Diversity is important, and we must keep that in mind and even respect and welcome groups who may not be oppressed. Equality is not for one, it is for all! One of the dangers facing the World is the deterioration of the home and family. The family is one of the greatest institutions of civilization. Subversion of this great institution can do nothing less than bring destruction upon the World. The plan of life and salvation teaches that marriage is for time and eternity. They very purpose of life is that we might take upon ourselves morality, that we might prove ourselves to see if we will do the things that the Lord has commanded up. This is a glorious World in which we live. It was created by God through his only Begotten Son, with its Heavenly bodies and their functions. The Earth with its abundance of flowers, its adornment of beautiful tress and shrubs; the majestic mountains; the mighty blue oceans; the sun and its great functions; the starts and the amazing planets in the Heaven and Victorian architecture—yes, they are all the handiwork of God. All these things bid us have joy. Humans, however, are the greatest of all God’s creations. The Lord God told Moses: “This is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of humans,” reports Moses 1.39. The question, “Do miracles occur?” and the question, “Is the course of Nature absolutely uniform?” are the same question asked in two different ways. Hume, by sleight of hand, treats them as two different questions. He first answers “Yes,” to the question whether Nature is absolutely uniform: and then uses this “Yes” as a ground for answering, “No,” to the question, “Do miracles occur?” The single real question which he set out to answer is never discussed at all. He gets the answer to one form of the question by assuming the answer to one form of the same question. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

Probabilities of the kind that Hume is concerned with hold inside the framework of an assumed Uniformity of Nature. When the question of miracles is raised, we are asking about the validity or perfection of the frame itself. No study of probabilities inside a given frame itself tells us how probable it is that the frame itself can be violated. Granted a school time-table with French on Tuesday morning at ten o’clock, it is really probable that Jones, who always skimps his French preparation, will be in trouble next Tuesday, and that he was in trouble on any previous Tuesday. However, what does this tell us about the probability of the time-table’s being altered? To find that out one must eavesdrop in the masters’ common-room. It is no use studying the time table. If we stick to Hume’s method, far from getting what he hoped (namely, the conclusions that all miracles are infinitely improbable) we get a complete deadlock. The only kind of probability he allows holds exclusively within the frame of uniformity. When uniformity is itself in question (and it is in question the moment we ask whether miracles occur) this kind of probability is suspended. And Hume knows no other. By his method, therefore, we cannot say that uniformity is either probable or improbable. We have impounded both uniformity and miracles in a sort of limbo where probability and improbability can never come. This result is equally disastrous for the scientist and the theologian; but along Hume’s lines there is nothing whatever to be done about it. Our only hope, then, will be to cast about for some quite different kind of probability. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

Let us for the moment cease to ask what right we have to believe in the Uniformity of Nature, and ask why in fac humans do believe in it. I think the belief has three causes, two of which are irrational. In the first place we are creatures of habit. We expect new situations to resemble old ones. It is a tendency which we share with other terrestrial beings; one can see it working, often to very comic results, in our dogs and cats. In the second place, when we plan our actions, we have to leave out of account the theoretical possibility that Nature might not behave as usual to-morrow, because we can do nothing about it. It is not worth bothering about because no action can be taken to meet it. And what we habitually put out of our minds we soon forget. The picture of uniformity thus comes to dominate our minds without rival and we believe it. Both these causes are irrational and would be just as effective in building up a false belief as in building up a tree. However, I am convinced that there is a third cause. “In science,” said the late Sir Arthur Eddington, “we sometimes have convictions which we cherish but cannot justify; we are influenced by some innate sense of the fitness of things.” This may sound a perilously subjective and aesthetic criterion; but can one doubt that it is a principal source of our belief in Uniformity? A Universe in which unprecedented and unpredictable events were at every moment flung into Nature would not merely be inconvenient to us: it would be profoundly repugnant. We will not accept such a Universe on any terms whatever. It is utterly detestable to us. It shocks our “sense of the fitness of things.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

