As we discussed earlier, the U.S. government has a plan to eliminate the shadow economy, and that involves registering each citizen’s every purchase on a master computer. This emergent system is a multi-pronged plan of government monitoring the decisions and movements of its citizenry. The Universal Product Code (UPC) was an early and important part of the plan, and its swift and universal acceptance by the public is cause for concern. Some have taken notice of the numbered code below the bars and lines of the UPC code: They are the numbers 666. At the time the UPC code was being rushed into existence, Public Service announcements inundated with the virtues of Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT), which promised to lead us into the promised land of a “checkless, cashless society.” The ostensible virtue of this plan would be greater “convenience.” In the late 1970s, the Federal Reserve released a film on EFT which featured a businessman magically teleporting an astonished couple around bank vaults and check verification centers like Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Past. The hapless couple, wide-eyed, exclaim, “Gee, Electronic Fund Transfer will really make my life convenient!” The EFT plan would ultimately lead to getting rid of credit/identification cards (too “inconvenient” and “risky”) in lieu of subcutaneous indentification number implants. There were a series of articles printed on the developing technology of laser tattooing, which has been used ever since in the 1970s in the tagging of cattle. This ties into the “Mark of the Beast” prophecy as foretold in the Book of Revelation, in which no one can buy or sell without the Mark of the Beast. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

There already exists a “hand-scan” machine, which has been implemented in a test with 3,000 army recruits at Ft. Benjamin, and is supposed to be established in the American market place at some point. The hand-scan machine will read the number tattooed into the consumer’s hand (seemingly invisible but readable to laser scanners), and will then feed the consumer’s bill into the legendary “SWIEFT” computer in Brussels, Belgium. The amount will be automatically debited from the consumer’s account. There is a demonic scenario that those lacking the hand tattoo as not being allowed to purchase food, or anything else. The internationalist flavor of the Belgian computer is allied with what is part is part of the “We Are the World” syndrome: a softening up of people’s minds by New Age charlatans and demonists’ manipulation of people’s altruistic emotions. The “World Instant of Cooperation,” “Hands Across America,” “Live Aid” and “World Peace Meditation” are among the recent major events of the “secular humanist” religion which is supposed to usher in worship of the false Messiah. Some people believe that Christ is here now and that he will speak to everyone “telepathically.” His presence guarantees there will be no third World War. Now that would be something. So many people speak about the last days and all the horror and hardship, but a lot of people forget that Jesus Christ is supposed to save us. Nonetheless, the Big Brother-style monetary and “criminal tracking” systems will usher in the final soul-killing regime of the anti-Christ, who will demand people’s souls in return for the privilege of surviving under the omniscient system of a demonic mafia. There is an experimental transponder system which is touted as relieving the overcrowding of prisons by making “criminals” prisoners of their own home. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Many people believe that the COVID-19 locks downs were the testing of the experimental transponder system. This technology has been further developed to track cars on all roads. More fine-tuning will make it possible for a master computer to track all people’s movements at all times. The concern is that the vast majority of the population will not have to be coerced into Satan worship, but may do so gladly. Agents of the Sinister Plot will perpetrate a kind of Orwellian double-think, and lead unknowing victims onto the Death Path. The most powerful of these agents are mixed up in the film, television and music industries, due to the enormous psychic influence they wield. There is a power that is given to certain people to do things that is not of God Almighty. Many people, for example, believed Michael Jackson was the second Christ. Some people believe that Satan is going to appear as a physical entity. Satan has chosen people, and it is believed that there are many of them on the planet. Satan will use his race of people to deceive the rest of the World. So many people are starting to embrace radical movements. The are number one today in practically every field in entertainment. So many people can relate to the Apartheid thing, the catalyst of which is hate. The deception is there, and you really have to look hard to see it. When the Messiah rises up in power, everybody will be able to relate to him. He will make peace and stop all the terrorism and solve everybody’s problems, and people are going to get sucked right into it. It is thought that the solution is not to become part of the one-World Mark of the Beast system and never, when the time comes, lay eyes on the False Messiah. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

In Belgium, there is a large Satanic following that has to stay underground because of an old witchcraft law still on the books. European souls were obviously not ripe for conversion, and when the bickering broke out, the experiment in Amsterdam only confirmed LaVey’s conviction that the grotto system did not work and that the church had gotten away from its philosophical essence—egotism. The cell concept was good, he decided, but its purpose was defeated when socialization became an end in itself—what LaVey terms the “Moose Lodge Syndrome.” The word “occult,” the High Priest points up, merely means “hidden,” or “secret,” which was the antithesis of what his grottoes had been practicing. LaVey decided to create a network of “true” occultists—“underground men,” in the Dostoyevskian sense of the term. The mind of Western man, as he saw it, was being anesthetized and controlled through the manipulation of the electronic media; in particular, television. It is the ultimate goal of the political powers that be, LaVey believes, to create through television the uniform society in which individualism is stifled and the masses are preprogrammed to march to whatever tune is played. For mainstream society, the rights teachings established the framework and the atmosphere for the modern university. A regime founded on the inclinations of its members is one where freedom, rightly understood, is primary. And the right to know immediately follows from the right to pursue one’s own preservation, and to be the judge of the means to that preservation. And the right to know, of those who desire to know and can know, as a special status. The universities flourish because they were perceived to serve society as it wants to be served, not as Socrates served it or Thales failed to serve it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Thus it is indeed true that there is a special kinship between the liberal university and liberal democracy, not because the professors are the running dogs of the “system,” but because this is the only regime where the powerful are persuaded that letting the professor do what they want is good. Without this “liberal” framework, the rights that professors claim for themselves are meaningless. The very notion of rights was first enunciated by the founders of liberalism, and its only home is in liberal society, in both theory and practice. All of this meant that the philosopher switched parties from the aristocratic to the democratic. The people, who were by definition uneducated and the seat of prejudice, could be educated, if the meaning of education were changed from experience of things beautiful to enlightened self-interest. The aristocrats, with their pride, their love of glory, their sense that they are born with the right to rule, now appear to be impediments to the rule of reason. The new philosophers dedicated themselves to reducing the aristocrats back into the commons, removing their psychological underpinnings and denigrating their tastes. This turn to the people can be understood as an appreciation of their decent desire for equality and willingness to contract not to do injustice in return for not suffering injustice, as opposed to the nobles’ rejection of equality and willingness to risk suffering injustice in order to be first. Or it can be understood as a hardheaded strategy adopted in order to make use of the people’s power. In this the modern philosophers imitated the ancient tyrants who found it easier to satisfy the people than the nobles who dared to rival them. No one has naturally privileged position other than the knowers. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

This turn should not be interpreted as a movement in philosophy from Right to Left. The emergence of a Right and a Let was a consequence of this turn to political activism, away from political accommodationism. The Left is the vehicle of modern philosophy and the Right is the opposition, largely religious, to it. Center is only the old liberalism, when a schism occurs in the philosophical party at the end of the eighteenth century, and a more radical egalitarianism threatens the project of science from within. Left means the transformation of society by Enlightenment, a possibility either not envisaged, or rejected, by all older thinkers. In modernity it is possible for there to be a right-wing philosopher, id est, one who opposes the philosophic attempt to rationalize society; but in antiquity all philosophers had the same practical politics, inasmuch as none believed it feasible or salutary to change the relations between rich and poor in a fundamental or permanently progressive way. Democratic politics with a moral and intellectual foundation which commands the suffrage of the wise is strictly a modern invention, part and parcel of Enlightenment broadly conceived. The philosophers, however, had no illusions about democracy. As I mentioned, they knew they were substituting one kind of misunderstanding for another. The gentleman thought that philosophic equanimity in the face of death comes from gentlemanly or heroic courage exercised for the sake of the noble. The man of the people, on the other hand, takes the philosopher’s reasonableness about avoiding death to be a product of the passionate fear of death that motivates him. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

However, the philosopher knows that the rational, calculating, economic man seeks immortality just as irrationally as, or even more so than, the man who hopes for eternal fame or for another life, of which the only sign or guarantee is lodged in his hopes but for which he organizes his life. The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die. He does everything reasonable to put off the day of his death—providing for defense, peace, order, health and wealth—but actively suppresses the fact that the day must come. His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such. He gives way without reserve to his most powerful passion and the wishes it engenders. The hero and the pious man are at least taking account of eternity. Although their wishes may make them mythologize about it, the posture they assume is somehow more reasonable. The philosopher always thinks and acts as though he were immortal, while always being fully aware that he is mortal. He tries to stay alive as long as possible in order to philosophize, but will not change his way of life or his thought in order to do so. He is sensible in a way that heroes can never be; he looks at things under the guise of eternity, as the bourgeois can never do. Therefore he is at one with neither. Only the life devoted to knowing can unite these opposites. Socrates is the tragic hero whose mind is full of the things artisans think about. The great modern philosophers were as much philosophers as were the ancients. They were perfectly conscious of what separates then from all other men, and they knew that the gulf is unbridgeable. They knew that their connection with other men would always be mediated by unreason. They took a dare on the peculiar form of reasoning that comes from the natural inclinations. They seem to have been confident that they could benefit from the rational aspect and keep the irrational one from overwhelming them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

The theoretical life remained as distinct from the practical life in their view as in the ancient one—theory looking to the universal and unchangeable while understanding its relation to the particular and changing; practice, totally absorbed by the latter, seeing the whole only in terms of it, as a theodicy or an anthropodicy, presented as God or History. Philosophy and philosophers always see through such hopes for individual salvation and are hence isolated. The modern philosophers know that theory is pursed for its own sake but took an interest in promoting the opinion that, to paraphrase Clausewitz, theory is just practice pursued by other means. The philosophers in their closets or their academics have entirely different ends than the rest of mankind. The vision of the harmony of theory and practice is only apparent. The moderns did not think, as did the ancients, that they would lose sight of the distinction between the two in identifying them. This is the most precise definition of their daring. What the ancients almost religiously kept apart, the moderns though they could join without risk. The issue is: Does a society based on reason necessarily make unreasonable demands on reason, or does it approach more closely to reason and submit to the ministrations of the reason and submit to the ministrations of the reasonable? The difficulty is illuminated by the popular contemporary misuse of a Greek word, praxis. It now means that there is no theory and no practice, that politics has been theocratized and philosophy politicized. It expresses the overcoming of the distinction between the eternal and the temporal. This is surely a result of Enlightenment, although it goes counter to the intentions of the Enlighteners. The question is whether it is a necessary or only accidental result. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

It has long been fashionable in some quarters to treat the thinkers of the Enlightenment as optimistic and superficial. This was a view promoted in the wake of the French Revolution by reactionaries and romantics, the counter-coup of the religions and the poetic, which has had considerable and enduring success. The modern philosophers are alleged to have believed in a new dawn in which men would become reasonable and everything would be for the best. They did not, according to this popular view, understand the ineradicable character of evil, nor did they know, or at least take sufficient account of, the power of the irrational of which our later, profounder age is so fully aware. This, however, is a skewed and self-serving interpretation. No one who looks carefully at the project these philosophers outlined can accuse them of being optimistic in the sense of expecting a simple triumph of reason or of underestimating the power of evil. It is not sufficiently taken into account how Machiavellian they were, in all senses of that word, and that they were actually Machiavelli’s disciples. It was not by forgetting about the evil in man that they hoped to better his lot but by giving way to it rather than opposing it. By lowering standards. The very qualified rationality that they expected from most men was founded self-consciously on encouraging the greatest of all irrationalities. Selfishness was to be the means to the common good, and they never thought that the moral or artistic splendor of past nations was going to be reproduced in the World they were planning. The combination of hardness and playfulness found in their writings should dispel all suspicion of unfounded hopefulness. If anything, what they plotted was “realistic.” And as to superficiality, everything turns on what the deepest human experience is. The philosophers, ancient and modern, agreed that the fulfillment of humanity is the use of reason. Man is the particular being that can know the universal, the temporal being that is aware of eternity, the part that can survey the whole, the effect that seeks the cause. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Whether it is wonder at the apprehension of being or just figuring things out, reason is the end for which the irrational things exist, and all that seems to be merely brutish in man is informed by his rational vocation—so thought the philosophers. Christopher Marlowe understood both philosophy and Machiavelli very well when he put in the latter’s mouth the phrase, “I hold there is no sin but ignorance.” There are other experiences, always the religious, and in modern times the poetic, which make competing claims. However, it is not immediately evident that their claims are superior to those of philosophy. The issue comes back again to the relative dignity of reason vs. revelation. The fact that popularized rationalism is, indeed, superficial is no argument against the philosophers. They knew it would be that way. (And, even in this, the democratic citizen, knowing and exercising his rights, is not the most contemptible of beings.) They were trying to make the central human good central to society, and Enlightenment was and remains the only plausible scheme for doing so. On the face of this, it seems absurd to me to say that Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Locke, Montesquieu and even Voltaire (who might be considered a mere popularizer of these others) were less deep than Jacques Maritain or T.S. Eliot—to mention two famous contemporaries from whose mouths I learned as a young man that the Enlightenment was shallow. Rousseau, who initiated the profound school of criticism of Enlightenment’s effects, nevertheless say that Bacon, Descartes and Newton were very great men, and he speaks of the “wise Locke.” He knew that these were his theoretical kin, although he disagreed with them in crucial respects. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

