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He Began to Think, After All, Was Death the End?
A story of confession—man tells how he reached the true meaning of his experience of life, and that this meaning border directly on the eternal. Satan first appeared in the sixth century B.C., in Persia, under the name of Angra Mainyu. He was usually represented as a snake, or as part lion, part snake, which points up once again the recurring symbolism of the serpent and cat. The Zoroastrian religion was the official religion of Persia at that time, and it spread with the extension of the Empire until the Persian military might was crushed by the Muslim invasion of A.D. 652. The teachings of the prophet Zoroaster served as served as a vehicle by which the doctrine of ethical dualism, the eternal battle between good and evil, was to spread to the rest of the World. Zoroastrianism taught that there were two forces or spirits in the Universe from which all else emanated: Ahura Mazda, the Principle of Light, the source of all good, and Angra Mainyu, the Principle of Darkness, the source of all evil. These two were supposed to be carrying on a constant battle, each attempting to destroy the other, until the coming of the Judgement, at which time the forces of Light would triumph. The Earth and all the material Universe were created by Ahura Mazda to be used as a weapon by which to ensnare and defeat Angra Mainyu. Man was created by Ahura Mazda to be used as a weapon by which to ensnare and defeat Angra Mainyu. Man was created by Ahura Mazada for the same purpose, but having the faculty of free will, one could choose between good and evil. In preparation for the oncoming battle, both spirits created subsidiary spirits to help them in their fight, these sides being organized into vast military organizations, efficient and terrible. The development of this military hierarchy, with Satan commanding legions of horrible demons, was to have a tremendous impact on the thinking of Judaic, Christian, and even Islamic cosmologies, the idea coming into special prominence at times when each of the cultures was making moves toward military expansion.
In 586 B.C., Jerusalem was taken by King Nebuchadnezzar after a long and bloody war, the Hebrews being deported to Babylonia. In 538 B.C., Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylonia and issued a decree giving the Jewish people there a privileged status in the new social order. However, Cyrus was not only the harbinger of political freedom but also the carrier of a new spiritual awakening. Satan had appeared in the holy books of the Jewish people long before their contact with the Persians, but only in a very limited role. Satan translated from Hebrew means “accuser” or “adversary,” and that was precisely the role Satan played in Judaic angelology before the Persian influence. Satan was at the time, at the very most, slightly rebellious and resentful, perhaps wishing to work evil but forced to promote good due to the overriding influence of God. His function was to accuse men before God, expose their infidelity, and then bring about their punishment—but only under the auspices of God Himself. To the ancient Jewish people, who were hard-core realists, Satan symbolized man’s evil inclinations. It is very likely, in fact, that the introduction of Satan into Judaism was intended only in a figurative sense, and that he was not supposed to function as a distinct spiritual being at all. The contact with the Zoroastrians, at any rate, brought drastic changes in Jewish literature. The Jewish Sheol, once a place of eternal peace and sleep, was transformed into Hell, a place of damnation and punishment for the wicked. The serpent that tempted Eve became Satan in disguise, and the Devil became the originator of all evil, the author of death, a complete contradiction of the earlier Book of Isaiah, in which God proclaimed Himself to be responsible for all good and evil in the World, the creator of life and death.
The Judaic demonology, which had been up to that time relatively unimportant, took on a fresh look, and Satan as the archfiend came to head up a formalized hierarchy of storm troopers dedicated to the overthrow of the Heavenly forces. Demons consorted with humans to produce human offspring. Men went to bed at night fearing the coming of the bloodsucking she-demon Lilith or her consort, Samael, the Angel of Death, who cut men down in their prime and carried them off to Hell. In was in such a condition that Satan was transferred to the emerging Christian sect. In the New Testament, he become the “Old Serpent,” the “Great Dragon,” upholding his snaky image. Considering later developments, these reptilian descriptions are very relevant, for nowhere in Zoroastrian, Judaic, or Christian mythology was Satan described as a goat, as he was later portrayed by the Inquisitors. The Devil was a cosmic element to be taken seriously by any right-thinking Christians, of course, but at that time, Christianity was much too bus fighting for its own survival to search out Satan in any lair in which he might be hiding. In the Fifth century, in his treatise The City of God, Saint Augustine described the legions of demons that are active on Earth and the powers that they exert over humans. However, he went on to say that evil was a creation not of the Devil, but of God, in order to select the “elect” from the damned. In stating, “For we cannot call the devil a fornicator or drunkard or ascribe him any sensual indulgence though he is the secret instigator and prompter of those who sin in these ways,” he reflected an image of Satan far different from the one that was to emerge later on the Continent. The picture of Satan as sort of an immoral dope-pusher, getting weak persons hooked on his “junk” while he himself abstained and reaped the profits, was a far cry from the later lecherous goat, the Prince of Fornication, who as the witches’ Sabbats copulated with every woman present.
In the gray Celtic mists of Wales and Scotland, the remains of Druidism, a mysterious religious group that claimed to be able, by certain strange, magical rituals, to make rain, to bring down fire from the sky, and to perform other wondrous and miraculous acts was found. Druids would meet in the darkness of the forests, these sorcerers, among their sacred trees. In Greece, missionaries found the bloody rites of Dionysus, the goat-god, the god of vegetation. There also, in beautiful gardens, they discovered the people making offerings to Priapus, who bore the horns of a goat and who displayed proudly a huge phallus, a deity of productive power who protected the fields and the bees and the sheep. They encountered the god Pan waiting for them deep in the black forests, waiting for the transformation that would increase the limits of his kingdom a thousandfold. Wherever the Christian missionaries turned, they found the peasantry worshipping many animal gods, primary among them being the bull, the ram, and the stag. Among the northern Teutonic peoples, there were the war gods Thor and Odin, and the evil Loki, all wearing horned helmets as they went to battle. Freyja, the Scandinavian May queen counterpart of the southern Diana, donned antlers and was responsible for the revival of life in the spring. Dionysus, Isis, Priapus, Cernunnos, all were horned gods of fertility. Those woods and glades were populated with nymphs and goatlike satyrs, lesser spirits who played gleefully and licentiously in the summer sun. The horned god was to resist the oncoming Christian tide, become miraculously transformed into Satan, the ruler of the Earth in all its glory. With the conquest of the new pagan territories, Christians launched a spiritual assault on their new captives in an attempt to spread the gospel.
Most of the missionaries underestimated the power of the nature religions of the pagans. They viewed the holding of such religious beliefs to be due merely to error and believed that once such errors were revealed, the pagans would be blinded by the light of truth and embrace Jesus as their Savior. However, the pagans found the teachings of the Nazarene to be a little too distant and mystical for their liking. Thus, when the initial attempt at conversion failed, the missionaries found it necessary to change their views, and they began to incorporate many elements of the old religions into Christian doctrine in an attempt to kill them by subversion. Many of the pagan deities were transformed overnight into Christian saints, adding new pages to the growing Christian mythology. Elements of pagan rituals and ceremonies found their way into Christian services as each parish soaked up local traditions. As late as 1282, a priest at Inverkeithing was found to be leading fertility dances at Easter around the phallic figure of god, and the Catholic hierarchy, after investigation, allowed him to keep his benefice. From the sixth century, as more territory became opened to Christianity, the pagan kings began to convert one by one. Certain wicked women, reverting to Satan, and seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believed and professed that they would ride at night with Diana on certain beasts, with an innumerable multitude of women, passing over immense distances, obeying her commands as their mistress, and evoked by her on certain nights. Tales of nocturnal gatherings of witches who flew on animals to hilltop meetings were common enough to have been included in Boccaccio’s Decameron in 1350, but most of the high Christian officials saw these women not as practitioners of the abominations to which they confessed, but only as the unwilling victims of demonic tricksters.
Some, spurred on by the pessimistic view that the World was purposely created and maintained as a living Hell, existing solely to prepare humans for their future Heavenly existence, the pious conducted a “holier than thou” contest to see who could inflict the most self-abuse. They measured Earthly success in terms of how much pain they could force themselves to endure, or how many lice they were able to nurture in their hair. As asceticism came to be incorporated into Church dogma, all of nature came to be looked upon as something vile and corrupt. Knights Templar and various Gnostic heresies, were clear-cut reactions against the corruption rampant in the Church and they instituted strict vows of chastity and poverty among their priesthoods. Since the Templars were a wealth order and since the wealth of all those convicted of heretical crimes became the property of the state, it is possible that the episode was fabricated by King Philip of France to fill his badly depleted treasure. However, in 1312, the powerful Knights Templar, a fraternal organization of Christian Crusaders, which had ostensibly formed as a response to what its leader saw as corruption in the Church, was declared heretical by the Church, and its members imprisoned. Many disciples of the group cracked under the strain of torture and confessed to having practiced a variety of abominable rite, including the worship of a deity called Baphomet, described alternately as a breaded man’s head with one or three faces, a human skull, or a monstrous figure with human hands and the head of a goat, a candle sputtering between its horns. Initiates were forced to spit and trample upon the cross, renounce Christ as a false prophet, gird themselves with cords that had been tied to pagan idols, and perform homosexual acts.
Unfortunately, the Templars failed to develop a survival course geared to an unexpected enemy—their own church—and the last Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, was burned outside Paris in 1314. Regardless of the reality of the Satanic charges against them, the Templar legend would play an important role in Western magical tradition and in the belief systems of other secret societies—Satanic and non-Satanic—which traced their own practices to those of the Knights. In 1275, not long before Jacques de Molay’s execution, the first official execution for witchcraft was burned at the stake in Toulouse. Other executions followed. With most of the powerful heretical movements stamped out by the fourteenth century, the Christian fathers, intoxicated by the smell of burning flesh, searched frantically for new victims. The early witch executions set a valuable precedent, and the pantheon of nature gods of the peasant farmers was opened up for attack. By the time the concepts of heresy and witchcraft had become thoroughly confused, and the Inquisitors saw demons everywhere. The biblical edict, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” came into literal use on a grand scale. By the time that Pope Innocent VIII gave official sanction by a papal bull in 1484 for the witch prosecutions, executions for witchcraft had been in full swing in parts of the Continent for two hundred years. However, in 1485, a more detailed account of the dealings of witches was published by the Dominican Inquisitors Henry Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, entitles the Malleus Maleficarum. This work, which became a manual for Inquisitors and witch-hunters for the next two centuries, spelled out in great detail the methods of workings of witches, their treacherous league with the Devil, and described methods for securing convictions of the accused. The doors were thrown open for the blood bath.
The frenzy that shook Europe was monumental. The witch became for the European Christian, as H.R. Trevor-Roper terms it, the “stereotype of noncomformity,” a convenient scapegoat for jealousy and self-hatred. The craze reached such paranoiac proportions that between 1120 and 1741, when the madness finally subsided, ninety domestic animals had been tried before courts of law for murder and witchcraft. In 1314 at Valois, a bull that had gored a man to death was sentenced to death by strangulation. All of Europe was under the dark cloud of Satan, as neighbors and friends viewed each other with suspicion and families turned on one another in blind fear. The Reformation of the sixteenth century made Catholics even more certain that the Satanic forces were everywhere trying to undermine the authority of the Church. The Thirty Years War was seen as Armageddon, the Infernal Hierarchy more than ever assuming the aspects of a well-oiled military machine, with Satan leading Luther and his demonic Protestant hordes in a bloody assault on the City of God. The Lutherans entered the proceeding with vigor, for they were revolting against the corruption and laxity they saw in the Church, this decay being due to Satanic influences. Luther viewed his adversaries as bring inspired by the Devil, and even his own bodily ailments he attributed to demonic activity. The spiral of executions soared ever upward, each side tying to outdo the other to meet the challenge. One Protestant reformer by the name of Carpzov claimed personal responsibility for the deaths of 20,000 people. The property seized from the witches was a valuable source of capital with which to finance the war effort. Besides this, there were many carpenters, judges, jailers, exorcists, woodcutters, and executioners who had an economic reason to see the bloodbath continue.
By the time the people had regained their senses and the Inquisition had come to a screeching halt in the late seventeenth century, an untold number of victims had been burned, strangled, hanged, or tortured to death. Even higher than the reported deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic, 9 million suspected witches had been terminated. However, while the tragic farce had been conducted, a strange metamorphosis had taken place. The Inquisition, which had convicted a multitude of peasants for worshipping the Devil, had found itself caught up in a self-fulfilling prophecy; it had created a new vision. Satan had begun to change in appearance by the time of the first mass executions for witchcraft in the fifteen century. He had shed his snakeskin and had grown a coat of fur and horns. He had become hoofed and shaggy. He had become Pan and Priapus and Cernunnos and Loki and Odin and Thor and Dionysus and Isis and Diana. He had become the god of fertility and abundance and lust. He was the lascivious goat, the mysterious black ram. He was all of nature and indeed life itself to the peasant, who had often lived on the verge of starvation due to the crushing taxes of the feudal aristocracy. He was pleasures of the flesh, and since to the peasant pleasures of the flesh was identical to creation itself, and was one of the few pleasures not open to taxation, he was their god. The Churches fanatical asceticism, its rabid identification of pleasures of the flesh with evil, added to the Devil’s strength. The Inquisitors, with an image of Satan and his hellish activities imprinted on their brains, slowly managed to stamp the image on the minds of peasantry. It was through their dogged efforts that Satan became the savior of man. When the Satanic hysteria gets to the point of absurdity, people start questioning the whole line of crap. It will eventually get so no one believes anything Christian ministers say anymore. When they hear about the Devil and how rotten he is, it just makes them curious about what the Satanic viewpoint might be.
In modern times, figures were produced as many as 100,000 people are sacrificed to the Devil every year in the United States of America alone. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, there was a site used by a cult. A form of a church. And it is probably still in use. Some symbols and artifacts were discovered that made some concerned. An officer from Albuquerque Police Department was more specific: “This is definitely witchcraft. And I’d stay away from there if there are any people around. They will hurt you.” Another “occult expert” observed that the symbol they found was “a very powerful spiritual symbol.” It essentially started a witch hunt in the community. If you recall a suburb called Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles, California. Centering on the popular McMartin Preschool day-car centre, it would become the most expensive trial in Californian criminal history up to that point. It began when some parents voiced suspicious that their children were abused by staff at the centre. Seven staff members were arrested to face 208 different charges. Then things got weird. The children began telling increasingly bizarre stories. They had been forced to drink blood and eat feces, had witnessed adults sacrificing animals and eating babies. To many, this seemed like a morbid, childish fantasy. However, the trial split the whole community, including those prosecuting the case. One prosecutor proudly announced the discovery of “toy rabbit ears, a cape, and a candle” proved the existence of a Satanic cult. Another resigned in disgust at the shabby proceedings. Meanwhile, things just got weirder. One child said he was kept in a cage with a lion. The case dragged on for many years. As the trial turned into a circus, it emerged that the mother who made the initial accusations had a history of mental problems. Five of the accused were released without charge because evidence against them was, according to the District Attorney “incredibly weak.”
The last defendant was released as the jury deadlocked on a verdict. That following July, a second trial produced the same result. This inconclusive verdict is emblematic of the Satanic ritual abuse myth. On one side, those who wanted to believe in it emphasized that the accused had never been fully exonerated. In the other, the secptics pointed out that nothing had been proved—despite huge public expenditure—and wondered aloud whether the therapist who interviewed the children had helped inspire their macabre tales of cultists and demons. We may pay the tribute of a tearful smile to the ashes of witchcraft, and express our opinion of the present-day beliefs of the simple country-folk by a pitying smile, feeling all the time how much more enlightened we are than those who believed, or still believe in such absurdities! However, the mind of a man is built in water-tight compartments. What better embodies the spirit of the young twenty-first century than a powerful motor car, fully equipped with the most up-to-date appliances for increasing speed or less vibration; in its tuneful hum as it travels at forty-five miles an hour without an effort, we hear the triumph-song of mind over matter. The owner certainly does not believe in witchcraft or phishogues (or perhaps in anything save himself!), yet he fastens on the radiator a “Teddy Bear” or some such thing by way of a mascot. Ask him why he does it—he cannot tell, except that other do the same, while all the time at the back of his mind there exists almost unconsciously the belief that such a thing will help to keep him from the troubles and annoyances that beset the path of the motorists. The connection between cause and effect is unknown to him; he cannot tell you why a Teddy Bear will keep the engine operating normally or prevent punctures—and in this respect he is for the moment on exactly the same intellectual level as, let us say, his brother-man of New Zealand, who carries a baked yam with him at night to scare away ghosts.
The truth of the matter is that we all have a vein of superstition in us, which makes its appearance at some period in our lives under one form or another. A. will laugh to scorn B.’s belief in witches or ghost, while one oneself would not undertake a piece of business on a Friday for all the wealth of Croesus; while C., who laughs at both, will offer one’s hand to the palmist in full assurance of faith. There are some marvelous tales about Sarah Winchester her mansion. In fact, thousands of words have been and will be written about the Mystery Hose and its Lady but the great question is yet to be answered, —Why? Why? Sarah Winchester was truly overcome by the loss of her month-old baby girl, Annie, and a grief magnified 15 years later by her husband’s sudden death. Doctors and friend urged her to leave the East, seek a milder climate and search for some all-consuming hobby. One physician did suggest that she “build a house and do not employ an architect.” William Wirt Winchester, the Husband of Sarah Winchester, was of an ancient family, and had inherited wealth. When he was at university, he fell into somewhat evil hands; for he made friends with an old doctor of college, who feared not God and thought ill of man, and spent all his time in dark researches into the evil secrets of nature, they study of dangerous poisons and many other hidden words of darkness such as drinking vitals of his own blood, conducting Satanic rituals in a deserted farmhouse, intercourse with spirits of evil, and the black influences that lie in wait for the soul; and he found William an apt pupil. William lived in a Victorian cottage near the university for some years till he was nearly thirty, seldom visiting his home, and writing but formal letters to this father, who supplied him gladly with a small revenue, so long as he kept busy with education.
Then his father, Oliver Fisher Winchester, died and William Wirt Winchester came home to take up his inheritance, which was a plentiful one. He also became the president of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. He lived in his father’s Victorian mansion in New Haven, Connecticut, which lay very desolate and gloomy. To serve him he had a man and his wife, Sarah, who were quiet and simple people and asked no questions; the wife cooked his meals, and kept the rooms, where he slept and read, clean and neat; the man moved his machines for him, and arranged his phials and instruments, having a light touch and serviceable memory. The door of the house that gave on the street opened into a hall; to the right was a kitchen, and a pair of rooms where the man and his wife lived. On the left was a large room running through the house; the windows on to the street were walled up, and the windows at the back looked on the garden, the trees of which grew closet to the casements making the room dark, and in a breeze rustling their leaves or leafless branches against the panes. In this room William had a furnace with bellows, the smoke of which discharged itself into the chimney; and here he did much of his working, making mechanical toys, as a clock to measure the speed of wind or water, roller skates, a little chariot that ran a few yards by itself, a puppet that moved its arms and laughed, hammers, planes, saws, footballs and bicycles. The room was filled up with dark lumber, in a sort of order that would have looked to a stranger like disorder, but so that William could lay his hand on all that he needed. From the hall, which was paved with stone, went up the stairs, very strong and broad, of massive oak; under which was a postern that led to the garden; on the floor above where a room William slept in, which again had its windows to the street boarded up, for he was a light sleeper, and the mornings sounds of the awakening city disturbed him.
The room was hung with a dark arras, sprinkled with red flowers; he slept in a great bed with black curtains to shut out all light; the windows looked into the garden; but on the left of the bed, which stood with its head to the street, was an alcove, being the hangings, containing a window that gave on the church. One the same floor were thirteen other rooms; in one of these, looking on the garden William had his meals. It was plain, panelled room. Next was a room where he read, filled with books, also looking on the garden and the next to that was a little room of which he alone had the key. This room he kept locked, and no one set foot in it but himself. There was one more room on this floor, set apart for guests (who never came), with a great bed and a press of oak. And that looked on the street. Above, there was a row of plain plastered rooms, in which stood furniture for which William had no use, and many crates in which his machines and phials came to him; this floor was seldom visited, except by the man, who sometimes came to put a box there; and the spiders had it to themselves; except for a little room where stood an optic glass through which on clear nights William sometimes looked at the moon and stars, if there was any odd misadventure among them, such as an eclipse; or when a fiery-tailed comet went his way silently in the Heavens. William had but two friends who ever came to see him. One was an old physician who had ceased to practise his trade, which indeed was never abundant, and who would sometimes drink a glass of wine with William, and engage in curious talk of men’s bodies and diseases, or look at one of William’s inventions. William had come to know him by having called him in to cure some aliment, which needed a surgical knife; and that had made a kind of friendship between them; but William had little need thereafter to consult him about his health, which indeed was now settled enough, though he had but little vigour; and he knew enough of drugs to cure himself when he was ill.
The other friend was a silly priest of the college, that made belief to be a student but was none, who thought William a very wise and mighty person, and listened with open mouth and eyes to all that he said or showed him. This priest, who was fond of wonders, had introduced himself to William by pretending to borrow a volume of him; and then had grown proud of the acquaintance, and bragged greatly of it to his friends, mixing up much tht was fanciful with a little that was true. However, the result was that gossip spread wide about William, and he was held in the town to very a very fearful person, who could do strange mischief if her had a mind to; William never cared to walk abroad, for he was of a shy habit, and disliked to meet the eyes of his fellows; but if he did go about, men began to look curiously after he as he went by, shook their heads and talked together with dark pleasure, while children fled before his face and women feared him; all of which pleased William mightily, if the truth were told; for at the bottom of his restless and eager spirit lay a deep vanity unseen, like a lake in the woods; he hungered not indeed for fame, but for repute—and he cared little in what repute he was held, so long as men thought him great and marvellous; and as he could not win renown by brave deeds and words, he was rejoiced to win it by keeping up a certain darkness and mystery about his ways and doings; and this was very clear to him, so that when the silly priest called him Seer and Wizard, he frowned and looked sideways; but he laughed in his heart and was glad. Now, when William was near his fortieth year, there fell on him a heaviness of spirit which daily increased upon him. He began to question his end and what lay beyond. He had grown to believe that in death, the soul was extinguished like a burnt-out flame. William began, too, to question his life and what he had done.
He had made a few guns, toys, and filled vacant hours, and had gained a kind of fame—and this was all. Was he so certain, he began to think, after all, that death was the end? Were there perhaps, not in the vast house of God, rooms and chambers beyond that in which he was set for awhile to pace to and fro? About this time he began to read in a Bible tht he had lain dusty and unopened on a shelf. It was his mother’s book, and he found therein many little tokens of her presence. Here was a verse underline; at some gracious passage the page was much fingered and worn; in one place there were stains that looked like the mark of tears; then again, in one page, there was a small tress of hair, golden hair, tied to a paper with a name across it, that seemed to be the name of his daughter who had died at six weeks old; and again there were a few withered flowers, like little sad ghosts, stuck through a paper on which was written his father’s name—the name of the powerful, demanding, silent man who William had feared with all his heart. William felt a sudden desire of the heart for a woman’s love, for tender words to sooth his sadness, for the laughter and kisses of his new born daughter—and he began to ransack his mind for memories of his baby; he could remember he being pressed to his heart one morning, with her fragrant hair falling about his. She had unusually long hair for a newborn baby. The worst was that he must bear his sorrow alone, for there were none to whom he could talk of such things. The doctor was a dry as an old bunch of herbs, and as for the priest, William was ashamed to show anything but contempt and pride in his presence. For relief he began to turn to a branch of his studies that he had long neglected; this was a fearful commerce with the unseen spirits.
William could remember having practised some experiments of this kind with the old doctor; but he remembered them with a kind of disgust, for they seemed to him but a sort of deadly juggling; such dark things he had seen seemed like a dangerous sport with unclean beings, more brute-like than human. Yet now he read in his curious books with care, and studied the tales of necromancers, who had indeed seemed to have some power over the souls of men departed. However, the old books gave him but little faith, and a kind of angry disgust at the things attempted. And he began to think that the horror in which such men as made these books lived, was not more than the dak shadow cast on the mirror of the soul by their own desperate imaginings and timorous excursions. One Sunday he was strangely sad and heavy; he could settle to nothing, but threw book after book aside, and when he turned to some work of construction, his had seemed to have lost its cunning. It was a grey and sullen day in November; a warm wet wind came buffeting up from the west, and roared in the chimney and eaves of the old mansion. The shrubs in the garden plucked themselves hither and thither as though in pain. William walked to and fro after his midday meal, which he had eaten hastily without savour; at last, as though with a sudden resolution, he went to a secret cabinet and got out a key; and with it he went to the door of the little room that was always locked. He stopped at the threshold for a while, looking hither and thither; and then he suddenly unlocked it and went in, closing and locking it behind him. The room was as dark as night, but William going softly, his hands before him, went to a corner and got a tinder-box which lay there, and made a flame. A small dark room appeared, hung with a black tapestry; the window was heavily shuttered and curtained; in the centre of the room stood what looked like a small altar pained black; the floor was all bare, but with white marks upon it, half effaced.
William looked about the room, glancing sidelong, as though in some kind of doubt; his breath went and came quickly, and he looked paler than usual. Presently, as though reassured by silence and calm of the place, he went to a tall press that stood in in corner, which he opened, and took from it certain things—a dish of metal, some small leather bags, a large lump of chalk, and a book. He laid all but the chalk down on the alter, and then opening the book, read in it a little; and then he went with the chalk and drew certain marks upon the floor, first making a circle, which he went over again and again with anxious care; at times he went back and peeped into the book as though uncertain. Then he opened the bags, which seemed to hold certain kinds of powdered, this dusty, that in grains; he ran them through his hands, and then poured a little of each into his dish, and mixed them with his hands. Then he stopped and looked about him. Then he walked to a place in the wall on the further side of the altar from the door, and drew the arras carefully aside, disclosing a little alcove in the wall; into this he looked fearfully, as though he was afraid of what he might see. In the alcove, which was all black, appeared a small shelf, that stood but a little way out from the wall. Upon it, gleaming very white against the black, stood the skull of a man, and on either side of the skull were the bones of a man’s hand. It looked to him, as he gazed on it with a sort of curious disgust, as though a dead man had come up to the surface of a black tide, and was preparing presently to leap out. On either side stood two long silver candlesticks, very dark with disuse; but instead of holding candles, they were fitted at the top with flat metal dishes; and in these he poured some of his powders, mixing them as before with his fingers. William felt a shudder ass through he veins.
He went down for supper. When his food was served, he could hardly touch it, and he drank cranberry juice as his custom was to do. Around midnight, William rose from his place; the house was now all silent, and without the night was very still, as though all things slept tranquilly. He took a black robe, and put it around him, so that it covered him from head to foot, and then gathered up the parchment, and the key of the locked room, and went softly out, and so came to the door. This he undid with a kind of secret and awestruck haste, locking it behind him. Once inside the room, he wrestled awhile with a strong aversion to what was in his mind to do, and stood for a moment, listening intently, as though he expected to hear some sound. However, the room was still, except for the faint biting od some small creature in the wainscot. After performing a ritual, suddenly William saw for a moment a pale light, as of moonlight, and then with a horror of what words cannot attain to describe, he saw a face hand in the air a few feet from him, that looked in his own eyes with a sort of intent fury, as though to spring upon him if he turned either to the right hand or to the left. His knees tottered beneath him, and a sweat of icy coldness sprang on his brow; there followed a sound like no sound William had dreamed of hearing; a sound that was near and yet remote, a sound that was low and yet charged with power, like the groaning of a voice in grievous pain and anger, that strives to be free and yet is helpless. And then William new that he indeed opened the door that looks into the other World, and that deadly thing that held him in enmity had looked out. His reeling brain still told him that he was safe where he was, but that he must not step or fall outside the circle; but how he should resist the power of the wicked face he knew not. He tried to frame a prayer in his heart; but there swept such fury of hatred across the face that he dared not. So he closed his eyes and stood dizzily waiting to fall, and knowing that if he fell it was the end.
Suddenly, as he stood with his eye closed, he felt the horror of the spell relax; he opened his eyes again, and saw that the face died out upon the air, becoming first white and then thin. Then there fell a low and sweet music upon their air, like a concert of flutes and harps, very far away. And then suddenly, in a sweet radiance, the face of his daughter, as she lived in his mind, appeared in the space, and looked at him with a kind of Heavenly loved; then beside the face appeared two thin hands which seemed to wave a blessing toward him, which flowed like healing into his soul. The relief from the horror, and the flood of tenderness that came into his heart, made him reckless. The tears came into his eyes, not in a rising film, but a flood of hot and large. He took step forwards rounding the altar; but as he did so, the vision disappeared, the lights shot up into a flare and went out; the house seemed to be suddenly shaken; in the darkness he heard the rattle of bones, and the clash of metal, and William fell all his length upon the ground and lay as one dead. But while he lay, there came to him in some secret cell of his mind a dreadful vision, which he could only dimly remember afterwards with a fitful horror. A door-to-nowhere opened. He stepped through. It was very damp and chilly, but there was a glimmering light; he walked a few paced down the hallway. The floor underfoot were slimy, and the walls streamed with damp. He thought that he could return; but the great door was closed behind him, and he could not open it. William felt like a child in the grip of a giant and went forward in great terror and perplexity. Then there came someone very softly down the passage and drew near—it was his wife Sarah. He followed her into the parlor where she received her morning tea. He could not get her attention, but while looking over her shoulder, he noticed the date on the Oakland Tribune was Sunday, December 30, 1900.
Then end soon came, for the tall man, who had brought William there, broke out into a great storm of passion; and William heard him say, “He hath yielded himself to his own will; and he is mine here; so let us make an end.” William made haste to go back, and found the door-to-nowhere ajar; but he as he reached it, he heard a horrible sin behind him, of cries and screams; and it was with a sense of gratitude, that he could not put into words, but which filled all his heart, that he found himself back in his home again. And then the vision all fled away, and with a shock coming to himself, he found that he was laying in his own room; he was cold and aching in every limb, and then he knew that a battle had been fought out over his soul, and moments later, he passed away, on March 7th 1881, but the evil had not prevailed. Upon William’s death, his wife Sarah inherited $20,000,000 and 777 shares of stock in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester’s response to the death of her child and husband left a beautiful, bizarre, and impressive architectural reflection of her psyche. The fascinating story of the Winchester Mystery House has its roots in the personal tragedies suffered by Mrs. Winchester and in the legacy of the Winchester rifle, “The Gun That Won the West.” Each of us dwells in our own particular glass house, and so cannot afford to hurl missiles at one’s neighbours; milk-magic or motor-mascots, pishogues or palmistry, the method of the manifestation is of little account in comparison with the underlying superstition. The latter is an unfortunate trait that has been handed down to us from the infancy of the race; we have managed to get rid of such physical features as tails or third eyes, whose day of usefulness has passed; we no longer masticate our meat raw, or chip the rugged flint into the semblance of a knife, but we still acknowledge our descent by giving expression to the strange beliefs that lie in some remote lumber-room at the back of the brain.
However it may be objected that belief in witches, ghosts, fairies, charms, evil-eye, etcetera, need not be put down as unreasoning superstition, pure and simple, that in fact the trend of modern thought is to show us that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than were formerly dreamt of. We grant that humans are very complex machines, a microcosm peopled with possibilities of which we can understand but little. We know that mind acts on mind to an extraordinary degree, and that the imagination can affect the body to an extent not yet fully realized, and indeed has often carried humans far beyond the bounds of commo-sense; and so we consider that many of these elements of the above beliefs can in a general way be explained along these lines. Nevertheless that does not do away with the element of superstition and, we ma add, oftentimes of deliberately-planned evil that underlies. There is no need to resurrect the old dilemma, whether God or the Devil was the principal agent concerned; we have no desire to preach to our readers, but we feel that every thinking human will be fully prepared to admit that such beliefs and practices are inimical to the development of true spiritual life, in that they tend to obscure the ever-present Deity and bring into prominence primitive feelings and emotions which are better left to fall into a state of atrophy. In addition they crippled the growth of national life, as they make the individual the fearful slave of the unknow, and consequently prevent the development of an independent spirit in one without which a nation is only such in name. The dead past utters warnings to the heirs of the ages. It tells us already we have partially entered into a glorious heritage, which may perhaps be as nothing in respect of what will ultimately fall to the lot of the human race, and it bid us give our upward-soaring spirits freedom, and not fetter them with the gross beliefs of yore that should long ere this have been relegated to limbo.
Winchester Mystery House
This Friday, Aiden Sinclair is back at The Winchester Mystery House for two performances and an exclusive 13 guest Victorian Seance. Shows take place in Sarah’s iconic Grand Ballroom and Dining Room. You DON’T want to miss this 👀🔮Tickets available on our site! https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/aiden-sinclair/
Are You Brave Enough to Explore the House at Night?
The one problem with oral language is that after being handed down from generation to generation, the reasons for certain social laws are often forgotten and they become elevated to the stature of natural laws, the breaking of which is felt by humans to be detrimental to one’s survival as an organic entity. The laws begin to work independently of the reasons for their existence and in the process assume greater force. “Thou shalt not” is the basic of the concept of social evil. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet they neighbor’s wife—all these are examples of social evils. If indulged, such acts are evil in that they would facilitate the breakdown of ties within the culture; they are prohibitions aimed at maintenance and control. Seldom have these evils been personified by any particular god, since they act in the capacity of universal laws and, as such, are mechanical, impersonal. Satan has not personified these social taboos in the same sense that Set personified the night and Horus personified the sun; he rather has skillfully manipulated these moral edicts in an attempt to undermine the forces of righteousness and good. Satan as personification of evil has beaten a consistent and clear path through the religious history of Western man and in each guise has been representative of the social type of evil. He has been uniformly antisocial, anti-humanity, anti-God throughout all the religious systems in which he has appeared, at least according to the tenants of the opposing side. However, only under one of the religions in which he appears, Christianity, did a separate movement materialize devoted to his worship as a symbol of the anti-God. The reason for this has been stated many times by writers and historians: historically, Satanism as a religion was the anomalous child of Christian repression.
