For the most part we understand only gradually the decisive experiences which we have in our relation with the World. First, we accept what they seem to offer us, we express it, we weave it into a “view,” and then think we are aware of our World. However, we come to see that what we look on in this view is only an appearance. Not that our experiences have deceived us. However, we have turned them to our use, without penetrating to their heart. As a result, the material World has become condemned as a carefully laid trap, set up by the Devil for the purpose of deluding and ensnaring man. Christians were warned by the priesthood to beware of the delights of material existence, lest they be sidetracked from their true Earthly purpose, the preparation for a spiritual afterlife. All joys came under the rule of the Church, to be dispensed as the clergy saw fit. Pleasures of the flesh, people were informed, was to be indulged in solely for the purpose of propagating Christian babies and nothing else. The ecclesiastical severance of man from nature went so far that in the twelfth century a book entitled Hortus Deliciarum issued an ominous warning that the joys of gardening might well be harmful to the redemption of the soul. However, while these ideals of asceticism and self-denial were taking root in Christian dogma, the inequities of administration were apparent for all who had eyes to see. The hypocrisy of the clergy was flagrantly displayed, and, on this account, many had ceased to listen to long, tedious sermons dealing with the inevitable damnation of sinners. Priests were constantly seducing female members of their own laities, and as early as the eighth century, many convents had been condemned by high ecclesiastical figures as being “hotbeds of filthy conversation, drunkenness, and vice.”

As the peasant masses were considered to be the property of the feudal lords whose lands they occupied, they found themselves subject to the caprice of these lords and felt crushed beneath the injustices of the system. The serfs were taxed unmercifully and were subject to the foraging raids that were frequently made by the soldiers of the nobility, who came to carry off their grain or their women, depending on the inclination. One feudal law went to the extreme of declaring that before a peasant could consummate his marriage, he had to bring his bride to his lord in order that the lord might have the “first fruits” of the marriage. The peasant might forestall this, thereby preserving his wife’s virginity (at least temporarily), by making a prescribed payment to the noble, but the payment was usually too large for the peasant to afford. These injustices usually had the weight of the Church behind them, for the Church was a de facto part of the aristocracy. The social order was presented to the people as being ordained by Heaven and therefore immutable; the Church took the attitude that if God had wanted the situation changed, then He would change it. As long as they were on top of the heap, the Church and the nobility had little impetus to rock the boat. However, soon the peasantry became resentful of the oppression forced on them from above. Peasant revolts spread across Europe and one by one were put down by force of arms. The Church backed up the efforts of aristocracy to quell the rebels, deeming them to be anarchists inspired by the forces of Hell trying to topple God’s empire. The result was that the lower classes had ceased to listen to a God who had become in their eyes a solemn and unfeeling hypocrite, who dealt fortune to those least deserving and inflicted punishment on those most virtuous. God was the friend and ally of the corrupt nobility, the enemy of the common human.

The disaffection with the Christian hypocrisy was not only widespread among the peasantry but was shared by many members of the nobility themselves. It was no wonder, then, that the organized heretical movements that had begun to trickle into the Empire from the south had taken root in the minds of many. New ideas, carried from the east and south by the Crusaders, who had been sent, ironically enough, to stamp them out, began to take seed in certain Christian circles. Many of these movements, such as the Knights Templar and the various Gnostic heresies, were clear-cut reactions against the corruption rampant in the Church, and they instituted strict vows of chastity and poverty among their priesthoods. By the thirteenth century, the officials in Rome, exhausted from the senseless bloodshed and humiliating defeats in the Holy Land, began to call the troops home and turn their attention to more domestic problems. When they opened their eyes, they not only found blasphemous idolatry being carried on by the peasant masses but also saw their own position being undermined by heresies that had grown too big to be considered lightly. Christianity was rotting beneath its own weight. If the kingdom of God were to be saved from the jaws of Hell, these devout and pious men saw that something would have to be done, and done quickly. The laws grew steadily tougher because they felt that the only possibility man had for redemption was to expurgate evil by denying all forms of carnality. Christianity to them was a corrupt force, leading humans into sin and degradation, and the rabid opposition they expressed to the Church caused the papacy grave concern.

Manichaean sects, which had been brought into northern and central Europe from Bulgaria, such as the Albigenses and the Cathari, had attained such power that they had managed to send out missionaries to various parts of Europe in order to gather converts. In many areas they had been successful. To the Manichaeans, procreation was the ultimate sin, since it was the propagation of materiality. Realizing that the lower elements of the movement would not be able to expunge their terrestrial drives entirely, the elect of these sects may have given their unofficial sanction to pleasures of the flesh that would not result in reproduction. At any rate, under the direction of Innocent III, these pockets of dissension were exterminated, many of the groups going underground to carry on their opposition to Christianity. By the time of the suppression of the Manichaeans, the death penalty had come to be used freely in cases of heresy. Today, as in the past, hundreds of thousands of Catholic priests’ question and rail against the discipline of celibacy. Those tormented by doubt have options. They may take leaves of absence up to a year, to meditate, pray, and resolve their personal crises. They may seek counseling with the Catholic framework. They may also seek counseling within the Catholic framework. They may also abandon their vocations and return to the World, a course of action once unthinkable and even now, difficult to negotiate successfully. No Catholic religious doubts that celibacy freely chosen, or granted by God’s grace, has the power of infusing the priest with a profound love and serenity that strengthens his ministry and enrich his relations with parishioners. Coerced celibacy, on the other hand, weakens and saddens, embitters and alienates.

Some priests simply endure, with loneliness their overriding companion. Many cheat and take lovers they either disguise as housekeepers or friends or flaunt as mistresses. Others find the struggle intolerable and finally leave; of those who do so, 94 percent identify their discomfort with celibacy as they prime motive. Since Vatican II, over one hundred thousand have joined the exodus, more than one every two hours, early one-quarter of the World’s working priests. In the United States of America 42 priests leave within twenty-five years of their ordination, which translates into the bleak statistic that half of American priests under the age of sixty have already gone. In Canada in the past two decades alone, the number of priests and nuns has dwindled by a quarter, though 46 percent of Canadians are Catholic and the vast majority—84 percent versus 71 percent in the United States of America—are amenable to ministry by married priests. At the same time that droves of priests have been defecting, far fewer novices have felt called to join holy orders. Swiftly and steadily, the World’s complement of Catholic clergy is dangerously eroding, so that nearly half of all parishes have no priest at all. At the root of this phenomenon is compulsory celibacy, the issue that has racked the Church since its earliest days. “It was mainly about celibacy,” said Dominic, an America ex-priest, about his decision to leave. “I was spending too much of my time, my energy, my inner strength, on coping with it. Celibacy was presenting me from being the priest I wanted to be…The Christian I wanted to be. Celibacy had become an end rather than a means. That is the case with any number of priests.” Another priest, returning to his empty house after the emotional outpouring of Sunday mass, felt he “was like a driver who had gone down deep and did not have a decompression chamber when he came up.”

William Cleary, a Jesuit for twenty years, left the priesthood when he became convinced the celibacy is not a virtue and, in its denial of God-given sexuality, may even be “a vague kind of sin.” After all, Cleary argues in “A Letter to My Son: The Sin of Celibacy,” sexuality is God’s vehicle for perpetuating life on Earth and “reveals the Divine Being, and…reveals who we humans are, the incredible depths of this World’s goodness…[and] helps toward prayer, contemplation, and all the religious and human values.” No wonder that Dean R. Hoge notes, in The Future of Catholic Leadership, that “the celibacy requirement is the single most important deterrent to new vocations to the priesthood, and if it were removed, the flow of men into seminaries would increase greatly, maybe fourfold.” It should also be emphasized that traditionally the Church has treated apostates with brutal indifferences; leaving is often a miserable experience, emotionally, psychologically, professionally, and financially. In the United States of America, they were “solitary, shuffling parish, from whom Christian society asked only that they should disappear off the face of the Earth.” Italians refer to them as the Church’s “White Homicides” because despite years of service, they are pushed out into the World jobless, scorned, with only about $300 to their name, bereft of friends, ostracized by former colleagues. Even in countries where the Church does not actively persecute those who renounce their vows, the transition from religious to secular life is almost always trying and often frightening. Ex-priests who continue to work for the Church—as pastoral assistant, for example—report that they are underpaid, stigmatized, and humiliated, and that celibate coworkers are unfriendly, hostile, and envious of them.

As if they are in the same category as disbarred lawyers or other disgraced professionals, too often, ex-priests are dismissed. However, the majority remain devout Catholics who long to continue practicing their profession of serving God. Thousands of the attempt to so through Rent-A-Priest, a nonprofit agency begun in 1992 in Framingham, Massachusetts, which now has branches in Canada and South Africa. In the U.S., Rent-A-Priest claims a database of over two thousand estranged priests available to conduct baptisms, funerals, and other sacraments. The majority of these men are now married and call themselves “married Catholic priests.” However, the Church does not acknowledge them as such—the Canadian diocese of Toronto, for instance, refers to them as “laicized priests,” an ambiguous and unsatisfactory classification. Worldwide, the Church deplores Rent-A-Priest’s swelling ranks as a manifestation of the raging conflict over celibacy. More seriously, it refuses to sanction the sacrament they perform. No wonder, then, that so many priests prefer to remain in holy orders and defile the vow of chastity they find so onerous. However, how many is “so many”? Approximately 40 percent of American priests are chronically uncelibate, 20 percent in stable relationships with one or more adult woman, nearly as many with adult men. Subtract this cheating 40 percent from the priesthood and 60 percent remain. As its members at least celibate? Not necessarily. Many of them indulge in occasional erotic adventures, but slack Church tallying of pleasures of the flesh lapses permits about four such episodes annually before it labels their perpetrator sexually active. In other words, about half the Catholic clergy sworn to celibacy is uncelibate. Underneath all the tales there does lie something different from the tales? How different?

