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Dramatic as they Seemed at the Time, the Upheavals Wrought
Dramatic as they seemed at the time, the upheavals wrought by Milken were only part of a much larger revolution. For today’s changes in the control and channeling of capital—still one of the changes in the entire economy. In Morgan’s time, and throughout the heyday of Wall Street power, the mass production of millions of identical products was symbolic of “modern times.” Today, we are standing the principle of mass production on its head. Computer-driven technologies are making it possible to turn out small runs of increasingly customized goods aimed at niche markers. Smart companies are moving from the production of long runs of increasingly customized goods aimed at niche markets. Smart companies are moving from the production of long runs of commodity products to short runs of “higher value products” like specialty steels and chemicals. Meanwhile, constant innovation shortens product life cycles. We find precisely parallel changes in the financial service industry, which is also diversifying product lines and shortening product life cycles. It, too, is spewing out a stream of niche products—new types of securities, mortgages, insurance policies, credit instruments, mutual funds, and endless permutations and combinations of these. Power over capital flows toward endless permutations and combinations of these. Power over capital flows toward firms capable of customization and constant innovation. In the new Third Wave economy, a car or a computer may be built in four countries and assembled in a fifth. Markets, too, expand beyond national boundaries. In the current jargon, business is becoming global. Once more, in direct parallel, we fund the financial services—banking, insurance, securities—all racing to “globalize” in order to serve their corporate clients. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The Third Wave economy operates at super-high speeds. To keep pace, financial firms are pouring billions into new technologies. New computers and communications networks not only make possible the variation and customization of existing products, and the invention of new ones, but also drive transaction speeds toward instantaneity. As new-style factories shift from “batch processing” to round-the-clock or “continuous flow” operations, finance follows suit, and shifts from “banker’s hours” to twenty-four-hour services. Financial centers crop up in multiple time zones. Stocks, bonds, commodities, and currencies trade nonstop. Electronic networks make it possible to assemble and disassemble billions in what seems like nanoseconds. Speed itself—the ability to keep pace or stay ahead—affects the distribution of profit and power. A good example is the shrinkage of the “float” once enjoyed by banks. “Float” is the money in customers’ accounts on which the bank can earn interest while customer checks are waiting to clear. As computers accelerate the clearing process, banks gain less advantage from these funds and are forced to find alternative sources of revenue—which leads them into frontal competition with other sectors of the financial industry. As capital markets expand and interlink, from Hong Kong and Tokyo to Toronto and Paris, crossing time zones, money runs faster. Velocity and volatility both rise, and financial power in society shifts from hand to hand faster and faster speeds. Take together, all these changes add up to the deepest restructure of the World finance since the early days of the industrial era. They reflect the rise of new system of wealth creation, and even the most powerful firms, once controlling vast flows of capital, are tossed about like matchsticks in a gale. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
In 1985, America’s largest investment banker, Salomon Brothers, committed itself to build an impressive $455 million headquarters on Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. By spring of 1987 Salomon became the target of a possible takeover; in October it had to shut down the municipal bond business in had dominated for twenty years; its commercial paper department went, too; 800 of its 6,500 employees were laid off; the October 1987 stock market crash slammed into the firm, and by December it was ignominiously forced to backout of the big headquarters deal at a cost of $51 million. As profits plummeted and its own stock price fell, internal schisms rent the firm apart. One faction favored sticking to its traditional role as a capital supplier to the Blue Chips. Another sought to enter the high-yield or junk bond business that Milken had pioneered and reach out to second-tier firms. Defections and chaos followed. “The World changed in some fundamental ways,” rued its chairman, John Gutfreund, “and most of us were not on top of it. We were dragged into the modern World.” The “modern World,” however, is a volatile, hostile place of the old dragons. Not only individuals and companies, but whole sectors of the financial industry totter. The collapse of more than five hundred savings-and-loans banks in the United States of America, requiring the government to pump hundreds of billions into an emergency rescue plan, reflects the rising instability. Government regulatory agencies designed for a simpler, slower smokestack World proved unable to anticipate and avert the looming disaster, as hundreds of these “thrift institutions,” caught off guard and crushed by rapidly shifting interest rates, went down in a welter of corruption and stupidity. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
As the global economy grows, the financial marketplace itself becomes so vast that it dwarfs any single institution, company, or individual—even a Milken. Tremendous currents rip through the system causing eruptions and perturbations on a global scale. From the dawn of the industrial era, money power was centered in Europe. By the end of World War II, it had shifted decisively to North America, and more specifically to the southern tip of Manhattan Island. U.S. economic dominance went unchallenged for nearly three decades. From then on, money—and the power that flows from it—has been zigzagging unsteadily across the planet like a pachinko Ball gone mad. In the mid-seventies, seemingly overnight, the OPEC cartel sucked billions out of Europe, North America (and the rest of the World), and sent them zigging into the Middle East. Immediately, these petrodollars were zagged into bank accounts in New York or Zurich, zigged out once more in the form of gigantic loans to Argentina, Mexico, or Brazil, shot right back to U.S. and Swiss banks. As the value of the dollar feel and trade patterns shifted, capital zagged again to Tokyo, and zigged back into real estate, government bonds, and other holdings in the United States of America—all at speeds that stagger the experts struggling to understand what is happening. With each such lurch of capital comes a corresponding redistribution of power at the global and local levels. As oil money fire-hosed into the Middle East, Arab nations began to wield a huge cudgel in international politics. Israel found herself increasingly isolated in the U.N. African countries, needing oil and eager for foreign aid from the Arabian people, broke off diplomatic relations with Jerusalem. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Petrodollars began to influence the media in various parts of the World. And the lobbies of hotels in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait were jammed with attache-case-carrying supplicants—salesmen, bankers, executives, and wheeler-dealers from around the World, pleading ignominiously with this or that spurious relative of a royal family for contacts and contracts. However, by the early 1980s, as OPEC unity fell apart and oil prices collapsed, the frenzy waned, and so did Arab political power. Today the horde of supplicants, often representing the largest banks and corporations in the World, mill about the lobbies of hotels like the Okura or the Imperial in Tokyo. The growing volatility of the World capital market, dramatized by such huge swings and punctuated by stock market crashes and recoveries, as in the “Two Octobers”—October 1987 and October 1989—are a sign that the old system is increasingly going out of control. Old safety mechanisms, designed to maintain financial stability in a World of relatively closed national economies, are as obsolete as the rust-belt World they were designed to protect. Globalized production and marketing require capital to flow easily across national boundaries. This, in turn, demands the dismantling of old financial regulations and barriers erected by national removal of these barriers in Japan and in Europe has negative consequences as well. The result is a larger and larger pool of capital instantly available anywhere. However, if this makes the financial system more flexible and helps it overcome localized crises, it also raises the ante, escalating the risk of massive collapse. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Modern ships are built with watertight compartments so that a leak in one part of the hull cannot flood and sink the entire vessel. Liberalization of capital so that it can flow freely is the equivalent of eliminating these fail-safe compartments. Essential for the advance of the economy, it increases the danger that a serios collapse in one country will spread to others. It also threatens the power of one of the most important economic institutions of the industrial age: the central bank. Until a decade or so ago, a relative handful of central bankers and government officials could decisively affect the price of everything from Danish hams to Datsun cars by manipulating interest rates and intervening in foreign currency markets. Today this is becoming harder for them to do. Witness the explosive growth of the “forex,” or foreign exchange, markets and the electronic networks that facilitate them. Only a few years ago the Bank of Japan could influence the yen-dollar ratio by buying or selling 16 billions’ worth of dollars. Today such sums are laughable. An estimated 200 billion dollars’ worth of currencies are traded every day in London, New York, and Tokyo alone—more than a trillion a week. (Of this, no more than 10 percent is associated with World trade; the remaining 90 percent is speculation.) Against this background the role of individual central banks, and even of the major ones acting in concert, is limited at best. Because power is rapidly shifting out of the hands of central bankers and the governments they nominally represent, we hear urgent calls for new, more centralized regulation at supra-national level. These are attempts to control a post-smokestack financial system by using essentially the same tools used during the smokestack age—merely raised to a higher power. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
In Europe some political leaders call for the elimination of national currencies and the creation of a single all-European central bank. France’s former finance minister Edouard Ballladour and West Germany’s foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher are joined by many French, Belgian, and Italian officials in pushing for this higher level of centralization. Though still some time off in the future, says economist Liane Launhardt of Commerzbank A.G. in Frankfurt: “We will eventually have to have a European central bank.” Against this supra-nationalism, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain has waged a rear-guard action in defense of national sovereignty. However, even at the World level we begin to see increasingly attempts by the G-7, the group of seven largest industrial economies, to synchronize and coordinate their policies with respects to currencies, interest rates, and other variables. And academics and some financial experts argue for a “World central bank.” If the globalizers win, it will mean further weakening of the power of existing central banks—the key regulators of capital in the noncommunist World since the dawn of the smokestack age. The decades to come will therefore see a titanic power struggle between the globalizers and the nationalists over the nature of new regulator institutions in the World capital markets. This struggle reflects the collision between a moribund industrial order and the new global system of wealth creation that is replacing it. Ironically, however, these proposals to centralize control of global finance at a higher level run counter to developments at the actual level of economic production and distribution, both of which are becoming more dispersed, diverse, and decentralized. This suggests that the outcome of this historic power struggle may satisfy neither nationalists nor globalists. History, full of surprises, could force us to reframe the issues in novel ways and to invent wholly new institutions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
