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It is Not Unusual for the Inventive Genius to Claim the Voice of God as the Only Authority!
No one on Earth is more ingenious than an addict out to score. Protestant fundamentalists built a kindergarten-through-college network of Christian schools whose graduates would become warriors in the army of the religious right. Even as students were attacking the authority of secular universities, fundamentalist proselytizers were brining millions of other young people into their fold. Parents do not want their families and children and homes and businesses being destroyed by the demonic decade. The scripts goes something like this: Once upon a time, there was both order and freedom in American cultural life, especially in the universities that served as citadels of learning and beacons to the rest of society. Yes, a few professors were thought to be unpatriotic, but anyone who saw something wrong with American society was acting like a baby. The veterans who took advantage of the GI Bill were profoundly grateful for the chance to go to college because a diploma was their passport to a white-collar job, and their children regarded higher education as a birthright and assumed that jobs would be there when they were ready to take on adult responsibilities. For the most part, students and professors pursed truth with little interference from the Worlds of gross commercialism and gross politics. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
Think Periclean Athens, the University of Heidelberg in the nineteenth century, Oxford and Cambridge before the Great War, and that is the higher learning Americans enjoyed—except in much larger numbers than had ever been the case in human history. Then the barbarians stormed the gates—no, the barbarians were already inside the gates. Instead of studying for their exams and listening to their teachers, students began to fancy themselves liberators of Americans. Much of the great tradition was still ere, but then decay or collapse started to set in. In the guise of students, an alien cultural started to attack. They were on the warpath against all forms of authority, including the educational authority of the universities and the pieties of middlebrow culture. The American university that was a glorious center of higher learning, was now spewing out nonsense about how awful McMansions where, what an atrocious symbol Germans automobile were, and how middle managers were glorified baby sitters and how they rich deserve nothing. The sentimental falsehoods in public and private institutions poisoned the core curriculum and infected the minds of vulnerable youth for it told them that no matter how hard they work, they should feel guilty about success, and that they do not deserve what they earn. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
All the anti-intellectuals were doing was filling Americans with shame so they could strip away the American Dream. And then the flags were removed from the class rooms, students were no longer allowed to pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. The pinkos wanted to replace McMansions with high rise apartment buildings with paper thin walls so they could monitor you. They wanted to popularize Korean cars instead of Germany luxury automobiles, and instead of people reading books and studying to become doctors, lawyers, nurses, and engineers, they would watch countless hours of TV and become experts on celebrity popular culture. However, many Americans believed that university presidents and college chancellors were captains of erudition. Veterans were thankful that the GI Bill made is possible for millions of working-class people who served their country to become the first members of their families to attend college. Even women attended college and earned a bachelor’s degree to become educated, well-rounded mothers so they would be better equipped to educate their children. So, the Ivy Tower on the Hill—the place where committed scholars search for truth in a World that desperately needs help is one of the best institutions in the World, no matter what critics say. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
A college education is the best aspect of the civil rights movement in the World. It allows our youth to learn and use their minds, to obtain job so they do not have to sit around being poor and bitter. It is still possible to get a first-rate education in any number of American colleges. Some institutions have more rigorous requirements than others, and, in any event, it is always possible for self-selected lovers of learning to learn. High culture can never be obliterated as long as the species continues to produce extraordinary individuals with the inclination and fortitude to pursue their interests and talents against the grain and the mass culture surrounding them. However, because of the erosion of core studies, it is now possible at many institutions of so-called higher learning for students to receive a degree in psychology without having taken mid-level biology courses; for a cultural studies major to graduate without reading the basic texts of American history, Economic, or studying the Enlightenment; and for business majors to graduate without having studied any literature after one’s freshman year. And all of these college graduates, should they choose to become teachers at any level of the educational system, will pass on their narrowness and ignorance to the next generation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
During the past ten years, many institutions have moved to restore a stronger core curriculum (as they also did in the late seventies), but this grudging, formulaic trend is higher education’s equivalent of the frantic emphasis on standardized testing in elementary and secondary schools: it as everything to do with politics—both academic politic and, in the case of public universities, the politics of getting financial support from state legislatures. When university officials start talking about a return to “the basics,” it is a sure bet that some prominent state legislator or governor or President Trump has zeroed in on the academic shortcoming of State U. and that no one is referring to the unquantifiable and more genuine learning whose importance within a society cannot be measured by test scores and can only be mourned in its absence. The Whole World is Watching, and that is true. Parents want their kids to think of college as a safe and accepting place, where people who have been sheltered from crime and chaos can go and see the trees, drink mochas and lattes, espresso and cappuccinos with the other kids, eat cobb salads and avocado toast, filet mignon and foie gras, read Shakespeare, invest in a McMansion with roommates as a form of student housing, and once in the spring the boys can go to a dance with the girls. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
This image of peaceful, privileged youth is what the intellectuals who are presumably running the colleges want—and they want to run the goodly, so parents can be happy about writing tuition checks. They want to being back clubs like the Campus Crusade, which is a powerful Christian right-wing youth movement that is really popular in the Bible Belt. Evangelists are trying to save the nation by appealing to young men and women, many who are disillusioned with drugs and the revolution involving pleasures of the flesh, by providing students with a way to remake their lives. These groups even enhance their appeal by their deliberate adoption and adaption of popular fashion trends and language, minus obscenities and showing too much skin, for the purpose of preaching old-time religion. They even have fashionable hairstyles and look just like other college students. Some organizations have names like the Christian World Liberation Front and the Jesus Christ Light and Power Company and open shelters for young people who are burnt out from Worldly ways, which may not even be their fault because they do not know better or just got caught up. Whatever the case, accepting God has been proven to help depression and can put youth in contact with important members of the community who may offer them careers or internships upon graduation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
Conservatives want people to celebrate the old American Dream of love and education and Jesus Christ as our Saviour. One might even say that it is a revival and reformation of the Christian American Dream, which is embedded in everyday life society and still manages to dominate attitudes and even behavior within certain limited spheres. Christianity is a ritual of purification and cleansing, a celebration of the capacity of feeling to triumph over Worldly patterns. And it is important that human feelings should occasionally win—as important as occasional epiphanies and miracles are for religion. In our society this issue is a matter of life and death (of society, if not the individual). I also have come to a better understand of what people are saying about injustice in society. They want more funding for adequate programs like education, legal assistance, public defenders, child care, and government investigators who actually will help them because that will prevent people from being arrested. As it stands, these government agencies do not have the ability or skill, time or desire to help people. Then problems fester until it becomes a police matter and people are arrested. At that point, prosecutors will spend countless hours and millions of dollars to prosecute individuals even for minor crimes that would have been avoided if the resources were provided to help these people with ongoing problems. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
As it stands, the media likes to play it off like there is some major mental health crisis in America, but the fact is that no one helps people when they are facing problems. Now, there may be a mental health issue with some of these people in the news media, politicians, and some people running businesses. However, when people are doing wrong to individuals, even if it is a problem that there is clear cut discrimination, harassment or some kind of other crime a person is a victim of, it is ignored and that is why people end up in police custody. The government is not willing to put ethical people in place to help them and maybe spend $10,000.00 on an investigation, but they are willing to spend millions of dollars prosecuting a person. So these people are not saying defend the police, they are saying there are ways to use resources that will save money and keep these matters from becoming police problems. As it stands, society is abusing the police because all of these problems, and many of them are really petty, get kicked over to law enforcement and then law enforcement is expected to be a lawyer, psychologist doctor or guardian when that is not even their job because other government agencies are not handling their mandated responsibilities. RandolphHarris 8 of 24
The youth assume that their elders are attempting to deceive them with this talk of proper channels—that is deliberate obstruction, since the elders know that “proper channels” are designed to negate rather than to facilitate change. Their reactions are then a horror of social uproar that many people cannot comprehend because they have never experienced what these people are going through. The elders’ notion that radical leaders are “just trying to get their names in the papers” has been replaced by calling the people liars and saying they are crazy. Parents believe that is it their responsibility to make their child into the most all-around perfect adult possible, which means paying a great deal of attention to their inner states and latent characteristics. The child no longer has a private sphere, but one’s entire being is involved with parental aspirations, and it really hurts when you invest so much love, time, money, and energy into a being for society to rip that individual apart, while people sit back watching and laughing. Our children do not even take their own personalities for granted, and it really hurts them to have their dreams crushed by racism and injustice. Parents believe they are required not just to put in the time but to make their children motivated. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
However, some parents are willing to throw their children to the dogs for something so trivial as etiquette and it makes a deep impression. So, yeah, some of these problems are not just with government institutions, but within the house. Some children are too young to know their parents do not wish them well and want to see them fail. Since these children cannot see anything so important as to justify this betrayal, all social situations seem to have a dishonest quality. However, parents who are good Christians, absorbed with the goal of molding their child’s total character, are much less inclined to sacrifice the child to the etiquette concerns of strangers. The artist working on one’s masterpiece does not let guests use it to wipe their feet on. As a result, their children have grown up to feel that human needs have some validity of their own, ad their careful socialization to upper-middle-class values has well prepared them to accept the responsibility of becoming a gainfully employed, good citizen. Because of the parents know that there is a deep need for economic and status security, they want their children to face reality (by which they mean social reality). “My money is not your money. I am paying all the major bills and providing you with a place to stay, nice clothes, hot meals, and even an Ultimate Driving Machine. Because of this, life seems easy, but it is not.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
This unique power that parents have—to give their children attributes they do not themselves possess—is perhaps the unconscious determinant of an otherwise incomprehensible theme that appears so often in fairy tales: that of the impoverished old parent or helper who gives the hero magic gifts that could have made the giver oneself wealthy and powerful but apparently did not. However, upper-middle-class Americans parents relate to their children in a somewhat vampiresque way. They feed on the child’s accomplishments, sucking sustenance for their pale lives from vicarious enjoyment of one’s development. In a sense this sucking is appropriate since the parents give so much—lavish so much care, love, thoughtfulness, and self-sacrifice on their blook bank. However, this is little comfort for the child, who at some point must rise above one’s guilt and live one’s own life—the culture demands it of one. And after all, a vampire is a vampire. Basically, parents want their children to become mannikins which their fathers can display his influence to his friends. The crosses many youth wear around their necks are actually necessary to ward off the elders, whose vampiresque involvement who has been insufficiently exorcized. It is not that they are offended by the elders, but their hope is to magically neutralize their symbiotic relationship. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
Many youths are asked to take note of their hostile reaction towards older adults in the society, because it is bad to consider any one as being “unnecessary” and their rude reactions are in “bad taste.” One day, we will all be elders and will want our due respect. No one likes to admit that they have spent their lives in a foolish, evil, or crazy manner. That is why God tells us to humble ourselves and respect our elders. Furthermore, youth do not realize that elders are taught to lie about their feelings. They are not likely to say: “You frighten and depress us. We are afraid we have spent our lives on nurturing an ungrateful family, who brutalizes their neighbours, purses useless electronic devices and creates a joyless environment. It always seemed that right thing to do, to try to raise up a family in the way of the Lord, with Christian values, but now we are a little unsure, and if we had known how you would behave so wretchedly, we would have bought a smaller home and took more vacations instead of having children.” Instead, they suppress their doubts and fears about themselves by refusing to perceive the meaning of the stimulus. When their children cry for peace of social justice they says, “Do not talk dirty,” or “Go read the ‘Good Book.’” This is a way of saying, “There is nothing important or disturbing going on here—this is just my child who is mischievous or careless at times—it is just a family affair.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
It is a desperate attempt for them to enjoy their lives and want you to enjoy the fact that you are privileged enough to not have to endure injustice and hearing about it makes them feel like failures. They view the World as unchanging—to convert the deep social unrest of the day into the blank torpor of lace curtain suburban life. This philosophy also speaks to a much larger social phenomenon. How, for example, can matters so intrinsically important, such as politics, government positions, new broadcasting be trusted to be handled by people who present themselves as not the most sane, unstable, and ineffective members of our society? The answer is two incompatible processes are taking place at once: politicians are supposed to be philanthropists, they are not supposed to be getting paid to help society, while pretending that the people do not exist. It has become a self-serving job, where many people become wealthy, while citizens and corporation feel it is taxation without representation, and not providing for the general welfare of the people. Assuming the framework of institutions required by equal liberty and fair equality of opportunity, the higher expectations of those better situated are just if and only if they work as part of a scheme which improves the expectations of the least advantaged members of society. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
The intuitive idea is that the social order is not to establish and secure the more attractive prospects of those better off unless doing so is to the advantage of those less fortunate. A strongly egalitarian conception in the sense of distribution is that unless it makes both persons better off (limiting ourselves to the two-person case for simplicity), an equal distribution is to be preferred. Also, nothing is lost if an accurate interpersonal comparison of benefits is impossible. It suffices that the least favoured person can be identified and one’s rational preference determined. Also, if each person gains relative to the other, further benefits to one become less valuable from a social point of view. If art helps us to define the absolute, so madness brings us to a closer understanding of the relative. For whereas we sometimes can accept the aesthetic, the immediacy of the work of art, we fight acceptance of the products of the deluded and call it madness. We say no to the possessions, the compulsions, the hallucinations. We deny their uniqueness, their absoluteness and immediacy, and place them in relation to something that can be accepted. We say these are the products of diseased minds, of sick brains and glands, of distorting heat waves, of propaganda and suggestion, or drugs and poisons, of the experience of frustration, conflict, and trauma. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
For these other categories are acceptable. The unacceptable is thus related to the sick organism, to the false culture, to the disproportionate environment: we feel safe once again. And we may be at that, sometimes. For in the relational dimension there is mobility, change, and the chance to choose. One is not captivated entirely; one can compare, discriminate, and select. It is possible to move from or toward, increase or decrease one over the other. Then there is the chance to get out of trouble or into still more. There is freedom to the n—1 absolutes available within the perspective allowed. One has gone from the principle of pleasure to the principle of reality; but when no choice continuum is offered, when there are no degrees of freedom, then one is frustrated in that dimension. We may try to fight as long as there is some dimly sensed hope, but when that too disappears that dimension is dead for us and we are left just a little less alive. Of course for one who is “adjusted” to one’s madness, who accepts one’s mission, who no longer questions one’s lost, the same epiphanous structure of experience is evident as in the case of the experience called aesthetic. There is no need to distinguish between abnormality in the absolute dimension of experience. The mad person like the priest accepts one’s calling. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
In fact it is not unusual for the inventive genius to claim the voice of God as the only authority. For the new absolute is not derivative, has no ultimate sanction beyond its being, its epiphany. Each individual, including the reader, must refer to one’s own insight for an ostensive definition. To some extent experience in madness and aesthetic experience differ only as a matter of taste. There is no difference that cannot be questioned. Each may be accepted for itself and that is the point. It is only in so far as we see that each leads to consequences of different value to us that any distinction between the two may be noticed. Madness too frequently is self-limiting, and as such defeats its protective function by ultimately removing or devaluating that which it would protect. The question which madness does not answer or answers but poorly is: “Madness, then what?” In fact any inability to answer the questions: “Then what?” is revealing of madness; to the degree that the answer evades this question, to that degree there is madness. That is the only test of the abnormal. The normal epiphany of experience is, like most science and art, open ended. Growth may still occur, selection take place, change be accepted with grace and interest. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
Life can expand in depth and scope, in richness of action and experience. The completion of one leads to the opening of the next, not to boredom, self-destruction, or fear. Theoretically, if the paths chosen were completely normal, there should be no termination to life. Even at present there is usually continuity of life on into the future somewhere of some species. And that life can be called normal, the healthy life. No, it is not in the absolute dimension that the difference between normal and abnormal lies. It is only in the relative dimension that such a consideration gains significance. Then why do we continue to make the mistake of judging the absolute as good and bad, healthy and diseased, normal and abnormal? I do not know entirely the probable answer to this but the fact is that we do confuse these and I would like to point to a few crucial areas where this confusion causes no end of needless suffering to those so misinformed. This includes all of us. Job and Joseph are examples of those who saw the hand of God in their circumstances. In one day the Sabeans stole Job’s oxen, and the Chaldeans carried off his camels and ended the lives of his servants. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Lightning burned up his sheep, and a mighty wind struck the house of his oldest son, ending the lives of all his children. Later Job himself was afflicted with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. Job’s response at the loss of his children and his possessions was, “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away,” reports Job 1.21. And with respect to his own afflictions he said, “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble,” reports Job 2.10. Quite apart from Job’s humble reaction toward God, we should note first that he ascribed his sufferings to the hand of God. We must learn to see beyond the actions of evil people and the disasters of nature to the sovereign God who controlled these events. And the inspired writer who recorded the trials of Job, at the close of his account, said, “They [his relatives and friends] comforted and consoled him [Job] over all the trouble the LORD had brought upon him,” reports Job 42.11. Even though the writer had himself reported the malicious activity of Satan in Job’s life at the beginning of the narrative, he still ultimately ascribed Job’s troubles to the Lord. Joseph, when he finally revealed his identity to his wicked brothers who had sold him into slavery, saw beyond their evil acts and said, “So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God,” reports Genesis 45.8. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
Joseph recognized that God in His sovereignty used even the heinous sins of his brothers to accomplish His purpose. So, you and I, if we are to appropriate God’s grace in our times of need, must see His sovereignty ultimately ruling in all the circumstances of our lives. And when those circumstances are difficult, or disappointing, or humiliating, we must humble ourselves under His mighty hand. Not only must we see God’s mighty hand behind our circumstances, we must also see it as the hand of the loving Father discipling His children. We lose a lot of comfort in times of trials because we tend to view them as evidences of God’s desertion of us rather than evidences of His Fatherly discipline and care. Endure all hardships—all of it—as God’s discipline. You may be sure that whatever hardship comes into your life from whatever immediate source, God is in sovereign control of it and is using it as an instrument of discipline in your life. Discipline is a proof of God’s love, “because the Lord disciplines those He loves,” Hebrews 12.6. This is not a word of warning, but a word of encouragement. The purpose of God’s discipline is that so we may share in His holiness, that we may be conformed in our character to His character. Discipline may be either corrective or remedial. It may be sent for the purpose of correcting some sinful attitude or action, or to remedy some lack of our character. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
In either case, discipline is administered by our Heavenly Father in love, not wrath. Jesus has already borne the wrath of God in our place, so all adversities that come to us, come because God loves us and designs to conform us to the likeness of His Son. God has thoughts of love in all He does to His people. The ground of His dealings is love, and the purpose of His dealings is love. He has regard, in all, to our good here, to make us partakers of His holiness, and to our glory hereafter, to make us partakers of His glory. From the Light of God that I am. From the Love of God that I am. From the Power of God that I am. From the Heart of God that I am. I decree—I dwell in the midst of Infinite Abundance. The Abundance of God is my Infinite Source. The River of Life never stops flowing and it flows through me with lavish expression. Good comes to me through unexpected avenues and God works in a myriad of ways to bless me. I now open my mind to receive my good. Nothing is too good to be true. Nothing is too wonderful to happen With God as my Source nothing amazes me. I am not burdened by thoughts of past or future. One is gone. The other is yet to come. By the power of my belief, couped with my purposeful fearless actions and my deep rapport with God, my future is created and my abundance made manifest. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
I ask and accept that I am lifted in this and every moment into Higher Truth. My mind is quiet. From this day forward I give freely and fearlessly into Life and Life gives back to me with a fabulous increase. Blessings come in expected and unexpected ways. God provides for me in wondrous ways for the work that I do. I AM indeed grateful. And so it is. Join me in a POWERFUL ABUNDANCE MASTERCLASS. Set your intentions for the goodness and abundance of all and you will indeed be blessed. “Behold, now it came to pass that soon after Moroni had sent his epistle unto the chief governor, he received an epistle from Pahoran the chief governor. And these are the words which he received: I, Pahoran, who am the chief governor of this land, do send these words unto Moroni, the chief captain over the army. Behold, I say unto you, Moroni, that I do not joy in your great afflictions, yea, insomuch that they have risen up in rebellion against me, and also those of my people who are free humans, yea, and those who have risen up are exceedingly numerous. And it is those who have sought to take away the judgment-seat from me that have been the cause of this great iniquity; for they have used great flattery, and they have led away the hearts of many people, which will be the cause of sore affliction among us; they have withheld our provisions, and have daunted our free people that they have not come unto you. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
“And behold, they have driven me out before them, and I have fled to the land of Gideon, with as many humans as it were possible that I could get. And behold, I have sent a proclamation throughout this part of the land; and behold, they are flocking to us daily, to their arms, in the defence of their country and their freedom, and to avenge our wrongs. And they have come unto us, insomuch that those who have risen up in rebellion against us are set at defiance, yea, insomuch that they do fear us and durst not come out against us to battle. They have got possession of the land, or the city, of Zarahemla; they have appointed a king over them, and he hath written unto the king of the Lamanites, in the which he hath joined them an alliance with him; in the which alliance he hath agreed to maintain the city of Zarahemla, which maintenance he supposeth will enable the Lamanites to conquer the remainder of the land, and he shall be placed king over this people when they shall be conquered under the Lamanites. And now, in your epistle you have censured me, but it mattereth not; I am not angry, but do rejoice in the greatness of your heart. I, Pahoran, do not seek for power, save only to retain my judgment-seat that I may preserve the rights and the liberty of my people. My soul standeth fast in that liberty in the which God hath made us free. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
“And now, behold, we will resist wickedness even unto bloodshed. If they would stay in their own land, we would not shed the blood of the Lamanites. If they would not rise up in rebellion and take the sword against us, we would not shed the blood of our brethren. If it were requisite with the justice of God, or if He should command us so to do, we would subject ourselves to the yoke of bondage. However, behold he doth not command us that we shall subject ourselves to our enemies, but that we should put our trust in Him, and He will deliver us. Therefore, my beloved brother, Moroni, let us resist evil, and whatsoever evil we cannot resist with our words, yea, such as rebellions and dissensions, let us resist them with our swords, that we may retain our freedom, that we may rejoice in the great privilege of our church, and in the cause of our Redeemer and our God. Therefore, come unto me speedily with a few of your men, and leave the remainder in the charge of Lehi and Teancum; give unto them power to conduct the war in that part of the land, according to the Spirit of God, which is also the spirit of freedom which is in them. Behold I have sent a few provisions unto them, that they may not perish until ye can come unto me. Gather together whatsoever force ye can upon your march hither, and we will go speedily against those dissenters, in the strength of our God according to the faith which is in us. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
“And we will take possession of the city of Zarahemla, that we may obtain more food to send forth unto Lehi and Teancum; yea, we will go forth against them in the strength of the Lord, and we will put an end to this great iniquity. And now, Moroni, I do joy in receiving your epistle, for I was somewhat worried concerning what we should do, whether it should be just in us to go against our brethren. However, ye have aid, except they repent the Lord hath commanded you that ye should go against them. See that ye strengthen Lehi and Teancum in the Lord; tell them to fear not, for God will deliver them, yea, and also all those who stand fast in that liberty wherewith God hath made them free. And now I close mine epistle to my beloved brother, Moroni,” reports Alma 61.1-21. Wheat for you, Father of Grain. Barley for you, Father of Grain. Corn for you, Father of Grain. I scatter them for you, Father of Grain: a tribute to your well-famed generosity. God, you are worthy of worship: please hear me. I remember you every moment of the day. I pray to the one whose arrows bring health, to God the beautiful one. From your lyre come tunes of harmonious enchantment, and I listen entrapped, sweet-singing God. We will look to all commandments of the Lord, and do them; Lord bless us that we not follow our own heart and own eyes, but fortify us in your will. We will be holy to the Lord our God. #Randolphharris 24 of 24
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Memory is More Incredible than Ink for it is a Wise Father who Knows His Own Child!