People must learn to love the soul, and especially seek to purify one’s thought-life. There are different requirements about the extent and nature of pleasures of the flesh discipline at different stages of the path. One’s own innermost promptings are the best guide here for they come from the higher self. However, they need to be separated from bodily impulses and emotional broodings, which is difficult to do. It is immaterial for the adept whether one lives a celibate or married life. The attitude toward pleasures of the flesh will always depend upon individual circumstances. A celibacy reached through insight and not by institutional behest, or an asceticism practised within marriage—in both cases as immaculate in thought as in deed—shows its value in peace and strength. However, for those who cannot arrive at this admittedly difficult condition, there should be periods of temporary withdrawal from pleasures of the flesh activity ranging from a few weeks to a few years. For single persons and dedicated married ones it is a voluntary inner self-discipline. Under the urge of intimate passions men will form undesirable relationships which bring mental and emotional sufferings, or fall into unpleasant habits, or behave quite ridiculously under the delusion that they are finding happiness. To gratify the desire of the moment without thought about its possible distant, but undesirable, consequence, is the fact of immaturity. If a human wished to become truly adult one should cultivate the needful qualities. The price of excess pleasure has to be paid in the end. It is paid in unwanted children, unhappy castaways, unpleasant diseases, lost health and premature ageing. Strength is squandered in undisciplined activities of pleasures of the pleasures of the flesh. When the mating urge descends on humans, they develop a temporary but immense capacity for glorifying the beloved person, seeing beautifies and virtues which may be quite slight or even non-existent. With the eyes so widely out of focus, nature achieves her purpose with ease.

In this—that the thing which is involved is a thing of a different nature, how it may put on a human appearance or indulge in its servants their human appetites. It is cold, it is hungry, it is violent, it is illusory. The warm blood children and meeting at the Sabbath do not satisfy it. It wants something more and other; it wants “obedience,” it wants “souls,” and yet it pines for matter. It never was, and yet it always is. To explain what I am getting at, I find it helpful to refer to two films, which taken together embody the main lines of my argument. The first film is of recent vintage and is called The Gods Must Be Crazy. It is about a tribal people who live in the Kalahari Desert plains of southern Africa, and what happens to their culture when it is invaded by an empty Coca-Cola bottle tossed from the window of a small plane passing overheard. The bottle lands in the middle of the village and is construed by these gentle people to be a gift from the gods, for they not only have never seen a bottle before but have never seen glass either. The people are almost immediately charmed by the gift, and not only because of its novelty. The bottle turns out, has multiple uses, chief among them the intriguing music it makes when one blows into it. However, gradually a change takes place in the tribe. The bottle becomes an irresistible preoccupation. Looking at it, holding it, thinking of things to do with it displace other activities once thought essential. However, more than this, the Coke bottle is the only thing these people have ever seen of which there is only one of its kind. And so those who do not have it try to get it from the one who does. And the one who does refuses to give it up. Jealousy, green, and even violence enter the scene, and come very close to destroying the harmony that has characterized their culture for a thousand years.

The people begin to love their bottle more than they love themselves, and are saved only when the leader of the tribe, convinced that the gods must be crazy, returns the bottle to the gods by throwing it off the top of a mountain. The film is great because it can be a metaphor about how leaders in the Catholic Church need to set an example by remaining celibate and not let this false idol of pleasures of the flesh overcome them and the entire Earth. However, it also raises two questions of extreme importance to another situation: How does culture change when new technologies are introduced to it? And is it always desirable for a culture to accommodate itself to the demands of new technologies? The leader of the Kalahari tribe is forced to confront these questions in a way that America have refused to do. And because his vision is not obstructed by a belief in what Americans call “technological progress,” he is able with minimal discomfort to decide that the songs of the Coke bottle are not so alluring that they are worthy admitting envy, egotism, and greed to a serene culture. The second film relevant to my argument was made in 1967. It is Mel Brook’s first film, The Producers. The Producers is a rather raucous comedy that has at its center a painful joke: An unscrupulous theatrical producer has figured out that it is relatively easy to turn a buck by producing a play that fails. All he has to do is induce dozens of backers to invest in the play by promising them exorbitant percentages of its profits. When the play fails, there being no profits to disperse, the producer walks away with thousands of dollars that can never be claimed. Of course, the central problem he must solve is to make sure that his play is a disastrous failure. And so he hit upon an excellent idea: he will take the story of Adolf Hitler—and make it into a musical.

Because the producer is only a crook and not a fool, he assumes that the stupidity of making a musical on this theme will be immediately grasped by audiences and tht they will leave the theater in dumbfounded rage. So he calls his play Springtime for Hitler, which is also the name of its most important song. The song begins with the lyrics: Springtime for Hitler and Germany; winter for Poland and France. The melody is catchy, and when the song is sung it is accompanied by a happy chorus line. (One must understand, of course, that Springtime for Hitler is no spoof of Hitler, as was, for example, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. The play is instead a kind of denial of Hitler in song and dance; as if to say, it was all in fun.) The ending of the movie is predictable. The audience loves the play and leaves the theater humming Springtime for Hitler. The musical becomes a great hit. The producer ends up in jail, his joke having turned back on him. However, Brook’s point is that the joke is on us. Although the film was made years before a movie actor became President of the United States of America, Brooks was making a kind of prophecy about that—namely, that the producers of American culture will increasingly turn our history, politics, religion, commerce, and education into forms of entertainment, and that we will become as a result a trivial people, incapable of coping with complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty, perhaps even reality. We will become, in a phrase, a people amused into stupidity. For those readers who are not inclined to take Mel Brooks as seriously as I do, let me remind you that the prophecy I attribute here to Brooks was, in fact, made many years before b a more formidable social critic than he. I refer to Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World at the time that the modern monuments to intellectual stupidity were taking shape: Nazism in Germany, fascism in Italy, communism in Russia.

However, Huxley was not concerned in his book with such naked and crude forms of intellectual suicide. He saw beyond them, and mostly, I must add, he saw America. To be more specific, he foresaw that the greatest threat to the intelligence and humane creativity of our culture would not come from Big Brother and Ministries of Propaganda, or gulags and concentration camps. He prophesied, if I may put it this way, that there is tyranny lurking in a Coca-Cola bottle; that we could be ruined not by what we fear and hate but by what we welcome and love, by what we construe to be a gift from the gods. And in case anyone missed his point in 1932, Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited twenty years later. By the, George Orwell’s 1984 had been published, and it was inevitable that Huxley would compare Orwell’s book with his own. The difference, he said, is that in Orwell’s book people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. The Coke bottle that has fallen in our midst is a corporation of dazzling technologies whose forms turn all serious public business into a kind of Springtime for Hitler musical. Television is the principal instrument of this disaster, in part because it is the medium Americans most dearly love, and in part because it has become the command center of our culture. Americans turn to television not only for their light entertainment but for their news, their weather, their politics, this religion, their history—all of which may be said to be their serious entertainment. The light entertainment is not the problem. The least dangerous things on television are its junk. What I am talking about is television’s preemption of our culture’s most serious business.

It would be merely banal to say that television presents of with entertaining subject matter. It is quite another thing to say that on television all subject matter is presented as entertaining. And that is how television brings ruin to any intelligent of public affairs. Political campaigns, for example, are now conducted largely in the form of television commercials (and you will notice parties with the smaller number of commercials usually lose). Candidates forgo precision, complexity, substance—in some cases, language itself—for the arts of show business: music, imagery, celebrities, theatrics. Indeed, political figures have become so good at this, and so accustomed to it, that they do television commercials even when they are not campaigning, as, for example, Geraldine Ferraro for Diet Pepsi and former Vice-Presidential candidate William Miller and the late Senator Sam Ervin for American Express. More currently President Joe Biden endorsing Masks on TV and Vice President Kamala Harris endorsing vaccines. Furthermore, political figure appear on variety shows, soap operas, sit-coms, and YouTube videos. Barak Obama appears on Armin Van Buuren’s State of Trance, episode 1000, I believe. George McGovern, Ralph Nader, Ed Koch, and Jesse Jackson have all hosted “Saturday Night Live.” Henry Kissinger and former President Gerald Ford have done cameo roles on “Dynasty.” Tip O’Neill and Governor Michael Dukakis have appeared on “Cheers.” Michelle Obama has appeared on “Ellen. Richard Nixon did a short stint on “Laugh-In.” The late Senator from Illinois, Everett Dirksen, was on “What’s My Line?,” a prophetic question if ever there was one. What is the line of these people? Or, more precisely, where is the line that one ought to be able to draw between politics and entertainment? I would suggest that television has annihilated it.

There was a time while working on this report that we became thrilled about the implications of the human ingestion of light. As we began to understand for the first time that there is a concrete relationship between our bodies and light, and that light is a kid of thing we ingest for nourishment and growth, like food, we began to feel that humans probably hungered for and sought light the way plants do. We know that humans seek food. A lot of life is spent in this process. We can say that seeking food is instinctive in all humans. Even babies know how to do it, with their limits. If light is also food, then might we not seek it, as plants do? Id this why we look at the moon? Is this why we gaze at fire? It there an innate longing for light, like a kind of cellular hunger? If so, then I suppose Anne Waldman could be right. With natural light gone, we seek a surrogate light: television. Every culture and religion in history has placed light at the center of its cosmology. “Receive the light.” “Seek enlightenment.” “The truth always comes to the light.” “The mind of light.” “The luminescent soul.” The Hopi Indians speak of light as entertaining them through the tops of their heads. It is a goal of theirs to keep the tops of their heads open for light. Of course they are speaking in spiritual terms. It is very efficient and sensible to develop religions around natural processes which are the bases of survival. Most indigenous cultures do that. The Bolivian Indians have a meditational routine every day at the same time, sitting high on a cliff facing the sun. They called it “taking light.” They give it the same kind of meaning as “taking waters.” They claimed it had medicinal value, as well as stimulating spontaneous insight. There is hardly a medicine/healing system in the World where light is not used for health purposes…physical, mental, spiritual.