One thing seems clear. When the battle to reshape global finance reaches its climax in the decades ahead, many of the greatest “powers that be” will be overthrown. Yet even these upheavals in the distribution of World money-power reveals less than the whole story. They will be dwarfed in history by a revolution in the nature of wealth itself. For something odd, almost eerie, is happening to money itself—and all the power that flows from it. So many industrial-age institutions are racing toward implosion. Leaders who attempt to redesign old institutions face denial, stubborn resistance and conflict. Innovators who seek to create new institutions or organizations face skepticism. Both need guts, political skill, tenacity, a sense of timing and commitment. They need allies. Externa crisis—and even internal recognition of it—is not enough to bring about transformation in the absence of a persuasive, plausible, nonutopian vision of an alternative. And it is precisely here that social imagination is called for. Fortunately, there are tested tools that can help unleash it. One of these is the addition or subtraction of functions. For example, the university was originally a place to teach students. In the nineteenth century, the University of Berlin added research to its core functions and became a model for other universities around the World. In the twentieth century, innovators did the reverse, subtracting students from the model of a research university, leaving only the research. The result was a new type of institution called a think tank. Recently, a wave of adding and subtracting functions has swept through American industry under the rubric of outsourcing and insourcing. A corporate transformation also occurs when existent functions are either radically expanded or reduced. Big-enough changes in scale can add up to qualitative transformation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
In a World in which borders have become more porous, the distinction between foreign and domestic affairs has broken down. Should each country continue to have a foreign ministry? In universities, should neatly bounded academic disciplines be permanent? Of should disciplinary departments be replaced by temporary, problem-oriented teams comprising students and professors with diverse specialties? In all sectors of society—private, public, and civil—we will need completely new models of organization—strange combinations of networks within bureaucracies, bureaucracies within networks, checkerboard organizations, organizations flexible enough to double or halve their capacity overnight, organizations that survive by forming temporary “coalitions of the willing” to accomplish specified goals. Preventing systemic institutional implosion will require transforming not just big corporations and governmental departments but every level of the economy and society, from small business to churches, local unions and local NGOs. On a smaller, slower scale this happened before, when the industrial revolution was still young and needed new, post-agrarian institutions, from department stores and police forces to central banks and think tanks. Innovators arose from the most unexpected places and created them against far greater resistance and odds than those posed in today’s societies transitioning beyond industrialism. And it is here that the United States of America is perhaps the strongest. It has fewer lengthy traditions to protect. It has ethnic and cultural diasporas that bring ideas to America from all over the World. Its people are among the most entrepreneurial in the World—and not just in business. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
It has intellectual entrepreneurs, activist entrepreneurs, online entrepreneurs, religious entrepreneurs, academic entrepreneurs. And, unlike societies that suppress individual entrepreneurialism, it preaches a gospel of change that celebrates it. However, America is not alone in innovational resources. Never in history have there existed more educated people committed to making change. Never have there been so many different kinds of institutions, or more powerful tools for matching, mixing, simulating, designing and testing new institutional models. Fortunately, we are beginning to see a new “meta-intuition” appear—a handful of laboratories for social invention and entrepreneurship—mainly focused on the civil-society sector, which is bubbling with energy and imagination. Some universities now teach courses in social invention. Some foundations offer modest awards for the best ideas. The U.S. Patent Office has approved patents for new business models. However, should not there be an imaginative new form of patent for equally creative social models? Innovation will either be sparked by topside leadership ready to transform existing institutions or it will explode from the bottom, as more and more industrial-age institutions collapse and systemic implosion nears. Advanced economies are honeycombed with millions of social inventors, innovators, organizational risk-takers, dreamers and practical men and women, better educated, with access to more knowledge from everywhere, armed with the most powerful knowledge tools known to the human race and bursting for the chance to invent a better tomorrow. They are all over the World, ready to remake it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
As for the United States of America, it is especially rich with innovative, ever-inventive, try-it-out, go-for-it people eager to test new idea and new models. Even the Sepulveda Solution—the crazy, wonderful juxtaposition of a car wash offering the latest best sellers, how-to books and the works of Cervantes and Garcia Marquez; Dante, Darwin and Du Bois; Whiteman and Wollstonecraft; Aristotle and Plato; Machiavelli and Rousseau; John Locke; and Thomas Paine’s ever-inspiring Rights of Man. A car wash, even with a bookstore, will not change America, let alone the World. However, thousands, indeed millions, of creative adaptations to the emerging markets, culture and conditions of the knowledge economy will. If a car wash can also be a bookstore, the range of options for preventing an institutional implosion may be limited only by our social imagination. The time has come to free it. With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-Worlds disappears. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy. The United Sates of America is the only culture to have a Technopoly. It is a young Technopoly, and we can assume that it wishes not merely to have been the first but to remain the most highly developed. Therefore, it watches with a careful eye Japan and several European nations that are striving to become Technopolies as well. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
To give a date to the beginnings of Technopoly in America is an exercise in arbitrariness. It is somewhat like trying to say, precisely, when a coin you have flipped in the air begins its descent. You cannot see the exact moment it stops rising; you know only that it has and is going the other way. Huxley himself identified the emergence of Henry Ford’s empire as the decisive moment in the shift from technocracy to Technopoly, which is why in his brave new World time is reckoned as BF (Before Ford) and AF (After Ford). Because of its drama, we are tempted to cite, as a decisive moment, the famous Scopes “monkey” trial held in Dayton, Tennessee, in the summer of 1925. There, as with Galileo’s heresy trial three centuries earlier, two opposing World-views faced each other, toe to toe, in unconcealed conflict. And, as in Galileo’s trial, the dispute focused not only on the content of “truth” but also on the appropriate process by which “truth” was to be determined. Scopes’ defenders brought forward (or, more accurately, tried to bring forward) all the assumptions and methodological ingenuity of modern science to demonstrate that religious belief can play no role in discovering and understanding the origins of life. William Jennings Bryan and his followers fought passionately to maintain the validity of a belief system that placed the question of origins in the words of their god. In the process, they made themselves appear ridiculous in the eyes of the World. Almost seventy years later, it is not inappropriate to say a word in their behalf: These “fundamentalists” were neither ignorant of nor indifferent to the benefits of science and technology. They had automobiles and electricity and machine-made clothing. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
They used telegraphy and radio, and among their number were men who could fairly be called reputable scientists. They were eager to share in the largesse of the America technocracy, which is to say they were neither Luddites nor primitives. What wounded them was the assault that science made on the ancient story from which their sense of moral order sprang. They lost, and lost badly. To say, as Bryan did, that he was more interested in the Rock of Ages than the age of rocks was clever and amusing but woefully inadequare. The battle settled the issue, once and for all: in defining truth, the great narrative of inductive science takes precedence over the great narrative of Genesis, and those who do not agree must remain in an intellectual backwater. Studies of nanotechnology are today in the exploratory engineering phase, and just beginning to move into engineering development. The basic idea of exploratory engineering is simple: combine engineering principles with known scientific facts to form a picture of future technological possibilities. Exploratory engineering looks at future possibilities to help guide our attention in the present. Science—especially molecular science—has moved fast in recent decades. There is no need to wait for more scientific breakthroughs in order to make engineering breakthroughs in nanotechnology. Exploratory engineering has an outer box which represents the set of all the technologies permitted by laws of nature, whether they exist or not, whether they have been imagined or not. Within this set are those technologies that are manufacturable with today’s technology, and those that are understandable with today’s science. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Textbooks teach what is understandable (hence teachable) and manufacturable (hence immediately practical). Practical engineers achieve many success by cut-and-try methods and put them into production. Exploratory engineers study what will become practical as manufacturing abilities expand to embrace more of the possible. Each of these types of exploratory engineering relates most familiar kinds taught in school: this “textbook engineering” covers technologies that can be both understood (so they can be taught) and manufactured (so they can be used). Bridge-building and gearbox design fall in this category. Other technologies, however, can be manufacture but are not understood—any engineer can give examples of things that work when similar things do not, and for no obvious reason. However, as long as they do work, and work consistently, they can be used with confidence. This is the World of “cut-and-try engineering,” so important to modern industry. Bearing lubrication, adhesives, and many manufacturing technologies advance by cut-and-try methods. Exploratory engineering covers technologies that can be understood but not manufactured—yet. Technologies in this category are also familiar to engineers, although normally they design such things only for fun. So much is known about mechanics, thermodynamics, electronics, and so forth that engineers can often calculate what something will do, just from a description of it. Yet there is no reason why everything that can be correctly described must be manufacturable—the constraints are different. Exploratory engineering is as simple as textbook engineering, but neither military planners nor corporate executive see much profit in it, so it has not received much attention. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The concepts of molecular manufacturing and molecular nanotechnology are straightforward results of exploratory-engineering research applied to molecular systems. As we observed above, if anyone had bothered, the basic ideas could have been worked out sixty years ago. However, now, with the threshold of nanotechnology approaching, attention is beginning to focus on where the next steps lead. If technology keeps advancing, and competition practically guarantees that advanced will continue, nanotechnology seems to be where the World is headed. It will open both a huge range of opportunities for benefit and a huge range of opportunities for misuse. We will paint scenarios to give a sense of the prospects and possibilities, but we do not offer predictions of what will happen. Actual human choices and blunders will depend on a range of factors and alternatives beyond what we can hope to anticipate. Television is another interesting form of technology. The attempt to push the information through television foes flat. It does not work. The viewer is left to evaluate aspects of the experience that television can capture, and these reduce to objective facts like the arguments among opposing viewpoints as to the best use of this area. People need homes. The developer has a right to profit. The tax base of the community is affected. Meanwhile, the ecologists speak of flyways and breeding grounds, endangered plants and nearly extinct creatures. A whole world of sensory information has been abandoned, and yet it is in this World that real understanding of marshes exists. And without the understanding who can care about the marsh? Taxes become more important. Birds can be seen elsewhere. Images of mud and reeds do not inspire the mind, especially compared with the hard facts of our World. People need jobs building hoses. Nobody ever “uses” swamps anyway. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