The generation gap is just another way of saying that the younger generation makes overt what is covert in the older generation; the child expresses openly what the parents represses. The mass media with the use of television ( “The Most Effective Devil in America,” is telling you a vision) has flooded out local boundaries and forced the total society into a dim awareness of what it is like to live in fear. It is not so much the increase in violence that upsets middle-class Americans as the democratization of violence: the less affluent and underrepresented have become less willing to serve as specialized victims of violence from a political agenda (“legally”) and each other (illegally). The same point can be made about crimes against property, given the well-known class bias in our legal system. Since the ways in which the affluent steal from the less affluent are rarely defined as crimes (when executives of a major corporation were jailed for a few days some years ago for stealing millions of dollars from the public through antitrust violations many people were shocked that respectable humans could be treated in such a rude fashion) rising property crimes rates may only reflect an increase in the democratization of larceny, a result attributable in part to the success of the mass media in convincing the less affluent that only the possession of various products can satisfy their various social, pleasures of the flesh, and moral requirements. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Leaving aside these more likely to be considered violent when they have political overtones. Our nation has never known a time without serious urban riots—usually about some kind of economic or social injustice—but it was only when they began to have a political thrust and to attack business districts that the concerns about the rioting began to grow. The same relationship holds true for the college campus. It is not violence as such but its political aims that arouse concern. The same people who assail the violence of campus radicals are quite happy to regale listeners with tales of their own (apolitical) childhood pranks—pranks that would bring a jail sentence if committed today. College students on many campuses have rioted annually for generations, and the injuries and vandalism resulting from such riots have often far exceeded that produced by protests. Yet these apolitical riots have always been considered venial. The difference is that student pranks and riots in the past attacked authority but accepted it. The protests of today confront authority and question it. Thus although no violence at all may occur, those toward whom the protest is directed may feel that violence has been done to them. The disruption of ordinary daily patterns and assumptions are experienced as a kind of psychological violence. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Consider what happens when a defective traffic light fails to change from red to green. The line of cars grows and restlessness increases. At some point someone decides that the symbol of order is in fact in disorder and either goes through the red light or begins to honk one’s hor. As soon as one goes through, the others all follow suit. The initiator in this situation is engaging in a kind of civil disobedience. One is challenging the specific rule about red lights in terms of a broader understanding which says that the purpose of traffic laws is to regulate traffic not to disrupt it. Yet because the situation has no real political significance the incidence carries no threat or violent connotation. We live in a society in which cruelties inflicted upon humanity can be exposed in every living room through mass media or on Facebook and Twitter. We discuss and debate constantly the appearance of any instance anywhere in the World of inhumane treatment of one person by another, but we still do not always get the full story. Nonetheless, we stress that every human life, even corporations, are beings of value. We live, in short, in modern, secure, civilized World, in which a single isolated act of violence is a calamity, an outrage. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
Yet, innocent people still have their characters and beings terminated by the most barbarous means possible and shows no qualms about it. These techniques are a bit reminiscent of the dunking stool used in earlier centuries to test potential witches: if the person was not a witch the individual would drown—if one did not drown thus proved one was a witch and one was burned to death. The energy required to avoid even the most obvious forms of exploitation by commercial enterprises in our society would not permit the individual to lead a normal active life. Like Looking-glass Country, it takes all the running one can do to stay in the same place. Powerlessness has always been the common lot of most of humankind. However, the more we attempt to solve problems through increased autonomy the more we find ourselves at the mercy of these mysterious, impersonal, and remote mechanisms that we have ourselves created. Their indifference is a reflection of our own. All societies, optimally, must allow for both change and stability since: effective adaptation to the environment requires both modification and consolidation of existing reposes; social integration depends both upon the preservation and upon the periodic dissolution of existing structural differentiation; and personal happiness rest upon both familiarity and novelty in everyday life. Every society evolves patterns for attempting to realize these mutually incompatible needs. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
We talk of technology as the servant of humans, but it is a servant that now dominates the households, too powerful to fire, upon whom everyone is helplessly dependent. We tiptoe about and speculate upon his mood. What will be the effects of such-and-such an invention? How will it change our daily lives? We never ask, do we want this, is it worth it? (We did not ask ourselves, for example, if the major conveniences offered by social media could really offset the calamitous disruption and depersonalization of our lives that it brought about.) We simply say, “You cannot stop progress,” and shuffle back inside. We pride ourselves on being a “democracy” but we are in fact slaves. We submit to an absolute ruler who governs our state or city whose edicts and whims we never question. We watch that individual carefully, hang on to one’s every word; for technology is a harsh and capricious king, demanding prompt and absolute obedience. We laugh at the old lady who holds off the highway bulldozers with a Winchester Rifle, but we laugh because we are Uncle Toms. We try to outdo each other in singing the praises of the oppressor, although in fact the value of technology in terms of human satisfaction remains at best undemonstrated. For when evaluating its effects we always adopt the basic assumptions and perspective of technology itself, and never examine it in terms of the totality of human experience. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
We say this or that invention is valuable because it generates other inventions—because it is a means to some other means—not because it achieves an ultimate end. We play down the “side effects” that so often become the main effects and completely negate any alleged benefits. The much-vaunted “freedom” of American life is thus an illusion, one which underlies the sense of spuriousness so many Americans feel about their basic institutions. We are free to do only what we are told, and we are “told” not by a human master but by a mechanical construction. However, how can we be the salves of technology—is not technology merely an extension of, a creation of, ourselves? This is only metaphorically true. The forces to which we submit so abjectly were not generated by ourselves but by our ancestors—what we create will in turn rule our progeny. It takes a certain amount of time for the social effects of technological change to make their appearance, by which time a generation has usually passed. Science-fiction writers have long been fascinated with the notion of being able to create material objects just by imagining them, and have built novels, stories, and films around the idea. Actually, it is merely an exaggeration of what normally takes place. Technology is materialized fantasy. We are ruled today by the material manifestations of the fantasies of previous generations. #RanolphHarris 6 of 25
We treat technology as if it were a fierce patriarch—we are deferential, submissive, and alert to its demands. Perhaps, that is why men dominate the Silicon Valley in San Jose, California USA, and in Shenzhen, a city in south China’s Guangdong province known as the “Silicon Valley of China.” (The Silicon Valley of China has gradually become a global hardware center and hub for scientific and technological advances, where skyscrapers appear commonplace and the population has surged past 13 million.) We feel spasms of hatred toward technology, and continually make fun of it but we do little to challenge the rule. People who develop technology, like Wolfgang Egger who is a World-famous Germany car designer, reports, “to have this opportunity to create something like this [an electric car] from nothing is a big challenge that I need.” That is the main reason why he joined the Chinese car manufacturer BYD three years ago. Technology has inherited the fantasy of the authoritarian father. Furthermore, since the technological environment that rules, frustrates, and manipulates us is a materialization of the wished of our forefathers, it is quite reasonable to say that technology is the authoritarian father in our society. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
The American father can be a good-natured humble man in the home precisely because he is so ruthless toward the nonhuman environment, leveling, uprooting, filling in, building up, tearing down, blowing up, tunneling under. This ruthlessness affects his children only indirectly, as the deranged environment afflicts the eyes, ears, nose, and nervous system of the next generation. However, it affects them nonetheless. Through this impersonal intermediary we inflict our will upon our children, and punish them for our generous indulgence—our child-oriented, self-sacrificing behaviour. It I small wonder that the myth of the punitive patriarch stays alive. From this viewpoint, then, delegating to technology the role of punitive patriarch is another example of the first process we described: the tendency to avoid interpersonal conflict by compartmentalization and a false illusion of autonomy—to place impersonal mechanisms between and around people and imagine that we have created a self-governing paradise. It is a kind of savage joke in its parental form. We say: “Look, I am an easy-going, good-natured, affectionate father. I behave in a democratic manner and treat you like a person, never pulling rank. As to all those roads and wires and social media and clones and machines and bombs and complex bureaucratic institutions out there, do not concern yourself about them—this is my department.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
However, when the child grows up one discovers the fraud. One learns that one is a slave to his father’s unconscious and unplanned whims—that the area of withheld power was crucial. The child becomes angry and rebels, saying, “You were not what you pretended, and I cannot be what you encouraged me to be.” The child attacks “the system” and authority everywhere, trying to find the source of the deception, and using techniques that reflect one’s commitment to what one’s father deceived one into thinking one was—a person. However, by this time one has also learned the system of avoiding conflict through impersonal mechanism and is ready to inflict the same deception on one’s own children. We love and indulge our children, and would never dream of hurting them. If they are poisoned, bombed, gassed, burned, or whatever, it is surely not our fault, since we do not even know how to manipulate those objects. The danger comes from outside. Perhaps long ago we did something to deliver them into these impersonal hands, but we have forgotten, and in any case it is not our responsibility. Technology, in other words, is our plains sorcerer. Because Americans have submitted so passively to the havoc wreaked by technological change, they have had to convince themselves that their obsequiousness is right and good and appropriate. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
Any challenge to the technological-over-social priority threatens to expose the fact that Americans has lost their adulthood and their capacity to control their environment. So long as the priority is unchallenged and unmentioned, the human surrender involved need not be confronted. However, youth is increasingly saying: “What about the people? Why have you abdicated your birthright to hardware?” It is a humiliating question, and humiliating questions tend to be answered with blows. Furthermore, the social changes wrought by technological change are so vast and shattering and we are kept so off-balance by them that the desire for independent social change (that is, change produced by human needs rather than technology) appears not as a solution and the assumption of control, but as still another disruptive force. It is like the inhabitants of an occupied country, who say to their militants, “do not fight the enemy, it will just bring more massive retaliation down upon us. Attack your own family.” The predominant feeling is that there is more change than anybody can tolerate already, so how can anyone ever consider a radical reevaluation of the whole system. I felt sure that it was just a public-relations problem that only needed a public-relations solution. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
I do not give a damn how it is done; do whatever has to be done to stop these leaks and prevent further lies and unauthorized disclosures. I do not want excuses. I want results…whatever the cost. It became necessary for Americans to express themselves on a middle plane between vaporous idealism and self-interested practicality. The association of highbrow culture with vaporous idealism and lowbrow culture with self-interested practicality exemplified the widespread acceptance, by intellectuals as well as noneintellectuals, of the idea that devotion to the life of the mind must somehow be opposed to a decent regard for the exigencies of everyday life. The distinctive feature of American middlebrow culture was its embodiment of the old civic credo that anyone willing to invest time and energy in self-education might better oneself. Many uneducated people cherished middlebrow values: the millions of sets of encyclopedias sold door to door from the 1920s well into the 1980s were often purchased through an installment plan by parents who had never owned a book but were willing to sacrifice to provide their children with information about the World that had been absent from their own upbringing. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
Remnants of earnest middlebrows striving today among various communities, but the larger edifice of middlebrow culture, which once encompassed Americans of many social classes as well as ethnic and racial backgrounds, has collapsed. The disintegration and denigration of the middlebrow are closely linked to the political and class polarization that distinguishes the current wave of anti-intellectualism from the popular suspicion of highbrows and eggheads that have always, to a greater or lesser degree, been a part of the American psyche. What has been lost is an alterative to mass popular culture, imbibed unconsciously and effortlessly through the audio and video portals that surround us all. What has been lost is the culture of effort. Middlebrow culture was, above all, a reading culture. In the 1950s, to be raised in a middlebrow family meant that there were books, magazines, newspapers in the house and that everyone old enough to read had a library card. Some schools in Sacramento, California would even pause for fifteen minutes a day for reading time, where students could read whatever they wanted, as long as it was a book, it was appropriate, and educational. If much of the reading material was scorned by highbrow intellectuals, the books certainly provided ample room for growth. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
People had books clubs, much like Reese Witherspoon has popularized, where people select a book each month, read it and talk about. And people who live in segregated communities were taught to learn to appreciate masterpieces like The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and many more, and to make sure that no one could segregate one’s mind. Still, 25 percent of American high school biology teachers still believe that dinosaurs and humans coexisted. American ideal of self-education is a distinct era of self-help, and people placed far more emphasis on improving personality and public image and the mind like never before. However, “civilized” is still defined by the gatekeeps of greatness on the installment plan. Many people want to make it into the “Fat Man’s” class which was dubbed that for the size of their pocketbooks. We want everything to be cheap and high quality, but do not look at the value and utility it provides, and then complain about how little we get paid. Our parents, grandparents, and maybe for some of you, great grandparents had it a lot harder than we do today. We hear about how inexpensive everything used to be, but do not take inflation into account. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
In 1952, a great book cost $249.95, in 2020 dollars that is $2,470.21. Imagine what a luxury a book was back then. In fact, reading books was a status symbol because the proved to the World that one was the sort of person who did read and who could afford the price of a book. People like Reese Witherspoon is doing an excellent job trying to get Americans back into reading books. When a celebrity is seen doing anything, it becomes a trend and what could be a more productive trend than getting people to expand their minds. The possession of certain kinds of knowledge, and the ability to recalls facts before an audience of millions, could provide both fame and fortune. When being smart become a trend, imagine how much better off our society will be, how much productive our children will be. They will learn the root of what it takes to have fun and know they have to study and work hard to earn the money it takes to have fun. Because, as one gets older, fun gets more expensive. Getting a day off from school and watching TV is no longer fun, but having the ability to legally buy new cars and houses and take vacations and decorate your own private home is fun. Having privacy and dignity in your own environment is fun. Being able to relocate or explore the World when you want to is fun. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
An aspect of the Christian work ethic is enthusiasm. “Whatever you do,” Paul told the Colossians, “work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for humans,” reports Colossians 3.23. To the Romans Pail admonished, “Never be lacking in seal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord,” reports Romans 12.11. It is natural—actually quite easy—to be enthusiastic if your work is prominent, but less natural the more hidden it is, as the conductor of a great symphony orchestra once reveled when asked which was the most difficult instrument to play. “Second violin,” he answered. “We can get plenty of first violinists. However, to get someone who will play second violin with enthusiasm—that is a problem!” And so it is. However, actually, doing one’s work with enthusiasm, even if hidden, plays for an audience far greater than that of the most famous symphony orchestras or World champion sports teams! If we could be really see this, our enthusiasm would never flag. However, it can still be hard to reason with some people. Their very mind has been taken over by one or more feelings and is made to defend and serve those feelings at all costs. It is a fearful condition from which some people never escape. We have noted how thoughts generate feelings. If we allow certain negative thoughts to obsess us, then their associated feelings can enslave and blind us—that is, take over our ability to think and perceive. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
As humans, we can unknowingly become slaves to technology, or feelings and so man other things. Here, for example, is a woman (it could have just as well have been a man) who has taken in the thought that she has been treated unfairly for years in her marriage and her job. Rather than sensibly addressing the circumstances or just turning her mind away from this thought, she receives it and broods over it—for years—developing a tremendous sense of injustice and outrage, which she also welcomes and cultivates with the assistance of sympathetic friends. The “root of bitterness” (Hebrews 12.15) gradually spreads over her whole personality, seeping deeply into her body and soul. It becomes something you can see in her bodily motions and actions and hear oozing through the language she uses. It affects her capacity to see what is actually going on around her, to realize what she is actually doing, and to think thoroughly and consistently. She is in the prison of resentment, though she thinks she is perhaps for the first time acting freely. Beyond the individual level, poisonous emotions and sensations often take over entire social groups, blinding them and impelling them on terrible courses of destruction. This is nearly always what has happened in cases where repression of ethnic groups or genocide occurs. Thus, to the onlooker the participants (the tyrants) seem to be deaf, blind, and insane—which, in a sense, they are. They, too, are imprisoned. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
Feelings can be successfully reasoned with, can be corrected by reality, only in those (whether oneself or others) who have the habit and are given the grace of listening to reason even when they are expressing violent feelings or are in the grip of them. A feeling of sufficient strength may blot out all else and will invariably do so in one who has not trained oneself, or been trained, to identify, to be critical of, and to have some distance from one’s own feelings. Combined with a sense of righteousness, strong feeling becomes impervious to fact and reason. I beseech ye brethren, by the bowels of Christ, believe ye may be wrong! One’s feelings of righteousness does not mean one is right and actually should alert one to be very cautious and humble. Those who are wise will, accordingly, never allow themselves, if they can help it, to get in a position where they feel too deeply about any human matter. They will never willingly choose to allow feeling to govern them. They will carefully keep the pathway open to the house of reason and go there regularly to listen. If we are to appropriate God’s grace, we must humble ourselves, we must submit to His providential working in our lives. To do this we must first see His mighty hand behind all the immediate causes of our adversities and heartaches. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
We must believe the biblical teaching that God is in sovereign control of all our circumstances, and whatever or whoever is the immediate cause of our circumstances, God is behind them all. “And it came to pass that he wrote again to the governor of the land, who was Pahoran, and these are the words which he wrote saying: Behold, I direct mine epistle to Pahoran, in the city of Zarahemla, who is the chief judge and the governor over the land, and also to all those who have been chosen by this people to govern and manage the affairs of this war. For behold, I have somewhat to say unto them by the way of condemnation; for behold, ye yourselves know that we have been appointed to gather together humans, and arm them with swords, and with cimeters, and all manner of weapons of war of every kind, and send forth against the Lamanites, in whatsoever part they should come into out land. And now behold, I say unto you that myself, and also my men, and also Helaman and his men, have suffered exceedingly great sufferings; yea, even hunger, thirst, and fatigue, and all manner of afflictions of every kind. However, behold, were this all we had suffered we would not murmur nor complain. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
“However, behold, great has been the slaughter among our people; yea, thousands have fallen by the sword, while it might have otherwise been if ye had rendered unto our armies sufficient strength and succor for them. Yea, great has been your neglect towards us. And now behold, we desire to know the cause of this exceedingly great neglect; yea, we desire to know the cause of your thoughtless state. Can you think to sit upon your thrones in a state of thoughtless stupor, while your enemies are spreading the work of death around you? Yea, while they are murdering thousands of your brethren—yea, even they who have looked up to you for protection, yea, have placed you in a situation that ye might have sent armies unto them, to have strengthened them, and have saved thousands of them from falling by the sword. However, behold, this is not all—ye have withheld your provisions from them, insomuch that many have fought and bled out their lives because of their great desires which they had for the welfare of this people; yea, and this they have done when they were abut to perish with hunger, because of your exceedingly great neglect towards them. And now, my beloved brethren—for ye ought to have stirred yourselves more diligently for the welfare and the freedom of this people. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
“However, behold, ye have neglected them insomuch that the blood of thousands shall come upon your heads for vengeance; yea, for known unto God were all their cries, and all their sufferings—behold, could ye suppose that ye could sit upon your thrones, and because of the exceeding goodness of God ye could do nothing and he would deliver you? Behold, if ye have supposed this ye have supposed in vain. Do ye suppose this ye have supposed in vain. Do ye suppose that, because so many of your brethren have been killed it is because of their wickedness? I say unto you, if ye have supposed in vain; for I say unto you, there are many who have fallen by the sword; and behold it is to your condemnation; for the Lord suffereth the righteous to be slain that his justice and judgment may come upon the wicked; therefore ye need not suppose that the righteous are lost because they are slain; but behold, they do enter into the rest of the Lord their God. And now behold, I say unto you, I fear exceedingly that the judgments of God will come upon this people, because of their exceeding slothfulness, yea, even the slothfulness of our government, and their exceedingly great neglect towards their brethren, yea, towards those who have been slain. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
“For were it not for the wickedness which first commenced at our hear, we could have withstood our enemies that they could have withstood our enemies that they could have gained no power over us. Yea, had it not been for the war which broken out among ourselves; yea, were it not for these king-men, who caused so much bloodshed among ourselves; yea, at the time we were contending among ourselves, if we had united our strength as we hitherto have done; yea, had it not been for the desire of power and authority which those king-men had over us; had they been true to the cause of our freedom, and untied with us, and gone forth against our enemies, instead of taking up their swords against us, which was the cause of so much bloodshed among ourselves; yea, if we had gone forth against them in the strength of the Lord, we should have dispersed our enemies, for it would have been done, according to the fulfilling of his word. However, behold, now the Lamanites are coming upon us, taking possession of our lands, and they are murdering our people with the sword, yea, our women and our children, and also carrying them away captive, causing them that they should suffer all manner of afflictions, and this because of the great wickedness of those who are seeking for power and authority, yea, even those king-men. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
However, why should I say much concerning this matter? For we know not but what ye yourselves are seeking for authority. We know not but what ye are also traitors to your country. Or is it that ye have neglected us because ye are in the heart of our country and ye are surrounded by security, that ye do not cause food to be sent unto us, and also humans to strengthen our armies? Have ye forgotten in the commandments of the Lord your God? Yea, have ye forgotten the captivity of our fathers? Have ye forgotten the many times we have been delivered out of the hands of our enemies? Or do ye supposed that the Lord will still deliver us, while we sit upon our thrones and do not make us of the means which the Lord has provided for us? Yea, will ye sit in idleness while ye are surrounded with thousands of those, yea, and tens of thousands, who do also sit in idleness, while there are thousands round about in the borders of the land who are falling by the sword, yea, wounded and bleeding? Do ye supposed that God will look upon you as guiltless while ye sit still and behold these things? Behold I say unto you, Nay. Now I would that ye should remember that God has said that the inward vessel shall be cleansed first, and then shall the outer vessel be cleansed also. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
“And now, expect ye do repent of that which ye have done, and begin to be up and doing, and send forth food and humans unto us, and also unto Helaman, that he may support those parts of our country which he had regained, and that we may also recover the remainder of our possession in these parts, behold it will be expedient that we contend no more with the Lamanites until we have first cleansed our inward vessel, yea, even the great head of our government. And expect ye grant mine epistle, and come out and show unto me a true spirit of freedom, and stive to strengthen and fortify our armies, and great unto them food a part of my freemen to maintain this part of our land, and I will leave the strength and the blessings of God upon them, that none other power can operate against them—and this because of their exceeding faith, and their patience in their tribulation—and I will come unto you, and if there be any among you that has a desire for freedom, yes, if there be even a spark of freedom remaining, behold I will stir up insurrections among you, even until those who have desires to usurp power and authority shall become extinct. Yea, behold I do not fear your power nor your authority, but it is my God whom I fear; and it is according to his commandments that I do take my sword to defend the cause of my country, and it is because of your iniquity that we have suffered much loss. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
“Behold, I wait for assistance from your; and except ye do administer unto our relief, behold, I come unto you, even in the land of Zarahemla, and smite you with the sword, insomuch that ye can have no more power to impede the progress of this people in the cause of our freedom. For behold, the Lord will not suffer that ye shall live and wax strong in your iniquities to destroy his righteous people. Behold, can you suppose that the Lord will spare you and come out in judgment against the Lamanites, when it is the tradition of their fathers that has caused their hatred, yea, and it has been redoubled by those who have dissented from us, while your iniquity is for the cause of your love of glory and the vain things of the World? Ye know that ye do transgress the laws of God, and ye do know that ye do trample them under your feet. Behold, the Lord saith unto me: If those whom ye have appointed your governors do not repent of their sins and iniquities, ye shall go up to battle against them. And now behold, I, Moroni, am constrained, according to the covenant which I have made to keep the commandments of my God; therefore I would that ye should adhere to the word of God, and send speedily unto me of your provisions and of your men, and also to Helaman. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
“And behold, if ye will not do this I come unto you speedily; for behold, God will not suffer that we should perish with hunger; therefore he will give unto us of your food, even if it must be by the sword. Now see that ye fulfill the word of God. Behold, I am Moroni, your chief captain. I seek not for power, but to pull it down. I seek not for honour of the World, but for the glory of my God, and the freedom and welfare of my country. And thus I close mine epistle,” reports Alma 60.1-36. A lion protecting His young, you rage when aroused. Nothing stands before You, no troubles can resist You, no enemies defeat You. A roaring in the distance announces your arrival, scattering the dealers of cares. You shake the Earth beneath their feet, upsetting all the plans. “Therefore shall ye lay up these My words in your heart and in your soul; and ye shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for frontless between your eyes. And ye shall teach them to your children, talking of them, when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them upon the doorpost of thy house, and upon thy gates; that your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, upon the land which the Lord promised unto your fathers to give them, as the days of the Heavens above the Earth,” reports Deuteronomy 11.16-21. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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You cannot have a constitutional right to do something that is illegal. Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with similar liberty for others. Furthermore, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and also attached to positions and offices open to all. There are two ambiguous phrases in the second principle, namely “everyone’s advantage” and “open to all.” Determining their sense more exactly will lead to a second formulation of the principle. The final version of the two principles considers the rendering of the first principle. By way of general comment, these principles primarily apply to the basic structure of society. They are to govern the assignment of rights and duties and to regulate the distribution of social and economic advantages. As their formulation suggests, these principles presuppose that the social structure can be divided into two more or less distinct parts, the first principle applying to the one, the second to the others. They distinguish between those aspects of the social system that define and secure the equal liberties of citizenship and those that specify and establish social and economic inequalities. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