The vulgarity of modern society, the object of so many complaints by intellectuals, is something the philosophers were willing to live with. After all, as Socrates points out, all societies look pretty much the same from the heights, be they Periclean Athens or Des Moines, Iowa. A peaceful, wealthy society where the people look up to science and have enough money to support it is worth more than splendid imperia where there are slaves and no philosophy. Locke appears superficial because he was not a snob. There is no way he could make a parade of the magnificence of what he saw. There is no doubt that these were serious men and that their contrivances have had a pubic effect unlike that of any philosophers or scientists before or since. They only comparable political events are the founding of what Machiavelli called new modes and orders by prophets—by Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, Romulus and (he implies) Jesus—which he called on the philosophers to imitate. Modernity is largely of these philosophers’ marking, and our self-awareness depends on understanding that they wanted to do and what they did do, grasping thus why our situation is different from all other situations. However contrary it may be to contemporary historical wisdom, the leading thread that runs through all the accidents of modern history is the philosophical doctrine of the Enlightenment. Modern regimes were conceived by reason and depend on the reasonableness of their members. And those regimes required the reason of natural science in every aspect of their activity, and the requirements of scientific advance largely determine their policy. Whether it is called liberal democracy or bourgeois society, whether the regime of the rights of man or that of acquisitiveness, whether technology is used in positive or negative sense, everyone knows that these terms describe the central aspects of our World. They are demonstrably the results of the thought of a small group of men with deep insight into the nature of things, who collaborated in an enterprise the success of which is almost beyond belief. It penetrated and informed every detail of life. These are not men to be dismissed—but they can be questioned. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

The less affluent are not stupid. If they were, they could not survive. They know their tiny patch of Earth. They know the smell of an oncoming storm. They know when the dry season is due. However, what they know is a minute fraction of what they could know. And that delta—that difference—helps keep them poor. Even smart farmers in rich countries waste labor, energy, water, fertilizers and pesticides; cause serious ecological damage; and grow less product than is possible because of what they do not know in detail about their land. Help, however, is on the way, from twelve thousand miles in space. Until now farmers—including agribusiness companies—have usually applied the same treatment to an entire field—a one-size-fits-all strategy. However, we are approaching the point at which a handheld Global Positioning System receiver in a village—or one shared by several villages—will receive increasingly detailed information from currently orbiting satellites about the specific fertilizer, nutrients, water and other needs of every individual plot, if not plant. This will customize farming, allowing a grower to apply fertilizer, say, only where, when and in the least amount needed. It can also transform current water systems by improving irrigation and recycling methods and even make possible higher-value-added water for specialized uses. In fact, according to a National Research Council study, “improvements in irrigation technology alone can reduce the anticipated Worldwide demand for additional water resources by one half during the next 25 years.” Good for farmers and good for the environment, “precision agriculture” and customized purification methods bring de-massification to the field. And this points to a larger, indeed, transformatory change. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

We know that industrial-style agriculture leads to environmentally dangerous monocrops and monoculture. By contrast, what we see here is a first hint of potential movement in the opposite direction, not by a reversion to pre-industrial methods but by an advance far beyond them. As markets, at least in the rich World, call for increasingly customized foods and healthy products, we can expert to see new, varied methods and technologies that will ultimately draw on more varied crops from around the World—something that environmentalists should anticipate and welcome. Today precision agriculture and many of these other new methods are still nascent—and expensive but cost will plummet. Molecular nanotechnology will emerge step by step. Major milestones, such as the engineering of proteins and the positioning of individual atoms, have already been passed. To get sense of the likely pace of developments, we need to look at how various trends fit together. Computer-based molecular-modeling tools are spawning computer-aided design tools. These will grow more capable. The underlying technology base—computer hardware—has for decades been improving in price and performance on a steeply rising curve, which is generally expected to continue for many years. These advances are quite independent of progress in molecular engineering, but they make molecular engineering easier, speeding advances. Computer models of molecular machines are beginning to appear, and these will whet the appetites of researchers. Progress in engineering molecular machines, whether using proximal probes or self-assembly, will eventually achieve striking success; understanding of the long-term promise of molecular engineering will become more widespread. Some combination of these developments will eventually lead to a serious, public appraisal of what these technologies can achieve—and then the World of opinion, funding, and research fashion will change. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Before, advances will be steady but haphazard; afterward, advances will be driven with the energy that flows into major commercial, military, and medical research programs, because nanotechnology will be recognized as furthering major commercial, military, and medical goals. The timing of subsequent events depends largely on when this threshold of serious attention is reached. In making time estimates, people are prone to assume that a large change must take a long time. Most do, but not all. Pocket calculators had a dramatic effect on the slide-rule industry: they replaced it. The speed of this change caught the slide-rule moguls by surprise, but the pace of progress in electronics did not slow down merely to suit their expectations. One can argue that nanotechnology will be developed fast: many counties and companies will be competing to get there first. They will be driven onward both by the immense expected benefits—in many areas, including medicine and the environment—as well as by potential military applications. That is a powerful combination of motives, and competition is a powerful accelerator. A counterargument, though, suggest that development will be slow: anyone who has done anything of significance in the real World of technology—doing a scientific experiment, writing a computer program, brining a new product to market—knows that these goals take longer than expected. Indeed, Hofstadter’s Law states that projects take longer than expected, even when Hofstadter’s Law is taken into account. This principle is a good guide for the short term, and for a single project. The situation differs though, when many different approaches are being explored by many different groups over a period of years. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Most project may take longer than expected, but with many teams trying many approaches, one approach may prove faster than expected. The winner of a race is always faster than the average runner. The remarkable thing about molecular engineering is that is look like there are many different ways to get there and, at the moment, rapid progress is being made along every path—all at the same time. Also, technology development is like a race run over an unmapped course. When the first runners reach the top of a hill, they may see a shortcut. A trailing runner may decide to crash off into the bushes, and stumble across a bicycle and a paved road. The progress of technology is seldom predictable because progress often reveals new directions. So how can we estimate a date for the arrival of nanotechnology? Well, a lot of it is here. For instance, the BMW iX which can change exterior paint colors with the push of a button and the grill that can repair minor damages itself. However, it is safe to say that we should take the cautious approach: When anticipating benefits, assume it is still a little while in the future before seeing nanotechnology on a massive scale; when preparing for potential problems, assume it is right around the corner. The old folk saying applies: Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Any dates assigned to “far off” and “right around the corner” can be no better than educated guesses—molecular behavior can be calculated, but not technology timetables of this sort. With those caveats, we would estimate that general-purpose molecular assemblers will likely be developed in the early decades of the twenty-first century, perhaps in the third and fourth. Many visionaries intimately familiar with the developments of silicon technology still forecast it would take between ten to twenty years more before vast molecular engineering becomes a reality. This is well beyond the planning horizon of most companies. However, recently, everything has begun to change. Based on the new developments, current progress suggests the revolution may happen within this decade, perhaps starting within five years. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

The most chilling case of how deeply our language is absorbing the “machine as human” metaphor began on November 4, 1988, when the computers around the ARPANET network became sluggish, filled with extraneous data, and then clogged completely. The problem spread fairly quickly to six thousand computers across the United States of America and overseas. Th early hypothesis was that a software program had attached itself to other programs, a situation which is called (in another human-machine metaphor) a “virus.” As it happened, the intruder was a self-contained program explicitly designed to disable computers, which is called a “worm.” However, the technically incorrect term “virus” stuck, no doubt because of its familiarity and its human connections. As Raymond Gozzi, Jr., discovered in his analysis of how the mass media described the event, newspapers noted that the computers were “infected,” that the virus was “virulent” and “contagious,” that attempts were made to “quarantine” the infected computers, that attempts were also being made to “sterilize” the network, and that programmers hoped to develop a “vaccine” so that computers could be “inoculated” against new attacks. This kind of language is not merely picturesque anthropomorphism. It reflects a profound shift in perception about the relationship of computers to humans. If computers can become ill, then they can become healthy. Once healthy, they can think clearly and make decisions. The computer, it is implied, has will, has intentions, has reasons—which means that humans are relieved of responsibility for the computer’s decisions. Through a curious form of grammatical alchemy, the sentence “We use the computer to calculate” comes to mean “The computer calculates.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

If a computer calculates, then it may decide to miscalculate or not calculate at all. That is what bank tellers mean when they tell you that they cannot say how much money is in your checking account because “the computers are down.” The implication, of course, is that no person at the bank is responsible. Computers make mistakes or get tired or become ill. Why blame people? We may call this line of thinking an “agentic shift,” a term I borrow from Stanley Milgram to name the process whereby humans transfer responsibility for an outcome from themselves to a more abstract agent. When this happens, we have relinquished control, which in the case of the computer can accomplish them or be imagined to accomplish them. Machines of various kinds will sometimes assume a human or, more likely superhuman aspect. Perhaps the most absurd case I know of is in a remark a student of mine once made on a sultry summer day in a room without air conditioning. On being told the thermometer read ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit, he replied “No wonder it’s so hot!” Nature was off the hook. If only thermometers would behave themselves, we could be comfortable. However, computers are fare more “human” than thermometers or almost any other kind of technology. Unlike most machines, computers do not work; they direct work. They are, as Norbert Wiener said, the technology of “command and control” and have little value without something to control. This is why they are of such importance to bureaucracies. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Justin Harris is forty-eight years old and still married to his first wife. He works nearly sixty hours a week, in return for which he receives $162,000 a year. He also has come stock options and extra life insurance, but travels tourist of business class when he flies. He has been with his company for more than ten years and in his present job for nearly five. Just below the top rank in his firm, he dreams of becoming a Chief Executive Officer, but know his changes are remote. In the meantime, he wants parity with his company’s Chief Financial officer. The problem is that Tom is a specialist and his superiors think he does not know enough about general management. So he feels trapped in his specialty, and he reads enviously about colleagues who have left the profession behind and broken into the mainstream of corporate management at the highest levels—people like Jay Collins, who is vice chairman of Banking, Capital Markets, and Advisory at Citigroup, or Ms. Marie C. Pillai, a vice-present at General Mills, Inc., or, Ron Escue, senior vice president at Equicor, a joint venture of Equitable Life and Hospital Corporation of America. Justin is sharp, bright, clean-cut, and articulate, but he tends to lapse into a jaw-breaking jargon that leaves co-workers and superiors suitably puzzled and instantly brands him a “techie.” While Pillai, Escue, and Collins are real people who began as computer specialist and “migrated” outward from Information Systems, or “IS,” and upward into senior management, Justin is a fictional composite whose traits, according to a recent survey, match those of an increasingly restive and assertive group of executives known as “chief information officers.” In the United States of America today more than two hundred big corporations use the title “Chief Information Officer” or some close approximation of it. Not many years ago, there was no such thing. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Nomenclature varies, but in many firms the CIO title is a notch or two up from such related designations as “Manager of Data Processing,” “Vice-President of Information Systems,” or “Director, Management Information Systems.” CIOs are the men—only a few, so far, are women—whim ae responsible for spending the huge budgets corporations now allocate for computers, data processing, and information services. Because of this they find themselves at the hot center of the info-wars. Naturally, bureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and towards itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority. A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear. We cannot dismiss the possibility that, if Adolf Eichmann had been able to say that it was not he but a battery of computers that directed the Jews to the appropriate crematoria, he might never have been asked to answer for his actions. Although (or perhaps because) I came to “administration” late in my academic career, I am constantly amazed at how obediently people accept explanations that begin with the words “The computer shows…” or “The computer has determined…” It is Technopoly’s equivalent of the sentence “it is God’s will,” and the effect is roughly the same. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