It is possible that viewers of that program had a greater feeling for swamps when the swamps resided totally in their imaginations, where, at least, they had the richness that fantasy can creature. On television, the fantasy is destroyed and the perspective is flattened. What was true for this news report is true for all television programs that concern nature. Seeing the forests of Borneo on television makes one believe that one knows something of these forests. What one knows, however, is what television is capable of delivering, a minute portion of what Borneo forests are. It cannot make you care very much about them. When Georgia-Pacific proceeds to cut down hundreds of thousands of acres of Borneo forests, at it has so many others in the Pacific Basin, one remains unmoved. The wood is needed for homes. The objective data dominate when only objective data can be communicated. Meanwhile, sitting in our dark rooms ingesting images of Borneo forests, we lose feeling even for the forests near our homes. While we watch Borneo forests, we are not experiencing neighbourhood forests, local wilderness or even local parks. As forests experience reduces to television forest, out caring about forests, any forests, goes into dormancy for lack of direct experience. And so the lumber company succeeds in cutting down the Borneo forest, and then, near to home, it also succeeds in building a new tract of condominiums where a local park had been. In my opinion, the more the natural environment is conveyed on TV, the less people will understand about it or care about it, and the more likely its destruction becomes. Ecologists would be wise to abandon all attempts to put nature on television. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Programs concerned with the arts, programs concerned with many religions and all programs concerned with non-Western cultures are similarly distorted by television’s inability to convey their sensual aspects. Theater music, dance, if they are to be fully understood and appreciated, require exquisitely fine visual and aural reproduction as well as exquisitely tuned sense reception in the viewer. The experience of them on television is only the barest approximation of the direct experience of the performance. The information loss is enormous, and it is the most critical and subtle the information that is lost. Some people argue that television delivers a new World of art to people in, say, Omaha, who might otherwise never see the Stuttgart Ballet or the New York Philharmonic. They say this stimulates Ballet or the New York Philharmonic. They say this stimulates interest in the arts. I find this very unlikely. Information received with only two senses, especially in the limited range of television, and considering the other dulling aspects of the medium, is simply not the same at the receiving end as it would have been in the theater or concert hall. On television the depths are flattened, the spaces edited, the movements distorted and fuzzed-up, the music thinned and the scale reduced. This would have to affect the level of understanding and limit the quality of the experience. The human senses cannot experience what is not there. If the television delivers a drastically reduced version of an art experience, then this is what the senses must deal with, and if one has never directly experienced the real thing, how is one to know that the reality is richer than the television version? #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Reading Moby Dick as a comic book does not inspire one to read Moby Dick in the original. Quite the opposite. And so seeing the Stuttgart Ballet performing on television leaves one with such a reduced notion of ballet as to reduce the appeal of the ballet itself. The result is likely to be boredom and switched channels. To say that such a program stimulates new interest in arts is to behave. And so it goes in all areas. The religions of the World, from Tibetan Buddhism to many forms of Catholicism, are deeply rooted in the rich interplay of the human mind and senses. On television they must be understood through fixed cerebral channels, leaving description, but no feeling. The same can be said for must cultures of the World still immersed in the sensory relationships between human and environment. There is no way to effectively convey African cultures, as was mentioned, through images disconnected from the other senses, and certainly not through logical analysis. More often than not these cultures and others are sensually or mystically based and can be deeply understood only in those terms. Unfortunately, television makes the effort to explain them anyway, just as it claims to convey nature, the arts, the news and the details of human feeling. Human beings who view these attempts are led to believe that these fuzzy little pellets of information about our rich, subtle, complex and varied World constitute something close to reality. What they really do is make the World as fuzzy, coarse, and turned-off as the medium itself. If flesh feels inherently good, the more flesh must feel that much better! This simple idea emerges out of a kind of folk-wisdom that stretches back to the Paleolithic era. A similar cultural predisposition toward the opposite extreme of thinness certainly pervades post-industrial culture. The two extremes are inextricably linked by a core fascination with the power of food…a fixation which ranges back past the era of human evolution to the roots of mentality in the higher primates, in which eating becomes the key drive of pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The force-feeder control the victim bound by the magnitude of their own flesh, the surgeon or anorectic controls the subject’s bodily integrity. The consumptive fetish, as we might call the two combined back into their root, is the primordial source of all sado-masochistic behavioural patterns, since food and flesh are the most primary instruments of control, of life and death themselves. It is assumed that the chronological story of the World is in the primeval state and evolutionarily stable. However, cooperation based on reciprocity can gain a foothold through two different mechanisms. First, there can be kinship between mutant strategies, giving the genes of the mutants some stake in each other’s own success, thereby altering the payoff of the interaction when viewed from the perspective of the gene rather than the individual. A second mechanism to overcome total defection is for the mutant strategies to arrive in a cluster so that they provide a nontrivial proportion of the interactions each has. And if the probability that interaction between two individuals will continue is great enough, then TIT FOR TAT is itself evolutionarily stable. Moreover, its stability is especially secure because it can resist the intrusion of whole clusters of mutant strategies. Thus cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in a predominately noncooperative World, can thrive in a variegated environment, and can defend itself once fully established. A variety of specific biological applications of this approach follows from two of the requirements for the evolution of cooperation. The basic idea is that an individual must not be able to get away with defecting without the other individuals being able to retaliate effectively. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The response requires that the defecting individual not be lost in a sea of anonymous others. Higher organisms avoid this problem by their well-developed ability to recognize many different individuals of their species, but lower organism must rely on mechanisms that drastically limit the number of different individuals or colonies with which they can interact effectively. The other important requirement to make retaliation effective is that the probability of the same two individual meeting again must be high. When an organism is not able to recognize the individual with which it had a prior interaction, a substitute mechanism is to make sure that all of its interactions are with the same player. This can be done by maintaining continuous contact with the others. This method is applied in most mutualisms, situations of close association of mutual benefit between members of different species. Ideology today, in popular speech, is, in the first place, generally understood to be a good and necessary thing—unless it is bourgeois ideology. The evolution of the term was made possible by the abandonment, encouraged by Nietzsche, of the distinction between true and false in political and moral matters. Men and societies need myths, not science, by which to live. In short, ideology became identical to values, and that is why it belongs on the honour roll of terms by which we live. If we examine Weber’s, of course, meant that all societies or communities of human beings require such violent domination—as the only way order emerges from chaos in a World with no ordering force in it other than man’s creative spirituality—while Marxists still vaguely hope for a World where there are values without domination. This is all that remains of their Marxism, and they can and do fellow-travel with Nietzscheans a goodly bout de chemin. One sees their plight in the fact that ideology no longer has its old partner, science, in their thought, but stands in lonely grandeur. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Born with the Proverbial Silver Spoon in His Mouth
When his name first exploded into the headlines, Michael Milken was an intensely private, work-obsessed an in his early forties, nominally a senior vice-president of Drexel Burnham Lambert, an investment banking firm actually co-founded by Morgan in 1871. Despite this deceptive title, Milken was more than just another senior vice-president. He was the architect of a whole new order in American finance. He was, as many soon recognize, the J.P. Morgan of our time. In the 1980s, Drexel became one of Wall Street’s hottest investment banking firms. And because Milken’s hard-driving efforts were mainly responsible for its spectacular growth, he was allowed to run his own largely independent shop, three thousand miles from the firm’s headquarters in the East. His office was just across from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. Milken would arrive at his office as early as 4.30 or 5.00 A.M., in time to squeeze in a few meetings before the opening of the New York Stock Exchange, three time zones away. CEOs of major corporations, trekking in from New York or Chicago, would drag themselves red-eyed to these conferences, hat in hand, seeking financing for their companies. One might want to build a new plant; another might wish to expand into new markets; a third might wish to make an acquisition. They were there because they knew Milken could find the capital for them. Throughout the day Milken would sit at the center of a huge X-shaped trading desk, whispering, wheeling, dealing, shouting, surrounded by a frenzy of employees working the telephones and computer screens. It was from this desk that he and his team reshaped modern American industry, as Morgan had done in an earlier day. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
A comparison of how each did it tells a lot about how the control of capital—and hence the power of money in society—is changing today. And it begins with the personal. While J.P. Morgan was paunchy, fierce-looking, and imposing, Milken is tall, slender, clean-shaven, with curly black hair and the look of a startled doe. While Morgan was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his baby mouth, Milken, son of a CPA, collected soiled spoons off tables at the coffee shop where he worked for a time as a busboy. Morgan commuted between Wall Street, mid-Manhattan, an estate on the Hudson, and palatial residence in Europe. Milken still lives in a far-from-palatial wood and brick home in Encino, in the not-quite-fashionable San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. Seldom far from the Pacific Ocean, he keeps his eyes focused on Japan, Mexico, and the developing economies to the south. Morgan surrounded himself with compliant young ladies and left his wife and family to languish in his absence; Milken is, by all accounts, a family man. Morgan disliked Jewish people. Milken was Jewish. Morgan despised trade unions; Milken has served as a financial consultant for rail, airline and maritime unions. The idea that employees might own their own firms would have struck Morgan as arrant communism. Milken favors worker-ownership and believes it is going to play a major role in American industry in the years to come. Both men accumulated vast power for themselves, because notorious in the press, came under government investigation for real and/or alleged wrongdoing. However, far more important, they shifted the structure of power in America in remarkably different ways. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