The basic liberties of citizens are, roughly speaking, political liberty (the right to vote and to be eligible for public office) together with freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person along with the right to hold (personal) property; and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law. These liberties are all required to be equal by the first principle, since citizens of a just society are to have the same basic rights. The second principle applies, in the first approximation, to the distribution of income and wealth and to the design of organizations that make use of differences in authority and responsibility, or chains of command. While the distribution of wealth and incomes need not be equal, it must be to everyone’s advantage, and at the same time, positions of authority and offices of command must be accessible to all. One applies the second principle by holding positions open, and then, subject to this constraint, arranges social and economic inequalities so that everyone benefits. These principles are to be arranged in a serial order with the first principle prior to the second. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
This ordering means that a departure from the institutions of equal liberty required by the first principle cannot be justified by, or compensated for, by greater social and economic advantages. The distribution of wealth and income, and hierarchies of authority, must be consistent with both the liberties of equal citizenship and equality of opportunity. It is clear that these principles are rather specific in their content, and their acceptance rests on certain assumptions that I must eventually try to explain and justify. A theory of justice depends upon a theory of society in ways that will become evident as we proceed. For the present, it should be observed that the two principles (and this holds for all formulations) are a special case of a more general conception of justice that can be expressed as follows: All social values—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone’s advantage. Injustice, then, is simply inequalities that are not to the benefit of all. The illegal begins immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer. Of course, this conception is extremely vague and requires interpretation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
As a first step, suppose that the basic structure of society distributes certain primary goods, that is, things that every rational human is presumed to want. These goods normally have a use whatever a person’s rational plan of life. For simplicity, assume that the chief primary goods at the disposition of society are rights and liberties, powers and opportunities, income and wealth. (Later on in Part Three the primary good of self-respect has a central place.) These are the social primary goods. Other primary goods such as health and vigor, intelligence and imagination, are natural goods; although their possession is influenced by the basic structure, they are not so directly under its control. Imagine, then, a hypothetical initial arrangement in which all the social primary goods are equally distributed: everyone has similar rights and duties, and income and wealth are evenly shared. This state of affairs provides a benchmark for judging improvements. If certain inequalities of wealth and organizational powers would make everyone better off than in this hypothetical starting situation, then they accord with the general conception. Now it is possible, at least theoretically, that by giving up some of their fundamental liberties humans are sufficiently compensated by the resulting social and economic gains. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
The general conception of justice imposes no restrictions on what sort of inequalities are permissible; it only requires that everyone’s position be improved. We need not suppose anything so drastic as consenting to a condition of slavery. Imagine instead, when the economic returns are significant and their capacity to influence the course of policy by the exercise of these rights would be marginal in any case, that humans forego certain political rights. It is this kind of exchange which the two principles as stated rule out; being arranged in serial order they do not permit exchanges between basic liberties and economic and social gains. The serial ordering of principles expresses an underling preference among primary social goods. When this preference is rational so likewise is the choice of these principles in this order. In developing justice as fairness, I shall, for the most part, leave aside the general conception of justice and examine instead the special case of the two principles in serial order. The advantage of this procedure is that from the first the matter of priorities is recognized and an effort made to find principles to deal with it. One is led to attend throughout to the conditions under which the acknowledgement of the absolute weight of liberty with respect to social and economic advantages, as defined by the lexical order of the two principles would be reasonable. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
Offhand, this ranking appears extreme and too special a case to be of much interest; but there is more justification for it than would appear at first sight. Or at any rate, so I shall maintain. Furthermore, the distinction between fundamental rights and liberties and economic and social benefits marks a difference among primary social goods that one should try to exploit. It suggests an important division in the social system. Of course, the distinctions drawn and the ordering proposed are bound to be at best only approximations. There are surely circumstances in which they fail. However, it is essential to depict clearly the main lines of a reasonable conception of justice; and under many conditions anyway, the two principles in serial order may serve well enough. When necessary we can fall back on the more general conception. The fact that the two principles apply to institutions has certain consequences. Several points illustrate this. First of all, the rights and liberties referred to by these principles are those which are defined by the public rules of the basic structure. Whether humans are free is determined by the rights and duties established by the major institutions of society. Liberty is a certain pattern of social forms. The first principle simply requires that certain sorts of rules, these defining basic liberties, apply to everyone equally and that they allow the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for all. #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
The only reason for circumscribing the rights defining liberty and making human’s freedom less extensive than it might otherwise be is that these equal rights as institutionally defined would interfere with one another. When principles mention persons, or require that everyone gain from an inequality, another thing to bear in mind is that the reference is to representative persons holding the various social positions, or offices, or whatever, established by the basic structure. Thus in applying the second principle I assume that it is possible to assign an expectation of well-being to representative individuals holding these positions. This expectation indicates their life prospects as these positions. This expectation indicates their life prospects as viewed from their social station. In general, the expectations of representative persons depend upon the distribution of rights and duties throughout the basic structure. When this changes, expectations change. I assume, then, that expectations are connected: by raising the prospects of the representative human in one position we presumably increase or decrease the prospects of representative humans in other positions. Since it applies to institutional forms, the second principle (or rather the first part of it) refers to the expectations of representative individuals. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
Neither principle applies to distributions of particular goods to particular individuals who may be individuals who may be identified by their proper names. The situation where someone is considering how to allocate certain commodities to less affluent persons who are known to one not within the scope of the principles. They are meant to regulate basic institutional arrangements. We must not assume that there is much similarity from the standpoint of justice between an administrative allotment of goods to specific persons and the appropriate design of society. Our common-sense intuitions for the former may be a poor guide to the latter. Now the second principle insists that each person benefit from permissible inequalities in the basic structure. When one views it as a concern, this means that it must be reasonable for each relevant representative human defined by this structure to prefer one’s prospects with the inequality to one’s prospects without it. One is not allowed to justify differences income or organizational powers on the ground that the disadvantages of those in one position are outweighed by the greater advantage of those in another. Much less can infringements of liberty be counterbalanced in thus way. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
Applied to the basic structure, the principle of utility would have us maximize the sum of expectations of representative humans (weighted by the number of persons they represent, on the classical view); and this would permit us to compensate for the losses of some by the gains of others. Instead, the two principles required that everyone benefit from economic and social inequalities. It is obvious, however, when the initial arrangement of equality is taken as a benchmark that there are indefinitely many ways in which all may be advantaged. The grasping of the being of another person occurs on a quite different level from our knowledge of specific things about an individual. Obviously a knowledge of the drives and mechanisms which are in operation in the other person’s behaviour is useful; a familiarity with one’s patterns of interpersonal relationships is highly relevant; in formation about one’s social conditioning, the meaning of particular gestures and symbolic actions is of course to the point, and so on ad infinitum. However, when we confront the overreaching, most real fact of all—namely, the immediate, living person oneself, all these fall on to a quite different level. When we seek to know a person, the knowledge about one must be subordinated to the overarching fact of one’s actual existence. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
In the ancient Greek and Hebrew languages the verb “to know” is the same word as that which means to copulate with. This is illustrated time and again in the King James translation of the Bible—“Abraham knew his wife and she conceived…” and so on. Thus the etymological relation between knowing and loving is exceedingly close. Though we cannot go into this complex topic, we can at least say that knowing another human being, like loving one, involves a kind of union, a dialectical participation with the other. This is called the “duel mode.” If one is to be able to understand an individual, one must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking. The encounter with the being of another person has the power to shake one profoundly and may potentially be very anxiety-arousing. It may also be joy-creating. In either case, it has the power to grasp and move one deeply. And obviously the individual has defended oneself from anxiety at the price not only of the isolation of oneself from the other but also of the radical distortion of reality. For one does not ten really see the other person. It does not disparage the importance of the technique to point out that technique, like data, must be subordinated to the fact of the reality of two persons in the room. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
However, we find ourselves up against a dilemma. Our human being has become a sort of indeterminate clay which would have to receive [the desires] passively—or one would be reduced to a simple bundle of these irreducible drives or tendencies. In either case the human disappears; we can no longer find “the one” to whom this or that experience has happened. Either in looking for the person we encounter a useless, contradictory metaphysical substance—or else the being whom we seek vanishes in a dust of phenomena bound together by external connections. However, what each of us requires in this very effort to comprehend another is that one should never resort to this idea of substance, which is inhuman because it is well this side of the human. Also, if we admit that the person is a totality, we can not hope o reconstruct one by an addition or by an organization of the diverse tendencies which we have empirically discovered in one. Every attitude of the person contains some reflection of this totality. A jealousy of a particular date in which a subject posits oneself in history in relation to a certain person signifies for the one who knows how to interpret it, the total relation to the World by which the subject constitutes oneself as a self. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
This empirical attitude is by itself the expression of the choice of an intelligible character. There is no mystery about this. It is interesting that the term “mystic” is used in this derogatory sense to mean anything we cannot segmentize and count. The odd belief prevails in our culture that if we cannot make it mathematical, a thing or experience is not real, and if we can reduce it to numbers it is somehow real. Thus we deny reality of our own experience. The term “mystic,” in this disparaging sense, is generally used in the service of obscurantism; certainly avoiding an issue by derogation is only to obscure it. Is not the scientific attitude rather, to try to see clearly what it is we are talking about and then to find whatever terms or symbols can best, with least distortion, describe this reality? It should not so greatly surprise us to find that “being” belongs to that class of realities, like “love” and “consciousness” (for two other examples), which we cannot segmentize or abstract without losing precisely what we set out to study. This does not, however, relieve us from the task of trying to understand and describe them. The loss of the sense of being is related on one hand to our tendency to subordinate existence to function: a human knows oneself not as a human or self but as a ticket-seller in the subway, a grocer, a professor, a vice president of Cresleigh, or by whatever one’s economic function may be. #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
And on the other hand, this loss of the sense of being is related to the mass collectivist trends and widespread conformist tendencies in our culture. Indeed, I wonder if a psychoanalytic method, deeper and more discerning than any of that has been evolved until now, would not reveal the morbid effects of the repression of this sense and of the ignoring of this need. We need to be cognizant of freedom to become aware that there are forces in the World acting upon us. This is the sphere where we have the potential capacity to pause before reacting and thus to cast some weight on whether our reaction will go this way or that. And this, therefore, is the sphere where one, the human being, is never merely a collection of drives determined forms of behaviour. Hymans are the beings who can be conscious of, and therefore responsible for, their existence. It is this capacity to become aware of one’s own being which distinguishes the human being from other beings, as far as we know. Humans are not only being-in-itself, as all beings are, but also being-for-itself. They are the person-who-is-responsible-for-one’s-own-existence choosing. If the reader will keep in mind that being is a participle, a verb form implying someone in the process of being something, the full meaning of the term human being will be clearer. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
We can understand another human being only as we see what one is moving toward, what one is becoming; and we can know ourselves only as we project our potentia in action. The significant tense for human beings is thus the future—that is to say, the critical question is what I am pointing toward, becoming, what I will be in the immediate future. Thus, being in the human sense is not given once and for all. It does not unfold automatically as the cypress tree does from the seed. For an intrinsic and inseparable element in being human is self-consciousness. If one is to become oneself, humans are the particular being who has to be aware of oneself, be responsible for oneself. As far as we know, human beings are also the particular being who knows that at some future moment one will not be; one is the being who is always in a dialectical relation with nonbeing, death. And one not only knows one will sometime not be, but one can, in one’s own choices one makes once and for all at the point of considering suicide; it reflects to some degree a choice made at every instant. The profound awareness of human beings is one pictured with incomparable beauty. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
The do-it-yourself movement has accompanied, paradoxically, increasing specialization in the occupational sphere. As one’s job narrows, perhaps, one seeks the challenge of new skill-acquisition in the Cresleigh Home. However, specialization also means that one’s interpersonal encounters with artisans in the Cresleigh Home proliferate and become more impersonal. It is not a matter of familiar encounter with the local smith or grocer—a few well-known individuals performing a relatively large number of functions, and with whom one’s casual interpersonal contacts may be a source of satisfaction, and are in any case a testimony to the stability and meaningful interrelatedness of human affairs. One finds instead a multiplicity of narrow specialists—each perhaps a stranger (the same type of repair may be performed by a different person each time). Every relationship, such as it is, must start from scratch, and it is small wonder that the householder turns away from such an unrewarding prospect in apathy and despair. Americans thus find themselves in a vicious circle, in which their extrafamilial relationships are increasingly arduous, competitive, trivial, and irksome, in part as a result of efforts to avoid or minimize potentially irksome or competitive relationships. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
As the few vestiges of stable and familiar community life erode, the desire for a simple, cooperative life style grows in intensity. The most seductive appeal of radical ideologies for Americans consists in the fact that all in one way or another attack the competitive foundations of our society. Each touches a responsive doubt, and the stimuli arousing this doubt must be carefully unearthed and rooted out, just as the Puritan must unearth and root out the stimuli of the pleasures of the flesh that excite one. Both efforts are ambivalent, since, the seek and destroy process is a part a quest for the stimulus itself. The Puritanical censor both wants the stimuli of the pleasures of the flesh and is in part of a quest to destroy it, and one’s job enables one to gratify both of these contradictory desires. There is a similar prurience in the efforts of groups such as the House UnAmerican Activities Committee to uncover subversion. Just as the censor gets to experience far more pornography than the average human, so the Congressional red-baiter gets to hear as much Anti-Patriot ideology as one wants, which is apparently quite a lot. Now it may be objected that American society is far less competitive than it once was, and the appeal of radical ideologies should hence be diminished. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
A generation of critics has argued that the entrepreneurial individualist of the past has been replaced by a bureaucratic, security-minded, Organization Human. Much of this historical drama was written through the simple device of comparing yesterday’s owner-president with today’s assistant sales manager; certainly these nostalgia-merchants never visited a nineteenth-century company town. Another distortion is introduced by the fact that it was only the most ruthlessly competitive robber barons who survived to tell us how it was. Little is written about the neighbourhood store that extended credit to the less affluent, or how Mrs. Sarah Winchester paid her employees three times the national average and built houses for them and their families on her estate around her mansion (unfortunately most the Victorian homes that were around the mansion were destroyed, but the mansion still stands as well as one guest house), or the small town industry that refused to lay off local workers in hard times—they all went under together. And as for the organization humans—they left us no sags. Despite these biases real changes have undoubtedly occurred, but even if we grant that the business World as such was more competitive, the total environment contained more cooperative, stable, and personal elements. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
The individual worked in smaller firm with lower turnover in which one’s relationships were more enduring and less impersonal, and in which the ideology of Adam Smith was tempered by the fact that the participants were neighbours and might have been childhood playmates. Even if the business World was a cannibalistic as we imagine it (which seems highly unlikely), one encountered it as a deviant episode in what was otherwise a more comfortable and familiar environment than the organization human can find today in or out of one’s office. The organization human complex is simply an attempt to restore the personal, particularistic, paternalistic environment of the family business and the company town; and the other-directed “group think” of the suburban community is a desperate attempt to bring some old-fashioned small-town collectivism into the transient and impersonal life-style of the suburb. The social critics of the 1950’s were so preoccupied with assailing these rather synthetic substitutes for traditional forms of human interdependence that they lost sight of the underlying pathogenic forces that produced them. Medical symptoms usually result from attempts made by the body to counteract disease, and attacking such symptoms often aggravates and prolongs the illness. This appears to be the case with the feeble and self-defeating efforts of twentieth-century Americans to find themselves a viable social context. #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
“And now, it came to pass in the twenty and sixth year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi, behold, when the Lamanites awoke on the first morning of the first month, behold, they found Amalickiah was dead in his own tent; and they also saw that Teancum was ready to give them battle on that day. And now, when the Lamanites saw this they were affrighted; and they abandoned their design in marching into the land northward, and retreated with all their army into the city of Mulek, and sought protection in their fortifications. And it came to pass that the brother of Amalickiah was appointed king over the people; and his name was Ammoron; thus king Ammoron, the brother of king Amalickiah, was appointed to reign in his stead. And it came to pass that he did command that his people should maintain those cities, which they had taken by the shedding of blood; for they had not taken any cities save they had lost much blood. And now, Teancum saw that the Lamanites were determined to maintain those cities which they had taken, and those parts of the land which they had obtained possession of; and also seeing the enormity of their number, Teancum thought it was not expedient that he should attempt to attack them in their forts. #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
“However, he kept his men around about, as if making preparations for war; yea, and truly he was preparing to defend himself against them, by casting up walls round about and preparing places of resort. And it came to pass that he kept thus preparing for war until Moroni had sent a large number of humans to strengthen his army. And Moroni also sent orders unto him that he should retain all the prisoners who fell into his hands; for as the Lamanites had taken many prisoners, that he should retain all the prisoners of the Lamanites as a ransom for those whom the Lamanites had taken. And he also sent orders unto him that he should fortify the land Bountiful, and secure the narrow pass which led into the land northward, lest the Lamanites should obtain that point and should have power to harass them on every side. And Moroni also sent unto him, desiring him that he would be faithful in maintaining the quarter of the land, and that he would seek every opportunity to scourge the Lamanites in that quarter, as much as in his power, that perhaps he might take again by stratagem or some other way those cities which had been taken out of their hands; and that he also would fortify and strengthen the cities round about, which had not fallen into the hands of the Lamanites. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26
“And he also said unto him, I would come unto you, but behold, the Lamanites are upon us in the borders of the land by the west sea; and behold, I go against them, therefore I cannot come unto you. Now, the king (Ammoron) had departed out of the land of Zarahemla, and had made known unto the queen concerning the death of his brother, and had gathered together a large number of humans, and had marched forth against the Nephites on the borders by the west sea. And thus he was endeavouring to harass the Nephites, and to draw away a part of their forces to that part of the land, while he had left to possess the cities which he had taken, that they should also harass the Nephites on the borders by the east sea, and should take possession of their lands as much as it was in their power, according to the power of their armies. And thus were the Nephites in those dangerous circumstances in the ending of the twenty and sixth year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi. However, behold, it came to pass in the twenty and seventh year of the reign of the judges, that Teancum, by the command of Moroni—who has established armies to protect the south and the west borders of the land, and had begun his march towards the land Bountiful, that he might assist Teancum with is humans in retaking the cities which they had lost– #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
“And it came to pass that Teancum had received orders to make an attack upon the city of Mulek, if it were possible retake it. And it came to pass that Teancum made preparations to makes an attack upon the city of Mulek, and march forth with one’s army against the Lamanites; but he saw that it was impossible that he could overpower them while they were in their fortifications; therefore he abandoned his designs and returned again to the city Bountiful, to wait for the coming of Moroni, that he might receive strength to his army. And it came to pass that Moroni did arrive with his army at the land of Bountiful, in the latter end of the twenty and seventh year f the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi. And in the commencement of the twenty and eight year, Moroni and Teancum and many of the chief captains held a council of war—what they should do to cause the Lamanites to come out against them to battle; or that they might by some means flatter them out of their strongholds, that they might gain advantage over them and take again the city of Mulek. And it came to pass they sent embassies to the army of the Lamanites, which protected the city of Mulek, to their leader, whose name was Jacob, desiring hm hat he would come out with is armies to meet them upon the plains between the two cities. #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
“However, behold, Jacob, who was a Zoramite, would not come out with his army to meet them upon the plains. And it came to pass that Moroni, having no hopes of meeting them upon fair grounds, therefore, he resolved upon a plan that he might decoy the Lamanites out of their strongholds. Therefore he caused that Teancum should take a small number of humans and march down near the seashore; and Moroni and his army, by night, marched in the wilderness, on the west of the city Mulek; and thus, on the morrow, when guards of the Lamanites had discovered Teancum, they ran and told it unto Jacob, their leader. And it came to pass that the armies of the Lamanites did march forth against Teancum, supposing by their numbers to overpower Teancum because of the smallness of his numbers. And as Teancum saw the armies of the Lamanites coming out against him he began to retreat down by the seashore, northward. And it came to pass that when the Lamanites saw that he began to flee, they took courage and pursued them with vigour. And while Teancum was thus leading away the Lamanites who were pursuing them in vain, behold, Moroni commanded that a part of his army who were with him should march forth into the city, and take possession of it. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
“However, behold, Jacob, who was a Zoramite, would not come out with his army to meet them upon the plains. And it came to pass that Moroni, having no hopes of meeting them upon fair grounds, therefore, he resolved upon a plan that he might decoy the Lamanites out of their strongholds. Therefore he caused that Teancum should take a small number of humans and march down near the seashore; and Moroni and his army, by night, marched in the wilderness, on the west of the city Mulek; and thus, on the morrow, when guards of the Lamanites had discovered Teancum, they ran and told it unto Jacob, their leader. And it came to pass that the armies of the Lamanites did march forth against Teancum, supposing by their numbers to overpower Teancum because of the smallness of his numbers. And as Teancum saw the armies of the Lamanites coming out against him he began to retreat down by the seashore, northward. And it came to pass that when the Lamanites saw that he began to flee, they took courage and pursued them with vigour. And while Teancum was thus leading away the Lamanites who were pursuing them in vain, behold, Moroni commanded that a part of his army who were with him should march forth into the city, and take possession of it. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
“And thus they did, and slew all those who had been left to protect the city, yea, all those who would not yield up their weapons of war. And thus Moroni had obtained possession of the city Mulek with a part of his army, while he marched with the remainder to meet the Lamanites when they should return from the pursuit of Teancum. And it came to pass that the Lamanites did pursue Teancum until they came near the city Bountiful, and then they were met by Lehi and a small army, which had been left to protect the city Bountiful. And now behold, when the chief captains of the Lamanites had beheld Lehi with his army coming against the, they fled in much confusion, lest perhaps they should not obtain the city Mulek before Lehi should overcome them; for they were wearied because of their march, and the humans of Lehi were fresh. Now the Lamanites did not know that Moroni had been in their rear with his army; and all they feared was Lehi and his men. Now Lehi was not desirous to overtake them till they should meet Moroni and his army. And it came to pass that before the Lamanites had retreated far they were surrounded by the Nephites, by the humans retreated far they were surrounded by the Nephites, by the humans of Moroni on the one hand, and the humans of Lehi on the other, all of whom were fresh and full of strength. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
“However, the Lamanites were wearied because of their long march. And Moroni commanded his humans that they should fall upon them until they had given up their weapons of war. And it came to pass that Jacob, being their leader, being also a Zoramite, and having an unconquerable spirit, he le the Lamanites forth to battle with exceeding fury against Moroni. Moroni being in their course of march, therefore Jacob was determined to slay them and cut his way through the city of Mulek. However, behold, Moroni and his humans were more powerful; therefore they did not give way before the Lamanites. And it came to pass that they fought on both hands with exceeding fury; and there were many slain on both sides; yea, and Moroni was wounded and killed. And Lehi pressed upon their rear with such fury with his strong humans, that the Lamanites in the rear delivered up their weapons of war; and the remainder of them, being much confused, knew not whither to go or to strike. Now Moroni seeing their confusion, he said unto them: If ye will bring forth your weapons of war and deliver them up, behold we will forbear shedding your blood. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
“And it came to pass that when the Lamanites had heard these words, their chief captains, all those who were not slain, came forth and threw down their weapons of war at the feet of Moroni, and also commanded their humans that they should do the same. However, behold, there were any that would not; and those who would not deliver up their swords were taken and bound, and their weapons of war were taken from them, and they were compelled to march with their brethren forth int the land Bountiful. And now the number of prisoners who were taken exceeded more than the number of those who had been slain, yea, more than those who had been slain on both sides,” reports Alma 52.1-40. He walked the path that descends to death; Himself still living, He braved the journey and brought rebirth to those beyond hope dwelling in the coldest regions, living in the halls of Earth. Facing Death boldly, He led him to love and taught him the secrets that only He knew. It was His great courage that taught us to dare and His example that we should follow in the heart of trouble that may beset us. Come, my beloved, with chorus of praise, welcome Bride Sabbath, the Queen of the days. “Keep and Remember!”—in divine Word He that is One Alone, made His will heard; One is the name of Him, One is the Lord! His are the fame and the glory and praise! #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
Cresleigh Homes
It may be warm, but we still feel the fall spirit creeping in! 🍂 Have you started decorating your home for fall?