You will not be surprised to know that I rarely resort to such humbug. However, on occasion, when pressed to the wall, I have yielded. No one has as yet replied, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Their defenselessness has something Kafkaesque about it. In The Trial, Josef K. is charged with a crime—of what nature, and by whom the charge is made, he does not know. The computer turns too many of us into Josef Ks. It often functions as a kind of impersonal accuser which does not reveal, and is not required to reveal, the sources of the judgments made against us. It is apparently sufficient that the computer has pronounced. Who has put the data in, for what purpose, for whose convenience, based on what assumptions are questions left unasked. This is the case not only in personal matters but in public decisions as well. Large institutions such as the Pentagon, the Internal Revenue Service, and multinational corporations tells us that their decisions are made on the basis of solutions generated by computers, and this is usually good enough to put our minds at ease or, rather, to sleep. In any case, it constrains us from making complaints or accusations. In part for this reason, the computer has strengthened bureaucratic institutions and suppressed the impulse toward significant social change. “The arrival of the Computer Revolution and the founding of the Computer Age have been announced many times,” Weizenbaum has written. “But if the triumph of a revolution is to be measures in terms of the social revision it entrained, then there has been no computer revolution. In automating the operation of political, social, and commercial enterprises, computers may or may not have made them more efficient but they have certainly diverted attention from the question whether or nor such enterprises are necessary or how they might be improved. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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Nice little dollies, they were, and not bigger than Gulliver’s Lilliput people. Their ways were like ours. In their America they had a republic on our own plan, and in their Europe, their Asia and their Africa they had monarchies and established churches, and a pope and a czar, and all the rest of it. They were not afraid of us; in fact they held us in rather frank contempt, because we were giants. Giants have never been respected, in any World. These people had a quite good opinion of themselves, although they were no bigger than a banana, and many of them no bigger than a clothespin. In church it was a common thing for the preacher to look out over his congregation and speak of them as the noblest work of God—and never a clothes pin smiled! These little animals were having wars all of the time, and raising armies and building navies, and striving after the approval of God every way they could. And wherever there was a savage country that needed civilizing, they went there and took it, and divided it up among the several enlightened monarchs, and civilized it—each monarch in his own way, but generally with Bibles and bullets and taxes. And the way they did whoop-up Morals, and Patriotism, and Religion, and the Brotherhood of Man was noble to see. I could not see that they differed from us, except in size. It was like looking at ourselves through the wrong end of the spyglass. However, Sandy said there was one difference, and a big one. It was this: each person could look right into every other person’s mind and read what was in it, but he thought his own mind was concealed from everybody but himself! “The Lord speaks unto men according to their language,” reports 2 Nephi 31.3. Aristotle in his Ethics shows how the philosopher appears as the ally of the gentlemen, speaking to them about the noble deeds that are their specialty (not his). #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

All he apparently does is clarify for them what they already practice. However, he makes slight changes that point toward philosophy. Piety is not even included in the list of the individual virtues. And shame, a quality of the noble and a great enemy of reason, is mentioned only in order to be banished from the canon. The virtuous man has nothing to be ashamed of, says Aristotle—and observation that fits Socrates’ view of himself but is not typical of gentlemen. And gradually Aristotle turns his readers’ attention to the theoretical life, not by seriously theorizing with them but by pointing to the direction in which it lies. He makes it godlike and the completion of their own incompleteness, which they used to achieve by admiring. Achilles and revering the Olympian gods. Now they admire the theoretical men who contemplate a thinking god. It is an open question whether the gentleman grasped the essence of philosophy less accurately in this way than does the modern man who respects the scientist because he provides him with useful things. Similarly in his Poetics, Aristotle explains to gentlemanly lovers of the theater what tragedy is and what they get from it. However, here too the changes things a bit. The poet is not, as Homer presents himself, inspired by the Muse but is an imitator of nature, id est, of the same thing the philosophers study, and hence does not depict a World alien to the one studied by philosophy, or one that results from causes in conflict with those admitted by science. Aristotle explicitly connects poetry with philosophy. And the end, the final cause, of tragedy is said to be the purgation of pity and fear, the two passions that combined lead to enthusiasm, religious possession or fanaticism. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Socrates had attacked the poets for appealing to those passions that make men ecstatic from terror at what they can suffer and their unprotectedness in their suffering. It is just here, according to Socrates, that reason should be invoked, to face the necessary, to remind men of the order in things that exists in spite of the accidents that happen to them individually. Pity and fear cry out for satisfaction, for attention, for being taken seriously. Above all, the World men incline to see is full of benevolent and malevolent deities who take their cases seriously. Poetry to succeed must speak to these passions, which are more powerful than reason in almost all men. Because poetry needs an audience it is, in Socrates’ view, too friendly to the enemies of reason. The philosopher has less need to enter into the wishes of the many or, as the wise of our time would put it, into the drama of history, or to be engage. This is why Socrates heightens the enmity between philosophy and poetry. Aristotle, actually following Socrates’ lead, suggests that the poet can be the doctor of mortals who are so mad as to insist they should be immortal. The poet, not the philosopher, can treat the passions that are dangerous to philosophy, which Socrates had to his great cost ignored. He can arouse these passions in order to flush them out of the soul, leaving the patients more relaxed and calmer, more willing to listen to reason. Aristotle tells the poets they should present heroes who deserve their fates, whose sad ends are plausibly attributable to a flaw in their characters. Their suffering, while pitiable, is not promiscuous, a reproach to the moral order, or the lack of one, in the World. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

The effect of such drama would be to make men gentle and believers in the coherence of the World, in the rational relation of cause and effect. They are not made reasonable by this but are saved from hatred of reason and more disposed to accept it. Aristotle does not attempt to make scientists out of gentlemen, but he tempers their prevailing passions in such a way as to make them friends of philosophy. Socrates does much the same thing in the Apology when he addresses those who voted for his acquittal and tells them myths that tend to make death seem less terrible. The tales are not true, but they reinforce the gentleness that kept them from fearing and hence condemning Socrates. Socrates criticizes poetry in order to encourage it to be an ally of the philosophers instead of the priests. Thus philosophy’s response to the hostility of civil society is an educational endeavor, rather more poetic or rhetorical than philosophic, the purpose of which is to temper the passions of gentlemen’s souls, softening the hard passions such as anger, and hardening the soft ones such as pity. The model for all such efforts is the dialogues of Plato, which together rival the Iliad and the Odyssey, or even the Gospels, introducing a new hero who excites admiration and imitation. To introduce a new hero, a new taste has to be established, and the taste for Socrates is unique, counter to all previous tastes. Plato turns the personage of The Clouds into one of those civilization-constituting figures like Moses, Jesus or Achilles, who have a greater reality in men’s souls than do their own flesh-and-blood contemporaries. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

As Achilles is said to have formed Alexander the Great; Alexander, Caesar; and Caesar, Napoleon—reaching out to one another from the peaks across the valleys—so Socrates is the teacher of philosophers in an unbroken chain for two and a half millennia, extending from generation to generation through all the epochal changes. Plato insured this influence, not by reproducing Socrates’ philosophy, in the manner of Aristotle or Kant, but by representing his action, more in the manner of Sophocles, Aristophanes, Dante and Shakespeare. Socrates is made to touch the prevailing passion of each of the different kinds of soul in such a way as appear to be divinatory of their longings and necessary to their self-understanding. There are dialogues that touch the pious; some move the ambitious and the idealistic; others excite the erotic and still others the warriors and the politicians; some speak to the poets, others to the mathematicians; lovers of money are no more forgotten than are lovers of honor. There is hardly anyone who is not made indignant by one aspect of another of Socrates’ discourse, but there is also hardly anyone who is not moved and heartened by other aspects. Socrates stated the case for all human types better than they could have stated it for themselves. (He, of course, also stated the problem with each of those types and their aspirations.) Plato demonstrates the need for Socrates and in so doing makes the need felt in his readers. It is not only Alcibiades who felt incomplete without Socrates. In almost on case was there a total conversion of a man. Certainly none is ever depicted in the dialogues. Plato himself, and a few others, were converted to philosophy, and their self-discovery was possible because Socrates was more or less tolerate in Athens. The toleration of philosophy requires its being thought to serve powerful elements in society without actually becoming their servant. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

The philosopher must come to terms with the deepest prejudices of men always, and of the men of his time. The one thing he cannot change and will not try to change is their fear of death and the whole superstructure of beliefs and institutions that make death bearable, ward it off or deny it. The essential difference between the philosopher and all other men is his facing of death or his relation to eternity. He obviously does not deny that many men die resolutely or calmly. It is relatively easy to die well. The question is how one lives, and only the philosopher does not need opinions that falsify the significance of things in order to endure them. He alone mixes the reality of death—its inevitability and our dependence on fortune for what little life we have—into every thought and deed and is thus able to live while honestly seeking perfect clarity. He is, therefore, necessarily in the most fundamental tension with everyone except his own kind. He relates to all the others ironically, id est, with sympathy and a playful distance. Changing the character of his relationship to them is impossible because of the disproportion between him and them is firmly rooted in nature. Thus, he has no expectation of essential progress. Toleration, not right, is the best he can hope for, and he is kept vigilant by the awareness of the basic fragility of his situation and that of philosophy. Socrates allies himself with those who are powerful in the city and at the same time fascinated or charmed by him. However, the charm only endures so long as he does not confront their most important concerns. Crito, the family man, thinks of Socrates as a good soldier. Those who get angry at Socrates and accuse him always see something the more gently disposed miss. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Thrasymachus sees that Socrates does not respect the city. He sees the truth about Socrates, but he cannot, at least in the beginning, appreciate him. The other appreciate him. The others appreciate him, but partly because they are blind to what is most important to him. This provides the model for the political tactics followed by the philosophers from Plato up to Machiavelli. None was primarily political, for there was a definite limit on what one could expect from politics, and it was essential not to make the pursuit of the truth dependent on what is politically relevant. Politics was a serious study to the extent that one learned about the soul from it. However, the practical politics of all the philosophers, no matter how great their theoretical differences, were the same. They practiced an art of writing that appealed to the prevailing moral tastes of the regime in which they found themselves, but which could lead some astute readers outside of it to the Elysian Fields where the philosophers meet to talk. They frequently became the interpreters of the traditions of their nations, subtly altering them to make them open to philosophy and philosophers. They were always suspect, but they also always had their well-placed friends. For this reason the form and content of the writings of men like Plato, Cicero, Farabi and Maimonides appear very different, while their inner teachings may be to all intents and purposes the same. Each had a different beginning point, a different cave, from which he had to ascend to the light and to which he had to return. Thus they appeared to be “relevant” without forming their minds to the prejudices of the day. This protected them from the necessity of the temptation to conform to what is most powerful. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Classical philosophy was amazingly robust and survived changes as great as are imaginable, such as that from paganism to the revealed Biblical religions. Marsilius of Padua was as Aristotelian as was Aristotle, proving that the problems are permanent but their expressions are changing. We moderns think that a comparatively minor change, like that wrought by the French Revolution, necessitates new thought. The ancients held that a man must never let himself be overcome by events unless those events taught something essentially new. They were more intent than were any men before or since on preserving the freedom of the mind. This was their legacy to the university. They, however, never let the principle become a dogma and never counted on its having any other ground than their wits. They were ever mindful of the responsibilities and the risks of their enterprise. In sum, the ancient philosophers were to a man proponent of aristocratic politics, but not for the reasons intellectual historians are wont to ascribe to them. They were aristocratic in the vulgar sense, favoring the power of those possessing old wealth, because such men are more likely to grasp the nobility of philosophy as an end itself, if not to understand it. Most simply, they have the money for an education and time to take it seriously. Only technology, with its attendant problems, makes universal education possible, and therefore opens the prospect of a different kind of relationship of philosophy to politics. Lavey’s brand of Satanism was designed to fill the void between religion and psychiatry, meeting man’s need for ritual, fantasy, and enchantment while at the same time providing a rational set of beliefs on which to base one’s life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

The other major religions are outmoded, he asserts, because they are trying to keep superstition alive in a technological age. Christianity preaches the virtues of altruism and asceticism, LaVey acknowledges, but for political, not World reasons. “What are the Seven Deadly Sins?” he is fond of asking. “Gluttony, avarice, lust, sloth—they are urges every man feels at least once a day. How would you set yourself up as the most powerful institution on Earth? You first find out what every man feels at least once a day, establish that as a sin, and set yourself up as the only institution capable of pardoning that sin.” For LaVey, it is the guilt that makes people sick, not their urges. If an individual is law-abiding and causes harm to no other creature, then he or she should be able to indulge in whatever activity, pleasures of the flesh or otherwise, that one finds pleasurable. Distinguishing self-indulgence from compulsion, however, LaVey cautions, “If a person has no proper release for his desires, they rapidly build up and become compulsions.” In reality, it might not be so easy to tell when the line between the two has been crossed. Like a drug addict or alcoholic who insists he or she can stop anytime her or she wants, a person may try to present a sexual compulsion simply as a preference. Yet, as long as the compulsions were not alarming overt, LaVey, in the early days of the Church of Satan, was not strict in applying the distinction. He recognized that many of those applying for membership did indeed have emotional and psychological problems and were attracted to his church because of their feelings of alienation from the rest of society. In fact, many of the rituals held at midnight on Fridays at the black house took that fact into account with accommodating calculation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