The reason that Devil worship reached the degree of organization and the size that it did under Christianity, and under other monotheistic religious systems, is the Christian definition of evil. The idea of social evil for the Christians soon became aligned and synonymous with self-indulgence. The Christian idea of the Seven Deadly Sins (greed, pride, envy, anger, gluttony, lust, and sloth) is indicative of this aversion to self-indulgence. Pleasure came to be looked upon as being tainted. Man found it hard, nevertheless, to dissociate himself intellectually from self-indulgence and from his own carnality, from his emotions and from his physical delights. His self became divided and he found that he was being led in two directions at once. A gulf widened between man’s conscious and unconscious mind, and he found himself obsessed by images of his instinctual nature, his animal being. The Devil, conceived and cast in the form of the ubiquitous chtonic snake, functioning at an unconscious level as man’s animal being, was looked upon by the Christian theologians with stern foreboding. The people were told that the Devil was evil, that he represented carnality, pride, lust, gluttony, rebelliousness, all those centrifugal forces that would tend toward atomization and social disintegration. They were told that Satan was evil because he had dared to opposed God, the perfect and omnipotent creator of the Universe. The people nodded in agreement, for they knew that this was correct, but at a deeper level of consciousness something squirmed uncomfortably. It all struck a chord that was just a bit too familiar, for the Devil reminded them of somebody they knew very well—themselves. He was self-indulgent and so were they; he had great pride and so did they; he rebelled against tyrannical authority and so did they often use to.
Satan painted a colorful picture, to be sure, much more attractive than the one of an overpowering, intolerant, faultless God whom none could ever hope to approach in perfection. So the Devil remained intact as a symbol under Christianity; he was humanity in all its weakness, and it was from this manifestation that he originally derived all his strength. In other religions in which he played a major role, Satan had never achieved any great following simply because the theologians, in their mythmaking functions, were more careful in their social definitions of evil. All those religious systems in which Satan has appeared share one common trait: they are all monotheistic and, as such, need a negative balance for the beneficial construct of an all-powerful, all-good, and merciful God. Satan is necessary because there is no other way to dispose of the evil realities constantly confronting humanity. Since pestilence, famine, and death are formidable evils faced by all humans, and since it is difficult, to day the least, to attribute their origin to pure goodness, an evil source must be assumed to exist. In undertaking to relate some of my experiences in connection with the purchase and sale of haunted houses, I was successful in this class of business, but some of my adventures I went through were of such a character that I dared not continue. My nerves are fairly strong, but there are some things which I never wish to face again. I was first tempted to dabble in this unlucky class of business with what is now known as the Winchester Mystery House, which is an extravagant maze of beautiful Victorian craftmanship—marvelous, baffling, and eerily eccentric, to say the least. The Winchester Mystery House became known as “the house built by the spirits.” At the time of Mrs. Winchester’s death in 1922, there were rooms full of ornate treasures still waiting to find a niche in the massive home.
A client was anxious to see me one day, he wanted to make an immediate offer, at almost any price, for the most mysterious hose in the World. However, once he took a tour of the house, he said it was haunted and ran out the front door. The house became very hard to sell. It was all nonsense, of course; but the people in the neighborhood had it in their head that this was a haunted house; and now if any tenants come they are sure to hear of it directly, and get frightened. The result is that I had lost tenant after tenant, and the reputation of the Winchester mansion was so bad that I could not sell it. I assured the clients that the house was in thorough repair, but tended to be reluctant to answer the questions about the ghosts. Potential buyers would ask, “Are there any stories about the house?” Anything to account for its being haunted?” “No; no. What story should there be? It is a modern house—hardly been built for 36 years.” “And how long has it been your property?” “I bought it as soon as it was put up.” “And how long has it been haunted?” I frowned because I disliked to hear this word. “The hose has been talked about for some years now—20 or 30 years,” I replied. The client’s curiosity about the Winchester Mansion was so strong. When I took him on the tour of the estate, he was shocked at how beautiful it was. I had no, however, been able to find a caretaker because you must pay them for living in such a house. I had been trying to get someone to come and occupy it rent free for a time in order to live down its reputation, but often times the tenants would go missing. The client asked if there was any room particularly connected with the ghostly rumours. The grounds have their share of unexplained mysteries.
After a monetary hesitation, I led him upstairs into what was Mrs. Winchester’s principal bedroom. In the inner courtyard, there is a crescent shaped hedge that points to Mrs. Winchester’s bedroom—the one where she died. Coincidence? Maybe…but again, we will never know for sure. “Is this where the ghosts walk?” he asked as he glanced around the empty room. I was plainly annoyed by his insistence. “There are no ghosts, and they do not always anywhere,” I said irritably. I glanced up at the ceiling, and swiftly withdrew my eyes with a nervous tremor. I could tell the client was firmly persuaded that I had been the victim of some spectral horror, though I was anxiously trying to conceal it for fear of frightening him off. “Perhaps I had been not tell you anything,” I said, after considering a moment. “There is a great deal in the influence of suggestion, so it is said. If I were to tell you what the people who have slept in this room have seen, or dreamt they have seen, that might be enough to make you dream the same. Whereas, if a sensible man without any notions came and slept here, one would most likely never be disturbed.” Upstairs I showed him another room which was an unfinished attic space. The prospect from the widow showed hum that it was situated over the haunted chamber. “Is there something wrong with this room as well?” he demanded. “The servants do not like sleeping in it,” was my grudging admission. “It does very well as a boxroom.” The client was very anxious to secure an option to purchase the Winchester Mansion at the end of the month. My next step was to secure some attendance, and to send down some furniture for the many empty rooms which they mystery appeared to cling. All of Mrs. Winchester furniture had been sold at auction.
It took movers six weeks, six truck loads a day, to empty the mansion. Many of them often got lost. I was not very well pleased with the idea of taking the ghosts seriously. However, I knew that there were things in Nature which ordinary rules did not explain. I had seen things myself which could not be accounted for by natural means. I dared not tell the client that there had been a murderer lurking in the mansion ready to spring on potential clients and stab them. Suddenly, we heard a low moan—the moan of a creature in mortal terror, drawn out till it became a muffled scream. The moan was repeated, coming distinctly from the room below us. This is why I did not live having an open house at night. With candles in hand, as we reached the third floor landing the moan was repeated in a more terrible key—the key of horror instead of terror. At the same moment the door of one of the haunted rooms was thrown open, and suddenly Agnus, the maid, appeared on the threshold, with a cloak thrown over her shoulders, and a look of fear and distress on her face. “What is it?” I asked. “Merrill, she has seen something horrible, and I cannot get her to come to.” Without stopping to consider questions of etiquette, I dashed into the room. The gas had been turned full on, and by its light I saw the young lady lying stretched out on a couch at the foot of the bed, her features frozen into expression of one who looks upon some horrid sight, while from her parted lips there issued those appalling sounds which wounded like the stabs of a knife. I caught her by the shoulders and shook her, without making the slightest change in her swoon-like conditions. “Water!” I called out to Agnus, who stood wringing her hands, too dazed to act.
The water was brought, and I dashed half a glass in the face of the sufferer. At first it had no more effect than if she had been dead. Then came a startling change. The moans suddenly ceased, the victim opened her eyes, which showed the dull glassy stare of a somnambulist, and sitting half up, she commenced muttering so quickly and indistinctly that it was difficult to catch the words. “The blood, the blood, the blood, the blood, dripping, dripping, from the read lead in the ceiling, the red leak in the ceiling, in the ceiling, dripping on me, dripping on me, dripping on me!” The words rose into a wild shriek as her blank eyes were turned full on the ceiling overheard, the ceiling between the room she was in and the dressing room the size of three rooms. Involuntarily I looked up and the ceiling did not show the slightest mark. We lifted the unconscious lady and carried her out of the accursed room, and into one adjoining, where we laid her on the floor. Hardly had she passed the doorway of the haunted chamber when the dreadful screams began to die away, and the rigidity of the features to relax. In a short time the trance conditions passed away and we left Merrill to sleep. When she woke in the morning, we told her she had just has a bad dream, but she remembered nothing of what had passed in the night. At her own request, at breakfast, I described to her what had occurred, as minutely as possible. She was profoundly impressed. Of course, the client had bolted out of the house. However, Merrill, said with great conviction, “I am certain that what I saw represents something that actually happened in this house. Dreadful as it sounds, I firmly believe that somebody has been murdered in that attic with the witches cap, and that his blood did drip through the ceiling of the room below, as I saw it last night.”
As soon as the staff left the house, I went straight to a builder’s in the neighborhood, and engaged him to send some men to examine the flooring between two of the haunted rooms. The builder received my order with marked interest. “I knew there was something the matter with that house,” he observed. “It ain’t likely that tenant after tenant would come away sacred without something was wrong. Why, do you know, sir, in the last year since Mrs. Winchester died, I’ve white-washed one ceiling in the house thirteen times!” The builder’s interest led him to accompany his men, a carpenter and a plasterer, to the scene of action. I pointed out that place on the ceiling, as nearly as I could judge it, from which the ghostly dew had appeared to fall. Then men took measurements, and then, proceeding to the attic above, located a spot under the bed I used to sleep in. The bed was quickly removed, the flooring stripped off, and in the space between the joists there was exposed a mass of lime. Both the men, as well as their master, were quick to declare that the lime could not have been left there for no good,” the builder asserted. “If you want somethings hidden away and destroyed, there is nothing better than what lime is when it is fresh. It burns as well as fire, and makes no smoke.” “You mean a dead body?” I said shuddering. “I don’t say nothing about that,” the builder answered, pulling himself up. “It ain’t for me to say what that lime’s been used for. All I say is it wasn’t me that left it there, nor yet my men.” The two men began clearing the stuff away. The volatile element had evidently evaporated long ago. As they struck downward with their tools, one of them went through the plaster of the ceiling below, and a shaft of light came up.
An exclamation from one of the men followed. I bent down and peered into the cavity. On a large beam which here crossed the floor I saw a deep black stain, the stain of long-dried blood! A moment after the carpenter stood suddenly, griped about with one hand amid the woodwork, and drew forth to the light a small sharp stiletto, rusted with the same dismal stain. Nothing more was found. I gave the builder an order to entirely renew the flooring between these two haunted rooms. The most extraordinary part of the story remains to be told. The report of what had taken place having got abroad in the county, the local police came to me to obtain the stiletto, which I had been careful to preserve. By its means they were enabled to unearth a crime which had gone unsuspected till that hour, and to extort a confession from the murderer. Into the details of this terrible case, I do not care to enter. However, it is sufficient to say that the victim had perished while asleep in the attic, and that his blood had actually soaked through the ceiling into the room below, which was that of his murder—the Butler! Later that night, I was alone in the Winchester Mansion. A bright moon was out that night, and I heard a noise like a million soldiers, thrampin’ on the road, so I looked, and the hallway was full of little men, the length of my palm, with gray coats on, and all in rows like one of the regiments; each spoke with a pike on their shoulders and a shield on their arms. One was in front, byway he was the general, walking with his chin up as proud as a peacock. They marched right out the door-to-nowhere and there was another army of men with red coast. The two armies had the biggest fight you have even seen, the grays against the reds.
After looking on a bit, I got excited, for the grays were beating the reds like blazes. And then the sight left my eyes and I remembered no more until morning. I was laying on the floor, in the hallway, where I had seen them, as stuff as a crutch. Typically old castles, deserted graveyards, ruined churches, secluded glens in the mountains, springs, lakes, and caves all are the homes and resorts of fairies, as is very well known on the west coast. The better class of fairies are fond of human society and often act as guardians to those that they love. They are believed to living in the Winchester Mansion to receive the souls of dying and escort them to the gates of Heaven, not, however, being allowed to enter with them. On this account, fairies love graves and graveyards and of course this 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester rifle. They have often been seen walking to and fro among the rooms and gardens. There are, indeed, some accounts of faction fights among the fairy bands at or shortly after a new soul enters the mansion. The question in dispute being whether the soul of the departed belonged to one of the other faction. The amusements of the fairies consist of music, dancing, and ball playing. In music their skills exceed that of men, while their dancing is perfect, the only drawback being the fact that it blights the grass, “fairy-rings” of dead grass, apparently caused by a peculiar fungous growth. Mrs. Winchester used to host fairy balls in her Grand Ball Room, the music for which was furnished by an orchestra which the management had no doubt been at great pains expensive to secure and instruct. All around the fairies would dance like angels the fireflies giving them light to see by, and the moonbeams shinning on the lake for it was light to see by. Even now, staff who have been at the Winchester Mystery House sometimes hear the soft strains of their voices in the distance, and will hurry away least they discover one’s presence and be angry at the intrusion of their privacy.
When in unusually good spirits the fairies will sometimes admit a mortal to revels, but if one speaks, the scene at once vanished, one becomes insensible, and generally finds oneself by the roadside the next morning, with the drudgery of pains in one’s arms and legs and back, that if thirteen thousand devils were after one, one could not stir a toe to save the soul of one, that is what the fairies do be pinching and punching one for coming on them and speaking out loud. Black magic has not changed since the Middle Ages. The term “black art” was then applied to magic because the proficient in it were considered to be in league with the powers of darkness. The term “black magic” refers to the art of producing supernatural effect by direct league with Satan and demons. Frequently those who practice black magic make an actual pact with the powers of darkness, signing their allegiance to the devil in their own blood. This ceremony had come down from the Middle Ages to present-day Europe, where it is practiced in parts of Germany, France, and Switzerland. The ritual of signing an agreement involves a complete sell-out to the devil. Some magic involves the direct solicitation and help of demons, specifically the devil. It is the most terrible and powerful form of occult art, majoring in enchantment for persecution and vengeance, but also employing diabolical powers for defense and healing. An example of this nefarious practice is found in the death spells cast by witch doctors among aboriginal people, such as the Papuans on the island of New Guinea. Enchantment for persecution and vengeance, as well as for defense and healing, is still practiced today, not only in pagan cultures but also in civilized lands where occultism flourishes. Literature on magic was found in the Winchester Mansion and auctioned off with the rest of Mrs. Winchester’s belongings. There were incantations, charms, and spells.
One of the movers, who have never been troubled with psychic disturbances, returned home from taking the items to San Francisco to be auctioned off, and suddenly found himself suffering from acute fear dreams. He had the feeling during sleep that a neighbor lady, the mother of his coworker who was still missing after moving items out of the mansion, was strangling him. The tormented man went to an occultist who told him he was under magic persecution. The neighbor woman was seeking revenge on him for his good fortune in the light of her son’s bad fortune. With the occultist’s help, the terror-dreams creased. (That is why theft from the Winchester Estate is not tolerated. It is said to bring curses on those who remove sacred items without permission or payment.) Then the former mover found himself under a new attack: the neighbor was causing his cattle to die, head after head. The conjurer promised to remedy this new menace. Scraps of paper inscribed with magical formulae were to be mixed with the food of the cattle. The astonishing result was the cessation of the cattle epidemic. In addition to many cases of persecution and self-defense by black magic, occult healing are also common. A local farmer at the Winchester estate went to Mrs. Winchester for counseling and related the traffic results of charming by black magic. The farmer’s son had become paralyzed after an illness. The doctor could not help. However, Mrs. Winchester healed the boy through black magic, so that the paralysis disappeared completely. She had developed this skill after the death of her six-week-old daughter and her husband. Ancient and modern pagan religions, as well as those who subscribe to Christianity, have produced such psychically endowed mediums who have improved their gifts by the study and practice of the magical arts.
From what source people derive their power is not always clear—probably neither to they themselves nor their devotees have ever set themselves the task of unravelling that psychological problem. If they were turned wizards or witches, and indeed they only represented white witchcraft in a degenerate and colourless stage. Their entire time is not occupied with such work, nor, in the majority of cases, do they take payment for their services; they are ready to practice their art when occasion arises, but apart from such moment they pursue the ordinary avocations of rural life. The gift has come to them either as an accident of birth, or else the especial recipe or charm has descended from father to son, or has been bequeathed to them by the former owner; as a rule such is used for the benefit of their friends. Seen from the parapsychological point of view, magic persecution is a mediumistic problem similar to that of materialization. In the same way that a medium can emit energy that can be transformed into the phantasm of a man, so he is able to transform the same energy into the form of an animal. We have on record many cases of the materializations of dogs, cats, frogs, snakes, and even cases where the apparition was half man and half animal. If a phantasm is injured in some way at a spiritistic séance then the medium also suffers in a similar way. The same holds true in the case of animal phantasms. We are thus justified in coming to the conclusion that magic persecution is on the same level as materialization. Many methods of defence magic are based on this fact. If the victim is able to injure the phantasm that is assaulting one, it is reckoned that one has as good won the battle. We have seen then that certain forms of spiritistic offensive and defensive magic are based on materializations.
In 1888, a large black cat was found to be hanging around the Winchester mansion. In one of the cottages, on the estate, a farmer’s wife was about to give birth to a child. The cat would not go away until finally someone threw an axe at it, thereby injuring its leg. Next day it was discovered that an old woman on the estate also hurt her foot. The servants knew this woman to be a master of black magic, and indeed a few days later she took her revenge. On visiting the mother, Ida, of the new-born child, the witch murmured something and at the same time patted the child on the head. Thereafter the child cried continuously for days on end and could not be pacified. It was also discovered that as the child grew up its memory was particularly weak. Afterward the woman had three miscarriages, suffered the early death of her mother and disappearance of her father, but the source of her mental problems was far more spectacular than these mundane tragedies. Using hypnosis, Mrs. Winchester discovered that this mother to a new born had been repressing memories of an horrific past in which she had been an unwilling member of a murderous Satanic cult. Recollections would have convinced many mental-health professionals that she was suffering from pathological delusions. Her “memories” revealed a cult, led by the a monstrous Joris-Karl Huysmans, who indulged in acts of unbelievable brutality in the name of the Devil, such as blood-drinking, and other unspeakable acts. Mrs. Winchester considered the woman to be of nervous debility and easily influenced. When she had the servants cottage searched, they discovered a secret room, holding an apparently sacrificial altar with a wooden dagger suspended above a glass bowl.
In our files, there are about 40 examples involving cats, and almost all of them deal with the same problem, that of a person causing an apparition to appear in the Winchester Mystery House or elsewhere on the estate. Hamilton Howard was once hired for a job on the estate. The young man was on the verge of being dismissed because he very mysterious. He had a fair share of Satanic drawings in the cottage he was allowed to stay in, while working at a farm hand, and he never had meals with the other men. He belonged to a blood drinking cult. This might explain why stories began circulating about the carcasses of cows being discovered on Mrs. Winchester’s farm and other nearby farms drained of blood, with their eyes, lips, and private organ removed. The mystery of where the blood had cone, and how and why these animals had been operated on with seemingly surgical precision, gave birth to stories of Dracula in California and the California Cannibals. Occasionally, starving people have resorted to cannibalism for survival necessity. It is no secret, however, that Mrs. Winchester had her fair share of hauntings. One night, she heard footsteps going from the basement to the attic and then back again. There were also footsteps in the hall and at first, they thought that it was a burglar. Often her staff would search for an intruder. In addition to the footsteps the lights were sometimes turned on, and the gas too. No amount of careful investigation was able to produce any evidence as to the cause of the apparent haunting. One night, Mrs. Winchester had a séance in her Blue Séance Room. The spirit with whom she had made contact started that he had been a Catholic priest who had lived in the house 200 years before she renovated the original farm house and turned it into a mansion. He had murdered his housekeeper and had buried her in the basement. Since then, he had had to haunt the scene of his crime.
When asked in which room he had murdered the housekeeper the table suddenly began to move across the floor. It then hit the door of the room so hard that the wood was chopped. As Mrs. Winchester opened the door, the table rushed into the adjoining room and slid into the corner. In the course of doing this it hit an oak bedstead so hard that it left a permanent impression on it. The spirit was questioned further and when she asked is there was anything that could be done for him, he replied, “Yes, you can pray for me.” Mrs. Winchester did in fact pray for the restless ghost after that, and for a number of years the mansion was no longer haunted. The mansion has been haunted for several generations before its expansion. However, more than one ghost was attached to the property and it became a nexus for spiritual activity. Every person possesses one’s own home spiritually. This possession continues to live on in the house after the departure of the person concerned. Humans do not only leave behind their physical body when they die, but also a spiritual “larva.” When one dies, one leaves a spiritual complex behind that has an independent existence in the astral World, and which sometimes only disintegrates centuries later. This spiritual complex is supposed to cause the phenomen on ghost and apparitions. For some, the real of the dead is not so much a place as a state of being, and some think that there are times, as for example at one’s deathbed, when this realm of the dead becomes visible to our Earthly eyes. The idea that human beings have to remain in the mortal sphere after their death until they are freed from all the thing that once tied them to the World is widely accepted. This idea is similar to the popular opinion that criminals and other such people have to haunt the place of their crime until they are taken out of this sphere to a higher or lower level of existence. Ghosts do not occur only in connection with spiritism, but we have dealt with them here since the problem arose.
Winchester Mystery House
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I Have Enough Trouble Conjuring Myself Out of Bed in the Morning
Returning from her global trip, Mrs. Winchester arrived in San Francisco, California USA and finding this area seldom subject to thunderstorms, she purchased an unfinished farmhouse four miles west of San Jose. She hired an architect, a foreman and an army of carpenters and work began; architect and foremen quit the first day. The story of their fate was told by one generation to another, but in course of ages the natural cause, well known to the unfortunates at times of the calamity, was lost to view, and the story of the disaster began to assume supernatural features. There was a legend that Mrs. Winchester’s estate contains not only her mansion, but village of Victorian cottages. In the center of the hundred of acres of land was a fountain guarded by spirits, fairies, elves, and leprechawns, who guarded the Winchester Estate. Things went well, the fairies and the people on the estate sharing the benefits of Mrs. Winchester’s farmland, which included orchards of apricots, plums, and walnut trees to supplement Mrs. Winchester’s income. Mrs. Winchester’s financial resources were virtually unlimited; upon her husband’s death, she received $20,000,000 (2022 inflation adjusted $692,780,722.89) in cash and 777 shares of stock in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Upon her mother-in-law’s death in 1897, Mrs. Winchester received 2,000 more shared, which meant she owned under fifty percent of the company’s capital stock. This provided her with an income of $1,000 (2022 inflation adjusted $34,639.04) a day—back in the days before income taxes. The combination of her wealth and her eccentric building project gave rise to many rumors in the local community. It was the biggest house that most people had ever seen in their lives with, at the time, over 500 rooms, and 125,000 square feet, four stories high, and a nine-story observation tower.
On the Winchester Estate, there lived two woodcutters; Albert Jennings Fountain and Louis Le Prince. At the time of which I am speaking, Albert was an old man; and Louis, his apprentice, was a lad of twenty years. Every day they went together to a forest situated about a mile from the estate, which was still on Mrs. Winchester’s vast landholdings. On the way to that forest there used to be a wide lake to cross; and there was a boat. Albert and Louis were on their way home, one very cold evening, when a great rain storm overtook them. They reached the boat; and they found that the boatman had gone away, leaving the boat on the other side of the lake. It was no day for swimming; and the woodcutters took shelter in a cottage in the forest. There was a fire place in the cottage and a couple of bedrooms. At first they did not feel cold, but they made a fire anyway. They fastened the door, and lay down to rest with the blankets over them. They thought the storm would be over soon. Albert almost immediately fell asleep; but the boy, Louis, lay awake a long time, listening to the awful wind, and the continual slashing of the rain against the door. The lake was roaring; and the cottage made creaking noises. It was a terrible storm; and the air was every moment becoming colder, even though the fire was blazing in the fireplace; and Louis shivered under his blankets. However, at last, in spite of the cold, he too fell asleep. The door to the cottage was forced open; and, by the moonlit rain, he saw a woman in the room—a woman in all white. She was bending above Albert, and blowing her breath upon him—and her breath was like a bright white mist. Almost in the same moment she turned to Louis, and stopped over hum. He tried to cry out, but found that he could not utter any sound.
The white woman bent down over him, lower and lower, until her face almost touched him; and he saw that she was very beautiful—though her eyes made him afraid. For a little time she continued to look at him—then she smiled, and she whispered: “I intended to treat you like the other man. However, I cannot help feeling some pity for you—because you are so young. You are a pretty boy, Louis; and I will not hurt you now. However, if you ever tell anybody—even Mrs. Winchester—about what you have seen this night, I shall know it; and then you will regret it. Remember what I say!” With these words, she turned from him, and passed through the doorway. Then he found himself able to move; and he sprang up, and looked out. However, the woman was nowhere to be seen; and the rain was pouring hard. Louis closed the door, and secured it by fixing several billets of wood against it. He wondered if the wind had blown it open—he though that he might have been only dreaming, and might have mistaken the gleam of the moonlit rain in the doorway for the figure of a white woman: but he could not be sure. He called Albert, and was frightened because the old man did not answer. He put out his hand in the dark, and touched Albert’s face, and found that it was ice! Albert was stark and dead…by dawn the storm was over; and the boatman returned to his station, a little after sunrise, he found Louis lying senseless beside the frozen body of Albert. Louis was promptly care for, and soon came to himself; but he remained a long time ill from the effects of the cold of that terrible night. He had been greatly frightened also by the old man’s death; but he said nothing about the vision of the woman in white.
As soon as he got well again, he returned to his calling—going alone every morning to the forest, and coming back at nightfall with bundles of wood for Mrs. Winchester’s Hall of Fires. Because of the mansion’s immense size, it contained forty-seven fireplaces and seventeen chimney. One rambling section in particular, the Hall of Fire, was designed to produce as much heat as possible—perhaps to ease Mrs. Winchester’s extreme arthritis. In addition to many widows that let the sunlight stream through, the three adjoining rooms have four fireplaces and three hot air registers from the coal furnace in the basement. One evening, in December of the following year, as Louis was on his way to the Winchester mansion, he overtook a girl who happened to be travelling by the same road. She was a tall, slim young lady, very good-looking; and she answered Louis’s greeting in a voice as pleasant to the ear as the voice of a song-bird. Then he walked beside her; and they began to talk. The girl said her name was Theodosia Alston; that she had lately lost both her parents; and that she was going to visit Mrs. Winchester for tea, who might help her to find a situation as a servant. Albert soon felt charmed by this unusual girl; and the more that he looked at her, the more beautiful she appeared to be. He asked her whether she was yet betrothed; and she answered, laughingly, that she was free. Then, in turn, she asked Louis whether he was married, or pledged to marry; and he told her that, although he had only a windowed mother to support, the question of an “honourable daughter-in-law” had not yet been considered, as he was very young. After these confidences, they walked on for a long while without speaking; but you know the saying, “When the wish is there, the eyes can say as much as the mouth.”
By the time they reached the village, they had become very much pleased with each other; and then Louis asked Theodosia to rest awhile in his cottage on the estate. After some shy hesitation, she went there with him; and his mother made her welcome, and prepared a warm meal for her. Theodosia behaved so nicely that Louis’s mother took a sudden fancy to her, and persuaded her to speak to Mrs. Winchester about a job in the mansion. And the natural end of the matter was that Mrs. Winchester was very pleased with Theodosia and hired her right away. Later on Louis and Theodosia were married. She proved a very good maid and daughter-in-law. When Louis’s mother came to die—some two years later—her last words of affection and praise for the wife of her son. And Theodosia bore Louis thirteen children, boys and girls—handsome children all of them, and very fair of the skin. Mrs. Winchester’s staff thought Theodosia a wonderful person, by nature different from themselves. Most of the women on the estate aged early; but Theodosia, even after having become the mother of thirteen children, looked as young and fresh as on the day when she had first come to the estate. One night, after the children had gone to sleep, Theodosia was sewing by the light of Tiffany lamp; and Louis, watching her said: “To see you sewing there, with the light on your face, makes me thin of a strange thing that happened when I was a lad of twenty. I then saw somebody as beautiful and white as you are now—indeed, she was very like you.” Without lifting her eyes from her work, Theodosia responded: “Tell me about her…Where did you see her?” Then Louis told her about terrible night in the Victorian cottage in the forest—and about the White Woman that had stopped above him, smiling and whispering—and about the silent death of Albert.
And Louis said: “Asleep or awake, that was the only time that I saw a being as beautiful as you. Of course, she was not a human being; and I was afraid of her—very much afraid—but she was so white! Indeed, I have never been sure whether it was a dream that I saw, or the Ghost Woman of the Winchester. Theodosia flung down her sewing, and arose, and bowed above Louis where he sat, and shrieked into his face: “It was I-I-I! Theodosia it was! And I told you then that you would regret this if you ever said one word about it! But for those children asleep there, I would curse you right this moment! And now you had better take very, very good care of them; for if every they have reason to complain of you, I will treat you as you deserve!” Even as she screamed, her voice became thin, like a crying of winds—then she melted into a bright white mist that spired to the roof-beams, and shuddered away through a chimney. Never again was she seen. Soon after there were reports of graves being opened, and bodies stolen. Reports of rash cattle mutilations, and killing of two hundred dogs, cats, and pigs in that area. When Louis went back to the cottage, he found a fire containing animal bones, along with a crude Satanic altar, as a group of youth were interrupted conducting a conjuring spell. There were Satanic pentagrams on the walls. Some years later, a woman at the Winchester mansion believed that another desired to steal the butter she had just churned, flew in a passion, assaulted her and threw her down, breaking her arm in the fall. The woman was burnt, not because she was a witch, but in the belief that the real servant had been taken away and a fairy changeling substituted in her place; when the latter was subjected to the fire it would disappear, and the servant would be restored. Thus the underlying motive was kindness, but on, how terribly mistaken!
By chance there came onto the Estate an angel who had been sent from Heaven to observe the servants of the Winchester mansion and note their piety. In the garb and likeness of a man, weary and footsore with travel, the angel spied the castle (mansion) from the hills above the lake, came down, and boldly took a night’s lodging in Mrs. Winchester’s mansion. Mrs. Winchester asked him, “Where would you like to sleep, beautiful creature?” The angel pointed to a spot nearby the parlor, told Mrs. Winchester he would be happy there and to build and prosper; then, as the awe-stricken widow kneeled before him, his clothing became white and shining, wings appeared on his shoulders, he rose into the air and vanished. And one night, on a day of the thunder and lighting and big rain there did a ghost come into Mrs. Winchester’s mansion. Objects were thrown through the air and furniture moved around by its. A heavy oak wardrobe moved six feet across the room. Some knocking and scratching noises were heard in the house, and again objects were seen to fly through the rooms for no apparent reason. It was observed that the object sometimes travelled in a rectangular course which is physically impossible. These events grew even more complicated, and things began to appear and disappear in both closed rooms and containers. Mrs. Winchester was very annoyed as her bed started levitating. A lady came to her that night while she was elevated, she was dressed in white, with a wreath on her head, and said Mrs. Winchester was in danger. She then told the maid, “If you receive this woman’s pension-book without taking off her clothes and cleaning them, and putting out her bed and cleaning up the house, you will receive a curse. The ravings of this creature were accepted as gospel truth.
A torrent of rain fell from the sky, and drowned several of the farmers, and a lake was formed over the spot where they stood when the curse was pronounced. And sometimes, they say, when the mansion is quite still, one may hear the groans of the lost souls that where once chained at the bottom. A lot of supernatural activity happened on the estate than many cannot explain. Mrs. Winchester may have been trying to confuse evil spirits. There were no budget ceilings or deadlines to meet. This resulted in many of the 600 rooms, and features being dismantled, built around, or sealed over. Some rooms were remodeled many times. However, because so many rooms were redone, and astounding 160 rooms still remain today. This naturally resulted in some peculiar effects, such as stairs that lead to the ceiling, doors that ho nowhere and that open onto walls, and chimneys that stop just short of the roof! Mrs. Winchester once had some silverware stolen and she suspected a young mad who worked for her and who already had quite a bad reputation. Mrs. Winchester turned to a spiritist for help. This man was both a clairvoyant and a medium, and he also possessed the remarkable powers of materialization and dematerialization. This spiritist went with the woman into the back yard of her house and there put himself into a trance. Suddenly they were disturbed by a strange noise from the roof of the house, and then the stolen silverware fell from the roof on to a pile of hay beside the house. Mrs. Winchester had no idea how this was accomplished. One might be able to find a natural explanation for this occurrence, as for example someone throwing the stolen articles out of the skylight at that moment. It could not have been the maid though, for she had already been given notice. However, it could have been one of the other employees with whom she had been friendly, and who may have received the stolen articles from her.
The word “divine” is derived from the Latin divinus, meaning “divinely” inspired and pertaining to a deity (divus).” Thus a diviner is one who practices divination. One processes to predict future events or to reveal occult things by supernatural means. Divination is a specialized for of magic. In magic, demonic agencies are resorted for performing superhuman feats. In divination, magic is used to foresee the future. Divination relates to magic as prophecy relates to miracle. Both divination and prophecy imply special knowledge. In divination it is unclear if it is godly or demonic. However, magic is supposed to be Satan’s imitation of God’s miracles. Genuine fortune-telling or divination assumes the existence of superhuman spiritual beings. It also assumes that these beings possess knowledge which humans do not have and that they are willing, upon certain conditions that are familiar to diviners, to transmit this information to humans. In ancient times, the convictions prevailed widely that not only oracles but omens of all types were given to humans by the gods. In the cases of supernatural invention, the various forms of fortune-telling were real divinatory phenomena. Divination supposedly invites the activity of demon spirits because it seeks secret knowledge. Rock music has an incessant throbbing beat, the same beat that people in primitive cultures use in their demonic rites and dances. If the beat is monotonous enough it can induce a state of hypnosis. The fundamentalists and their allies attributed powers to rock music that were inherently supernatural, sorcery wrapped in a thin veil of pseudoscientific gibberish. Since its inception by British bands Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, heavy metal has always had a heady whiff of brimstone about it. As the genre took off, and mental bands have been filling stadiums with fans, the Devil increasingly symbolized their bombastic form of rebellion.