When Milken was born on July 4, 1946, the America economy was still dominated by huge companies formed, for the most part, in the Morgan era. These were Genera Motors, and Goodyear Tires, the Burlington Mills and Bethlehem Steels of the World. These smokestake firms, the so-called Blue Chips, along with their lobbyists, political fund-raisers, and trade associations, plugs organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers, had enormous political, as well as economic, clout. Collectively, they sometimes acted as though the country belonged to them. This corporate power was magnified by their influence on the media through the control of immense advertising budgets, and their ability, at least in theory, to shut down a plant in a recalcitrant congressman’s district, and shift the investments and jobs to another where the political climate was more favourable. Often they were able to induce the labor unions representing their blue-collar workers to join them in a lobbying effort. This “smokestack power,” moreover, was further protected by a financial industry that made it difficult for competitors to challenge Blue Chip dominance. As a result, the basic structure of industrial power remained largely unchanged through mid-century in the United States of America. Then something happened. Milken was still in elementary school in 1956, when, for the first time, service and white-collar workers came to outnumber blue-collar workers in the United States of America. And by the time he began his career as a young investment banker the economy had already begun its rapid transition to a new system of wealth creation. Computers, satellites, vastly varied services, glocalization, were creating a totally new, change-filled business environment. However, the financial industry, hidebound and protected by legislation, formed a major barrier to change. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
Until the 1970s, long-term capital was readily available for Blue Chip dinosaurs, but much more difficult for smaller, innovative and entrepreneurial firms to obtain. Wall Street was the financial Vatican of the World, and in the United States of America two “rating services”—Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s—guarded the gates of the capital. These two private firms assigned risk ratings to bonds, and only some 5 percent of American companies were considered by them to be of “investment grade.” This locked thousands of companies out of the long-term debt market or sent them to banks and insurance companies for loans rather than to investors in the bond market. A student, first at the University of California in Berkeley and later at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Milken studied investor risk. He discovered that many of the smaller firms frozen out of Wall Street had good records for paying their debts. If anyone would buy bonds from them, they seldom defaulted and were prepared to pay higher than usual interest. From this counterintuitive insight came the so-called high-yield or “junk” bond, and Milken, now a young underling at Drexel, proceeded to sell them to investors with missionary zeal. The details of the story are not important for our purposes. What matters is that Milken succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. The result was that he almost single-handedly broke the financial isolation that had hitherto been imposed on this secondary tier of companies. It was like a dam bursting. Capital poured into these companies, passing through Drexel on its way. By 1989 the junk-bond market reached an astronomical $180 billion. Rather than creating a “money trust,” therefore, as Morgan had done, Milken made finance more competitive and less monopolistic, opening the gates, as it were, and freeing thousands of companies from dependence on banks and insurance companies. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
They also bypassed the snooty Wall Street firms that existed to serve the Blue Chips. Milken’s bonds permitted managers to go directly to the public and to institutional lenders like pension funds for the capital with which to build new plants, to expand markets, to do research and development—or to take over other firms. Roughly 75 percent of junk bonds were quietly used for investment in new technology, or to open new markets, and for other noncontroversial purposes. Drexel’s advertising made much of the fact that while employment in the Blue Chips, the old giants, was not keeping pace with the economy’s expansion, jobs in the smaller firms they financed multiplied more rapidly than in the economy at large. However, some of the capital Milken supplied was used in pitched takeover battles. These dramatic financial showdowns filled the headlines and kept the stock market and the nation itself spellbound. Stock prices soared and plunged on rumors of more, and still more, takeovers and raids affecting some of the nation’s best-known companies. Deals were made that no longer provided a reasonable balance of risk and reward for the investor. Debt was pyramided on top of unrealistic debt in any orgy of speculation. Taxi drivers and waitresses knowingly discussed the latest news and called their stockbrokers, hoping to cash in on the killings to be made as competing raiders bid up the stock of corporations marked for takeover. As other Wall Street firms entered the junk-bond market, the money machine created by Milken a Drexel, no longer in their hands alone, became a runaway juggernaut. Such violent upheavals, often led to a slaughter of the innocents. Companies were “downsized,” workers ruthlessly laid off, executive ranks decimated. Not surprisingly, a massive counterattack was launched with Milken as the principal target. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
By forcing open the sluice gates of capital, Milken had rattled the entire structure of smokestack power in America. While enriching Drexel Burnham (and feathering his own nest to the amazing tune of $550 million in 1987 alone), he also made bitter enemies of two extremely powerful groups. One consisted of the old-line Wall Street firms who previously had had a stranglehold on the flow of capital to American corporations; the other consisted of the top managers of many of the largest firms. If they could, both had every reason to destroy him. Both also had powerful allies in government and the media. First savaged in the press, which pictured him as the very embodiment of capitalist excess, Milken was then hit with a ninety-eight-count federal indictment charging him with securities fraud, market manipulation, and “parking” (illegally holding stock that belonged to Ivan Boesky, the arbitrageur who was jailed for insider trading). Threatening to use sweeping legal powers designed to deal with the Mafia, rather than with stock market wrongdoings, the federal government forced Drexel to sever its relationship with Milken and pay a crushing $650 million fine to the government. At the same time, some of the worst-case buy-outs began to come apart, panicking investors and pushing down the value of most junk bonds, safe and unsafe alike. Soon Drexel, struggling to stabilize itself after the $650 million fine, and itself holding $1 billion in junk bonds, fund itself driven to the wall. Drexel collapsed with a thunderous crash. Milken, already tried and convicted in the press, ultimately pled guilty to six violations in a complex deal that erased all other criminal charges. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
However, as in the case of Morgan, the question of whether or not he broke the law is far less important for the country than his net impact on American business. For while finance was restructuring other industries, Milken was restricting finance. The conflict between those, like Morgan, who wanted to restrict assess to capital so that they could themselves control it, and those like Milken, who fought to widen access, has a long history in every country. “There has been a long struggle,” writes Professor Glenn Yago of the State University of New York (Stony Brook), “to innovate U.S. capital markets to make them more accessible. Farmers fought for credit in the 19th century, and agricultural productivity increases…were the outcome. In the 1930s, small businessmen got relief from being squeezed out from bank credit windows. After World War II, workers and consumers sought credit for home ownership and college education. In spite of resistance by those who would restrict popular access to credit, financial markets responded to demand and the country flourished.” While an excess of credit can unleash inflation, there is a difference between excess and access. By broadening access, Milken’s firm could, as Connie Bruck, one of his most savage critics, admits, “reasonably sustain the claim…that it had furthered the ‘democratization of capital,’” which is why some trade unionists and African-Americans rallied to his defense in his time of trouble. Morgan and Milken, in short, change American finance in contrary ways. Furthermore, while Morgan was the ultimate centralizer and concentrator, operating on the assumption that the whole was worth more than its parts, Milken and the people he financed often started from the opposite assumption. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
Thus the 1960s and 1970s had seen the formation of gigantic, unwieldy, unfocused “conglomerates”—huge companies built on bureaucratic management and a blind belief in “economies of scale” and “synergy.” The bonds Milken sold financed takeovers designed to bust up these behemoths and create slimmer, more maneuverable and more strategically focused firms. Virtually every Milken-funded takeover resulted in the sell-off of divisions or units, because, in fact, the parts were worth more than the whole; the synergy, less than imagined. A striking case in point was the breakup of the Beatrice Companies, an ungainly agglomeration that combined, with little logic, Avis car rentals, Coca-Cola bottling, Playtex brassieres, the manufacture of tampons, along with the food processing that had once formed its core business. After its parts were sold to other companies, Beatrice was a much smaller firm operating more sensibly in the food, cheese, and meat business. Borg-Warner, an industrial firm, sold off its financial operations. Revlon, after takeover, sold off its medical business and other units unrelated to its central skills—the cosmetic industry. Milken’s easing of access to capital also helped nourish upstart firms in the new service and information sectors that are key to the advanced economy. Surely this was not Milken’s primary purpose. He was more than willing to fund rust-belt industries as well. However, operating at a moment when the entire economy was in transit out of the smokestack era, he was certainly aware of this fundamental change and, in some ways, helped spur it on. Thus at one point he told Forbes magazine that much of the restructuring going on had to do with the country’s transition out of the industrial age, adding that “in an industrial society, capital is a scarce resource, but in today’s information society, there is plenty of capital.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
Since Milken’s high-yield or junk bonds worked to the advantage of newer, less established companies rather than the Blue Chips, all of whom had easy access to conventional financing, it is not surprising that many of his beneficiaries were in the fast-expanding service and information sectors where newer companies were likely to be found. Thus Milken helped reorganize or channeled capital into cellular telephones, cable television, computers, health services, day care, and other advanced business sectors—whose growing power challenged the dominance of the old smokestack barons. In short, Morgan and Milken alike, but in almost diametrically different ways, shook the established power structure in their time and for this reason, quite apart from legal issues, called down upon themselves hailstorms of controversy and calumniation. For good or ill, legally or not, each changed finance in ways that corresponded to the emerging needs of the economy in their time. It required a leap of imagination on the part of Muhammad Yunus to create a bank that lends money to some of the World’s most desperately impoverished people—village entrepreneurs who might need as little as thirty of fifty dollars to start a tiny business. Conventional banks could not afford to make and service such minute loans, and borrows did not have collateral or credit histories. In 1976 Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist, created the Grameen Bank. Instead of requiring collateral, it asked borrowers to recruit a group of cosigners in their own community to guarantee repayment. The group would have a collective interest in the success of the borrower’s small business and could exert social pressure or provide help if payments fell behind. If the debt was repaid, its members might themselves qualify for loans. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
By 2005, Grameen had made loans to 4.3 million people in tiny amounts totaling $4.7 billion, almost entirely to women—who turn out to be more apt to succeed in their enterprises and also more likely to make full repayment. Grameen has sparked similar operations in at least thirty-four countries and has set up a foundation to help NGOs and others replicate the Grameen model. Today microfinance is a sizeable global industry. Two keys to its success are its interest rates on these loans—very high by U.S. or European standards—and the remarkable 98 percent repayment rate it claims. In truth, Grameen has had collection difficulties. Yet, these borrowers are less risky than loaning money to some millionaires and billionaires. What is even more interesting about this social invention is the transformative impact it is having on other institutions. To begin with, Grameen has had many imitators of the model it launched in Bangladesh. By 2001, according to The Wall Street Journal, “shopkeepers playing cards in the village of Bagil Bazar can cite from memory the terms being offered by seven competing microlenders.” Because Grameen’s profits are unusually strong, some twenty-six NGOs working in poor countries have created microloan banks of their own to help fund their nonprofit activities. In turn, the spread of microfinance had led to the creation of MicroRate, a rating agency for microfinance banks—itself a novelty. According to its founder, Damian von Stauffenberg, more and more NGO banks will transform themselves into conventional banks in the decade to come, because that would greatly increase their ability to both borrow and lend. As many as two hundred have already taken the preliminary steps. Some will become competitive with conventional banks, and that, he suggests, will bring big global retail banks and local commercial banks into the microloan business. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