John Whiteside Parsons was born on 2 October 1914 in Los Angeles, California. His mother and father separated while he was quite young, and Parsons said later that this left him with “…a hatred of authority and a spirit of revolution, as well as an Oedipal attachment to his mother. He felt withdrawn and isolated as a child, and was bullied by other children. This gave him, he thought, “…the requisite contempt for the crowd and for the group of mores…” Parsons was born into a rich family, and sometime in his youth there was what he referred to as a loss of family fortune. This loss must only have been a temporary one, though—perhaps caused by the break-up of the family—since in the 1940s he inherited from his father a large, Victorian-style mansion in the well-to-do area of Pasadena. During adolescence, Parsons developed an interest in science, especially physics and chemistry, and in fact he went on to develop a career as a brilliant scientist in the fields of explosives and rocket-fuel technology. His achievements as a scientist were such that the Americans named a lunar crater after him when they came to claim that territory for their own. Appropriately enough, Crater Parsons is on the dark side of the moon. Many people—the ones who retain a rich cultural perspective that is not fully Americanized—is not the one who is chosen for the network television show or the corporate vice-presidency. He or she would not be chosen because, in so many ways, this person would be ill suited for the objective, mental, aggressive, unfeeling styles that are rewarded in corporate life. Instead, the corporations pick the rare person who is more like the traditional White males who already occupy the center stage. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

What is true for television commentators and corporation executive is also true for government officials. As the personnel within the institutions change, the institutions maintain their inflexible form. The balance of power among races and genders begins to alter, but the power arrangement themselves—some people on top, other people on the bottom, other people are often times totally excluded. If alternative to the life-style of the system exist, they are not represented. None of this is to argue that the non-dominant culture or any group which has been denied access should not seek the success they are presently beginning to achieve in the objective World of money and power. In their shoes I would certainly do the same. It is only a remark that the subtle pressures of technological and corporate form create an archetypal Faustian bargain. In winning rights or money or power, the diverse elements in American culture lose their unique identity, their cultural roots. They become what they oppose. And so the real power is revealed as existing in the institutions and the technology itself. For proof, you have only to watch the diverse cultural programming on television. It might as well be American Housewife of Chicago Fire. As with Flowers of the Attic, a way of mind is reduced to the exigencies of soap opera and sitcoms. As for mainstream American “culture,” presumed to be the oppressor, it does not exist either. It is itself subordinate to corporate culture, or corporate consciousness, commodity life and the channelization of all behavior and thought into a nice package that suits a machine. Speaking of machines, one of the most important things computers do today is talk to one another. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

In fact, computers and communication are so closely fused today as to be inseparable. This means that computer companies must defend not only their operating systems, but also their access to, or control of, telecommunications networks. If operating systems control what goes on inside computers, telecommunications standards control what does on between computers. (The distinction, in reality, is not so neat, but good enough for our purposes here.) And here again we find companies and countries locked in a bitter struggle over the main systems that process our information. Because more data, information, and knowledge now flows across national boundaries, the info-war over telecommunications is, if anything, even more politically fraught than the war over operating systems. General Motors, for example, in trying to tie together its global production, has devised its own standard to allow its machines to communicate with one another even though they come from different makers. It calls this standard MAP (for Manufacturing Automation Protocol) and has tried to promote its Worldwide adoption by other manufacturers and its own supplies. To block GM, the European Community (EC) has talked thirteen giant manufacturing companies, including BMW, Olivetti, British Aerospace, and Nixdorf, into supporting a counter-standard called CNMA. If European machines are going to talk to one another, the EC seems to be saying, it will not be on terms defined by General Motors—of the United States of American. This toe-to-toe over electronic communication in the factories of the plants, however, is only part of a larger battle for control of the World’s extra-intelligent networks. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

As Japanese firms began to connect up electronically with plants and offices around the World a host of companies rushed to sell them the necessary computers and telecommunications links. This is a field in which U.S.A technology still outstrips that of Japan; and IBM, once again, was a major player. However, the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications announced that any networks linking Japan with the outside World would have to conform to a technical standard set by an obscure United Nations consultative committee on telecom policy. This ruling would have kept IBM in Japan from using equipment and systems designed to its own proprietary standard. The result was a massive lobbying effort in Washington and Tokyo, negotiations between the two governments, and ultimately, a back-off by Japan. When each country’s telephone system was controlled by a single company or ministry, national standards were set and international standards were then decided by the International Telecommunications Union. Life was simple—until computers wanted to talk to one another. By the 1980s, as new technologies avalanched into the market, businesses and individuals alike were using machines built by different manufacturers, using different operating systems, running programs written by different software houses, and trying to send messages around the World through a patchwork of cables, microwaves, and satellites belonging to different countries. The result today is the much-bewailed electronic Tower of Babel, and it explains why desperate cries for “connectivity” and “interoperability” echo around the business World. And here yet again the main struggle has shaped up as IB versus The World. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

IBM has long promoted a standard called System Network Architecture. The problem with SNA is that while it allows (some, not all) IBM machines to talk to other IBM machines, it is decidedly deaf to a great many non-IBM computers. As The Wall Street Journal once put it: “Hooking any non-SNA computers into those networks is a programmer’s nightmare. Rivals wanting to sell their computers to IMB’s legion of customers must mimic SNA in their own machines.” This indirect control of access to information may have been tolerable when most computers were IBMs, but not today. Hence the cry had gone up for computer democracy. While we are focusing on technology, consider the case of cesarean sections. Close to one out of every four Americans is now born by C-section. Through modern technology, American doctors can deliver babies who would have died otherwise. As Dr. Laurence Horowitz notes in Taking Charge of Your Medical Fate, “…the proper goal of C-section is to improve the chances of babies at risk, and that goal has been achieved.” However, C-sections are a surgical procedure, and when they are done routinely as an elective option, there is considerable and unnecessary danger; the changes of a woman’s dying during a C-section delivery are two to four times greater than during a normal traditional delivery. In others words, C-sections can and do save the lives of babies at risk, but when they are done for other reasons—for example, for the convenience of doctor or mother—they pose an unnecessary threat to health, and even life. Your body is not a machine. It is a living organism. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

To take another example: a surgical procedure known as carotid endarterectomy is used to clean out clogged arteries, thus reducing the likelihood of stroke. In 1987, more than one hundred thousand Americans had this operation. It is now established that the risks involved in such surgery outweigh the risks of suffering a stroke. Horowitz again: “In other words, for certain categories of patients, the operation may actually kill more people than it saves.” To take still another example: about seventy-eight thousand people every year get cancer from medical and dental X-rays. In a single generation, it is estimated, radiation will induce 2.34 million cancers. Examples of this kind can be given with appalling ease. However, in the interests of fairness the question about the value of technology in medicine is better phrased in the following way: Would American medicine be better were it not so totally reliant on the technological imperative? Here the answer is clearly, yes. We know, for example, from a Harvard Medical School study which focused on the year 1984 (no Orwellian reference intended), that in New York State alone there were thirty-six thousand cases of medical negligence, including seven thousand deaths related in some way to negligence. Although the study does not give figures on what kinds of negligence were found, the example is provided of doctors prescribing penicillin without asking the patients whether they were hyper-sensitive to the drug. We can assume that many of the deaths resulted not only from careless prescriptions and the doctors’ unwise thoughts about their patients’ histories but also from unnecessary surgery. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

In other words, iatrogenics (treatment-induced illness) is not a major concern for the profession, and an even greater concern for the patient. Doctors themselves feel restricted and dominated by the requirement to use all available technology. Technology is not a neutral element in the practice of medicine: doctors do not merely use technologies but are used by them. Second, technology creates its own imperatives and, at the same time, creates a wide-ranging social system to reinforce its imperatives. And third, technology changes the practice of medicine by redefining what doctors are, redirecting where they focus their own attention, and reconceptualizing how they view their patients and illness. Like some well-know diseases, the problems that have arisen as a result of the reign of technology came slowly and were barely perceptible at the start. As technology grew, so did the influence of drug companies and the manufacturers of medical instruments. As the training of doctors changed, so did the expectations of patients. As the increase in surgical procedures multiplied, so did the diagnoses which made them seem necessary. Through it all, the question of what was being undone had a low priority if it was asked at all. The Zeitgeist of the age placed such a question in a range somewhere between peevishness and irrelevance. In a growing Technopoly, there is no times or inclination to speak of technological debits. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Ho do researchers design what they cannot see? To make a new molecule, both its structure and the procedure to make it must be designed. Compared to gigantic science projects like the Superconducting Supercollider and the Hubble Space Telescope, working with molecules can be done on a shoestring budget. Still, the costs of trying many different procedures add up. To help predict in advance what will work and what will not, designers turn to models. You may have played with molecular models in chemistry class: colored plastic balls and sticks that fit together like Tinker Toys. Each color represents a different kind of atom: carbon, hydrogen, and so on. Even simple plastic models can give you a feel for how many bonds each kind of atom makes, how long the bonds are, and at what angels they are made. A more sophisticated form of models uses only sphere and partial spheres, without sticks. These colorful, bumpy shapes are called CPK models, and are widely used by professional chemists. Nobel laureate Donald Cram remarks that “We have spent hundreds of hours building CPK models of potential complexes and grading them for desirability as research targets.” His research, like that of fellow Nobelists Charles J. Pederson and Jean-Marie Lehn, has focused on designing and making medium-sized molecules that self-assemble. Although physical models cannot give a good description of how molecules bend and move, computer-based molecules can. Computer-based modeling is already playing a key role in molecular engineering. As John Walker (a founder and leader of Autodesk) has remarked, “Unlike all of the industrial revolutions that preceded it, molecular engineering requires, as an essential component, the ability to design, model, and simulate molecular structures using computers.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

This has not gone unnoticed in the business community. John Walker’s remark was part of a talk on nanotechnology given at Autodesk, a leader in computer-aided design, model, and simulate molecular structures using computers.” This has not gone unnoticed in the business community. John Walker’s remark was part of a talk on nanotechnology given at Autodesk, a leader in computer-aided design and one of the five largest software firms in the United States of America. Soon after this talk, the company made its first major investment in the computer-aided design of molecules. How does molecular design compare to more familiar kinds of engineering? Manufacturers and architects know that designs for new products and buildings are best done on a computer, by computer-aided design (CAD). The new molecular-design software can be called molecular Cad, and in its forefront are researchers such as Jay Ponder of the Yale University Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. Ponder explains that “There’s a strong link between what molecular designers are doing and what architects do. Michael Ward of Du Pont is designing a set of building blocks for a Tinker Toy set so that you can build larger structures. That is exactly we’re doing with modeling techniques. All the designs and mechanical engineering principles that apply to building a skyscraper or a bridge apply to molecular architecture as well. If you’re building a bridge, you’re going to model it and see how many trucks can be on the bridge at the same time without it collapsing, what kind of forces you’re going to apply to it, whether it can stand up to an earthquake. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

“And the same process goes on in molecular design: You’re designing pieces and then analyzing the stresses and forces and how they will change and perturb the structure. It’s exactly the same as designing and building a building, or analyzing the stresses on aby marco-scale structure. I think it’s important to get people to think in those terms. The molecular designer has to be creative in the same way that an architect has to be creative in designing a building. When people are looking at the interior of a protein structure and trying to redesign it to create a space that will have a particular function, such as binding to particular molecules, that’s like designing a room to use as a dining room—one that will fit certain sizes of tables and certain numbers of guests. It’s the same thing in both cases: You have to design a space for a function.” Ponder combines chemistry and computer science with an overall engineering approach: “I’m kind of a hybrid. I spend about half my time doing experiments and about half my time writing computer programs and doing computational work. In the laboratory, I cate or design molecules to test some of the computational ideas. So I’m at the interface.” The engineering perspective helps in thinking about where molecular research can lead: “even though with nanotechnology we’re at the nanometer scale, the structures are still big enough that an awful lot of things are classical. Again, it’s really like building bridges—very small bridges. And so there are many almost standard mechanical-engineering techniques for architecture and building structures, such as stress analysis, that apply. That American Technopoly has now embraced the computer in the same hurried and mindless way it embraced medical technology is undeniable, was perhaps inevitable, and is certainly most unfortunate.  #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