Satan translated from Hebrew means “accuser” or “adversary,” and that was precisely the role Satan played in Judaic angelology before the Persian influences. Satan was at the time, at the very most, slightly rebellious and resentful, perhaps wishing to work evil but forces to promote good due to the overriding influence of God. His function was to accuse humans before God, expose their infidelity, and then bring about their punishment—but only under the auspices of God Himself. To some, Satan symbolizes man’s evil inclinations. The sign of the devil’s horns—index and little fingers extended from a fist—replaced the peace sign as youth culture’s salute. Many may not know this, but AC/DC stands for “Away from Christ/the Devil Comes,” while KISS is “Kids in the Service of Satan.” Many artists are accused of producing backward, or “back-masking,” music on records. The back-masking myth contends that messages recorded backwards and camouflaged with music can enter a person’s mind without them knowing it, as a subliminal form of brainwashing. Like the hypnotic effects of the “druid beat,” many considered it as sorcery. In 1986, evangelist Jim Brown of Ohio led 75 young people in the mass burning of records containing the theme tune to Mr Ed, the popular TV comedy show about a talking horse. If the song “A Horse is a Horse” was played backwards, Mr. Brown explained, the message “Someone sung this song for Satan” could be heard. Some evangelist believe that all rock music was “a carefully masterminded plan instigated by Satan himself.” However, in dealing in the extraordinary phenomena that undulate between the natural and the supernatural, the physical and superphysical, some discount any theory that postulates evil supernaturalism. Yet, to be fully meaningful, the scientific studies in parapsychology must take into consideration the reality of the spirit World of evil (Satan and demons).
To limit the scientific to the natural plane of existence is to omit some of the data responsible for certain natural effects. The result of such study is a tendency to explain away rather than objectively explain supernatural events and to end up with learned theories that ignore part of the evidence. This is where current parapsychological studies stand. They are, however, exceedingly valuable in focusing scientific interest on the supernatural realities behind occultism. If they would recognize the influence of evil supernaturalism in psychic activities, they could advance to great achievements. As an ingredient of idol worship, magic goes back to antiquity. By virtue of their multiplicity and limited knowledge and power, the gods (demons) of paganism are incapable of establishing stability and security in society. This deficiency forced both gods and men to make use of magic—an inactive power independent of god and men, but which could be activized by the assistance of incantations and rituals in order to accomplish supernatural deeds. Magic—like divination—is the divinely forbidden art of bringing about results beyond human power by recourse to superhuman spirit agencies (Satan and demons). In the widest sense of this definition, divination is but a species of magic employed as a means of securing secret and illegitimate knowledge, especially of the future. If magic is genuine and not ere deception or hocus-pocus, it must be personal. Living, intelligent spirit beings become the real agents. Humans, by incantations and ceremonies, actually influence and even control these spirit agents. The activity of such superphysical agents of evil produces the extrasensory phenomena of magic, that is, occurrences the transcend the normal operation of physical law and the perception of human’s five senses. This is how the Winchester Mystery House became known as “the house built by the spirits.”
The Winchester Mystery House is open all weekend until 5PM! Ghostly tales are bountiful at Sarah Winchester’s Mystery House. Come explore the beautiful & bizarre Winchester Estate.
Kitchen Dramas—Are they Arms Race or Saving Civilization as We Know it?
One a person experiences the full impact of the conflict in consciousness, one turns in an accusing rage on the target object. During the past several years, I have spent a good deal of my time blaming television for many of the more obvious dysfunctions from which Western culture—and especially America—is now suffering. It has been pointed out to me that I do this because I am by nature a negative person, always ready to condemn what is wrong rather than to praise what is right. Several of my students have even gone so far as to observe that had I lived during the period of incunabula—during the first fifty years of the printing press—I would have burdened everyone with a long list of depressing prophecies about the dangers of the machine-made book and universal literacy. However, my students are only half right. Assuming I had the brains to see what was happening in the year 1500, I would certainly have warned the Holy See that the printing press would place the word of God on every Christian’s kitchen table, and, as a consequence, the authority of the Church hierarchy would be put in jeopardy. Had I been granted a papal audience, I would have warned the Pop that armed with a printing press, Martin Luther was more than a malcontent priest suffering from a bad case of constipation. The printed word made him a serious revolutionary. I might also have warned the local princes that their days were numbered, that printing would give form to a new idea of nationhood which would make local potentates obsolete. And if the Brotherhood of Alchemists had allowed me to give the keynote address at their annual convention, I would have told them to go into another line of work, that printing would give great impetus to inductive science and that alchemy would not stand against the glare of publicly shared scientific knowledge. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
I would also have told any wandering bards who came my way that within a hundred years their trade would lie in ruins, that tribal lays and epic poetry were doomed, and that they would be wise to urge their trainees to turn their talents to writing essays and reading novels. Now, not every one of these prophecies foretells a bad thing. That is why I said my students are only half right. Whether or not a prophecy is negative depends on your point of view. For example, since most of you are Lutherans, you probably would have cheered the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire. The Catholics of those times would, of course, have mourned it passing. In any case, there are some changes brought about by new media benefit some, harm others, and to a few do not make much of a difference. This is as true of television as it was of the printing press or any other important medium, although in the case of television there are very few indeed who are not affected in one way of another. For most of you here, television will provide a gratifying career. On the other hand, and in the long run, television may bring an end to the careers of schoolteachers, since school itself was an invention of the printing press and must stand or fall on the issue of how much importance the printed word will have in the future. New media break up old knowledge monopolies; indeed, create new conceptions of knowledge, even new conceptions of politics. If not for television, Joe Biden, for example, would not be President of the United of America, which is good for him and the interests he represents, but not so good for the poor and vulnerable. However, television can people good as it creates a true theater of the masses. For example, between the years 1948 and 1958, approximately 1,500 fifty-two-minute plays were performed “live” on American television. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
“Live” means that these plays were performed at the precise moment they were seen by the television audience, a condition which since the advent of videotape and the widespread use of film has become increasingly rare; “fifty-two minutes” describes the actual running time of the play, eight minutes of the hour being subtracted for commercial messages, the listing of credits, and publicity for the next week’s play. There is no doubt that American television’s finest dramatic moments were provided by fifty-two-minute hours, particularly by such weekly series as the Kraft Television Theater (1947-58), the Philco-Goodyear Playhouse (1948-50), and the Studio One (1948-57). These programs began by presenting adaptations of classic and established contemporary novels but by 1950 had shifted to original dramatic work. By that time, such producers and directors as Worthington Miner, Fred Coe, Delbert Mann, Arthur Penn, and John Frankenheimer has assembled about them several gifted young writers who were prepared to devote their collective talents to a serious exploration of television’s artistic resources. Included in that group, among others, were Reginal Rose, Tad Mosel, Robert Alan Aurthur, Horton Foote, Rob Serling, J.P. Miller, and Gore Vidal. None, however, wrote more fittingly for television than Paddy Chayefsky, whose name, along with Edward. R. Murrow’s, symbolizes what romantics call “the golden age of television.” Mr. Chayefsky was to the “original” television drama what Mr. Ibsen was to the “social drama,” which is to say that he was one of the first creators and certainly its most distinguished one. Like Mr. Ibsen, he achieved an almost perfect union of form and content. Critics have observed, for example, that the effects that Mr. Ibsen achieved in A Doll’s House and Ghosts were a function not only of his themes, with which audience were certainly familiar in 1879 and 1881, but also of the stark, simple, and economical form in which he stated them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Social dramas had been written before Mr. Ibsen, but it remained for him to discover the form for dramatizing social problems. Mr. Chayefsky, of course, did not write for the stage behind a proscenium arch, viewed from a distance in a darkened theater. He wrote for a seventeen-inch screen situated in a family living room, on which the only colors were varying shades of gray. He also had to present his story, from start to finish, in fifty-two minutes, and he could make two assumptions with absolute assurance: that his play would be interrupted at least twice for commercial messages, and that he would have to attract his audience instantly or lose much of it to other channels. He knew, too, as did his director, Delbert Mann, that the picture on the television screen is considerably cruder in visual definition than that on a motion-picture screen. So Mr. Chayefsky wrote his plays in anticipation of the audience’s observing the players in almost unrelenting “close-up.” Mr. Chayefsky realized that some of these technical-aesthetic conditions could create, as could perhaps no other medium, a sense of utter and absolute reality; could create the illusion that what the audience was seeing was not a mere play but life as seen through a seventeen-inch, nearly square hole. Beginning with a play called Holiday Song, which dealt with a rabbi’s re-examination of one’s faith in God, Mr. Chayefsky created a series of dramas that have often been characterized as “small” masterpieces, sometimes referred to as “kitchen” dramas, since much of the action seemed to take place in family kitchens. In any case, they were plays about unexceptional situations. The plots were uncluttered, and undaring, and highly compressed. They had few unexpected turns, little action, no treachery, no perversion, and no heroic gestures (in the traditional sense). #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Mr. Chayefsky’s stories were “small” very much as Sherwood Anderson’s stories are small. The setting was New York, not small-town Ohio, but like Mr. Anderson, Chayefsky explored in economical but meticulous detail the agonizing problems of small people. And thus he elevated the status of both the problems and the people who suffered them. In fact, Mr. Chayefsky once remarked that “Your mother, sister, brothers, cousins, friends—all of these are better subjects for drama than Iago.” He was talking, of course, about television drama. Mr. Chayefsky’s most known play, Marty, tells the story of an unmarried, inarticulate butcher who is attacked to a sensitive but homely woman. Marty’s friends attempt to dissuade him from seeing the woman because she is, in their words, “a dog.” His mother, who fears being abandoned resents the woman bitterly. Against a backdrop of such universal themes as man’s need of loving and being loved, his fear of living alone, and his need to communicate, Mr. Chayefsky pursued his “small” story with persistent literalness, concluding with an equally “small” crisis in which Marty decides, against the protests of his friends and family, to phone the woman and ask her for a date. On the stage of in a novel, the plot would be too flimsy to carry much dramatic weight. When the play was adapted for the movies, it required more “movement” or action and the addition of at least one subplot. On the television screen, however, they play was an artistic triumph, producing a disturbing and edifying illusion of intimacy. Perhaps no other medium is better suited to the “slice of life” drama than television, a fact that is apparently well known to Ingmar Berman. Although television was invented in the 1920s, it did not exist for any practical purposes until after World War II. It is easy to forget that advertising, at least on the scale we have come to know it, barely existed before then either. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
In 1946, advertisers spent about $3 billion. For the previous two decades, advertising expenditure had been fairly constant at about that level. By 1975, however, the national advertising budget had grown by 1,000 percent to $30 billion. In 2021, the national advertising budget reached $82 billion (expected to around $95 billion by the end of 2022). In that same year the television advertising budget has skyrocketed to $68 billion, and could be approximately $80 billion by the end of 2022. As you see, most of the increases in advertising. However, what is significant is that within only tend years of its effective inauguration, television was absorbing 60 percent of all advertising spending and driving hundreds of newspapers, magazines and radio stations out of the market. A symbiotic relationship developed. Advertising financed television’s growth. Television was the greatest delivery system for advertising that had ever been invented. We could call it love at first sight, except in this case, the match may have been prearranged. If you are fortunate enough to recall, think back to the days immediately after World War II. Although I was only ten in 1945, I remember the expectant and uncertain feeling of the times very well. Everyone was relieved that the war was over and was expecting things to get back to normal, but what was normal? Memories of the Depression loomed. I remember listening to my parents talk with their friends on those backyard summer evenings of 1945, and I could feel the fear. Like most ordinary people, my parents know that the war had alleviated the Depression. During the war, American industrial capacity, lying fallow only a few years before, had actually expanded to build the military machine. My father’s own business was an example. Now there were no more uniforms to make, and no more tanks. The war had given men jobs as soldiers and women jobs as factor workers. Full employment had practically become a reality. Now Johnny was marching home again, jobless. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
If this was the talk among ordinary people, one can only imagine what was said in industrial boardrooms and at the Department of Commerce. With industrial capacity and capital investment expanded as they were, the consequences of a drop in production could make the 1930s look like golden years. A long-standing criticism of capitalism—that it can stave off cyclic depression only through war-seemed about to be confirmed. Suddenly in 1946, government and industry started making identical pronouncements about regearing American life to consume commodities at a level never before contemplated. It was not that military production was about to be abandoned. Even now it remains the single most important factor in the United States of America’s economy. However, in 1946 with the war just over, it was not clear that the decline in military spending would be as temporary as it turned out to be. Some new offsetting factor was needed. Thus, a new vision was born that equated the good life with consumer goods. An accelerate economy, continuing booming expansion of wartime, added to a new consumer ideology achieved the greatest economic growth rate in the country’s history from 1946 to 1970. To make such growth possible, both ends of the transformation process described previously had to be hyped up. First, we needed to insure an abundant supply of raw material to convert into commodities. This led to a burst of American investment overseas as well as to enormous assistance programs for sympathetic “underdeveloped” countries. Often we secured our supply by the creation of client governments propped up with military assistance. Raising anticommunism to the status of a holy war in the 1940s and the 1950s formed the political foundation for these military and economic programs and underlay the assertion of the patriotic virtues of foreign investment. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
At the other end of the transformation equation, an accelerated movement of commodities into consumers’ homes was critical. People had to be convinced that life without all these products was undesirable and unpatriotic. It was time to forget the rationing of the war years and consumer for your country. Advertising and television were the dynamic duo that would rededicate the consuming American. Advertising’s ability to create a passionate need for what is not needed was already well established. Since economic growth and a consumer economy had to be based upon selling far more commodities than were needed to meet actual needs, economic growth depended upon advertising. Television, which had been lying around in mothballs since the 1920s, was dusted off and enlisted as the means to deliver the advertising lifestyle fast, right into people’s homes and heads. Quick to spot any new technology that could assist their urgent cause, big advertisers immediately invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing this idle sales tool. And so advertising gave birth to television, and television have advertising a whole new World to conquer. Together they made possible an enormous, though temporary, economic bonanza. Can you recall the TV advertising of the 1940s and 1950s? Smiling, happy people. Scrubbed children. Housewives showing their impossibly clean wash. Smiling junior-executive husbands emerging from their new cars, greeted at the picket fence by their clean, cheerful families? The happy mowing of the lawn. The happy faces reflected off the polished toasters? The nuclear family was idealized to a greater extend than ever before, because the family was the ideal consumption unit. Women had to get out of those factories and overalls and back into little pink dresses in the kitchen. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Those returning soldiers needed jobs. Rosie the Riveter gave way to June Allyson. Separate family units maximized production potential. Private homes. Private cars. Two cars. Private washing machines. Private television sets. Within a few years, the World started changing. The battery-operated lawn mower I saw on television one day appeared on my lawn the next week. So did the car. The whole neighborhood started looking like a television commercial. The woods near my house in disappeared and were replaced by hundreds of identical versions of my house. Neighborhoods everywhere started looking like each other. Freeways replaced country roads. Shopping centers replaced corner markets. Pavements covered everything. “Prosperity,” “security,” “happiness,” studded ads and presidential speeches alike. This incredible outpouring of commodities, this entire revamping of landscape, this filling of houses with gadgets was supposed to constitute some kind of Latter-Day Saints Kingdom of God. That is what everyone was thinking, saying, and believing. It was what made America America. One of my high school teachers during the 1950s told my class that it was America’s commitment to a consumption economy that made our country different and better than all others. He told us that by expanding our economy, we could soon make everyone wealthy. America was already the World’s only classless society, he said. Workers and managers were equal partners in a glorious process benefiting everyone. In America everyone was equal. Our standard of living made it that way. Everyone could have a car. Everyone could have a business. We are not developing nations, where the water is dangerous to drink, and there are few rich people and everyone else is poor and all of them wished they had what we had. Because of this prosperity, we did not have to deal with the chaotic times of psychological and spiritual upheaval nor have actual fear among people of witchcraft, sorcerers, and others who claimed to know how to consort with the demons. The medieval period had died, and the modern period was born. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
A few years later at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, I learned how and why this commodity life and the economic growth it produces was supposed to be so good for absolutely everyone. I learned that they had been talking about in these boardrooms and at the Department of Commerce. It was called the “trickle-down theory.” It goes more or less like this: Industrial expansion, rapid economic growth and the consumption economy benefit everyone. The theory—which is the basis of Keynesian American economics—has it that when people buy more and more commodities, they produce more profits for industry, enabling it to expand. When industry expands, more jobs result. This puts more money into circulation, enabling people to buy more commodities, expanding profits again, yielding more investments, more jobs and starting the cycle around on another turn. This is an oversimplified process, which leaves out such variables as savings, borrowing, and so on. The way it is presented here is more or less the way it is translated through the media and through out educational system into popular understanding: a beautiful circle of activity, everyone helping everyone else, labor and management rowing the boat together, all serving the common good and growing endlessly. It explained the patriotic urgency of people spending more and more on commodities. The benefits would “trickle down” to everyone in this country, including those at the bottom on the pyramid. Jobs, money, prosperity, happiness, security, democracy, equality were all lumped together as inevitable results of this cycle. Most people believe in this “trickle-down-theory” still. Presidents get elected based on whether they can convince the public that they will stimulate the beautiful cycle. President Trump was elected for doing it and he proved his word. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The tickle-down theory is the nice simple kind of economic model that can be sold to a mass population removed from any deeper understanding of how things really work. Trying to come to grips with economic nuance is for most of us no easier than trying to understand how much nuclear radiation is “safe.” Who knows? The “experts” know. Like every other organizing model in our society, economic processes have been removed from personal participation, appropriated into a nether World of flow charts, financial analyses, and circle graphs. Like scientific and technological systems, once economic systems reach a certain size and complexity, they can be controlled only by forces far outside the grasp of the individual and community. One explanation of them sounds as plausible as another. In the absence of a really thorough training in economics—a training which itself supports many arbitrary and fantastic theories—this trickle-down model of the benefits of a consumer society sounds perfectly valid. It certainly seemed valid for a little while. People had jobs, the economy was growing, and homes were filling up with every more intricate gadgets. Only now, thirty years after the trip was launched, can we see the process from the vantage point of joblessness, inflation, bankruptcy and default, and realize that something was terribly wrong somewhere. In fact, it was a fantasy. It was packaged and sold to us like the seven-piece matching living-room sets on the television screen. Buy now, pay later when you are richer than you are now. However, when later came, very few of us were richer (and that usually happens to everyone). It turned out that the pursuit of all those happy goodies did not produce happy people; it produced isolated, frustrated, alienated people. More important, the economic benefits did not trickle down to create some egalitarian democracy. The benefits tickled up. That is why President Trump also used the tickle charger. Not only did he cut taxes, but also infused the less affulent with supercharged unemployment benefits, and helped the veterns, disabled, retirement and others reciveing government transfer pays by sending the a large cash sum of money, and then a few other payments for less, and he also supported businesses get through the pandemic. So the economy was stimulated and had a few trickle charges to keep the market flowing well. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The democratic revolution succeeded in extending formal self-government and opportunity to nearly everybody, regardless of birth, property, or education. However, it gave up the ideal of the town meeting, with the initiative and personal involvement that alone could train people in self-government and give the practical knowledge of political issues. The actual result has been the formation of a class of politicians who govern, and who are themselves symbolic front figures. Correspondingly, the self-determination won by the American Revolution for the regional states, that should have made possible real political experimentation, soon gave way to a national conformity; nor has the nation as a whole conserved its resources and maintained its ideals. The result is a deadening centralism, with neither local patriotism nor national patriotism. The best people do not offer themselves for public office, and no one has the aim of serving the Republic. Typical is the fate of the hard-won Constitutional freedoms, such as freedom of speech. Editors and publishers have given up trying to give an effective voice to important but unpopular opinions. Anything can be printed, but the powerful interests have the big presses. Only the safe opinion is proclaimed and other opinion is swamped. The liberal revolution succeeded in shaking off onerous government controls on enterprise, but it did not persist to its goal of real public wealth as the result of free enterprise and honestly informed choice on the market. The actual result is an economy dominated by monopolies, in which the earnest individual entrepreneur or inventor, who could perform a public service, is actively discouraged; and consumer demand is increasingly synthetic. Conversely, the Jeffersonian ideal of a proud and independent productivity yeomanry, with natural family morals and a co-operative community spirit, did in fact energize settling the West and providing the basis for our abundance. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
However, because it has failed to cope with technological changes and to withstand speculation, “farming as a way of life” has succumbed to cash cropping dependent on distant markets, and is ridden with mortgages, tenancy, and hired labor. Yet it maintains a narrow rural morality and isolationist politics, is a sucker for the mass culture of Madison Avenue and Hollywood, and in the new cities (exempli Gratia, in California, where farmers have migrated) is a bulwark against genuine city culture. Constitutional safeguards of person were won. However, despite the increasing concentration of state power and mass pressures, no effect was made to give to individuals and small groups new means easily to avail themselves of the safeguards. The result is that there is no longer the striking individuality of free men; even quiet nonconformity is hounded; and there is no asylum from coast to coast. Fraternity—this short-lived ideal of the French Revolution, animating a whole people and uniting all classes as a community, soon gave way to aa dangerous nationalism. The ideal somewhat revived as the solidarity of the working class, but this too has faded into either philanthropy or “belonging.” Brotherhood of races—the Civil War won formal rights for African Americans, but failed to win social justice and factual democracy. The actual result has been segregation, and fear and ignorance from various people of all races. However, in the 2020s, that stigma is fading. Pacificism—this revolution has been entirely missed. Acceleration not only makes facts obsolete but blunts some of the key tools we use when we think. Analogy provides a case in point. It is virtually impossible for us to think without relying on analogies. This “thought-tool” is based on identifying similarities in two or more phenomena and then drawing conclusions from one to apply to the other. Doctors, we noted, will often say “the heart is like a pump” and then describe its “values” and other components in mechanical terms. This model helps them conceptualize and treat the heart. Often this process yields powerful results. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
However, once similarities are identified, it is typically taken for granted that the similarities continue. And in slow-change eras, they may do so for long periods. In today’s hyper-change environment, however, once-similar things also change and very often become markedly dissimilar, often making conclusions based on the analogy false and misleading. To deal with today, therefore, we need not only new knowledge but new ways to think about it. Yet too many economists, consciously or otherwise, cling to the belief that economics is analogous to physics. This notion arose centuries ago, when Newtonian ideas about equilibrium, causation and determinism dominated that science. Since then, of course, physicists have drastically revised their views about these matters. However, many economists still base their findings on crude Newtonian assumptions. Trained to think in industrial terms, many find it difficult to grapple with the odd character of knowledge—the fact that it is non-rival and non-depletable, that it is intangible and thus hard to measure. It is only when we set today’s failures of economics alongside the looming crisis in science that we begin to gauge their true significance. For together these two fields have the greatest—or at least the most direct—impact on how we create wealth. And both are heading for transformation. When it comes to relationships, a university teacher of liberal arts cannot help confronting special handicaps, a slight deformity of the spirit, in the students, ever more numerous, whose parents are divorced. I do not have the slightest doubt that they do as well as other sin all kinds of specialized subjects, but I find they are not as open to the serious study of philosophy and literature as some other students are. I would guess this is because they are less eager to look into the meaning of their lives, or to risk shaking their received opinions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
In order to live with the chaos of their experience, they tend to have rigid frameworks about what is right and what is wrong and how they ought to live. They are full of desperate platitudes about self-determination, respect for other people’s rights and decisions, the need to work out one’s individual values and commitments, etcetera. All this is a thin veneer over boundless seas of rage, doubt, and fear. Young people habitually are able to jettison their habits of belief for an exciting idea. They have little to lose. Although this is not really philosophy, because they are not aware of how high the stakes are, in this period of their lives they can experiment with the unconventional and acquire deeper habits of belief and some learning to go along with them. However, children of divorced parents often lack this intellectual daring because they lack the natural youthful confidence in the future. Fear of both isolation and attachment clouds their prospects. A large measure of their enthusiasm has been extinguished and replaced by self-protectiveness. Similarly, their open confidence in friendship as part of the newly discovered search for the good is somewhat stunted. The Glauconian eros for the discovery of nature has suffered more damage in them than in most. Such students can make their disarray in the cosmos the theme of their reflection and study. However, it is a grim and dangerous business, and more than any student I have known, they evoke pity. They are indeed victims. An additional factor in the state of these students’ souls is the fact that they have undergone therapy. They have been told how to feel and what to think about themselves by psychologists who are paid by their parents to make everything work out as painlessly as possible for the parents, as part of no-fault divorce. If ever there was a conflict of interest, that is it. There are big bucks for therapists in divorce, since the divorces are eager to get back to persecuting the wretches who smoke or to ending the arms face or to saving “civilization as we know it.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Meanwhile, psychologists provide much of the ideology justifying divorce—exempli gratia, that it is worse for kids to stay in stressful homes (thus motivating the potential escapees—that is, the parents—to make it as unpleasant as possible there). Psychologists are the sworn enemies of guilt. And they have an artificial language for the artificial feelings with which they equip children. However, it unfortunately does not permit such children to get a firm grip on anything. Of course, not every psychologist who deals with these matters simply plays the tune called by those who pay the piper, but the givens of the market and the capacity for self-deception, called creativity, surely influence such therapy. After all, parents can shop around for a psychologist just as some Catholics used to shop for a confessor. When these students arrive at the university, they are not only reeling from the destructive effects of the overturning of faith and the ambiguity of loyalty that result from divorce, but deafened by self-serving lies and hypocrisies expressed in a pseudoscientific jargon. Modern psychology at its best has a questionable understanding of the soul. It has no place for the natural superiority of philosophic life, and no understanding of education. So children who are inclined to believe that philosophy live in a less enlightened state and have a long climb just to get back up to the cave, or the World of common sense, which is the proper beginning for their ascent toward wisdom. They do not have confidence in what they feel or what they see, and they have an ideology that provides not a reason but a rationalization for their timidity. These students are the symbols of the intellectual-political problems of our time. They represent in extreme form the spirit vortex set in motion by loss of contact with other human beings and with the natural order. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
However, all students are affected, in the most practical everyday way, unaware that their situation is peculiar, because their education does not give them perspective on it. Now, Web sites routinely collect detailed data on visitor behavior, and those statistics underscore just how quickly we leap between pages when we are online. Over a period of two months in 2008, an Israeli company named ClickTale, which supplies software for analyzing how people use corporate Web pages, collected data on the behavior of a million visitors to sites maintained by its clients around the World. It found that in most countries people spend, on average, between nineteen and twenty-seven seconds looking at a page before moving on to the next one, including the time required for the page to load into their browser’s window. German and Canadian surfers spend about twenty-one second, Indians and Australians spend about twenty-four seconds, and the French spend about twenty-five seconds. On the Web, there is no such thing as leisurely browsing. We want to gather as much information as quickly as our eyes and fingers can move. That is true even when it comes to academic research. As part of a five-year study, a group from University College London examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium. Both sites provided users with access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. The scholars found that people using the sites exhibited a distinctive “form of skimming activity” in which they would hop quickly from one source to another, rarely returning to any source they had already visited. They would typically read, at most, one or two pages of an article or book before “bouncing out” to another site. “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense,” the authors of the study reported; “indeed there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The shift in our approach to reading and research seems to be an inevitable consequence of our reliance on the technology of the Net, and it bespeaks a deeper change in our thinking. There is absolutely no question that modern search engines and cross-referenced websites have powerfully enabled research and communication efficiencies. There is also absolutely no question that our brains are engaged less directly and more shallowly in the synthesis of information when we use research strategies that are all about “efficiency,” “secondary (and out-of-context) referencing,” and “once over, lightly.” As people are falling in love with the Internet, reading and its mediums is reminiscence of some of Capellanus’s more universal rules. He believed that love is always in a flux, either growing or diminishing. Making it public usually kills it. Its very nature as next to impossible to consummate is also its most powerful stimulus, and during its fleeting lifetime, jealously will sharpen the intensity of the country lovers feelings. Courtly love is obsessive and best endured by constant contemplation of the beloved. By the fourteenth century, an anonymous poet was refining the notion of love. In his “Ten Commandments of Love,” he advocated faith or honesty, attentiveness, discretion, patience, secretness, prudence, perseverance, pity, measure or moderation, and mercy. The lover in Chaucer’s “Complaint to His Lady” is so excessively long-suffering that he swears to obey his lady in whatever she dies, would rather die than offend her, and begs only for a drop of her grace. Here is his version of courtly love: “But I, my lyf an deeth, to yew obeye, and with right buxom herte, hooly I preye, as [is] your moste pleasure, so doth by me; and therfor, swete, rewe on my peynes smerte, and of your grace, graunteth me some drope; for ells may me laste no blis no hope, no dwelle within my trouble careful herte.” #RandolpHarris 18 of 19
Courtly love was agonizing and admirable, the source of chivalrous virtue. For these same reasons, it was often chaste, both because the logistics of consummation defeated the would-be lovers and also because, in some manifestations, courtly love was inherently pure. As one troubadour sang, “Out of love comes chastity.” As enormous but logical stretch puts courtly love together with the secret feudal societies that adopted then institutionalized a collective devotion to an unattainable woman who inspired their members to deeds of greatest daring and valor. The woman? The Virgin Mary, whose immaculate conception the early medieval Church had just begun to celebrate. The most famous of these secret societies was the Knights Templar, excommunicated knights who swore oaths of poverty, obedience, and chastity and dedicated themselves to the (newly immaculately conceived) Virgin Mary. Unlike their secular counterparts, however, whose courtly love involved personal grooming as a token of respect to their lady loves, virginal or otherwise, the Knights of the Templar who were abstinent, according to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, “never combed, rarely washed, [and wore] their beards bushy, sweaty, and fusty, stained by their harness and the heat. Centuries of literature and lives imitating art transformed courtly into romantic love, intense and unattainable, a phenomenon too high—mindedly impractical to survive marriage and the trials of time, routine, and old age. The precious instant of recognizing the beloved, the stylized pursuit, the exchange of extravagant words penned on scented paper, the self-indulgently obsessive meditating on each other—these became the characteristic of this new kind of love. Attraction based on pleasures of the flesh fueled it, just as it had the courtliest of loves, but in this case as well, intimate passions dominated the lover’s agenda. As literature, romantic love flirted and seduced as it inflamed and seared, titillating its aficionados with its stately ritual of gallant chase, heartsick suffering, rapturous encounters, gushing epistles, all in the name of profoundest if evanescent love. Sometimes this love was chaste by intention. Even when it was not, pleasures of the flesh was usually overpowered by complications of plot and character that, depending on your point of view, either reprieved the lovers from the banality of pleasures of the flesh or condemned them to its nonconsummation. Centuries of courtly and romantic love challenged thousands of lovers. Ultimately, most emerged from its clutches with their virtue intact. If our World is made up of such changes, as these, is it strange that my heart is so sad. prophets. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Cresleigh Homes
Luxurious outdoor living requires porch space AND a spot for the littlest members of the household to enjoy the sunshine, too! 😍
Our home at #MillsStation Residence 4 is the largest home in the community, but that extra playhouse definitely gives it an edge. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-4/
The lounge off the entry amplifies this social core; optional bedroom enhances the choices. This design lends a little Victorian formal touch to the arrival for family and guests.
The beautiful quartz counter top island has an optional built-in quartz tablecounter, which allos plenty of island seating.
The abundant cabinet space highlights the kitchen, while gathered windows and sliding door generate seamless connectivity to the home’s outdoor entertainment and leisure spaces.
