a multitude of difficulties that conceal from us the knowledge of the real foundations of human society. It is this ignorance of the nature of humans which throws so much uncertainty and obscurity on the true definition of natural right. For the ideal of right, and even more that of natural right, are manifestly ideas relative to the nature of humans. Therefore, one continues, the principles of this science must be deuced from this very nature of humans, from human’s constitution and state. It is not without surprise and a sense of outrage that one observes the paucity of agreement that prevails among the various authors who have treated it. Among the most serious writers one can hardly find two who are of the same opinion on this point. The Roman jurists—not to mention the ancient philosophers who seem to have done their best to contradict each other on the most fundamental principles—subject human and all other terrestrial beings indifferently to the same natural law, because they take this expression to refer to the law that nature imposes on itself rather than the law she prescribes, or rather because of the particular sense in which those jurists understood the word “law,” which on this occasion they seem to have taken only for the expression of the general relations established by nature among all animate beings for their common preservation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The moderns, in acknowledging under the word “law” merely a rule prescribed to a moral being, that is to say, intelligent, free, and considered in one’s relations with other beings, consequently limit the competence of the natural law to the only terrestrial being who know of endowed with reason, that is, to humans. However, with each other defining this law in one’s own fashion, they all establish it on some metaphysical principles that even among us there are very few people in a position to grasp these principles, far from being able to find them by themselves. So that all the definitions of these wise humans, otherwise in perpetual contradiction with one another agree on this alone that it is impossible to understand the law of nature and consequently to obey it without being a great reasoner and a profound metaphysician, which humans do not naturally have, and from advantages the idea of which they cannot conceive until after having left the state of nature. Writers begin by seeking the rules on which, for the common utility, it would be appropriate for humans to agree among themselves; and then they give the name natural law to the collection of these rules, with no other proof than the good which presumably would result from their universal observance. Surely this is a very convenient way to compose definitions and to explain the nature of things by virtually arbitrary views of what is seemly. However, as long as we are unaware of natural man, it is futile for us to attempt to determine the law he has received or which is best suited to his constitution. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
All that we can see very clearly regarding this law is that, for it to be law, not only must he will of one who is obliged by it be capable of knowing submission to it, but also, for it to be natural, it must speak directly by the voice of nature. Leaving aside therefore all he scientific books which teach us only to see humans as they have made themselves, and meditating on the first and most simple operations of the human soul, I believe I perceive in it two principles that are prior to reason, of which one makes us ardently interested in our well-being and our self-preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient being, especially our fellow humans, perish or suffer. It is from the conjunction and combination that our mind is in a position to make regarding these two principles, without the need for introducing that of sociability, that all the rules of natura right appear to me to flow; rules which reason is later forced to reestablish on other foundations, when, by its successive developments, it has succeeded in smothering nature. In this way one is not obliged to make a human a philosopher before making one a human. One’s duties toward others are not uniquely dictated to one by the belated lessons of wisdom; and as long as one does no resist the inner impulse of compassion, one will never harm another human or even another sentient being, except in the legitimate instance where, if one preservation were involved, one is obliged to give preference to oneself. By this means, an end can also be made to the ancient disputes regarding the participation of non-human terrestrial beings in the natural law. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
For it is clear that, lacking intelligence and liberty, some terrestrial beings cannot recognize this natural law; but since they share to some extent in our nature by virtue of the sentient quality with which they are endowed, one will judge that they should also patriciate in natural right, and that humans are subject to some sort of duties toward them. It seems, in effect, that if I am obliged not to do any harm to my fellow humans, it is less because one is a rational being than because one is a sentient being: a quality that, since it is common to both non-human terrestrial beings and human beings, should at least give the former the right not to be needlessly mistreated by the latter. This same study or original man, of his true needs and the fundamental principles of his duties, is also the only good means that can be used to remove those multitudes of difficulties which present themselves regarding the origin of moral inequality, the true foundations of the body politic, the reciprocal rights of is members, and a thousand other similar questions that are as important as they are poorly explained. In considering human society from a tranquil and disinterested point of view it seems at firs to manifest merely the violence of powerful men and the oppression of the weak. The mind revolt against the harshness of the former; one is inclined to deplore the blindness of the latter. And since nothing is less stable among men than those external relationships which chance brings about more often than wisdom, and which are called weakness or power, wealth or poverty, human establishments appear at first glance to be based on piles of shifting sand. It is only in examining them closely, only after having cleared away the dust and sand that surround the edifice, hat one perceives the unshakable base on which it is raised and one learns to respect its foundations. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Now without a serious study of man, of his natural faculties and their successive developments, one will never succeed in making these distinctions and in separating, in the present constitution of things, what the divine will has done from what human art has pretended to do. The political and moral investigations occasioned by the important question I am examining are therefore useful in every way; and the hypothetical history of governments is an instructive lesson for man in every respect. In considering what we would have become, left to ourselves, we ought to learn to bless him whose beneficent hand, in correcting our institutions and giving them an unshakable foundation, has prevented the disorders that must otherwise result from them, and has brought about our happiness from the means that seemed likely to add to our misery. Learn whom God has ordered you to be, and in what part of human affairs you have been placed. As it stands, 52 percent of evangelicals do not accept or do not believe in absolute moral truths! What is happening? When the church does not get it right, the World certainly cannot get it right. Revival is coming! The Heavenly messengers will quiet your fears as you learn to find Jesus Christ. “Then I saw another mighty Angel coming down from Heaven. He was robed in a cloud, with a rainbow above his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs were like fiery pillars. He was holding a little scroll, which lay open in his hand. He planted his right foot on the sea, and his left foot on the land, and he gave a loud shout like the roar of a lion. When he shouted, the voices of the seven thunders spoke. And when the seven thunders spoke, I was about to write; but I heard a voice from Heaven say, ‘Seal up what thunders have said and do not write it down.’ #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“Then the Angel I had seen standing on the sea and on the land raised his right and to Heaven. And he swore by him who lives for ever and ever, who created the Heavens and all that is in them, the Earth and the sea and all that is in it, and said, ‘There will be no more delay! However, in the days when the seventh Angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced to his servants the prophets.’ Then then voice that I had heard from Heaven spoke to me once more: ‘Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the Angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.’ So I went to the Angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, ‘Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.’ I took the little scroll from the Angel’s hand and ate it. It tasted sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour. Then I was told, “You must prophesy again about many people, nations, languages and kings,” reports Revelation 10.1-11. With tender regard for human weaknesses, the Angel will give humans time to become accustomed to the divine radiance. Then the joy and glory will no longer be hidden. The whole plain will light up with the bright shinning of the hosts of God. Earth will be hushed, and the Heavens will stoop to listen to the son—“Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace, good will towards humans.” “For the Lord your God is brining you into a good land, a land of flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a long of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
“God is blessing us with a land where we will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and from whose hills you may mine copper, blue sapphires and diamond. You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land He has given you,” reports Deuteronomy 8.7-11. Tall, lush rain forest dripping in the morning wild orchids banana flowers, thick vines drape los palos del sol and great white cedar; others with five foot green elephant ears flopping, hundreds of butterflies, orange caterpillars, blue birds, pink mushrooms, through billion of green leaves quivering moist in the patchy sunlight. There are exalted but rare occasion when inspiration, peace, and spiritual majesty conjoin their blessed presence within us. It is with one for the flicker of a second—an unfathomable tranquility, an indefinable beauty—and then gone. Some enter into this experience only once in a lifetime; others repeat it a few times. Only a rare individual here and there enters it frequently. 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. O Lord, please guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile, and to those who slander me, let e 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; speedily defeat their aims and thwart their purposes for Thine own sake, for Thine own power, for Thy holiness and Law. That Thy loved ones be delivered, answer us, O Lord, and save with Thy redeeming power. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Thou who establishes peace in the Heavens, please grant peace unto us and unto All America. Amen. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 