In a word, one new organization, Grameen, has had a transformatory impact—not just on the lives of the poor entrepreneurs it has helped but on the way NGOs raise money for their activities. It could alter conventional banking as well, as it blurs the boundaries between the profit and nonprofit Worlds. Grameen is not the only example of high-impact social invention. Amazon.com has created the bookstore without a store. EBay has developed an auction bureau in which the customers do the auctioneering. Google, Yahoo! and other search engines process 600 million queries a day, altering what libraries do and compelling changes—perhaps transformation—in the staid book-publishing industry. Attacking the industrial-age social welfare model, Vern Hughes in Australia charged that “politicians are still able to get away with promising more schools, more hospitals, more nurses and more police,” as if pouring more money int them will cure the crises they face. In this model, the many social agencies deliver one-size-fits-all services to “disconnected, passive and disempowered ‘clients.’” As an alternative, Hughes cites a program in Melbourne called Person to Person, made up of families of kids with disabilities. These families were “sick of standardized services for their children,” all of whom had different needs. The families persuaded Australia’s Department of Human services to provide cash instead of services, and pay it to a group “support coordinator” the families selected. The coordinator would then buy and allocate “a mix of services chosen by the families (education, home help, day care, etcetera).” As Hughes puts it, the emerging paradigm in human services “shifts focus away from supply-side delivery to demand-side personalization.” This demassification is the welfare-service equivalent of product customization in the marketplace. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
The technocracy that emerged, fully armed, in nineteenth-century America disdained such beliefs, because holy men and sin, grandmothers and families, regional loyalties and two-thousand-year-old traditions, are antagonistic to the technocratic way of life. They are a troublesome residue of tool-using period, a source of criticism of technocracy. They represent a thought-World that stands apart from technocracy and rebukes it—rebukes its language, its impersonality, its fragmentation, its alienation. And so technocracy disdains such a thought-World but, in America, did not and could not destroy it. We may get a sense of the interplay between technocracy and Old World values in the work of Mark Twain, who was fascinated by the technical accomplishments of the nineteenth century. He said of it that it was “the plainest and sturdiest and infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the World has seen,” and he once congratulated Walt Whiteman on having lived in the age that gave the World the beneficial products of coal tar. It is often claimed that he was the first writer regularly to use a typewriter, and he invested (and lost) a good deal of money in new inventions. In his Life on the Mississippi, he gives lovingly detailed accounts of industrial development, such as the growth of the cotton mills in Natchez: “The Rosalie Yarn Mill of Natchez has a capacity of 6000 spindles and 160 looms, and employs 100 hands. The Natchez Cotton Mills Company began operations four years ago in a two-story building of 50 x 190 feet, with 4000 spindles and 128 looms….The mill works 5000 bales of cotton annually and manufactures the best standard quality of brown shirtings and sheetings and drills, turning out 5,000,000 yards of these good per year.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
Twain liked nothing better than to describe the giantism and ingenuity of America industry. However, at the same tie, the totality of his work is an affirmation of preindustrial value. Personal loyalty, regional tradition, the continuity of family life, the relevance of the tales and wisdom of the elderly are the soul of his work throughout. The story of Huckleberry Finn and Jim making their way to freedom on a raft is nothing less than a celebration of the enduring spirituality of pretechnological man. If we ask, then, why technocracy did not destroy the Worldview of a tool-using culture, we may answer that the fury of industrialism was too new and as yet too limited in scope to alter the needs of inner life or to drive away the language, memories, and social structures of the tool-using past. It was possible to contemplate the wonders of a mechanized cotton mill without believing that tradition was entirely useless. In reviewing nineteenth-century American history, one can hear the groans of religion in crisis, of mythologies under attack, of a politics and education in confusion, but the groans are not yet death-throes. They are the sounds of a culture in pain, and nothing more. The ideas of tool-using cultures were, after all, designed to address questions that still lingered in a technocracy. The citizens of a technocracy knew that science and technology did not provide philosophies by which to live, and they clung to the philosophies of their fathers. They could not convince themselves that religion, as Dr. Freud summed it up at the beginning of the twentieth century, is nothing but an obsessional neurosis. Nor could they quite believe, as the new cosmology taught, that the Universe is the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms. And they continued to believe, as Mark Twain did, that, for all their dependence on machinery, tools, ought still to be their servants, not their masters. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
They would allow their tools to be presumptuous, aggressive, audacious, impudent servants, but that tools should rise above their servile station was an appalling thought. And though technocracy found no clear place for the human soul, its citizens held to the belief that no increase in material wealth would compensate them for a culture that insulted their self-respect. And so two opposing World-views—the technological and the traditional—coexisted in uneasy tension. The technological was the stronger, of course, but the traditional was there—still functional, still exerting influence, still too much alive to ignore. This is what we find documented not only in Mark Twain but in the poetry of Walt Whiteman, the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, the prose of Thoreau, the philosophy of Emerson, the novels of Hawthorne and Melville, and, most vividly of all, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s monumental Democracy in America. In a word, two distinct thought-Worlds were rubbing against each other in nineteenth-century America. If our future will include nanotechnology, then it would be useful to understand what it can do, so that we can make more sensible plans for our families, careers, companies, and society. However, many intelligent people will respond that understanding is impossible, that the future is just too unpredictable. This depends, of course, on what you are trying to predict: The weather a month from now? Forget it; weather is too chaotic, even weather applications get predictions wrong. The position of the Moon a century from now? Easy; the Moon’s orbit is like clockwork. Which personal-computer will lead twenty years from now? Good luck; major companies today did not even exist twenty years ago. That personal computers will become even more enormously powerful? A virtual certainty. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
And so on. If you aim to say something sensible about the future of technology, the tick is to ask the right questions and to avoid the standard pitfalls. Here are our suggestions for how to blunder into a Megamistake in forecasting: Ignore the scientific facts, or guess. Forget to ask whether anyone wants the projected product or situation. Ignore the costs. Try to predict which company or technology will win. In looking at what to expect from nanotechnology—or any technology—all of these must be avoided, since they can lead to some grand absurdities. In a classic demonstration of the first error, someone once concocted the notion that pills would someday replace food. However, people need energy to live, and energy means calories, which means fuel, which takes up room. To subsist on pills, one would need to gobble them by the fistful. This would be like eating a tasteless kibbled dog food, which was hardly the idea. In short, the pills-for-food prediction ignored the scientific facts. In a similar vein, we once heard promises of a cure for cancer—but this was based on a guess about scientific facts, a guess that “cancer” was in some sense a single disease, which might have a single point of vulnerability and a single cure. This guess was wrong, and progress against cancer has been slow. Earlier, we presented a scenario that includes the routine cure of a cancer using nanotechnology. This scenario takes account of the currently known facts: Cancers differ, but each kind can be recognized by its molecular makers. Molecular machines can recognize molecular makers, and so can be primed to recognize and destroy specific kind of cancer cells as they turn up. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Even nanotechnology cannot cram a meal into a pill, but this is just as well. The pills-for-food proposal did not just ignore the facts, it also ignored what people want—things like dinner conservation and novel ethnic cuisines. Magazines once promised cities beneath the sea, but who wants to live in the ultimate damp, chilly climate? California and the sunbelt have somehow proved more popular. And again, we were promised talking cars, but after giving them a try, people prefer luxury cars from companies that promise silence. Many human wants are easy to predict, because they are old and stable: People want better medical care, housing, consumer goods, transportation, education, and so forth, preferably at lower costs, with greater safety, in a cleaner environment. When our limited abilities force us to choose better quality or lower cost or greater safety or a cleaner environment, decision become sticky. Molecular manufacturing will allow a big step in the direct of better quality and lower costs and increased safety and a cleaner environment. (Choices of how much of each will remain.) There is no existing market demand for “nanotechnology,” as such, but a great demand for what it can do. Neglecting costs has also been popular among prognosticators: Building cities under the sea would be expensive, with few benefits. Building in space has more benefits, but would be far more expensive, sing past or present technologies. Many bold projections gather dust on shelves because development or manufacturing costs are too high. Some examples include personal robots, flying cars, and Moon colonies—they still sound more like 1950s science fiction than practical possibilities, and costs is one major reason. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
Molecular manufacturing is, in part, about cost reduction. As mentioned above, molecular machines in nature make things inexpensively, like wood, potatoes, and hay. Trees are more complex than spacecraft, so why should spacecraft stay more expensive? Gordon Tullock, professor of economics and political science at the University of Arizona, says of molecular nanotechnology, “its economic effect is that we will all be much richer.” The prospect of building sophisticated products for the price of potatoes gives reason to pull a lot of old projections down from the shelf. We hope you will not find the dust when we brush them off for a fresh look. Even staying within the bounds of known science, focusing on things people want, and paying attention to costs, it is still hard to pick a specific winner. Technology development is like a horse race: everyone knows that some horses will win, but knowing which is harder (and worth big bucks). Both corporate managers betting money and researchers betting their careers have to play this game, and they often lose. A technology may work, provide something useful, and be less expensive than last year’s alternative, yet still be clobbered in the market by something unexpected but better. To know which technologies will win, you would have to know all the alternatives, whether they have been invented yet or not. Good luck! We will not try to play that game here. “Nanotechnology” (like “modern industry”) describes a huge range of technologies. Nonetheless, nanotechnology in one form or another is a monumentally obvious idea: it will be the culmination of an age-old trend toward more thorough control of the structure of matter. Predicting that some form of nanotechnology will win most technology races is like predicting that some will win a horse race (as opposed to, say, a dachshund). #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