The Cathedral of the Fallen Angel
During a Connecticut thunderstorm, Mrs. Winchester’s husband and baby lost their lives in a tragic fire. The distracted widow turned to spiritualism and was advised to take a trip around the World. This she did, visiting mediums, spiritualists and wizards in Europe and India. Foretelling her future, one seer warned her of all the countless thousands of departed souls slain by her husband’s rifles; she was told to plan a castle and continue its building indefinitely because as long as it was under construction she would live; cessation would prove immediately fatal. In the afternoon of Tuesday, July 10, 1888, the inhabitants of Santa Clara Valley, were greatly excited by the sudden appearance, far out in the fields, of a mansion where none was known to exist. The people of the town were farmers and knew the area well. The day before, they had been out on their horses and rode over the spot where the unusual mansion appeared, and where certain that the locality was the best farmland in the valley. And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, for the day was clear and the mansion could be seen as plainly as they saw the hills to the south. It was massive. The estate was surrounded by a six-foot hedge, densely wooded; here and there were deep shadows in its sides indicating glens heavily covered with undergrowth and grasses. At one end the mansion rose almost precipitously from the from the land; at the other, the declivity was gradual; the thick forest of the estate gave way to smaller trees, these to shrubs; these to green meadows that finally melted into the valley. It was patrolled by a pack of ferocious hellhounds, plus, of course, Mrs. Winchester’s staff of armed bodyguards. Hundreds of people from all over California came to investigate; when, as they neared the spot, the beautiful but bizarre mansion became dim in outline, less vivid in color, and at last vanished entirely, leaving the wonder-stricken farmers to return, fully convinced that for the first time in their lives they had really seen this enchanted mansion. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
For once there was a topic of conversation that would outlast the day, and the enchanted Winchester mansion passed from lip to lip, both story and the mansion grew in size till the latter was little less than a continent, contain a labyrinth mansion with towers and steeples, stupendous mountain range views, fertile valleys, and wide spreading plains; while the former was limited only be the patience of the listener, and embraced the personal experience, conclusions, reflections, and observations of every woman, man, and child in the valley who had been fortunate enough to see the mansion, hear of it, or tell where it had been seen elsewhere. This is the invariable history of its appearance. No one had ever been able to come close to its grounds, but it had been so often seen on the west coast, that a doubt of its existence, if expressed in the company of farmers, will at once establish for the sceptic a reputation for balderdash of the common affairs of every-day life. In Santa Clara, for instance, the Winchester mansion had been seen by hundreds of people, while many more could testify to its appearance near San Francisco. In San Jose, all the population saw it a few years ago, and shortly before, the villagers of Oakland, saw it, if not by themselves, at least by some of their friends. The Enchanted Winchester mansion, it should be stated that its resemblance to a Victorian/Gothic castle is sometimes very close, and shows that the “enchanter” who has it under a spell knows her business, and is determined to keep her mansion for herself changes its appearance as well as its location in order that her property may not be recognized nor appropriated. At night, passers-by heard ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. Mrs. Winchester’s arrival was a sensational event. They talked about Mrs. Winchester! Gossiped would be a more fitting word, gossip no one claimed to like-but everyone enjoyed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Talk begat rumor and as the years passed and new towers and gables rose behind the six-foot hedge of Llanada Villa, the rumors grew to established legend. Populations said it just appeared out of nowhere two years ago. Sure two twins could not be like her, and when it appeared in Santa Clara, the mansion would move around to different locations. It had also appeared in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, but it went no further than the Bay Area. Concerning Mrs. Winchester’s mansion, legendary authorities differ on many material points. Some believed that its architecture was due to geometry or some other enchantment, while opponents of this materialistic view were inclined to the opinion that the mansion was not what it seemed to be, that was to say, not Earth, wood, and stones, like as those most people see, but only an illusion that evil spirits or the devil created to deceive the town. Public opinion on the west coast was therefore was strongly divided on the subject, unity of sentiment existing on two points only; that the island had been seen, and that there was something quite out of the ordinary in its appearance. People believe that it would come and go in the night like a light in a bog, and when you do see it, you can see through it. An old fisherman of San Francisco called Ebenezer Thornton knew all about the enchanted Winchester mansion, having not only seen it himself, but, when a boy, learned its history from a “fairy man,” who obtained his information from “the good people” themselves, the facts stated being therefore, of course, of indisputable authority, what the fairies did not know concerning the doings of supernatural and enchanted circles, being not worth knowing. He said that the Winchester mansion was full of temples and round towers all covered with gold and silver till they shone so one could not see it for the brightness. There was a great enchantress in the mansion, and she had all kinds of secrets, and knew where to dig for a pot of gold. She built the castle in one night, and could make herself disappeared when she wanted and could take any shape she pleased. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Ebenezer when on to say that Mrs. Winchester’s husband gave her a charm before he died to use when she was in mortal danger, he also left her a ton of diamonds and millions of dollars. She was a pretty smart woman. One night, Mrs. Winchester was awakened by a noise in one of the kitchens. She tole down, and found her old housekeeper, Madge, with half a dozen of her kidney, sitting by the fire drinking whisky. When the bottle was finished, one of them cried, “It’s time to be off,” and at the same moment she put on a peculiar red cap, and added:–“By yarrow and rue, and my red cap, too, hie over to England!” and seizing a twig she soared up the chimney. As the latter was making her preparations Mrs. Winchester rushed into the kitchen, snatched the cap from her, and placing herself astride of her twig uttered the magic formula. She speedily found herself high in the air over the Irish Sea, and swooping though the empyrean at a rate unequalled by the fastest airplane. They rapidly neared the Welsh coast, and espied a castle afar off, towards the door of which they rushed with a frightful velocity; Mrs. Winchester closed her eyes and awaited the shock, but found to her delight that she had slipped through the keyhole without hurt. The party made their way to the cellar, where they caroused heartily, but the spirits proved too heady, and somehow Mrs. Winchester was captured and dragged before the lord of the castle, who sentenced her to be hanged. On her way to the gallows an old woman in the crowd called out in Irish, “Ah, the enchantress herself, Sarah Winchester alanna! Is it going to die you are in a strange place without your magical charm?” She reached into her pocket and held it in her hand. On reaching the place of execution she was allowed to address the spectators, and did so in the usual ready-made speech, beginning, “Good people all, a warning take by me.” But when she reached the last line, “My parents reared me tenderly” instead of stopped she unexpected added, “By yarrow and rue, good-bye I love you,” with the result that she shot up through the air, to the great dismay of all beholders. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Magic persecution. Genuine magic is the art of bringing about results beyond human powers through the enlistment of supernatural agencies. Black magic deliberately involves the devil and demons, and the resulting enchantment is used for persecution and revenge. A spiritistic circle of twenty members furnishes a good example. Working with black magic, these spiritis experimented to see if they could cause psychic harm or even illness in people they disliked. A strong medium of this occult group chose a minister as a target and vowed to afflict and eliminate her. The minister suffered a nervous breakdown and was unable to work for several months. Some phenomena must be eliminated from the spiritistic magic field. In the psychiatric realm, for example, many schizophrenics claim to be magically persecuted. In reality this is only a symptom in the course of psychotic disease. Eliminating all such cases, there are still large-scale, genuine phenomena, especially in areas where occultism has flourished for many years. One common form of magic persecution is beatings by an invisible attacker. Parapsychology also sees magical persecution as a mediumistic problem in the sphere of materializations. Strong mediums (when under demon control) send out energy with which to build up human phantasms and are also able to transform this energy into animal forms, including dogs, cats, frogs, snakes, or human bodies with animal heads, etcetera. This explains the bizarre spiritistic persecution through phantoms in the form of various animals of human bodies with nonhuman heads. These animals bite, scratch, or otherwise torment their victims. Examples, of these occult phenomena abound in areas where the black arts are practiced. However, such occurrences are denied by many intellectuals. Often peasants and country people, especially in Europe, know more about magic than university graduates, who claim to swindle or hocus-pocus trickery are used instead of occult powers. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Magic defense. Magic defense enlists supernatural agencies to counteract or unto the mischief wrought by magic persecution. Various kinds of spells, charms, or incantations are employed. In spiritistic séances it is an established fact that injuries inflicted upon a phantasm are sustained by the medium, even in the case of animal phantasm. Many defensive customs develop to combat this threat since magical persecution involves materialization. If a victim can injure an aggressive phantasm one has won the struggle. Many in the West wanted to remove Satan from the equation of black magic and demonic aspects of life. However, more serious discontent came from Satanists whose concerns were completely the opposite. Anton LaVey did not believe in Satan as a literal entity—He was a name for the dark, brutal aspects of humans and nature, as well as a symbol for the potency of humans’ untrammeled will. The Church of Satan was not a religion, and did not worship deities. For many, however, this was not enough. They wanted a real Devil to worship—belonging to a dark, mysterious coven, in the traditional gothic style, seemed much more appealing than being part of some cultural and social elite. Some believed that Satan, although thrown out of Heaven, was reinstated as the son of God and is directly in contact with him. If any coven members offends, they are a bit evil now and again, given corporal punishment, or is expelled from one’s coven and cursed. However, this is said to be for the members own good. They really believe in love, the sanctity of woman as the child bearer and procreator of life, and in worshipping Satan their master. Aleister Crowley was grooming Kenneth as his successor. Mr. Grant’s work examined lost gods, strange spiritual traditions and forbidden symbols, often leading him to some disreputable spiritual neighborhood where devils and demons might be expected to reside, like the Winchester Mystery House. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
If you have a lot of magic in you, you can be a Satanist and have no idea. As if they are the mafia or something, sometimes those who are suspected of being Satanists have their offices broken into like they are the Mafia or something. The Church of Satan, however, has saved lives because it has given them power, power to come out and be themselves when traditional churches would not accept these people. The Dark Lord, was said to be an anthropoid but faceless. Looking at the concept as a diamond, much like the ones left to Mrs. Winchester by her husband William Wirt Winchester, Satan or Lucifer was just other facets of that diamond, purely ways of achieving workings which encompassed the whole. So, if you are particularly drawn to the gothic Satanist current, fine, use rituals based around that. In the Temple of Darkness one could equally have Satanists, Setians, or followers of other paths, the principle being that the whole thing is a psychodrama anyway. Magic is basically the Western version of yoga. Everything that happens in magic happens first in your head. Set, the Egyptian god of evil, was an older deity than Satan. Satan derives from Set. Set, who is defined as the Prince of Darkness, is a force about which you could say, “As we are now, he once was.” When you die your force can survive. Magic is mind enhancing. When one perishes or passes, instead of going into the cosmic whole—becoming one with the goddess or whatever—by sheer force of the will the existence of that magician’s mind can be sustained. This is the whole idea of the Temple of Set, and they use the word “xeper,” meaning “to become,” to define this. Spiritistic cults. If you did not know, Mrs. Winchester was a spiritists. Spiritism is considered a form of Christianity, practically in all civilized countries. A typical meeting consists of hymns, prayer, and a sermon as in a Christian service. The sermon, however, is allegedly given by a spirit from the other World, through a medium. These cults are said to be affected by the “doctrines of demons” and press into the supernatural World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
However, even born-again Christians often cannot differentiate between the spiritual and the psychic-demonic when under the spell of doctrinal errors, particularly those concerning the work of the Holy Spirit. The result can sometimes be confusion, division, and promotion of certain spiritual gifts accredited to demons. We have sometimes seen people end up suffering from mediumistic psychosis. Quite a number of patients who have suffered serious psychic disturbances through the misuse of such practices have become split personalities. The spirits which they called, confused them. One who tries to discover the promises of the other side through superstition endangers oneself to fall a prey to the dark side of one’s psyche. However, many Christians say that spirits of loved ones cannot be brought back from the dead, and the it is just a demon impersonating them. Yet, consider the case of Saul’s visit to the spiritistic medium at Endor (1 Samuel 28.3-25). Samuel’s spirit was actually brought back from the spirit World when the medium Endor tried to contact him. Yet, God brought the spirit back. The Lord stepped. Still one must be careful because many become enslaved and oppressed by occult powers and become victims of various manifestations of spiritistic phenomena. While overwhelming evidence from Christian counseling confirms the fact that spiritistic complicity serious damages the believer’s spiritual life, adherents of Buddhism, Island, or even false cults of Christianity sense no ill effects. Spiritists claim that spiritism has strengthened their belief in life after death and deepened their religious devotion. Psychiatry, psychology, and medical treatment are not sufficient for the healing of the whole human. The gospel of Christ and the liberating power of the Word of God can fully heal body, soul, and spirit. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Mrs. Winchester had a pain in her right forearm. At first the pain was treated as rheumatism but one day the Mrs. Winchester made the interesting discovery that the pain would suddenly subside if she wrote a letter. Having discovered this, whenever the pain became unbearable, she would always take a pencil and begin to write in order to alleviate the pain. However, after a period of time the Mrs. Winchester when go into her Blue Séance Room, where she developed a writing compulsion. She would write things down that she could normally speaking never have written. Often times, this is where the blueprints from her mansion came from. Added to this the written material on each occasion turned out to be some form of religious treatise. Mrs. Winchester took the articles to her minister to let him examine them. He was surprised at their intellectual content. Mrs. Winchester had become a spiritistic writing medium. The parapsychologist would merely see in this example a psychic automation involving the expression of subconscious thoughts. It is true that we need not consider the Mrs. Winchester to be in direct contact with the dead, or putting it another way we need not assume that this is a case of direct demonization, but God could be speaking to her. This is why some believe Mrs. Winchester to be a prophetess. During one of her spiritistic seances, as it happened, a phantasm did in fact appear during a séance. However, it is still not necessary to believe that a spirit really did appear in this instance. Depth psychology suggest that a phantasm can be produced in the following way. The medium through emitting energy causes matter to form as a result of this. In nuclear physics we have the idea that matter is nothing more than concentrated energy. Einstein’s formula E=M.c^2 illustrates this relationship. A comparison can also be drawn from another branch of physics. It is found that both particles and anti-particles are formed at the cathode of an X-ray tube when a current is passed through it at a very high voltage. Energy in the form of electro-magnetic waves is in this way transformed into matter. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
The next step in the mediumistic process involves the unconscious tapping of the information from some source or other, and then the newly formed matter is physically shaped according to this information. The final step is made when the phantasm is brought under the control of the medium. Looking at it from this point of view there is no necessity to believe that the dead person has in any way been disturbed. An animistic explanation based on the powers of the subconscious is thus sufficient to explain the phenomenon of materialization. Yet this is not to say that the rationalistic explanation does justice to the facts of the case. The problem is not as simple as that. However, we do not have the time to delve further into the scientific side of the issues. We have, on many occasions witnessed a disintegration of the personalities of both mediums and participants where materializations have taken place. In addition to this in every case where a person has frequently taken part in spiritistic séances, there is some kind of reaction, even if it is not immediately notice or if there is no manifestation—something happens. There are also people who are able to practise the excursion of the soul. Spiritists affirm that people can send out an astral body from their material body, and commission it to do whatever they ask. Perhaps that was the case when Mrs. Winchester appeared in another country? Spiritism haunts the dark jungle of human aberration. During a séance as the Winchester mansion, Mrs. Winchester noticed that time was passing somewhat wearily. She could hear an occasional thud, thud. Some time must have elapsed before she became, dimly at first, and then distinctly, aware of a bluish phosphorescent emanation from a skeleton. This seemed to rise above it like a faint smoke, which gradually gained consistency, took form, and became distinct; and she saw before her the misty, luminous form on an unclothed man, with wolfish countenance, prognathous jaws, glaring at her out of eyes deeply sunk under projecting brows. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Although she thus descried what she saw, it gave her no idea of substance; it was vaporous, and yet it was articulate. Indeed, she could not say for sure if she saw this apparition with her eyes, or whether it was a dream-like vision of the brain. Though luminous, it cast no light on the wall of the Blue Séance Room; if she raised her hand, it did not obscure any portion of the form presented to her. Then she heard: “I will tear you with the nails of my fingers and toes, and rip you with my teeth.” “What have I done to injure and incense you?” she asked. No word was uttered by either of them; no word could have been uttered by this vaporous form. It had no material lungs, nor throat, nor mouth to form vocal sounds. It had but the semblance of a man. It was a spook, not a human being. However, it proceeded through the walls, odylic force which smote on the tympanum of her mind or soul, and thereon registered the ideas formed by it. So in a like manner Mrs. Winchester thought her replies, and they were communicated back in the same manner. If vocal words had passed between them neither would have been intelligible to the other. No dictionary was ever compiled, or would be compiled, of the tongue or prehistoric man; moreover, the grammar of the speech of that race would be absolutely incomprehensible to humans now. However, thoughts can be interchanged without words. When we think we do not think in any language. It is only when we desire to communicate our thoughts to other humans that we shape them into words and express them vocally in structural grammatical sentences. The beasts have never attained to this, yet they can communicate with one another, not by language, but by thought vibrations. Mrs. Winchester knew as she conversed with him that she was not speaking to him in English, nor in French, nor in Latin, nor in any tongue whatever. Moreover, when she used the words “said” or “spoke,” she meant no more than that the impression was formed by her brain-pan or the receptive drum of her soul, was produced by the rhythmic, orderly sequence of thought-waves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
When, however, she expressed the words “screamed” or “shrieked,” she signified that those vibrations came sharp and swift; and when she said “laughed,” tht they came in a choppy, irregular fashion, conveying the idea, not the sound of laughter. “I will tear you! I will rend you to bits and throw you in pieces about this mansion!” shrieked this demon man. Mrs. Winchester remonstrated, and inquired how she had incensed him. However, yelling with rage, he threw himself upon her. In a moment she was enveloped in a luminous haze, strips of phosphorescent vapour laid themselves about her, but she received no injury whatever, only her spiritual nature was subjected to something like a magnetic storm. After a few moments the spook disengaged itself from Mrs. Winchester, and drew back to where it was before, screaming broken exclamations of meaningless rage, and jabbering savagely. It rapidly cooled down. “Why do you wish to ill me?” She asked again. “I cannot hurt you. I am spirit, you are matter, and spirit cannot injure matter; my nails are psychic phenomena. Your soul you can lacerate yourself, but I can effect nothing, nothing.” “Then why have you attacked me? What is the cause of your impotent recement?” “Because you are the heiress to the Winchester Rifle, and I lived eight thousand years ago. Why are you nursed in the lap of luxury? Why you enjoy your comforts, a civilization that we new nothing of? It is not just. It is cruel on us. We have nothing, nothing, literally nothing, not even lucifer matches!” Again he feel to screaming, as might a caged monkey rendered furious by failure to obtain an apple which he could not reach. “I am very sorry, but it is no fault of mine.” “Whether it be your fault or not does not matter to me. You have these things—we had not. Why, I saw you just now strike a light on the sole of your boot. It was done in a moment. We had only flint and ironstone, and it took half a day with us to kindle a fire, and then it flayed our knuckles with continuous knocking. No! we have nothing, nothing—no lucifer matches, no commercial travellers, no Benedictine, no pottery, no metal, no education, no elections, no chocolat menier.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
“How do you know about these products of the present age, here, buried one hundred feet of soil for eight thousand years?” “It is my spirit which speaks with your spirit. My spook does not always remain with my bones. I can go up; rocks and stones and earth and your labyrinth mansion heaped over me do not hold me down. I am often above. I am in the gasolier overhead. I have seen your servants plough the fields. I have seen a bottle of Benedictine. I have applied my physical lips to it, but I could taste, absorb nothing. I have seen commercial travellers there, cajoling the patron into buying things he did not want. They are mysterious, marvellous beings, their powers of persuasion are little short of miraculous. Why do you think of doing with me?” “Well, I propose first of all photographing you, then soaking you in gum Arabic, and finally transferring you to a museum.” He screamed as though with pain, and grasped: “Do not! do not do it. It will be torture insufferable.” “But why so? You will be under glass, in a polished oak or mahogany box.” “Do not! You cannot understand what it will be to me—a spirit more or less attached to my body, to spend ages upon ages in a museum with fibulae, triskelli, palstaves, celts, torques, scarabs. We cannot travel very far from our bones—our range is limited. And conceive of my feelings for centuries condemned to wander among glass cases containing prehistoric antiquities, and to hear the talk of scientific men alone. Now here, it is otherwise. Here I can pass up when I like into your mansion, and can see the maid and butlers cleaning, the roses and trees growing, the farmers working the field and the magnificent glow of your fine estate. Give me life. There is a sort of filmy attachment that connects our psychic nature with our mortal remains. It is like a spider and its web. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
“Suppose the soul to be the spider and the skeleton to be the web. If you break the thread the spider will never find its way back to its home. So it is with us; there is an attachment, a faint thread of luminous spiritual matter that unites us to our Earthly husk. It is liable to accidents. It sometimes gets broken, sometimes dissolved by water. If a black beetle crawls across it it suffers a sort of paralysis. I have never been to the other side of the of your mansion, I feared to do so, though very anxious to see your architecture and furniture.” “This is news to me,” replied Mrs. Winchester. “Do you know of any case of rupture of connection?” Yes,” he replied. “My old father, after he was dead some years, got his link of attachment broke, and he wandered about disconsolate. He could not find his own body, but he lighted on that of a young female of seventeen, and he got into that. It happened most singularly that her spook, being frolicsome and inconsiderate, had got its bond also broken, and she, that is her spirit, straying about in quest of her body, lighted on that of my venerable parent, and for want of a better took possession of it. It so chanced that after a while they met and became chummy. In the World of spirits there is no marriage, but there grow up spiritual attachments, and these two got rather fond of each other, but never could puzzle it out which was which and what each was; for a female soul had entered into an old male body, and a male soul had taken up its residence in a female body. Neither could riddle out of which each gender was. You see they had no education. However, I know that my father’s soul became quite sportive in that young woman’s skeleton. Each generation makes some discovery that advances civilization a stage, the next enters on the discoveries of the preceding generations, and so culture advances stage by stage. Man is infinitely progressive; even the brute beast is.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
At that moment, Mrs. Winchester heard a shout—saw a flash of light. The construction workers had pierced the barrier. A rush of fresh air entered. She staggered to her feet. She felt dizzy. Kind hands grasped her. She was dragged forth. Brandy was poured down her throat. When she came to herself, she said, “Thank you. Talking with spirits can be terrible dreadful. When you are trying to summon one, souls get crossed and the one you are seeking may not cross through. They are so desperate to find a medium to communicate with.” As an ingredient of idol worship, magic goes back to antiquity. By virtue of their multiplicity and limited knowledge and power, the gods (demons) of paganism are incapable of establishing stability and security in society. This deficiency forced both gods and men to make use of magic—an inactive power independent of gods and men, but which could be activized by the assistance of incantations and rituals in order to accomplish supernatural deeds. Because of widespread denial of the reality of supernatural power—both divine and demonic, confusion abounds concerning the nature of magic. The history of magic is replete with extraordinary extrasensory phenomena that involve the spirit realm and every phase of the natural World as well, including human beings, animals, plants, and inorganic matter. Spirit-rapping, apparitions, ghosts, moving of furniture, and playing of musical instruments by invisible hands, stones falling from a ceiling, magical killing of cattle and blighting of crops, etcetera, are just a few of the weird occurrences that have happened at the Winchester Mystery House in its 134 years. However, there have also been beautiful supernatural events such as apparitions getting married, giant spirits of light in the shape of a man peering out guests, and on occasion, even rainbows and angels have appeared. Not all spirits or evil or angry, some or loving and welcoming. Few of thousands of annual transient guests are disappointed for here one finds visible truth even stranger than all the weird Mystery House features. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Winchester Mystery House
Beautiful weather calls for a walk around Sarah’s iconic gardens ⛲️🪴Open 10AM – 5PM this weekend!
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle , or who were jealous of its wealth 👻
And a Hair of His Head Shall Not Fall to the Ground Unnoticed
We cannot go to others with what we have received, saying: This is what needs to be known, this is what needs to be done. We can only go and put to the proof in actions. And even this is not what we “ought to” do: rather we can—we cannot do otherwise. This is the eternal revelation which is present in the here and now. I neither know of nor believe in any revelation that is not the same in its primal phenomenon. Joseph Smith returned to Independence in April, 1832, to help the Saints in their conflict with the pioneer Missourians, who did not like the people from the East. The day after his arrival, Joseph called a conference of the Saints in America. One of the first items of business was to vote to acknowledge Joseph Smith as “president of the high priesthood,” or president of the church. Provision was later made for two counselors to the president, making three in the Presidency. A revelation was received at this time in which the Lord said: “I give unto you directions how you may act before me, that it may turn to you for your salvation. I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say, but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise. American must increase in beauty, and in holiness…America must arise and put on her beautiful garments. Therefore, I give unto you this commandment, that ye bind yourselves by this covenant. And you are to be equal, or in other words, you are to have equal claims on the properties, for the benefit of managing the concerns of your stewardships, every man according to his wants and his needs, inasmuch as his wants are just. And all this for the benefit of the church of the living God, that every man may improve upon his talent, that every man may gain other talents; yea, even an hundredfold, to be cast into the Lord’s storehouse, to become the common property of the whole church, every man seeking the interest of his neighbor, and doing all things with an eye single to the glory of God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
“Make unto yourselves friends with the mammon of unrighteousness, and they will not destroy you. Leave judgment alone with me, for it is mine and I will repay. Peace be with you; my blessings continue with you, for even yet the kingdom is yours, and shall be for ever if you fall not from your steadfastness.” After preaching several powerful sermons and visiting and encouraging the Saints, Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, and Newell K. Whitney left Independence for Kirtland, where they arrived in June. During this same month the first issues of the paper, the Evening and Morning Star, was published at Independence. It was a joyous treat for the Saints in Kirtland to receive a copy of this paper. Joseph and Sidney Rigdon spent much of their time on the work of correcting the Scriptures during the summer and fall of 1832. Two revelations were given during this period giving instruction on the priesthood in the church and containing many glorious promises. The Lord praised the Saints for their hard work which had been done by much sacrifice and under unfavorable conditions. The Lord explained the purposes of the two priesthoods, the Aaronic and the Melchisedec. The people were instructed to accept the ministry of men who are called to the priesthood. Jesus Christ, the Lord said: “All they who receive this priesthood receiveth me, saith the Lord, for he that receiveth my servants receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth my Father, and he that reciveth my Father receiveth my Father’s kingdom.” Helpful instruction was given in this revelation: “You shall live by every word that proceedeth forth from the mouth of God. For the word of the Lord is truth, and whatsoever is truth is light, and whatsoever is light in Spirit, even the Spirit of Jesus Christ. And the Spirit giveth light to every man that cometh into the World; and the Spirit enlightenth every man through the World, that hearkeneth to the voice of the Spirit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
“And everyone that hearkeneth to the voice of the Spirit, cometh unto God, even the Father. Whoso cometh not unto me is under the bondage of sin; and whoso recieveth not my voice is not acquainted with my voice, and is not of me; and by this you may know the righteous from the wicked.” The elders were told they should travel without money or provisions—“pure or scrip” were the exact words used—and Jesus promised: “And any man that shall go and preach this gospel of the kingdom, and fail not to continue faithful in all things, shall not be weary in mind, neither darkened, neither in body, limb or joint; and an hair of his head shall not fall to the ground unnoticed. And they shall not go hungry, neither athirst. Therefore take no thought for the morrow, for what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed. For consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin; and the kingdoms of this World, in all their glory, are not arrayed like one of these; for your Father who art in Heaven, knoweth that you have need of all these things. Therefore, let the morrow take thought for the things of itself. Neither take ye thought beforehand what ye shall say, but treasure up in your minds continually the words of life, and it shall be given you in the very hour that portion that shall be meted unto every man. Whoso receiveth you receiveth me, and the same will feed you, and clothe you, and give you money. And he who feeds you, or clothes you, and gives you money, shall in no wise lose his reward.” A little son, whom they named Joseph Smith III, was born to Emma and Joseph on November 6, 1832. This baby was to have an important part in the work of the Lord later. An important revelation was given on December 27, 1832. The Saints were commanded to keep the laws of God. The Lord said: “He who is not able to abide the law of a celestial kingdom, can not abide a celestial glory; and he who can not abide the law of terrestrial kingdom, can not abide a terrestrial glory; he who can not abide the law of a telestial kingdom, can not abide a telestial glory; therefore, he is not meet for a kingdom of glory. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
“And if your eye be single to my glory, your whole bodies shall be filled with light, and there shall be no darkness in you, and that body which is filled with light comprehendeth all things. Therefore, sanctify yourselves that your minds become single to God, and the days will come that you shall see him. Continue in prayer and fasting from this time forth. And I give unto you a commandment, that you shall teach one another the doctrines of the kingdom. Call your solemn assembly, as I have commanded you; and as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning even by study, and also by faith. See that ye love one another; cease to be covetous; learn to impart one to another as the gospel requires; cease to be idle; cease to be unclean; cease to find fault one with another. Cease to sleep longer than is needful; retire to thy bed early, that ye may not be weary; arise early, that your bodies and your minds may be invigorated. Pray always, that you may not faint until I come.” Provision was made in this revelation for establishing a “school of the prophets,” in the “house of the Lord.” This school was for all members of the priesthood, from the high priests to the deacons, and it was to be taught by the Presidency of the church. To be humble is to recognize gratefully our dependence on the Lord—to understand that we have constant need for His support. Humility is an acknowledgment that our talents and abilities are gifts from God. It is not a sign of weakness, timidity, or fear; it is an indication that we know where our true strength lies. We can be both humble and fearless. We can be both humble and courageous. The Lord will strengthen us as we humble ourselves before Him. “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble…Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall life you up,” reports James 4.6 and 10. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
When the storms in life come, one can be steady because one is standing on the rock of one’s faith in Jesus Christ. May everyone face the storms with a peaceful heart. The place to begin is to remember that we are each a beloved child of God and that He has inspired servants. Those servants of God have foreseen the times in which we live. Know also that in the last days, perilous times shall come. Anyone with eyes to see the signs of the times and ears to hear the words of prophets knows that is true. The perils of greatest danger come to us from the forces of wickedness. Those forces are increasing. And so it will become more difficult, not easier, to honor the covenants we must make and keep to live the gospel of Jesus Christ. For those of us who are concerned for ourselves and for those we love, there is hope in the promise God has made of a place of safety in the storms ahead. It has never been more important than it is now to understand how to build a strong foundation. “Then Solomon said, The Lord has said that He would dwell in the thick darkness,” reports II Chronicles 6.1. Therefore, do not fear because God is everywhere. The human wish, we are saying, is not merely a push from the past, not merely a call from primitive needs demanding satisfaction. It also has in it some selectivity. It is a forming of the future, a molding by a symbolic process which includes both memory and fantasy, of what we hope the future will be. The wish is the beginning of orienting ourselves to the future, an admission that we want the future to be such and such; it is a capacity to reach down deep into ourselves and preoccupy ourselves with a longing to change the future. However, there is no will without a prior wish. The wish, like all symbolic processes, has a progressive element, a reaching ahead, as well as a regressive pole, a propulsion from behind. The wish thus carries its meaning as well as its force. Its motive power lies in the conjunction of this meaning and force. We can now understand why William Lynch should hold that “to wish is the most human act.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The past is drifting away at a faster and faster rate. When we look back at, say, the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we realize that many of its defining episodes no longer grip us as strongly as they one did. For the generation now coming into power, events like the 911, the civil rights protests of the 2020s, the Ukrainian War, the Cultural Revolution, homelessness, demands for affordable housing and spread of graffiti in small towns seems increasingly more significant and relevant. Therefore much of what will happen in our lifetimes will consist of adaptation to and further development of a process that began three quarters of a century ago—the most revolutionary wave of change in wealth creation since at least the eighteenth century. Let us pause briefly, then, to summarize and draw together some key things. First, this revolution is a matter not just of technology, stock-market swings, inflation or deflation but of profound social, cultural, political and geopolitical changes as well. Failure to recognize the connections between these and economics leads us to seriously underestimate the oncoming challenges we face. Second, while headlines and business chatter continually refer to improving or declining “fundamentals,” we suggest that that these ups and downs are largely superficial responses to far more important shifts in what we have termed “deep fundamentals”—those factors and forces that have governed all economic activity sine our days as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Economists have long studied some of these essentials—things like work, the division of labor, exchange and the sharing of rewards. They have also filled libraries with studies on technology, energy and the environment. Business gurus drawing on these studies pour out advice about everything from human-resource management to network organization, insourcing and outsourcing, leadership and strategy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Yet, if they ignore three key forces driving today’s wealth revolution—dramatic changes in our relations to time, space and, above all, knowledge, how good can advice and proposed strategies be? It is, we have contended, only by recognizing the centrality of these wealth drivers that we can prepare for tomorrow. For this reason, we have looked closely at each of these deep fundamentals and their impacts on wealth. Take, for instance, the de-synchronization effect. As we saw earlier, companies are compelled to shift and re-shirt their products and relationships incessantly. Customer demands, financial imperatives and market forces all change at accelerating, but very different, rates. In doing so, they impose destabilizing cross-pressures on firms whose managers struggle to come to terms with time. In response, a big synchronization industry has grown up to help firms cope with clashing speeds. At the same time, a backward, tortoise-paced public sector—itself badly de-synchronized—imposes a huge “time-tax” on companies by slowing them down with delays in court decisions, procurements process, regulatory rulings, permit procedures and in a thousand other ways. In short, one part of the system is flooring the gas pedal while the other is slamming on the brakes. Nowhere, as we have noted, is this more frustratingly evident than in the contradiction between the fast-changing skill requirements of an advanced, accelerative economy and the glacial immobility of its schools. We have seen also that some degree of de-synchronization is essential to keep competition and innovation going on. However, it is equally clear that excessive de-synchronization can throw companies, industries and entire economies into chaos. Indeed, one can look at the great stock market shakeouts as desperate attempts by the wealthy system to re-synchronize itself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
However, time is only part of the story. To understand tomorrow’s oncoming changes, the cumulative effects of time conflicts need to be seen against the equally powerful transformations in the spatial landscape. Thus the World today holds its breath while watching the massive relocation of wealth and wealth creation toward formerly “developing” countries led by China and India—surely one of the biggest and fastest such transfers in history and possibly the completion of a great circle of wealth movement that began some five hundred years ago. Moreover, we have suggested that, instead of asking whether globalization will continue, we recognize a coming split—possible de-globalization on the economic level and re-globalization of campaigns against such problems as pollution, terrorism, drugs, sexual slavery and genocide. Here, too, gas pedal and brake are applied at the same time. Out of this collision will come the accelerated relocation of the globe’s wealth creation to new high-value-added hot spots—leaving behind new pockets of poverty. However, the most dramatic spatial shifts of all has little to do with these terrestrial concerns. Though millions brush it aside, we actually stand at the historical edge of humanity’s serious thrust into outer space. For historians of tomorrow looking back at the twenty-first century, one of most important economic events of all may prove to be the colonization of space and wealth creation beyond our home planet. None of these changes would occur without even more potent transformations in the deep fundamental of knowledge and our relations with it. While shifts in the use of time and space will be easy to recognize, today’s revolution in knowledge—the defining deep fundamental of our time—is far harder to grasp. These changes are, by their very nature, intangible, invisible, abstract, epistemological and seemingly remote from daily life. Yet no attempt to forecast the future of wealth can succeed without a thorough appreciation of the new role of knowledge. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