Chinese healing systems coordinate treatments of carious organs with foods of specific color. For example, for lung disorders, white foods like turnips and onions will be prescribed. Heart disorders are assisted by eating red foods such as beets and pomegranates. These might be combined with meditational practices in which the patient is asked to keep a certain color in mind. A spleen problem is considered to be caused partly by the body’s insufficient absorption of nutrients found in green vegetables. Intestinal problems may be caused by an insufficiency or an overabundance of foods containing pink light. In Mahayana Buddhism, each chakra (energy center) of the body is described as processing certain parts of the color spectrum, while also intermixing the colors processed by other energy centers. In acupuncture, the two principal light-reception glands, the pineal and the pituitary, are the subject of specific light treatments, designed to keep them in balance. Many cultures consider the body’s experience of color, which is to say spectra, as a prime factor in health. However, when faced with this kind of evidence, this culture places it all in a “primitive” category. We consider it superstition or mythology rather than knowledge or science. Another fascinating science topic is how much remains to be learned about the workings of explicit and even implicit memory, and much of what we now know will be revised and refined through future research. However, the growing body of evidence makes clear that the memory inside our heads is the product of an extraordinarily complex natural process that is, at every instant, exquisitely tuned to the unique environment in which each of us lives and the unique patter of experiences that each of us goes through.

The old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on continual, indeterminate organic growth, are, it turns out, remarkably apt. In fact, they see, to be more fitting than our new, fashionably high-tech metaphors, which equate biological memory with the precisely defined bits of digital data stored in databases and processed by computer chips. Governed by highly variable biological signals, chemical, electric, and genetic, every aspect of human memory—the way it is formed, maintained, connected, recalled—has almost infinite gradations. Computer memory exists as simple binary bits—ones and zeros—that are processed through fixed circuits, which can be either open or closed but nothing in between. One salient lessons to emerge is how different biological memory is from computer memory. The process of long-term memory creation in the human brain is one of the incredible processes which is so clearly different “than artificial brains” like those in a computer. While an artificial brain absorbs information and immediately saves it in its memory, the human brain continues to process information long after it is received, and the quality of memories depends on how the information is processed. Biological memory is alive. Computer memory is not. Those who celebrate the “outsourcing” of memory to the Web have been misled by a metaphor. They overlooked the fundamentally organic nature of biological memory. What gives real memory its richness and its character, not to mention its mystery and fragility, is its contingency. It exists in time, changing as the body changes. Indeed, the very act of recalling a memory appears to restart the entire process of consolidation, including the generation of proteins to form new synaptic terminals.

Once we bring an explicit long-term memory back into working memory, it becomes a short-term memory again. When we reconsolidate it, it gains a new set of connections—a new context. The brain that does the remembering is not the brain that formed the initial memory. In order for the old memory to make sense in the current brains, the memory has to be updated. Biological memory is in a perpetual state of renewal. The memory stored in a computer, by contrast, takes the form of distinct and static bits; you can move the bits from one storage drive to another as many times as you like, and they will always remain precisely as they were. The proponents of the outsourcing idea also confuse working memory with long-term memory. When a person fails to consolidate a fact, an idea, or an experience in long-term memory, one is not “freeing up,” space in one’s brain for other function. In contrast to working memory, with its constrained capacity, long-term memory expands and contracts with almost unlimited elasticity, thanks to the brain’s ability to grow and prune synaptic terminals and continually adjust the strength of synaptic connections. Unlike a computer, the normal human brain never reaches a point at which experience can no longer be committed to memory; the brain cannot be full. The amount of information that can be stored in long-term memory is virtually boundless. Evidence suggests, moreover, that as we build up our personal store of memories our minds become sharper. The very act of remembering appears to modify the brain in a way that can make it easier to learn ideas and skills in the future. We do not contain our mental powers when we store new long-term memories. We strengthen them. With each expansion of our memory comes an enlargement of our intelligence.

A great way to encourage students to study is to tell them one day they will be as rich as Bill Gates. He spent like six hours a day studying. Nowadays, the person to be like might be Elon Musk. Nonetheless, the Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory, but we when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying out minds of their riches. In the 1970s, when school began allowing students to use portable calculators, many parents objected. They worried that a reliance on the machines would weaken their children’s grasp of mathematical concepts. The fears, subsequent studied showed, were largely unwarranted. No longer forced to spend a lot of time on routine calculations, many students gained a deeper understanding of the principles underlying their exercises. Today, the story of the calculator is often used to support the argument that our growing dependence on online databases is benign, even liberating. In freeing us from the work of remembering, it is said, the Web allows us to devote more time to creative thought. However, the parallel is flawed. The pocket calculator relieved the pressure on our working memory, letting us deploy that critical short-term store for more abstract reasoning. As the experience of math students has shown, the calculator made it easier for the brain to transfer ideas from working memory to long-term memory and encode them in the conceptual schemas that are so important to building knowledge. The Web has a very different effect. It places more pressure on our working memory, not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas. The calculator, a powerful but highly specialized tool, turned out to be an assistance to memory, but think how much smarter one’s brain would be without the assistance of a calculator. When you are racing a student on the blackboard to finish a math problem first, you cannot use a calculator. Additionally, the Web is a technology of forgetfulness.

Patients do not prosume health just by exercising more or quitting tobacco. They invest their money in technologies that can help them better care for themselves and their families. In 1965, about the only equipment available in the home were canes, crutches, walkers, and beds. In 1980, when we first called attention in The Third Wave, that market for home-use medical instruments was still relatively tiny. Today, patients are responsible for 99 percent of diabetes-management responsibilities, and sales of home-use diabetes-management products are $25.31 billion and is expected to reach $41.88 billion in 2028. However, home-care technology is no longer limited to a few basic products such as insulin-infusion kits, blood-pressure machines and pregnancy-test kits. An ever-widening array of technologies are springing up to help prosumers care for themselves or their loved ones. Anyone going online today can buy self-testing equipment for the detection from everything from allergies to COVID-19, prostate cancer to hepatitis. Trouble with your hand? The FlagHouse catalog for “special populations” offers a “finger goniometer” for measuring range of motion in metacarpophalangeal finger joints. Along with it you can get a hydraulic dynamometer and hydraulic pinch gauge for other measurements of the hand. Trouble breathing? You can buy an ultrasonic nebulizer, a spirometer, even a lifesaving ventilator unit. You can lay in a neurologist’s hammer or your own pediatric stethoscope. Women can regularly monitor their estradiol, testosterone and progesterone levels. There are new home tests for osteoporosis and colon cancer. According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), home-care systems are “the fastest growing segment of the medical device industry.” However, all this empowering self-help technology is still primitive compared with what lies ahead.

An FDA magazine reports that “the list of planned and imagined medical devices reads like a work of science fiction…imagine a toothbrush with a biosensing chip that checks your blood sugar and bacteria levels while you are brushing…computerized eyeglasses with a tiny embedded display that can help those who wear them remember people and things…a smart bandage…that could detect bacteria or virus in a wound and tell the wearer if treatment with antibiotics is warranted and which to use.” There is a “smart T-shirt” that monitored the vital signs of climbers on a recent expedition to Mount Everest. Upcoming developments also include a hands-free device that allows disabled person to operate machines by blinking an eye or by brain activity. Imagine home CAT scans in the privacy of your own marble bathroom. Automatic urine analysis with every flush. Computerized life-expectancy projection updated after each meal. As with any such forecast, not all of these products will ever see the light of day, or prove affordable, practical and safe. However, they represent only the first drops of a technology torrent to come. It will change the economics of both self-care and paid care. And it represents yet another way in which the mostly unmeasured prosumer economy interacts with the money economy. Prosumers invest money to buy capital goods that will help them perform better in the non-money economy—which will then reduce costs in the money economy. Would not the overall “output” of health be increased by recognizing the essential role of prosuming and changing the ratio of input by doctor, on one side, and patient on the other? Whether we look at demographics or costs, changes in the amount and availability of knowledge or coming breakthroughs in technology, it is clear that prosumers will play an even bigger role in the massive health economy of tomorrow.

It is, therefore, time for economists, instead of regarding the non-money economy as irrelevant or unimportant, to systematically track the most significant ways in which both these economies feed each other, and integrate with one another to form an overarching wealth-creating, health-creating system. If we understood these relationships better, they would cast important light on the global health crisis. At a minimum, they might introduce vital new questions into today’s relentlessly predictable political debates about health in many countries. If prosumers make huge, unpaid contributions to the level of health everywhere, if they invest their own money to make those contributions, might it not make sense to reduce overall health costs by educating and training prosumers as we now train producers? One of the investments governments could make in health care would be to instruct schoolchildren on how to be better health prosumers. That would include teaching some of the same things we teach in medical school—basic human anatomy and physiology and the causes and treatment of disease…Teach them to diagnose and treat common minor health problems. We should also teach them which kinds of health problems really require professional help. There needs to be a community-based, predictive game for children with type I diabetes. Professionals aim to develop mental models of their physiologies to motivate these children to check their glucose levels more frequently. The game would encourage diabetic kids, linked together wirelessly, to play on a computer to predict their own and others’ glucose levels. The idea is to leverage untapped social dynamics rather than relying entirely on doctor-patient instructions or parental nagging. In a densely cross-connected knowledge-based economy, why continue to think of the health crisis and the educational crisis as separate, rather than as interlinked? Can we not use imagination to revolutionize the ideas and institutions in both fields? Millions of prosumers are ready to help.