If you are stumped on where to start, keep an eye out for our upcoming blog post for how to get into the fall spirit! 😍 https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/
Waiting for the Angel to Stir the Water, I Realized I am Almost a God the Creator—The World I See is My World!
The faces of the past are like leaves that settle to the ground, they may the Earth rich and thick, so that new fruit will come forth every Summer. Radio and television have contributed greatly to the demise of the art of conversation. Scientist have attempted to pin down the difference between the effects of radio and television and have not as yet been able to turn up any solid results. It seems to me that neither radio nor television is an agent of dialogue. They work indirectly. In both of them there is someone on the giving end and someone on the receiving end. There can be no contradictions, no back talk. When the radio or TV is turned on, conversation stops. Radio and TV can create the impression of conversation, but they cannot really make it come about. That, I think, is a privilege reserved for living human beings. The crucial issue is whether radio and television invite us, stimulate us, challenge us to converse or whether they are inimical to the conditions that make conversation possible. However, in that regard radio seems less harmful to me than television. Television encourages passivity, a comfortable consumer mentality, more than any other medium. It is the most successful means we have ever developed to help us “pass time.” However, real conversation demands time. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
If we pass our time and kill our time, conversation cannot flourish. Radio, if I am seeing things rig, does not exert so strong an attraction. It promotes and demands more alertness, more imagination. It could be, if it wanted to be, an inexhaustible source of material for conversation. It cannot offer conversation itself, but it can offer the stuff of conversation. It can point us toward other, more basic and direct means of communication, calling our attention, say, to the uniqueness and delight of face-to-face conversation. In many cases, when people turn on the radio, they are still free. However, when an individual turns on the TV and there is a program that interests them, they become addicted to them and do not want to move from in front of the screen. With the assistance of radio technology, one can listen to a conversation somewhat in the same way that they listen to someone else speaking on the telephone, and to be honest, it can be much better than the gibberish and chatter coming out of most people’s mouths because there is a topic that is meant to keep people interested. What we hear on the radio is not, of course, as personal as a telephone conversation, but we take both the telephone and radio in stride. We are not fascinated by them, and so I can truly say that we are free either to listen to the radio or not listen to it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
My reaction to television is quite different. With television I lose a bit of my freedom. The minute the set is turned on and I see the picture on it, I experience what I would hesitate to call a compulsion but what is certainly a strong impulse or inclination to watch, even if I know intellectually that the program is utter drivel. I do not means to say that everything on television is drivel, some of it is very fascinating and highlights lifestyles we may be interested in, or inform of about myths we what to know about, some people even use television shows like a book club and discuss them so they forego sin by gossiping about real life people. People feel drawn to watch TV because it transports them to other realities they want to explore. Television holds a fascination far greater than that of radio. It exerts a kind of psychological spell that cannot be explained in terms of the content of any particular program. I have often asked myself what this fascination is, and I think it is rooted in some very profound level of our nature: By merely pressing a button, we can summon another World into our living rooms. That appeals to profound magical instincts. With television I become a kind of god. I can get rid of the reality I actually live with, and in its place I can create a new reality that appears when I press the button. #RandolpHarris 3 of 23
I am almost God the Creator. The World I see is my World. That reminds me of a story that not only illustrates this point vividly but also has the advantage of being true. A father and his six-year-old son were riding in the family car on a rainy, stormy day. They had a flat tire and had to stop to change it. Given the weather, that was a thoroughly unpleasant task, and the boy said to his father, “Daddy, can we not change to a different channel?” that is the way the child saw the World. If this one does not suit me, I will switch to another one. My wife recently read a novel by a Polish author and then told me a story, which I found utterly intriguing. The novel tells about the son of a very wealthy and eccentric man. The body grows up in his parental house but in total isolation. All he has available to him is a television set. He leaves it on all day, and he thinks that what he sees on it is reality (acute television intoxication). The young man never says a word, cannot say a word, because he knows nothing. All he can do is watch, because for him the World is nothing but a television show. However, precisely because he says nothing and because he eventually winds up in the house of one of the most powerful men in America, people think he must be terribly important. Pretty soon everyone knows his name, and in the end he is nominated for president because he never says anything and has not any opinions at all. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
This story illustrates just what I have been talking about. Reality and what we see in television have become one, and I think that this experience of being able to press a button and makes another World become a reality is—as you have said—a profound, atavistic experience and one that we find incredibly seductive. That is why television has no need, as it were, to offer anything “good.” Its appeal lies in the very nature of the medium. People are drawn to it the way they are to shooting star or to any other exciting spectacle—where they can remain spectators and are in no way prepared to take any action themselves. The flip side of this illusion of power (that can be had by pressing a button) is, then, total passivity. With radio, the possibility still remains that listening can be a kind of response, a predisposition to activity that should not be confused with merely waiting for enlightenment. Television has brought about drastic changes in our listening habits. Now that television has gotten people of the habit of attending to anything fully and closely, we can no longer assume that we have our listeners’ attention. Television has reduced radio to a more modest role. Indeed, radio hardly qualifies as a mass medium any more—a situation for which we should perhaps be grateful. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Should not radio therefore be defining new tasks for itself that will take into account these differences we have been discussing here? I know that South German Radio has offered an extensive series of programs covering subjects ordinarily treated in university courses. The language has been somewhat simpler perhaps, but that is all to the good. (If instructors used simpler language to convey more content, it would be an improvement in our university courses.) This, it seems to me, is an admirable task for radio and one in which it can fill a significant educational role. It is remarkable with how little concentration people think, live, and work these days. Work is so fragmented and shattered that concentration is usually only mechanical and partial. We rarely encounter that full concentration that involves the whole person. A worker on an assembly line who has to tighten the same screw over and over again needs a certain kind of concentration is usually only mechanical and partial. We rarely encounter that full concentration that involves the whole person. A worker on an assembly line who has to tighten the same screw over and over again needs a certain kind of concentration to keep up one’s pace, but this type of concentration is capable of listening without one’s thoughts wandering off; one will not try to do five things at once because one cannot find any one thing that really satisfies one. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
And, of course, without concentration we cannot accomplish anything. Everything we do without concentration will have little value. If concentration is lacking, our activities will not provide us or anyone else with satisfaction. That holds true for all of us, not just for great artist or scientist. I now turn to the notion of reflective equilibrium. The need for this idea arises as follows. According to the provisional aim of mortal philosophy, one might says that justice as fairness is the hypothesis that the principles which would be chosen in the original position are identical with those that match our considered judgments and so these principles describe our sense of justice. However, this interpretation is clearly oversimplified. In describing our sense of justice an allowance must be made for the likelihood that considered judgments are no doubt subject to certain irregularities and distortions despite the fact that they are rendered under favourable circumstances. When a person is presented with an intuitively appealing account of one’s sense of justice (one, say, which embodies various reasonable and natural presumptions), one may well revise one’s judgments to conform to its principles even though the theory does not fit one’s existing judgments exactly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
One is especially likely to do this if one can find an explanation for the deviations which undermines one’s confidence in one’s original judgments and if the conception presented yields a judgment which one finds one can now accept. From the standpoint of moral philosophy, the best account of a person’s sense of justice is not the one which fits one’s judgments prior to one’s examining any conception of justice, but rather the one which matches one’s judgments in reflective equilibrium. As we have seen, this state is one reached after a person has weighed various proposed conceptions and one has either revised one’s judgments to accord with one of them or held fast to one’s initial convictions (and the corresponding conception). The notion of reflective equilibrium introduces some complications that call for comment. For one thing, it is a notion characteristic of the study of principles which govern actions shaped by self-examination. Moral philosophy is Socratic: we may wan to change our present considered judgments once their regulative principles are brought to light. And we may want to do this even though these principles are a perfect fit. A knowledge of these principles may suggest further reflections that lead us to revise our judgments. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
This feature is not peculiar though to moral philosophy, or to the study of other philosophical principles such as those of induction and scientific method. For example, while we may not expect a substantial revision of our sense of correct grammar in view of a linguistic theory the principles of which seem especially natural to us, such as change is not inconceivable, and no doubt our sense of grammaticalness may be affected to some degree anyway by this knowledge. However, these is a contrast, say, with physics. To take an extreme case, if we have an accurate account of motions of the Heavenly bodies that we do not find appealing, we cannot alter these motions to conform to a more attractive theory. It is simply good fortune that the principles of celestial mechanics have their intellectual beauty. There are, however, several interpretations of reflective equilibrium. For the nation varies depending upon whether one is to be presented with only those descriptions which more or less match one’s existing judgments except for minor discrepancies, or whether one is to be presented with all possible descriptions to which one might plausibly conform one’s judgements together with all relevant philosophical arguments for them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
In the first case we would be describing a person’s sense of justice more or less as it is although allowing for the smoothing out of certain irregularities; in the second case a person’s sense of justice may or may not undergo a radical shift. Clearly it is the second kind of reflective equilibrium that one is concerned with in moral philosophy. To be sure, it is doubtful where one can ever reach this state. For even if the idea of all possible descriptions and of all philosophically relevant arguments is well-defined (which is a questionable one), we cannot examine each of them. The most we can do is to study the conceptions of justice known to us through the tradition of moral philosophy and any further ones that occur to us, and then to consider these. This is pretty much what I shall do, since in presenting justice as fairness I shall compare its principles and arguments with a few other familiar views. In light of these remarks, justice as fairness can be understood as saying that the two principles previously mentioned would be chosen in the original position in preference to other traditional conceptions of justice, for example, those of utility and perfection; and that these principles give a better match with our considered judgments on reflection than these recognized alternatives. Thus justice as fairness moves us closer to the philosophical ideal; it does not, of course, achieve it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
This explanation of reflective equilibrium suggests straightway a number of further questions. For example, does a reflective equilibrium (in the sense of the philosophical ideal) exist? If s, is it unique? Even if it is unique, can it be reached? Perhaps the judgments from which we begin, or the course of reflection itself (or both), affect the resting point, if any, that we eventually achieve. It would be useless, however, to speculate about these matters here. They are far beyond our reach. I shall not even ask whether the principles that characterize one person’s considered judgments are the same as those that characterize another’s. I shall take for granted that these principles are either approximately the same for persons whose judgments are in reflective equilibrium, or if not, that their judgments divide along a few lines represented by the family of traditional doctrines that I shall discuss. (Indeed, one person may find oneself torn between opposing conceptions at the same time.) If human’s conceptions of justice finally turn out to differ, the ways in which they do is a matter of first importance. Of course we cannot know how these conceptions vary, or even whether they do, until we have a better account of their structure. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
And this we now lack, even in the case of one human, or homogeneous group of humans. Here too there is likely to be a similarity with linguistics: if we can describe one person’s sense of grammar we shall surely know many things about the general structure of language. Similarly, if we should be able to characterize one (educated) person’s sense of justice, we would have a good beginning toward a theory of justice. We may suppose that everyone has in oneself the whole form of a moral conception. So for the purposes of this essay, the views of the reader and the author are the only ones that count. The opinions of others are useful only to clear our own heads. I wish to stress that a theory of justice is precisely that, namely, theory. It is a theory of the moral sentiments (to recall an eighteenth-century title) setting out the principles governing our moral powers, or, more specifically, our sense of justice. These is a definite if limited class of facts against which conjectured principles can be checked, namely, our considered judgments in reflective equilibrium. A theory of justice is subject to the same rules of method as other theories. Definitions and analyses of meaning do not have a special place: definition is but one device used in setting up the general structure of theory. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Once the whole framework is worked out, definitions have no distinct status and stand or fall with the theory itself. In any case, it is obviously impossible to develop a substantive theory of justice founded solely on truths of logic and definition. The analysis of moral concepts and the a priori, however traditionally understood, is too slender a basis. Moral philosophy must be free to use contingent assumptions and general facts as it pleases. There is no other way to give an account of our considered judgments in reflective equilibrium. This is the conception of the subject adopted by most classical British writers through Sidgwick. I see no reason to depart from it. I believe that his view goes back in its essentials to Aristotle’s procedure in the Nicomachean Ethics. And Sidgwick thought of the history of moral philosophy as a series of attempts to state in full breadth and clearness those primary intuitions of Reason, by the scientific application of which the common moral thought of humankind may be at once systematized and corrected. He takes for granted that philosophical reflection will lead to revisions in our considered judgments, and although there are elements of epistemological intuitionism in his doctrine, these are not given much weight when unsupported by systematic considerations. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Moreover, if we can find an accurate account of our moral conceptions, then questions of meaning and justification may prove much easier to answer. Indeed some of them may no longer be real questions at all. Note, for example, the extraordinary deepening of our understanding of the meaning and justification of statements in logical and mathematics made possible by developments since Frege and Cantor. A knowledge of the fundamental structures of logic ad set theory and their relation to mathematics has transformed the philosophy of these subjects in a way that conceptual analysis and linguistic investigations never could. One has only to observe the effect of the division of theories into those which are decidable and complete, undecidable yet complete, and neither complete no decidable. The problem of meaning and truth in logic and mathematics is profoundly altered by the discovery of logical systems illustrating these concepts. Once the substantive content of moral conceptions is better understood, a similar transformation may occur. It is possible that convincing answers to questions of the meaning of justification or moral judgments can be found in no other way. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
I wish, then, to stress the central place of the study of out substantive moral conceptions. However, the corollary to recognizing their complexity is accepting the fact that our present theories are primitive and have great defect. We need to be tolerant of simplifications if they reveal and approximate the general outlines of our judgments. Objections by way of counterexamples are to be made with care, since these may tell us only what we know already, namely that our theory is wrong somewhere. The important thing is to find out how often and how far it is wrong. All theories are presumably mistaken in places. The real question at any given time is which of the views already proposed is the best approximation overall. To ascertain this some grasp of the structure of rival theories is surely necessary. It is for this reason that I have tried to classify and to discuss conceptions of justice by reference to their basic intuitive ideas, since these disclose the main difference between them. In presenting justice as fairness I shall contrast it with utilitarianism. I do this for various reasons, partly as an expository device, partly because the several variants of the utilitarian view have long dominated our philosophical tradition and continue to do so. And this dominance has been maintained despite the persistent misgivings that utilitarianism so easily arouses. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
The explanation for this peculiar state of affairs lies, I believe, in the fact that no constructive alternative theory has been advanced which has the comparable virtues of clarity and system and which at the same time allays these doubts. Intuitionism is not constructive, perfectionism is unacceptable. My conjecture is that the contract doctrine properly worked out can fill this gap. I think justice as fairness an endeavor in this direction. Of course the contract theory as I shall present it is subject to the strictures that we have just noted. It is no exception to the primitiveness that marks existing moral theories. It is disheartening, for example, how little can now be said about priority rules; and while a lexical ordering may serve fairly well for some important cases, I assume that it will not be completely satisfactory. Nevertheless, we are free to use simplifying devices, and this I have often done. We should view a theory of justice as a guiding framework designed to focus our moral sensibilities and to put before our intuitive capacities more limited and manageable questions for judgment. The principles of justice identify certain considerations as morally relevant and the priority rules indicate the appropriate precedence when these conflict, while the conception of the original position defines the underlying idea which is to inform our deliberations. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
If the scheme as a whole seems on reflection to clarify and to order our thoughts, and if it tends t reduce disagreements and to bring divergent convictions more in line, then it has done all that one may reasonably ask. Understood as parts of a framework that does indeed seem to help, the numerous simplifications may be regarded as provisionally justified. However, achieving this new vision of oneself—of who one would be—must not be presumed to be a mere snap of the fingers. It will require genuine openness to radical change in oneself, careful and creative instruction, and abundant supplies of divine grace. For most people all of this only comes to them after they reach the lowest level of their lives or the worst point of a decline, and discover the total hopelessness of being who they are. Most people cannot envision who they would be without the fears, angers, lusts, power ploys, and woundedness with which they have lived so long. They identify with their habit-worn feelings. When Jesus said to the man by the pool of Bethesda, waiting for the angel to stir the waters, “Wilt thou be made whole?” he was not just passing the time of day (John 5.6). #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
We are not told how old he was, but this man had been in his impotent condition for thirty-eight years! If made whole, he would have to deal with a career change of immense proportions. To all his relatives and acquaintances he would no longer be “the one whom we take to the pool every day to wait for the angel.” He would now be…What? Who? How would he identify himself? How would be now relate to others and they to him? He might even have to get a job. Doing what? However, really, this man’s problems was nothing compared to an individual undergoing the transformation of his feelings (emotions, sensations, desires) from those he learned in the home, school, and playground as he grew up to those that characterize the inner beings of Jesus Christ. He is not no to be one who will spend hours watching TV, listening to the radio, fantasizing sensual indulgence or revenge, or who will try to dominate or injure others in attitude, word, or deed. He will no repay evil for evil—push for push, blow for blow, taunt for taunt, hatred for hatred, contempt for contempt. He will not be always on the hunt to satisfy his lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride of life (1 John 2.16). #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
No wonder he has no real ideal who he will be; and he must content himself with the mere identity: “apprentice of Jesus.” That is the starting point from which his new identity will emerge, and it is in fact powerful enough to bear the load. “Behold, now it came to pass that the people of Nephi were exceedingly rejoiced, because the Lord had again delivered them out of the hands of their enemies; therefore they gave thanks unto the Lord their God; yea, and they did fast much and pray much, and they did worship God; yea, and they did fast much and pray much, and they did worship God with exceedingly great joy. And it came to pass in the nineteenth year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi, that Alma came unto his son Helaman and said unto him: Believest thou the words which I spake unto thee concerning those records which have been kept? And Helaman said unto him: Yea, I believe. And Alma said again: Believest thou in Jesus Christ, who shall come? And he said: Yea, I believe all the words which thou has spoken. And Alma said unto him again: Will ye keep my commandments? And he said: Yea, I will keep thy commandments with all my heart. Then Alma said unto him: Blessed art thou; and the Lord shall prosper thee in this land. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
“However, behold, I have somewhat to prophesy unto thee; but what I prophesy unto thee ye shall not make known; yea, what I prophesy unto thee shall not be made known, even until the prophecy is fulfilled; therefore write the words which I shall say. And these are the words: Behold, I perceive that this very people, the Nephites, according to the spirit of revelation which is in me four hundred years from the time that Jesus Christ shall manifest himself unto them, shall dwindle in unbelief. Yea, and then shall they see wars and pestilences, yea, famines and bloodshed, even until the people of Nephi shall become extinct—yea, and this because they shall dwindle in unbelief and fall into the works of darkness, and lasciviousness, and all manner of iniquities; yea, I say unto you, that because they shall sin against so great light and knowledge, yea, I say unto you, that from that day, even the fourth generation shall not pass away before this great iniquity shall come. And when that great day cometh, behold, the time very soon cometh that those who are now, or the seed of those who are no numbered among the people of Nephi, shall no more be numbered among the people of Nephi. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
“However, whosoever remaineth, and is not destroyed in that great and dreadful say, shall be numbered among the Lamanites, and shall become like unto them, all, save it be a few who shall be called the disciples of the Lord; and them shall the Lamanites pursue even until they shall become extinct. And now, because of iniquity, this prophecy shall be fulfilled. And now it came to pass that after Alma had said these things to Helaman, he blessed him, and also his other sons; and he also blessed the Earth for the righteous sake. And he said: Thus saith the Lord God—Cursed shall be the land, yea, this land, unto every nation, kindred, tongue, and people, unto destruction, which do wickedly, when they are fully ripe; and as I have said so shall it be; for this is the cursing and the blessing of God upon the land, for the Lord cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance. And now, when Alma has said these words he blessed the church, yea, all those who should stand fast in the faith from that time henceforth. And when Alma had done this he departed out of the land of Zarahemla, as if to go into the land of Melek. And it came to pass that he was never heard of more; as to his death or burial we know not of. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
“Behold, this we know, that he was a righteous man; and the saying when abroad in the church that he was taken up by the Spirit, or buried by the hand of the Lord, even as Moses. However, behold, the scripture saith the Lord took Moses unto himself; and we suppose that he has also received Alma in the spirit, unto himself; therefore, for this cause we know nothing concerning his death and burial. And now it came to pass in the commencement of the nineteenth year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi, that Helaman went forth among the people to declare the word unto them. For behold, because of their wars with the Lamanites and the many little dissensions and disturbances which had been among the people, it became expedient that the word of God should be declared among them, yea, and that a regulation should be made throughout the church. Therefore, Helaman and his brethren went forth to establish the church again in all the land, yea, in every city throughout all the land which was possessed by the people of Nephi. And it came to pass that they did appoint priests and teachers throughout all the land, over all the churches. And now it came to pass that after Helaman and his brethren had appointed priests and teachers over the churches that there arose a dissension among them, and they would not give heed to the words of Helaman and his brethren. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
“However, they grew proud, being lifted up in their hearts, because of their exceedingly great riches; therefore they grew rich in their own eyes, and would not give heed to their words, to walk uprightly before God,” reports Alma 45.1-24. Most High, from all directions about me, the spirits are praying. The spirits of east and south are praying. The spirits of west and north are praying. The spirits below and above are praying. The spirits are praying with me. We all together are praying to you, Ancient one. Please open Heaven’s door. Looking out at my yard, I see a leaf falling from a tree, and I raise a prayer of awe for God who caused such a marvel to me. This is a sign of the necessity of Grace, the Fatherly tenderness of God, the might of the all-prevailing Name; which are never weak, never diluted, never drawling, never ill-arranged, never provocation to listlessness; which exhibit an exquisite skill of antithesis and a rhythmical harmony which he ear is loth to lose. With a marvellous flexibility, my Lord, thank you for accepting all of your children with all of the different conditions of the human spirit. This is an example of a rich variety of construction, subject to a general law of threefold division. We give glory to God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Humans Expect Something Extraordinary: The Coming of the New World Order in the Near Future!