We have provided an admittedly simplified primer on the scope, nature and role of knowledge as the central resource of advanced economies. However, here again we do not just need to analyze, but to synthesize—to see these deeply fundamental changes in interaction with one another. When we alter our relationship to time, for example, by speeding things up, we inevitably make some knowledge obsolete. We thereby increase the backlog of obsoledge that we lug around with us. Let us proceed to economic and social changes. New Deal. The Keynesian economics of the New Deal has cushioned the business cycle and maintained nearly full employment. It has not achieved its ideal of social balance between public and private works. The result is an expanding production increasingly consisting of corporation boondoggling. Syndicalism. Industrial workers have won their unions, obtained better wages and working conditions, and affirmed the dignity of labor. However, they gave up their ideal of workers’ management, technical education, and concern for the utility of their labor. The result is that a vast majority could not care less about what they make, and the “labor movement” is losing force. Class struggle. The working class has achieved a striking repeal of the iron law of wages; it has won a minimum wage and social security (although future funding is uncertain). However, the goal of an equalitarian or freely mobile society has been given up, as has the solidarity of the underprivileged. The actual result is an increasing rigidity of statuses; some of the underprivileged tending to drop out of society altogether. On the other hand, the cultural equality that has been achieved has been the degradation of the one popular culture to the lowest common denominator. Production for Use. This socialist goal has been missed, resulting in many of the other failures here listed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Sociology. During the past century, the sociologist have achieved their aim of dealing with humankind in its natural groups or groups with common problems, rather than as isolated individuals or a faceless mass. Social science has replaced many prejudices and ideologies of vested interests. However, on the whole, social scientists have given up their aim of fundamental social change and an open-experimental method determining its goals as it went along: the pragmatist ideal of society as a laboratory for freedom and self-correcting humanity. The actual result is an emphasis on “socializing” and “belonging,” with the loss of nature, culture, group solidarity and group variety, and individual excellence. There are 773,000,000 illiterates in the World. There are approximately 43 million illiterates in the United States of America, and according to a report from our Librarian of Congress, there may be an equal number of alliterates. In any case, a general impatience with books will develop, especially with books in which language is used with subtlety to express complex ideas. Most likely there will be a decline in readers’ analytical and critical skills. According to the results of standardized tests given in schools, this has been happening in the United States of America for the past fifty-five years. I suspect concern for history will also decline, to be replaced by a consuming interest in the present. The effect on political life will be devastating. There will be less emphasis on issues, substance, and ideology, an increase in the importance of image and style. Politicians will have greater concern for moment-to-moment shifts in public opinion, less concern for long-range policies. Unless the use of television for political campaigns is strictly prohibited, elections may be decided by which party spends more on televisions and media consultants. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Even if political commercials are prohibited, politicians will appear on entertainment programs and will almost certainly be asked to give testimonials for non-political products such as cars, beer, and breakfast foods. The line between political life and entertainment will blur, and movies stars may be taken seriously as political candidates. Once the population becomes accustomed to spending much of its time watching television—in the United States of America, the average household has television on about eight hours a day—there will be a decrease in activities outside the home: fewer and smaller gatherings in parks, beer halls, concert halls, and other public places. As street life decreases, there may well be an increase in street crime. Young and some older people will, of course, become disaffected from school and reading. Children’s games are likely to disappear. In fact, it will become important to keep children watching television because they will be a major consumer group. In the United States of America, children watch 5,000 hours of television before they enter kindergarten and 16,000 hours by high school’s end. Commercial television does not dislike children; it simply cannot afford the idea of childhood. Consumerhood takes precedence. Naturally, family life will be significantly changed. There will be less interaction among family members, certainly less talk between parents and children. Such talk as there is will be noticeably different from what you are now accustomed to. The young will speak of matters that once were confined to adults. Commercial television is a medium that does not segregate its audience, and therefore all segments of the population share the same symbolic World. You may find that in the end the line between adulthood and childhood has been erased entirely. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Television is itself a commodity, and an expensive one too. Therefore it is physically consistent with the prevalent reality. Its purchase gives the commodity system a boost. Television changes the nature of the artificial environment from passive to active. Unlike buildings and machines, television literally enters inside human beings; inside our homes, our minds, our bodies, making possible the reordering of human processes from the inside. Television is an experience that can be had by virtually everyone at the same time. By substituting for a greater diversity of experiences and unifying everyone with it, it assists commercial efficiency. With all people confined to the same mental and physical condition, a single advertising or political voice appropriate to the common mood can influence everyone. Once diversity of experience is reduced to television, a relative handful of people can control everyone’s awareness. Luckily for advertisers, in a capitalist system, whoever is in a position to pay for the technology has primary access to it. Television is unique in that it smooths out any furrows in the commodity system. Dormant anxieties can be dulled by the television experience. Beyond being a delivery system for commodity life, it is the solder to hold that life together, the drug to ease the pain of confined and channeled existence. Though television passes for experience, it is really more like “time out,” as we shall see later. It is anti-experience. Its interaction with the human body and mind fixes people to itself, dulls human sensibility and dims awareness of the World. This enhances the commodity life by reducing knowledge of any other. By focusing people on events well outside their lives, television encourages passivity and inaction, discourages self-awareness and the ability to cope personally, both of which are dangerous for advertising. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
By speaking in images, television adds a dimension to the mirror-image process. Unlike radio or print media, advertising can now implant internal movies, forever available for self-comparison. Television encourages separation: people from community, people from each other, people from themselves, creating more buying units and discouraging organized opposition to the system. It creates a surrogate community: itself. It becomes everyone’s intimate advisor, teacher and guide to appropriate behavior and awareness. Thereby, it becomes its own feedback system, furthering its own growth and accelerating the transformation of everything and everyone into artificial form. This enables a handful of people to obtain a unique degree of power. You have seen how commercial stress the values of youth, how they stress consumption, the immediate gratification of desires, the love of the new, a contempt for old technology. Television screens are saturated with commercials promote the Utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naïve but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales. Which is to say, they are not. They are about values and myths and fantasies. One might even say they form a body of religious literature, a montage of voluminous, visualized sacred texts that provide people with images and stories around which to organize their lives. To give you some idea of exactly how voluminous, I should tell you that the average America will have seen approximately 1 million television commercials, at the rate of a thousand per week, by the age of twenty. By the age of sixty-five, the average American will have seen more than 2 million television commercials. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Commercial television adds to the Decalogue several impious commandments, among them that thou shalt have no others gods than consumption, thou shalt despise what is old, thou shalt seek to amuse thyself continuously, and thou shalt avoid complexity like the ten plagues of that the underworld. Perhaps you are thinking that I exaggerate the social and psychic results of the commercialization of television and that, in any case, what has happened in the United States of America could not happen anywhere else. If you are, you overestimate the power of tradition and underestimate the power of technology. To enliven your senses of the forces unleashed by technological change, you need only remind yourself of what the automobile has brought to Austria. Has it not changed the nature of your cities, created the suburbs, made roads through your forest and homes, restructured your economy? You must not mislead yourselves by what you know about World culture as of 2022. May regions around the World are still living in the age of Gutenberg. Commercial television attacks such backwardness with astonishing ferocity. For example, at the present time, less than 20 percent of population in Tuvalu watches television in the evening. A commercial television system will fund this situation intolerable. In the United States of America, approximately 90 percent of people watch television during evening hours, and broadcasters find even those number unsatisfactory. In nations like Korea, television commercials are bunched together so that they do not interfere with the continuity of the programs. Such a situation makes no sense to American commercial systems. The whole idea is precisely to interrupt the continuity of programs so that one’s thoughts cannot stray too far from consideration of consumership. Indeed, the aim is to obliterate the distinction between a program and a commercial. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
In some countries, you do not have many advertising agencies, and those you have are small and without great influence. In America, our advertising agencies are among the largest and most powerful corporations in the World. DDB Needham Worldwide has gross billings of $6.7 billion each year, 6,726 employees and SICs 7311 advertising agencies, and possibly receives $700 million per year for American network television alone. This is serious money and these are serious radicals. They cannot afford to permit a culture to retain old ideas about work or religion or politics or childhood. And it will not be long before they and their kind show up in the most primitive communities. If, like me, you claim allegiance to an authentic conservative philosophy, one that seeks to preserve that which nourishes the spirit, you would be wise to approach all proposals for a free-market television system with extreme caution. Indeed, I will go further than that: it is either hypocrisy or balderdash to argue that the transformation of the World from a print-based culture to a television-based culture can leave that country’s traditions intact. Conservatives know this is nonsense, and so they worry. Radicals also know this is nonsense. However, they do not care. In 1879, a French ophthalmologist named Luis Emile Javal discovered that when people read, their eyes do not sweep across the words in a perfectly fluid way. Their visual focus advances in little jumps, called saccades, pausing briefly at different points along each line. One of the Javal’s colleagues at the University of Paris soon made another discovery: that the pattern of pauses, or “eye fixations,” can vary greatly depending on what is being read and who is doing the reading. In the wake of these discoveries, brain researchers began to use eye-tracking experiments to learn more about how we read and how our minds work. Suck studies have also proven valuable in providing further insights into the Internet’s effects on attention and cognition. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
In 2006, Jakob Nielsen, a longtime consultant on the design of Web pages who has been studying online reading since the 1990s, conducted an eye-tracking study of Web users. He has 232 people wear a small camera that tracked their eye movements as they read pages of text and browsed other content. Nielsen found that hardly any of the participants read online text in a methodical, line-by-line way, as they would typically read a page of text in a book. The vast majority skimmed the text quickly, their eyes skipping down the pages in a pattern that resembled, roughly, the letter F. They would start by glancing all the way across the first two or three lines of text. Then their eyes would drop down a bit, and they would scan about halfway across a few more lines. Finally, they would let their eyes cursorily drift a little father down the left-hand side of the page. This pattern of online reading was confirmed by subsequent eye-tacking study carried out at the Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State University. “F,” wrote Mr. Nielsen, in summing up the findings for his clients, is “for fast. That is how users read your precious content. In a few second, their eyes move at amazing speed across your website’s words in a pattern that is very different from what you learned in school.” As a complement to his eye-tracking study, Mr. Nielsen analyzed an extensive database on the behavior of Web users that had been compiled by a term of German researchers. They had monitored the computers of twenty-five people for an average of about a hundred days each, tracking the time the subjects spent looking at some fifty thousand Web pages. Parsing the data, Mr. Nielsen found that as the number of words on a pace increases, the time a visitor spends looking at the page goes up, but only slightly. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
For every hundred additional words, the average viewer will spend just 4.4 more seconds perusing the page. Since even the most accomplished reader can read only about eighteen words in 4.4 seconds, Mr. Nielsen told his clients, “when you add verbiage to a page, you can assume that customers will read 18 percent of it.” And that, he cautioned, is almost certainly an overstatement. It is unlikely that the people in the study were spending all their time reading; they were also probably glancing at pictures, videos, advertisements, and other types of content. Mr. Nielsen’s analysis backed up the conclusions of the German researchers themselves. They had reported that most Web pages are viewed for ten seconds or less. Fewer than one in tend page views extend beyond two minutes, and a significant portion of those seem to involve “unattended browser windows…left open in the background of the desktop.” The researchers observed that “even new pages with plentiful information and many links are regularly viewed for a brief period.” However, with many people still have 4GLTE mobile phones, advertisers can get several seconds more of free advertisement from certain formats because the phones freeze up and leave their content on the phone for longer than they have paid for, so it is like with the older technology, firms get more for their dollar. Overall, however, results seem to “confirm that browsing is a rapidly interactive activity.” The results also reinforce something that Mr. Nielsen wrote in 1997 after his first study of online reading. “How do users read on the web?” he asked then. His succinct answer is: “They do not.” Many types of reading are important. The most visible sign of our increasing separateness and, in its turn, the cause of ever greater separateness is divorce. It has a deep influence on our universities because more and more of the students are products of it, and they do not only have problems themselves but also affect other students and the general atmosphere. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Divorce in America is the most palpable indication that people are not made to live together, and that, although they want and need to create a general will out of the particular wills, those particular wills constantly reassert themselves. There is a quest, but ever more hopeless, for arrangements and ways of putting the broken pieces back together. The task is equivalent to squaring the circle, because everyone loves oneself most but wants others to love one more than one loves themselves. Such is particularly the demand of children, against which parents are now rebelling. In the absence of a common good or common object, as Mr. Rousseau puts it, the disintegration of society into particular wills is inevitable. Selfishness in this case is not a moral vice or a sin but a natural necessity. The “Me generation” and “narcissism” are merely descriptions, not causes. The solitary savage in the state of nature cannot be blamed for thinking primarily of oneself, nor can a person who lives in a World where the primacy of oneself, nor can a person who lives in a World where the primacy of self-concern is only too evident in the most fundamental institutions, where the original selfishness of the state of nature remains, where concern for the common good is hypocritical, and where morality seems to be squarely on the side of selfishness. Or, to put it otherwise, the concern with self-development, self-expression, or growth, which flourished as a result of the optimistic faith in a preestablished harmony between such a concern and society or community, has gradually revealed itself to be inimical to community. A young person’s qualified or conditional attachment to divorced parents merely reciprocates what one necessarily sees as their conditional attachment to one, and is entirely different from the classic problem of loyalty to families, or other institutions, which were clearly dedicated to their members. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
In the past, such breaking away was sometimes necessary but always morally problematic. Today it is normal, and this is another reason why the classical literature is alien to so many of our young, for it is largely concerned with liberation from real claims—like family, faith, or country—whereas now the movement is in the opposite direction, a search for claims on oneself that have some validity. Children who have gone to the school of conditional relationships should be expected to view the World in the light of what they learned there. Children may be told over and over again that their parents have a right to their own lives, that they will enjoy quality time instead of quantity time, that they are really loved by their parents even after divorce, but children do not believe any of this. They think they have a right to total attention and believe their parents must live for them. There is no explaining otherwise to them, and anything less inevitably produces indignation and an inextirpable sense of injustice. To children, the voluntary separation of parents seems worse than their death precisely because it is voluntary. The capriciousness of wills, their lack of directedness to the common good, the fact that they could be otherwise but are not—these are the real source of the war of all against all. Children learn a fear of enslavement to the wills of others, along with a need to dominate those wills, in the context of the family, the one place where they are supposed to learn the opposite. Of course, many families are unhappy. However, that is irrelevant. The important lesson that the family taught was the existence of the only unbreakable bond, for better or for worse, between human beings. The decomposition of this bond is surely America’s most urgent social problem. However, nobody even tries to do anything about it. The tide seems to be irresistible. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Among the many items on the agenda of those promoting America’s moral regeneration, I never find marriage and divorce. The last time anyone in public office took a crack at anything like this issue was when President Trump urged Federal civil servants living together out of wedlock to get married. He said, “Marriage is a very beautiful and wonderful experience, something that everyone should enjoy. When I married, it was courtly love, and was one of the happiest moments in my parents’ lives.” Courtly love, the literary invention of medieval troubadours, is one thing and, unlike the proverbial and unchanging wheel, has been constantly reinvented. Courtly love is a manifestation that acknowledges the tenderness of romance, but incorporates it into a great passion guided not by carnality but rather by the highest moral and aesthetic values. Courtly love is an exalted state between a man and a superior woman he both respects and adores with quasi-religious fervor. Her love tests his resolve, firmness, and loyalty, for it is difficult to obtain. It is also immensely ennobling, so that his very suffering strengths every aspect of his being: his military prowess, social standards, even his moral and religious perspectives. Sometimes, the mere thought of his beloved triggers these holistic improvements. The rules of courtly love are the inherently painful ceaseless meditation on the beauty of one’s beloved, whom one glimpses from time to time but cannot possess. The ideal, seldom fulfilled, is total union with the beloved, to whom one is almost never married. O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,–Nature’s observatory—whence the dell, its flowery slops, its river’s crystal swell, may seem a span; let me thy vigils keep ‘mongst boughs pavillion’s, where the deer’s swift leap startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
But though I will gladly trace these scenes with thee, yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, whose words are images of thoughts refin’d, is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be almost the highest bless of human-kind, when to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. The moon is full the spring nights grow longer, in the north forests startled crows cry out. Past loves are a thousand miles farther each day, still the season’s changes can stir the heart. As one who with pain and suffering has cut a path through a trackless wilderness, and then looks back to observe joyfully other humans travelling easily the roadway one has chartered, so did out forefathers bless their lot as the bearers of salvation, saying: “How goodly is our portion, how blessed our lot, how beautiful our heritage!” Verily our ancestors regarded their role in history as a sign of God’s grace, a token of the love of the Almighty for America, and through America for all human. (Oh, by the way, America is seen as a brand and live styles in many countries, so there are people in China, Japan, and Korea, for example, who believe they are the real Americans. This shows you how manifest destiny and the America Dream is real.) For this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples. May we, the latter day children of America continue our people’s historic quest for God and His law of righteousness, and together with our fellowmen, may we establish His kingdom of truth, justice and peace. And the Lord shall be King over all the Earth, on that day, the Lord shall be One, and His name one. The history of America is the great living proof of the working of divine Providence in the affairs of the World. Alone among the nations America has shared all great movements since humankind became conscious of their destinies. If there is no divine purpose in the long travail of America, it is vain to seek for any such purpose in humans’ life. In the reflected light of that purpose each American should lead one’s life with an added dignity. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Love Can be a Cover for Violence
Everybody poppin’ pain pills is everybody hurt? Victorian men used to push down and suppress what he called “lower” bodily desires. However, one surely cannot be a man of decision without taking bodily desires into consideration. Particularly if the disease or treatment is mutilating, celibacy from impotence as a consequence of various genital cancers, is presumed and understood. The same is true of paraplegia or quadriplegia. Diabetes is another condition that may provoke impotence in men. So are some psychiatric disorders that include symptoms of shame and despair. Another common one is anorexia, which in severe form effectively neuters the victim, who becomes too weak to contemplate, desire, or partake in pleasures of the flesh. Other conditions that may induce celibacy are less well known. One of these is vaginismus, in which muscle spasms around the female private area are so severe that a male organ cannot enter it or causes extreme pain when it does. It is difficult to know how many women are affected by it. In the 1970s and 1980s, Masters and Johnson found it in about 5 percent of research volunteers at their institute. They suspected it was generally underestimated in medical diagnoses of the general population because many women sufferers opt for celibacy to avoid the pain and embarrassment of dealing with it. Because these women do not seek help for what might be perceived as a dysfunction, they are medical research’s unknowns. Vaginismus is uncomfortable sensation for women and can be so severe that pleasures of the flesh is impossible. Masters and Johnson have been consulted by desperate couples unable to consummate their marriages after ten years. Often they are driven to seek help because a longing for children overpowers their embarrassment or their refusal to acknowledge they have a problems. Sometimes vaginismus develops after years of normal functioning. Traumatic events such as nonconsensual pleasures of the flesh may provoke it. If an episiotomy has not properly healed, for example, so may experience pain during pleasures of the flesh. Other painful conditions may also provoke vaginismus as a defensive response. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Negative pleasures of the flesh psychological condition can also produce vaginismus, as a reaction to feelings of extreme guilt. Many women reported to Masters and Johnson that their mothers were intensely puritanical about pleasures of the flesh and refused to allow their daughters to do anything they labeled harlotry, including wearing makeup before age eighteen, dressing in typical teenage style, or having boyfriends. One woman’s mother had zealously clipped newspaper articles describing nonconsensual pleasures of the flesh and, throughout her daughter’s four years at university, sent them to her weekly. In the sphere of pleasures of the flesh, though some women avoid intimate passions altogether, others “service” their husbands through fellatio or manual manipulation. They are distraught that they cannot offer traditional pleasures of the flesh and worry that their spouses will find a more titillating partners. Some do, engaging in extramarital affairs for a release through pleasures of the flesh and also to verify that they themselves are still capable of intimate passions. Couples forced into celibacy that is the direct consequence of a medical condition, as opposed to a religious, ascetic, or idealistic principle, see their abstinence as an unfortunate, even tragic condition that requires professional intervention. It subtly alters the form of a relationship and is extremely stressful. In rare instances, this unwelcome celibacy is seen for what it is: a bearable way of life precipitated by a regrettable medical condition. The body consists of the muscular, neurological, and glandular correlates of intentionality, such as increased adrenalin secretion when we are enraged and want to strike something, increased speed of heart beat when we are anxious and want to run, engorgement of the private organs when we are excited by intimate passions. Therefore, it is important for one to become aware of one’s bodily feelings and bodily state in the moment. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Civilization has seemingly led us around full circle, back to the state of nature taught to us by the founding fathers of modern thought. However, now it is present not in rhetoric but in reality. Those who first taught the state of nature proposed it as a hypothesis. Liberated from all the conventional attachments to religion, country, and family that men actually did have, how would they live and how would they feel reconstruct those attachments? It was an experiment designed to make people recognize what they really care about and engage their loyalties on the basis of this caring. However, a young person today, to exaggerate only a little, actually begins de novo, without the givens or imperatives that one would have had only yesterday. His country demands little of one and provides well for one, one’s religion is a matter of absolutely free choice and—that is what is really fresh—so are his involvements in pleasures of the flesh. He can now choose, but he finds he no longer has a sufficient motive for choice that is more than whim, that is binding. Reconstruction is proving impossible. The state of nature should culminate in a contract, which constitutes a society out of individuals. A contract requires not only a common interest between the contracting parties but also an authority to enforce its fulfillment by them. In the absence of the former, there is no relationship; in the absence of the latter, there can be no trust, only diffidence. In the state of nature concerning friendships and love today, there is doubt about both, and the result is a longing for the vanished common group, called roots, without the means to recover it, and timidity and self-protectiveness in associations guaranteed by neither nature nor convention. The pervasive feeling that love and friendship are groundless, perhaps the most notable aspect of the current feeling of groundless, perhaps the most notable aspect of the current feeling of groundlessness, has caused them to give way to the much vaguer and more personal idea of commitment, that choice in the void whose cause resides only in the will of the self. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The young want to make commitments, which constitute the meaning of life, because love and nature do not suffice. That is what they talk about, but they are haunted by the awareness that the talk does not mean very much and that commitments are lighter than air. At the origins of modern natural rights teachings, freedom and equality were politically principles intended to bring both justice and effectiveness to the relationships of ruling and being ruled, which in the conventional order were constituted by pretended rights of strength, wealth, tradition, age and birth. The relationships of king and subject, master and slaver, lord and vassal, patrician and pleb, rich and poor, were revealed to be purely manmade and hence not morally binding, apart from the consent of the parties to them, which became the only source of political legitimacy. Civil society was to be reconstructed on the natural ground of man’s common humanity. Then it would appear that all relationships or relatedness within civil society would also depend on the free consent of individuals. Yet the relationships between man and woman, parent and child, are less doubtfully natural and less arguably conventional than the relations between rulers and ruled, especially as they are understood by modern natural rights teaching. They cannot be understood simply as contractual relationships, as resulting from acts of human freedom, since they would thereby lose their character and dissolve. Instead they seem to constrain that freedom, to argue against the free arrangements of consent dominant in the political order. However, it is difficult to argue that nature both does and does not prescribe certain relations in civil society. The radical transformation of the relations between men and women and parents and children was the inevitable consequence of the success of the new politics of consent. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
It might be said, with some exaggeration, that the first state-of-nature teachers paid little attention to the natural teleology of gender because they were primarily concerned with analyzing away the false appearances of teleology in the existing political arrangements. (I mean by teleology nothing but the evident, everyday observation and sense of purposiveness, which may be only illusory, but which ordinarily guides human life, the kind everyone sees in the reproductive process.) Each individual is the judge of one’s own best interests and they have the right to choose rulers who are bound to protect them, while abstracting from the habits of thought and feeling that permitted patricians under the colors of the common good to make use of plebs for their own greedy purposes. The plebs have equal rights to selfishness. The ruled are not directed by nature to the rulers any more than the rulers naturally care only for the good of the ruled. Rulers and ruled can consciously craft a compact by which the separate interests of each are protected. However, they are never one, sharing the same highest end, like the organs in Menenius’ body. There is no body politic, only individuals who have come together voluntarily and can separate voluntarily without maiming themselves. Although the political order is constituted out of individuals, the subpolitical units remain largely unaffected. Indeed, they counted on the family, as an intermediate between individual and the state, partially to replace what was being lost in passionate attachment to the polity. The immediate and reliable love of one’s own property, wife and children can more effectively counterpoise purely individual selfishness than does the distant and abstract love of country. Moreover, concern for the safety of one’s family is a powerful reason for loyalty to the state, which protects them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The nation as a community of families is a formula that until recently worked very well in the United States of America. However, it is very questionable whether this solution is viable over the very long run, because there are two contrary views of nature present here. And, as the political philosophers have always taught, that one that is authoritative in the political regime will ultimately inform its parts. In the social contract view, nature has nothing to say about relationships and rank order; in the older view, which is part and parcel of ancient political philosophy, nature is prescriptive. Are the relations between men and women and parents and children determined by natural impulse or are they the product of choice and consent? In Aristotle’s Politics, the subpolitical or prepolitical family relations point to the necessity of political rule and are perfected by it, whereas in the state-of-nature teachings, political rule is derived entirely from the need for protection of individuals, bypassing their social relations completely. Are we dealing with political actors or with men and women? In the former case, persons are free to construct whatever relations they please with one another; in the latter, prior to any choice, a preexisting frame largely determines the relations of men and women. There are three classic images of the polity that clarify this issue. The first is the ship of state, which is one thing if it is to be forever at sea, and quite another if it is to reach port and the passengers go their separate ways. They think about one another and their relationships on the ship very differently in the two cases. The former case is the ancient city; the latter, the modern state. The other two images are the herd and the hive, which oppose each other. The herd may need a shepherd, but each of the animals is grazing for itself and can easily be separated from the herd. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In the hive, by contrast, there are workers, drones and a queen; there is a division of labor ad a product toward which they all work in common; separation from the hive is extinction. The herd is modern, the hive ancient. Of course, neither image is an accurate description of human society. Men are neither atoms nor parts of a body. However, this is why there have to be such images, since for the brutes these things are not a matter for discussion or deliberation. Man is ambiguous. In the tightest communities, at least since the days of Odysseus, there is something in man that wants out and sense that his development is stunted by being just part of a whole, rather than a whole itself. And in the freest and most independent situations men long for unconditional attachments. The tension between freedom and attachment, and attempts to achieve the impossible union of the two, are the permanent condition of man. However, in modern political regimes, where rights precede duties, freedom definitely has primacy over community, family and even nature. The spirit of this choice must inevitably penetrate into all the details of life. The ambiguity of man is well illustrated in the passion of pleasures of the flesh, and the sentiments that accompany it. Pleasures of the flesh may be treated as a pleasure out of which men and women may make what they will, its promptings followed or rejected, its forms matters of taste, its importance or unimportance in life decided freely by individuals. As such, it would have to give precedence to objective natural necessity, to the imperatives of self-love or self-preservation. Or pleasures of the flesh can be immediately constitutive of a whole law of life, to which self-preservation is subordinated and in which love, marriage and the rearing of infants is the most important business. It cannot be both. The direction in which we have been going is obvious. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Now, it is not entirely correct to say that humankind at large is able to treat pleasures of the flesh as a matter of free choice, one which initially does not obligate us to others. In a World where the natural basis of sexual differentiation has crumbled, this choice is readily available to men, but less so to women. Man in the state of nature, either in the first one or the one we have now, can walk away from an encounter involving pleasures of the flesh and never give it another thought. However, a woman may have a child, and in fact, as becomes ever clearer, may want to have a child. Pleasures of the flesh can be an indifferent thing for men, but it really cannot quite be so for women. This is what might be called the female drama. Modernity promised that all human beings would be treated equally. Women took that promise seriously and rebelled against the old order. However, as they succeeded, men have also been liberated from their old constraints. And women, now liberated and with equal careers, nevertheless find they still desire to have children, but have no basis for claiming that men should share their desire for children or assume a responsibility for them. So nature weighs more heavily on women. In the old order they were subordinated and dependent on men; in the new order they are isolated, needing men, but not able to count on them, and hampered in the free development of their individuality. The promise of modernity is not really fulfilled for women. Love had been assumed to be a motivating force, a power which could be relied upon to push us onward in life. However, the great shift in our day indicates that the motivating force itself is now called into question. Love has become a problem to itself. So self-contradictory, indeed, has love become that some of those studying family life have concluded that “love” is simply the name for the way more powerful members of the family control other members. Love can be a cover for violence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The same can be said about will. We inherited from our Victorian forefathers the belief that the only real problem in life was to decide rationally what to do—and then will would stand ready as the “faculty” for making us do it. Now it is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide. The very basis of will itself is thrown into question. Is will an illusion? Many psychologists and psychotherapists, from Dr. Freud down, have argued that it is. The term “will power” and “free will,” so necessary in the vocabulary of our fathers, have all but dropped completely out of any contemporary, sophisticated discussion; or the words are used in derision. People go to therapist to find substitutes for their lost will: to learn how to get the “unconscious” to direct their lives, or to learn how to get the “unconscious” to direct their lives, or to learn the latest conditioning technique to enable them to behave, or to use new medications to release some motive for living. Also to learn the latest method of “releasing affect,” unaware that affect is not something you strive for in itself but a by-product of the way you give yourself to a life situation. Every age has its own special forms of imperialism. And so does each conqueror. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the British mastered the art, their method of invasion was to send their navy, then their army, then their administrators, and finally their educational system. The Americans now do it differently. They send their television shows and fake news media. The method has much to recommend it. Neither armies nor navies clash by night; the invasion occurs without loss of life and without much resistance. It is also both pleasurable and quick. In a few years, we shall be able to boast that the sun never sets on an American television show. Political consciousness is born through the winds of technology. Electromagnetic waves penetrate more deeply than armies. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
If nations keep relying on nineteenth-century forms of imperialism while continuing to make terrible television shows, they may find themselves turning into a Third World country. Advertising exists only to purvey what people do not need. If it is available, whatever people do need they will find without advertising. This is so obvious and simple that it continues to stagger my mind that the ad industry has succeeded in muddying the point. No single issue gets advertisers screaming louder than this one. They speak about how they are only fulfilling the needs of people by providing an information service about where and how people can achieve satisfaction for their nee. Advertising is only a public service, they insist. Speaking privately, however, and to corporate clients, advertisers sell their services on the basis of how well they are able to create needs where there were none before. I have never met an advertising person who sincerely believes that there is a need connected to, say, 99 percent of the commodities which fill the airwaves and the print media. Nor can I recall a single street demonstration demanding one single product in all of American history. If there were such a demonstration for, let us say, nonreturnable bottles, which were launched through tens of millions of dollars of ads, or chemically processed foods, similarly dependent upon ads, there would surely have been no need to advertise these products. The only need that is expressed by advertising is of raw materials with no intrinsic value into commodities that people will buy. If we take the word “need” to mean something basic to human survival—food, shelter, clothing—or basic to human contentment—peace, love, safety, companionship, intimacy, a sense of fulfillment—these will be sought and found by people whether or not there is advertising. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
In fact, advertising intervenes between people and their needs, separates them from direct fulfillment and urges them to believe that satisfaction can be obtained only through commodities. It is through this intervention and separation that advertising can create value, thereby justifying its existence. Consider the list of the top twenty-five advertisers in the United States of America. They sell the following products: soap, detergents, cosmetics, cars and sodas, all of which exist in a realm beyond need. If they were needed, they would not be advertised. People do need to eat, but the food which is advertised is processed food: processed meats, sodas, sugary cereals, candies. A food in its natural state, unprocessed, does not need to be advertised. If it is available to them, hungry people will find the food. To persuade people to buy the processed version is another matter because it is more expensive, less naturally appealing, less nourishing, and often harmful. The need must be created. Perhaps there is a need for cleanliness. However, that is not what advertisers sell. Cleanliness can be obtained with water and a little bit of natural fiber, or solidified natural fat. Major World civilizations kept clean that way for millennia. What is advertised is Americanism, a value beyond cleanliness; sterility, the avoidance of all germs; sudsiness, a cosmetic factor; and brand, a surrogate community loyalty. There is need for tranquility and a sense of contentment. However, these are the last qualities drug advertisers would like you to obtain; not on your own anyway. A drug ad denies your ability to cope with internal processes: feelings, moods, anxieties. It encourages the belief that personal or traditional ways of dealing with these matters—friends, family, community, or patiently awaiting the next turn in life’s cycle—will not succeed in your case. It suggests that a chemical solution is better so that you will choose the chemical rather than your own resources. The result is that you become further separated from yourself and less able to cope. Your ability dies for lack of practice and faith in its efficacy. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
A deodorant ad never speaks about the inherent values of applying imitation-lemon fragrances to your body; it has no inherent value. Mainly the ad wishes to intervene in any notion you may have that there is something pleasant or beneficial in your own human odor. Once the intervention takes place, and self-doubt and anxiety are created, the situation can be satisfied with artificial smells. Only through this process of intervention and substitution is there the prospect of value added and commercial profit. The goal of all advertising is discontent or, to put it another way, an internal scarcity of contentment. This must be continually created, even at the moment when one has finally bought something. In that event, advertising has the task of creating discontent with what has just been bought, since once that act is completed, the purchase has no further benefit to the market system. The newly purchased commodity must be gotten rid of and replaced by the “need” for a new commodity as soon as possible. The ideal World for advertisers would be one in which whatever is bought is used only once and then tossed aside. Many new products have been designed to fit such a World. As a visitor in your country—indeed, as one who does not even know your language well enough to use it in these circumstances—I feel obliged to add something to the culture. You are entitled to know at the start from what cultural and political perspectives I see the World, since everything I will have to say here reflects a point of view quite likely different from your own. I am what may be called a conservative. This word, of course, is ambiguous, and you may have a different meaning for it from my own. Perhaps it will help us to understand each other if I say from my point of view many political are radical. It is true enough that many of them no longer speak of the importance of preserving such traditional instructions and beliefs as the family, childhood, the work ethic, self-denial, and religious piety. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
In fact, it seems like most politicians do not care one way or another whether any of this is preserved. No one, beside President Trump, wants to put America and Americans first anymore. Kids have to sell their bikes to buy food for dinner. People have to work two and three jobs to pay the mortgage. And other companies turn to increasing fees to make due in these challenging times. That is why I am for preserving tradition; that is not where most politicians’ interests lie. You cannot fail to notice that many are no longer mostly concerned to preserve a free-market economy, to encourage what is new, and to keep America technologically progressive. Many of our political leaders are not devoted to capitalism anymore. No people have been more entranced by newness—and particularly technological newness—than Americans. That is why our most important radicals have always been capitalists, especially capitalist who have exploited the possibilities of new technologies. The names that come to mind are Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst, Willian Winchester, Sarah Winchester, Samuel Goldwyn, Henry Luce, Alan Dumont, and Walt Disney, among many others. These capitalist-radicals, inflamed by their fascination for new technologies, created the twentieth century. If you are happy about the twentieth century, you have them to thank for it. However, as we all know, in every virtue there lurks a contrapuntal vice. We must praise our ambition and vitality but at the same time to condemn our naivete and rashness. A culture that exalts the new for its own sake, that encourages the radical inclination to exploit what is new and is therefore indifferent to the destruction of the old, that such a culture runs a serious risk of becoming trivial and dangerous, especially dangerous to itself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
This is exactly what is happening in the United State of America in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. In today’s America, the idea of newness not only is linked to the idea of improvement but is the definition of improvement. If anyone should raise the question, What improves the human spirit?, or even the more mundane question, What improves the quality of life?, Americans are apt to offer a simple formulation: That which is new is better, that which is newest is best. The cure for such balderdash is a philosophy of conservatism. My version of a President is one who puts America and Americans first and stays out of the business and affairs of other nations. A true conservative, like myself, knows that technology always fosters radical social change. A true conservative also knows that it is useless to pretend that technology will not have its way with a culture. However, a conservative recognizes a difference between nonconsensual and seduction. The former cares nothing for the victim. The seducers must accommodate oneself to the will and temperament of the object of one’s desires. Indeed, one does not want a victim so much as an accomplice. What I am saying is that technology can attack a nonconsensual culture or be forced to seduce it. The aim of a genuine conservative in a technological age is to control the fury of technology, to make it behave itself, to insist that it accommodate itself to the will and temperament of a people. It is one’s best hope that through one’s efforts a modicum of charm may accompany the union of technology and culture. When it comes to technocracy–in our own history, philosophers of the new technology, like Veblen, Geddes, or Fuller, succeeded in making efficiency and know-how the chief ethical values of the folk, creating a mystique of “production,” and a kind of streamlined esthetics. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