This is not to say that the computer is a blight on the symbolic landscape; only that, like medical technology, it has usurped powers and enforced mind-sets that a fully attentive culture might have wished to deny it. Thus, an examination of the ideas embedded in computer technology is worth attempting. Others, of course, have done this, especially Joseph Weizenbaum in his great and indispensable book Computer Power and Human Reason. Weizenbaum, however, ran into some difficulties, as everyone else has, because of the “universality” of computers, meaning (a) that their uses are infinitely various, and (b) that computers are commonly integrated into the structure of other machine. It is, therefore, hard to isolate specific ideas promoted by computer technology. The computer, for example, is quite unlike the stethoscope, which has a limited function in a limited context. Except for safecrackers, who, I am told, use stethoscopes to hear the tumblers of locks click into place, stethoscopes are used only by doctors. However, everyone uses or is used by computers, and for purposes that seem to know no boundaries. Putting aside such well-known functions as electronic filing, spreadsheets, and word-processing, one can make a fascinating list of the innovative, even bizarre, uses of computers. Computers are enabling aquatic designers to create giant water slides that mimic roller coasters and eight-foot-high artificial waves. Of course you know computers are used in board room meetings, but computer graphics help jurors to remember testimony better. We are sandwiched-on, tuned-in, visually oriented society, and jurors tend to believe tht they see. This technology keeps the jury’s attention by simplifying the material and by giving them little bursts of information. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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Although the philosophic experience is understood by the philosophers to be what is uniquely human, the very definition of man, the dignity and charm of philosophy have not always or generally been popularly recognized. This is not the case with the other claimants to the throne, the prophet or the saint, the hero or the statesman, the poet or the artist, whose claims, if not always accepted, are generally recognized to be serious. They were always present, apparently coeval with civil society, whereas philosophers appeared late on the scene and had to make their way. And this has something to do with the problem, but it may be symptom rather than cause. I doubt that the people have much greater access to the typical experiences of prophets, kings, and poets than to those of the philosophers. Great imagination, inspiration, intrepidity in the pursuit of glory are further from the ordinary lives of ordinary men than is the experience of reasoning found in the practical arts in daily use, like farming, building, shoemaking, and which is despised by the higher men. Socrates always has to remind his aristocratic interlocutors of these crafts and uses them as models of the knowledge aristocrats lack. However, this may indicate part of the difficulty: the people want something higher, something exalted, to admire. And certainly Socrates’ person, at first sight anyway, does not provide such an object of admiration, as Aristophanes’ comedy makes abundantly clear. Moreover, and more important, the prophets, kings, and poets are clearly benefactors of mankind at large, providing men with salvation, protection, prosperity, myths and entertainment. They are the noble bulwarks of civil society, and men tend to regard as good what does good to them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Philosophy does no such good. All to the contrary, it is austere and somewhat sad because it takes away many of men’s fondest hopes. It certainly does nothing to console men in their sorrows and their unending vulnerability. Instead it points to their unprotectedness and nature’s indifference to their individual fates. Socrates is old, unattractive, and not well off, of no family, without prestige or power in the city, and babbles about Ether’s taking Zeus’s place. The kings praised by poetry and illustrated in sculpture are ambiguous. On the one had they seem to exist for their own sake, beauty in which we do not participate and to which we look up. on the other hand, they are in our service—ruling us, curing us, perhaps punishing us, but for our sakes, teaching us, pleasing us. Achilles is perfection, what most men can only dream about being, and is therefore their superior and properly their master. However, he is also their warrior protector, who in order to save Greece overcomes the fear of death that other men cannot overcome. All the heroes are in the business of taking care of and flattering men, the demos, receiving admiration and glory as their pay. In some sense they are fictions of civil society, whose ends they serve. Not that they do not do the deeds for which they are praised, but the goodness of those deeds is measured, alas, by utility, by the greatest good of the greatest number. The statesman possesses virtues that are supposed to be good in themselves; but he is measured by his success in preserving the people. Those virtues are means to the end of preservation, id est, the good life is a good way of life, it cannot, at least in its most authentic expression, be, or serious be understood to be, in the city’s service. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

The theoretical life, therefore, has an almost impossible public relations problem. Socrates hints at this in his Apology when, ridiculously—since he was never angry and since he distinguished himself as a soldier exclusively in retreats—he likens himself to Achilles. The defenselessness of philosophy in the city is what Aristophanes points out and ridicules. He, the poet, has much sympathy with the philosopher’s wisdom but prides himself on not being so foolish. He can take care of himself, win prizes from and be paid by the people. His stance is that of the wise guy in the face of the wise man; he is city smart. He warns the philosophers and proves prophetic in comically portraying the city’s vengeance. The generation of great men who followed Socrates, including Plato, Xenophon and Isocrates, took the warning very much to heart. Philosophy, they recognized, is weak, precisely because it is new, not necessary, not a participant in the city’s power. It is threatened and is a threat to all the beliefs that tie the city together and unite the other high types—priests, poets, and statesmen—against philosophy. So Socrates’ successors gathered all their strength and made a heroic effort to save and protect philosophy. Socrates in Aristophanes’ story minded his own business, was the subject of rumor and ridicule, until a father who was in debt because of his son’s prodigality wanted to free himself of his obligations. Socrates’ atheism was the right prescription for him, insofar as it meant that he need not fear Zeus’s thunderbolt if he broke the law, if he perjured himself. The law is revealed to be merely manmade, and hence there is no witness to his misdeeds if he can escape the attention of other men. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Philosophy liberates this unwise old man. His son, too, is liberated, but with the unexpected consequence that he loses reverence for his father and his mother, who are no longer under divine protection. This the father cannot stand and returns to his belief in the gods, who it turns out protect the family as well as the city. In a rage he burns down Socrates’ school. Aristophanes was prescient. The actual charges against Socrates were corrupting the youth and impiety, with the implication that the latter is the deepest cause of the former. And whatever scholars may say about the injustice of Aristophanes’ or Athens’ charges, the evidence supports those charges. In the Republic, for example, marriages are short-term affairs arranged only for reproduction, the family is dissolved, wise sons rule over and can discipline unwise fathers, and the prohibitions against incest are, to say the least, relaxed. The reverence for antiquity is replaced by reason, and the rule of fathers and the ancestral are disputed. This follows immediately from Socrates’ procedures, and it entered into the bloodstream of the West, one of the innumerable effects of philosophy that, for better or worse, are to be found only there. Angry fathers are one of the constituencies morally hostile to Socrates, who was not trying to achieve this result, or to reform the family. His example and the standards of judgment he invoked simply led to it. Socrates collided not with culture, society or economy but with the law—which means with a political fact. The law is coercive. The human things impinge on the philosophers in the form of political demands. What philosophers need to survive is not anthropology, sociology or economics, but political science. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Thus without any need for sophisticated reasons, political science was the first human science or science of human things that had to be founded, and remained the only one until sometime in the eighteenth century. The stark recognition that he depended on the city, that as he looked up to the Heavens he lost his footings on the ground, compelled the philosopher to pay attention to politics, to develop a philosophic politics, a party, as it were, to go along with the other parties, democratic, oligarchic, aristocratic and monarchic, that are always present. He founded the truth party. Ancient political philosophy was almost entirely in the service of philosophy, of making the World a safer place for philosophy. Moreover, the law against which Socrates collided was the one concerning the gods. In its most interesting expression of the law is the divine law. The city is sacred, it is a theological-political entity. (This is, by the way, why the Theological-Political Treatise is for Spinoza the book about politics.) The problem for the philosophers is primarily religion. The philosophers must come to terms with its authoritative presence in the city. Socrates in the Apology makes some suggestions as to how the philosopher must behave. He must deny that he is an atheist, although he remains ambiguous as to the character of his belief. Any careful reading of the Apology makes clear that Socrates never says he believes in the gods of the city. However, he does try to make himself appear to be a sing sent from the gods, commanded to do what he does by the Delphic god. Nonetheless he is condemned. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Socrates states his problem succinctly in explaining his way of life to his jurors: “If I tell you that I would be disobeying the god and on that account it is impossible for me to keep quiet, you will not be persuaded by me, taking it that I am ironizing. And if I tell you that it is the greatest good for a human being to have discussions everyday about virtue and the other things you hear me talking about, examining myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not livable for a human being, you will be even less persuaded.” The people recognize Socrates’ irony, his talking down to them, and see how implausible his religious claims are. His irony appears as irony and is therefore not successful. However, the truth, unadorned by the Delphic cover, is incomprehensible, corresponding to no experience his audience has. He would be closer to success in sticking to his first story. One can from this very description analyze the political situation. There are three groups of men: most do not understand him are hostile to him, and vote for his condemnation; a smaller but not inconsiderable group also do not understand Socrates but glimpse something noble in him, are sympathetic to him and vote for his acquittal; finally, a very small group knows what he means when he says the greatest good for a human being is talking about—not practicing—virtue (unless talking about virtue is practicing it). The last group is a politically inconsiderable. Therefore the whole hope for the political salvation of philosophy rests with the friendliness of the second group, good citizens and ordinarily pious, but somehow open. And it was to such men, the gentlemen, that philosophy made its rhetorical appeal for almost two thousand years. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

When they ruled, the climate for philosophy was more or less salubrious. When the people, the demos, ruled, religious fanaticism or vulgar utility made things much less receptive to philosophy. Tyrants might be attracted to philosophers, either out of genuine curiosity or the desire to adorn themselves, but they are the most unreliable of allies. All of this rests on a psychological analysis that was forced on the philosophers, who had previously not paid much attention to men or their souls. They observed that the most powerful passion of most men is fear of death. Very few men are capable of coming to terms with their own extinction. It is not so much stupidity that closes men to philosophy but love of their own, particularly of their own lives, but also love of their own children and their own cities. It is the hardest task of all to face the lack of cosmic support for what we care about. Socrates, therefore, defines the task of philosophy as “learning how to die.” Various kinds of self-forgetting, usually accompanied by illusions and myths, make it possible to live without the intransigent facing of death—in the sense of always thinking about it and what it means for life and the things dear in life—which is characteristic of a serious life. Individuals demand significance for this individual life, which is so subject to accident. Most human beings and all cities require the unscientific mixture of general and particular, necessity and chance, nature and convention. It is just this mixture that the philosophers cannot accept and which he separates into its constituent parts. He applies what he sees in nature to his own life. “As are the generations of leaves, so are the generations of men,”—a somber lesson that is only compensated for by the intense pleasure accompanying insight. Without that pleasure, which so few have, it would be intolerable. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

The philosopher, to the extent that he really only enjoys thinking and loves the truth, cannot be disabused. He cherishes no illusion that can crumble. If he is comic, at least he is absolutely immune to tragedy. Nonphilosophic men love the truth only as long as it does not conflict with what they cherish—self, family, country, fame, love. When it does not conflict, they hate the truth and regard as a monster the man who does not care for these noble things, who proves they are ephemeral and treats them as such. The gods are the guarantors of the unity of nature and convention dear to most men, which philosophy can only dissolve. The enmity between science and mankind at large is, therefore, not an accident. Behind every strategy there is a dream, an image of what should be. A Third Wave strategy for breaking the back of poverty begins with what may, to some, seem like a dream—but could well become a reality, and soon. Indeed, it is the old anti-poverty strategies, not the new one, that are unrealistic. Incremental microchanges at the village level are not enough to bring about the massive progress that is needed. Nor can China or India, or those who follow their course, hope to succeed by turning themselves into megafactories polluting their air, land, and water to degrees never before seen and jam-cramming hundreds of millions more peasants into cities already at the breaking point. We will keep people from fleeing the countryside into urban favelas, villas miserias, shantytowns and squatter villages only when the productivity gap is closed between what brute labor on the soil can accomplish and what advanced technology makes possible today—and will make possible tomorrow. It will also take far greater clarity of purpose. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

The entire public discussion of global poverty is muddied by a failure to decide whether the goal is to minimize absolute poverty—or to close the much-discussed “gap” between rich and poor. Closing the gap can be accomplished by impoverishing the affluent without necessarily raising the living standards of the poor one iota. However, contrast, the individual revolution radically widened the gap—but also reduced poverty. Attempts to move everyone forward equally have repeatedly proved a disaster. The prime goal should be to raise the living conditions above absolute poverty, whether or not the relative gap widens. Only after every baby is fed, after everyone’s drinking water is safe, after average life expectancy in poor countries reaches at least seventy and after basic education targets are met should closing the gap be a priority. What is needed is a strategy aimed at nothing less than the transformation of today’s impoverished rural areas into centers of advanced, highly productive enterprise—regions no longer dependent on the muscle power of emaciated, old-before-their-time parents but on the brainpower of their children. To be realistic, this strategy must look beyond the immediate—at what is emerging, even embryonic. Fortunately, powerful tools now being developed can help us. They begin with the fiercely contested issue of genetically modified food. Where is protein engineering headed? Protein engineering is a powerful tool in synthetic biology that can create proteins with tremendous potential for therapeutic and industrial use. The field has recently taken giant leaps forward from its origins, and some of its pioneers predict that the next five to ten years hold exponentially more promise. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