I am an invisible person. No, I am not a spook…nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a human of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Creativity is a yearning for immortality. We have seen that intuitionism raises the question of the extent to which it is possible to give a systematic account of our considered judgments of the just and unjust. In particular, it holds that no constructive answer can be given to the problem of assigning weights to competing principles of justice. Here at least we must rely on our intuitive capacities. Classical utilitarianism tries, of course, to avoid the appeal to intuition altogether. It is a single-principle conception with one ultimate standard; the adjustment of weights is, in theory anyway, settled by reference to the principle of utility. Mill thought that there must be but one such standard, otherwise there would be no umpire between competing criteria, and Sidgwick argues at length that the utilitarian principle is the only one which can assume this role. They maintain that our moral judgments are implicitly utilitarian in the sense that when confronted with a clash of precepts, or with notions which are vague and imprecise, we have no alternative except to adopt utilitarianism. #RandolphHarris 1 of 27
Mills and Sidgwick believe that at some point we must have a single principle to straighten out and to systematize our judgments. Undeniably one of the great attractions of the classical doctrines is the way it faces the priority problem and tries to avoid relying on intuition. As I already remarked, there is nothing necessarily irrational in the appeal to intuition to settle questions of priority. We must recognize the possibility that there is no way to get beyond a plurality of principles. No doubt any conception of justice will have to rely on intuition to some degree. Nevertheless, we should do what we can to reduce the direct appeal to reduce the direct appeal to our considered judgments. For if humans balance final principles differently, as presumably they often do, then their conceptions of justice are different. The assignment of weights is an essential and not a minor part of a conception of justice. If we cannot explain how these weights are to be determined by reasonable ethical criteria, the means of rational discussion have come to an end. An intuitionist conception of justice is, one might say, but had a conception. We should do what we can to formulate explicit principles for the priority of problem, even though the dependence on intuition cannot be eliminated entirely. #RandolphHarris 2 of 27
In justice as fairness the role of intuition is limited in several ways. Since the whole question is rather difficult, I shall only make a few comments here the full sense of which will not be clear until later on. The first point is connected with the fact that the principles of justice are those which would be chosen in the original position. They are the outcome of a certain choice situation. Now being rational, the persons in the original position recognize that they should consider the priority of these principles. For if they wish to establish agreed standards for adjudicating their claims on one another, they will need principles for assigning weights. They cannot assume that their intuitive judgment of priority will in general be the same; given their different positions in society they surely will not. Thus I suppose that in the original positions the parties try to reach some agreement as to how the principles of justice are to be balanced. Now part of the value of the notion of choosing principles is that the reasons which underlie their adoption in the first place may also support giving them certain weights. Since in justice as fairness the principles of justice are not thought of as self-evident, but have their justification in the fact that they would be chosen, we may find in the grounds for their acceptance some guidance or limitation as to how they are to be balanced. #RandolphHarris 3 of 27
Given the situation of the original position, it may be clear that certain priority rules are preferable to others for much the same reasons that principles are initially assented to. By emphasizing the role of justice and the special features of the initial choice situation, the priority problem may prove more tractable. A second possibility is that we may be able to find principles which can be put in what I shall call a serial or lexical order. The term “lexicographical” drives from the fact that most familiar examples of such an ordering is that of words in a dictionary. To see this, substitute numerals for letters, putting “1” for “a” “2” for “b” and so on, and then rank the resulting strings of numerals from left to right, moving to the right only when necessary to break ties. In general, a lexical ordering cannot be represented by a continuous real-valued utility function; such a ranking violates the assumption of continuity. In the history of moral philosophy the conception of a lexical order occasionally appears though it is not explicitly discussed. A clear example may be found in comparing pleasures of the same kind, we use their intensity and duration; in comparing pleasures of different kinds, we must consider their duration and dignity jointly. Pleasure of higher kinds may have a worth greater than those of the lower kinds however great the latter’s intensity and duration. #RandolphHarris 4 of 27
It also is natural to rank moral worth as lexically prior to non-moral values. And of course the primacy of justice, as well as the priority of right are further cases of such an ordering. The theory of utility in economics began with an implicit recognition of the hierarchical structure of wants and the priority of moral consideration. (The correct term of lexical order is “lexicographical,” but it is too cumbersome.) This is an order which requires us to satisfy the first principle in the ordering before we can move on to the second, the second before we consider the third, and so on. A principle does not come into play until those previous to it are either fully met or do not apply. A serial ordering avoids, then, having to balance principles at all; those earlier in the ordering have an absolute weigh, so to speak, with respect to later ones, and hold without exception. We can regard such a ranking as analogous to a sequence of constrained maximum principles. For we can suppose that any principle in order is to be maximized subject to the condition that preceding principles are fully satisfied. As an important special cast I shall, in fact, propose an ordering of this kind by ranking the principle of equal liberty prior to the principle regulating economic and social inequalities. #RandolphHarris 5 of 27
This means, in effect, that the basic structure of society is to arrange the inequalities of wealth and authority in ways consistent with the equal liberties required by the preceding principle. Certainly the concept of a lexical, or serial, order does not offhand seem very promising. Indeed, it appears to offend our sense of moderation ad good judgment. Moreover, it presupposes that the principles in the order be of a rather special kind. For example, unless the earlier principles have but a limited application and establish definite requirements which can be fulfilled, later principles will never come into play. Thus the principle of equal liberty can assume a prior position since it may, let us suppose, be satisfied. Whereas if the principle of utility were first, it would render otiose all subsequent criteria. I shall try to show that at least in certain social circumstances a serial ordering of the principles of justice offers an approximate solution to the priority problem. Finally, the dependence on intuition can be reduced by posing more limited questions and by substituting prudential for moral judgment. Thus someone faced with the principles of an intuitionist conception may rely that without some guidelines for deliberation one does not know what to say. One might maintain, for example, that one could not balance total utility against equality in the distribution of satisfaction. #RandolphHarris 6 of 27
Not only are the notions involved here too abstract and comprehensive for one to have any confidence in one’s judgement, but there are enormous complications in interpreting what they mean. The aggregative-distributive dichotomy is no doubt an attractive idea, but in this instance it seems unmanageable. It does not factor the problem of social justice into small enough parts. In justice as fairness the appeal to intuition is focused in two ways. First we single out a certain position in the social system from which the system is to be judged, and then we ask whether, from the standpoint of a representative human in this position, it would be rational to prefer this arrangement of the basic structure rather than that. Given certain assumptions, economic and social inequalities are to be judged in terms of the long-run expectations of the least advantaged social group. Of course, the specification of this group is not very exact, and certainly our prudential judgments likewise give considerable scope to intuition, since we may not be able to formulate the principle which determines them. Nevertheless, we have asked a much more limited question and have substituted for an ethical judgment a judgment of rational prudence. Often it is quite clear how we should decide. #RandolphHarris 7 of 27
The reliance on intuition is of a different nature and much less than in the aggregative-distributive dichotomy of the intuitionist conception. In addressing the priority problem the task is that of reducing and not of eliminating entirely the reliance on intuitive judgments. There is no reason to suppose that we can avoid all appeals to intuition, of whatever kind, or that we should try to. The practical aim is to reach a reasonable reliable agreement in judgment in order to provide a common conception of justice. If human’s intuitive priority judgments are similar, it does not matter, practically speaking, that they cannot formulate the principles exist. Contrary judgments, however, raise a difficulty, since the basis for adjudicating claims is to that extent obscure. Thus our object should be to formulate a conception of justice which, however much it may call upon intuition, ethical or prudential, tends to make our considered judgments of justice converge. If such a conception does exist, then, from the standpoint of the of the initial situation, the priority problem is not that of how to cope with the complexity of already given moral facts which cannot be altered. Instead, it is the problem of formulating reasonable and generally acceptable proposals for bringing about the desired agreements in judgment. #RandolphHarris 8 of 27
On a contract doctrine the moral facts are determined by the principles which would be chosen in the original position. These principles specify which considerations are relevant from the standpoint of social justice. Since it is up to the persons in the original position to choose these principles, it is for them to decide how simple or complex they want the moral facts to be. The original agreement settles how far they are prepared to compromise and to simplify in order to establish the priority rules necessary for a common conception of justice. I have reviewed two obvious and simple ways of dealing constructively with the priority problem: namely, either by a single overall principle, or by a plurality of principles in lexical order. Other ways no doubt exist, but I shall not consider what they might be. The traditional moral theories are for the most part single-principled or intuitionistic, so that the working out of a serial ordering is novelty enough for a first step. While it seems clear that, in general, a lexical order cannot be strictly correct, it may be an illuminating approximation under certain special though significant conditions. In this way it may indicate the larger structure of conceptions of justice and suggest the directions along which a closer fit can be found. #RandolphHarris 9 of 27
Since the spiritual life is instinctoid, all the techniques of subjective biology apply to its education. The spiritual life (B-values, B-fact, metaneeds, et cetera) can in principle be introspected. It has “impulse voices” or “inner signals” which, though weaker than basic needs, can yet be “heard,” and which therefore comes under the rubric of the “subjective biology” I have described. In principle, therefore, all the principles and exercises which help to develop (or teach) our sensory awareness, our body awarenesses, our sensitivities to the inner signals (given off by our needs, capacities, constitution, temperament, body et cetera)—all these apply also, though less strongly, to our inner metaneeds, id est, to the education of our yearnings for beauty, law, truth, perfection, et cetera. I have used the term “experientially empty” to describe those persons whose inner signals are either absent or remain unperceived. Perhaps we can also invent some such term as “experientially rich” to describe those who are so sensitive to the inner voices of the self that even the metaneeds can be consciously introspected and enjoyed. It is this experiential richness which in principle should be “teachable” or recoverable, I am confident, at least in degree, perhaps with the proper use of psychedelic chemicals, with Esalen-type, non-verbal methods, with prayer and contemplation techniques, with further study of peak-experiences or of B-cognition, et cetera. #RandolphHarris 10 of 27
The Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California, specializes in such methods. The tacit assumption underlying this new kind of education is that both the body and the “spirit” can be loved, and that they are synergic and hierarchically rather than mutually exclusive, id est, one can have both. Not only are humans PART of nature, and it part of them, but also they must be at least minimumly isomorphic (corresponding or similar in form and relations) with nature (similar to it) in order to be viable in it. It has evolved humans. Their communion with what transcends them therefore need not be defined as non-natural or supernatural. It may be seen as a “biological” experience. Perhaps human’s thrilling to nature (perceiving it as true, good, beautiful, et cetera) will one day be understood as a kind of self-recognition or self-experience, a way of being oneself and full functional, a way of being at home, a kind of biological authenticity, of “biological mysticism,” et cetera. Perhaps we can see mystical or peak-fusion not only as communion with that which is most worthy of love, but also as fusion with that which is, because humans belong there, being truly part of what is, and being, so to speak a member of the family: one direction in which we find increasing confidence is the conception that we are basically one with the cosmos instead of strangers to it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 27
This biological or evolutionary version of the mystic experience or the peak-experience—here perhaps has no different from the spiritual or religions experience—reminds us again that we must ultimately outgrow the obsolescent usage of “highest” as the opposite of “lowest” or “deepest.” Here the “highest” experience ever descried, the joyful fusion with the ultimate that humans can conceive, can be seen simultaneously as the deepest experience of our ultimate personal animality and specieshood, as the acceptance of our profound biological nature as isomorphic with nature in general. “And Jesus went out, and his disciples, into the towns of Caesarea Philippi: and by the way he asked his disciples, saying unto them, Whom do humans say that I am? And they answered, John the Baptist: but some say, Elias; and others, One of the prophets. And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ. And he charged them that they should tell no human of him. And he began to teach them, that the Son of humans must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be skilled, and after three days rise again. And he spake that saying openly. And Peter took him, and began to rebuke him. #RandolphHarris 12 of 27
“However, when he had turned about and looked on his disciples, he rebuked Peter saying, Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of humans,” reports Mark 8.27-33. This story is the center of Mark’s Gospel. And in this story we find the heart of the Christian message. The message is infinitely simple, yet rich and profound, and concentrated in four words: “Thou art the Christ.” Let us think about this message in the light of our story, which is the real beginning of the Passion and Death. Then Jesus and his disciples set out for the villages of Caesarea and Philippi, on a road between some unimportant villages, at a time which seems indefinite—“then.” However, on this road occurred the most important event of human history. It is the most important not only from the point of view of the believer, but also from the of the detached observer of World history. And this indefinite “the” pointed to the most definite and decisive moment in the experience of humankind, the moment in which one human dared to say to another: “Thou art Christ.” On the road, He inquired of Hid disciples, “Who do people say I am?” John the Baptist,” they told him, although some say that you are Elijah, and others, that you are one of the prophets.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 27
Why did they give Him titles that elevated Him above the ordinary human being? It was because they expected something extraordinary: the coming of the new World order in the near future. All generations of humankind had waited in vain for this stage of the World, in which justice and peace would reign. The people believed that their generation would witness its coming. However, before it would come, forerunners would have to appear, to announce its coming and to prepare the people. Elijah would come from Heaven, to which he had been elevated; perhaps Jeremiah would rise from the dead; or some other prophet would appear; even John the Baptist might return from his grave. They felt that behind the figure of this teaching and healing Rabbi some mysterious thing was hidden. They thought that He must be the mask for one of the forerunners, who would come to prepare the new and final period of history. That is what the disciple heard from the people. Although there have been two thousand years of Christianity, there are still such people. Jesus. For them, remains the forerunner. The new World and he who is to bring it in are still to come. #RandolphHarris 14 of 27
Justice and peace have not yet begun to rule. The new World may be near at hand, or it may be still far from us. In any case, it has not appeared. That is the characteristic feeling of the Jewish people, the feeling that prevents them from becoming Christian. It is also the feeling of large groups within present-day Christendom, the feeling that drives them to wait and to work for the World of peace and justice, although they are constantly disappointed, and constantly have to start over again. If Jesus should ask us today, “Who do people say that I am?” we should have to answer exactly as His first disciples did: that He was one of the forerunners, and although perhaps the greatest of them all, probably not the last one; a forerunner and a prophet, but not one who will fulfill all things. The reign of justice and peace, the new World has not yet come. For their use is not more for probation than for affecting and moving. For there are many forms which, though they mean the same, yet affect differently; as the difference is great in the piercing of that which is sharp and that which is flat, though the strength of the percussion be the same. Certainly there is no human who will not be more affected by hearing it said, Your enemies will be glad of this” ……than by hearing it said only, “This will be evil for you.” …these points and stings of words are by no means to be neglected. #RandolphHarris 15 of 27
Consider what has been said. In an abstract way, it has been said that an idea may or may not evoke an emotional response, many carry different degrees of emotional response, may call out different kinds of emotion in different persons. In a concrete way, it is being observed that a sharp instrument pierces easier than a dull one, though the force exerted be the same. Consider the economy in phrasing the abstract conception and note that it is instantly illuminated by the image of piercing. The abstraction and the image have been related analogically. Reason has been put to work and so has imagination. Even more interesting, because more subtle, is the pair of statements: This will be evil for you. Your enemies will be glad of this. The base of both statements was probably suggested by the stock, popular generalization: What is good for the virtuous human is evil for the bad human, and what is evil for the virtuous human is good for the bad human. As reason has applied the idea to a specific person or audience, the outcome is flat, literal statement: this will be evil for you. As imaginative reason has applied the idea—your enemies will be glad of this—concreteness of language and indirectness of reference have set up a context of allusiveness that might well lead a respondent to construct a clear, full image for the illusion oneself. #RandolphHarris 16 of 27
The illusion works through the principles of comparison and contrast, and so the intellect is served; the images are intimated, and so the imagination is invited to act. I have by me indeed a great many more Sophisms of the same kind, which I collected in my youth; but without their illustrations and answers, which I have not now the leisure to perfect; and to set forth the naked colours without their illustrations (especially as those above given appear in full dress) does not seem suitable. Ideas must be accessible to sense; that is, they must be images of one kind or another that the recipient can “see.” The imagination was not always directed, restrained, and bound by reason. It could serve a higher power than reason. It is the instrument of faith and divine grace as the faculty through which God communicated directly with humans. In matter of faith and religion our imagination raises itself above reason; not that divine illumination resides in the imagination; its seat being rather in the very citadel of the mind and understanding; but that the divine grace uses the motions of the imagination as an instrument of illumination, just as it uses the motions of the will as an instrument of virtue; which is the reason why religion ever sough access to the mind by similitudes, types, parables, visions, dreams. #RandolphHarris 17 of 27
Humans can learn of things divine from two sources: from nature or from God directly. If from nature, there can be two avenues of knowing. One is that which springs from sense, induction, reason, argument, according to the laws of Heaven and Earth. One is that which flashed upon the spirit of humans by an inward instinct, according to the law of conscience; which is a spark and relic of one’s primitive original purity. The almost universal belief of our times that when God drove humans from the Garden of Eden he vouchsafed them a vestige of knowledge of truth and goodness, a seed to which they could become sensitive and could learn to nourish. This kind of seed was in the citadel of the mind. However, humans also can learn of God directly. If they did, it would be through faith, a mysterious way that is based on the belief that the spirit is affected by spirit. Imagination is that modulation of spirit that is peculiarly sensitive to images and that is adept at reproducing and making them. So by nature imagination is a sensitive instrument, sensitive to its own mater, spirit, and sensitive to its own kind, similitudes. “And now, my son Helaman, I command you that ye take the records which have been entrusted with me; and I also command you that ye keep a record of this people, according as I have done, upon the plates of Nephi, and keep all these things sacred which I have kept, even as I have kept them; for it is for a wise purpose that they are kept. #RandolphHarris 18 of 27
“And these plates of brass, which contain these engravings, which have the records of the holy scriptures upon them, which have the genealogy of our forefathers, even from the beginning—Behold, it has been prophesied by our fathers, that they should be kept and handed down from one generation to another, and be kept and preserved by the hand of the Lord until they should go forth unto every nation, kindred, tongue, and people that they shall know of the mysteries contained thereon. And now behold, if they are kept they must retain their brightness; yea, and they will retain their brightness; yea, and also shall all the plates which do contain that which is holy writ. Now ye may suppose that this is foolishness in me; but behold I say unto you, that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass; and small means in many instances doth confound the wise. And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls. And now, it has hitherto been wisdom in God that these things should be preserved; for behold, they have enlarged the memory of this people, yea, and convinced many of the error of their ways, and brought them to the knowledge of their God unto the salvation of their souls. #RandolphHarris 19 of 27
“Yea, I say unto you, were it not for these things that record do contain, which are on these plates, Ammon and his brethren could not have convinced so many thousands of the Lamanites of the incorrect tradition of their fathers; yea, these records and their words brought them unto repentance; that is, they brought them to the knowledge of the Lord their God, and to rejoice in Jesus Christ their Redeemer. And who knoweth but what they will be the means of bringing many thousands of them, yea, and also many thousands of our stiffnecked brethren, the Nephites, who are now hardening their hearts in sin and iniquities, to the knowledge of their Redeemer? Now these mysteries are not yet fully made known unto me; therefore I shall forbear. And it may suffice if I only say that are preserved for a wise purpose, which purpose is known unto God; for he doth counsel in wisdom over all his works, and his path are straight, and his course is one eternal round. O remember, remember, my son Helaman, how strict are the commandments of God. And he said: If ye will keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land—but if ye keep not his commandments ye shall be cut off from his presence. #RandolphHarris 20 of 27
“And now remember, my son, that God has entrusted you with these things, which are sacred, which he has kept sacred, and also which e will keep and preserve for a wise purpose in him, that he may show forth his power unto future generations. And now behold, I tell you by the spirit of prophecy, that is ye transgress the commandment of God, behold, these things which are sacred shall be taken away from you by the power of God, and ye shall be delivered up unto Satan, that he may sift you as chaff before the wind. However, if ye keep the commandments of God, and do with these things which are sacred according to that which the Lord doth command you, (for you must appeal unto the Lord for all things whatsoever ye must do with them) behold, no power of Earth or hell can take them from you, for God is powerful to the fulfilling of all his words. For he will fulfill al his promises which he shall make unto you for he has fulfilled his promises he had made unto our fathers. For he promised unto them that he would preserve these things for a wise purpose in him, that he might show forth his power unto future generations. And now behold, one purpose hath he fulfilled, even to the restoration of many thousands of the Lamanites to the knowledge of the truth; and he hath shown forth his power in them unto future generations; therefore they shall be preserved. #RandolphHarris 21 of 27
“Therefore I command you, my so Helaman, that ye be diligent in fulfilling all my words, and that ye be diligent in keeping the commandments of God as they are written. And now, I will speak unto you concerning those twenty-four plates, that ye keep them, that mysteries and the words of darkness, and their secret works, or the secret works of those people who have been destroyed, may be made manifest unto this people; yea, all their murders, and robbings, and their plunderings, and all their wickedness and abominations, may be made manifest unto this people; yea, and they ye preserve these interpreters. For behold, the Lord saw that his people began to work in darkness, yea, work secret murders and abominations; therefore the Lord said, if they did not repent they should be destroyed from off the face of the Earth. And the Lord said: I will prepare unto my servant Gazelem, a stone, which shall shine forth in darkness unto light, that I may discover unto them the works of their brethren, yea, their secret works, their works of darkness, and their wickedness and abominations. And now, my son, these interpreters were prepared that the word of God might be fulfilled, which he spake. #RandolphHarris 22 of 27
“I will bring forth out of darkness unto light all their secret works and their abominations; and except they repent I will destroy them from off the face of the Earth; and I will bring to light all their secrets and abominations, unto every nation that shall hereafter possess the land. And now, my son, we see that they did not repent; therefore they have been destroyed, and thus far the word of God has been fulfilled; yea, their secret abominations have been brought out of darkness and made known unto us. And now, my son, I command you that ye retain all their oaths, and their covenants, and their signs and their wonders ye shall keep from this people, that they know them not lest peradventure they should fall into darkness also and be destroyed. For behold, there is a curse upon all this land, that destruction shall come upon all those workers of darkness, according to the power of God, when they are fully ripe; therefore I desire that his people might not be destroyed. Therefore ye shall keep these secret plans of their oaths and their covenants from this people, and only their wickedness and their murders and the abominations shall ye make known unto them; and ye shall teach the to abhor such wickedness and abominations and murders; and ye shall also teach them that these people were destroyed on account of their wickedness and abominations and their murders. #RandolphHarris 23 of 27
For behold, they murdered all the prophets of the Lord who came among them to declare unto them concerning their iniquities; and the blood of those who they murdered did cry unto the Lord their God for vengeance upon those who were their murderers; and thus the judgments of God did come upon these workers of darkness and secret combinations. Yea, and cursed be the land forever and ever unto those workers of darkness and secret combinations, even unto destruction, except they repent before they are fully ripe. And now, my son, remember the words which I have spoken unto you; trust not those secret plans unto this people, but teach them an everlasting hatred against sin and iniquity. Preach unto them repentance, and faith on the Lord Jesus Christ; teach them to humble themselves and to be meek and lowly in heart; teach them to withstand every temptation of the devil, with their faith on the Lord Jesus Christ. Teach them to never be weary of good works, but to be meek and lowly in heart; for such shall find rest to their souls. O, remember, my son, and learn wisdom in thy youth; yea, learn in thy youth to keep the commandments of God. Yea, and cry unto God for all thy support; yea, let all thy doings be unto the Lord, and whithersoever thou goest let it be in the Lord. #RandolphHarris 24 of 27
“Yea, let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord; yea, let the affections of thy heart be placed upon the Lord forever. Counsel with the Lord in all thy doings, and he will direct thee for good; yea, when thou liest down at night lie down unto the Lord, that he may watch over you in your sleep; and when thou risest in the morning let thy heart be full of thanks unto God; and if ye do these things, ye shall be lifted up at the last day. And now, my son, I have somewhat to say concerning the things which our fathers call a ball or director—or our fathers called it Liahona, which is, being interpreted, a compass; and the Lord prepared it. And behold, there cannot any human work after the manner of so curious a work-personship. And behold, it was prepared to show unto our father the course which they should travel in the wilderness. And it did work for them according to their faith in God; therefore, if they had faith to believe that God could cause that those spindles should point the way they should go, behold, it was done; therefore they had this miracle, and also many other miracles wrought by the power of God, day by day. Nevertheless, because those miracles were worked by small means it did show unto them marvelous works. #RandolphHarris 25 of 27
“They were slothful, and forgo to exercise their faith and diligence and then those marvelous works ceased, and they did not progress in their journey; therefore, they tarried in the wilderness, or did not travel a direct course, and were afflicted with hunger and thirst, because of their transgressions. And now, my son, I would that ye should understand that these things are not without a shadow; for as our father were slothful to give heed to this compass (now these things were temporal) they did not prosper; even so it was with things which are spiritual. For behold, it is as easy to give heed to the word of Christ, which will point to you a straight course to eternal bliss, as it was for our fathers to give heed to this compass, which would point unto them a straight course to the promised land. And now I say, is there not a type in this thing? For just as surely as this director did bring our fathers, by following its course, to the promised land, shall the words of Christ, if we follow their course, carry us beyond this vale of sorrow into a far better land of promise. On my don, do not let us be slothful because of the easiness of the way; for so was it with our father; for so was it prepared for them, that if they would look they might live; even so it is with us. #RandolphHarris 26 of 27
“The way is prepared, and if we will look we may live forever. And now, my son, see that ye take care of these scared things, yea, see that ye look to God and live. Go unto this people and declare he word, and be sober. My son, farewell,” reports Alma 37.1-47. Wheels turn and the seasons turn and the Earth turns and the stars turn. The Universe turns and I turn with it. King of the tuning, my face turns toward you in wonder. Great Father, please help me. I have studied your ways for many years now, and still you hide yourself from me. I can call to you under a multitude of names, but still you do not come. I can tell you a large number of your stories, but still I do not know who you are. I have many pictures of you, but still I have not seen your face. Though I throw out titles and powers and associations in mad armfuls, still there is nothing there when the whirlwind I create as become still. In that nothing, then, in the quiet after my storm, I will await you. Come to me, if such is your will, or do not come to me, if such is your will. Still I will wait. What else can I do? I bring greetings to God of this place from my people, from my family, from me, and not only greetings but gifts of friendship. I give them to you to establish between us the sacred bond. I who stand before you, I who come into your presence, I who am your worshipper, call out to you, God. #RandolphHarris 27 of 27
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Lord of the Pathway, to you I call; Lord of the Pathway, I lift my voice to you. Gate Keeper, Waiting One please open the door, that I may pass through to your land, God, there to be refreshed by the power you, Great one. Please do not hide in you cave of clouds, Most High, and deprive our World of your splendor. Please come to the mirror we have prepared, washing it with clear water. See, we are clean to; nothing is here which would defile. We are worthy of your presence ad eager to see you. Please leave your cloud cave and shine for us.