In advance of experience, in the teeth of many experiences, we are already enlisted on the side of uniformity. For of course science actually proceeds by concentrating not on the regularities of Nature but on her apparent irregularities. It is the apparent irregularity that prompts each new hypothesis. It does do because we refuse to acquiesce in irregularities: we never rest till we have formed and verified a hypothesis which enables us to say that they were not really irregularities at all. Nature as it comes to us looks at first like a mass of irregularities. The stove which lit all right yesterday will not light to-day; the water which was wholesome last year is poisonous this year. The whole mass of seemingly irregular experience could never have been turned into scientific knowledge at all unless from the very start we had brought to it a faith in uniformity which almost no number of disappointments can shake. This faith—the preference—is it a thing we can trust? Or is it only the way our minds happen to work? It is useless to say that it has hitherto always been confirmed by the event. That is no good unless you (at least silently) add, “And therefore always will be”: and you cannot add that unless you know already that our faith in uniformity is well grounded. And that is just what we are now asking. Does this sense of fitness of our correspond to anything in external reality? The answer depends on the Metaphysic one holds. If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that out sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tells us anything about a reality external to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

Our convictions are simply a fact about us—like that colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true, we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform. Only if quite a different Metaphysic is true, can it be trusted. If the deepest things in reality, the Fact which is the source of all other facthood, is a thing in some degree like ourselves—if it is a Rational Spirit and we derive our rational spirituality from It—then indeed our conviction can be trusted. Our repugnance to disorder is derived from Nature’s Creator and ours. The disorderly World which we cannot endure to believe in is the disorderly World He would not have endured to create. Our conviction that the time-table will not be perpetually or meaninglessly altered is sound because we have (in a sense) eavesdropped in the Masters’ common-room. The sciences logically require a metaphysic of this sort. Our greatest natural philosopher thinks it is also the metaphysic out of which they originally grew. Professor Whitehead points out that centuries of belief in a God who combined “the personal energy of God” with “the rationality of a Greek philosopher” first produced that firm expectation of systemic order which rendered possible the birther of modern science. Humans became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. Two significant developments have already appeared—the hypothesis of a lawless sub-nature, and the surrender of the claim that science is true. We may be living nearer than we supposed to the end of the Scientific Age. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

However, if we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed, you have no security against it. That is the bargain. Theology says to you in effect, “Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events.” The philosophy which forbids you to make uniformity absolute is also the philosophy which offers you solid grounds for believing it to be general, to be almost absolute. The Being who threatens Nature’s claim to omnipotence confirms her in her lawful occasions. Give us this ha’porth of tar and we will save the ship. The alternative is really much worse. Try to make Nature absolute and you find that her uniformity is not even probable. By claiming too much, you get nothing. You get the deadlock, as in Hume. Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue one’s experiments and the Christian to continue one’s prayers. We have also, I suggest, found what we were looking for—a criterion whereby to judge the intrinsic probability of an alleged miracle. We must judge it by our “innate sense of fitness of things,” that same sense of fitness which led us to anticipate that the Universe would be orderly. I do not mean, of course, that we are to use this sense in deciding whether miracles in general are possible: we know that they are on philosophical grounds. Nor do I mean that a sense of fitness will do instead of close inquiry into the historical evidence. As I have repeatedly pointed out, the historical evidence cannot be estimated unless we have first estimated the intrinsic probability of the recorded event. It is in making that estimate as regards each story of the miraculous that our sense of fitness comes into play. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

If in giving such weight to the sense of fitness I were doing anything new, I should feel rather nervous. In reality I am merely giving formal acknowledgement to a principle which is always used. Whatever humans may say, no one really thinks that the Christian doctrine of Resurrection is exactly on the same level with some pious title-tattle about how Mother Egaree Louise miraculously found her second best thimble by the assistance of St. Anthony. The religious and the irreligious are really quite agreed on the point. The whoop of delight with which the sceptic would unearth the story of the thimble, and the “rosy pudency” with which the Christian would keep it in the background, both tell the same tale. Even those who think all stories of miracles absurd think some very much more absurd than others: even those who believe them all (if anyone does) think that some require a specially robust faith. The criterion which both parties are actually using is that of fitness. More than half the disbelief in miracles that exists is based on a sense of their unfitness: a conviction (due, as I have argued, to false philosophy) that they are unsuitable to the dignity of God or Nature or else to the indignity and insignificance of humans. Although God can do all things, He cannot make a think that is corrupt not to have been corrupted. There does not fall under the scope of God’s omnipotence anything that implies a contradiction. Now that the past should not have been implies a contradiction. For as it implies a contradiction to say that Socrates is sitting, and not sitting, so does it to say that he sat, and did not sit. However, to say the he did sit is to say that it happened in the past. To say that he did not sit, is to say that it did not happen. Whence, that the past should not have been, does not come under the scope of divine power. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