However, they did not succeed in wresting management from the businessmen and creating their own World of a neat and transparent physical plant and a practical economics of production and distribution. The actual results have been slums of works of engineering, confused and useless overproduction, gadgetry, and new tribes of middlemen, promoters, and advertisers. With urbanism, as Le Corbuiser and Gropius urged, we have increasingly the plan and style of functional architecture; biological standards of housing; scientific study of traffic and city services; some zoning; and the construction of large-scale projects. However, nowhere is realized the ideal of over-all community planning, the open green city, or the organic relation of work, living, and play. The actual results have been increasing commutation and traffic, segregated HRNs (high risk neighborhoods), a “functional” style little different from packaging and the tendency to squeeze out some basic urban functions, such as recreation or schooling, to be squeezed out altogether. Garden City—in the opposite numbers, the Garden City planners after Ebenezer Howard, have achieved some planned communities protected by greenbelts. However, they did not get their integrated towns, planned for industry, local commerce, and living. The result is that actual suburbs and garden cities are dormitories with a culture centering around small children, and absence of the wage earner; and such “plan” as the so-called shopping center makes such communities fell like small towns without disrupting the village committees too much. The movement to conserve the wilds cannot withstand the cars, so that all areas are invaded and regulated. If you did not know, in Sacramento, California there are still wild jack rabbits, cotton tail rabbits, bevers, duck, swans, geese, turkeys and some people claim that we still have deer, but I have not seen any since I was a kid. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Kansas State University scholars conducted a realistic study. They had a group of college students watch a typical CNN broadcast in which an anchor reported four news stories while various info-graphics flashed on the screen and a textual news crawl ran along the bottom. They had a second group watch the same programing but with the graphics and the news crawl stripped out. Subsequent tests found that the students who had watched the multimedia version remembered significantly fewer facts from the stories than those who had watched the simpler version. “It appears,” wrote the researchers, “that this multimessage format exceeded viewers’ attentional capacity.” Supplying information in more than one form does not always take a toll on understanding. As we all know from reading illustrated textbooks and manuals, pictures can help clarify and reinforce written explanations. Education researcher have also found that carefully designed presentations that combine audio and visual explanations or instructions can enhance students’ learning. The reason, current theories suggest, is that our brains use different channels for processing what we see and what we hear. Auditory and visual working memory are separate, at least to some extent, and because they are separate, effective working memory may be increased by using both processors rather than one. As a result, in some cases the negative effects of split attention might be ameliorated by using both auditory and visual modalities—sound and pictures, in other words. The Internet, however, was not built by educators to optimize learning. It presents information not in a carefully balanced way but as a concentration-fragmenting mishmash. The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention. That is not only a result of its ability to display many different kinds of media simultaneously. It is also a result of the ease with which it can be programmed to send and receive messages. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Most e-mail applications, to take an obvious example, are set up to check automatically for news messages every few seconds, and people routinely click the “check for new mail” button even more frequently than that. Studies of office workers who use computers reveal that they constantly stop what they are doing to read and respond to incoming e-mails. It is not unusual for them to glance at their in-box thirty or forty times an hour (though when asked how frequently they look, they will often give a much lower figure). Since each glance represents a small interruption of thought, a momentary redeployment of mental resources, the cognitive costs can be high. Psychological research long ago proved what most of us know from experience: frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious. The more complex the train of though we are involved in, the greater the impairment the distraction causes. Now, there is a threatening attack brewing that could give powerful ammunition to every science-hater in society. Again, this attack is aimed not at the scientific method as such but on two elements of the ethic associated with it—the ideas that knowledge produced by science should be freely circulated and that scientists should be free to explore everything. The free circulation of scientific findings is under withering fire from both business and government. More and more scientific research is either funded or conducted by corporations that, for high-stakes commercial reasons, are racing to patent their findings or cloak them in secrecy. Simultaneously, governments, reacting to the genuine threat of terrorism, are demanding that more and more scientific findings be kept secret for security reason. The age of the “Super-Empowered Individual”—the terrorist, criminal or psychotic armed with weapons of mass and individual destruction—is fast approaching. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
While it is clear that the media and the Internet cannot continue to offer instruction manuals for bomb building and the manipulation of toxic materials, disquieting debates are under way about how much of science needs to be withheld from public view. On the one hand, in the light of terrorism, registration of laboratories and surveillance of research activity may now be necessary. The most dangerous thing is secrecy. Biological weaponry itself was developed behind walls of secrecy. This is why so many are pushing to fortify all borders. You see how bad COVID-19 was, there could be something worse coming. Making the distinction about which knowledge is dangerous and out to be censored is very hard. The distinction between offensive and defensive uses of biological agents is really a matter of how information is utilized rather than the information itself. You have to know how to defend against bioterrorism, but in knowing that you should also know how to inflict bioterrorism. Preventing disclosure of new findings is one thing. However, even more disturbing are proposals to make whole broad categories of knowledge off-limits to research. Some are even coming from scientists themselves, who conjure up apocalyptic scenarios to support their theses. Some people believe that science needs to “relinquish” research that might lead to the domination of the human species by the runaway destructive self-replication of technologies now made possible by advances in genetics, robotics and nanotechnology. By 2030, computers might be smarter than humans—smart enough to reproduce themselves and essentially take over. Various physicists have discussed, if something went wrong— they could wipe out not only the human race but Earth and the cosmos as well. Other scientists regard this as nonsensical. Arguing that we do not know enough even to assess the levels of risk, critics propose various steps that should precede the undertaking of dangerous experiments in any field, not just physics. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
It has been debated if two teams of scientists against each other—a “red team” to offer reasons why such experiments would not be safe and a “blue team” that would make the cause for going forward would be reasonable. Wow. I never considered how powerful man is or can be. This is something worth taking into consideration. However, the attempt to avoid risk carries risks of its own—thus the most extreme precautionary policy would utterly paralyze science. And with it, one might add, the knowledge of the economy of the future. Self-criticism is at the very heart of science. And science and scientists should never be above criticism from the public. Science is itself a social activity, dependent, to a degree many scientists underestimate, on the ideas, epistemologies and built-in assumptions of the surrounding culture. Nor should scientists alone police science, since, like everyone else, they have their own self-interests. What we are seeing, however, is not just a series of unrelated, disparate attacks on science but a convergent conviction that science needs to be reduced in influence, stripped of the respect it has earned—in short, devalued as a key test of truth. However, the battle over truth is not confined to science. Different groups in society are, for different reason, actively trying to manage our minds by shifting the truth filters through which we, in our turn, see the World—the tests we use to separate true from false. This battle has no name. However, it will have a profound effect on the revolutionary wealth system now superseding that of the industrial age. Many people think there is nothing left to revolt over and that is why they are now attacking others in an increased fashion. Well, there is obviously one thing left to revolt against and that is pleasures of the flesh. The frontier, the establishing of identity, the validation of the self can be, and not infrequently does become for some people, a revolt against sexuality entirely. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
God loves all of His children and He wants them to respect their body because it is a temple that the Father made especially for you. It is precious and should be treated with respect and dignity. God created the many diverse races and ethnicities and esteems them all equally. As the Book of Mormon puts it, “all are alike unto God.” Life did not begin at birth, as is commonly believed. Prior to coming to Earth, individuals existed as spirits, therefore our bodies are only loaners, we do not own them. God has allowed us to use them so we can come to Earth and learn somethings and teach others how to love. Mortal life is crucial to the plan of happiness God would provide for His children: “We will prove them herewith,” God stated, “to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them,” adding a promise to increase glory forever upon the faithful. Faith is a principle of action and power. Whenever you work toward a worthy goal, you exercise faith. You show your hope for something that you cannot yet see. Having faith in Jesus Christ means relying completely on Him—trusting in His infinite power, intelligence, and love. It includes believing His teachings. It means believing that even though you do not understand all things, He does. Remember that because He has experienced all your pains, afflictions, and infirmities, He knows how to help you rise about your daily difficulties. Jesus has overcome the World and prepared the way for you to receive eternal life. He is always ready to help you as you remember His plea: “Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 6.36. Faith is much more than a passive belief. You express your faith through action—by the way you live. The Savior promised, “If ye will have faith in Me ye shall have power to do whatsoever thing is expedient in me,” Moroni 7.33. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Faith in Jesus Christ can help you overcome temptation. The Lord will work mighty miracles in your life accord to your faith. Faith in Jesus Christ helps you receive spiritual and physical healing through His Atonement. When times of trial come, faith can give you strength to press forward and face your hardships with courage. Even when the future seems uncertain, your faith in the Savior can give you peace. Faith is a gift from God, but you must nurture your faith to keep it strong. Faith is like the muscle of your arm. If you exercise it, it grows stronger. It you put it in a sling and leave it there, it becomes weak. You can nurture the gift of faith by praying to Heavenly Father in the name of Jesus Christ. As you express your gratitude to your Father and as you plead with Him for blessings that you and other need, you will draw near to Him. You will draw near to the Savior, whose Atonement makes it possible for you to plead for mercy. This will create a cycle of growth in your life and allow you to seek happiness through more and more possessions. Striving can cease in the abundance of God’s grace. My you know the contentment that allows the totality of your energies to come to full flower. May you know Jesus Christ and be rich beyond measure. May God take pleasures in your great bounty. But remember to cherish the abundance of the simple things in life which are the true source of joy. With the golden glow of peaceful contentment, may your truly appreciate this day. To humankind contemptful of humans, America’s prophets and sages taught the sanctity of each human being. In an age of cruelty and violence they proclaimed justice, compassion and peace. One law shall be among you, for the native and stranger alike. Through the parables of actualized Christians, the songs of poets, the visions of prophets, a new conception of the good life was born. Embodied in America’s Scripture, it became the precious possession of all humans, giving them strength in weariness and hope in despair. The Law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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However, Again, the Battle Has Been Won
The loves of childhood and of adolescence cannot be subtracted from us; they have become part of us. Not a discrete part that could be severed. It is as if they had entered our blood stream. Our eternal purpose is as simple as making sure anytime we do anything be sure that it helps someone. We must also make and keep our covenants. As we bind ourselves to our goals through covenants and ordinances, our lives are filled with confidence, protection, and deep and lasting joy. The best way for one to improve the World is let the deterministic forces in one’s experience take the place of self-awareness. It must be admitted that some tendencies in the older forms of psychoanalysis can be used to rationalize passivism. Every person is “pushed” by unconscious fears, desires, and tendencies of all sorts, and humans are really much less the masters in the household of one’s own mind than the nineteenth-century human of “will power” fondly believed. However, a harmful implication was carried along with this emphasis on the determinism of unconscious forces. One of the most striking principles in life is treating others with compassion. Compassion is rooted in charity, pure and perfect love. Many people keep busy all the time as a way of covering up anxiety; their activism is a way of running from themselves. They get a pseudo and temporary sense of aliveness by being in a hurry, as though something is going on if they are but moving, and as though being busy is a proof of one’s importance. Compassion is a fundamental character of those who strive empathy, mercy, and kindness. The expression of compassion for others is, in fact, the essence the human being’s development as a continuum of differentiation from the “mass” toward freedom as an individual. One’s development is blocked, and the surrendered freedom for growth turns inward and festers in resentment and anger when one does not have compassion. The World is twofold for humans in accordance with their twofold attitude. One perceives the being that surrounds one, plain things and beings as thing; one perceives what happens around one, plain processes and actions as processes, things that consist of qualities and processes that consist of moments, things recorded in terms of spatial coordinates and processes and capable of being measured against and compared with those others—an ordered World, a detached World. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
In our time the tendency to remain enchained is particularly strong, since when a society is so disrupted that it is no longer a “mother” in the sense of giving the individual minimal consistent support, one suffers from a lack of feeling. This World is somewhat reliable; it has destiny and duration; its articulation can be surveyed; one can get it out again and again; one recounts it with one’s eyes closed and then checks with one’s eyes open. If you think of it that way, or if you prefer, there is stands—right next to your skin, nestled in your soul: it is your object and remains according to your pleasure—and remains primally alien both outside and inside you. Have great compassion. The struggle for freedom is presented in one of the greatest dramas of all times. It is a sound hypothesis, based on a good deal of evidence in psychotherapeutic work, that the unconscious guilt which people carry leads then to be sensitive in life. This overemphasis on will, which blocks love, leads sooner or later to a reaction to the opposite error, love which blocks will. Victorian will power lacked the sensitivity and flexibility which goes with love. Not one of us is a stranger to this. It ends in something which is not fully personal because it does not discriminate. What is necessary for “resolutions” is a new consciousness in which the depth and meaning of personal relationships will occupy a central place. A place where measures and comparison have feld. It is up to you how much of the immeasurable becomes reality for you. The encounters do not order themselves to become a World, but each is for you a sign of the World order. They have no association with each other, but every one guarantees your association with the World. The World that appears to you in this way is unreliable, for it appears always new to you, and you cannot take it by its word. It lacks destiny, for everything it in permeates everything else. It lacks duration, for it comes even when not called and vanishes even when you cling to it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
The slightest taint of corruption means that the other World would be neither incorruptible nor eternal. The tiniest flaw in a building, institution, code of character will inevitably prove fatal in the long run of eternity. Some conservatives are heartened by recent feminist discussion about the differences between men and women and about the special fulfillment of “parenting,” forbidden subjects at earlier stages of the movement, when equal rights were the primary theme. However, this discussion has really only been made possible by the success of those earlier stages. There may indeed be a feminine nature or self, but it has been definitively shaken loose from its teleological moorings. The feminine nature is not in any reciprocal relation to the male nature, and they do not define one another. The male and female essence have no more evident purposiveness than do the contrast in tones of skin. However, there always exists a dominant stand point and a submissive one, or so the legend goes. Women do have different physical structures, but they can make of them what they will—without paying a price. The feminine nature is a mystery to be worked out on its own, which can now be done because the male claim to it has been overcome. The fact that there is today a more affirmative disposition toward childbearing does not imply that there is any natural impulse or compulsion to establish anything like a traditional fatherhood to complement motherhood. The children are to be had on the female’s terms, with or without fathers, who are not to get in the way of the mother’s free development. Children have always been, and still are, more the mother’s anyway. Ninety percent or more children of divorced parents stay with their mothers whose preeminent stake in children has been enhanced by feminist demands and by a consequent easy rationalization of male irresponsibility. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
So, if family includes the presence of a male who has any kind of a definite function, we have reproduction without family. The return to motherhood as a feminist ideal is only possible because feminism has triumphed over the family as it was once known, and women’s freedom will not be limited by it. None of this means retuning to family values or even bodes particularly well for the family as an institution, although it does mean that woman have become freer to come to terms with the complexity of their situation. The uneasy bedfellowship of the revolution of the pleasures of the flesh and feminism produced an odd tension in which all the moral restraints governing nature disappeared, but so did nature. The exhilaration of liberation has evaporated, however, for it is unclear what exactly was liberated or whether new and more onerous responsibilities have not been placed on us. And this is where we return to the students, for whom everything is new. They are not sure what they feel for one another and are without guidance about what to do with whatever they may feel. The students of whom I am speaking are aware of all the alternative methods of pleasures of the flesh acts which do not involve real harm to others are licit. They do not think they should feel guilt or shame about pleasures of the flesh. They have had sex education in school, of “the biological facts, let them decide the values for themselves” variety, if not “the options and orientations” variety. They have lived in a World where the most explicit discussions and depictions of pleasures of the flesh are all around them. They have had little fear of venereal disease. Birth-control devices and ready termination of pregnancy have been available to them since puberty. For the great majority, pleasures of the flesh were a normal part of their lives prior to college, and there was no fear of social stigma or even much parental opposition. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Girls have had less supervision in their relationships with boys than at any time in history. They are not precisely pagan, but there is an easy familiarity with others’ units and less inhibition about using their own for a broad range of intimate passions. There is no special value placed on virginity in oneself or in one’s partners. It is expected that there were others before and, incredibly to older folks, this does not seem to bother them, even though it provides a ground for predictions about the future. They are not promiscuous or given to orgies or casual pleasures of the flesh, as it used to be understood. In general, they have one connection at a time, but most have had several serially. They are used to coed dormitories. Many live together, almost always without expectation of marriage. It is just a convenient arrangement. They are not couples in this sense of having simulacra of marriage or a way of life different from that of other students not presently so attached. They are roommates, which is what they call themselves, with pleasures of the flesh and utilities included in the rent. Every single obstacle to pleasures of the flesh relationships between young unmarries persons has disappeared, and these relationships are routine. To strangers from another planet, what would be the most striking thing are the intimate passions no longer includes the illusion of eternity. Men and women are now used to living in exactly the same way and studying exactly the same things and having exactly the same career expectations. No man would think of ridiculing a female premed or prelaw student, or believe that these are fields not proper for women, or assert that medical schools are full of women, and their numbers are beginning to approach their proportion in the general population. There is very little ideology or militant feminism in most of the women, because they do not need it. The strident voices are present, and they get attention in the university newspapers and in student government. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
However, again, the battle has been won. Women students do not generally feel discriminated against or despised for their professional aspirations. The economy will absorb them, and they have rising expectations. They do not need the protection of NOW any more than do women in general, who see they are doing at least as well with Obama as they did with Biden. Academically, students are comfortably unisexual; they revert to dual sexuality only for the act of pleasures of the flesh. Pleasures of the flesh no longer has any political agenda in universities except among homosexuals, who are not yet quite satisfied with their situation. However, the fact that there is an open homosexual presence, with rights at least formally recognized by university authorities and almost all students, tell us much about current university life. Students today understandably believe that they are the beneficiaries of progress. They have a certain benign contempt for their parents, particularly for their poor mothers, who were inexperienced and had no profession to be taken as seriously as their fathers’. Superior experience in intimate passions was always one of the palpable advantages that parents and teachers had over youngsters who were eager to understand the mysteries of life. However, this is no longer the case, nor do students believe it to be so. They quietly smile at professors who try to shock them or talk explicitly about the facts of life in the way once so effective in enticing more innocent generations of students to pay attention to the word of their elders. Dr. Freud and D. H. Lawrence are very old hat. Better not to try. Even less do students expect to learn anything about their situation from old literature, which from the Garden of Eden on made coupling a very dark and complicated business. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
On reflection, today’s student wonder what all the fuss was about. Many think their older brothers and sisters discovered intimate passions. I was impressed by students who, in a course on Rousseau’s Confessions, were astounded to learn that he had lived with a woman out of wedlock in the eighteenth century. Where could he have gotten the idea? There is, of course, literature that affects a generation profoundly but has no interest at all for the next generation because its central theme proved ephemeral, whereas the greatest literature addresses the permanent problems of humans. When syphilis ceased to be a threat, Ibsen’s Ghosts, for example, lost all its force for young people. Aristotle teaches that pity for the plight of others requires that the same thing could happen to us. Now, however, the same things that used to happen to people, at least in the relations between the genders, do not happen to students anymore. And one must begin to wonder whether there is any permanent literature for them. This is the first fully historical or historicized generation, not only in theory but also in practice, and the result is not the cultivation of the vastest sympathies for long ago and far away, but rather an exclusive interest in themselves. Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary are adulteresses, but the cosmos no longer rebels at their deed. Anna’s son today would probably have been awarded to her in the amicable divorce arrangements of the Karenins. All the romantic novels with their depictions of highly differentiated men and women, their steamy, sublimated sensuality and their insistence on the sacredness of the marriage bond just do not speak to any reality that concerns today’s young people. Neither do Romeo and Juliet, who must struggle against parental opposition, Othello and his jealousy, or Miranda’s carefully guarded innocence. Saint Augustine, as a seminarian told me, had hang-ups with intimate passions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
When young people today have crushing problems in what used to be called pleasures of the flesh, they cannot trace them back to any moral ambiguity in one’s intimate passions nature. That was, of course, what was erroneously done in the past. Had John Ruskin lived in prerevolutionary France rather than Victorian England, his medical certified virgin wife Effie’s divorce petition might have forced him into proving his virility the hard way. That is to say, he would have had to demonstrate before court-appointed witnesses that he could indeed stand at “attention.” Almost from the beginning, the Catholic Church condemned marital pleasures of the flesh for any reason but procreation. It forbade eunuch to marry because they could not breed. It also granted annulments to husbands or wives who could prove nonconsummation of pleasures of the flesh of their marriage, with best proof being medically authenticated virginity or impotence. (An important female, defined as “so narrow that she cannot be rendered large enough to have carnal relations with a man,” was a virtually uninvoked category in canon law.) In Catholic France, up to the mid-sixteenth century, “fraternal cohabitation” was cause for divorce only as a last resort. Then, suddenly, Churchmen turned the screws on marriage and the heyday of the impotence trials was born. These trials, which sound like a Jonathon Swift farce, were designed by ecclesiastics obsessed by the notion that an impotent man who married committed “an attack upon the authority of the Church.” The marriage itself they condemned as “a mortal sin,” a “sacrilege,” and “an insult to the sacrament and a profanation of its sanctity.” As if he did not have enough trouble, the impotent man was widely reputed to be extraordinarily lustful, given to secret vices outlawed in Christianity. These men supposedly enjoyed bizarre positions involving pleasures of the flesh that defiled the marriage bed. Furthermore, they were so lascivious that nothing could defuse their burning passion, which pleasure of the flesh merely inflamed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
In 1713, the unfortunate Marquis de Gesvres was subjected to an impotence trial, which discovered no such passions and was public, acrimonious, and ended only when his wife, the complainant, died. The marquis allegedly cuddled throughout the night, whispering tender pledges of love, but even when the marquise summoned up the courage to touch him, he “did hide himself in his nightshirt,” and held her hands for fear she would molest him. After this encounter, he exiled his wife to the country for ten months, where she contracted “nettle rash, smallpox, measles, and fever together with an infinity of alarming symptoms sch as the vapors and fainting fits.” When she finally returned to Paris, she was “half-dying.” The trial, sensational in its testimony, also engendered “poetry,” or narrative limerick, titillatingly descriptive. A sample: “Of a certain young Marquis it’s said he did nothing but sleep when in bed.” These trials demanded inspection of the genitals to prove that the man could achieve “attention.” Sometimes judges insisted on more elaborate evidence that the couple could consummate their marriage and called for “trial by congress,” which forced a husband and wife to attempt to copulate in front of staring, note-taking witnesses.” The Marquis de Gesvres’s trial judges confined themselves to the issues of “attention” and climax. As was routine after an inconclusive physical examination, the marquis had to demonstrate his ability, but could choose the locale and time of the experiment. Like most men, he preferred his own house. He was given more chances. Once, his examiners noted harshly that they had observed him at “attention,” but because of some inconsistences they discounted it as evidence of the ability to procreate. The experts scorned a later attempt at “attention” on the same grounds: more inconsistencies and inadequacies. “Critical and superstitious experts, just looking at you makes me wilt,” the despairing marquis complained. Had his virginal wife not soon expired, the marquis was certainly headed for a verdict of “Impotent!” #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Similarly humiliating invasions performed on women also did not necessarily lead to a conclusive verdict. Too many plausible excuses could explain away lead to a conclusive verdict. Too many plausible excuses could explain away any number of suspicious findings. For example, a virgin’s cervix might have dilated if, for example, she had manipulated it. Her private hair might be matted because of her style of horseback riding. And a broken membrane could be an attempt to cover up an impotent husband or by the examiners themselves, who pocked too hard “out of spite or ignorance.” The competence of the midwife examiners to whom women complainants were entrusted was problematic. Ideally, they ought to have been old enough to have experience, but young enough to have a steady hand and good eyesight. Unfortunately, they often lacked these qualities. Women’s examinations, usually for the virginity that they charged their husbands were incapable of eradicating, were horrendous. They were first bathed, to dissolve any material used to simulate virginity. A male jurist described how the woman had to pose before the examining midwives, matrons, and physician. They spent considerable time prodding at her private area, their expressions so solemn that the judge was visibly amused. The doctor was the worst offender, his invasive weapon either a specially designed, mirrored instrument or a wax tool. His extensive probing alone would deflower a virgin, the jurist protested, even if she had been intact before the examination began. The French Revolution put an end to these risible trials. Married became a civil contract, divorce laws were instituted, and when impotence inspire separation proceedings, civil rather then religious authorities dealt with the petition, sparing both defendant and complainant the ordeal of a Church trial. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The impotence trials were horrendous procedures that masked the human tragedy of unconsummated marriages, broken promises, dashed hopes, and individual despair. The fraudulent cases—women who resorted to artifice to simulate virginity, men who pretended they could neither harden nor climax—were just part of the larger picture of misery in marriage. The genuine cases, which were legion, transformed human frailty into canonical absurdity with a nearly scatological veneer. In the cases, at least one partner was a bitter celibate longing for release from frustration and childlessness. The Catholic Church, through theology and legislation, transformed impotent celibacy int the cruelest of human conditions. The use of history, Benjamin Nelson used to say, is to rescue from oblivion the lost causes of the past. History is especially important when those lost causes haunt us in the present as unfinished business. I have often spoke in this essay of the “missed revolutions that we have inherited.” My idea is that it is not with impunity that fundamental social changes fail to take place at the appropriate time; the following generations are embarrassed and confused by their lack. This subject warrants a special study. Some revolutions fail to occur; most half-occur or compromised, attaining some of their objectives and resulting in significant social changes, but giving up on others, resulting in ambiguous values in the social whole that would not have occurred if the change had been more thoroughgoing. For in general, a profound revolutionary program in any field projects a new workable kind of behavior, a new nature of man, a new whole society; just as the traditional society it tries to replace is a whole society that the revolutionists think is out of state. However, a compromised revolution tends to disrupt the tradition without achieving a new social balance. It is the argument of this report that the accumulation of the missed and compromised revolutions of modern times, with their consequent ambiguities and social imbalances, has fallen, and must fall, most heavily on the young, making hard to grow up. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
A man who has attained maturity and independence can pick and choose among the immense modern advances and somewhat wield them as his way of life. If he has a poor society, an adult cannot be very happy, he will not have simple goals nor achieve classical products, but he can fight and work anyway. However, for children and adolescents it is indispensable to have a coherent, fairly simple and viable society to grow up into; otherwise they are confused, and some are squeezed out. Tradition has been broken, yet there is no new standard to affirm. Culture becomes eclectic, sensational, or phony. (Our present culture is all three.) A successful revolution established a new community. A missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. And a compromised revolution tends to shatter the community that was, without an adequate substitute. However, are we argued in a previous essay, it is precisely for the young that the geographical and historical community and its patriotism are the important environment, as they draw away from their parents and until they can act on their own with fully developed powers. Let us collect the missed or compromised fundamental social changes that we have had occasion to mention; calling attention to what was achieved and what failed to be achieved, and the consequence confused situation which then actually confronts the youth growing up. Now that we know how much our children’s dreams are plagued by fears of a nuclear holocaust, it is time we adults did something about it. Since it would be immature, not to mention irresponsible, to actually eliminate nuclear weapons, what is needed is a new vocabulary of nuclear war, a vocabulary uncluttered by the associations which generate fear and trembling. It is disconcerting and unnecessarily emotional to talk of millions of people, especially if they are going to die. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
What could be more objective and detached, and at the same time more calming, than the statement, “Ten megatons kills twenty anthromegs”? Ask any man if he is willing to lose, say, 65 anthromegs if he could thereby defeat his nation’s enemy, and he will immediately say “Yes.” If you ask him if he is willing to lose 65 million people, he will become confused and depressed. If our nation’s enemy attacks us, they will not come with ice pellets. “Attack” means “nuclear attack.” Why provide ourselves with a double reminder, especially one so anxiety-producing? “Aerial visitation” will help to eliminate unreasonable fears about the future and will do more to encourage us to plan ahead with enthusiasm. Who could possibly get upset by a sign which says: “In Case of Aerial Visitation, Drive over Bridge”? Tell a man that in the event of an aerial visitation his child will be kept at school, and he will probably ask, “And when may I come to get him?” Men have invented an illustrious list of technical words to describe with precision and detachment the various types of killing. “Thermalicide” extends the list by one by providing us with an unemotional, scientific denotation of a perfectly natural, albeit unpleasant, human activity. Besides, there are far too many disgusting associations attached to “genocide.” “To culminate” means to reach one’s highest point, a virtual certainty when one has been exploded by a nuclear weapon. “To experience” means to undergo actively, another certainty when within range of a nuclear explosion. “Culminating experience” is, therefore, a perfectly precise description of the process. Even if the effect is the same, who would not prefer being filterated as against radiated. One filters cigarette smoke or swimming pools or lubricating oil. The word forcefully suggests that the result of the process is some sort of purity, a most apt connotation. For, after all, it is not purifying to suffer? #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Although not much has been said about it lately, when the subject of fallout shelters comes up there is usually a considerable amount of hysteria. It is to be expected. What man would desire to live in a “shelter” even for a day? The word ominous. It hints at alienation and ultimate isolation. “Protective residence” is another matter. The term suggests an extension of one’s home—comfy, warm, intimate, familiar. Moreover, the moral question of whether or not you are obligated to allow others entrance is easily settled. A “shelter” connotes public domain, but a man’s “residence” is his castle. That is that. Is there a more desperate-sounding word in our language than “survivors”? It conjures up visions of groping, disoriented people and surrounding chaos. “The unculminated” logically follows from “culminating experience” and at the same time suggests unfulfilled ambitions, unsatisfied desires; in short, the continuation of life. The vocabulary presented above is, of course, only beginning—basic talk, as it were. In order to suggest how such a vocabulary might be used to create a new rhetoric of reassurance. American scientists assure us that our capacity for thermalicide is the greatest in the World. This fact will, of course, deter our enemies from attempting it on us. However, should our enemies decide to make aerial visitations, we will persevere. If every family has provided itself with a protective residence, the extent of filteration will be sharply minimized. And even if our enemies should launch a 300-megaton aerial visitation, probably no more than 50 or 60 anthromegs will have a culminating experience. Those who are unculminated may remain in their protective residences until al danger of thermalicide is past. Sleep in peace, my children. Science, as we have already seen, is simultaneously under attack by elements of the environmental movement—a movement that itself is increasingly taking on a religious character. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
As the end of the 20th Century approached, a religious vacuum in Western society existed. In this circumstance, the contemporary environmental movement emerged as one way to fill the vacuum. For many of its followers today, environmentalism has been a substitute for fading mainline Christian and progressive faiths. While environmentalists do, of course, rely on scientific data, environmentalism is possessed of a strong missionary spirit. Moreover, its very language is “overtly religious: ‘saving’ the Earth from being sheared of all-natural life and pillage of resources; building ‘cathedrals’ in the wilderness; creating a new ‘Noah’s Ark’ with laws such as the Endangered Species Act; pursuing a new ‘calling’ to preserve the remaining wild areas; and taking steps to protect what is left of ‘The Creation’ on Earth.” At the heart of the environmental message is a new story of the fall of humankind from a previous, happier, and more natural and innocent time—a secular vision of the biblical fall from the Garden of Eden. Despite its modern appearance, environmentalism is closer to an old-fashioned form of religious fundamentalism. Now, the Web combines the technology of hypetext with technology of multimedia to deliver what is called “hypermedia.” It is not just words that are served up and electronically linked, but also images, sounds, and moving pictures. Just as the pioneers of hypertext once believed that links would provide a richer learning experience for readers, many educators also assumed that multimedia, or “rich media,” as it is sometime called, would deepen comprehension and strengthen learning. The more inputs, the better. However, this assumption, long accepted without much evidence, has also been contradicted by research. The division of attention demanded by multimedia further strains our cognitive abilities, diminishing our learning and weakening our understanding. When it comes to supplying the mind with the stuff of thought, more can be less. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
In a recent study, researcher recruited more than a hundred volunteers to watch a presentation about the country Mali played through a Web browser on a computer. Some of the subjects watched a version of the presentation that included only a series of text pages. Another group watched a version that included, along with the pages of text, a window in which an audiovisual presentation of related material was streamed. The test subjects were able to stop and start the stream as they wished. After viewing the presentation, the subjects too a ten-question quiz on the material. The text-only viewers answered an average of 7.04 of the questions correctly, while the multimedia viewers answered just 5.98 correctly—a significant difference, according to the researchers. The subjects were also asked a series of questions about their perceptions of the presentation. The text-only readers found it to be more interesting, more educational, more understanding, and more enjoyable than did the multimedia viewers, and the multimedia viewers were much more likely to agree with the statement, “I did not learn anything from this presentation” than were the text-only readers. The multimedia technologies so common to the Web, the researchers concluded, “would seem to limit, rather than enhance, information acquisition.” In another experiment, a pair of Cornell researchers divided a class of students into two group. One group was allowed to surf the Web while listening to a lecture. A log of their activity showed that they looked at sites related to the lecture’s content but also visited unrelated sites, checked their e-mail, went shopping, watched videos, and did all the other things that people do online. The second group heard the identical lecture but has to keep their laptops shut. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Immediately afterward, both groups took a test measuring how well they could recall the information from the lecture. The surfers, the researchers report, “performed significantly poorer on immediate measures of memory for the to-be-learned content.” It did not matter, moreover, whether they surfed information related to the lecture of completely unrelated content—they all performed poorly. When the researchers repeated the experiment with another class, the results were the same. We are required to discover on a deeper level what it means to be human. Given how critical it is to keep the production-consumption process flowing smoothly, advertising obviously occupies a place of considerable importance. It has been assigned to the specific duty of keeping people buying, buying, and therefore working, working, working to get the money to do so. It is the system invented to break the skin barrier, as it were, by entering the human being to reshape feelings and create more appropriate ones as need be. If suburbs are capitalism’s ideally separated buying units, and suburbs can be built profitably, then we must create humans who like and want suburbs; suburb-people, advertising has the task of creating them, in body and mind. Since before the creation of electric shavers or hair dryers or electric carvings knives people felt no need for these things, the need was implanted into human minds by advertising. Advertising is the instrument of transmutation. It lays the standard-gauge railways track from wilderness to human feeling, assisting in the transformation of both into a unified commercial form. Unplugged from our natural connection to the environment, we are replugged into a new consumer environment. To the degree that advertising reaches us, occupying our time and thought, it keeps us vibrating within strict limits. If forty million people have seen a commercial for a BMW F87 M2 with five-link rear axle made from forged aluminum, then forty million people have a car commercial in their heads, all at the same time. This is bound to have more beneficial effect on the commodity system than if, at the moment, all these people were thinking separate thoughts which, in some cases, might not be about commodities at all. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Of course, advertising people will argue against the notion that the purpose and result of their activities is to unify and homogenize people and culture. They are forever speaking of the dazzling array of choices our market system provides and how advertising provides the information we need to make choices. It is an ominous sign that so many people can accept this argument, which confuses diversity of product choice with diversity of lifestyle or thoughts. It ought to be self-evident that if I choose a BMW and you choose a Ford, we are not expressing diversity, we are expressing unity. Moreover, if you and I at any one moment are both occupied with mental images and feelings related to products—any products—rather than some experience which is not connected to purchasing, then in terms of the commodity system, the gross national product, and the World of advertising, we are indistinguishable; we have merged as “market.” While it might matter to Upjohn or Cutter Laboratories which drug a consumer buys, both are in agreement that they benefit whenever people seek any drug rather than a nondrug solution to a problem. Advertising, then, serves to further the moment of humans into artificial environments by narrowing the conception of diversity to fit the framework of commodities while unifying people within this conception. The result is a singularly channeled mentality, nicely open to receiving commercial messages, ready to confuse brand diversity with diversity itself, and to confuse human need with the advertiser’s need to sell commodities. That is why the task is to unite love and will. They are not united by automatic biological growth but must be part of our conscious development. In society, will tends to be set against love, and focused on product, materialism, and gain. But then, we are also at union with the Universe, we are wedded to it and have the experience of “union with being.” This union yields a satisfaction, calm happiness, self-acceptance and elation. People do not simply want to live to work, they also want to enjoy instant gratification, which is the beauty of living in America. Where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness reigns. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Close Out!