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As God has set the king of America, so in our Psalm he has set the intermediary—beings—here called “gods” and elsewhere called “sons of God,” over the nations of the Earth, each over one of the nations, in order to manifest in its structure and government the justice of the Judges of the World. In His first speech God accuses them of having judged not in accordance with His order and regulation, but in the manner of what is false and evil: for they have confirmed and substantiated in their power those who have acted wickedly against God’s speech and the end—with only a hint of the fall of the “gods”—of the visionary event of which the Psalmist has to inform us. However, his song is not ended. Rather now, for the first time, the real Psalm is heard, in only a few words, and yet saying all that has still to be said. The speaker turns away from us to God. “In my vision,” he says to him, “I have seen how Thou dost bring to destruction the rule over history of Thy rebellious governors. So be it, Lord. Since those who were entrusted with the office of judge succumbed to injustice, do Thou abolish the intermediary rule, renounce the useless work of underlings and Thyself judge the World immediately in Thy justice. Thine are the nation, lead them as thine own! Close the history of man which is pray to delusion and wickedness, open his true history!” In the human World, which has been given over to the intermediary beings, they play a confused game. From the unknown One who gave this World into their impure hands, no message of comfort or promise penetrates to us. He is, but He is not present. What has not entered into the view of humanity, of the humans of our time, is that the formlessness of darkness should be removed first of al by the production of light. In the firs place because light is a quality of the first body, and thus by means of light it is fitting that the World should first receive its form.

The second reason is because light is a common quality. For light is common to terrestrial and celestial bodies. However, as in knowledge we proceed from general principles, so do we in work of every kind. For the living thing is generated before the animal, and the animal before the man. It is fitting, then, as an evidence of the Divine wisdom, that among the works of distinction the production of light should take first place, since light is a form of the primary body, and because it is more common quality. Indeed, the third reason: that all other things are made manifest by light. And there is yet a fourth, already touched upon in the objections; that day cannot be unless light exists, which was made therefore on the first day. According to the opinion of those who hold that the formlessness of matter preceded its form in duration, matter must be held to have been created at the beginning with substantial forms, afterwards receiving those that are accidental, among which light holds the first place. In the opinion of those who hold that the formlessness of matter preceded its form in duration, matter must be held to have been created at the beginning with substantial forms, afterwards receiving those that are accidental, among which light holds the first place. In the opinion of some the light here spoken of was a kind of luminous nebula, and that on the making of the sun this returned to the matter of which it had been formed. However, this cannot well be maintained, as in the beginning of Genesis Holy Scripture records the institution of that order of nature which henceforth is to endure. We cannot, then, say that what was made at that time afterwards ceased to exist. Others, therefore, held that this luminous nebula continues in existence, but so closely attached to the sun as to be indistinguishable. However, this is as much as to say that it is superfluous, whereas none of God’s works have been made in vain.

On this account it is held by some that the sun’s body was made out of this nebula. This, too, impossible to those at least who believe that the sun is different in its nature from the four elements, and naturally incorruptible. For in that case its matter cannot take on another form. Once Americans become convinced that there is indeed a basement to which psychiatrists have the key, their orientation will become that of the self, the mysterious, free, unlimited center of our being. All our beliefs issue from it and have no other validation. Although nihilism and its accompanying existential despair are hardly anything but a pose for Americans, as the language derived from nihilism has become a part of their educations and insinuated itself into the daily lives, they pursue happiness in ways determined by that language. There is a whole arsenal of terms for talking about nothing—caring, self-fulfillment, expanding consciousness, and so on, almost indefinitely. Nothing determinate, nothing that has a referent. There is a straining to say something, a search for an inwardness that one knows one has, but it is still a cause without an effect. The inner seems to have no relation to the outer. The outer is dissolved and becomes formless in the light of the inner, and the inner is a will-o’-the-wisp, or pure emptiness. No wonder the mere sound of the Existentialists’ Nothing or the Hegelians’ Negation has an appeal to contemporary ears. American nihilism is a mood, a mood of moodiness, a vague disquiet. It is nihilism without the abyss. Nihilism as a state of soul is revealed not so much in the lack of firm beliefs but in a chaos of instincts or passions. People no longer believe in a natural hierarchy of the soul’s varied and conflicting inclinations, and the traditions that provided a substitute for nature have crumbled.

The soul becomes a stage for a repertory company that changes plays regularly—sometimes a tragedy, something a comedy; one day love, another day politics, and finally religion; now cosmopolitanism, and again rooted loyalty; the city or the country; individualism or community; sentimentality or brutality. And there is neither principle nor will to impose a rank order on all these. All ages and places, all races and all cultures can play on this stage. Nietzsche believed that the wild costume ball of the passions was both the disadvantage and the advantage of late modernity. The evident disadvantage is the decomposition of unity or “personality,” which in the long run will lead to psychic entropy. The advantage hoped for is that the richness and tension present in the modern soul might be the basis for comprehensive new Worldviews that would take seriously what had previously been consigned to a spiritual ashcan. This richness, according to Nietzsche, consisted largely in thousands of years of inherited and now unsatisfied religious longing. However, this possible advantage does not exist for young Americans, because their poor education has impoverished their longings, and they are hardly aware of the great pasts that Nietzsche was thinking of and had within himself. What they do have now is an unordered tangle of rather ordinary passions, running through their consciousness like a monochrome kaleidoscope. They are egotists, not in a vicious way, not in the way of those who know the good, just or noble, and selfishly reject them, but because the ego is all there is in present theory, in what they are taught. We are a bit like savages who, having been discovered and evangelized by missionaries, have converted to Christianity without having experienced all that came before and after the revelation.

It is an urgent business for one who seeks self-awareness to think through the meaning of the intellectual dependency that has led us to such an impasse. “Future shlock” is a name given to a cultural condition characterized by the rapid erosion of collective intelligence. Future shlock is the aftermath of future shock. Whereas future shock results in confused, indecisive, and physically uprooted people, future shlock produces a massive class of mediocre people. Human intelligence is among the most fragile things in nature. It does not take much to distract it, suppress it, or even annihilate it. In this century, we have had some lethal examples of how easily and quickly intelligence can be defeated by any one of its several nemeses: ignorance, superstition, moral fervor, cruelty, cowardice, neglect. In the late 1920s, for example, Germany was, by any measure, the most literate, cultured nation in the World. Its legendary seats of learning attracted scholars from every corner. Its philosophers, social critics, and scientists were of the first rank; its humane traditions and inspiration t less favored nations. However, by the mid-1930s—that is, in less than ten years—this cathedral of human reason had been transformed into a cesspool of barbaric irrationality. Many of the most intelligent products of German culture were forced to flee—for example, Einstein, Freud, Karl Jaspers, Thomas Mann, and Stefan Zweig. Even worse, those who remained were either forced to submit their minds to the sovereignty of primitive superstition, or—worse still—willingly did so: Konrad Lorenz, Werner Heisenberg, Martin Heidegger, Gerhardt Hauptmann. On May 10, 1933, a huge bonfire was kindled in Berlin and the books of Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, Emile Zola, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and a hundred others were committed to the flames, amid shots of idiot delight.

By 1936, Joseph Paul Goebbels, Germany’s Minister of Propaganda, was issuing a proclamation which began with the following words: “Because this year has not brought an improvement in art criticism, I forbid once and for all the continuance of art criticism in its past form, effective as of today.” By 1936, there was no one left in Germany who had the brains or courage to object. Exactly why the Germans banished intelligence is a vast and largely unanswered question. I have never been persuaded that the desperate economic depression that afflicted Germany in the 1920s adequately explains what happened. Humans do not become tyrants in order to keep warm. Neither do they become stupid—at least not that stupid. However, the matter need not trouble us here. I offer the German case only as the most striking example of the fragility of human intelligence. My focus here is the United States of America in our own time, and I wish to worry you about the rapid erosion of our own intelligence. If you are confident that such a thing cannot happen, your confidence is misplaced, I believe, but it is understandable. After all, the United States of America is one of the few countries in the World founded by intellectuals—men of wide learning, of extraordinary rhetorical powers, of deep faith in reason. And although we have had our moods of anti-intellectualism, few people have been more generous in support of intelligence and learning than Americans. It was the United States of America that initiated the experiment in mass education that is, even today, the envy of the World. It was America’s churches that laid the foundation of our admirable system of higher education; it was the Land-Grant Act of 1862 that made possible our great state universities; and it is to America that scholars and writers have fled when freedom of the intellect became impossible in their own nations.

Because America has been so innovative, educational, and productive is why the great historian of American civilization Henry Steele Commager called America “the Empire of Reason.” However, Mr. Commager was referring to the United States of America of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What term would he use for America today, I cannot say. Yet he has observed, as other have, a change, a precipitous decline in our valuation of intelligence, in our uses of language, in the disciplines of logic and reason, in our capacity to attend to complexity. Perhaps he would agree with me that the Empire of Reason is, in fact, gone, and that the most apt term for America today is the Empire of Shlock. In any case, this is what I wish to call to your notice: the frightening displacement of serious, intelligent public discourse in American culture by the imagery and triviality of what may be called show business. I do not see the decline of intelligent discourse in America leading to the barbarisms that flourished in Germany, of course. No scholars, I believe, will ever need to flee America. There is will no bonfires to burn books, but Congress and other politicians sure are burning the Constitution of the United States of America and sending up back to becoming a developing nation by sending all our jobs and money to other nations, while over taxing Americans and making it impossible for wages to keep up with inflation. Yet, I cannot imagine any proclamations forbidding once and for all the all art criticism, or any other kind of criticism. However, this is not a cause for complacency, let alone celebration. A culture does not have to force scholars to flee to render them impotent. A culture does not have to burn books to assure that they will not be read. And a culture does not need a Minister of Propaganda issuing proclamations to silence criticism. There are other ways to silence criticism. There are other ways to achieve stupidity, and it appears that, as in so many other things, there is a distinctly American ways.

To determine what mix of spectral ingredients is likely to produce the most vital humans, a logical place to start is with natural light, since this is the only light that humans ingested for millions of years. During all of that time, the only human experience of light was of natural light: sun, moon, stars and, more recently, fire. Therefore, whatever light-receptive capacities exist in humans, and whatever cellular reactions humans have to light, they must have evolved to be attuned to the particular spectra emitted by those light sources. For generations ago, representing one one-fifty-thousandth of the human experience, we invented artificial light. It has been only two generations since artificial light became so widespread that we moved into artificially lighted environments. Now, most of the light we ingest through our skin and eyes is artificial. Meanwhile, we no longer receive the light we formerly received, because we are no longer outdoors. It is a kind of madness to think that this change would not affect us, another sign of our removal from any understanding of our interaction with the environment. The term “malillumination” describes the results on the body. We are “starved” for some natural light spectra, and we have “overdosed” on those spectra that come from artificial light: incandescent, fluorescent, mercury vapor, sodium, LED, television, and others. Imagine that you suddenly have up eating all fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts and meats, and began eating pasta, candy and sugary cereals only. All these groupings are “food,” but the nutrients within each are substantially different. Where they are the same—there is some protein, for example in candy, and there is starch in some vegetables—they are of entirely different proportions.