Dear Lord of the shining bow, with hair of flame, with beauty shining, truth’s bright friend and falsehood’s foe, Masters of both lyre and singing: Please be with me, bring art and grace, please be with me, bring light and song, please be with me, bring all that is beautiful, please bring all that is beautiful when you come to me.
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As Pure in thought as Angels are, to Know Her was to Love Her!
Life experiences become acting experiences, which in turn become life experiences. Today I saw her for the first time at Mrs. Jansen’s. I was introduced to her. Oh! She was good as she was fair. None—none on Earth above her! As pure in thought as angels are, to know her was to love her. She did not seem to make anything of it or pay any attention to me. I kept myself as unobtrusive as possible in order to observe her all the better. She stayed only a moment; she had come only to fetch the daughters, who were to go to the royal kitchen. While the two Jansen girls were putting on their coats, we two were alone in a room, and I, with a cold, almost supercilious apathy, said a few casual words to her, to which she replied with undeserved politeness. Then they went. I could have offered to accompany them, but that already would have sufficed to indicate the gallant suitor, and I have convinced myself that she is not to be won that way. –On the contrary, I chose to leave right after they had gone and to walk faster than they, but along other streets, yet likewise heading toward the royal kitchen so that when they turned onto Store Kongensgade I passed them in the greatest haste without greeting them or anything. It is necessary for me to gain entrance to the house, and for that, as they say in military language, I am prepared. It looks, however, as if that will be a fairly protracted and difficult matter. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
I have never known any family that lived so much apart. It is only she and her aunt—no brothers, no cousins, not a thread to grab onto, no far-removed connection to contact. I walk around continually with one arm available. Not for anything in the World would I walk with someone on each arm at this time. My arm is a grappling hook that must always be kept in readiness; my arm is intended for the potential yield—if far off in the distance a very distant relative or friend should appear whom I from afar could catch hold of, then I make a grab. Moreover, it is not right for a family to live so isolated; the poor young lady is being deprived of the opportunity to learn to know the World, to say nothing of the other possible dangerous consequences it may have. That always has its revenge. It is the same with proposing. To be sure, such isolation does protect one from petty thievery. In a very sociable house, opportunity makes the thief. However, that does not matter greatly, for there is not much to steal from such young women; when they are twenty-eight years old, their hearts are already a filled autograph album, and I never care to write my name where many have already written. It never occurs to me to scratch my name on a window pane or in a tavern, or on a tree or a bench in Frederiksberg gardens. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Beliefs are the rails upon which our lives run. We almost always act according to what we really believe. It does not matter much what we say we believe or what we want others to think we believe. When the rubber meets the road, we act out our actual beliefs most of the time. That is why behaviour is such a good indicator of a person’s beliefs. Let us look, then, at five aspects of belief that are critical to the shape of our minds. The content of a belief. A belief’s impact on behaviour I a function of three of the belief’s traits: its content, strength, and centrality. The content of a belief helps determine how important the belief is for our character behaviour. What we believe matters—the actual content of what we believe about God, morality, politics, life after death, and so on will shape the contours of our lives and actions. In fact, the contents of one’s beliefs are so important that, according to Scripture, our eternal destiny is determined by what we believe about Jesus Christ. Today, people are inclined to think that the sincerity and fervency of one’s beliefs are more important than the content. As long as we believe something honestly and strongly, we are told, then that is all that matters. Nothing can be further from the truth. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
I can believe with all my might that my Ultimate Driving Machine will fly me to Japan or love is caused solely by the brain, but that fervency does not change a thing. As far as reality is concerned, what matters is not whether I like a belief or how sincere I am in believing it but whether or not the belief is true. I am responsible for what I believe and, I might add, for what I refuse to believe because the content of what I do or do not believe makes a tremendous difference to what I become and how I act. The strength of a belief. There is, however, more to a belief than its content. There is also strength and centrality for the person who believes it. We are all familiar with the idea of a belief having strength. If you believe something, that does not mean you are certain that it is true. Rather, it means that you are at least more than 50 percent convinced the belief is true. If it were fifty-fifty for you, you would not really have the belief in question. Instead, you would still be in a process of deciding whether or not you should adopt the belief. A belief’s strength is the degree to which you are convinced the belief is true. As you gain evidence and support for a belief, its strength grows for you. It may start off as plausible and later become fairly likely, quite likely, beyond reasonable doubt, or complete certain. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
The more certain you are of a belief, the more it becomes a part of your very soul, and the more you rely on it as a basis for action. The centrality of a belief. You may be less familiar with this concept than with the previous two, but with a little reflection the idea of centrality is easy to grasp. The centrality of a belief is the degree of importance the belief plays in your entire set of beliefs, that is, in your Worldview. The more central a belief is, the greater the impact on one’s Worldview were the belief given up. My belief that prunes are good for me is fairly strong (even thought I do not care for that belief!), but it is not very central for me. I could give it up and not have to abandon or adjust very many other beliefs I hold. However, my beliefs in absolute morality, life after death, or the Christian faith are very central for me—more central now, in fact, than just after my conversion in 2020. If I were to lose these beliefs, my entire set of beliefs would undergo a radical reshuffling—more so now than in 2021. As I grow, some of my beliefs come to play a more central role in the entire way I see life. How do we change beliefs? The content, strength, and centrality of a person’s beliefs plays a powerful role in determining the person’s character and behaviour. However, there is an apparent paradox about one’s beliefs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
On the one hand, Scripture holds us responsible for our beliefs since it commands us to embrace certain beliefs and warns us of the consequences of accepting other beliefs. On the other hand, experience teaches us that we cannot choose or change our beliefs by direct effort. For example, if someone offered you $100,000 to believe right now that a pink elephant was sitting next to you, you could not really choose to believe this in spite of having a good motive to do so! Happily, there is a way out of this paradox: we can change our beliefs indirectly. If I want to change my beliefs about something, I can embark on a course of study in which I choose to think regularly about certain things, read certain pieces of evidence and argument, and try to find problems with evidence raised against the belief in question. More generally, by choosing to undertake a course of study, meditation, and reflection, I can put myself in a position to undergo a change in the content, strength, and centrality of my beliefs. (We will look more at these truths later.) And if these kinds of changes in belief are what caused a change in my character and behaviour, then I will be transformed by these belief changes. That is exactly why Paul tells us to be transformed by the renewing of the mind, because it is precisely activities of the mind that change these three aspects of belief, which, in turn, transform our character and behaviour. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
How beliefs form the plausibility structure of a culture. There is a critical corollary of this insight. If I cannot even entertain the belief needed to bring about that change, I will never be able to change my life. By “entertain a belief” I mean to consider the possibility that the belief might be true. If you are hateful and mean to someone at work, you will have to change what you believe about the person before you will treat one differently. However, if you cannot even entertain the thought that one is a god person worthy of kindness, you will not change. There is a straightforward application here for evangelism. A person’s plausibility structure is set of ideas the person either is or is not willing to entertain as possibly true. For example, no one would come to a lecture defending a flat Earth because this idea is just not part of our plausibility structure. We cannot even entertain the idea. Moreover, a person’s plausibility structure is a function of the beliefs one already has. God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favourable conditions for the receptions of the gospel. False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
We may preach with all the fervour of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the World to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. If a culture reaches the point where Christian claims are not even part of its plausibility structure, fewer and fewer people will be able to entertain the possibility that they might be true. Whatever stragglers do come to faith in such a context would do so on the basis of felt needs alone, and the genuineness of such conversions would be questionable to say the least. This is why apologetics is so crucial to evangelism. It seeks to create a plausibility structure in a person’s mind, favourable conditions, so the gospel can be entertained by a person. To plant a seed in someone’s mind in pre-evangelism is to present a person with an idea that will work on one’s plausibility structure to create a space in which Christianity can be entertained seriously. If this is important to evangelism, it is strategically crucial that local churches think about how hey can address those aspects of the modern Worldview that place Christianity outside the plausibility structure of so many. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Our modern post-Christian society is perilously close to regarding Christian claims as mere figments in the minds of the faithful. Speaking of fundamentalists after the Scopes trial in 1925, historian George Marsden observes that they could not “raise the level of discourse to a plane where any of their arguments would be taken seriously. Whatever they said would be overshadowed by the pejorative associations attached to the movement by the seemingly victorious secular establishment.” Tragically, as we approach the twenty-first century, our current context for proclaiming Christian truth is even worse than it was in the decades following 1925. During those decades, at least argumentation was considered relevant to making or accepting religious claims. However, now religious assertions are regarded as mere expressions of private belief or emotion, far below the level needed for argument itself to be considered at all relevant. The plausibility, content, strength, and centrality of our beliefs play a key role in determining our character and behaviour. And various activities of thought and study affect our beliefs and thereby impact our character and behaviour. Because thoughts and beliefs are contained in the mind, intellectually development and the renewal of the mind transform our lives. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
James’ words are consistently surgical. However, none are so penetrating as these: “If anyone considers oneself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on one’s tongue, one deceives oneself and one’s religion is worthless,” reports James 1.26. An exercise in futility! This is a spiritually terrifying statement, to say the least, for it cuts like a hot knife through warm butter, dissecting the cant and piety of the self-satisfied religious. An out-of-control tongue suggests bogus religion, no matter how well one’s devotion is carried out. The true test of a human’s spirituality is not one’s ability to speak, as we are apt to think, but rather one’s ability to bridle one’s tongue. The Lord Jesus Himself explained this in no uncertain terms in a heated exchange with the Pharisees: “Make a tree god and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit. You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks,” reports Matthew 12.33, 34). The tongue will inevitably reveal what is on the inside. This is especially true under stress, when the tongue is compulsively revealing. A preacher with a hammer in hand, doing some work on a church workday, noticed that one of the men seemed to be following him around. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Finally the preacher asked this man why he was following him around. The man answered, “I just want to hear what you say when you hit your thumb.” The curious parishioner understood that would be of the home, where the mouth unfailingly trumpets one’s essence. James does not mean that those who sometimes fall into this sin have a worthless religion, for all are guilty at times. Rather, he is saying that if anyone’s tongue is habitually unbridled, though one’s church attendance be impeccable, one’s Bible knowledge envied, one’s prayers many, one’s tithes exemplary, and though one considers oneself religious…one deceives oneself and one’s religion is worthless. The ever practical James has cut through all the religious decorum, but it is not butter that glistens under one’s knife, but the marrow of our souls. True religion controls the tongue. Humans, how is your religion? How is mine? Do you talk too much? Do you pass along choice morsels for others to gleefully take in? Do you pass along choice morsels for others to gleefully take in? Do you say to people’s faces what you would never say behind their backs? Do you have a “gift” of a sharp tongue? Are people elevated or diminished through your words? #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
From the time when one begins to take instruction from one’s teacher, the disciple also begins a period of probation in one’s inner career and of separation from one’s inner weaknesses. The probation will enable one gradually to show forth all the different aspects of one’s personality and will indicate how receptive one really is to the teacher’s influence. During this process, qualities which are lying latent beneath the surface will arise above it; situations will arrange themselves in such a way as to force one to express them. In short, what is hidden will become open. Thus one will be given the chance to look to one’s moral foundations before one advances to the intensive mystical training which places hidden power and hidden knowledge in one’s hands. Without first getting such a foundation, one who gets possession of these powers may soon fall into overpowering temptations, with disastrous results to oneself and others. The inner conflict which results from the probation will force one to face oneself, to look at the weaknesses which are present within one and to try to conquer them. If there is no other way to get one to do so, then one will have to take the way of suffering their consequences so as to have them brought home to one. Such a phase of the disciple’s career will naturally be filled with strains for oneself and with misunderstandings about oneself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The term of probation is a period of severe trials and strong temptations. However, the principle of probation is a sound one. Out of the vortex of its tests and stresses and upheavals, one has the chance to emerge a stronger and wiser being. One’s probationary period is concerned with the general purification of character from egoism and animality as well as with its sensitization to intuition and instruction. Without such a basis to work upon, it would be dangerous for one to venture into mystical work or public service. Nor would the teacher permit one to do so, as there are inexorable laws, not of one’s making, which govern the matter. One must be on guard and not mistake psychism for spirituality, pseudo-intuition for the real thing, mix personal motives with altruistic service, nor lose oneself in dreams and fantasies instead of finding oneself in inspired action. These faults are common to most mystical aspirants. The Quest for God is deadly serious and demands so much. It is far easier to go astray from it than to keep on it. A householder is responsible for all who dwell in the house, but especially for guest. Treat anyone who has safely passed the borders of your land with respect, unless they perform some act to offend the spirit of God. Even then, treat them with kindness until you have escorted them off your property. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
It is your responsibility to restore the harmony to your house. This obligation holds for the uninvited as well as the invited guest—the neighbourhood children, the sales person, the evangelist at your door. Greet them pleasantly. Offer them hospitality. If you invite them in, offer them something to ear or drink. Your Cresleigh Home will develop a reputation for hospitality, which will please God no end. Lord who sits at the edge of my land, sits at the edge of all I own. Watchful Jesus Christ guards my space. About my Cresleigh Home, establish your place of warding. Stand watchfully at the corners. Be a shield between our house and all that would work evil. Guard our land and all who claim its protection. Here on the border, you stand your watch. I have come out here to assure you that your attention to duty is appreciated, bringing not only words, but gifts to place before your maker. Watcher on the Borders, the steward of this land offers to you. This grain is for you, and the atmosphere is for you. “O that I were an angel, and could have the wish of mine heart, that I might go forth and speak with the trump of God, with a voice to shake the Earth, and cry repentance unto every people! Yea, I would declare unto every soul, as with the voice of thunder, repentance and the plan of redemption, that they should repent and come unto our God, that there might not be more sorrow upon all the face of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
“However, behold, I am a man, and do sin in my wish; for I ought to be content with the things which the Lord hath allotted unto me. I ought not to harrow up in my desires the firm decree of a just God, for I know that he granteth unto humans according to their desires, whether it be unto death or unto life; yea, I know that he allotteth unto humans, yea, decreeth unto them decrees which are unalterable, according to their wills, whether they be unto salvation or unto destruction. Yea, and I know that good and evil have come before all humans; he that knoweth not good from evil is blameless; but one that knoweth good and evil, to one it is given according to one’s desires, whether one desireth good or evil, life or death, joy or remorse of conscience. Now, seeing that I know these things, why should I desire more than to perform the work to which I have been called? Why should I desire that I were an angel, that I could speak unto all the ends of the Earth? For behold, the Lord doth grant unto all nations, of their own nation and tongue, to teach his word, yea, in wisdom, all that he seeth fit that they should have; therefore we see that the Lord doth counsel in wisdom, according to that which is just and true. I know that which the Lord hath commanded me, and I glory in it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
“I do not glory of myself, but I glory in that which the Lord hath commanded me; yea, and this is my glory, that perhaps I may be an instrument in the hands of God to bring some soul to repentance; and this is my joy. And behold, when I see many of my brethren truly penitent, and coming to the Lord their God, then is my soul filled with joy; then do I remember what the Lord has done for me, yea, even that he hath heard my prayer; yea, then do I remember his merciful arm which he extended towards me. Yea, and I also remember the captivity of my fathers; for I surely do know that the Lord did deliver them out of bondage, and by this did establish his church; yes, the Lord God, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, did deliver them out of bondage. Yea, I have always remembered the captivity of my fathers; and that same God who delivered them out of the hands of the Egyptians did deliver them out of bondage. Yea, and that same God did establish his church among them; yea, and that same God hath called me by a holy calling, to preach the word unto this people, and hath given me much success, in the which my joy is full. However, I do not joy in m own success alone, but my joy is more full because of the success of my brethren, who have been up to the land of Nephi. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
“Behold, they have laboured exceedingly, and have brought forth much fruit; and how great shall be their reward! Now, when I think of the success of these my brethren my soul is carried away, even to the separation of it from the body, as it were, so great is my joy. And now may God grant unto these, my brethren, that they may sit down in the kingdom of God; yea, and also all those who are the fruit of their labours that they may go no more out, but that they may praise him forever. And may God grant that it maybe done according to my words, even as I have spoken. Amen,” reports Alma 29.1-17. When we understand what humans are, we do not forthwith understand other things which belong to them, but we understand them one by one, according to a certain succession. On this account the things we understand as separated, we must reduce to one by way of composition or division, by forming an enunciation. Now the species of the divine intellect, which is essences of all things, and also whatever can accidental to them. Enunciatory composition signifies some existence of a thing; and thus God by His existence, which His essence, is the similitude of all those things which are signified by enunciation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Seeing that I have no confidence in anything but Thy mercy, do Thou endue my mouth with power to proclaim Thy truth, and sanctify my work with more abundant richness of grace, that Thou mayest both save my unworthy self, and justify in Thy loving-kindness the flock entrusted to me. Whatever Thou seest corrupt in them, do Thou make sound; and whatever Thou discernest vicious in me, do Thou cure; whatever guilt they have contracted or do contract, through my sinful lukewarmness or carelessness, do Thou put away. If in anything they have fallen into sin, whether with or without my knowledge, or have fallen by the stumbling block of my example, pardon them, and render not to my unhappy self the punishment which such a fault deserves. However, let the rebukes which I have administered in censure of others conduce to their salvation; and let the pleading of this prayer recall them from the error they have committed, that they may not endure the torments of hell:–so that Thou mayest vouchsafe pardon to their iniquities, and wash away the offence of which I have become guilty by my own unfitness to bear rule. Incline Thine ear, O God, to our sacrifices, and write me, and those who are committed to me, in Thy books; whereby, together with the flock entrusted to me, I may both be cleansed from all sin, and be enabled to attain to Thee in peace. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Look down from Heaven, O Christ, on Thy flock and lambs, and bless their bodies and souls. Grant those who have received Thy sign, O Christ, on their foreheads, to be Thine own in the day of judgment.
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Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat—God Moves in a Mysterious Way, Survival of the Fittest!