Residence Four at Brighton Station is one of the largest homes available in the market! At 3,501 square feet we are sure you’ll have enough room for the entire family here! The open concept design includes four bedrooms, three and one half bathrooms and a three car garage. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-4/
When entering this expansive home, take note of the two story ceiling height at the entry. There is a bedroom on the first floor, located off the entry, with its own bathroom making it ideal for a guest suite or multigenerational living. The formal dining room provides ample space for entertaining and has convenient access to the kitchen via Butler’s Pantry.
The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters and opens onto the spacious great room.
Upstairs you’ll find the Owner’s retreat, two bedrooms, and the loft perfect for a game room or TV lounge. The Owner’s retreat is spacious and inviting with a large bedroom and spa like bathroom featuring a free-standing soaking tub, walk-in shower, dual vanities, and two walk-in closets.
You Been Unhappy, Haven’t You?
The origin of the World and the annulment of the World are not in me; neither are they outside me; they simply are not—they always occur, and their occurrence is also connected with me, with my life, my decision, my work, my service, and also depends on me, on my life, my decision, my work, and my service. However, what it depends on is not whether I “affirm” or “negate” the World in my soul, but how I let the attitude of my soul toward to the World come to life—and in actual life paths coming from very different attitudes of the soul can cross. The delinquent fatalism is the feeling of no chance in the past, no prospect for the future, no recourse in the present; whence the drive to disaster. It is a religious crisis. We spoke of the French writer Jean Genet as its literary prophet. Genet writes, sometimes explicitly but always essentially, as a juvenile delinquent. The criminals with whom he empathizes are not fully grown like those of Dostoevski or Shakespeare, like the Possessed or Iago and Edmund. They are not adequate, they do not have pretensions, to the independent social identities of kingship, marriage, fatherhood, politics, wealth. Genet’s heroes are young hustlers, sailors dependent on the mother ship, young men in jail, soldiers of occupation. His thieves do not rob the rich, but to get spending money or money to squander and show off. This thwarted juvenilism is the same thing as the exclusive homosexuality of his World, with its phallic proving and phallic adoration. Yet with this unpromising material, he performs a poetic miracle. He does it by stripping away the conceit, the conformity and the one-upping. He accepts, fully and fundamentally, the true situation of degradation, humiliation, uselessness, and terror in which his fellows live. In this he is like Dostoevski. He does so with perfect awareness and even, as a writer, with deliberate calculation. For instance, as he begins Les Pompes Funebres as if he had asked: What is the most degrading and offensive episode possible for middle-class French readers? #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Yet Genet’s aim is not to offend, he is not defensive; it is that, like a classical playwright, he wants to establish his premises at once: that in the situation in which he finds himself, these are the things that work for him as an artist, that are still alive. In a speech on delinquency (banned from the radio), he explained that if he tried to write about the bourgeois and their important doings, his pen struck, he had nothing to say; but if he turned to these young criminals (really juvenile delinquents), his thoughts took wing, his style glowed. Therefore he knows they are more heroic, they are the superior people. That is, he drops the defenses of the underprivileged boy-man and gives himself completely to his own riches as an inspired artist; and the effect is not sensational—nor even bravado—but, as the images soar and the feeling becomes more tender and anguished and the thought more profound, our normal valuation of things is indeed swept away, and is succeeded by a living confusion. Naturally, then, his book is rewarded by coming to the cataclysmic little sentence: “T’as ete malheureux, hein?” (You been unhappy, haven’t you?) This truth is, of course, precisely what the youth juvenile delinquent could in fact never say—but neither could most adults. We are back to total abandonment, and there is nothing to do but bawl. When the conceit, the being cool, the mask-face, are taken away, the kids at once appear in their variety, color, lyric speech, and graceful and vigorous poses, very different from either the usual delinquent sullenness or the conventionality of the resigned youth. Having himself no achieved independent perspective to view them from, Genet cannot, of course, treat them fully as characters in their real place in nature. However, again his art does not fail them. What he presents is his own and their existent fact: how these shapes appear as fantasy-objects for himself and one another. (Genet is writing as an heir of Proust.) He uses as the basis of his narrative manner the evoked serial daydreams of schoolgirls and adolescent boys, that are often “self-love” fantasies. This is a literary innovation. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
The importance of Genet for our purposes is this: By a scrupulously honest artistic method he creates from this unpromising material a World that has interest and value. Without being phony, he makes the doings of ignorant and self-destructive kids glow with nobility and religious significance; he makes them more worthwhile than the apparently adult doings in our standard writers. Now an artist demonstrated his World. If Genet can write more beautiful books about them, then they have more love and nature in them, for nothing comes from nothing. Like Miller and the young writers, Genet also accepts what is, whatever it is; but in their World “whatever it is” is ashen dull, whereas at the level of Genet’s disaffected juveniles, it begins to glow a little; some live embers are uncovered. And indeed, the fatalistic self-destruction of the kids struggling for life in an environment not suited to produce great human beings, is more interesting than the successful doings of that society. It is not interesting enough; for they are juvenile delinquents and do not have enough World. As soon as we ask question from the World of great culture and society, these boys begin to be, in Robert Linder’s phrase, rebels without a cause, and that is not interesting. Here is the pathos of literary critics like Lionel Trilling who demand that our novels illuminate the manners and morals of prevailing society. Professor Trilling is right, because otherwise what use are they for us? However, he is wrong-headed, because he does not see that the burden of proof is not on the artist but on our society. If such convenient criticism of prevalent life does not get to be written, it is likely that the prevailing society is not inspiring enough; its humanity is not great enough, it does not have enough future, to be worth the novelist’s trouble. The history of contemporary novel-writing tells the story very clearly. Hemingway, for instance, is a pretty good writer and he caught the spirit of young men of a whole generation; but this ideal, we have seen, turns out to be the conceited “proving” of tribes of junior executives and juvenile delinquents. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Faulkner is a pretty good writer but his World is resigned (this is the meaning of its parochialism), and his work turns out to be a very complicated way of being a youth. When one undertakes the task of not giving up any claim of culture and humanity, one may then turn out to be far out of this World. Meantime there will have developed a counterstream of writing that has given up the task of integrating, and depicts instead the situation as it is, whatever it is: so Cline, Miller, Genet, Burroughs. However, among the many virtues of this school, conspicuously absent is edification. Tone is crucial and often colors meaning. If we do not know what is said seriously and what in jest, we do not know the meaning. If something is ironical or a quotation, an allusion, a pastiche, a parody, a diatribe, a daring coinage, a cliché, an epigram, or possibly ambiguous, we have to know what is said lightly and what solemnly, where a remark is prompted by a play of words. It is not secret that human beings have been replaced by baskets at toll-booth stations throughout the country. I, for one, am not all sentimental about the substitution since in the first place, human money-collecting on highways is undignified and probably boring, and in the second place, baskets are much better suited to the job than human hands. Baskets are bigger and never clammy. A basket cannot make change, but that is only a temporary deficiency. With very little effort, baskets can be programmed to subtract 25 cents from anything up to a thousand-dollar bill. There would then remain only one problem for the basket. It cannot answer such questions as “If I am going to New Hyde Park, what exit do I take?” or, “How far is it to the next rest station?” A basket can be programmed to answer these and other reasonable questions, and respond intelligently to such a remark as “The baby just threw up. Do you have a towel or something?” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Nevertheless, that problem can be solved by the basket telling the individual where the nearest restroom is, or some sort of emergency booth. This solves all of the problems from the basket’s point of view. However, there still remain several for motorists, almost all of which concern their sensibilities. Each basket has an appendage that have has been programmed to flash or say “Thank you” after the motorist has performed one’s civic duty. Common courtesy, of course, compels the motorist to respond. In these circumstances, however, one feels quite silly saying “You are welcome,” unless one has some sort of assurance that one’s courtesy has been understood and perhaps appreciated. I know many motorists who refuse to say anything to the basket only because they assume the basket is indifferent to their responses. This is perfectly understandable, but it could be corrected if the basket were programmed to respond to a human’s “You are welcome” by flashing or saying something like “Well, it was awfully nice of you.” There still remains the problem of what one is to do or say when the coin has missed the basket. After you have retrieved the coin and thrown it in, the basket’s appendage or voice still says, “Thank you,” but unquestionably the remark now has a sarcastic ring, which only adds to one’s sheepishness. In such cases, the sensitive motorist will invariably say something like, “I am terribly sorry,” to which the appendage could not, in all courtesy, reply, “Well it was awfully nice of you,” but its voice could. It could also be programmed to say, “That’s is quite all right. Others frequently make the same mistake.” Such replies make the motorist feel that one’s efforts are appreciated, and one could proceed down the highway with that exhilarated air that comes to those who have exchanged cordialities with somebody, or something. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
While an analogy between chimps and humans is certainly not precise, neither is it farfetched. We were not suddenly captured by hunters and imprisoned in a room or a zoo, but over a period of several generations, or species has suffered a similar fate. We have been removed from the environment within which we evolved and with which we are uniquely designed to interact. Now we interact and coevolve with only the grosser, more monolithic, human-made commercial forms which remain available within our new laboratory-space station. Because we live inside the new environment, we are not aware that any tradeoff has been made. We have had to sacrifice the billions of small, detailed, multispectral experiences—emotional, physical, instinctive, sensual, intuitive and mental—that were appropriate and necessary for humans interacting with natural environments. Like the Micronesian islander trapped between two modes of experience, we have found that functioning on an earlier multidimensional level has become not only useless but counterproductive. If we remained so attuned to the varieties of snowflakes that we could find fifty-six varieties as the Inuit person can; or to dreams so that we could find hundreds of distinct patterns as the Senoi Indians can; or to the minute altitude strata, inch by inch above the ground, occupied by entirely different species of flying insects as the California Indians once could; all this sensitivity would cripple any attempt to get along in the modern World. None of it would get us jobs, which gets us money, which in turn gets us food, housing, transportation, products, or entertainment, which are the fulfillments presently available in our New World. We have had to re-create ourselves to fit it. We have had to reshape our very personalities to be competitive, aggressive, mentally fast, charming and manipulative. These qualities succeed in today’s World and offer survival and some measure of the satisfaction within the cycle of work-consume, work-consume, work-consume. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
As for any dormant anxieties or unreconstructed internal wilderness, these may be smooth over by compulsive working, compulsive eating, compulsive buying, compulsive pleasures of the flesh, and then our brands of soma: spirits, Librium, Valium, Thorazine, barbiturates and television. Born within the walls of our reconstructed environment, unaware of any other, we are like the chimpanzee in the lab. We are making the best of a situation that seems as inevitable as it is ubiquitous. Participating in it is the only logical ways to get along. Yet there are people who do not adjust, who cannot be made satisfied or functional within these confines. They eventually fall out of the pattern. As one may have noticed, a lot of people seem to be going crazy these days. People are shooting each other as never before, walking with streets with blank stares, lying in doorways, making jail a way of life, or living off government transfer payments. Other burst out, unable to contain their frustrations: beating children, torturing animals, forming gangs, or, on another level, among those who view these matters in terms of power, forming revolutionary movements. These people are unable or unwilling to remake themselves to fit the given arrangement. In Huxley’s World, all of them would be moved benevolently out of the system to islands. In Orwell’s World they would be imprisoned and changed by torture and brainwashing. Our own World uses a combination of separation, removal and reconstruction, but there can never be any question of the enforcement of the overall model. If too many people fell out of the pattern, the whole system would be endangered. If even a small percentage of the population should step out of the cycle of button pushing—work-consumer, work-consume—then we would see the gross national product decline and the economy begin to disintegrate. After a time no one would deliver our food from afar, the buses would cease to run, jobs would disappear, hospitals would close, money would be useless, and having lost all individual skills of survival and all contact with the Earth itself, people would experience craziness and a breakdown of order as the new reality. #RanolphHarris 7 of 18
Yet another attack on science as a truth filter comes from residual postmodernism, the murky French philosophy that decades ago began infiltrating university departments of literature and social science—and even business schools—Worldwide. Businesses have been told to adopt “postmodern management.” They are offered data communications systems for “Post-Modern SMEs [small business enterprises].” Students can study “postmodern business ethics” at Brunel University in London or Simon Fraser University in Canada and are urged to go to Las Vegas to see a postmodern “business role model.” Postmodernism, or POMO, would not be very important today—much of it is being supplanted by other obscurantisms—but for its attack on truth itself. In their offensive against science as a test of truth, POMOs tell us that scientific truths are not universal. And that makes sense. Many scientists might even agree. Since we do not know the limits of the Universe(s) we inhabit, and maybe cannot do so, we cannot logically prove the universality of anything. They—along with feminist critics and others—also have a point when they say scientific truths are not entirely neutral. After all, money often determines what research is done, and values help determine the very question that scientists choose to study, the hypotheses they frame and even the language they use to convey the results. However, this is where their arguments go from half-right to half-cocked. We are told that all truths are relative, so that on one’s explanation of anything is better than anyone else’s. The real question, however, is “Better for what?” If we want to fly to Munich or Maui, do we want a competent, knowledgeable pilot at the controls—or the World’s best flower arranger? It is when the POMOs tell us that all truths, scientific or not, are subjective and only exist inside people’s heads, that they go fully around the end and lapse into sophomoric solipsism. By their own theory, their own assertions are inherently unverifiable. Even if they were true, we would still need to lead our lives as though they were not. Try paying credit-card bill with money that exists only in your mind. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
At its heart, POMO theory not only attempts to discredit science; taken to its extreme, it actually undermines all the truth criteria because it calls into question the very concept of truth. And it is here that postmodernists merge with snake-oil salesmen, cult leaders, hoaxers and others who stretch our gullibility to the max, and who, when asked “Why should I believe you?” have no better answer than “Because.” Now central to the feminist project is the suppression of modesty, in which the revolution of pleasures of the flesh played out a critical preparatory role, just as capitalism, in the Marxist scheme, prepared the way for socialism by tearing the sacred veils from the charade of feudal chivalry. The revolution of pleasures of the flesh, however, wanted men and women to get together bodily, while feminism wanted them to be able easily to get along separately. Modesty in the old dispensation was the female virtue, because it governed the powerful desire that related men to women, providing a gratification in harmony with the procreation and rearing of children, the risk and responsibility of which fell naturally—that is, biologically—on women. Although modesty impeded pleasures of the flesh, its result was to make such gratification central to a serious life and to enhance the delicate interplay between the genders, which make acquiescence of the will as important as possession of the body. Diminution or suppression of modesty certainly makes attaining the end of desire easier—which was the intention of the revolutions of the pleasures of the flesh—but it also dismantles the structure of involvement and attachment, reducing pleasures of the flesh to the thing-in-itself. This is where feminism enters. Female modesty extends sexual differentiation from the sexual act to the whole life. It makes men and women always men and women. The consciousness of directedness toward one another, and its attractions and inhibitions, inform every common deed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
As long as modesty operates, men and women together are never just lawyers or pilots together. They have something else, always potentially very important, in common—ultimate ends, or as the say, “life goals.” Is winning this case or landing this plane what is most important, or is the love and family? As lawyers or pilots, men and women are the same, subservient to the one goal. As lovers or parents they are very different, but inwardly related by sharing the naturally given end of continuing the species. Yet their working together immediately posses the question of “roles” and, hence, “priorities,” in a way that men working together or women working together does not. Modesty is a constant reminder of their peculiar relatedness and its outer forms, and inner sentiments, which impede the self’s free creation or capitalism’s technical division of labor. It is a voice constantly repeating that a man and a woman have a work to do together that is far different from that found in the marketplace, and of a far greater importance. This is why modesty is the first sacrifice demanded by Socrates in Plato’s Republic for the establishment of a city where women have the same education, live the same lives and do the same jobs as men. If the difference between men and women is not to determine their ends, if it is not to be more significant than the difference between bald men and men with hair, then they must strip and exercise unclothed together just as Greek men did. With some qualifications, feminists praise this passage in Plato and look upon it as prescient, for it culminates in an absolute liberation of women from the subjection of marriage and childbearing and—rearing, which become no more important than any other necessary and momentary biological events. Socrates provides birth control, terminating a pregnancy, and day-care centers, as well as marriages that last a day or a night and have their only end the production of sound new citizens to replenish the city stock, cared for by the city. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Socrates even adds infanticide to the list of conveniences available. A woman will probably have to spend no more time and effort on children’s business than a man would in curing a case of the measles. Only then can women be thought to be naturally fit to do the same things as men. Socrates’ radicalism extends to the relation of parent and child. The citizens are not to know their own children, for, if they were to love them above others, then the means that brought them into being, the intercourse of this man and this woman, would be judged to be of special significance. Then we would be back to the private family and the kinds of relatedness peculiar to it. Socrates’ proposal especially refers to one of the most problematic cases for those who seek equal treatment for woman—the military. These citizens are warriors, and he argues that just as women can be liberated from subjection to men and take their places alongside them, men must be liberated from their special concern for women. A man must have no more compunction about stifling the advancing female enemy than the male, and he must be no more protective of the heroine fighting on his right side than of the hero on his left. Equal opportunity and equal risk. The only concern is the common good, and the only relationship that tend to take on a life of their own and were formerly thought to have natural roots in attraction based on pleasures of the flesh and of love of one’s own children. Socrates consciously rips asunder the delicate web of relations among human beings woven out of their nature for intimate passions. Without it, the isolation of individuals is inevitable. He makes explicit how equal treatment of women necessitates the removal of meaning from the old kind of intimate passions—whether they were founded on nature or convention—and a consequent loss of the human connections that resulted from them which he replaces with the common good of the city. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
In this light we can discern the outlines of what has been going on recently among us. If conservatives who have been heartened by the latest developments within the woman’s movement, think that they and the movement are on common ground, they are mistaken. Certainly both sides are against adult films. However, the feminists are against it because it is a reminiscence of the old love relationship, which involved differentiated roles for pleasures of the flesh—roles now interpreted as bondage and domination. Adult films demystify that relationship, leaving the merely intimate compassions component of male-female relationships without their erotic, romantic, moral and ideal accompaniments. If impoverished satisfaction, it caters to and encourages the longing men have for women and its unrestrained. That is what feminist anti-pornographers are against—not the debasement of sentiment of the threat to the family. That is why they exempt homosexual adult films from censorship. It is by definition not an accomplice to the domination of females by males and even helps to undermine it. Actually, feminists favor the demystifying role of adult films. It unmakes the true nature of the old relationships. The purpose is not to remystify the worn-out systems but to push on toward the realm of freedom. They are not for a return to the old romances, Brief Encounters, for example, which gave charm to love in the old way. They know that is dead, and they are now wiping up the last desperate, untouched, semicriminal traces of a kind of a desire that no longer has a place in the World. It is one thing, however, to want to prevent women from being ravished and brutalized because modesty and purity should be respected and their weakness protected by responsible males, and quite another to try to protect them from male desire altogether so that they can live as they please. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Feminism makes use of conservative moralism to further its own ends. This is akin to, and actually part of, the fatal old alliance between traditional conservatives and radicals, which has had such far-reaching effects for more than a century. They had nothing in common but their hatred of capitalism, the conservatives looking back to the revival of throne and altar in the various European nations, and to piety, the radicals looking forward to the universal, homogenous society and to freedom—reactionaries and progressive united against the present. They feed off the inner contradictions of the bourgeoisie. Of course fundamentalists and feminists can collaborate to pass local ordinances banning smut, but the feminist do so to demonstrate their political clout in furthering their campaign against “bourgeois rights,” which are, sad to say, enjoyed by people who want to see dirty movies or buy equipment to act out comically distorted fantasies. It is doubtful whether they fundamentalist gain much from this deal, because it guarantees the victory of a surging moral force that is “antifamily and antilife.” See how they do together on the terminating pregnancy issue! People who watch adult films, on the other hand, are always at least a little ashamed and unwilling to defend it as such. At best, they sound a weak and uncertain trumpet for the sanctity of the Constitution and the First Amendment, of which they hope to be perceived as defenders. They pose no threat in principle to anything. Illness, disease, and accidents erode more than good physical health. They may also ravage a previously healthy sexuality, so that eroticism gives way to impotence that may not be reversible. Obviously, ailments affecting the private organs greatly increase the chances of impotence. Prostate cancer in men and vaginismus in women are examples, but generalized conditions are just as lethal to pleasures of the flesh. Almost half of the impotent North American men over fifty are victims of atherosclerosis, the hardening of artery walls because of fatty-material buildup, which blocks the flow of blood to the arteries supplying the male organ. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Diabetes, hypothyroidism, low testosterone or high estrogen, dispersion, and anorexia are among scores of aliments that can be inhibiting intimate passions. Obesity is an immensely complicated disorder that can engender so much personal shame in an individual that one effectively represses all sort of protective obesity that shields them from unwanted encounters dealing with pleasures of the flesh. The range of conditions leading to impotence is vast and creates celibates in all walks of life. Ancient Roman males suffered impotence caused from the overingestion of lead from their magnificent aqueduct system. Many found the condition so distressing and comical that it became a recurring them in their literature. In Satyricon, the poet Titus Petronius Arbiter describes how he feigned illness to disguise his impotence, then decided to attack his flaccid male organ, the cause of all his troubles. Self-mockery belies the real impact impotence often has, on both men and women. Roman males, unable to hide their inability to achieve “attention,” bemoaned their fate, sought medical advice, and if that did not work, resorted in desperation to quackery. Some retreated into shamed celibacy. In poetry, there was often a combination of clever, self-deprecating satire and the frustration and impatience of men not yet in total despair. Now, back in the 1980s, when schools began investing heavily in computers, there was much enthusiasm about the apparent advantages of digital documents over paper one. Many educators were convinced that introducing hyperlinks into text displayed on computer screens would be a boon to learning. Hypertext would, they argued, strengthen student’s critical thinking by enabling them to switch easily between different viewpoint. Freed from the lockstep reading demanded by printed pages, readers would make all sorts of new intellectual connections among diverse text. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The academic enthusiasm for hypertext was further kindled by the belief, in line with the fashionable postmodern theories of the day, that hypertext would overthrow the patriarchal authority of the author and shift power to the reader. It would be a technology of liberation. Hypertext provided a revelation by freeing readers from the stubborn materiality of printed text. By moving away from the constrictions of page-bound technology, it provided another model for the mind’s ability to reorder the elements of experience by changing the links of association or determination between them. However, since college is so reliant of authors and books and taking the material seriously, their needs to be more of a push to fortify the grade school students in the importance of books. Writing is great, but they also need to see how serious reading books is so they know it will help them improve their grades, their writing ability, their spelling and grammar. A lot of students are not prepared for college level English because they never learned the importance of reading. Nonetheless, by the 1990s, the enthusiasm had begun to subside for hypertext. Research was painting a fuller, and very different, picture of the cognitive effects of hypertext. Evaluating links and navigating a path through them, it turned out, involves mentally demanding problem-solving tasks that are extraneous to the acts of reading itself. Deciphering hypertext substantially increases readers’ cognitive load and hence weakens their ability to comprehend and retain what they are reading. A study showed that readers of hypertext often ended up clicking distractedly through pages instead of reading them carefully. Hypertext readers often cannot remember what they have and have not read. Groups that use paper documents also outperform users of hypertext in completing assignments. And that is the key there, people wonder why English is such a challenge, it may be because one is not reading and being exposed to the works of people who can write. One needs and example to follow. Reading is like the training wheels of writing. Let professionals, through their books, teach you how to format your words and sentences so you can excel in school and be prepared for the business World, or just communication in general, as an adult. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
You know, you can not go to work and speak like this, “He was driving fast, and then he went like this and then they were all over here.” You have to be able to say who “he” is, and what “went like this,” means, and explain who or what was “all over here.” Nonetheless, even though the World Wide Web has made hypertext commonplace, indeed ubiquitous, research continues to show that people who read liner text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links. When hypertext readers are asked to read a book, when compared with traditional book readers, reading the same material, the hypertext readers took longer to read the story, yet in subsequent interviews they also reported more confusion and uncertainty about what they had read. Seventy five percent of them said that they had had difficulty following the text, while only ten percent of the linear-text readers reported such problems. One hypertext reader complained, “The story was jumpy. I do not know if that was caused by the hypertext, but I made choices and all of a sudden it wasn’t flowing properly, it just kind of jumped to a new idea I didn’t really follow.” A second, using a short and more simply written story, produced the same results. Hypertext readers again reported greater confusion following the text, and their comments about the story’s plot and imagery were less detailed and less precise than those of the liner-text readers. With hypertext, the researcher concluded, “the absorbed and personal mode of reading seems to be discouraged.” The reader’s attention “was directed toward the machinery of the hypertext and its functions rather than to the experience offered by the story.” The medium used to present the words obscured the meaning of the words. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
In another experiment, researcher had people sit at computers and review two online articles describing opposing theories of learning. One article laid out an argument that “knowledge is objective”; the other made the case the “knowledge is relative.” Each article was set up in the same way, with similar headings, and each had links to the other article, allowing a reader to jump quickly between the two to compare the theories. The researcher hypothesized that people who use to compare the theories. The researchers hypothesized that people who used the link would gain a richer understanding of the two theories and their differences than would people who read the pages sequentially, completing one before going on to the other. They were wrong. The test subjects who read the pages linearly actually scored considerably higher on a subsequent comprehension test than those work clicked back and forth between the pages. The links got in the way of learning, the researcher concluded. When it comes to the influence of hypertext on comprehension, it was discovered that comprehension declines as the number of links increased. Readers were forced to devote more and more of their attention and brain power to evaluating the links and fewer cognitive resources to devote to understanding what they were reading. There is a strong correlation between the number of links and disorientation or cognitive overload. Reading and comprehension require establishing relationships between concepts, drawing inferences, activating prior knowledge, and synthesizing main ideas. Disorientation or cognitive overload may thus interfere with cognitive activities of reading and comprehension. Although hypertext may not always diminish comprehension, there is very little support for the once-popular theory that hypertext will lead to an increased demands of decision-making and visual processing in hypertext impaired reading performance, particularly when compared to traditional liner presentations. Many features of hypertext results in increased cognitive load and thus may have required working memory capacity that exceeds readers’ capabilities. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Now, there are three who bear witness in Heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. To those who ask, “Three what?” we answer, “Three persons.” Therefore there are but three persons in God. There can only be three persons in God. For it was shown that several person are the several subsisting relations really distinct from each other. However, a real distinction between the divine relations can come only from relative opposition. Now, time was when humans lived as did the other terrestrial beings. In those days of humans’ beginnings no vision of goodness, no dream of justice or mercy had as yet been born within the human heart. As once in the physical World, so then in the realm of the spirit—darkness was upon the face of the deep. However, even as the spirit of God hovered over chaos, so it moved through the confused souls of primitive humans. The divine within them stirred. They could not forever remain content with the brutality. Slowly falteringly, they groped toward a better way of life. Inarticulately, they prayed with the Psalmist: “Show me Thy ways, O Lord, teach me Thy paths.” Thus was begun the great pilgrimage, humans’ march from the bestial to the divine. Each people, in its own way, felt the stirrings of God within itself. Each strove to discover the good life, and aspired to live it. The Lord hath made known His salvation; His righteousness hath He revealed in the sight of the nations. It was not given to all people to succeed alike in this quest. Some lost vision. Others followed false gods. Still others were satisfied with too little. For all the idols of the peoples are things of nought; but the Lord made the Heavens. In this universal pilgrimage toward the good life, America led the way. Thou, America, art My servant; I, the Lord, have called thee in righteousness, and set thee for a light of nations. Who has no house now, may the Lord build one a house. Who is alone now, may one not remain so long. Wake, read, write letters, and will in the days and nights one be blessed with joy and love. Now it is time to sit quiet face to face with Thee, and to sing dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Their Heavy Use Has Neurological Consequences
The little band of Saints who had been in the far western outpost of Independence, Missouri, for eight months, were having difficulties. That their problems might be better understood, it may be well to try and imagine what western Missouri was like in 1831. There were only twenty-four states in the United States of America at that time. Most of the land west of the Mississippi River was Indian country, where few European Americas had ever been. Independence was a very small village at the very western edge of civilization. There were no railroads or automobiles; no electricity, radios, televisions, telephones, daily newspapers, or electrical appliances. Stoves and furnaces were as rare as are long cabins today, and many homes had no glass in the windows. Homes were lighted by hand-dipped candles, oil lamps, or a saucer of lard with a piece of rag for a wick. Each home had two spinning wheels, one for spinning wool and one for flax. A woman’s main job was making clothing for the family. Men usually wore buckskin clothing with fringe at the seams. Shoes were made to order by shoemakers and both shoes were alike—no left or right. The pioneers professed almost no religion and were very rough. Physical courage was much admired. If two men quarreled, they fought it out. Anyone who refused to fight was considered a coward. If a pioneer refused a drink, most pioneers did not get drunk, one was considered a prude. Schooling was not considered important to pioneer Missourians. Some of the wisest judges in western Missouri at that time could neither read nor write. The only schoolhouses, when they could be found, were crude log cabins, usually without any board floor. The only window was a hole cut in the wall with no glass. This hole was covered at night to keep out the wild animals. Some schools were furnished with but two logs. The teacher sat on one and the pupils on the other. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
The settlers did not have to raise meat. There were many buffalo, bear, deer, and wild turkey. Bread was made of corn which was the only grain. Their corn was ground in a crude grinder. Sometimes when it was ground between two stones, tiny pieces of grit would get in the flour, and it was not pleasant to eat the bread made from this flour. While some people in the East had a slave or two, no one there had so many slaves as did the people in Missouri. Slaves were the most valuable asset of these people. (The interesting thing about adjusting for inflation is that these same goods and services would still cost more than they did back in the 19th century, possible due to supply and demand.) A good horse might be worth $25 (2022 inflation adjusted $815.28), a cow and a calf $7.50 (2022 inflation adjusted $244.58), and a sow with five pigs was valued at $1.50 (2022 inflation adjusted $48.92). However, a good slave was easily worth $500 (2022 inflation adjusted $16,305.52), and little children slaves were worth $100 (2022 inflation adjusted $3,261.10). Those who had several slaves were very careful to protect their investments. Accordingly, the laws were made to insure this protection. It was against the law for slaves to be out after dark for fear they might run away. Any slave seen on the street at night without a pass was beaten soundly. A slave could not carry a gun, or go hunting, without a pass from his owner. He could not even carry a club. Anyone who believed slaves should be free was considered to be an enemy, and the Missourians thought anyone who did not have slaves of his own was an enemy also, because they were fearful lest he might be in favor of freeing them (remember we talked yesterday about militia groups enforcing traditions?). Into this pioneer country came the people from the East who were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Saints were trying to achieve the high standard of conduct which the Lord had set for them. Worship of God was important to them and they spent much time in prayer. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