Eating pasta, candy, and cereal will keep you alive, but it will affect your health. And so it is with alterations in light-diet from the “natural” mix of spectral ingredients to the artificial mix. Malillumination cases disorders ranging from lack of vitality to lowered resistance to disease, and hyperactivity. Researchers believe it can also lead to aggressive behavior, heart disease and even cancer. The body cannot handle this intervention in a natural human relationship with the environment any more than it can handle food additives or chemicals in the air. The body breaks down on the cellular level. As our lifestyle removes us further from the full-spectrum natural light and into artificial environments, our condition becomes worse. Even when we are outdoors, we filter the light that we receive in our eyes with sunglasses (which eliminate certain spectra, while allowing others to pass through) as well as eyeglasses and window glass. Smog also has a role. During the last eighty years, there has been a 20 percent decrease in the amount of sun that reaches the planet. My interest in the effect of light on humans was rooted in my investigation of television. Considering that human beings had not only moved away from natural light into artificial light, but that now our experience of artificial light is confined for four hours daily to television light, it began to seem obvious to me that a new level of distortion was underway. Human beings are soaking up far more television light, directed straight into their eyes, than any kind of artificial light that preceded it. It seemed to me that if variations in kind and volume of artificial light can affect humans, then there might be specific effects to be discovered from the enormous amount of television light most people absorb.

If you will inspect your color television screen closely—I suggest you use a magnifying glass—you will find that your picture emanates from a collection of red, blue, and green pixels, or lines. As you move away from the screen the colors merge in your eyes to seem like other colors, but the television is emitting only red, blue and green light. These pixels are made of a light-modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers. Liquid crystals do not emit light directly, instead using a backlight or reflector to produce images in color or monochrome. Many of the current LCD TVs are a lot like fluorescent lighting. However, the LED TVs (light-emitting diodes) are the newer type of LCD backlight which has become predominately the primary LCD backlight source in LCD monitors today. LED backlights care better than the CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamps) used in LCD TVs as a backlight as they are brighter, they take less energy, and LEDs last longer. We have studied the greens, reds, and blues that come from fluorescent lights, which of course would be very similar since both involve the excitation of mineral phosphors. It may not be precisely the same. The TV CCFL have three narrow wavelength peaks, just as in fluorescent, but how broad the bands are, we just do not know. (A narrow wavelength peak would indicate a very high concentration within one spectral range; this would be suspect because it would more seriously concentrate and distort what the human ingests. Color television is probably less harmful than black and white because color sets produce wider spectra, although seriously distorting the natural range of sunlight. On the other hand, color sets produce more X rays. If we are thinking there might be a relationship between the light emanations from color television and other fluorescent lights and chemical food additives, causing hyperactivity in children, there may be some truth to this.

All those artificial colorings have a certain wavelength resonance. Eliminating some of these artificial colorings and flavorings from children’s diets will reduce their hyperactivity and also their allergic responses. What I would like to do is take this and tie it to wavelength peaks of mercury-vapor lights, fluorescent lights and television light, because the heart of the matter could lie in an interaction of wavelength resonances between the chemicals and the light the body takes in. In television it could depend upon what the spectral peaks are. If they correspond to the wavelength absorption of some of these synthetic materials, then you can get tremendous reactions. It is the same with food. Different pigments have different wavelengths resonances, so different food ingredients may resonate with different light ingredients. Let us say you eat a lot of spinach and raisins, both which contain iron. Iron has a certain wavelength resonance, as do all metals. In fact, all matter interacts with other matter which may be similarly resonating. This is why soldiers will break ranks when they walk across a bridge. Too many of them walking in steps set up a wavelength pattern which has been known to resonate with that of the materials of the bridge and the whole thing can collapse. It is the same with food and light. If you eat a little bit of iron or calcium in your food and that wavelength is lacking in light you get, then you are not going to get any benefit. One the other hand, if you find yourself in a peak of light, whether it is television light or any other that reacts to iron, then you would have to watch your quantities, because if you get too much, you get an overaction. [Allergy, hyperactivity.] It could be too much of one or not enough of the other. Now with sunlight, you do not have those kinds of peaks. I am sure that one way or the other your diet of both food and light is responsible for a lot of different physical reactions that we have not been able to measure yet.

Now, implicit memories—the unconscious memories of past experiences that are recalled automatically in carrying out a reflexive action or rehearsing a learn skilled—are drawn on when one is dribbling a basketball or riding a bike. An implicit memory is recalled directly through performance, without any conscious effort or even awareness that we are drawing on memory. When we talk about our memories, what we are usually referring to are the “explicit” ones—the recollections of people, events, facts, ideas, feelings, and impressions that we are able to summon into the working memory of our conscious mind. Explicit memory encompasses everything that we say we “remember” about the past. Explicit memory is a complex memory—and for good reason. The long-term storage of explicit memories involves all the biochemical and molecular processes of “synaptic consolidation” that play out in storing implicit memories. However, it also requires a second form of consolidation, called “system consolidation,” which involves concerted interactions among far-flung areas of the brain. Scientists have only recently begun to document the workings of system consolidation, and many of their findings remain tentative. What is clear, though, is that the consolidation of explicit memories involves a long and involved “conversation” between the cerebral cortex and the hippocampus. A small, ancient part of the brain, the hippocampus lies beneath the cortex, folded deep within the medial temporal lobes. As well as being the seat of our navigational sense—it is where London cabbies store their mental maps of the city’s roads—the hippocampus play an important role in the formation and management of explicit memories. Much of the credit for the discovery of the hippocampus’s connection with memory storage lies with an unfortunate man named Henry Molaison.

Born in 1926, Henry Molaison was stricken with epilepsy after suffering a severe head injury in his youth. During his adult years, he experienced increasingly debilitating grand mal seizures. The source of his affliction was eventually traced to the area of his hippocamps, and in 1953 doctors removed move of the hippocampus as well as other parts of the medial temporal lobes. The surgery cured Molaison’s epilepsy, but it has an extraordinarily strange effect on his memory. His implicit memories remained intact, as did his older explicit memories. He could remember the events of his childhood in great detail. However, many of his more recent explicit memories—some dating back years before the surgery—had vanished. And he was no longer able to store new explicit memories. Events slipped from his mind moments after they happened. Molaison’s experience, meticulously documented by the English psychologist Brenda Milner, suggested that the hippocampus is essential to the consolidation of new explicit memories but that after a time many of those memories come to exist independently of the hippocampus. Extensive experiments over the last five decades have helped untangle this conundrum. The memory of an experience seems to be stored initially not only in the cortical regions that record the experience—the auditory cortex for a memory of a sound, the visual cortex for a memory of a sight, and so forth—but also in the hippocampus. The hippocampus provides an ideal holding place for new memories because its synapses are able to change very quickly. Over the course of a few days, through a still mysterious signaling process, the hippocampus helps stabilize the memory in the cortex, beginning its transformation from a short-term memory into a long-term one. Eventually, once the memory is fully consolidated, it appears to be erased from the hippocampus. The cortex becomes its sole holding place.

Fully transferring an explicit memory from the hippocamps to the cortex is a gradual process that can take many years. That is why so many of Molaison’s memories disappeared along with his hippocampus. The hippocampus seems to act as something like an orchestra conductor in directing the symphony of our conscious memory. Beyond its involvement in fixing particular memories in the cortex, it is thought to play an important role in weaving together the various contemporaneous memories—visual, spatial, auditory, tactile, emotional—that are stored separately in the brain but that coalesce to form a single, seamless recollection of an event. Neuroscientists also theorize that the hippocampus helps link new memories with older ones, forming the rich mesh of neuronal connections that give memory its flexibility and depth. Many of the connections between memories are likely forged when we are asleep and the hippocampus is relieved of some of its other cognitive chores. Though filled with a combination of seemingly random activations, aspects of the day’s experience, and elements from the distant past, dreams may be a fundamental way in which the mind consolidates the myriad of explicit recollections into a coherent set of representations for permanent, consolidated memory. When our sleep suffers, studies show, so, too, does our memory. Now, enforced clerical celibacy is a principle Church theologians cherish largely on the specious grounds of tradition, despite and avalanche of evidence that it has usually been widely ignored or violated, sometimes more, sometimes less than it is today. They also mouth rigid interpretations of the same scripture that all other Christian denominations find compatible with their own married clergy. They brush away all else—loneliness, depression, alienation, for example—as feather weight concerns.

Yet in the mid-1990s, a new situation crushed all their pervious objections to dust. Married Roman Catholic priests? Certainly—at least when those priests were converted, ex-Anglican clergymen who had staked their professional lives on a principle of misogyny so breathtaking, it resonated like a familiar echo in the hallowed precincts of the Vatican. This principle was, of course, that women must never be ordained, and the new—and married—priests were former Anglican priests who bucked their Church when, finally, toward the end of the twentieth century, it lurched into the minefield of female ordination. For decades, Rome had already made exceptions to the rule of celibacy in isolate cases, usually of priests converting from other churches, such as the Greek Orthodox, which permits married priests. However, North America and Australia were specifically exempted from this indulgence, though married priests were sometimes “lent” to them by European dioceses. Unlike these men, however, attracted to the Roman rites by any number of factors, the outraged ex-Anglicans were egregious misogynists, untied in their range over female ordination. Many of the ex-Anglican priests who quit their church because of its decision to permit women into the priestly ranks turned to Rome s a solution and requested permission to become Roman Catholic priests, despite their married status. With an alacrity astounding in such a sluggish institution, the pope approved these requests. The United Kingdom’s five Roman Catholic archbishops explained this ruling in a letter to their Church’s other, forcibly celibate priests. “At the present time the Catholic Church is welcoming into full communion a number of married clergymen of the Church of England, often together with their wives and in some cases their children,” their letter began.