This is what Augustine means when he says (Contra Faust. xxix, 5): “Whosoever says, If God is almighty, let Him make what is done as if it were not done, does not see that this is to say: If God is almighty let Hum effect that what is true, by they very fact that it is true, be false.” And the Philosopher says (Ethic. vi, 2): “Of this one thing alone is God deprived—namely, to make undone the things that have been done. Although it is impossible accidentally for the past not to have been, if one considers the past thing itself, as, for instance, the running of Socrates; nevertheless, if the pas thing is considered as past, that it should not have been is impossible, not only in itself, but absolutely since it implies a contradiction. Thus, it is more impossible than the raising of the dead; in which there is nothing contradictory, because this is reckoned impossible in reference to some power, that is to say, some natural power; for such impossible thing do some beneath the scope of divine power. As God, in accordance with the perfection of the divine power, can do all things, and yet some things are not subject to His power, because they fall short of being possible; so, also, if we regard the immutability of the divine power, whatever God could do, He can do now. Some things, however, at one time were in the nature of possibility, whilst they were yet to be done, which now fall short of the nature of possibility, when they have been done. So is God said not to be able to do them, because they themselves cannot be done. God can remove all corruption of the mind and body from a woman who has fallen; but the fact she has been corrupt cannot be removed from her; as also is it impossible that the fact of having sinned or having lost charity thereby removed from the sinner. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

In altering the info-sphere so profoundly, we are destined to transform our own minds as well—the way we think about our problems, the way we synthesize information, the way we anticipate the consequences of our own actions. We are likely to change the role of literacy in our lives. We may even alter our own brain chemistry. Hald’s comment about the ability of computers and chip-studded appliance to converse with us is not as blue-sky as it might seem. “Voice data entry” terminals in existence today almost feel at home with natural language, even thought they are not yet able to detect emotion or context, but forecasts for when this might happen range upwards of twenty years down to a mere five years, and the implications of this development—on both the economy and the culture—could be tremendous. Today millions of people are excluded from the job market because they are functionally illiterate. Even the simplest jobs demand people capable of reading forms, on-off buttons, paychecks, job instructions, and the like. In the Second Wave World the ability to read was the most element skill required by the hiring office. Pretty soon people will have to know how to write computer programs and repair computers to enhance their employment opportunities. It only makes sense. Learning a second or third language does give over a competitive advantage over the next applicant, but if one could also learn the language of computer programming and repair, that would be a huge advantage in the age of information. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

Still, illiteracy is not the same as stupidity. We know that illiterate people the World over are capable of mastering highly sophisticated kills in activities as diverse as agriculture, construction, hunting, and music. Many illiterates have prodigious memories and can speak several languages fluently—something most university-educated Americans cannot do. In Second Wave societies, however, illiterates were economically doomed. Literacy, of course, is more than a job skill. It is the doorway to a fantastic Universe of imagination and pleasure. Yet in an intelligent environment, when machines, appliances, and even walls are programmed to speak, literacy could turn out to be less paycheck-linked than it has been for the past three hundred years. Airline reservation clerks, stock-room personnel, machine operators, and repair people may be able to function quite adequately on the job by listening rather than reading, as a voice from the machine tell them, step by step, what to do next or how to replace a broken par. Computers are not superhuman. They need repair and rest. They make errors—sometimes dangerous ones. There is nothing magical about them, and they are assuredly not “spirits” or “souls” in our environment. Yet with all these qualifications, they remain among the most amazing and unsettling of human achievements, for they enhance our mind-power as Second Wave technology enhanced our muscle-power, and we do not know where our own minds will ultimately lead us. As we grow more familiar with the intelligent environment, and learn to converse with it from the time we leave the cradle, we will begin to use computers with a grace and naturalness that is hard for us to imagine today. And they will help all of us—not just a few “super-technocrats”—to think more deeply about ourselves and the World. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