A technology based on through control of the structure of matter will almost always beat one based on crude control of the structure of matter. Other technologies have already won races in the literal sense of being first. Few, however, will win in the sense of being best. Television cannot transmit information that comes in the form of smell, touch or taste. Furthermore, as we discussed, the information it can transmit through the visual and auditory senses is extremely narrow. The ranges of color, brightness, depth are confined by the technology. The sounds are blotted out by the whistle of the electron fields. Unfortunately, given the human tendency to accept the information of our senses as total and reliable, we are not aware of the aspects of the visual and aural information that are dropped out of this new information package. We assume that when we see and hear something, we are seeing and hearing everything that is being transmitted, as though we were actually observing the event directly. Or else we assume that what is lost is too minor to matter. We are inclined to believe the information as though it had not been processed, reduced and reshaped before we experienced it. In addition to the elimination of three sensory systems and the narrowing of two others, there is another sensory oddity in the television experience. Television disconnects the two operative sense modes—visual and sural. You are sitting in a room watching an image from miles away. You see the place, but the image you see and the sounds which reportedly connect to the image are not really connected. The sounds are “nearer” to you than the images are. Let us say you are watching two people walking on a faraway hillside. In real life, you could not make out what the characters are saying, but on television you can. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
The voices are amplified or dubbed in, so you can hear a conversation that would otherwise be inaudible. The natural informational balance between aural and visual has been shattered. Now, information that you take in with the visual sense cannot be used to modify or help process the information from the aural sense because they have each been isolated from each other and reconstructed. Furthermore, while you are watching and listening with your disconnected aural and visual senses, you are smelling some chicken roasting in the kitchen and you are drinking a glass of premium cranberry juice So television has attached two of your sensory modes to a distant sot, altered their natural arrangement to each other, but left other aspects of your sensory apparatus at home in present time. This is a very peculiar arrangement and in a way it is sort of funny, like playing a perceptual game in a technology museum. It takes on importance when we understand that the average person submits to this condition for four hours every day, and while in this state is receiving important information about life All of the information is narrowed to fit the sensory transmission limits of the medium and distorted by the sensory disconnections in the human. One can imagine the emergence of a new psychological syndrome: “sensory schizophrenia.” The cure will involve exercises to resynchronize wildly confused senses with each other, with the mind, and with the World. Because of all the preceding it ought to go without saying that any messages that are dependent upon sensory understanding and interaction are not going to work on television. This is very unfortunate for the ecology movement. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
It always surprises me whenever any attempts are made to show wilderness or wildlife on television. The fuzzy image previously described is the first problem: forests become blurs, ocean depths are impossibly foggy, the details of plants are impossible to see. So the viewer depends on the voice-over to know what is going on. Because of the blur naturalist programs focus on such objective behavior as playing, fighting, mating, eating, just as they do with human sitcoms and soap operas. There are more animal programs than plant programs because animals come through better on the fuzzy medium, and the larger and more rambunctious the animal the better. However, even if TV images were not as coarse as I have described them, there would still be no way to understand a forest or swamp or desert without all the senses fully operative, receiving information in all ranges, and freely interacting with each other. An interesting recent illustration of the problem was a news feature concerned with a decision that a town council had to make. A land developer sought a permit to convert a large marsh area into a new community of homes. Should the permit be okayed? It was quite a thoroughgoing, earnest report. Considering the subject, not ordinarily conceived as “good television” by producers, it was also an extraordinarily lengthy report, about eight minutes of an evening newscast. The report presented interviews with a local conservation group that opposed the project. It presented several minutes of images of the plants in the marshland, flocks of birds, nesting grounds, all with the appropriate wild-sounding calls. Having worked as a publicist for many years, in fact, as a publicist for environmental groups, I knew how much work the environmentalists had put into this program and how important they felt it to be. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
In the end, though, I knew they had failed no matter how this particular vote came out, because if there is anything which cannot be conveyed on television it is a feeling for a marsh. I suspect that the result of the program would be to decrease concern for marshes. These images and words about marshes were probably more than they had ever seen or heard before. Since the news report told them interesting things they did not know—how many varieties of creatures lived there, for example—they may have considered it quite a complete story. In terms of popular media, indeed it was. However, while the viewers knew more than before, they were not likely to be aware of what they did not know and were not getting. As the images of the marsh went hurtling into their brains, accompanied by a news reporter’s description of an egret nesting ground, they probably assumed that most of the relevant data were hand, that they had learned enough to make a judgment. Images and words about a marsh do not convey what a marsh is. You must actually sense and feel what a strange, rich, unique and unhuman environment it is. The ground is very odd, soft, sticky, wet and smelly. It is not attractive to most humans. The odor emanates from an interaction between the sometimes-stagnant pools and the plants that live in the mud in varying stages of growth and decay. If the wind is hot and strong there can be a nearly maddening mixture of sweet and rotting odors. To grasp the logic and meaning of marsh life, the richest biological system on Earth, one need to put one’s hand into the mud, overturn it, discover the tiny life forms that abound. One needs to sit for long hours in it, feeling the ebbs and flows of the waters, the creatures and the wind. And this is something television cannot do at this time. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
The sexuality and violence in the news and on TV serve as metaphors in life which acts directly on consciousness through the Image-ination—or else in the correct circumstances they can be openly deployed and enjoyed, imbued with a sense of the holiness of every thing from the ecstasy and wine to garbage and corpses. Those who ignore their World outside themselves risk destruction. It is creative nihilism to spend life in unreality. For those who follow life, it promises enlightenment and even wealth, a share of temporal power. Capital just does not persuade its readers that it is the truth about economics or about the inevitable future of man, and therefore worth the hard work it demands to be digested. A few brilliant essays still charm but are not enough on which to found a Worldview. The intellectual death of their eponymous hero has not stopped much of the Left from continuing to call itself Marxist, for he represents the poor in their perennial struggle against the rich, and their demand for more equality than liberal societies provided. However, beyond that, the Left’s nourishment comes from elsewhere. Nothing in Marx resonates in souls furnished by Sartre, Camus, Kafka, Dostoyevski, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Rousseau can still overpower where Marx falls flat. In Marx, ideology meant the false system of thought elaborated by the ruling class to justify its rule in the eyes of the ruled, while hiding its real selfish motives. Ideology was sharply distinguished in Marx from science, which is what Marx’s system is—id est, the truth based on disinterested awareness of historical necessity. In Communist society there will be no ideology. “The pure mind,” to use Nietzsche’s formulation, still exists in Marx’s thought, as it hard in all philosophy—the possibility of knowing the ways things are, an intellectual capacity irreducible to anything else. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
Ideology is a term of contempt; it must be seen through in order to be seen for what it is. Its meaning is not in itself but requires translation back into the underlying reality of which it is a misleading representation. The man without ideology, the one possessing science, can look to the economic infrastructure and see that Plato’s political philosophy, which teaches that the wise should rule, is only a rationalization for the aristocrats’ position in a slave economy; or that Hobbes’s political philosophy, which teaches man’s freedom in the state of nature and the resulting war of all against all, is only the over for the political arrangements suitable for the rising bourgeoisie. This point of view provides the foundation for intellectual history, which tells the story behind the story. Instead of looking at Plato and Hobbes for information about what courage is—a subject important to us—we should see how their definitions of courage suited those who controlled the means of production. However, what applies to Plato and Hobbes cannot apply to Marx; otherwise the very assertion that these thinkers were economically determined would be itself a deception, simply the ideology for the new exploiters Marx happens to serve. The interpretation would self-destruct. He would not know what to look for in the thinkers who were inevitably and unconsciously in the grip of the historical process, for he would be in the same condition as they were. There are certainly historical preconditions of Marx’s science; but they do not detract from the truth of his insight, which is therefore a kind of absolute moment in history that no further history can alter. This truth is the warrant for revolution, and the moral equivalent of the natural rights that warranted the American Revolution. Without it all the killing is unjust and frivolous. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
As we have talked about, cooperation based on reciprocity can thrive and be evolutionarily stable in a population with no relatedness at all. A case of cooperation that fits this scenario, at least on first evidence, has been discovered in the spawning relationships in sea bass. These fish have the sexual organs of both the male and the female. They form pairs and roughly may be said to take turns at being the high investment partner (laying eggs) and ow investment partner (providing sperm to fertilize eggs). Up to ten spawnings occur in a day and only a few eggs are provided each time. If gender roles are not divided evenly, pairs tend to break up. The system appears to allow the evolution of much economy in the size of testes, but these testes condition many have evolved when the species was sparser and more inclined to inbreed. Inbreeding would imply relatedness in the pairs and this initially may have promoted cooperation without the need of further relatedness. As the angels as the Heavenly, so of the king of the Earthly representative of God, that He knows all things. God discerns good and the evil, this refers specifically to the knowledge of the right and the wrong, the guilty and the innocent, which the Earthly judge, like the Heavenly who rules over the nations receives from His divine commissioner, so that He may give it practical realization. However, added to this is the fact that the word sequence “good and evil” does not permit us to suppose it a rhetorical flourish. Neither is it the case that “cognition in general only came to the first human when they partook of the fruit: it is not before a create without knowledge that, even before the creation of the woman, God brings the beasts that he may give them their appointed names, but before the bearer of his own breath, the beings upon whom, at the very hour of creation, he had manifestly bestowed the abundance of knowledge contained in speech, of which that being is now the master. “And they did not come unto Jesus with broken hearts and contrite spirits, but they did curse God, and wish to die. Nevertheless they would struggle with the sword for their lives,” reports Mormon 2. 14. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
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You Do Not Feel Powerful at All?