True protein engineering is building proteins completely from scratch, engineered to do what you want them to do. Like the IBM physicists, protein designers are moved by a vision of molecular engineering. Bill DeGardo predicted, “I think we will be able to make catalysts or enzymelike molecules, possibly ones that catalyze reactions not catalyzed in nature.” Catalysts are molecular machines that speed up chemical reactions: they form a shape for the two reacting molecules to fit into and thereby help the reaction move faster, up to a million reactions per second. New ones, for reactions that now go slowly, will give enormous cost saving to the chemical industry. Denver researchers John Stewart, Karl Hahn, and Wieslaw Klis announced their new enzyme, designed from scratch over a period of two years and built successfully on the first try. It is a catalyst, making some reactions go about 100,00 times faster.  Nobel Prize-wining biochemist Bruce Merrifield believed that “if others can reproduce and expand on this work, it will be one of the most important achievements in biology.” DeGrado also has longer-terms plans for protein design, beyond making new catalysts: “It will allow us to think about designing molecular devices in the next five to ten years. It should be possible ultimately to specify a particular design and build it. Then you will have, say, proteinlike molecules that self-assemble into complex molecular objects, which can serve as machinery. However, there is a limit to how small you can make devices. You will shrink things down so far and then you will not be able to go any further, because you have reached your molecular dimension.” Mark Pearson shows that management at Du Pont also has this vision. Regarding the prospects for nanotechnology and assemblers, he remarked, “You know, it’ll take money and effort and good ideas for sure. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

“But to my way of thinking, there is no absolute fundamental limitation to preclude us from doing this kind of thing.” He did not say his company plans to develop nanotechnology, but such plans are not really necessary. Du Pont is already on the nanotechnology path, for other—shorter-term, commercial—reasons. Like IMB, if they do decide to move quickly, they have the resources and forward-looking people needed to succeed. Scientists have moved beyond predicting the structures of proteins that exist in nature to designing completely new “unnatural” proteins—and then custom-designed proteins for particular purposes. For example, scientists working with virologist Ian Wilson, Ph.D., a professor of structural biology at the Scripps Research Institute, designed a protein that can exploit a vulnerability on the surface of the influenza virus. Using a program called Rosetta, they identified candidate chains of amino acids that might fold in the right way, and tested the top candidates on the real flu virus. The most successful of the new proteins, which they named HB1.6928.2.3, proved 100% protective against death from the flu in a mouse model in a study published in Nature in October 2017. Now, if three different materials are arranged in a grid capable of generating electricity, researchers at Martin Luther University (MLU) Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) have found that the energy generations of ferroelectric crystals in solar cells can be increased by a factor of thousands. To achieve this increase in electrical energy production, the researchers created crystalline layers of barium titanate, strontium titanate, and calcium titanate, which they placed alternatively on top of one another, separating the positive and negative charges in the same photovoltaic device. This arrangement could greatly increase the efficiency of solar panels. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Who else build molecular objects? Chemists, most of whom do not work on proteins, are the traditional experts in building molecular objects. As a group, they have been building molecules for over a century, with ever-increasing ability and confidence. Their methods are all indirect: they work with billions of atoms at a time—massive parallelism—but without control of the positions of their workpieces. The molecules typically tumble randomly in a liquid or gas, like pieces of a puzzle that may or may not fit together correctly when shaken in a box. Scientist need more control of the accuracy of their designs. One outstanding challenge is developing catalysts for reactions for which there currently are no catalysts. Another critical issue is understanding how these designed proteins interact with biological systems. In the past, a grad student or post-doc would make the mutations in a protein, evaluate the effect, and come up with a hypothesis for how the protein is working. Then they would make more mutations, repeat the process five or ten times, and slowly get something improved. Scientists think they can fully automate the entire process. Once the computational methods the lab has developed to identify key protein design sequences, they are handed over to a liquid-handling robot that mimics the process of a protein engineer in an automated fashion. The robot can be working around the clock, optimizing. They can let this thing go for a week or so and it will have gone through tends of rounds of optimization without any need for input from a human. The goal is to optimize enzymes that can degrade biomass into sugars to in turn be transformed into fuel. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Scientists can make new fluorescent proteins for probes and diagnostics and more sophisticated medicines that can recognize targets with higher specificity—mimics of naturally occurring hormones that have improved pharmacological properties. Within the next few years, an entirely new class of medicines and materials based on de novo protein designs will exist. Chemists mix molecules on a huge scale (in our simulation view, a test tube holds a churning molecular swarm with the volume of an inland sea), yet they still achieve precise molecular transformation. Given that they work so indirectly, their achievements are astounding. This is, in part, the result of enormous amount of work poured into the field for many decades. Thousands of chemists are working on molecular construction in the United States of America alone; add to that the chemists in Europe, in Japan, and in the rest of the World, and you have a huge community of researchers making great strides. Though it publishes only a one-paragraph summary of each research report, a guide to the chemical literature—Chemical Abstracts—covers several library walls and grows by many feet of shelf space every year. However, a serious objection raised by physicians, and one which has resonated throughout the centuries of technological development in medicine, is that interposing an instrument between patient and doctor would transform the practice of medicine; the traditional methods of questioning the patients, taking their reports seriously, and making careful observations of exterior symptoms would become increasingly irrelevant. Doctors would lose their ability to conduct skillful examinations and rely more on machinery than on their own experiences and insight. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

In his detailed book Medicine and the Reign of Technology, Stanley Joel Reiser compares the effects of the stethoscope to the effects of the printing press on Western culture. The printed book, he argues, “helped to create the detached and objective thinker. Similarly, the stethoscope helped to created the objective physician, who could move away from involvement with the patient’s experience and sensations, to a more detached relation, less with the patient but more with the sounds from within the body. Undistracted by the motives and beliefs of the patient, the auscultator [another term for the stethoscope] could make a diagnosis from sounds that he alone heard emanating from the body organs, sounds that he believed to be objective, bias free representations of the disease process.” The stethoscope could not by itself have made such ideas stick, especially because of the resistance to them even in America, by doctors whose training and relationship to their patients led them to propose mechanical interpositions. However, the ideas were amplified with each new instrument added to the doctor’s arsenal: the ophthalmoscope (in vented by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1850), which allowed doctors to see into the eye; the laryngoscope (designed by Johann Czermark, a Polish professor of physiology, in 1857), which allowed doctors to inspect the larynx and other parts of the throat, as well as the nose; and, of course, the X-ray (developed by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895), which could penetrate most substances but not bones. “If the hand be held before the fluorescent screen,” Roentgen wrote, “the shadow shows the bone darkly with only faint outlines of surrounding tissues.” Roentgen was able to reproduce this effect on photographic plates and make the first X-ray of a human being, his wife’s hand. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Three basic television standards are in use in different parts of the World at present: NTSC, PAL, and SECAM, each slightly different but incompatible. Because of this, an American program like Flowers of the Attic usually has to be converted from one system to another before it can be telecast abroad. However, the images produced by all three systems are fuzzy by contrast with what is known as QLED. “Quantum dot display” is a display device that uses quantum dots (QD), semiconductor nanocrystals which can produce pure monochromatic red, green, and blue light. QLED is to today’s home video screens what the compact mp3 is to the scratchy platter played on great, great-grandma’s gramophone. Quantum dot can put pictures on the TV screen that are better than the quality of the best big-screen movies. It can make an image blast off the computer monitor looking as bright and sharp as in person, if not better. QLED TV represents a new generation of consumer electronics, one that will drive technological developments in dozens of areas, from chip to fiber-optic to battery to camera technology. Because QD image quality is so good, it could even make it possible for cinemas all over the World to receive their movies via satellite, rather than on film as at present, which could open an additional immense market for satellite receivers and other equipment. In total, therefore, the decisions to which QLED TV standard(s) to use will shape a World market estimated to be worth nearly a trillion dollars. Japanese engineers have worked on QLED TV for nearly twenty years. Now high definition has burst on the World economic scene. The Japanese and Americans threat to render all European television sets obsolete—and to be the only ones with the power to replace them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

Economic paranoia is rampant in the United States of America as well as the entire World, people are bogged down in hairsplitting debates, political controversy, and with the health of the planet, its animals and people. However, these could be the result of removing God from his nation. Students no longer pledge allegiance to the flag in class, the ten commandments have been removed from government buildings, saying “God bless you,” to someone is seen by many being as bad as shouting to bad word to them, people no longer stand for the national anthem, and some refuse to play it. Christ said: love thine enemy. Christ’s enemy is Satan, and Satan’s enemy is Christ. Through love enmity is destroyed. Through love Christ and Satan have destroyed their enmity and come together for the End. Christ to judge, Satan to execute Judgement. Consciously or unconsciously, apathetically, half-heartedly, enthusiastically or fanatically, under countless other names by which we know them, and under innumerable disguises and descriptions, men have followed three Great Gods of the Universe ever since the Creation. Each one according to his nature. For the three Gods represent three basic human patterns of reality. Within the framework of each pattern there are countless variations and permutations, widely-varying grades of suppression and intensity. Yet each one represents a fundamental problem, a deep-rooted driving force, a pressure of instincts and desires, terrors, and revulsions. All three of them exist to some extent in every one of us. However, each of us leans more heavily toward one of them, whilst the pressures of the other two provide the presence of conflict and uncertainty. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Only through Christ can we reconcile our differences. The words in the Christian and Mormon Bibles leave the impression that they have welled-up from a deeper source than the intellect. Processian Social Darwinism elicited my sympathy, and their inherent apocalypticism mirrored my own forebodings of the near future. Were they the last National Socialists who would pass through the Flame of the End-Time, as foretold by Savitri Devi in The lightning and the Sun? Could they be the Vanguard of the Second Religiosity of the West as foretold by Oswald Spengler, or were they the Western various of the Thuggee, just one more element in our continuing descent into decadence? Around the time I began to ask these questions, Ed Sanders published The Family. Sanders claimed that The Process were pro-Hitler and Fascist in nature. It was true that they used a variation of the Swastika for their symbol. Their Social Darwinism was not so far afield from Nazi philosophy. They wore black uniforms and groomed themselves as an elite order. And a book they issued, Man’s Greatest Crime, was more hard-hitting and graphic than any anti-vivisectionist literature that I had ever seen. Did not the Nazis, whose Green Party advocate Walther Darre also champion the rights of the animal kingdom and nature? On the other hand, The Process operated a soup kitchen for the homeless and hungry. And they never mentioned politics or economics in any conversations I had with them. A number of members I met among the American recruits were Jewish. Sanders’ accusations and my own speculations raced across my mind, but I could never see any concrete evidence to confirm anything one way or the other. During meditations, we used the same chants Manson used to program others with subliminal messages. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

We were asked to close our eyes and meditate on something like Peace or Love or Fulfillment or whatever. After the meditation came to a close, we played for another hour and a half in the coffee house. Father Barnabas had a good voice for ballad and his folk-style guitar playing was reminiscent of Ian Anderson. One song in particular was quite beautiful in its lyrics and melody. It was about the God Lucifer. Father Matthew and I asked Father Barnabas to show us the chords to the song and give us the lyrics, and to the request his face contorted in anger and said “No!” We were taken aback by his anger, and never again had any personal contact with him. Much like the American Indians, Americans are now being slaughtered and driven off their lands, and many feel they are being forced to assimilate to an alternative lifestyle they do not agree with. Speaking in cultural terms, it is death either way. The only way members of the press could possibly care enough about American people is to have an anthropologist tell rambling stories about the impact on immigration, taxes, and globalization on the American people. Our culture, one that has been functioning well for two thousand years, could be destroy in one generation, in our lifetime, depending on who is in that White House in 2024. It is not only a physical assault, but a technological assault through most of the TV new media. Is it possible to adopt the hard-edged, fact-fascinating, aggressive, gross form in order to preserve a way of thinking that is totally American and completely alien to this new model being drive by California, New York, and the White House? They are totally ignoring people and their struggles and 161,548 people are homeless in California; and that 552,830 Americans are homeless (probably more like 4 million in California alone and 20 million natiin wide) and we do not have the resources to help them, but we can leave our borders open and send at least $52 billion a year to other countries. It takes 1.63 million Americans, who earn the national average salary of $32,000 anually to donate their full pay checks to the government, to generate $52 billion a year. To put that in perfect the top 1 percent pays $612 billion in taxes and the other 90 percent pays $461 billion in taxes. So a substantial amount of your money is being given away. Americans despertaly need that money for housing food and education. They once worked and paid taxes, now other nations are getting rich off of their labor, while the government refuses to help its own people. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