“Many of these clergy wish to be ordained priests in the Catholic Church…We are convinced that their ministry will enrich the church…The Holy Father has asked us to be generous. We are confident that you also will welcome and appreciate these new priests when, in due course, they take their place in the presbyterate of our dioceses.” The archbishops, anticipating outcries of resentment from some priests and joy from others, attempted to forestall both. Ordaining these ex-Anglican husbands as Catholic priests in no way implied a change in the ages-old rule of celibacy: “The special permission needed in these cases are by way of exception from the general practice of accepting only single men from priesthood.” The new priests would be required to “accept the general norm of celibacy and will not be free to marry again”—in fact, the bishops would investigate the stability of their new member’s marriages and evaluate the strength of their wives’ support for this new priestly venture. As well, the Church limited the admissions procedure to four years, so that the dissidents had to act relatively quickly. It also prohibited the suddenly Catholic clergy—men from assuming all the duties of regular parish priests. What about former Catholic religious who, forced to choose between ministry and marriage, had opted for the latter? Would they be eligible to resume their places in the Church? Not at all.  Unlike the Anglicans who had taken the holy vow of matrimony, the Catholic ex-religious had sworn their vows fully aware that celibacy was an integral component of their vocation. In other words, it was unthinkable that they could be exonerated after having defiantly broken these vows. The most truly stunning aspect of these Statutes for the Admission of Married Former Anglican Clergymen into the Catholic Church is their unbridled misogynism. How else to explain the otherwise inexplicable reversal of the celibacy-principle-cum-policy sanctioned by centuries, popes, and cannon law?

How else to understand how the same Church that shrugged off the protests, pleas, and anguish of its own Catholic clergy was suddenly so responsive to the spirituality of clergymen whose sole reason for resigning from their God-given vocation was their church’s decision to permit the ordination of woman? Why else would the pope and his advisers, who normally proceeded at a maddeningly sluggish pace, hurtle forth to snatch up this gang of ultraconservative Anglican dissidents? Certainly, after years of indifference to them, the Church did not have a crise de conscience about its unmanned pastorates, nor a moment de panique about the relentless flight of conflicted religious from their cloister back into the uncelibate World. No, what motivated the Church was the strength of the Anglican rebels’ conviction about the fundamental unsuitability of women as priests, a conviction today’s Church Fathers share and are committed to sustaining. Indeed, so strongly did this antiwomen ideology resonate with the Catholic hierarchy that it drowned out questions about just how sincerely these Anglican newcomers could ever accept such tenets as papal infallibility and the Immaculate Conception. The Church’s enthusiastic embrace of the resolutely misogynist ex-priest was, in a general atmosphere of ecumenicism and goodwill, an uncontrolled outburst of antiecumenicism. It was, in fact, nothing less than the public salvaging of men who had defied and challenged the Church of England, the self-serving gesture of fellow loyalists who recognized, and immediately recruited, these fundamentally kindred spirits.

Celibacy might be a brilliant jewel, but it pales beside the harsh light that directed women away from the path of humans treaded and blinds them whenever they band together to challenge the dogma that deems them unfit for priestly ordination. This is because, as we have seen, official Church celibacy stems largely from fear of women’s allure in pleasures of the flesh—an oft-cited image describes them as temples built over sewers—which only complete abstinence can successfully counterbalance. Now-married priest and John Hopkins Medical School lecturer Richard Sipe writes in A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy: “It is hard to overestimate the importance of antifeminism in the foundation of celibate conscientiousness and priestly development for over two centuries when discipline of celibacy was being solidified (1486 and following).” Seemingly humans stand alone, but they actually do not. One is conscious of a loving presence ever in one and around one, but it is love which has shed all turmoils and troubles, all excitments and illusions, all shortcomings and imperfections. It is hard to overcome desire for pleasures of the flesh, and neither ashamed repression nor unashamed expression will suffice to do so. Hunger and surfeit are both unsatisfactory states. The middle way is better, but it is not a solution in the true meaning of this term. At the time when a child is conceived, two factors contribute powerfully towards its physical nature and physical history. They are the state of the father’s thinking and the mother’s breathing. The pleasures of the flesh urge, bodily urge, physical attraction, animal urge—is often covered with romantic or sentimental tinsel and called love. That most human beings make their paradise depend on the mere fiction of paired bodies is something for a planetary visitor to marvel at.

It is not just the fantastic growth of medical knowledge (and obsoledge) in recent decades that holds revolutionary potential for improving health; it is also the parallel shift in control of that knowledge. Patients today are inundated with previously unavailable medical information instantly available on the Internet and on news programs, many of which routinely feature segments with a physician as host. A degree of background knowledge is also conveyed, with varying degrees of accuracy, by popular TV dramas with titles like Chicago Med, The Good Doctor. When a medical show did an episode about human papillomavirus (HPV)—which, though barely known by that name, happens to be the most frequently transmitted sexual disease in the United States of America—more than five million views learned something about in one night. Health documentaries abound. A prize-winning program about cochlear ear implants in deaf children took a top prize for TV documentaries in Japan. Since 1997, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration first allowed big pharmaceutical firms to advertise prescription drugs on television, viewers have been bombarded by commercials touting everything from anti-inflammatories and cholesterol-lowing drugs to antihistamines. Most hurriedly list side effects and urge viewers to ask their physicians for further information. Permitting such advertising no doubt encouraged the creation of the twenty-four-hour cable-TV Discovery Health Channel. This avalanche of health-related information, misinformation and knowledge hurled at the individual varies in objectivity and credibility. However, it directs more and more public attention to health issues—and changes the traditional relationships between doctors and patients, encouraging a more take-charge attitude on the part of the latter.

Ironically, while patients have more access to health information of uneven quality, their doctors, driven by pressures to speed up, have less and less time to peruse the latest medical journals, whether online or off, and to communicate adequality with relevant specialists—and with patients. Moreover, while doctors need knowledge about different conditions and see streams of patients whose faces are scarcely remembered from one visit to the next, educated, persistent, Internet-savvy patients may actually have read more recent research regarding their specific ailments than the doctor. Patients come with printouts of Internet material, photocopies of pages from the Physicians’ Desk Reference or clips from medical journals and health magazines. They ask question and no longer tug their forelocks in awe of the doctor’s white lab coat. Here, changes in relationship to the deep fundamentals of time and knowledge have radically altered medical reality. In economic terms, the doctor selling services is still a “producer.” The patient, by contrast, is not just a consumer, but a more active “prosumer” capable of making an increasing contribution to the economy’s output of wellness or health. Sometimes producer and prosumer work together; sometimes they work independently of each other; sometimes they work at cross purposes. Yet conventional health statistics and forecasts, by and large, ignore today’s rapid changes in these roles and relationships. Many of us change our diets, quit smoking or drinking, and adopt exercise regiments. If, then, our health improves, how much should be attributed to the doctor and how much to our own efforts? Put differently, how much of the health-care output is created by producers and how much by prosumers? And why do most economists count one and not the other?

According to Lowell Levin, professor emeritus at the Yale School of Public Health, “85 to 90 percent of all medical care in the United States of America is provided by ordinary people. Self-treatment remedies, he says, include aspirin for headaches, ice packs for sprains, ointments for burns, and much more. Dr. Levin, according to an interview in The World & I, “views all doctors and hospitals s necessary but undesirable social evil, like jails.” Whatever the actual percentage now, the combination of demography, costs pressures and knowledge all point toward a radical increase in the prosumer factor. However, all this so far ignores what may yet turn out to be the most important change of all: Tomorrow’s technology. Add that to the mix and watch what happens. Overpopulation has increased the poverty of the underdeveloped World. Overpopulation is due to oversexed activity. The belief that pleasures of the flesh are here solely for enjoyment is universal. The belief that it is here solely to produce wanted children with pleasures of the flesh thrown in as an inducement is usually rejected. However, the second belief is the correct along with a marriage clause. Humans have abused their instinct for pleasures of the flesh so that only its exaggerated continued act is considered normal and proper! The human who is called to the spiritual quest is also called to engage in battle with the terrestrial instincts. If they are to rule one, one will never know peace. And pleasures of the flesh being one of the most powerful of such instincts, it must necessarily be brought under control and disciplined. This is trye of all its three phases: mental, emotional, and physical. It is quite possible, healthy, and natural for a human to live a perfectly continent life for many years, the vital force being re-absorbed into the body, provided one’s mental life is kept equally pure. This is achieved by constant reflection upon the matter from the standpoints of experience, observation, and idealism, as well as by deliberate sublimation when passion is felt.

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Some years ago, while watching a program called the Vidal Sassoon Show (now mercifully defunct), I came across the quintessential example of something very fascinating about things that used to be exclusively adult secrets, and how this privacy has been lost. Vidal Sassoon is a famous hairdresser whose television show was a mixture of beauty hints, diet information, health suggestions, and popular psychology. As he came to the end of one segment of the show, the theme music came up and Sassoon had just time enough to say, “Don’t go away. We’ll be back with a marvelous new diet and then a quick look at incest.” Television is relentless in revealing and trivializing all things private and shameful. The subject matter of the confessional box and the psychiatrist’s office is now the public domain. Indeed, soon enough we will have the opportunity to see commercial television’s first experiments with presenting actual nudity, which will probably not be shocking to anyone, since television commercials have been offering a form of soft-core adult films for years, as for example Paris Hilton’s famous Carl’s Junior commercial. And on the subject of commercials—the one million of them that American youth will see in the first twenty years of their lives—they, too, contribute toward opening to youth all of the secrets that once were the province of adults, everything from feminine hygiene sprays to life insurance to the cause of martial conflict. And we must not omit the contributions of new shows, those curious entertainments that daily provide the young with vivid images of adult failure and even madness. As a consequence of all this, childhood innocence is impossible to sustain, which is why children have disappeared from television. Have you noticed that all the children on television shows are depicted as merely small adults, in the manner of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century paintings? For example, pre-teen Grover on the TV show The Neighborhood hangs out with only adults and has no friends his age.