Half of the reporters in town are looking on you as a Pulitzer Prize waiting to be won. The word norm means an authoritative standard, and correspondingly, normal means abiding by such a standard. It follows that a normal personality is one whose conduct conforms to an authoritative standard, and an abnormal personality is one whose conduct does not do so. However, having said this much we immediately discover that there are two entirely different kinds of standards that may be applied to divide the normal from the abnormal: the one statistical, the other ethical. The one pertains to the average or usual, and the other to the desirable or valuable. These two standards are not only different, but in many ways they stand in flat contradiction to one another. It is, for example, usual for people to have some noxious trends in their natures, some pathology of tissues or organs, some evidences of nervousness and some self-defeating habits; but though usual or avege, such trends are not healthy. Or again, society’s authoritative standard for a wholesome love life may be achieved by only a minority of American males. Here too the usual is not the desirable; what is normal in one sense is not normal in the other sense. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
Certainly, unless they are taught what is legal, ethical, moral and Godly, no system of ethics in the civilized World holds up as a model for its children becoming productive members of society. It is not the actualities, but rather the potentialities, of human nature that somehow provide us with a standard for a sound and healthy personality. One hundred years ago this double meaning of norm and normal did not trouble psychology so much as it does today. In those days psychology was deeply involved in discovering average norms for every conceivable type of mental function. Means, modes, and sigmas were in the saddle, and differential psychology was riding high. Intoxicated with the new-found beauty of the normal distribution curve, psychologists were content to declare its slender tails as the one and only sensible measure of “abnormality.” Departures from the means were abnormal and for this reason slightly unsavory. In this era there grew up the concept of mental adjustment, and this concept held sway well into the decade of the 1920s. While not all psychologists adjustment with average behaviour, this implication was pretty generally present. It was, for example, frequently pointed out that an animal who does not adjust to the norm for one’s species usually dies. It was not yet pointed out that a human being who does so adjust is a bore and a mediocrity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
Now time have changed. Our concern for the improvement of average human behaviour is deep, for we now seriously doubt that the merely mediocre human can survive. As social anomie spreads, as society itself becomes more and more sick, we doubt that the mediocre human will escape mental disease and delinquency, or that one will keep oneself out of the clutch of dictators or succeed in preventing atomic or biological warfare. The normal distribution curve, we see, holds out no hope of salvation. We need citizens who are in a more beneficial and optimistic sense of normal, healthy and sound. And the World needs them more urgently than it ever did before. It is for this reason, I think, that psychologists are now seeking a fresh definition of what is normal and what is abnormal. They are asking questions concerning the valuable, the right, and the good as they have never asked them before. At the same time psychologists know that in seeking for a criterion of normality in this new sense they are trespassing on the traditional domain of moral philosophy. They also know that, by and large, philosophers have failed to establish authoritative standards for what constitutes the sound life—the life that educators, parents, and therapist should seek to mold. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
And so psychologist, for the most part, wish to pursue the search in a fresh way and if they can, avoid the traditional traps of axiology. During the past few months two proposals have been published that merit serious attention. Both are by social scientists, one a psychologist in the United States of America, the other a sociologist in England. Their aim is to derive a concept of normality (in the value sense) from the condition of humans (in the naturalistic sense). Both seek their ethical imperatives from biology and psychology, not from value-theory directly. In short, they boldly seek the ought (the goal to which teachers, counsellors, therapists should strive) from the is of human nature. Many philosophers tell us that this is an impossible undertaking. However, before we pass judgment let us see what success they have had. Humans are expected to maximize those attributes that are distinctively human. The first is human’s capacity for the use of propositional language (symbolization). From this particular superiority over animals derives several specific guidelines for normality. With the assistance of symbolic language, for example, humans can delay their gratifications, holding in mind a distant goal, a remote reward, an objective to be reached perhaps only at the end of one’s life or perhaps never. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
With the assistance of symbolic language, one can imagine a future for oneself that is far better than the present. One can also develop an intricate system of social concepts that leads one to all manner of possible relations with other human beings, far exceeding the rigid symbiotic rituals of, say, the social insects. A second distinctive human quality is related to the prolonged childhood in the human species. Dependence, basic trust, sympathy and altruism are absolutely essential to human survival, in a sense and to a degree that is maybe not always true for animals. The conception of normality has to do with a model of integrative adjustment. It follows that a sense of personal responsibility marks the normal human, for responsibility is a distinctive capacity derived from holding in mind a symbolic image of the future, delaying gratification, and being able to strive in accordance with one’s conception of the best principles of conduct for oneself. Similarly social responsibility is normal; for all these symbolic capacities can interact with the unique factor of trust or altruism. Closely related is the criterion of democratic social interest which derives from both symbolization and trust. Similarly, the possession of ideals and the necessity for self–control follow from the same naturalistic analysis. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
A sense of guilt is an inevitable consequence of human’s failure to live according to the distinctive human pattern, and so in our concept of normality we must include both guilt and devices for expiation. Every psychologist who wishes to make minimum assumptions and who wishes to keep close to empirical evidence, and who inclines toward the naturalism of biological science prefers fact-based evidence that has not been manipulated. Manipulated and prejudice science is worthless junk. It is must like fake news and has no value other than propaganda. Nonetheless, our philosopher friends will arise to confound us with some uncomfortable questions. Is it not a distinctively human capacity, they will ask, for a possessive mother to keep her child permanently tied to her apron strings? Does any lower animal engage in this destructive behaviour? Likewise, is it not distinctively human to develop fierce in-group loyalties that lead to prejudice, contempt, and war? Is it not possible that the burden of symbolization, social responsibility, and guilt may lead a person to depression and suicide? Suicide, along with all the other destructive patterns I have mentioned, is distinctly human. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
A philosopher who raises these questions would conclude, “No, you cannot derive the ought from the is of human nature. What is distinctively human is not necessarily distinctively good.” What are the minimum conditions for survival? When we know these minimum conditions we can declare that any situations falling below this level will lead to abnormality, and tend toward death and destruction, which COVID-19 could be symbolic of—humanity falling below minimum conditions needed to sustain a developing nation like America, and others around the World. This criterion is called the abnorm and we can define it, even if we cannot define normality, because people in general agree more readily on what is bad for humans than on what is good for them. They agree on the bad because all mortals are subject to the basic imperative of survival. The need for survival is connected to our need for growth and the need for social cohesion. These two principles are the universal conditions of all life, not merely of human life. Growth means autonomy and the process of individuation. Cohesion is the basic fact of social interdependence, involving, at least for human beings, initial trust, heteronomy, mating and the founding of family. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
By taking an inventory of conditions deleterious to growth and cohesion we may establish the “abnorm.” As a start, the first and foremost disorders of child training is the continued or repeated interruption of physical proximity between mother and child and emotional rejection of the child by the mother are conditions that harm survival of the individual and the group. In the first criterion of abnormality lies in a rupture in the transmutation of cohesion into love. Most of what is abnormal can be traced to failures in the principle of cohesion, so that the child becomes excessively demanding and compulsive. It is abnormal (inimical to survival) if repetition of conduct occurs irrespective of the situation and unmodified by its consequences; also when one’s accomplishments constantly fall short of one’s potentialities; likewise when one’s psychosexual frustrations prevent both growth and cohesion. Normality requires a balance between individuation and socialization, between autonomy and heteronomy. When an individual identifies oneself to an extreme degree with a group, the effect is that one loses one’s value. On the other hand, a complete inability to identify has the effect that the environment loses its value for the individual. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
In both extreme cases the dynamic relationship between individual and environment is distorted. An individual behaving in such a way is called neurotic. In a normal group each member preserves one’s individuality but accepts one’s role as participator also. While there is much agreement that the normal personality must strike a serviceable balance between growth as an individual and cohesion with society, we do not yet have a clear criterion for determining when these factors are in serviceable balance and when they are not. However, Philosophers, I fear, would shake their heads at us and ask us, “How do you know that survival is a good thing?” Further, “Why should all people enjoy equal rights to the benefits of growth and cohesion?” And, “How are we to define the optimum balance between cohesion and growth within the single personality?” We also have to worry about the relationship between abnormality and creativity. It was Nietzsche who declared, “I say unto you: a human must have chaos yet within one to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” Have not many meritorious works of music, literature, and even of science draw their inspiration not from balance but from some kind of psychic chaos? In effect that creativity and normality are not identical values. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
On the whole the normal person will be creative, but if valuable creations come likewise from people who are slipping away from the norm of survival, this fact can only be accepted and valued on the scale of creativity, but not properly on the scale of normality. In this day of existentialism I sense that psychologist are becoming less and less content with the concept of adjustment, and correspondingly with the concepts of tension reduction, restoration of equilibrium, and homeostasis. We wonder if a human who enjoys these beatific conditions is truly human. Growth we know is not due to homeostasis but to a kind of “transiistasis.” And cohesion is a matter of keeping our human relationships moving and not in mere stationary equilibrium. Stability cannot be a criterion of normality since stability brings evolution to a standstill, negating both growth and cohesion. Dr. Freud once wrote to Dr. Fliess that he finds “moderate misery necessary for intensive work.” When people have a zero correlation between self and ideal self, it is too low for normality; it leads to such anguish that the sufferer seeks therapy. At the same time normal people are by no means perfectly adjusted to themselves. There is always a wholesome gap between self and ideal self, between present existence and aspiration. On the other hand, too high a satisfaction indicates pathology. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
When individuals reach an extremely high coefficient for self-satisfaction, it is clear that one is pathological. Perfect correlations we might expect only from smug psychotics, particularly paranoid schizophrenics. And whatever our definition of normality turns out to be it must allow for serviceable imbalances within personality, and between person and society. There is an approach dear to the psychologist’s heart. The established criterion of normality or otherwise known as soundness, leads us to identify people who are “sound.” Teachers of graduate students in the University of California nominated a large number of people whom they considered sound, and some of the opposite trend. In testing and experimenting with these two groups, whose identities were unknow to the investigators, certain significant difference appeared. For one thing the sounder human had more realistic perceptions; they were not thrown off by distortions or by surrounding context in the sensory field. Further, on adjective check-lists they stood high on such traits as integrated pursuit of goals, persistence, adaptability, good nature. On the Minnesota Personality Inventory they were high in equanimity, self-confidence, objectivity and virility. Their self-insight was superior, as was their physical health. Finally, they came from homes where there was little or not affective rupture. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
A healthy person will be able to “love” and to “work.” On the schedule of other qualities a healthy person possesses include among others: efficient perception of reality, philosophical humour, spontaneity, detachment, and acceptance of self and others. A normal person has a strong ego, an abnormal person has a weak ego. Whether one is normal or abnormal depends on the degree to which one can manage one’s relationships successfully. Furthermore, the earlier enthusiasm of psychologist for the normal distribution curve helps to entrench the theory of continuum. Extreme withdrawal and escape constitute psychosis. However, you may ask, do no we all do some escaping? Yes, we do, and what is more, escapism may provide not only recreation but may sometimes have a certain constructive utility, as it has in mild daydreaming. Only if the dominant process is confrontation, the process of escape can still be harmless. Left to itself escapism spells disaster. In the psychotic this process has the upper hand; in the normal person, on the contrary, confrontation has the upper hand. Following this line of reasoning we can list other processes that intrinsically generate abnormality, and those that generate normality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
The first list deals with catabolic (energy used to break down) functions. I would mention: Escape or withdrawal (including fantasy), repression or dissociation, other “ego defences,” including rationalization, reaction formation, projection, displacement, impulsivity (uncontrolled), restriction of thinking to concrete level, fixation of personality at a juvenile level, all forms of rigidification. The list is not complete, but the process in question, I submit, are intrinsically catabolic. They are as much so as are the disease mechanisms responsible for diabetes, tuberculosis, hyperthyroidism, or cancer. A person suffering only a small dose of these mechanisms may appear to be normal, but only if anabolic (requires energy to grow and build) mechanisms predominate. Among the latter I would list: Confrontation (or, if you prefer, reality testing) availability of knowledge to consciousness, self-insight, with its attendant humour, integrative action of the nervous system, ability to think abstractly, continuous individuation (without arrested or fixated development), functional autonomy of motives, frustration of tolerance. I realize that what I have called processes, or mechanisms, are not in all cases logically parallel. However, they serve to make my point, that normality depends on the dominance of one set of principles, abnormality upon the dominance of another. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
The fact that all normal people are occasionally afflicted with catabolic processes does not alter the point. The normal life is marked by a preponderance of the anabolic functions; the abnormal by a preponderance of the catabolic. Investigations have told us much concerning the nature of human needs and motives, both conscious and unconscious. Much is known concerning the pathologies that result from frustration and imbalance of these needs. We know much about childhood conditions that predispose toward delinquency, prejudice, and mental disorder. A moralist might do well to cast one’s imperatives in terms of standards for child training. I can suggest, for example, that the abstract imperative “respect for persons” should be tested and formulated from the point of view for child training. The distinction between the anabolic and catabolic processes in the formation of personality represents a fact of importance. Instead of judging merely the end-product of action, perhaps the moralist would do well to focus one’s attention upon the process by which various ends are achieved. Conceivably, the moral law could be written in terms of strengthening anabolic functions in oneself and in others whilst fighting against catabolic functions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
Apriorism, belief in a priori principles or reasoning specifically: the doctrine that knowledge rests upon principles that are self-evident to reason or are presupposed by experience in general, is a legitimate tool of philosophy. Up to now this method as yielded a wide array of moral imperatives, including the following: so act that maxim of thy action can become a universal law; be a respecter of persons; seek to reduce your desires; harmonize your interests with the interest of others; thou art nothing, thy folk is everything; thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind…and thy neighbour as thyself. Psychologists who in their teaching and counselling follow the lines now laid down will not go far wrong in guiding personalities toward normality. “Do not speak evil against one another, brethren,” reports James 4.11. God forbids any speech (whether true or false) which runs down another person. Certainly no Christian should ever be a party to slander—making false charges against another’s reputation. Yet some do. However, even more penetrating is the challenge to refrain from any speech intends to run down someone else, even if it is totally true. Personally I can think of few commands that go against commonly accepted conventions more than this, for most people think it is okay to convey negative information if it is true. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Some people have had to defend themselves because no one else would. Still, no innocent person should be physically attacked and terrorized by a violent mob and forced to defend themselves. We understand that lying is immoral. However, is passing along damaging truth immoral? It seems almost a moral responsibility! By such reasoning, criticism behind another’s back is thought to be all right as long as it is based on fact. Likewise, denigrating gossip (of course it is never called gossip!) is seen as okay if the information is true. Thus many believers use truth as a license to righteously diminish others’ reputations. Related to this, some reject running down another behind one’s back, but believe it is okay if done face to face. These persons are driven by a “moral” compulsion to make others aware of their shortcomings. Fault-finding is, to them, a spiritual gift – a license to conduct spiritual search-and-destroy missions. What people like this do not know is that most people are painfully aware of their own faults – and would like to overcome them – and are trying very hard to do so. Then someone mercilessly assaults them believing they are doing their spiritual duty – and, oh, the hurt! This destructive speaking down against others can also manifest itself in the subtle art of minimizing another’s virtues, and accomplishments. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
After being with such people, your mental abilities, athletic accomplishments, musical skills, and domestic virtues seem not to be quite as good as they were a few minutes earlier. Some of this feeling came perhaps from their words about your Ultimate Driving Machine—“what a nice little BMW”—or from surprised exclamations about what you did not know. It was also the tone of the voice, the cast of the eye, and the surgical silences. There are many sinful reasons why humans in Christ talk down to one another. Revenge over some slight, real or imagined, may be the motivation of “Christian” slander. Others imagine that their spirituality and sensitivity equips them to pull others from their ivory towers and unmask their hypocrisies. Gideon once rightly cried, “A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!” (Judges 7.20), and we may do the same, but in our case it is too often a sword of self-righteousness. Condescending words and actions may also come from the need to elevate oneself – like the Pharisee who thanked God he was not like other sinners “or even like this tax collector” (Luke 18.11). We thus enjoy the dubious elevation of walking on the bruised head of others, and coming down on innocent heads. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Sometimes this diminishing of others simply comes from too much empty talk. People do not have much to talk about, so they fuel the fires of conversation with the flesh of others. The abilities and motivations of the Body of Christ to run itself down could fill a library. We are all skillful in rationalizing such talk, but God’s Word still speaks: “Christians do not speak against one another.” Verbal cyanide comes in many forms. Gossip, innuendo, flattery, criticism, diminishment, are only a few of the venoms with which Christians inject each other. And the results are universal: toxic gastric juices a Devil’s feast – the swill of souls. Dear Lord in Heaven, please eat what is offered to you and transform it, as food is transformed, into blessings for me, and for all my household. The fire that burns on my hearth is the very heart of my Cresleigh Home. By feeding the fire with wood and with air, I am feeding my Cresleigh Home with what it needs most. I give you these things, fire on my hearth and more gifts will follow as we live our lives together. I light a fire on my family’s hearth and praise the God of our home. I pray to the Most High and praise the Ancestors. Hear my words, see me as I perform the rites, receive the gifts I offer you. Threshold Spirit, guardian and protector of my Cresleigh Home’s entrance, I honour you as I pass through the beautiful door. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
God of doorways, bless my goings out, bless my comings in. Lord of the threshold, of doors and gates Lord, place where inside and outside meet: God is my threshold. Please Guard my doors, God, keeper of the keys. Watch it with care, please keep my Cresleigh Homes safe. May the blessings of God guard this door. God it is who guards our doors. The Lord commands Ammon to lead the people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi to safety—upon meeting Alma, Ammon’s joy exhausts his strength—the Nephites give the Anti-Nephi-Lehies the land of Jershon—they are called the people of Amon. About 90-77 Before Christ. “Now it came to pass that when those Lamanites who had gone to war against the Nephites had found, after their many struggles to destroy them, that it was in vain to seek their destruction, they returned again to the land of Nephi. And it came to pass that the Amalekites, because of their loss, were exceedingly angry. And when they saw that they could not seek revenge from the Nephites, they began to stir up the people in anger against their brethren, the people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi; therefore they began again to destroy them. Now this people again refused to take their arms, and they suffered themselves to be slain according to the desires of their enemies. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
“Now when Amon and his brethren saw this work of destruction among those whom they so dearly beloved, and among those who had so dearly beloved them—for hey were treated as though they were angels sent from God to save them from everlasting destruction—therefore, when Amon and his brethren saw this great work of destruction, they were moved with compassion, and they said unto the king: Let us gather together this people of the Lord, and let us go down to the land of Zarahemla to our brethren the Nephites, and flee out of the hands of our enemies, that we be not destroyed. However, the king said unto them: Behold, the Nephites will destroy us, because of the many murders and sins we have committed against them. And Ammon said: I will go and inquire of the Lord, and if he say unto us, go down unto our brethren, will ye go? And the king said unto him: Yea, if the Lord saith unto us go, we will go down unto our brethren, and we will be any slaves among them; therefore let us go down and rely upon the mercies of our brethren. However, the king said unto him: Inquire of the Lord, and if he saith unto us go, we will go; otherwise we will perish in the land. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
“And it came to pass that Ammon went and inquired of the Lord and the Lord aid unto him: Get this people out of this land, that they perish not; for Satan has great hold on the hearts of the Amalekites, who do stir up the Lamanites to anger against their brethren to slay them; therefore get thee out of this land; and blessed are this people in this generation, for I will preserve them. And now it came to pass that Ammon went and told the king all the words which the Lord had said unto him. And they gathered together all their people, yea, all the people of the Lord, and did gather together all their flocks and herds, and departed out of the land, and came into the wilderness which divided the land of Nephi from the land of Zarahemla, and came over near the borders of the land. And it came to pass that Ammon said unto them: Behold, I and my brethren will go forth into the land of Zarahemla, and ye shall remain here until we return; and we will try the hearts of our brethren, whether they will that ye shall come into their land. And it came to pass that as Ammon was going forth into the land, that he and his brethren met Alma, over in the place of which has been spoken; and behold, this was a joyful meeting. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
“Now the joy of Ammon was so great even that he was full; yea, he was swallowed up in the joy of his God, even to the exhausting of his strength; and he fell again to the Earth. Now was not this exceeding joy? Behold, this is joy which none receiveth save it be the truly penitent and humble seeker of happiness. Now the joy of Alma in meeting his brethren was truly great, and also the joy of Aaron, of Omner, and Himni; but behold their joy was not that to exceed their strength. And now it came to pass that Alma conducted his brethren back to the land of Zarahemla; even to his own house. And they went and told the chief judge all the things that that happened unto them in the land of Nephi, among their brethren, the Lamanites. And it came to pass that the chief judge sent a proclamation throughout all the land, desiring the voice of the people concerning the admitting their brethren, who were the people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi. And it came to pass that the voice of the people came, saying: Behold, we will give up the land of Jershon, which is on the east by the sea, which joins the land Bountiful, which is on the south of the land Bountiful; and this land Jershon is the land which we will give unto our brethren for an inheritance. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
“And behold, we will set our armies between the land Jershon and the land Nephi, that we may protect our brethren in the land of Jershon; and this we do for our brethren lest they should commit sin; and this their great fear came because of their sore repentance which they had, on account of their many murders and their awful wickedness. And now behold, this will we do unto our brethren, that they may inherit the land Jershon; and we will guard them from their enemies with our armies, on condition that they will give us a portion of their substance to assist us that we may maintain our armies. Now, it came to pass that when Ammon had heard this, he returned to the people of Anti0Nephi-Lehi, and also Alma with him, into the wilderness, where they had pitched their tents, and made known unto them all these things. And Alma also related unto them his conversion, with Ammon and Aaron, and his brethren. And it came to pass that it did cause great joy among them. And they went down into the land of Jershon, and took possession of the land of Jershon; and they were called by the Nephites the people of Ammon; therefore they were distinguished by that name ever after. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
“And they were among the people of Nephi, and also numbered among the people who were of the church of God. And they were also distinguished for their zeal towards God, and also towards humans; for they were perfectly honest and upright in all things; and they were firm in the faith of Christ, even unto the end. And they did look upon shedding the blood of their brethren with the greatest abhorrence; and they never could be prevailed upon to take up arms against their brethren; and they never did look upon death with any degree of terror, for their hope and views of Christ and the resurrection; therefore, death was swallowed up to them by the victory of Christ over it. Therefore, they would suffer death in the most aggravating and distressing manner which could be inflicted by their brethren, before they would take the sword or cimeter to smite them. And thus they were a zealous and beloved people, a highly favoured people of the Lord,” reports Alma 27.1-30. O God, Whose will it runs down the order of all the ages; come to me, please look favorably on your servant’s sake. I try to live up to the order of Godly people and promote the messages in the scripture. You are the one and only God, and I approve of dedicating my service to you, Lord. Thank you for your gifts and take pity of me. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
Cresleigh Homes
We might have found the coziest reading spot in #PlumasRanch. 😍📚
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Look down from Heaven, O Christ, on Thy flock and lambs, and bless their bodies and souls. Grant those who have received Thy sign, O Christ, on their foreheads, to be Thine own in the day of judgment.
May the Angel of Peace Come in—One’s Over-Great Hat to Repay an Obligation is a Kind of Ingratitude!
It is very peaceful to be able to live for your work alone. The self-denial, the sacrifices that our work demands are all compensated for by that lovely serenity of giving yourself up to dance. People also need to understand their existential freedom and their responsibility in exercising that freedom. One must develop the chance to experience one’s self as an entity separate from one’s environment, with the capacity to respond to one’s own initiative rather than merely reacting. Does emotion have a presence r identity independent of the person it is “in”? We talk as if it did. We commonly speak of expression, storing, getting in touch with, or even spreading and emotion. We speak of guilt as something that haunts us, or fear as something the grips, strikes, betrays, paralyzes, or overwhelms us. Fear, as we talk about is, is something that can lurk, hide, creep, look up, or attack. Love is something we fall into or out of. Anger is something that overtakes or overwhelms us. In this way of talking we use the fiction of some independent, outside agency in order to describe a contrasting inner state. It is important for a person to understand the sociohistorical precedence for the present attitudes one felt victim to. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
God is in His Heaven—All is Right with the World! Grow Old with Me Because the Best if Yet to Be!
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In early 1948, Emanuel D’amico rented a brownstone storefront at number 309 Court Street in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Carroll Gardens. Emanuel, a sea merchant from Palermo, Sicily, left his home some twenty years prior — one of the over 4 million Italians who immigrated to America seeking their fortune in the New World. He’d lost all he had in a failed Pasta Company endeavor and New York seemed his last chance to make things right. For a number of years he worked odd jobs and began a number of side ventures, but none were too successful. A number of years later, after sending for his wife under a U.S. sponsored amnesty program, the two reunited in Brooklyn and shortly after opened the doors to D’amico Foods.
D’amico Foods originally set their sights on coffee. In 1948, there were few cafes and most coffee consumed was mass produced, undrinkable swill. With an AJ Deer Royal Roaster, Emanuel became one of the first small batch, roast to order Brooklyn roasters. The max capacity of the machine was a mere 10 pounds, ensuring that all coffee which left D’amico Foods was fresh. He was revolutionary in his approach and developed quite a following amongst the Italian immigrant population in Carroll Gardens. With each batch Emanuel pulled, the rich aroma of fresh roasted coffee spilled out into the neighborhood.
It is Still an Ill Wind that Blows When You Leave the Hairdresser, Guilty of Spiritual Arson!