The struggle of the American people today is as much a consciousness struggle as it is a civil rights battle. To the extent that it is framed exclusively as a civil rights issue, the Americans lose, at least in cultural terms. Individual Americans may win a job, or a right, or, if they are ever acknowledged, a small payment for an injustice, but their children and Americans of the future will not be Americans anymore; they will have been moved out nationwide artificially. Since television itself is an outgrowth of an issues argued within it would be predetermined. However, imagine for a moment that television did not exist. Let us say that only print media existed. It so happens that print media, while not perfect, can convey a lot more about American ways of mind than electronic media can because print can express much greater depth, complexity, change of mood, subtlety, detail and so on. Books, especially, can be written in much slower rhythms, encouraging a perception that builds, stage by stage, over the length of a long reading process that make take many hours, or days. Of course, publishers, these days, also riding the rapids of modern life and responsive to commodity-mind, discourage books that move at deliberate speed, preferring those that are punchy, fast-reading, highlighted, riding the tops of waves, like television sitcoms, or advertising. Yet many books do exist that are solely devoted to states of feeling or expression of intuition, or that deal in the realm of subjective reaction. There are books which are exclusively Americana. And so such works as American Pride: Poems Honoring America and Her Patriots by David Bancroft, American Pride by Diana Rosen, and American Titans by Michael Gray, are able to convey more on an imagery level, a sensory level, and an evocational level than all the TV specials combined. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

This is not to say that these books are sufficient. Only direct experience is. However, if the battle were fought in books, Americans might win. If print were the only media in the World, the natural advantage of today’s dominant forms—corporate, military, technological, scientific—over concrete ways of thinking would be vastly diminished. In a wider information field, the American mind would have greater validity. So people who are interested in celebrating and saving American cultures, like people interested in the arts or ecology or nay nonhierarchical political forms, might be well advised to cease all efforts to transmit these intentions through television and devote greater effort to undermining television itself and accelerating the struggle within other information fields. “Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he had committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed,” reports James 5.14-16. A protestant minister told me that one day one of the members of his church who was ill had asked if he lay hands on him and pray for him. The elders however, in every cause refused to do as the man asked. None of them had ever done such a thing before and all thought themselves incapable of doing it. The whole idea was complete alien to them. Why is this? Why is Christendom so ignorant of what the Bible says about the laying on the hands and prayer for the sick? Why do Christians often lack the courage to put into practice the various passages that refer to healing? Why is it left to the sects and the cults to monopolize these Scriptures? Are these promises only meant for the extremist groups? #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Is this a sign of the Church’s poverty that it no longer lives in the light of the promises of the Bible? These are questions which are relevant today. Let us then consider this problem in the light of the passage we have already quoted from the letter of James, and similar passages. It was custom in Jewish communities for the sick to call for the elders to visit them and to pray for them. The early Christians continued this practice although their view of sickness changed somewhat, for they no longer always considered it to be a punishment inflicted on the person by God for some particular sin in his life. The practice of anointing a person with oil was associated in the Old Testament with the choosing of a king and the sanctifying of a priest. It was also a sign of festive joy as we see it expressed. In Psalm 23, “Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup overflows.” Oil was considered to be one of the best medicines in existence. This suggests that in spite of the prayers of the elders, medicine itself was not rejected but actually used to combat the disease. It is evident from the Scriptures that oil had both a liturgical and a medicinal use. “Thus we may see that the Lord is merciful unto all who will, in the sincerity of their hearts, call upon His holy name. Yea, thus we see that the gate of Heaven is open unto all, even to those who will believe on the name of Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God. Yea, we see that whosoever will may lay hold upon the word of God, which is quick and powerful, which shall divine asunder all the cunning and the snares and the wiles of the devil, and lead the man of Christ in a strait and narrow course across that everlasting gulf of misery which is prepare to engulf the wicked—and land their souls, yea, their immortal souls, at the right hand of God in the kingdom of Heaven, to sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and with Jacob, and with all our holy fathers, to do not more out,” reports Helaman 3.27-30. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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Cresleigh Havenwood features four distinct floor plans ranging from 2,293 – 3,377 square feet and offering up to five bedrooms. 

Each plan has been thoughtfully designed and includes great features such as single story homes, guest suites, optional offices, garage workshops, and more!

Get the most out of your new home with Cresleigh’s All Ready smart home featuring all the connectivity needed to keep your house running. Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes with owned solar included! 

Located off of Virginiatown Road and McCourtney Road, residents of the 83 homesites of Cresleigh Havenwood will benefit from a brand new neighborhood in the prestigious City of Lincoln, California. 

Palo Verde Park, is  just down the street and there’s plenty of recreation to take part in all around town. 

Cresleigh Homes offers versatile flex space, an inviting great room and an open dining room that flows into kitchen with a center island and walk-in pantry. Some homes come with a Butler’s Pantry. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/

Whether we’ve been away for business or recreation, it’s hard to beat that feeling of getting back to our own Cresleigh Home.

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This, indeed, is true not merely for China and India but for Asia in general and the rest of the World. It is a reality grasped by a remarkable generation of Asian leaders long before their counterparts elsewhere. Lee Kwan Yew, the founder of independent Singapore, propelled a once sleepy colonial port into a World leader in high technology and services. In 2002 it became Asia’s top investor in biotech. Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s controversial former prime minister, set high-tech goals for Malaysia 2020 and attracted investment from Microsoft, Intel, Japan’s NTT, British Telecom and others. When Malaysia gained independence in 1957, its key exports were rubber and tin. Today it is a leading exporter of semicondctors and electrical goods. President Kim Dae-jung in South Korea, who served on the National Committee on Science and Technology before his election, approved $1.1 billion in funds for nanotechnology research. Once in the Blue House, he campaigned successfully to make his country a World leader in the application of I.T. and broadband communications—which it is today. Our talks with these and other Asian leaders make it clear that for them low-wage manufacturing jobs—and even routine call-center jobs like those outsourced to India—are just baby steps toward something far more dramatic: The leap to an advanced knowledge-based economy and society. As we scan the rest of the World, we can only ask, Where are the Lee Kwan Yews of Kin Dae-jungs of Latin America or Africa? In the Arabian World, hopefully, we see the first glimmerings of awakening in some of the Gulf States and in Jordan under young, computer-literate King Abdullah. What is it that has kept these various regions so mired in poverty? The hangover of colonialism? Religion? Culture? Corruption? Climate? Unstable politics? #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

 Is it politics that is keeping these various regions in poverty? Or could it be tribalism? Or combinations of these? Why do these regions lag so far behind the United States of America, Europe and fast-rising Asia? The answer differs by time and place. However, one thing is clear: It is in Asia—in rural China and rural India—that the true core of World poverty is found, and it is in these regions that the knowledge-based wealthy system can have its greatest success. It would be naïve to assume that India or China can wipe out poverty with technology alone. No country can. We have repeated throughout that the wealth revolution involves more than computers and hardware—more, in fact, than economics. It is clearly a social, institutional, educational, cultural and political revolution as well. However, it is also true that no country can eradicate its age-old rural poverty without drastically increasing agricultural productivity, and that cannot be done on a wide scale just by building better hoes and plows. Nor can it be accomplished by eliminating the agricultural subsidies paid by Europe and the United States of America to their minute handful of farmers. The effects of these subsidies are far more complex than their opponents suggest. A controversial case can even be made that, while they severely hurt subsistence peasants, they can indirectly spur industrial development. However, there is no doubt about the immediate short-term devastation they create in many less affluent countries. Yes, European and American subsidies—mainly payoffs to favored political constituencies—should be slashed. However, no one should imagine that even their total and immediate elimination would actually solve the problem of rural poverty. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Yes, the rich World, if only for moral reasons, should drastically increase funds for humanitarian aid and disaster relief. However, feeing people during an emergency or digging out corpses and helping re-house displaced victims after an Earthquake or tsunami will not, in themselves, transform the economics of World. Also, people forget that the millions and billions of taxpayer dollars sent over seas every year is funded from American’s working. It is not really the governments money. Hard working Americans are actually paying for that. As a result, especially when America is in crises, it is leading to bankruptcy, people going hungry, not be able to pay their bills and it leaves America crumbling while the rest of the World seems to thrive. Yes, hunger must be addressed. Immediate, emergency aid must be provided for the World’s hungriest people. Among the benefits, it will save the brains of children from the effects of malnutrition—brains needed in a future in which knowledge assumes increasing importance. However, hit-and-run food supplies for the worst-off will not break the back of global poverty. The same goes for viruses and other country-ravaging diseases that are killing millions each year around the World. No one can be anything but horrified and heartsick at the immense human tragedy they represent. We must save every life we can. Yet stopping the spread of these viruses and diseases without making other fundamental changes will not break the cycle of rural destitution. Economic advance, as everyone by now should know, demands saving women from degradation and inequality. It demands that we reduce, if not wipe out, corruption—and that we do the best we can, for now, with what passes for education. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

However, all of these measures, even all of them together, will not ultimately liberate the billions of rural poor whose lives are severely limited by the Earth’s stingy response to their ending, bitterly hard, sweaty labor. For that stingy response is the core reason for core poverty. Subsistence-level poverty cannot be conquered unless peasants agriculture is replaced by more productive activities. Any other plan is illusory. There is an upper limit, even under the best of circumstances, to how much First Wave peasants can make the Earth produce with the tools they now use. There are limits, as well, to how much Second Wave mechanized agribusiness can produce without severely damaging the environment. (Once the cost of rehabilitation is included, the productivity is less than it seems.) For all practical purposes, however, there are no limits to what Third Wave knowledge-based agriculture can produce. And that is why we are the edge of the biggest change in rural life since our ancestors first began to till the soil. Umbrellas and automobiles are different. Not just because of size, function, and cost. However, for a reason we seldom stop to consider. A person can use an umbrella without buying another product. An automobile, by contrast, is useless without fuel, oil, repair services, spare parts, not to mention streets and roads. The humble umbrella, therefore, is a rugged individual, so to speak, delivering value to its user irrespective of any other products that work only when combined with others.  If someone somewhere were not transmitting images to it, the television set would stare blankly into the living room. Even the lowly closet hanger presupposes a rack or bar to hang it on. Each of these is part of a product system. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

It is precisely their systemic nature that is their main source of economic value. And just as “team players” must play by certain agreed-on rules, systemic products need standards to work. If all the wall sockets have only two slots, a three-pronged electrical plug does not help much. This distinction between stand-aloe and systemic products throws revealing light on an issue that is widening today’s information war all around the World. The French call it la guerre des norms—“the war over standards.” Battles over standards are raging in industries as diverse as medical technology, industrial pressure vessels, and camera. Some of the most explosive—and public—disputes are directly related to the ways in which data, information, knowledge, images, and entertainment are created and distributed. In essence a global battle over dollars and political power, its outcome will reach into millions of homes. It will radically shift power among the industrial giants of the World: companies like IMB, AT&T, Sony, and Siemens. And it will affect national economies. Nowhere is this battle more public than in the three-way fight to determine what kind of television the World will watch in the decades to come. What we do know is that television has a goal. The goal is often to immerse us, the viewers, in an experience, to convey the beauty and mystery of the subject’s art and its organic, naturalistic meaning, even if it is a fictional television show. However, on television, cut at an average of ten technical events per minute, the ceremonials are practically impossible to follow. They are as fuzzy as the natural surroundings from which they have emerged. We get no sense of the dance or rhythm of life. It passes in and out of the frame of the camera. We see only this piece of it or that one. The fine details of the costumes blur like the tiny seeds of the flower. We cannot smell the foods they are eating, nor participate in the conversations they are having. We cannot feel the coldness of the air.  #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Our exposure comes in ten-second pieces, at most. Whatever understanding we develop comes from Luke Fetherston’s words, which describe what we cannot actually see or intuit. The information is virtually total. Aura is utterly destroyed. Time is fractured. The sensory information is lost. The context is deleted. The gestalt of intuition experience is cracked. The details are gone. The mood is impossible to convey. The Process is invisible, as is the source. No magic. Not enough is conveyed to develop any feeling od caring about what might happen to these people because the heart of their belief remains invisible, despite the attempt to convey it to me. This is not say I do not care what happens. However, I cared before I saw these scenes. If these scenes had been my total exposure to these cultures, they would only have confirmed the uselessness of trying to sustain cultures that obviously do not fit the World today. Okay. We get it. Conflict. Rules. Arguments. Laws. Right and wrong. Rip-off. Rights. Entrenched interest. Brutality. Lack of due process. Oppressors. Oppressed. Heroes. Downtrodden. It all comes flooding through. Now we start to care, now we get drawn in. What want to know will Joel ever recover? We see why Mr. Foxworth is so stern. We see why Mrs. Foxworth is trapped in a cage. Here in America, if corporations fail to provide what “we want,” then they die. We can tour a graveyard of headstones, carved with the names of the corporations that had not kept up with Americans’ changing needs. This was proof that we the people control the corporations, not vice versa. Corporate manipulation was a fiction. Planners say it would be nice if we all lived in apartments, but most people prefer to live in their own single-family houses. And American business, sparked by the profit motive, is providing them. The same with mass transit. People prefer their own cars, manufactured by big business, providing what people want. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