Today, when a problem arises, we immediately seek to discover its causes. However, until now even the most profound thinkers have usually attempted to explain things in terms of a relative handful of causal forces. For even the best human mind finds it difficult to entertain, let alone manipulate, more than a few variables at a time. (While we may deal with many factors simultaneously on a subconscious or intuitive level, systematic, conscious thinking about a great many variables is damnably difficult, as anyone who has tried it knows.) In consequence, when faced with a truly complicated problem—like why a child is delinquent, or why inflation ravages an economy, or how urbanization affects the ecology of a nearby river—we tend to focus on two or three factors and to ignore many others that may, singly or collectively, be far more important. Worse yet, each group of experts typically insists on the primal importance of “its own” causes, to the exclusion of others. Faced with the staggering problems of urban decay, the Housing Expert traces it to congestion and a declining housing stock; the Transportation Expert points to the lack of mass transit; the Welfare Expert shows the inadequacy of budgets for day-care centers or social work; the Crime Expert points a finger at the infrequency of police patrols; the Economic Expert shows that high taxes are discouraging business investment; and so on. Everyone high-mindedly agrees that all these problems are somehow interconnected—that they form a self-reinforcing system. However, no one can keep the many complexities in mind while trying to think through a solution to the problem. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

Urban decay is only one of a larger number of what Peter Ritner, in The Society of Space, once felicitously termed “weave problems.” He warned that we would increasingly face crises that were “not susceptible to ‘cause and effect analysis” but would require ‘mutual dependence analysis’; not composed of easily detachable elements but of hundreds of cooperating influences from dozens of independent, overlapping sources.” Because it can remember and interrelate large numbers of causal forces, the computer can help us cope with such problems at a deeper than customary level. It can sift vast masses of data to find subtle patterns. It can help assemble “blips” into larger, more meaningful wholes. Given a set of assumptions or a model, it can trace out the consequences of alternative decisions, and do it more systematically and completely than any individual normally could. It can even suggest imaginative solutions to certain problems by identifying novel or hitherto unnoticed relationships among people and resources. Human intelligence, imagination, and intuition will continue in the foreseeable decades to be far more important than the machine. Nevertheless, computers can be expected to deepen the entire culture’s view of causality, heightening our understanding of the interrelatedness of things, and helping us to synthesize meaningful “wholes” out of he disconnected data whirling around us. The computer is one antidote to blip culture. At the same time, the intelligent environment may eventually begin to change not merely the way we analyze problems and integrate information, but even the chemistry of our brains. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

Experiments by David Krech, Marian Diamond, Mark Rosenzweig, and Edward Bennett, among others, have down that animals exposed to an “enriched” environment have larger cerebral cortices, more glial cells, bigger neurons, more active neurotransmitters, and larger blood supplies to the brain than animals in a control group. Can it be that, as we complexify the environment and make it more intelligent, we shall make ourselves more intelligent as well? Dr. Donald F. Klein, Director of Research at New York Psychiatric Institute, one of the World’s leading neuropsychiatrists, speculates: “Krech’s work suggests that among the variable affecting intelligence is the richness and responsiveness of the early environment—understimulating, poor, unresponsive—coon learn not to take chances. There is little margin for error, and it actually pays off to be cautious, conservative, uninquisitive or downright passive, none of which works wonders for the brain. On the other hand, kids raised in a smart, responsive environment, which is complex and stimulating, may develop a different set of skills. If kids can call on the environment to do things for them, they become less dependent on parents at a younger age. They may gain a sense of mastery or competence. And they can afford to be inquisitive, exploratory, imaginative, and to adopt a problem-solving approach to life. All of which may promote changes in the brain itself. At this point, all we can do is guess. However, it is not impossible that an intelligent environment could lead us to develop new synapses and a larger cortex. A smarter environment might make smarter people.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