Watch any of the soap operas or family shows or situation comedies, and I think you will see children whose language, dress, sexuality, and interests are not different from those of the adults on the same shows. And yet, as television begins to render invisible the traditional concept of childhood, it would not be quite accurate to say that it immerses us in an adult World. Rather, it uses the material of the adult World as the basis for projecting a new kind of person altogether. We might call this person the adult-child. For reasons that have partly to do with television’s capacity to reach everyone, partly to do with the accessibility of its symbolic form, and partly to do with its commercial base, television promotes as desirable many of the attitudes that we associate with childishness—for example, an obsessive need for immediate gratification, a lack of concern for consequences, an almost promiscuous preoccupation with consumption. Television seems to favor a population that consists of three age groups: on the one end, infancy; on the other, senility; and in between, a group of indeterminate age, where everyone is somewhere between twenty and thirty and remains that way until dotage descends. In this connection, I recall to mind a television commercial which sells hand lotion. Or perhaps it was for Ivory soap. In it, we are shown a mother and a daughter, and then challenged to tell which is which. I find this to be a revealing piece of sociological of evidence, for it tells us that in our culture it is considered desirable that a mother should not look older than her daughter, or that a daughter should not look younger than her mother. If there is no clear concept of what it means to be an adult, whether this means that childhood is gone or adulthood is gone amounts to the same thing, there can be no concept of what it means to be a child.

However, you wish to describe the transformation taking place, it is clear that the behavior, attitudes, desires, and even physical appearances of adults and children are becoming indistinguishable. There is now virtually no difference, for example, between adults’ crimes and children’s crimes; and in many states, the punishments are becoming the same. Just for the record: from 1950-1985 years, the increase among the under-fifteen-year-old population in what the FBI calls “serious crimes” exceeded 11,000 percent! That is very important because many people want to relax the laws, members of the Catholic Church want to make celibacy extinct, and this is an indicator of how more crimes will progress as we dismiss rule, regulations, laws and traditions to make life more accommodating for those who maybe need to just stop pretending to be what they are not and chose another profession. There is also very little difference in dress. The children’s clothing industry has undergone a virtual revolution within the past fifteen years, so that there no longer exists what we once unambiguously recognized as children’s clothing. Eleven-year-old wear three-piece suits and Stacy Adams to birthday parties, and sixty-one-year-old women were Daisy Dukes, crop tops, belly piercings and nose rings to birthday parties. Twelve-year-old girls wear high heels, and fifty-two-year-old men wear sneakers. On the streets of New York and Chicago, you can see grown women wearing lingerie, stiletto thigh high boots, a mini-skirt, and a men’s blazer that is an example of adults imitating the Catholic school girl uniform. To take another case: children’s games, once so imaginatively rich and varied and so emphatically inappropriate for adults, are rapidly disappearing. Little League baseball and Peewee football, for example, are not only supervised by adults but are modeled in their organization and emotional style on big league sports.

Junk food, once suited only to the undiscriminating palates and iron stomachs of the young, is now common fare for adults. It has already been forgotten that adults are supposed to have more developed taste in food than children; McDonald’s and Burger King commercials show us that this distinction is no longer relevant. However, I think that is because society is becoming less formal and extremely expensive. The language of children and adults has also been transformed so that, for example, the idea that there may be words that adults ought not to use in the presence of children now seems faintly ridiculous. With television’s relentless revelation of all adults secrets, language secrets are difficult to guard, and it is not inconceivable to me that in the near future we shall return to the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century situation in which no words were unfit for a youthful ear. Of course, with the assistance of modern contraceptives, the appetites for pleasures of the flesh can be satisfied without serious restraint and without mature understanding of its meaning. Here, television has played an enormous role, since it not only keeps the entire population in a condition of high sexual excitement but stresses a kind of egalitarianism of fulfillment of pleasures of the flesh: pleasures of the flesh is transformed into a product available to everyone—let us say, like mouthwash or under-arm deodorant. It remains for me to mention that there has been a growing movement to recast the legal rights of children to that they are more or less the same as adults’. The thrust of this movement, which, for example, is opposed to compulsory schooling, resides in the claim that what has been thought to be a preferred status for children is instead only an oppression that keeps them from fully participating in society.

In short, our culture is providing fewer reasons and opportunities for children. I am not so singleminded as to think that television alone is responsible for this transformation. The decline of the family, the loss of a sense of roots—just over 40 million Americans change residence every year—and the elimination, through technology, of much significance in adult work are other factors. However, I believe television creates a communication context that encourages the idea that childhood is neither desirable nor necessary; indeed, that we do not need children. In talking about childhood’s end, I have not, of course, been talking about the physical disappearance of children. However, in fact that, too, is happening. Our birth rate in North America is declining and has been for over a decade, which is why schools are being closed all over the country. And the idea of children implies a vision of the future. They are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. However, television cannot communicate a sense of the future or, for that matter, a sense of the past. It is a present-centered medium, a speed-of-light medium. Everything we see on television is experienced as happening now. The grammar of television has no analogue to the past and future tenses in language. It amplifies the present out of all proportion and transforms the childish need for immediate gratification into a way of life. We end up with the culture of narcissism—no future, no children, everyone fixed at an age between twenty and thirty. You even have adults, senior citizens, who are fixed on living like the corrupt politicians, law enforcement, and the little girls from Pretty Little Liars—mixing preteen games and lies with major crimes. I believe that what we are describing is disastrous—partly because many value the charm, curiosity, malleability, and innocence of childhood, and partly because we believe that human beings need first to be children before they can be grown-ups.

Otherwise they remain like television’s adult-child all their lives, with no sense of belonging, no capacity for lasting relationships, no respect for limits, and no grasp of the future. However, mainly I think it is disastrous because as the television culture obliterates the distinction between child and adult, as it obliterates social secrets, as it undermines concepts of the future and the value of restraint and discipline, we seem destined to be moving back toward a medieval sensibility from which literacy had free us. TV also has other effects on the body and mind. The light we receive in our eyes and our cell structure. This is the chain of events: Light passes through the eye to contact the retina. The retina has a dual function. The first is the obvious one: translating the light into images by way of channels to the brain. The second, equally important function is for the light rays, aside from the role as image creators, to pass via neurochemical channels into and through the pineal and pituitary glands and therefore into the animal and human endocrine systems. The kind of light that passes through the eyes determines the reactions of human cells. When it comes to even minute changes in wavelength spectra (what we call “color”)—say, between one kind of artificial light and another, or between natural light and artificial light—cause important biochemical alterations. Critical to understanding all of this is the term “light,” which does not apply to a single, monolithic element. When we speak of “light” we ordinarily do not make distinctions between natural light or artificial light; not do we make the distinction between kinds of artificial light. We tend to lump al of them together. One flips the switch to “on” and what one gets is “light.” When it is “on” one can see. However, there is where the similarity ends.

Natural sunlight is made up of all the radiant wavelengths of energy (spectra) that fit within what we call “light.” What is more, it contains them in a specific mixture. So much of this and so much of that. Artificial light from any source—whether incandescent or fluorescent—leaves out many segments of the spectral range contained in natural light, and it delivers an entirely different mix of spectral ingredients. Incandescent light, for example, emphasize the portion of the spectrum near the infrared while minimizing or leaving out others. Artificial light is quite literally not the same element as natural light. To use the same term for both is to destroy understanding. We learned in school that plants ingest light and then convert it to energy for growth. The process is called photosynthesis. The plant literally takes light into its cells and converts it into nourishment. For a plant, light is a form of food. Changing the light source so that a plant ingests one set of spectral ingredients rather than another changes the nourishment and therefore the cellular and growth patterns of the plant. If you grow your own plants at home, you also know this to be true. You may not have a microscope with which to watch it, but if you move a plant nearer to the window (or farther away), it changes. Plant stores now sell special bulbs which help plants grow. When you move the plant or buy the bulb, what you are doing is changing the amount and the spectral character of the light the plant receives. You are changing its diet. Through photobiology we are finally beginning to grasp that what is true for plants seems also to be true for animals and humans. For all, light is a kind of food. Humans take light in through the eyes; and via the retinal-pituitary-endocrine system, it passes into cells. The exact mix of spectral ingredients that we ingest affects many aspects of human health and vitality. As you change the light, you change the spectra; as you change the spectra, you change the light-nourishment that finds its way to the cells; as you alter the cells, you alter the human body.

Now, when it comes to memory, the more times an experience is repeated, the longer the memory of the experience lasts. Repetition encourages consolidation. When researchers examined the physiological effects of repetition on individual neurons and synapses, they discovered something amazing. Not only did the concentration of neurotransmitters in synapses change, altering the strength of the existing connections between neurons, but the neurons grew entirely new synaptic terminals. The formation of long-term memories, in other words, involves not only biochemical changes but anatomical ones. That is why memory consolidation requires new proteins. Proteins play an essential role in producing structural changes in cells. The anatomical alterations in a slug’s relatively simple memory circuits were extensive. In one case, the researchers found that, before a long-term memory was consolidated, a particular sensory neuron had some thirteen hundred synaptic connections to about twenty-five other neurons. Only about forty percent of those connections were active—in other words, sending signals through the production of neurotransmitters. After the long-term memory had been formed, the number of synaptic connections had more than doubled, to about twenty-seven hundred, and the proportion that were active had increased from forty percent to sixty percent. The new synapses remained in place as long as the memory persisted. When the memory was allowed to fade—by discontinuing the repetition of the experience—the number of synapses eventually dropped to about fifteen hundred. The fact that, even after a memory is forgotten, the number of synapses remains a bit higher than it had been originally helps explain why it is easier to learn something a second time. The growth and maintenance of new synaptic terminals makes memory persist.