Cordelia, then, is her name! Cordelia! It is a beautiful name, and that, too, is important, since it can often be very disturbing to have an ugly name together with the most tender adjectives. I already recognized her a log way off; she was walking with two other girls on her left. The movement of their walking seemed to indicate that they were about to stop. I stood on the corner and read the posters, while I continually kept my eye on my strangers. They parted. The two presumably had gone a little out of their way, for they went in a different direction. She came along toward my corner. When she had walked a few steps, one of the young ladies came running after her and cried loudly enough for me to hear it: Cordelia! Cordelia! Then the third one joined them; they put their heads together for a privy council meeting whose secrets I futilely strained my ears to hear. Thereupon they all three laughed and hurried away at a somewhat quicker pace in the direction the two had taken. I followed them. They entered a house on Stranden. I waited for a while, since there was a strong probability that Cordelia would soon come back alone. However, that did not happen. Cordelia! That is really a splendid name—indeed, the same name as that of King Lear’s third daughter, that remarkable girl whose heart did no dwell on her lips, whose lips were mute when her heart was full. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
So also with my Cordelia. She resembles her, of that I am certain. However, in another sense her heart does dwell on her lips, not in the form of words but in more heartfelt way in the form of a kiss. How ripe with health her lips! I have never seen lips more beautiful. That I actually am in love I can tell partly by the secrecy with which I treat this matter, almost even with myself. All love is secretive, even the faithless kind, if it has the appropriate esthetic element within it. It has never occurred to me to wish for confidants or to boast of my adventures. Thus is almost makes me happy that I did not come to know where she lives but the place where she frequently visits. Perhaps I thereby may also have come even closer to my goal. I can make my observations without arousing her attention, and from this firmly established point it will be difficult for me to gain admission into her family. However, should this situation turn out to be a difficulty—eh bien [well, now]!—then I will put up with the difficulty alone. Everything I do I do con amore [with love] and o I also love con amore. In the realm of human destiny, the depth of human’s questioning is more important than one’s answers. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable. The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one’s soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are no attractive—you are leaking. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
James, the Lord’s brother, understood this as well as any man in history, and through the use of graphic analogies he has given us the most penetrating exposition of the tongue anywhere in literature, sacred or secular: “When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts,” reports James 3.3-5. The horse is an incredibly powerful animal. Takes 550 pounds (as much as puffing Olympic heavyweight lifter can hoist overhead), set it on a horse’s back, and it will barely snort as it stands breathing easily under the burden. The same horse, unburdened, can sprint a quarter-mile in about twenty-five seconds. A horse is half a ton of raw power! Yet, place a bridle and bit in its mouth and a 100-pound woman on its back who knows what she is doing and the animal can literally be made to dance. James observed the same phenomenon in ancient ships, as ships small and large were steered by an amazingly small rudder. Today it is still the same, where it be an acrobatic ski boat or the USS Enterprise. One who controls the rudder controls the ship. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
So it is with the mighty togue, that “movable muscular structure attached to the floor of the mouth” (Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary). “The tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts,” says James (v. 5). Or as Phillips has helpfully paraphrased it, “the human tongue is physically small, but what tremendous effects it can boast of.” Though it weighs only two ounces, it can legitimately boast of its disproportioned power to determine human destiny. This lives of Adolph Hitler and Winston Churchill bear eloquent testimony to the dark and bright sides of the to the dark and bright sides of the tongue’s power. The Fuhrer on one side of the Channel harangued a vast multitude with his hypnotic cadences. On the other side, the Prime Minister’s brilliant, measured utterances pulled a faltering nation together for its “finest hour.” However, we need not to look the drama of nations to see the truth of James’ words. Our own lives are evidence enough. Never doubt the power of the tiny tongue—and never underestimate it. James’ principal concern is with the destructive power of the tongue, and this produces a most provocative statement: “Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a World of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell,” (vv. 5,6). #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
The tongue has awesome potential for harm, as the forest fire analogy suggests. At 9.00 one Sunday evening, October 8, 1871, poor Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern as she was being milked, starting the great Chicago Fire. That disaster blackened three and one half miles of the city, destroying over 17,000 buildings before it was checked by gunpowder explosions on the south line of fire. The fire lasted two days and cost over 250 lives. However, ironically that was not the greatest inferno in the Midwest that year. Historians tell us that one the same day that dry autumn a spark ignited a raging fire in the North Woods of Wisconsin, a blasé which burned for an entire month, taking more lives than the Chicago Fire. A veritable firestorm destroyed billions of yards of precious timber—all from one spark! The tongue has that scope of inflammatory power in human relationships, and James is saying that those who misuse the tongue are guilty of spiritual arson. A mere spark from an ill-spoken word can produce a firestorm that annihilates everyone it touches. Furthermore, because the tongue is a “World of evil,” it contains and conveys all the World system’s wickedness. It is party to every evil there is and actively intrudes its evil into our lives. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
What is the effect of the tongue’s cosmic wickedness? “It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire” (v.6). “Course of life” is literally “the wheel of our genesis,” “genesis” referring to our human life or existence. What an apt description of human experience! About nine-tenths of the flames we experience in our lives come from the tongue. Having grabbed our imaginations with his graphic language, James adds the final touch: “and is itself set on fire by hell.” Here the language means continually set on fire. James used the same word for Hell that his brother Jesus used—“Gehenna”—derived from the perpetually burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem, a place of fire and filth where, as Jesus said, “their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9.48). Can anyone miss the point? The uncontrolled tongue has a direct pipeline to Hell! Fueled by Hell, it burns our lives with its filthy fires. However, it also, as Calvin says, an “instrument for catching, encouraging, and increasing the fires of hell.” Taking James’ word seriously, we recognize that the tongue has more destructive power than a hydrogen bomb, for the bomb’s power is physical and temporal, whereas the tongue is spiritual and eternal. The female spider is often a widow for embarrassing reasons—she regularly eats those who come her way. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Lonely suitors and visitors alike quickly become corpses, and her dining room is a morgue. A visiting fly, having become captive, will appear to be whole, but the spider has drunk his insides so that he becomes his own hollow casket. Not a pleasant thought, especially if you have a touch of arachnophobia, as I do! The reason for this macabre procedure is that she has no stomach and so is incapable of digesting anything with her. Through tiny punctures she injects her digestive juices into a fly so that his insides are broken down and turned into warm soup. This soup she swills, even as most of us swill souls of one another after having cooked them in various enzymes: guilt, humiliations, subjectivities, cruel love—there are a number of fine, acidic mixes. And some among us are so skilled with the hypodermic word that our dear ones continue to sit up and to smile, quite as though they were still alive. This is a gruesome but effective metaphor to describe the destructive power of evilly intended words. Words do not dissolve mere organs and nerves but souls! This World is populated by walking human caskets because countless lives have been dissolved and sucked empty by another’s words. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Significantly, James does not tell us how the tongue’s destructive power is manifested in human speech. He knows that the spiritual mind, informed by the Scriptures, will have no problem in making the connections. This is also the same message Mrs. Winchester left behind in her spider web, art glass, and Shakespearean windows. It is also why Mrs. Winchester did not tolerate gossip and would let an employee go in a heartbeat for violating her will. The tongue’s destructive power in gossip lead the list, of course. A neighbour was jealous of Mrs. Winchester’s house and she fell victim to disgruntled town’s folks, who tried to ruin her professionally through rumor, and almost did. Several years later the gossiper had a change of heart and wrote Mrs. Winchester asking for her forgiveness, and she forgave her. However, there was no way the story could be erased. As Solomon wisely observed, “The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down into a human’s inmost parts,” Proverbs 18.8. Gossip is greedily picked up and stored away by the hearers like tasty tidbits of filet mignon en croute au foie gras. Vigorous denial would only bring more suspicion—“So and so protests too much!” The damage was done. Hereafter the innocent Mrs. Winchester would always look into certain eyes and wonder if they had heard the story—and if they believed it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Gossip often veils itself in acceptable conventions such as “Have you hear?” or “Did you know?” or “They tell me…” or “Keep this to yourself, but…” or “I do not believe it is true, but I heard that…” or “I would not such rationalization in Christian circles is, “I am telling you this so you can pray.” This seems so pious, but the heart that feeds on hearing evil reports is a tool of Hell, and it leaves flaming fires and dead bodies in its wake. Oh, the heartache that comes from the tongue. A cousin of gossip is innuendo. Consider the ship’s first mate who after a drunken binge was written up by the captain on the ship’s log: “mate drunk off some Amsterdam and Hennessy today.” The mate’s revenge? Some months later he surreptitiously wrote on his own entry, “Captain sober today.” So it goes with the word unsaid, the awkward silence, the raised eyebrows, the quizzical look—all freighted with the misery of Hell. Gossip involves saying behind a person’s back what you would never say to one’s face. Flattery means saying to a person’s face what you would never say behind one’s back. The Scriptures warn us repeatedly against flatterers, for they are destructive people who carry a legion of unwholesome motives: “Whoever flatters one’s neighbour is spreading a net for one’s feet,” reports Proverbs 29.5. “A lying togue hates those it hurts, and a flattering mouth works ruin,” reports Proverbs 26.28. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Fault-finding seems endemic to the Christian Church. Perhaps this is because a taste of righteousness can be easily perverted into an overweening sense of self-righteousness and judgmentalism. Once while William Wirt Winchester was preaching, he noticed a lady in the audience who was known for her critical attitude. All through the service she sat and stared at his new tie. When the meeting ended, she same up to him and said very sharply, “Mr. Winchester, the strings on your tie are much too long. It is an offense to me!” He asked if any of the ladies present happened to have a pair of scissors in their purse. When the scissors were handed to him, he gave them to his critic and asked her to trim the streamers to her liking. After she clipped them off near the collar, he said, “Are you sure they are all right now?” “Yes, that is much better.” “Then let me have those shears a moment,” said Mr. Winchester. “I am sure you would not mind if I also gave you a bit of correction. I must tell you, madam, that your tongue is an offense to me—it is too long! Please stick it out…I would like to take some off.” On another occasion someone said to Mr. Winchester, “My talent is to speak my mind.” Mr. Winchester replied, “That is one talent God would not care a bit if you buried!” This is good advice for all Christians. “May the Lord cut off all flattering lips and every boastful tongue that says, ‘We will triumph with our tongues…’” reports Psalm 12.3, 4. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the scarifies imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the right secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice. Being first virtues of human activities, truth and justice are uncompromising. These propositions seem to express our intuitive conviction of the primacy of justice. No doubt they are expressed too strongly. In any event I wish to inquire whether these contentions or others similar to them are sound, and if so how they can be accounted for. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
To this end it is necessary to work out a theory of justice in the light of which these assertions can be interpreted and assessed. I shall begin by considering the role of the principles of justice. Let us assume, to fix ideas, that a society is a more or less self-sufficient association of persons who in the relations to one another recognize certain rules of conduct as binding and who for the most part act in accordance with them. Supposed further that these rules specify a system of cooperation designed to advance the good of those taking part in it. Then, although a society is a cooperative venture for mutual advantage, it is typically marked by a conflict as well as by an identity of interests. There is an identity of interests since social cooperation makes possible a better life for all than any would have if each were to live solely by one’s own efforts. There is a conflict of interests since persons are not indifferent as to how the greater benefits produced by their collaboration are distributed, for in order to pursue their ends they each prefer a larger to a lesser share. A set of principles is required for choosing among the various social arrangements which determine this division of advantages for underwriting an agreement on the proper distributive shares. These principles are he principles of social justice: they provide a way of assigning right and duties in the basic institutions of society and they define the appropriate distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Now let us say that a society is well-ordered when it is not only designed advance the good of its members but when it is also effectively regulated by a public conception of justice. That is, it is a society in which (1) everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice, and (2) the basic social institutions generally satisfy and are generally known to satisfy these principles. In this case while human may put forth excessive demands on one another, they nevertheless acknowledge a common point of view from which their claims may be adjudicated. If human’s inclination to self-interest makes their valiance against one another necessary, their public sense of justice makes their secure association together possible. Among individuals with disparate aims and purposes a shared conception of justice establishes the bonds of civic friendship; the general desire for justice limits the pursuit of other ends. One may think of a public conception of justice as constituting the fundamental character of a well-ordered human association. Existing societies are of course seldom well-ordered in this sense, for what is just and unjust is usually in dispute. Humans disagree about which principles should define the basis terms of their association. Yet we may still, despite this disagreement, that they each have a conception of justice. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
That is, they understand the need for, and they are prepared to affirm, a characteristic set of principles for assigning basic rights and duties and for determining what they take to be the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. Thus it seems natural to think the conception of justice as distinct from the various conceptions of justice and as being specified by the role which these different sets of principles, these different conceptions, have in common. Those who hold different conceptions of justice can, then, still agree that institutions are just when no arbitrary distinctions are made between persons in the assigning of basic rights and duties and when the rules determine a proper balance between competing claims to the advantages of social life. Humans can agree to this description of just institutions since the notions of an arbitrary distinction and of a proper balance, which are included in the concept of justice, are left open for each to interpret according to the principles of justice that one accepts. These principles single out which similarities and differences among persons are relevant in determining rights and duties and they specify which division of advantages is appropriate. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Clearly this distinction between the concept and the various conceptions of justice settles no important questions. It simply helps to identify the role of the principles of social justice. Some measures of agreement in conceptions of justice is, however, not the only prerequisite for a viable human community. There are other fundamental social problems, in particular those of coordination, efficiency, and stability. Thus the plans of individuals need to be fitted together so that their activities are compatible with one another and they can all be carried through without anyone’s legitimate expectations being severely disappointed. Moreover, the execution of these plans should lead to the achievement of social ends in ways that are efficient and consistent with justice. And final, the scheme of social cooperation must be stable: it must be more or less regularly complied with and its basic rules willingly acted upon; and when infractions occur, stabilizing forces should exist that prevent further violations and tend to restore the arrangement. Now it is evident that these three problems are connected with that of justice. In the absence of a certain measure of agreement on what is just and unjust, it is clearly more difficult for individuals to coordinate their plans efficiently in order to ensure that mutually beneficial arraignments are maintained. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Distrust and resentment corrode the ties of civility, and suspicion and hostility tempt humans to acts in ways they would otherwise avoid. So while the distinctive role of conceptions of justice is to specify basic rights and duties and to determine the appropriate distributive shares, the way in which a conception does this is bound to affect the problems of efficiency, coordination, and stability. We cannot, in general, assess a conception of justice by its distributive role alone, however useful this role may be in identifying the concept of justice. We must take into account its wider connections; for even though justice has a certain priority, being the most important virtue of institutions, it is still true that, other things equal, one conception of justice is preferable to another when its broader consequences are more desirable. Recognizing God helps you define the Universe as you see it. I who stand before you, I who come into your presence, I who am your worshipper, call out to you, Dear God in Heaven. You are unlimited, and are vastly greater than we are. Sweet-songed God, hear me. I come before you, Lord of the Bow, whose arrows bring healing. I ask that you help me, please heal the wounded in this planet, as their wounds vary from spiritual, financial, physical and/or mental. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
King Lamont supposes that Ammon is the Great Spirit—Ammon teaches the king about the Creation, God’s dealings with humans, and the redemption that comes through Christ—Lamoni believes and falls to the Earth as if dead. About 90 years Before Christ. “And it came to pass that king Lamoni caused that his servants should stand forth and testified to the things which they had seen, and he had learned of the faithfulness of Ammon in preserving his flocks, and also of his great power in contending against those who sought to slay him, he was astonished exceedingly, and said: Surely, this is more than a man. Behold, is not this the Great Spirit who doth send such great punishments upon this people, because of their murders? And they answered the king, and said: Whether he be the Great Spirit or a man, we know not; but this much we do know, that he cannot be slain by the enemies of the king; neither can they scatter the king’s flocks when he is with us, because of his expertness and great strength; therefore, we know that he is a friend to the king. And now, O king, we do not believe that a human has such great power, for we know cannot be slain. And now, when the king heard these words, he said unto them; Now I know that it is the Great Spirit; and he has come down at this time to preserve you lives, that I might be your brethren. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
“Now, this is the Great Spirit of whom our father have spoken. Now this was the tradition of Lamoni, which he had received from his father, that there was a Great Spirit. Notwithstanding they believed in a Great Spirit, they suppose that whatsoever they did was right; nevertheless, Lamont began to fear exceedingly, with fear lest he had some wrong in slaying his servants; for he had slain many of them because their brethren had scattered their flocks at the place of water; and thus, because they had had their flocks scattered they were slain. Now it was the practices of these Lamanites to stand by the waters of Sebus to scatter the flocks of the people, that thereby they might drive away many that were scattered unto their own land, it being a practice of plunder among them. And it came to pass that king Lamoni inquired of his servants, saying: Where is this man that has such great power? And they said unto him: Behold, he is feeding they horses. Now the king has commanded his servants, previous to the time of the watering of their flocks, that they should prepare his horses and chariots, and conduct him forth to the land of Nephi; for there had been a great feast appointed at the land of Nephi, by the father of Lamoni, who was king over all the land. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
“Now when king Lamoni heard that Ammon was preparing his horses and his chariots he was more astonished, because of the faithfulness of Ammon, saying: Surely there has not been any servant among all my servants that has been so faithful as this man; for even he doth remember all my commandments to execute them. Now I surely know that this is the Great Spirit, and I would desire him that he come in unto me, but I durst not. And it came to pass that when Ammon had made ready the horses and the chariots for the king and his servants, he went in no the king, and he saw that the countenance of the king was changed; therefore he was about to return out of his presence. And one of the king’s servants said unto him, Rabbanah, which is, being interpreted, powerful or great king, considering their kings to be powerful; and thus he said unto him: Rabbanah, the king desireth thee to stay. Therefore Ammon turned himself unto the king, and said unto him: What wilt thou that I should do for thee, O king? And the king answered him not for the space of an hour, according to their time for he knew no what he should say unto him. And it came to pass that Ammon said unto him again: What desirest thou of me? But the king answered not. And it came to pass that Ammon, being filled with the Spirit of God, therefore he perceived the thoughts of the king. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
“And he said unto him: Is it because thou hast heard that I defended thy servants and thy flocks, and slew seven of their brethren with the sling and with the sword, and smote off the arms of others, in order to defend thy flocks and thy servants; behold, is it this that causeth thy marvelings? I say unto you, what is it, that they marvelings are so great? Behold, I am a man, and am thy servant; therefore, whatsoever thou desirest which is right, that will I do. Now when the king had heard these words, he marveled again, for he behold that Ammon could discern his thoughts; but notwithstanding this, king Lamoni did open his mouth, and said unto him: Who art thou? Art thou that Great Spirit, who knows all things? Ammon answered and said unto him: I am not. And the king said: How knowest thou the thoughts of my heart? Thou mayest speak boldly, and tell me concerning these things; and also tell me by what power ye slew and smote off the arms of my brethren that scattered my flocks—and now, if thou wilt tell me concerning these things, whatsoever thou desirest I will give unto thee: and if it were needed, I would guard thee with my armies; but I know that thou art more powerful than all they; nevertheless, whatsoever thou desirest of me I will grant it unto thee. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
“Now Ammon being wise, yet harmless, he said unto Lamoni: Wilt thou hearken unto my words, if I tell thee by what power I do these things? And this is the thing that I desire of thee. And the king answered him, and said: Yea, I will believe all thy words. And thus he was caught with guile. And Ammon began to speak unto him with boldness, and said unto him: Believest thou that there is a God? And he answered, and said unto him: I do no know what the meaneth. And then Ammon said: Believest thou that there is a Great Spirit? And he said, Yea. And Ammon said: This is God. And Ammon said unto him again: Believest thou that this Great Spirit, who is God, created all things which are in Heaven and in the Earth? And he said: Yea, I believe that he created all things which are in the Earth; but I do not know the Heavens. And Ammon said unto him: The Heavens is a place where God dwells and all his holy angels. And king Lamoni said: Is it above the Earth? And Ammon said: Yea, and he looked down upon all the children of humans; and he knows all the thoughts and intents of the heart; for by his hand were they all created from the beginning. And king Lamoni said; I believe all these things which thou hast spoken. Art thou sent from God? Ammon said to him: I am a man; and man in the beginning was created after the image of God, and I am called by his Holy Spirit to teach these things unto this people, that they may be brought to a knowledge of that which is just and true. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
“And a portion of that Spirit dwelleth in me, which giveth me knowledge, and also power according to my faith and desires which are in God. Now when Ammon had said these words, he began at the creation of the World, and also the creation of Adam, and told him all the things concerning the fall of man, and rehearsed and laid before him the records and the holy scriptures of the people, which had been spoken by the prophets, even down to the time that their father, Lehi, left Jerusalem. And he also rehearsed unto them (for it was unto the king and to his servants) al the journeyings of their fathers in the wilderness, and all their sufferings with hunger and thirst, and their travail, and so forth. And he also rehearsed unto them concerning the rebellions of Laman and Lemuel, and the sons of Ishmael, yea, all their rebellions did he relate unto them; and he expounded unto them all the records and scriptures from the time that Lehi left Jerusalem down to the present time. However, this is not all; for he expounded unto them the plan of redemption, which was prepared from the foundation of the World; and he also made known unto them concerning the coming of Christ, and all the work of the Lord did he make known unto them. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
“And it came to pass that after he had said all these things, and expounded them to the king, that the king believed all his words. And he began to cry unto the Lord, saying: O Lord, have mercy; according to thy abundant mercy which thou hast had upon the people of Nephi, have upon me, and my people. And now, when he had said this, he fell unto the Earth, as if he were dead. And it came to pass that his servant took him and carried him in unto his wife, and laid him upon a bed; and he lay as if he were dead for the space of two days and two nights; and his wife, and his sons, and his daughters mourned over him, after the manner of the Lamenting his loss,” reports Alma 18.1-43. Look down from Heaven, O Christ, on Thy flock and lambs, and bless their bodies and souls. Please grant those who have received Thy sign, O Christ, on their foreheads, to be Thine own in the day of judgment. A Desto, Domine, supplicationibus nostris; et me, qui etiam misericordia Tua primus indigeo, clementer exaudi; et quem non election emeriti, sed dono gratiae Tuae, constituisti hujus operis ministrum, da fiduciam Tui muneris exsequendia, et Ispse in nostro ministerio quod Tuae pietatis est operare. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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MOVE IN READY: HOME SITE 74
4 Bedrooms – 3.5 Bathrooms – 3,501 sq. ft. – $621,740
Home Site 74 at Brighton Station is a beautiful Residence Four and one of the largest homes available in the market! At 3,501 square feet we are sure you’ll have enough room for the entire family here! The open concept design includes four bedrooms, three and one half bathrooms and a three car garage. Enjoy a spacious back yard with California Room included!
When entering this expansive home, take note of the two story ceiling height at the entry. There is a bedroom on the first floor, located off the entry, with its own bathroom making it ideal for a guest suite or multigenerational living.
The formal dining room provides ample space for entertaining and has convenient access to the kitchen via Butler’s Pantry.
The kitchen comes fully equipped with our gleaming extended kitchen island, perfect for family gatherings and an entertainer’s dream! White cabinets and undercabinet lighting with stainless steel appliances, quartz counters and tile backsplash complete this stunning kitchen.
Upstairs you will find the Owner’s retreat, two bedrooms, and the loft perfect for a game room or TV lounge. The Owner’s retreat is spacious and inviting with a large bedroom and spa like bathroom featuring a free-standing soaking tub, walk-in shower, dual vanities, and two walk-in closets. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/move-in-ready-home-site-74/
Randolph Harris II International 