All this, however, only begins to hint at the larger significance of the changes the new info-sphere brings with it. For the de-massification of the media and the concomitant rise of the computer together change our social memory. Self-imagery holds us together by a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. We confirm that we are as we imagine ourselves to be, by acting in a way which confirms it. In this, we may be guided by realistic self-imagery: “This-is-what-I-am,” or we may be guided by more idealized imagery: “This-is-how-I-would-wish-to-be.” There may not always be a lot of difference between these two: fortunate people are guided by ideas about themselves which please them, not crippled by aspects of themselves which shame or hurt them. How do we come to value our selves? More to the point, how do we come to value the ideas about ourselves which we do value? Surely our sense of worth comes initially from (m)others, though of course that is not how the infant part of us experiences it. The infant has right to feel grand. However, in fact our sense of worth depends on a good mirroring facilitating environment. If a mother accepts the faecal gift of proudly—or if she rejects it or is uninterested in it—she is not only responsive to a drive. She is also responding to the child’s forming self. Her attitude, in other words, influences a set of inner experiences that play a crucial role in the child’s future development. She responds—accepting, rejecting, disregarding—to a self that, in giving and offering, seeks confirmation by the mirroring self-object. The child therefore experiences the joyful prideful parental attitude, or the parent’s lack of interest…as the acceptance or rejection of one’s tentatively established, yet still vulnerable, creative-productive-active self. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

If the mother rejects this self just as it begins to assert itself as a center of creative-productive initiative (especially of course if her rejection or lack of interest is only one link in a long chain of rebuffs and disappointments emanating from her pathogenically unemphatic personality) or if her inability to respond to her child’s total self leads her to a fragmentation—producing preoccupation with its faeces—to the detriment of the cohesion-establishing involvement with her total child, her faeces-producing, learning, controlling, maturing, total child—then the child’s self will be depleted and it will abandon the attempt to obtain the joys of self-assertion. It will, for reassurance, turn to the pleasures it can derive from the fragments of its body self. This search for good feelings then no only fails to consolidate a valued self-image, but also leads to further fragmentation. In order to escape from depression, the child runs from the unemphatic or absent self-object to oral, anal and phallic sensation, which it experiences with great intensity. Disintegration—de-differentiation—is the fear at the heart of the narcissistically injured, that is of those whose self-imagery is a source of frequent misery to them. They lack that which gives more fortunate people a constant sense of their own well-being and worthwhileness. While the satisfaction of its needs gives the child a sense of well-bring and strength, what eventually gives it its integration and its identity is being treated as a whole person when it is not as yet feeling whole. For this to happen, people must relate to the baby as a person, and not as a series of chores or achievements. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

When the baby is treated as a collection of “part-objects,” there is likely to be less integration and less integrity. Very different consequences awaits the child whose oral, anal, and phallic sensations are welcomed as valid expressions of that child’s whole self (even before the child has a whole self). The empathic, mirroring, reflecting function of the adult then ensures pride in these functions without giving any of them eminence above the child as a living and loving human being—the whole person is validated. For people to value themselves, so that they can run their lives according to what they value, they have first to have been valued as persons. And they must have been loved for being, not for doing this or that—it is this which gives them the sense that they are valuable people rather than a jumble of bits. Initially, other people give the fortunate infant this identity by showing love and respect. In due course, this sense of value, given by (m)others, becomes self-respect, and becomes capable of acting as an integrating and guiding principle. This process is called “personalizing,” because it is the opposite of “depersonalizing.” By the late 1970s the postwar pattern seemed set. European Americans, for a variety of racial, educational, life-style, and tax reason, would continue to out-migrate to the suburbs. Non-European Americans, on the other hand, with few exceptions would become ever-more concentrated in the cities. The assumption that this is the inevitable future continues to be “popular wisdom” today, in spite of a quarter of a century of European American inner-city revitalization and gentrification and African American, Latino, and Asian suburbanization. During the 1970s it became increasingly apparent that in spite of the fact that both scholarly and popular attention were focused elsewhere, there were major changes in non-European American suburbanization. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

The fair housing legislation of 1968 legally opened the suburbs to middle-class non-European Americans. While racial steering still occurred, the housing legislation meant that African American, Latino, and Asian suburbanization was no longer de facto restricted to predominately Non-European American suburbs. The result was the beginning of African American and others experiencing a middle-class exodus to the suburbs. Not only did the non-dominant culture of America’s population grow faster than that in the cities; nationally, the rate of African American suburbanization was twice as fast as the previous decade. During the 1950s and 1960s, the percentage of African Americans who lived in suburbs barely changed. The 1970s marked a real turning point, with the African American population living outside cities growing faster than that within. In contrast to earlier decades, the 1970s showed the African American suburban population increasing three times as rapidly as the European American population. Washing, D. C., for example, saw its African decline 17 percent during the decade. By contrast, suburban Fairfax, in Virginia, saw a 119 percent increase in its African American residents, while the percentage increases for suburban Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland were 136 and 170 percent. By 1980 the latter county had 248,000 African American residents. Moderate- and middle-income non-European Americans were leaving the city for the suburbs. For upwardly mobile African Americans, as for European Americans, owning a home in the suburbs because a symbol of success in climbing the economic ladder. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