As one moves up the evolutionary ladder in neural complexity, game-playing behavior becomes richer. The intelligence of primates, including humans, allows a number of relevant improvements: a more complex memory, more complex processing of information to determine the next action as a function of the interaction so far, a better estimate of the probability of future interactions with the same individual, and a better ability to distinguish between different individuals. The discrimination of others may be among the most important abilities because it allows one to handle interactions with many individuals without having to treat them all the same, thus making possible the rewarding of cooperation from one individual and the punishing of defection from another. The model of the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is much less restricted than it may at first appear. Not only can it apply to interactions between two bacteria or interactions between two primates, but it can also apply to the interactions between a colony of bacteria and, say, a primate serving as a host. There is no assumption that payoffs of the two sides are comparable. Provided that the payoffs to each side satisfy the inequalities that define the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The model does assume that the choices are made simultaneously and with discrete time intervals. For most analytic purposes, this is equivalent to a continuous interaction over time, with the length of time between moves corresponding to the minimum time between a change in behaviour by one side and a response by the other. And, if they were treated as sequential, while the model treats the choices as simultaneous, it would make little difference. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Turning to the development of the theory, the evolution of cooperation can be conceptualized in terms of three separate questions: Robustness. What type of strategy can thrive in a variegated environment composed of others using a wide variety of more or less sophisticated strategies? Stability. Under what conditions can such a strategy, once fully established, resist invasion by mutant strategies? Initial viability. Even if a strategy is robust and stable, how can it ever get a foothold in an environment which is predominantly noncooperative? IBM, Kodak, and the NYPD are all large, old organizations. However, preventing the oncoming implosion requires more than changing in-place institutions. It also necessitates creating new types of companies, organizations and institutions, large and small, at every level of society. And that calls for social inventors prepared to face inadequate resources, rivalry, suspicion, cynicism, and just plain uber—stupidity. Daunting as all that sounds, it helps to remember that none of today’s familiar institutions—not IBM, not Kodak, not the United Nations, not the IMF, not police forces or post offices—dropped full-blown out of the Heavens. All our institutions, from central banks to blood banks, factories to firehouses, art museums to airports, were in fact originally conceived by business innovators and social inventors who faced far more entrenched resistance to change than we find in the advanced economies today. And many of their innovations in business and society have been at least as important as those in technology. We know the names of many of history’s great technological innovators—Savery and Newcomen and the steam engine, Whitney and the cotton gin, Edison and electric lighting, Morse and the telegraph, Daguerre and photography, Marconi and the radio, Bell and the telephone. And we justly celebrate their immense contributions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Unfortunately, few—other than specialists and historians, if needed they—can name the social inventor who first came up with the concept of a limited-liability corporation. Or the person who wrote it into Gesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung, the 1892 German law that was the first to embody it. Can anyone imagine what today’s World economy and financial system would look like minus limited liability for investors? Was that any less an achievement than, say, the telegraph? Not many investors today would build a home, apartment house, office building, shopping center, cinema or factory without buying fire insurance. However, who was the innovator inside the Phoenix Assurance Company who, in the 1790s, hired cartographer Richard Horwood to draw the first map of London designed to help a company assess the value of properties and make fire insurance available? Who was imaginative and brave enough to form the first mutual fund, the first symphony orchestra, the first auto club or any number of other companies and institutions whose existence is taken for granted today? And where is the Nobel Prize for social invention? If just a tiny fraction of the sums spent on scientific and technological research and innovation were devoted to labs for designing and testing new organizational and institutional structures, we might have a much broader range of options to head off the looming implosion. Genetic kindship theory suggests a plausible escape from some issues. Close relatedness of corporations permits true altruism—sacrifice of fitness by one individual for the benefit of another. True altruism can evolve when the conditions of cost, benefit, and relatedness yield net gains for the altruism-causing genes that are resident in the related individuals. Not defecting in a single-move Prisoner’s Dilemma is altruism of a kind (the individual is foregoing proceeds that might have been taken); so this kind of behaviour can evolve if two corporations are sufficiently related. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
In effect, recalculations of the payoffs can be done in such a way that an individual has a part interest in the partner’s gain (that is, reckoning payoffs in terms of what is called fitness). This recalculation can often eliminate the inequalities, in which case cooperation becomes unconditionally favored. Thus it is possible to imagine that the benefit of cooperation in Prisoner’s Dilemma-like situations can begin to be harvested by groups of closely related individuals and corporations. Obviously, as regards pairs, a parent and its subsidiaries or many examples of cooperation or restraint of selfishness in such pairs are known. Once the genes for cooperation exist, selection will promote strategies that base cooperative behavior on cues in the environment. Such factors as promiscuous fatherhood and events at ill-defined group margins will always lead to uncertain relatedness among potential participants. The recognition of any improved correlates of relatedness and use of these cues to determine cooperative behavior will always permit an advance in inclusive fitness. When a cooperative choice has been made, one cue to relatedness is simply the fact of reciprocation of the cooperation. Thus modifiers for more selfish behaviour of another individual or corporation is acquired, and cooperation can spread into circumstances of less and less relatedness. Finally, when the probability of two individuals meeting each other again is sufficiently high, cooperation based on reciprocity can thrive and be evolutionarily stable in a population with no relatedness at all. When a man or woman has got vast power, such as you have—you admit you have, do you not? “I do not know it, sir.” The man in the witness chair, who “did not know” he held power, was a bull-necked, bristle-browed banker with a fierce mustache and an above average sized nose. The congressional committee investigator pressed him: “You do not feel [powerful] at all?” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
“No,” he replied smoothly, “I do not feel it at all.” The time was 1912. The witness, in a dark suit and wing collar, with a gold watch chain draped across his generous paunch, dominated three or four giant banks, three trust companies, an equal number of life insurance companies, ten railroad systems, plus, among a few other odds and ends United States Steel, General Electric, AT&T, Western Union, and International Harvester. John Pierpont Morgan was the quintessential financial capitalist of the industrial era, the very symbol of turn-of-the-century money power. A womanizing churchgoer and moralizer, he lived in conspicuous opulence and gluttony, holding business meetings amid damask and tapestries from the palaces of Europe, next to vaults containing Leonardo da Vinci notebooks and Shakespeare folios. Morgan looked down his monumental nose at Jewish people and other marginalized groups, hated trade unions, sneered at new money, and fought ceaselessly with the other “robber barons” of his era. Born enormously rich in an era of capital scarcity, he was imperious and driven, savagely repressing competition, sometimes relying on methods that would probably now have landed him in jail. Morgan assembled huge sums and poured them into the great smokestack industries of his time—into Bessemer furnaces and Pullman cars and Edison generator and into tangible resources like oil, nitrates, copper, and coal. However, he did more than simply seize targets of opportunity. He planned strategically and helped shape the smokestack age in the United States of America, accelerating the shift of political and economic power from agricultural to industrial interests, and from manufacturing to finance. Furthermore, he was said to have “Morganized” industry in the United States of America, creating a hierarchically ordered, finance-driven system and, according to his critics, a “money trust,” which essentially controlled the main flows of capital in the country. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
When Morgan blandly denied having any power, the cartoonists had a field day, one picturing him sitting astride a mountain of coins marked “Control over $25,000,000,000”; another as a dour emperor in crown and robes, with a mace in one hand and a purse in the other. While to Pope Pius X he was a “great and good man,” to the Boston Commercial Bulletin he was a “financial bully, drunk with wealth and power, who bawls his orders to stock markets, directors, courts, governments and nations.” Morgan concentrated capital. He consolidated small companies into even larger and more monopolistic corporations. He centralized. He regarded top-down command as sacred and vertical integration as efficient. He understood that mass production was the coming thing. He wanted his investments to be protected by “hard” assets—plants, equipment, raw materials. In all this he was a near-perfect reflection of the early smokestack age he helped to create. And whether Morgan “felt powerful” or not, his control of vast sums in a period of capital scarcity have him immense opportunities to reward and punish others and to make changes on a grand scale. During the thirties some German Social Democrats became aware that Hitler, as well as Stalin, just would not fit Weber’s terms of analysis, which they had previously used; and they began to employ “totalitarian” to describe them. Whether this is a sufficient corrective to Weber’s narrowly conceived political science is questionable. However, “charismatic” did indeed fit Hitler, unless charismatic necessarily means something good—a favorable value judgment. I suspect that those who abandoned Weber in this way did so because they could not face how wrong he had been, or the possibility that the thought they had embraced and propagated might have heled to support fascism. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Hannah Arendt gave perhaps unconscious witness to my suggestion, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she used the now celebrated phrase “the banality of evil,” to describe Eichmann. It is not difficult to discern the “routinization of charisma” under this thin disguise. Hitler, then, must have been charismatic. After Hitler, everybody scurried back under the protective cover of morality, but practically no one turned to serious thought about good and evil. Otherwise our President, or the pope, for that matter, would not be talking about values.. This entire language, as I have tired to show, implies that the religious is the source of everything political, social and personal; and it still conveys something like that. However, it has done nothing to reestablish religion—which puts us in a pretty pickle. We reject by the fact of our categories the rationalism that is the basis of our way of life, without having anything to substitute for it. As the religious essence has gradually become a thin, putrid gas spread out through our whole atmosphere, it has gradually become respectable to speak of it under the marvelously portentous name the sacred. At the beginning of the German invasion of the United States of America, there was a kind of scientific contempt in universities for the uncleanness of religion. It might be studied in a scholarly way, as part of the past that we had succeeded in overcoming, but a believer was somehow benighted or ill. The new social science was supposed to take the place of morally and religiously polluted teachings just as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, et. al., had, according to the popular mythology, founded a natural science that crushed the superstitions of the Dark Ages. The Enlightenment, or Marxist, spirit still pervaded the land; and religion vs. science was equal to prejudice vs. truth. Social scientist simply did not see that their new tools were based on thought that did not accept the orthodox dichotomies, that not only were the European thinkers looking for something akin to religious actors on the political scene but that the new mind itself, or the self, had at least as much in common with Pascal’s outlook as it did with that of Descartes or Locke. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The sacred—as the central phenomenon of the self, unrecognizable to scientific consciousness and trampled underfoot by ignorant passers-by who had lost the religious instinct—was, from the outset of the value teaching, taken seriously by thinkers in Germany. That was because they understood what “value” really means. It has taken the softening of all convictions and the blurring of all distinctions for the sacred to be thought to be undangerous and to come into its own here. Of course, as we use it, it has no more in common with God than does value with the Ten Commandments, commitment with faith, charisma with Moses, or lifestyle with Jerusalem or Athens. The sacred turns out to be a need, like food or pleasures of the flesh; and in a well-ordered community, it must get its satisfactions like the other needs. In our earlier free-thinking enthusiasm, we tended to neglect it. A bit of ritual is a good thing; sacred space (Note how space—used to mean one’s apartment, workshop, office or whatever—has become a trendy word.) along with some tradition must be provided for, as a generation ago culture was thought to be a useful supplement. The disproportion between what all these words really mean and what they mean to us is repulsive. We are made to believe that we have everything. Our old atheism had a better grasp of religion than does this new respect for the sacred. Atheists took religion seriously and recognized that it is a real force, costs something and requires difficult choices. These sociologists who talk so facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