Naturally, television has been used more successfully for the latter cultural forms than the former. Also naturally, the American population develops more of a feeling for products and a life-style suitable to business than it does for a sensitive, subtle and beautiful way of mind that theoretically offers an alternative. The more people sit inside their television experience, the more fixed they become in the hard-edged reality that the medium can convey. If science is just for curiosity’s sake, which is what theoretical men believe, it is nonsense, and immoral nonsense, from the viewpoint of practical men. The World loses it proportions. Only Swift has rivalled Aristophanes in picturing the comedy of science. His description of a woman’s breast seen through a microscope shows what science means, not in order to denigrate science but to make clear the harsh disproportion between the World most men cling to and the one inhibited by theoretical men. What Aristophanes satirizes is the exterior of science, how the scientist appears to the nonscientist. He can only hint at the dignity of what the scientist does. His Socrates is not individualized; he is not the Socrates we know. He is a member of the species philosopher, student of nature, particularly of astronomy. The first known member of this species was Thales. He was the first man to have seen the cause of, and to predict, an eclipse of the sun. This means he figure out that the Heavens move in regular ways that accord with mathematical reasoning. He was able to reason from visible effects to invisible causes and speculate about the intelligible order of nature as a whole. He at that moment became aware that his mind was in accord with the principles of nature, that he was the microcosm. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

This moment contains many elements: satisfaction at having solved a problem; pleasure in using his faculties; fulness of pride, more complete than that of any conqueror, for he surveys and possesses all; certitude drawn from within himself, requiring no authorities; self-sufficiency, not depending, for the fulfillment of what is highest in himself, on other men or opinions or on accidents such as birth or election to power, on anything that can be taken from him; a happiness that has no admixture of illusion or hope but is full of actuality. However, perhaps most important for Thales was seeing that the poetic or mythical accounts of eclipses are false. They are not, as men believed prior to the advent of science, a sign from the gods. Eclipses are beyond the power of the gods. They belong to nature. One need not fear the gods. The theoretical experience is one of liberation, not only negatively—freeing the think from fear of the gods. They belong to nature. One need not fear the gods. The theoretical experience is one of liberation, not only negatively-freeing the thinker from fear of the gods—but also positively, simultaneously a discovery of the best way of life. Maimonides describes the experience of the philosophic use of reason as follow: “This then will be a key permitting one to enter places the gates to which were locked. And when these gates are opened and these places are entered into, the soul will find rest therein, the eyes will be delighted, and the bodies will be eased of their toil and of their labor.” What had previously been checked in man’s soul comes into full play. Freedom from the myths and their insistence that piety is best permits man to see that knowing is best, the end for which everything else is done, the only end that without self-contradiction can be said to be final. The important theoretical experience leads necessarily toward the first principles of all things and includes an awareness of the good. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Man as man, regardless of nation, birth, or wealth, is capable of this experience. And it is the only thing men surely have spiritually in common: the demonstrations of science come from within man, and they are the same for all men. When I think the Pythagorean theorem, I know that what is in me at that moment is precisely the same as what is within anyone else who is thinking that theorem. Every other supposedly common experience is at best ambiguous. Some of this experience still remains within the contemporary natural science, and it has a fugitive existence within the humanities. The unity of it all is hardly anywhere to be found or appreciated because philosophy hardly exists today. However, it was always understood by philosophers, because they share the experience and are able to recognize it in others. This sense of community is more important for them than any disagreements about the final things. Philosophy is not a doctrine but a way of life, so the philosophers, for all the differences in their teachings, have more in common with one another than with anyone else, even their own followers. Plato saw this in Parmenides, Aristotle in Plato, Bacon in Aristotle, Descartes in Bacon, Locke in Descartes and Newton, and so on. The tiny band of men who participate fully in this way of life are the soul of the university. This is true in historical fact as well as in principle. Universities came to be where men were inspired by the philosophers’ teachings and examples. Philosophy and its demonstration of the rational contemplative life, made possible and, more or less consciously, animated scholarship and the individual sciences. When those examples lost their vitality or were overwhelmed by men who had no experience of the, the universities decay or were destroyed. This, strictly, is barbarism and darkness. I do not mean that philosophers were ordinarily present in universities any more than prophets or saints are ordinarily present in houses of worship. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

However, if the faith disappears, if the experiences reported by the prophets and saints become unbelievable or matters of indifference, the temple is no longer a temple, no matter how much activity of various kinds goes on in it. It gradually withers and at best remains a monument, the inner life of which is alien to the tourists who pass idly through it. Although the comparison is not entirely appropriate, the university is also informed by the spirit, which very few men can fully share, of men who are absent, but it must preserve respect for them. It can admit almost anyone, but only if one looks up to and can have an inkling of the dignity of what is going on in it. It is itself always in danger of losing contact with its animating principle, of representing something it no longer possesses. Although it may seem wildly implausible that this group of rare individuals should be the center of what really counts for the university, this was recognized in the universities until only yesterday. It was, for example, well known in the nineteenth-century. German university, which was the last great model for the American university. However bad universities, and perhaps the greatest abhorred them. One cannot imagine Socrates as a professor, for reasons that are worthy of our attention. However, Socrates is of the essence of the university. It exists to preserve and further what he represents. In effect, it hardly does so anymore. However, more important is the fact that as a result of Enlightenment, philosophers and philosophy came to inhabit the universities exclusively, abandoning their old habits and haunts. There they have become vulnerable in new ways and thus risk extinction. The classical philosophers would not, for very good reasons, have taken this risk. Understanding these reasons is invaluable for our peculiar predicament. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

As our interventions have become more searching, they have also become more costly and more hazardous. Thus, today it is not unusual to find a fragile elder who walked into the hospital, [and became] slightly confused, dehydrated, and somewhat the worse for wear on the third hospital day because his first 48 hours in the hospital were spent undergoing a staggering series of exhausting diagnostic studies in various laboratories or in the radiology suite. None of this is surprising to anyone familiar with American medicine, which is notorious for its character “aggressiveness.” The question is, why? There are three interrelated reasons, all relevant to the imposition of machinery. The first has to do with the American character, which is so congenial to the sovereignty of technology. The once seemingly limitless lands gave rise to a spirit that anything was possible if only the natural environment could be conquered. Disease could also be conquered, but only aggressively ferreting it our diagnostically and just as aggressively treating it, preferably by taking something out rather than adding something to increase resistance. How could a people which has a revolution once in four years, which has contrived the Bowie Knife and the revolver which insists in sending out yachts and horses and body to outsail outrun, outfight and checkmate all the rest of creation; how could such a people be content with any but “heroic” practice? What wonder that the stars and stipes wave over doses of ninety grams of sulphate of quinine and that American eagle screams with delight to see three drachms [180 grains] of calomel given at the single mouthful? Medicine may have been hindered by doctors placing undue reliance upon the powers of nature in curing disease. Some specifically blame Hippocrates and his tradition for this lapse. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Dr. Benjamin Rush, for example, had considerable success in curing patients of yellow fever by prescribing large quantities of mercury and performing purges and bloodletting. (His success was probably due to the fact that patients either had mild cases of yellow fever or did not have it at all.) In any event, Rush was particularly enthusiastic about bleeding patients, perhaps because he believed that the body contained about twenty-five pints of blood, which is more than twice the average actual amount. He advised other doctors to continue bleeding a patient until four-fifths of the body’s blood was removed. Although Rush was not in attendance during George Washington’s final days, Washington was bled seven times on the night he died, which, no doubt, had something to do with why he died. All of this occurred, mind you, 153 years after Harvey discovered that blood circulates throughout the body. Putting side the question of the available medical knowledge of the day, Rush was a powerful advocate of action—indeed, gave additional evidence of his aggressive nature by being one of the singers of the Declaration of Independence. He persuaded both doctors and patients tht American diseases were tougher than European diseases and required tougher treatment. “Desperate diseases require desperate remedies” was a phrase repeated many times in American medical journals in the nineteenth century. The Americans, who considered European methods to be mild and passive—one might even say effeminate—met the challenge by eagerly succumbing to the influence of Rush: they accepted the imperatives to intervene, to mistrust nature, to use the most aggressive therapies available. The idea was to conquer both a continent and the diseases its weather and poisonous flora and fauna inflicted. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

So, from the outset, American medicine was attracted to new technologies. Far from being “neutral,” technology was to be the weapon with which disease and illness would be vanquished. The weapons were not long in coming. The most significant of the early medical technologies was the stethoscope, invented (one might almost say discovered) by the French physician Rene-Theophile-Hyacinthe Laennec in 1816. The circumstances surround the invention are worth mentioning. Working at the Necker Hospital in Paris, Laennec was examining a young woman with a puzzling heart disorder. He tried to use percussion and palpation (pressing the hand upon the body in hope of detecting internal abnormalities), but the patient’s obesity made this ineffective. He next considered auscultation (placing his ear on the patient’s chest to hear the heart beat), but the patient’s youth and gender discouraged him. Laennec then remembered that sound traveling through solid bodies is amplified. He rolled some sheets of paper into a cylinder, placed one end on the patient’s chest and the other to his ear. Voila! The sounds he heard were clear and distinct. “From this moment,” he later wrote, “I imagined that the circumstance might furnish means for enabling us to ascertain the character, not only of the action of the heart, but of every species of sound produced by the motion of all the thoracic viscera.” Laennec worked to improve the instrument, eventually using a rounded piece of wood, and called it a “stethoscope,” from the Greek word for “chest” and “I view.” For all its simplicity, Laennec’s invention proved extraordinarily useful, particularly in the accuracy with which it helped to diagnose lung diseases like tuberculosis. Chest diseases of many kinds were no longer concealed: the physician with a stethoscope could, as it were, conduct an autopsy on the patient while the patient was still alive. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

However, it should not be supposed that all doctors or patients were enthusiastic about the instrument. Patients were often frightened at the sight of a stethoscope, assuming that its presence implied imminent surgery, since, at the time, only surgeons used instruments, not physicians. Doctors had several objections, ranging from the trivial to the significant. Among the trivial was the inconvenience of carrying the stethoscope, a problem some doctors solved by carrying it, crosswise, inside their top hats. This was not without its occasional embarrassment—an Edinburgh medical student was accused of possessing a dangerous weapon when his stethoscope fell out of his hate during a snowball fight. A somewhat less trivial objection raised by doctors was that if they used an instrument they would be mistaken for surgeons, who were then considered mere craftsmen. The distinction between physicians and surgeons was unmistakable then, and entirely favorable to physicians, whose intellect, knowledge, and insight were profoundly admired. It is perhaps to be expected that Oliver Wendell Holmes, professors of anatomy at Harvard and always a skeptic about aggressiveness in medicine, raised objections about the overzealous use of the stethoscope; he did so, in characteristic fashion, by writing a comic ballad, “The Stethoscope Song,” in which a physician makes several false diagnoses because insects have nested in his stethoscope. Now, changing directions a bit. Is there anything special about proteins? The main advantage of proteins that they are familiar: a lot is known about them, and may tools exist for working with them. Yet proteins have disadvantages as well. Just because this design work is starting with proteins—soft, squishy molecules that are only marginally suitable for nanotechnology—does not mean it will stay within those limits. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

DeGrado points out, “The fundamental goal of our work in de novo design is to be able to take the next step and get entirely away from protein systems.” An early example is the work of Wallace Carothers of Du Pont, who used a de novo approach to studying the nature of proteins: Rather than trying to cut up proteins, he tried to build up things starting with amino acids and other similar monomers. In 1935, he succeeded in making nylon. DeGardo explains; “There is a deep philosophical belief at Du Pont in the ability of people to make molecules de novo that will do useful things. And there is a fair degree of commitment from the management that following that path will lead to products: not directly, and not always predictably, but they know that they need to support the basic science. I think ultimately we have a better chance at doing some really exciting things by de novo design, because our repertory should be much greater than that of nature. Think about the ability to fly: One could breed better carrier pigeons or one could design airplanes.” The biology community, however, leans more toward ornithology than toward aerospace engineering. DeGardo’s experience is that “a lot of biologists feel that is you are not working with the real thing [natural proteins], you are not studying biology, so they do not totally accept what we are doing. On the other hand, they recognize it as good chemistry.” “Wo be unto them that shall perver the ways of the Lord after this manner, for they shall perish except they repent. Behold, I speak with boldness, having authority from God; and I fear not what man can do; for perfect love casteth out all fear,” report Moroni 8.16. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

Cresleigh Homes

“I love to sit in a chair and look out the window and do nothing” – Ingrid Bergman

When you’re enjoying a home like ours at #PlumasRanch (Residence 2, specifically), it’s easy to just chill all afternoon! 😀

This smartly designed home offers a generous an ideal layout with 2,372 square feet, an open great room, dining room and kitchen, two bedrooms with a shared bath, and a separate owner’s suite with private bath and walk-in closet.

And our homes come with an All Ready Connected system, so it’s easy to set up our included Google Home Hub, sit back, and relax! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/residence-2/

Home interperts Heaven. A Cresleigh Home is Heaven for those of us on Earth.

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