However, while the legal restriction of middle-class African Americans to urban high-risk neighbourhoods was no more, housing discrimination remained. De jure housing discrimination on the basis of race was no longer operative but de facto discrimination, particularly on the individual level, remained a fact of life. Nonetheless, in spite of de facto discrimination, there was an opportunity for middle-class families who could afford to do so left the cities and moved into suburban neighbourhoods. The leavers sought better housing and better educational opportunities for themselves and their children. As a consequence, middle-class African American rates of suburbanization accelerated at the same time as European American suburban growth rates were declining. According to the Bureau of the Census figures, the European American suburban population increased 13.1 percent during the decade of the 1970s, while the African American population increased 42.7 percent. The European American suburban increase was exactly half the 26.1 percent figure of the 1960 to 1970 period and only a fraction of the rapid growth of European American suburbanites in the 1950s. African American suburban growth during the 1970s was not just a regional phenomenon; it too place in all areas of the country. A pattern seemed to be developing in which African American population shifts trailed European American changes by a decade or so but followed the same general patterns. One example of this African American population shift was that several of the cities having the largest African American populations, such as Philadelphia, Washington, Cleveland, and St. Louis, saw their African American populations actually decline. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

During the 1970–1980-decade, African Americans departed from Washington, D.C., at twice the rate of European Americans. Moreover, those departing were disproportionately people in their twenties and thirties with young children. One consequence of the upswing in African American suburbanization was that by 1980, African Americans numbered 12 percent the national population and represented 6.1 percent of the suburban population. By 1990, the African American figure had increased to 6.6 percent. As of 2021, the population of African Americans in the suburbs is 27 percent. Overall, suburbs are 35 percent non-European American. Some argue that non-European Americans are still underrepresented in the suburbs. However, in general, many people like to buy homes in middle-class and upper-middle class communities that have a high number of college educated, professional European Americans because they tend to keep to themselves, are peaceful, quiet, and keep their properties in outstanding condition. So, it is not only because they tend to have higher property values, but also because they are busy working and tend to care about their reputations in the community. Nonetheless, the underrepresentation of African Americans in the suburbs is not just because of income or educational differences. African Americans of every income level are highly segregated from European Americans at the same economic level. Political distinctions necessarily lend themselves to civil distinctions. The growing inequality between the people and its leaders soon makes itself felt among private individuals, and is modified by them in a thousand ways according to passions, talents and events. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

The magistrate cannot usurp illegitimate power without producing proteges for oneself to whom one is forced to yield some part of it. Moreover, citizens allow themselves to be oppressed only insofar as they are driven by blind ambition; and looking more below than above them, domination becomes more dear to the than independence, and they consent to wear chains in order to be able to give them in turn to others. It is very difficult to reduce to obedience someone who does not seek to command; and the most adroit politician would never succeed in subjecting humans who wanted merely to be free. However, inequality spreads easily among ambitious and cowardly souls always ready to run the risks of fortune and, almost indifferently, to dominate or serve, according to whether it becomes favourable unfavourable to them. Thus it is that there must have come a time when the eyes of people ere beguiled to such an extent that its leaders merely had to say to the humblest of humans, “Be great, you and all your progeny,” and one immediately appeared great to everyone as well as in one’s own eyes, and one’s descendants were elevated even more in proportion as they were at some remove from one. The more remote and uncertain the cause, the more the effect increased; the more loafers one could count in a family, the more illustrious it became. If this were the place to go into detail, I would easily explain how [even without government involvement] the inequality of prestige and authority becomes inevitable among private individuals, as soon as they are united in one single society and are focused to make comparisons among themselves and to take into account the differences they discover in the continual use they have to make of one another. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