The process also says something important about how, thanks to the plasticity of our brains, or experiences continual shape our behavior and identity. The fact that a gene must be switched on to form long-term memory shows clearly that genes are not simply determinants of behavior but are also responsive to environmental stimulation, such as learning. Furthermore, our intellectual skyline has been altered by German thinkers even more radically than has our physical skyline by Germany architects. My insistence on the Germanness of all this is intended not as a know-nothing response to foreign influence, the search for a German intellectual under every bed, but to heighten awareness of where we must look if we are to understand what we are saying and thinking, for we are in danger of forgetting. The great influence of a nation with a powerful intellectual life over less well endowed nations, even if the armies of the latter are very powerful, is not rare in human experience. The most obvious cases are the influence of Greece on Rome and of France on Germany and Russia. However, it is precisely the differences between these two cases and the example of Germany and the United States of America tht makes the latter so problematic for us. Greek and French philosophy were universalistic in intention and fact. They appeared to the use of a faculty potentially possessed by all men everywhere and at all times. The proper noun in Greek philosophy is only an interesting tag, as it is in French Enlightenment. (The same is true of Italian Renaissance, a rebirth that is proof of the accidental character of nations and the universality of Greek thinkers.) The good life and the just regime they taught know no limits of race, nation, religion, or climate.

This relation to man as man was the very definition of philosophy. We are away of this when we speak of science, and no one seriously talks of German, Italian, or English physics. And when we Americans speak seriously about politics, we mean that our principles of freedom and equality and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere applicable. World War II was really an educational project undertake to force those who did not accept these principles to do so. However, the German philosophy after Hegel cast doubt on them, and there was some relationship between German politics and German thought. Historicism has taught that the mind is essentially related to history or culture. Germanness is, according to later German philosophers, an essential part of them. For Nietzsche and those influenced by him, values are the product of folk minds and have relevance only to those minds. The possibility of translation itself is doubted by Heidegger. For him the Latin traditions of the Greek philosophical terms are superficial and do not convey the essence of the translated text. German thought tended not toward liberation from one’s own culture, as did earlier thought, but toward reconstituting the rootedness in one’s own, which had been shattered by cosmopolitanism, philosophical and political. We are like the millionaire in The Ghost (Geist) Goes West who brings a castle from brooding Scotland to sunny Florida and adds canals and gondolas for “local color.” We choose a system of thought that, like potato salad, does not travel; we chose a way of looking at things that could never be ours and had its starting point dislike of us and our goals. The United States of America was held to be a nonculture, a collection of castoffs from real cultures, seeking only comfortable self-preservation in a regime dedicated to superficial cosmopolitanism in thought and deed.

Our desire for the German things was proof we could not understand them. The decisive character of peoples and their values that was decreed by historicism of all kinds, but particularly by Nietzsche’s radical historicism, makes the German case the opposite of the Greek one. The difference can be seen in the way Cicero treats Socrates as opposed to the way Nietzsche does. For Cicero, Socrates is a friend and contemporary; for Nietzsche he is an enemy and an ancient. Given our country’s extreme Enlightenment universalism, nothing could be ore unwelcome to Nietzsche and Heidegger than our embrace. America, like Germany, also contains intelligent persons who were attracted, at least in the beginning and more so since the COVID pandemic, to fascism, for reasons very like those motivating the Left ideologues, reflections on autonomy and value certain. Once one plunges into the abyss, there is no assurance whatsoever that equality, democracy or socialism will be found on the other side. At the very best, self-determination is indeterminate. However, the conditions of value creation, particularly its authoritative and religious or charismatic character, would seem to militate against democratic rationalism. The sacred roots of community are contrary to the rights of individuals and liberal tolerance. The new religiosity connected with community and culture influenced people who look at other things from the perspective of creativity to lean toward the Right. On the Left there was only an assertion that Marx would, after his revolution, produce exactly what Nietzsche promised, while on the Right there was meditation on what we know of the conditions of creativity. Decent people became used to hearing things about which they would have in the past been horrified to think, and which would not have been allowed public expression. An extreme outcome in the struggle between Right and Left is inevitable.

The great mystery is the kinship of all this to American souls that were not prepared by education or historical experience for it. Perhaps the fantastic success of Freud in America was due simply to the fact that so many people were seeking refuge from tyranny, and there were very effective propagandists, or whether there was some special need for tyrants. This was also seen in Sacramento, California. Many people thought Darelle Steinberg would be a better mayor than Kevin Johnson, but they both seem like the same person. Their goal is not to help the citizens, but use taxpayer money to build and modernize buildings for entertainment. However, police shootings and overall police behavior was better when Johnson was the mayor.  Steinberg seems really out of touch with the community. The assembled powers are not cosmic in nature, but historical. The chief function with which they are entrusted is that of judging the Earth and they have clearly not to judge alongside one another, but the Earth is divided among them; to each a land and a nation is specially allotted. Each of them is a governor for God, and, each, are to dispense justice to one’s people, both outwardly and inwardly. Outwardly they may all have fulfilled their office honorably, and each of them may have adequately represented the cause of one’s nation in so far as that cause was righteous; for God does not speak of this. It is unjust rule of which He accuses them all, more precisely, failure to act against social injustice. Instead of fulfilling their task of helping the powerless and the unprotected to obtain justice in the face of the oppressor, they have adjudged to this man, just because he had all the power, all that he coveted. However, how long can measured GDP levels grow before the bankruptcy lawyers arrives? As we have seen, GDP figures are grossly distorted because of their failure to take prosumers output fully into account.

 If the economists assigned value to it, the total costs of health care would loom immensely larger. Long term health care costs in America are now $4.1 trillion annually. However, this underestimates the economic resources devoted to long-term health care…because most care is delivered informally by family and friends and is not included in economic statistics. It has been estimated that the economic value of such informal care-giving in the United States of America reaches $600 billion a year. Other researcher suggests that in the United States of America, family care for Alzheimer’s patients alone had a value exceeding $300 billion in 2020. And none of these figures includes unpaid caregiving for short-term problems. Governments and health industry officials worry that an aging population will mean more disease and debility, and therefore even higher costs. In the United States of America, pharmacies on average fill nineteen prescriptions a year for customers over fifty-five, compared with only eight for younger people. Health care costs for those over 65 years are thee to five times greater than for those younger than 65. Finally, add to all this the potential bankruptcy of pension systems as we known them, and the entire high-pitched public discussion plunges into the panic zone. There are, however, flaws in this overall picture. First, many such numbers are based on straight-line projections of past experience. That may be delusory in times of crisis or revolution. The longer-lived new generation will likely prove healthier than its parents were. Second, the same demographics that are increasing the percentage of elderly will reduce the percentage of young people and could reduce the cost of schools and pediatric care. Other financial offsets may also be possible. Nevertheless, none of these qualifications alters the need for radical reconceptualization of the entire problem of health in the twenty-first century.

Unfortunately, well-intentioned reforms based on industrial-age assumptions only make matters worse. To cut costs, politicians typically seek “efficiencies” that translate into assembly-line health care, a “managed” system offering one-size-fits-all, standardized treatment. Exactly as in low-tech factories, efforts are made to speed up the medical assembly line, essentially putting doctors into cubicles and allowing them only a few minutes with each patient. This is a self-defeating Second Wave strategy for a situation tht desperately needs a Third Wave response. In a business lagging behind other industries, smart pharmaceutical companies will soon transition toward de-massified, highly targeted, customized products that could reduce side effects and the additional costs they often impose. Cost-cutting reformers, in the meantime, seek just the opposite—mass-production health care in for form of standardized, cookie-cutter protocols, procedures and drugs. With costs and inefficiencies continuing to mushroom, the crisis in health economics cannot be resolved—until we look beyond industrial solutions to the extraordinary opportunities opened to us by the arrival of the knowledge economy and the new potentials for prosumer health care. Now, there is also a lot of contention when it comes to religion and celibacy. In 1970, the Jesuit magazine America predicted that by middecade, married priest would be a reality. Optimistic Dutch and Brazilian priests married. Optional celibacy, they believed, was almost certainly in the offing. How wrong intransigent Churchdom proved them! Not only did marriage remains strictly forbidden, but the Church subjected those requesting release from their vows to treatment many described as demeaning, even traumatizing. Virginity as a deliberately chosen vocation, based on a vow of chastity, and in combination with vows of poverty and obedience, creates particularly favorable conditions for the attainment of perfection in the New Testament sense.

However, some people believe that celibacy is the cause of priestly sinning in pleasures of the flesh, as a barrier to the religious vocations, and as a violation of human rights. This is to become a virginal kingdom of Heaven, as was the case with Mary. The virgin can become a wonderful channel of grace to the World, as was Mary. Because polygamy is becoming more common, clerical celibacy is an enormous obstacle to the recruitment of indigenous priests. It directly contradicts the traditional view that marriage is the focus of existence…a duty, a requirement from the corporate society, and a rhythm of life in which everyone must participate. One who does not is a cruse to the community, one is a rebel and a law-breaker, one is not only abnormal, but underhuman. It seems celibacy is neither understood nor respected. The temptation of the flesh is too strong for humans to resist. Many people believe that compulsory celibacy is going to eventually change, but what will that mean for society. Several think that the sexual revolution has gone too far, and would like to see some pillars in the community upholding the law of chastity. However, about 40 percent of U.S. priests are routinely uncelibate, a figure that excludes those whose lapses are infrequent. This is alarming and sparking worry that the sacraments dispensed by clergy who routinely desecrate their holy vows, will be inspiring in their congregations the notion that it is okay to be menu Catholics when something seems inconvenient or incompatible with their deepest beliefs, and that is perfectly acceptable. In fact, 84 percent of people in the United States of America would allow priests to marry. Indisputably, vast numbers of priests are either openly or clandestinely uncelibate, and in many countries large contingents are even married, either legally or de facto. Therefore, who prefers to operate within the Church’s defined spiritual parameters? Who prefers the public battle to clandestine defiance? Keep in mind, there are God’s representatives, but they do not have to be.   

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