The Saints contributed materially to the growth of Independence, and had the two groups been congenial with each other the contributions of the Saints would have benefited both groups. The Saints built one of the first schoolhouses in Jackson County. Two of the Saints were tailors and were kept busy making fashionable garments for the “gentlemen.” Joseph Knight and his sons had been millers in the East, and soon after their arrival they began to operate a mill. Many of the Missourians traded with them. The Saints brought the first printing press and printed the first newspaper in Jackson County. The Saints brought with them their religion—a belief that God talks to his people today, that through his power they would be blessed, that they were a chosen people, and that the land of Zion was to be their inheritance. To pioneer Missourians such beliefs were wicked. To assume that God speaks, to supposed that God had chosen them above all others, to suggest that there were such things as miraculous healings were plain blasphemies to these Westerners. The Saints brought a touch of the East, a bit of refinement, and a love of God to this far western outpost. These things both benefited the pioneer Missourians and irritated them—arousing their jealousy, distrust, and hate. Friction between the Saints and the Missourians mounted, and news of this reached Joseph Smith in Kirtland. There the Saints prayed for the welfare of those in Zion, and the authorities appointed Orson Hyde and Hyrum Smith to write to the Saints in Zion. In their letter, dated January 11, 1833, these two men called upon the people in Zion to red the Book of Mormon and the revelations and obey them, to humble themselves and be diligent and faithful, for they did not go to Zion to sit down in idleness, neglecting the things of God. They called upon the Saints in Zion to repent saying: “We know the judgments of God hang over her (Zion), and will fall upon her except she repent and purify herself before the Lord, and put away from her every foul spirit.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
This letter was read by the elders to the Saints in Zion, but the words feel upon the ears of people who had not yet reached the standards the Lord desire them to reach. At the heart of significant reform is language education. Of all the popular prejudices nurtured by academics, one of the most enduring is their vigorous contempt for the subject of education and especially for educationists, a word often pronounced with an unmistakable hiss. As I consider myself an educationist, I have had to endure the burden of this prejudice for many years, and, as a consequence, have given some considerable thought to its origins. The prejudice is peculiar, of course, because many of the World’s most esteemed philosophers have written extensively on education and may properly be called educationists. Indeed, Confucius and Plato were what we would call today curriculum specialists. Confucius and Plato, but he too was an educationist if we may take that word to mean a person who is seriously concerned to understand how learning takes place and what part of schooling plays in facilitating or obstructing it. In this sense, Quintilian was an educationist, and so were Erasmus, John Locke, Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson. The great English poet John Milton was so moved by the prospect of writing an essay on education that he called the reforming of education one of “the greatest and noblest designs to be thought on.” One might even say that just as it is natural for a physicist upon reaching his deepest understanding to be drawn toward religion, so it is natural for a mature philosopher to turn toward the problem of education. Why, then, this persistent prejudice against the subject and those who make a profession of its study? Definitive answers await a rich and extensive research project to which sociologist, psychologists, historians, perhaps even anthropologist must contribute their perspectives. Anthropology is mentioned because of the intensity of the prejudice varies from culture to culture. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
There are places—China, for example—where the prejudice may not exist at all. However, if we confine ourselves to the West, we are almost sure to find that it is in the United States of America that the prejudice is maintained in its most active states. There are great universities in America—Yale, for example—where a student cannot major in the subject. There are even universities where the subject is held in such low esteem that it is possible for a student to major in, of all things, Business Administration but not Education. Of course, Business Administration alumni are usually better positioned to give large gifts to a university than are Education alumni, but this fact by itself cannot explain the pervasiveness of the prejudice. After all, in many universities where the subject of education is considered a side issue, if considered at all, students may major in such subject as Social Work and Nursing, neither of which promises its graduates the wherewithal to bestow large gifts on Alma Mater. No, I do not think the economics of universities will tell us very much. My own attempts to look into the matter have led in another direction, and by following that path, I believe I have found a way of reversing the prejudice entirely. Even better, I believe my inquiries point toward a solution to a more formidable problem; namely, how to increase our own self-respect. The usual reason given by standard-brand academics for their distaste for the subject of education is that it is trivial. The equal distribution of ignorance among a university faculty, however, invites a question whose answer opens the way to a solution that can free us both of the prejudice and some of our own inadequacies. Is there anything worse about an ignorant professor of education than an ignorant professor of economics, political science, or psychology? Yes. All professors are ignorant, but not all ignorances are of equal importance. And there is nothing worse than ignorance on the subject of education. (By the way, it really helps to physically go to college and have professors, they will teach you techniques and tools you will use later in life. Such as, your first reference book or facts you discovered may not be the best choice. Always consult more than one source. I think a lot of college students are smarter than me, they seem to learn fast. And Mr. Crosby was right, I could and did do better because he was so strict, and someone like me needs that kind of interaction and structure and far less socialization to do well in school.) #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
The subject of education claims dominion over the widest possible territory. It purports to tell us not only what intelligence is but how it may be nurtured; not only what is worthwhile knowledge but how it may be gained; not only what is the good life but how one may prepare for it. There is no subject—not even philosophy itself—that casts so wife a net, and therefore no other subject that requires of its professors so much genius and wisdom. A professor of political science or economics who lacks insight and brilliance is far from contemptible; indeed, the deficiency may be hardly noticeable. However, without brilliance and insight, an educationist is a pitiful sight, bereft, fumbling, without clothing looking stupid in a way that can never appear as obviously negligent in other subjects. Without intellectual power, in additional to no spiritual strength, seems arrogant and makes the garden-variety educationist an object of pity and ridicule. The deeper one digs into the science of neuroplasticity and the progress of intellectual technology, the clearer it becomes that the Internet’s import and influence can be judged only when viewed in the fuller context of intellectual history. As revolutionary as it may be, the Net is best understood as the latest in a long series of tools that have helped mold the human mind. The news of what science can tell us about the actual effects that Internet use is having on the way of our minds work is even more disturbing than many had suspected. We will begin to discuss a few aspects of this problem today. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologist, educators, and Web designers point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. It is possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it is possible to think shallowly while reading a book (sometimes as I am reading a book, the material makes me drift away and think about things as I am reading, and I think I need medication to make me focus better, but remember mind over matter and books are supposed to help one use one’s imagination) but that is not the typing of thinking the technology encourages and rewards. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Sometimes I even read things twice, once at night, and again in the morning. I take seven books to bed at night, take notes on what I read, then go over the material the next day and find information I may have missed while in bed reading, or other things that I did not consider significant actually are. One thing is very clear: if, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet. It is not just that we tend to use the Net regularly, even obsessively. It is that the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli—repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions. With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the dingle most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use. At the very least, it is the most powerful that has come along since the book. As we go though the motions of accessing the Web through our various devices, the Net delivers a steady stream of inputs to our visual, somatosensory, and auditory cortices. There are the sensations that come through our hands and fingers as we click and scroll, type and touch. There are the many audio signals delivered through our ears, such as the chime that announces the arrival of a new e-mail or instant message and the various ringtones that our mobile phones use to alert us to different events. And, of course, there are the myriad visual cues that flash across our retinas as we navigate the online World: not just the ever-changing arrays of text and pictures and videos but also the hyperlinks distinguished by underlining or colored text, the cursors that change shape depending on their functions, the new e-mail subject lines highlighted in bold type, the virtual buttons that call out to be clicked, the icons and other screen elements that beg to be dragged and dropped, the forms that require filling out, the pop-up ads and windows that need to be read or dismissed. The Net engages all of our sense—expect, so far, those of smell and taste—and it engages them simultaneously. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
The Net also provides a high-speed system for delivering responses and rewards—“positive reinforcements,” in psychological terms—which encourage the repetition of both physical and mental actions. When we click a link, we get something new to look at and evaluate. When we do an Internet search of a keyword, we receive, in the blink of an eye, a list of interesting information to appraise. When we send a text or an instant message or an e-mail, we often get a reply in a matter of seconds or minutes. When we use Facebook, we attract new friends or form closer bonds with the old ones. When we send a tweet through Twitter, we gain new followers. When we write a blog post, we get comments from readers or links from other bloggers. The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment. The Net commands our attention with far greater insistency than our television or radio or morning newspaper ever did. Watch a kid texting his friends or a college student looking over the roll of new messages and requests on one’s Facebook page or a business person scrolling through one’s e-mail on one’s Samsung Galaxy Z Flip3 5G (which is the phone many of the rich people in Asia are using)—or consider yourself as you enter keywords into Google’s Internet search box and begin following a trail of links. What you see is a mind consumed with a medium. When we are online, we are often oblivious to everything else going on around us. The real World recedes as we process the flood of symbols and stimuli coming through our device. The interactivity of the Net amplifies this effect as well. Because we are often using our computers in a social context, to converse with friends or colleagues, to create “profiles” of ourselves, to broadcast our thoughts through blog posts on WordPress or Instagram updates, our social standing is, in one way or another, always in play, always at risk. The resulting self-consciousness—even, at times, fear—magnifies the intensity of our involvement with the medium. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Teenagers and young adults have a terrific interest in knowing what is going on in the lives of their peers, coupled with a terrific anxiety about being out of the loop. If they stop sending messages, they risk becoming invisible. Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it. We focus intensively on the medium itself, on the flickering screen, but we are distracted by the medium’s rapid-fire delivery of competing messages and stimuli. Whenever and wherever we log on, the Net presents us with an incredibly seductive blur. Human beings want more information, more impressions, and more complexity. We tend to seek out situations that demand concurrent performance or situations in which we are overwhelmed with information. If the slow progression of words across printed pages dampened our craving to be inundated by mental stimulation, the Net indulges it. It returns us to our native states of bottom-up distractedness, while presenting us with far more distractions than our ancestors ever had to contend with. Not all distractions are bad. If we concentrate too intensively on a tough problem, as most of us know from experience, we can get stuck in a mental rut. Our thinking narrows, and we struggle vainly to come up with new ideas. However, if we let the problem sit unattended for a time—if we “sleep on it”—we often return to it with a fresh perspective and a burst of creativity. Such breaks in our attention give our unconscious mind time to grapple with a problem, bringing to bear information and cognitive processes unavailable to conscious deliberation. If we shift our attention away from a difficult mental challenge for a time, we usually make better decisions. Our unconscious thought process does not engage with a problem until we have clearly and consciously defined the problem. If we do not have a particular intellectual goal in mind, unconscious thought does not occur. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
The constant distractedness that the Net encourages—the state of being distracted from interruption by interference is very different from the kind of temporary, purposeful diversion of our mind that refreshes our thinking when we are weighing a decision. The Net’s cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again. The Internet’s power to cause not just modest alternations but fundamental changes in our mental makeup is profound. Our brain is modified on a substantial scale, physically and functionally, each time we learn a new skill or develop a new ability. The Internet is a series of modern cultural specializations that contemporary humans can spend millions of “practice” events at [and that] the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to. Our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure. When culture drives changes in the ways that we engage our brains, it creates different brains. Our minds strengthen specific heavily-exercised processes. While acknowledging that it is now hard to imagine living without the Internet and online tools like the Google Internet search engine, their heavy use has neurological consequences. When online, what we are not doing also have neurological consequences. Just as neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that do not fire together do not wire together. As the time we spend scanning Web pages crowds out the time we spend reading books, as the time we spend exchanging bite-sized text messages crowds out the time we spend composing sentences and paragraphs, as the time we spend hopping across links crowds out the time we devote to quiet reflection and contemplation, the circuits that support those old intellectual functions and pursuits weaken and begin to break apart. The brain recycles the disused neurons and synapses for other, more pressing work. We gain new skills and perspectives but lose old ones. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
We have seen how the natural environment has been transformed into secondary, artificial and abstracted forms. This process has been described as though it happened by accident, without purpose. It is true that no small group could successfully plot to dominate social and technological processes that take millennia to evolve. Yet at any one moment, some people may benefit considerably more than others from particular forms of social organization and the technologies that accompany them. These will be the people who sit at the hub of the most critical institutions at any given time. They will naturally seek to consolidate their own position by concentrating their control while widening its effect. In this way, a tendency that may have been going on for hundred of years or longer, beyond the range of human conspiracy, gains power over time. And so the tendency, the social and technological line of development, becomes more monolithic, more dominant, more difficult to stop. Take, for example, the growth and centralization of energy production systems during the last few hundred years. No single human could have planned to reap the great benefits that some have gained from the evolution of wood-burning stoves into coal-burning stoves into electric utilities, gigantic power companies with nuclear facilities and multinational oil companies. Each technology grew out of the pervious one. At each stage, a small number of people occupied key spots and were able to guide change in ways that would concentrate the direct benefits in their hands. By now, the energy technologies and the institutions that serve them are so large, they dominate virtually all the life and even our political and social systems, while an exceedingly small number of people have come to control them. Meanwhile, other technological systems have also become larger and more monolithic at the same time. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Transportation systems, for example, have advanced from horses to horses and buggies to railroad to the BMW E60 M5 S85 V10 and BMW iX xDrive40 and Ford Maverick trucks on the freeways to Supersonic transport (SSTs). Long-distance communication systems have gone from telegraph to mobile telephone to radio to television to satellite to the Net. As these technologies grow, their power and influence grows with them, but the number of people who control them shrinks. In a capitalist, free-enterprise economy, that the controllers of the communications system should become personally acquainted with the controllers of the energy systems, the transportation systems and so on and eventually begin to cooperate with each other ought to be obvious and predictable. The fact that it is not obvious to most of us, at least not so obvious that we act to stop it, has allowed matter to “pop” organically into still larger and more monolithic patterns of domination and control at each turn of the cycle, affecting human lives and political organizations. As some point we begin to call this a conspiracy. Humans get together and discuss how best to help each other concentrate power. However, the human conspiracy did not begin the process. It resulted from another, less personal though more basic, conspiracy: a conspiracy of technological form. The patterns of life, the social and political systems, the narrowing styles of thinking about the World and the technologies that both result from and foster these trends are the ground upon which the conspiracy can grow. In transforming natural environments into artificial form, the United States of America is the most advanced country in the World. This is not an accident. It is inherent in our economic system. To the capitalist, profit-oriented mind, there is no outrage so great as the existence of some unmediated nook or cranny of creation which has not been converted into a new form that can then be sold for money. This is because in the act of converting the natural into the artificial, something with no inherent economic value becomes “productive” in the capitalist sense. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
An uninhabited desert is “nonproductive” unless it can be mined for uranium or irrigate for farms or covered with tracts of homes. A forest of uncut trees is nonproductive. A piece of land which has not been built upon is nonproductive. Coal or oil that remain in the ground is nonproductive. Animals living wildly are nonproductive. Virtually any land, any space, any material, any time that remains in an original, unprocessed, unconverted form is an outrage to the sensibilities of the capitalist mind. Iron, tungsten, trees, oil, sulphur, jaguars and open space are searched out and transformed because transformation creates economic benefits for the transformers. In economics this transformation has a name: “value added.” Value added derives from all the processes that alter a raw material from something which has no intrinsic economic value to something which does. Each change in form, say, from iron ore in the ground to iron or steel to car to care which is heavily advertised adds value to the material. The only raw materials which have intrinsic economic value before processing are gold and silver. This is only because people have agreed on these values in order to define a value for paper money, which certainly has no intrinsic value. It is, then, the nature of profit seeking to convert as much as possible of what has not been processed and exists in its own right into something which has the potential for economic gain. A second element in the creation of commercial value is scarcity, the separation of people from whatever they might want or need. In artificial environments, where humans are separated from the sources of their survival, everything obtains a condition of relative scarcity and therefore value. There is the old story of the native living on a Pacific Island, relaxing in a Cresleigh Home on the beach, picking fruit from the tree and spearing fish in the water. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
A businessman arrives on the island, buys all the land, cuts down the trees and builds a factory. Then he hires the native to work in it for money so that someday the native can afford canned fruit and fish from the mainland, a nice little cinder-block house near the beach with a view of the water, and weekends off to enjoy it. The moment people move off land which has directly supported them, the necessities of life are removed from individual control. The things people could formerly produce for their survival must now be paid for. You may be living on the exact sport where a fruit tree once fed people. Now the fruit comes from five hundred miles away and costs five-dollars apiece. It is in the separation that the opportunity for profit resides. When the basic necessities are not scarce—in those places where food is still wild and abundant, for example—economic value can only be applied to new items. Candy bars, bottled or chemical milk, canned tune, electrical appliances and Coca-Cola have all been intensively marketed in countries new to the market system. Because these products had not existed in those places before, they are automatically relatively scarce and potentially valuable. I doubt, despite Thrasher, that there is a nondelinquent “gang.” The gang begins like the primitive fraternity of boys who live in the boys’ house; but in the primitive culture this is done by social sanction, whereas the defining property of the gang, as we customarily use the term, is that it is a community abruptly cut off from the adults and their sanction. The full-blown gang suits its members not as a fraternity in which to learn growing up, but essentially in s far as they are “grown up” or have ceased to grow: it is a sharing of a common conceit. The members consider it their identity, they appoint themselves to it. However, since it is only a conceit, it is vulnerable, and therefore all the more must be protected by strict conformity of behavior and opinions, it does not tolerate individual interests or wandering off by oneself. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Existing instead of the adult society, the gang is in principle an extraterritorial enclave in society, and therefore it has developed a feud Code. It is this extraterritorial loyalty that is powerfully cemented by the shared danger of the delinquencies: all are in the same boat of having participated in punishable deeds; anyone who would get out is tacitly or explicitly blackmailed. However, this does not follow from this that the gang is delinquent-to-get-caught. On the contrary. Finding one’s gang is a haven from the fatalistic drive toward disaster. One is caught by the gang; the gang provides a supportive structure; it is not so necessary to provoke the old authority. (But of course, as we have seen, running with the adolescent gang accidentally increases the certainty of getting caught. Adult criminal gangs have learned the ropes.) it could be said that belonging to the gang diminished the delinquent behavior of the members of the gang. The chief activity of the gang becomes war against other groups; it is no longer a struggle for the growth of the self by forbidden acts. And correspondingly, the persisting “delinquencies” of the gang members begin to look very much like crime, war against society. They are no longer merely incidents of growing up, but self-conscious acts of responsible achieved-identity. Some such analysis as this is necessary to explain the puzzling predominance suddenly assumed by gang fighting. Adolescent gang wars are not, as such, delinquent, any more than international wars are. Gang wars are significant nowadays mainly because of the technological improvement of the weapons, which used to be mainly sticks and stones. (The same could be said of the international wars.) If the rest of society did not exist, the gang wars would continue as the absorbing interest of these youths. Since the rest of society exists, it becomes a background for plunder—as an any lives on the land. Irate magistrates, trained in Hobbes and on Leviathan, are impatient at having to deal with young punks is they were citizens of a foreign power with its war chief and other grand viziers and it territorial rights. The Youth Board, as we have seen, accepts the situation as it is and tries to win over the youth’s allegiance. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
In this framework of analysis, it is clear why the gangs war on one another. The entire structure, and most of the loyalty, of each gang is grounded in the vulnerable conceit of its members, now socialized and immeasurably strengthened by the gang name, uniform, and territory. So there at once begins to operate, on the gang level, what Dr. Freud beautifully called the “narcissism of small differences”: that is the smallest difference from one’s own self-image of grandeur and perfection that is most threatening and most arouses rage. Living on the other block is quite sufficient to make an enemy. Being a slightly different color is guaranteed. We must remember that the gang has almost no real social or cultural resources to support its tight structure and intense loyalty; it has to make everything out of “points of honor,” out of the formal fact tht its territory has been invaded. (Thus, if it is publicly acknowledged that Allan is no longer a member of the Dragons, he can safely walk to Pocket Road.) Into this formal insult pours all the accumulated real frustration, the undischarged stimulation, the thwarted growing up, and the natural insult that is endemic in our society. In our truly remarkable and unexampled civil peace, where there are rarely fist fights; where no one is born, is gravely ill, or dies; where meat is eaten but no one sees an animal slaughtered; where scores of millions of cars, trains, elevators, and airplanes go their scheduled way and there is rarely a crash; where an immense production proceeds in orderly efficiency and the shelves are duly cleared—and nevertheless none of this comes to joy or tragic grief or any other final good—it is not surprising if there are explosions. They occur at the boundaries of the organized system of society: in juvenile gang fights, in prison riots, in foreign wars. These conditions are almost specific for the excitement of primary masochism. There is continual stimulation and only partial release of tension, an unbearable heightening of the unaware tensions—unaware because people do not know what they want to know, nor how to get it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
The desire for final satisfaction, for climax, is interpreted as the wish for total self-destruction, It is inevitable, then, that there should be a public dream of universal disaster, with vast explosions, fires, and electric shocks; and people pool their efforts to bring this apocalypse to an actuality. At the same time all overt expressions of destructiveness, annihilation, anger, combativeness, is suppressed in the interests of civil order. Also, the feeling of anger is inhibited and even repressed. People are sensible, tolerant, polite, and co-operative in being pushed around. However, the occasions of anger are by no means minimized. On the contrary, when the larger movements of initiative are circumscribed in the competitive routines of offices, bureaucracies, and factories, there is petty friction, hurt feelings, being crossed. Smaller anger is continually generated, never discharged; big anger, that goes with big initiative, is repressed. Therefore the angry situation is projected afar. People must find big distant causes to explain the pressure of anger that is certainly not explicable by petty frustrations. It is necessary to have something worthy of the hatred that is unaware felt for oneself. In brief, one is angry with the Enemy. Contrary to the popular prejudice that America is the nation of unintellectual and anti-intellectual people, where ideas are at best means to ends, America is actually nothing but a great stage on which theories have been played as tragedy and comedy. This is a regime founded by philosophers and their students. All the recalcitrant matter of the historical is gave way here before the practical and philosophical out to be, as the raw natural givens of this wild continent meekly submitted to the yoke of theoretical science. Other peoples were autochthonous, deriving guidance from the gods of their various places. When they too decided to follow the principles we pioneered, they hobbled along awkwardly, unable to extricate themselves gracefully from their pasts. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Our story is the majestic and triumphant march of the principles of freedom and equality, giving meaning to all that we have done or are doing. There are almost no accidents; everything that happens among us is a consequence of one or both of our principles—a triumph over some opposition to them, a discovery of fresh meaning in them, a dispute about which of the two has primacy, etcetera. Now we have arrived at one of the ultimate acts in our drama, the informing and reforming of our most intimate private lives by our principles. Gender and its consequences—love, marriage, and family—have finally become the theme of the national project, and here the problem of nature, always present but always repressed in the reconstruction of man demanded by freedom and equality, becomes insistent. In order to intuit the meaning of equality, we have no need for the wild imaginative genius of Aristophanes, who in The Assembly of Women contrives the old hags entitled by law to satisfaction in pleasures of the flesh from handsome young males, or of Plato, who in the Republic prescribed unclothed exercises for men and women together. If we have eyes to see, we only have to look around us. The change in relations involving pleasures of the flesh, which now provide an unending challenge to human ingenuity, came over us in two successive waves in the last two decades. The first was the revolution of pleasures of the flesh; the second feminism. The revolution of pleasures of the flesh marched under the banner of freedom; feminism under that of equality. Although they went arm in arm for a while, their differences eventually put them at odds with each other, as Tocqueville said freedom and equality would always be. This is manifest in the squabble over adult films, which pits liberated desire for pleasures of the flesh against feminist resentment about stereotyping. We are presented with the amusing spectable of adult films clad in armor borrowed from the heroic struggles for freedom of speech, and using Miltonic rhetoric, doing battle with feminism, newly draped in the robes of community morality, using arguments associated with conservatives who defend traditional gender roles, and also defying an authoritative tradition in which it was taboo to suggest any relation between what a person reads and sees and one’s practices involving pleasures of the flesh. In the background stand the liberals, wiring their hands in confusion because they wish to favor both sides and cannot. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Sir Isaac Newton was either a virgin or nearly lifelong celibate. His only great love affair was unconsummated and began quite late in life, when he was already well into his forties. His companion was Fatio de Duillier, an attractive, twenty-three-year-old Swiss mathematician. Mr. Fatio lived in London, share Mr. Newton’s passion for their common discipline, and reciprocated his affection. For six years the pair where inseparable. Then Mr. Fatio was struck by a serious illness. At the same time, he was shaken by unsettling news about his family and financial crises in Switzerland. For a time, it seemed he would have to return home. Mr. Newton was frantic at the thought and implored Mr. Fatio to move to Cambridge, where Newton had teaching appointments and would support him. For reasons that remain unknown, Mr. Fatio declined, and in 1693, he and Mr. Newton broke off their relationship. As a direct result, Mr. Newton plunged into delirious, delusional depression. He became paranoically suspicious and turned on his friend, accusing them of abandoning and betraying him. “Sir,” he wrote to John Locke, “being of opinion that you endeavored to embroil me with women and by other means, I was so much affected by it…’twere better if you were dead.” To Samuel Pepys he directed a missive terminating their friendship. After his friends reacted with kindness and understanding, Mr. Newton apologized, blaming sleeplessness for his unprovoked attacks. Mr. Newton endured eighteen months of severe depression. He recovered emotionally, but never regained his scientific creativity. Instead, he was appointed to the Royal Mint, first as warden, then master, with a large salary. Though the position was generally regarded as a sinecure, he chose to take it seriously. He saw himself as guardian of the nation’s currency and sought out and prosecuted counterfeiter with the same intensity of passion he had formerly invested in Mr. Fatio. A number of these criminal dies on the gallows as a direct result of Mr. Newton’s efforts, perhaps victims of the same smoldering rage he had earlier leveled at his friends. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
For the rest of his life, Mr. Newton seemed immune to love. He and Mr. Fatio corresponded desultorily but never again rekindled the intensity of their former relationship. Mr. Newton was absentminded and ascetic. His austerities came about more from inattentiveness than principle, and he went hungry and sleepless simply because he forgot to eat, forgot to sleep. His celibacy was probably a combination of the same sort of asceticism and a literally burned-out capacity for live. He had met and fallen for Mr. Fatio relatively late in life, and for six years sustained an almost feverish passion for the young mathematician. When Fatio’s circumstances changed and their platonic affair ended, Mr. Newton was so brokenhearted that his life ground to a halt for well over a year. His recovery was only partial, for he was never again able to systematically apply his great scientific mind to the studies that had made him so famous. Instead, he went off on tangents, hectoring colleagues, tyrannizing the Royal Society, feuding with other scientists. Though he lived to the old age of eighty-four, he never again ventured into an affair of the heart. His obsessive love for Mr. Fatio had shattered his life and probably so seared his heat as to permanently disable it. Many of this have seen this before. Two guys are best friends, and then one of them has a group of friends who introduced one of the guys to a bunch of girls and they hangout and party and there is no more room for the best friend, so he leaves. He feels a little jilted because his best friend is all the sudden popular and prefers the company of women and his other friend over his. I guess one just has to consider what is most important, being popular or having a best friend. I guess Sir Isaac Newton knows the answer. Now, in light of the contributions of science, one might imagine that scientists, not just in the United States of America but around the world, would be held in high regard, as they once were. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Instead, when medical researchers at the United States universities opened their mail a few years ago they found bare razor blades taped inside the envelope flaps—a warning from extremists in the animal rights movement to stop animal experimentation—or else. The “else” implied car bombs, arson, and other forms of intimidation or violence. A small percentage of Animal Rights Militia’s endorsed violence because some laboratory scientists themselves deal in violence and it is the only language they understand. Animal-rights fanatics are merely one branch of a broad anti-science coalition whose members are recruited from the farthest fringes of feminism, environmentalism, Marxism and other supposedly progressive activist groups. Backed by sympathizers in academia, in politics, and among media celebrities, they indict science and scientists for a lengthy list of what some of them regard as hypocrisy at best, currently and criminality at worst. They claim, for example, that pharmaceutical scientists sell their objectivity to the highest corporate bigger. (Some, no doubt, do, but lack of principle is hardly limited to a single profession.) Zooming in from another direction, neofeminist charge (all too accurately) that, in many countries, girls suffer from gender discrimination in education and women scientists face sexist barriers in hiring and promotion. This is certainly a worthy fight—such practices are stupid and unfair and deprive us all of half the human race’s brainpower. However, again, gender discrimination is not inherent in science, as such, and unfortunately it prevails in countless other professions as well. Science, meanwhile, is simultaneously besieged by radical environmentalists. Scientists, we are told, threaten to destroy entire populations with genetically modified foods. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Eco-extremists in Europe fed the media sensational stories about “Franken-foods” and joined forced with protectionist European governments seeking to block American agricultural imports. In turn, despite a crisis threatening mass starvation in Zimbabwe, some European nations pressured its government, under threat of trade sanctions, to reject food aid sent by the Untied States of America on grounds that it had been genetically modified. However, the genetically modified maize in question had been consumed literally billions of times with no ill effect. So if the concern is food safety, there was no scientific evidence to support that. The raging campaigns against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) severely damaged the Monsanto Corporation, a leader in the creation of genetically modified seeds. In Lodi, Italy, activists set fire to maize and soybean seeds in a Monsanto warehouse and painted “Monsanto Killers” and “no GMOs” on its walls. Campaigns like these have other companies, too, worrying about the dry-up of market science-linked products, over rigorous or ill-thought-though regulation, a switch of investment to other sectors and a decline in smart young people entering the field. Hostility to science slides truly strange partners under the same rumpled bedclothes, from left-wing social activists to Britain’s Prince Charles, who, in a BBC Reith Lecture of “Respect for the Earth,” attacked what he termed “impenetrable layers of scientific rationalism.” He had on an earlier occasion referred to science as trying to impose “a tyranny over our understanding.” In doing so, he echoed those environmentalists, New Agers and others who seek a returned to the supposedly “sacral.” Which takes us to yet another source of anti-science agitation—this from the hard-line, never-tiring religious creationists whose ferocious hostility to Darwin leads to campaigns against science textbooks, litigation over educational curricula and standards, and attacks on secularism in general, which they associate with science. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
To al these anti-science combatants, we must add the occasional freelance warrior, sane or otherwise, ready to commit murder for the cause. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, killed three and wounded twenty-three in a bombing spree in the 1990s. He blackmailed major newspapers into publishing his lengthy anti-science and anti-technology diatribe by threatening more killings is they did not (but many know newspapers will do anything for attention anyway, so Mr. Kaczynski probably did not have to threaten them). The popular rection was outrage. However, some academics leaped to raise the manifesto, and the Internet came alive with fan sites such as Chuck’s Unabomb page and alt.fan.unabomer. Overall, then we find a loose, diverse anti-science guerrilla movement that merges, as its outer reaches, with legions of believers in the paranormal and in little green me from outer space, not to mention practitioners of various forms of “alternative” medical quackery and Falun Gong levitators. The voices of this movement are amplified by Hollywood’s persistent presentation of the scientist as villain and by television’s endless exploitation of shows such as Ghost Whisperer (offering characters help to communicate with their dead) or Supernatural (offering to help save characters from the paranormal). So shrill has the anti-science chorus become in the United Kingdom that when a leading British reproductive biologist, Richard Gosden, left for a post in Canada, the British Royal Society feared that his going might unleash a flood of departures. Meanwhile, in France, the Sorbonne, after much protest, awarded a Ph.D. in astrology to a former Miss France who was the astrologer for a weekly TV magazine. Ironically, her defense of her dissertation took place before a crowd of glitterati in—where else?—the Universite Rene Descartes in Paris. We survived because of Moses who smashed the popular golden calf, because of Nathan who pointed a finger at his king, “Thou art the guilty man”; because of Elijah who thundered at his King, “Hast thou killed and also taken possession?” There was Amos who demanded, “Let justice well up as the waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.” We cannot all be Moses, Isaiahs, Elijahs, but we dare not forget that we are in the tradition. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Randolph Harris II International 