These differences are of several sorts, but in general, since wealth, nobility or rank, power and personal meri are the principal distinctions by which someone is measured in society, I would prove that the agreement or conflict of these various forces is the surest indication of a well- or ill-constituted state. I would make it apparent that among these four types of inequality, since personal qualities are the origin of all the others, wealth is the last to which they are ultimately reduced, because it readily serves to buy all the rest, since it is the most immediately useful to well-being and the easiest to communicate. This observation enables one to judge rather precisely the extent to which each people is removed from its primitive institution, and of the progress it has made toward the final stage of corruption. I would note how much that universal desire for reputation, honours, and preferences, which devours us all, trains and compares our talents and strengths; how much it excites and multiplies the passions; and, making all humans competitors, rivals, or rather enemies, how many setbacks, successes and catastrophes of every sort it causes every day, by making so many contenders run the same course. I would show that it is to this ardor for making oneself the topic of conversation, to this furor to distinguish oneself which nearly always keeps us outside ourselves, that we own what is best and worst among humans, our virtues and vices, our sciences and our errors, our conquerors and our philosophers, that is to say, a multitude of bad things against a small number of good ones. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

Finally, I would prove that is one sees a handful of powerful and rich humans at the height of greatness and fortune while the mob grovels in obscurity and misery, it is because the former prize the things they enjoy only to the extent that the others are deprived of them; and because, without changing their position, they would cease to be happy, if the people ceased to be miserable. However, these details alone would be the subject of a large work in which one would weigh the advantages and the disadvantages of every government relative to rights of the state of nature, and where one would examine all the different faces under which inequality has appeared until now and many appear in [future] ages, according to the nature of these governments and the upheavals that time will necessarily bring in its wake. We would see the multitude oppressed from within as a consequence of the very precautions it had taken against what menaced it from without. We would see oppression continually increase, without the oppressed ever being able to know where it would end or what legitimate means would be left for them to stop it. We would see the rights of citizens and national liberties gradually die out, and the protests of the weak treated like seditious murmurs. We would see politics restrict the honour of defending the common cause to a mercenary portion of the people. We would see arising from this the necessity for taxes, the discouraged farmer leaving one’s field, even during peacetime, and leaving his plow in order to gird oneself with a sword. We would see the rise of fatal and bizarre rules in the code of honour. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

We would see the defenders of the homeland sooner or later become its enemies, constantly holding a dagger over their fellow citizens, and there would come a time when we would hear the say to the oppressor of their country: “If you order me to plunge my sword into my brother’s breast or my father’s throat, and into my pregnant wife’s entrails, and steal the gold coins from my uncle’s purse, I will do so, even though my right hand is unwilling.” When despair for the World grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not takes their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the World, and am free. Flee, my Beloved, till our love shall please Thee, then turn in pity. Base kings would sweep us hence;–shall their despoiling not appease Thee? O tear their roots up from our ruined heap! Then raise our rampart; let our songful children call, “Behold, He standeth now behind our wall.” Flee, my Beloved, till the day be breaking beyond the end of vision—then arise and chase these shadows,–him Thou wast forsaking, despised, shall be exalted, high and wise, sprinkling the nations.—Bare Thine art, Lord, when we cry, “The voice of my Beloved soundeth nigh.” Flee, my Beloved,–like a roe be flying till Thou reveal the end of mine account. Despoiled, and for my crown of beauty sighing, contemned, but longing for the glorious mount,–so with no leader and no prophet leave me, with yet no Tishbite to renew my fame; but plead my cause at last; the bonds that grieve me break; and my foe shall turn away in shame when these that do reproach me and deceive me I answer with sweet words that speak Thy name: “Lo, this is my Beloved, my Redeemer, Lover, Friend, my father’s God, my God until the end.” For the fathers’ sake Thou wilt save the children, yea, and bring redemption unto their children’s children. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hast redeemed America. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23  

Cresleigh Homes

The perfect house has space for the fancy and the casual! The Brighton Station Residence 2 offers a homey kitchen with a pass-through to the formal dining room, so you can eat frozen pizza or a three course meal – whatever fits the mood!

Many people enjoy the ease and accessibility in this single-story, light and roomy home, which boasts of nearly 2,500 square feet. All of the windows make this enchanting home an extension of the wonderful outdoor areas from which to relax or entertain. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-2/

I believe all of our lives we were looking for a Cresleigh Home, and we were really lucky to find it.

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