In such behavior a style of decision-making is involved that has much in common with the peculiar arbitrariness and rigour of religious vows in general, and with one called the Beast Vow in particular. Among the Pasupatas of India (the same who formalized the Seeking of Dishournor), the male practitioner commonly took the bull vow. (The bull is the most common shamanic animal by far.) He would spend a good part of each day bellowing like a bull and in general trying to transform his consciousness into that of a bull. Such behaviour was usually vowed for a specific length of time, most frequently either for a year or for the rest of one’s life. A person who took the frog vow would move for a year only by squatting and hopping; the snake vower would slither. Such vows are very precise and demanding. The novice, for example, may pick a certain cow and vow to imitate its every action. During the time of the vow the novice follows the cow everywhere: when the cow moos, the novice moos—and so on. (In ancient Mesopotamia cow-vowers were known as “grazers.”) By such actions the Paleolithic shaman attempts to effect ecology by infiltrating an animal species which can then be manipulated. The yogic practitioner hopes to escape from his or her own intentional horizon by entering into that of another species. These activities are echoed in performance pieces in various ways. Bill Gordh, as Dead Dog, spent two years learning how to bark with a sense of expressiveness. James Lee Bryars wore a pink silk tail everywhere he went for six months. Vito Acconic, in his Following Piece, 1969, would pick a passerby at random on the street and follow him or her till it was no longer possible to do so. What I am especially concerned to point out in activities like this is a quality of decision-making that involves apparent aimlessness along with fine focus and rigour of execution. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
This is a mode of willing which is absolutely creative in the sense that it assumes that it is reasonable to do anything at all with life; all options are open and none is more meaningful or meaningless than any other. A Jain monk in India may vow to sit for a year and then follow that by standing up for a year—a practice attested to in the Atharva Veda (about 1000-800 B.C.) and still done today. In performance art the subgenre known as Endurance Art is similar in style, though the scale is much reduced. In 1965 Beuys alternately stood and knelt on a small wooden platform for twenty-four hours during which he performed various symbolic gestures in immobile positions. In 1971 Burden, a major explorer of the Ordeal or Endurance genre, spent five days and nights fetally enclosed in a tiny metal locker (two feet by two feet by three feet). In 1974 he combined the immobility vow with the keynote theme of the artist’s person by sitting on an upright chair on a sculpture pedestal until, forty-eight hours later, he fell off from exhaustion. (Sculpture in Three Parts). In White Light/White Heat, 1975, he spent twenty-two days alone and invisible to the public on a high shelf-like platform in a gallery, neither eating nor speaking nor seeing, not seen by, another human being. The first thing to notice about these artists is that no one is making them do it and usually no one is paying them to do it. The second is the absolute rigour with which, in the classic performance pieces, these very unpragmatic activities are carried out. This peculiar quality of decision-making has become a basic element of performance poetics. To a degree (which I do not wish to exaggerate) it underscores the relationship between this type of activity and the religious vocation. A good deal of performance art, in fact might he called “Vow Art,” as might a good deal of religious practice. (Kafka’s term “hunger artist” is not unrelated.) #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Enthusiasms of this type have passed through cultures before, but usually in the provinces of religion or, more occasionally, philosophy. What is remarkable about our time is that it is happening in the realm of art, and being performed, often, by graduates of art schools rather than seminaries. In our time religion and philosophy have been more successful (or intransigent) than art in defending their traditional boundaries and prevent universal overflow with its harrowing responsibilities and consequences. A classic source on the subject of Ordeal Art is a book called the Path of Purification by Buddhaghosa, a fifth century A.D. Ceylonese Buddhist. It includes an intricately categorized compendium of behavioural vows designed to undermine the conditions response systems that govern ordinary life. Among the most common are the vows of homelessness—the vow, for example, to live out of doors for a year. This vow was acted out in New York recently by Tehching Hsieh, who styed out of doors in Manhattan recently for a year as a work of art. Hsieh (who also has leapt from the second story of a building in emulation of Klein’s leap) had specialized, in fact, in year-long vows acted out with great rigour. For one year he punched in hourly on a time clock in his studio, a device not unlike some used by forest yogis in India to restrict their physical movements and thus their intentional horizons. The performance piece of this type done on the largest scale was Hsieh’s year of isolation in a cell built in his Soho studio, a year in which he neither left the cell nor spoke nor read. Even the scale of this piece, however, does not approach that of similar vows in traditional religious settings. Himalayan yogis as recently as a generation ago were apt to spend seven years in a light-tight cave, while Simeon Stylites, an early Christian ascetic in the Syrian desert, lived for the last thirty-seven years of his life on a small platform on top of a pole. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The reduced scale of such vows in the art context reflects the difference in motivation between the religious ascetic and the performance artist. Religious vows are undertaken for pragmatic purposes. The shaman seeking the ability to fly, the yogi seeking the effacement of ego, the monk seeking salvation and eternal bliss, are all working within intricately formulated belief systems in pursuit of clearly defined and massively significant rewards. Less is at stake for the performance artist than for the pious believer; yet still something is at stake. An act that lacks any intention whatever is a contradiction in terms. For some artist (for example, Burden) work of this type functions as a personal initiation or cathartic for the audience as well as an investigation of the limits of one’s will; others (including Nitsch) are convinced that their performance work is cathartic for the audience as well and in that sense serves a social and therapeutic purpose. Rachel Rosenthal describes her performance work as “sucking disease from society.” However, in most work of this type attention is directed toward the exercise of will as an object of contemplation in itself. Appropriation art in general (and Vow Art in particular) is based on an aesthetic of choosing and willing rather than conceiving and making. Personal sensibility is active in the selection of the area of the Universe to be appropriated, and in the specific, often highly individual character of the vow undertaken; the rigour with which the vow is maintained is, then, like a crafts devotion to the perfection of form. Beyond this, the performance is often based on a suspension of judgment about whether or not the act has any value in itself, and a concentration on the purity of the doing. This activity posits as an ideal (though never of course perfectly attaining it) the purity of doing something with no pragmatic motivation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Like the Buddhist paradox of desiring not to desire, it requires a motivation to perform feats of motivelessness. It shares something of Arnold Toynbee’s opinion that the highest cultures are the least pragmatic. In this mode of decision and execution the conspicuously free exercise of will is framed as a kind of absolute. Displays of this type are attempts to break up the standard weave of everyday motivations and create openings in it through which new options may make their way to the light. These options are necessarily undefined, since no surrounding belief system is in place (or acknowledged). The radicality of work in this genre can be appraised precisely by how far it has allowed the boundaries of the art category to dissolve. Many works of the last twenty-five years have reached to the limits of life itself. Such activities have necessarily involved artists in areas where usually the psychoanalyst or anthropologist presides. The early explorations discussed here required the explicit demonstration of several daring strategies that had to be brought clearly into the light. Extreme actions seemed justified or even required, by the cultural moment. However, the moment changes, and the mind become desensitized to such direct demonstrations after their first shock of brilliant simplicity. When an artist in 1987 announces that his or her entire life is designated as performance, the unadorned gesture cannot expect to be met with the enthusiastic interest with which its prototypes were greeted a generation ago. Now, we talked about how it is more difficult to project caring on television, for various reasons, mostly because of the tendencies of the medium. The biases are not absolute restrictions. Though extremely rare, there are occasional examples of television programs that overcome the bias. Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage was one such example. It succeeded only because of the rare skill and sensitivity of the director and the performers. Their deep understanding of the medium allowed them to use it efficiently. Scenes qualifies as the exception that proves the rule. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Many Americans saw this production in movies houses, but it was originally created for television. This is why Bergman devoted so much of the production to facial close-ups. In a theater two and one-half hours of facial close-up became oppressive. When one is sitting in a movie house, one wants something beyond closeup imagery. However, on television, nothing other than closeup imagery could convey the subtle themes of a plot that concerned the excruciating shifts of feeling within a disintegrating marriage. Bergman had to convey tenderness, affection, caring, concern and intimacy, together with ambiguity, and then violence, rage, sorrow. These latter scenes, the violent ones, were among the very few in which he allowed the camera to pull back from the action, because the physical movement could convey the meaning. If you honour the medium’s limits absolutely, in demonstrating the best that is possible on television, Bergman also illuminated the absoluteness of the limits. He took television as far as one could and succeeded well enough. There is the tendency to forget that one cannot go further. Bergman is one of the rarest talents in the history of moving-image media, and given even his difficulty in communicating subtle feeling, the inherent resistance of television becomes clearer. Lesser talents, not daring to try what Bergman did, have to work against the medium, as it were, choosing more confined, easier-to-handle imagery, and emotional content that fits the narrowed scope of TV. Most directors will not even attempt to deal with subtle realms of information and they are wise not to. Producers and sponsors will also tend to avoid such subtlety because it is so unlikely to get high ratings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Roots was not an exception to this rule. In fact, it proves the rule. In the book, the cultural nuances of relationships were emphasized and developed, while the TV production avoided them altogether. Nor was there much effort to present the subtle ambience of the African natural environment, which was also highly developed in the book. The television production wisely concentrated on the larger, more explicit, and therefore more reproducible element of conflict in the story and the kinds of family attachment made familiar by soap operas. This is not to say that the production did not have value. It is only to remark that the values which were conveyed were the simplest ones to convey. The more subtle values, which are at the heart of the African culture and, therefore, formed the basis for the quality of feeling that existed among the uprooted enslaved human beings, were necessarily dropped out. In the end, the viewer got some fairly good information and feeling about good guys and bad guys during a certain period of history, but virtually no understanding of the successful repression of an entire culture and way of mind. So it goes in all dramatic programming. Nuance is being sacrificed to the larger and more visible elements of stories, and the cause of the sacrifice is a technical limitation of the medium. Problems of subtlety do not present themselves in quiz shows, sports events and sitcoms. These are confined to areas of human expression which are easy to capture, east to communicate, and easy to understand, even with directors and writers of ordinary talent and in a medium as vague as television. As a result, there is a tendency to favour such productions. The bias toward the coarse, the bold, and the obvious finds its way into all other categories of television programming, including even those that deal with so-called objective events in the World. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Public affairs programs are seriously biased away from coverage of highly detailed, complex, and subtle information, and so are news shows. Ordinarily this bias is believed to result from time factors—it takes too long to explain complicated issues. However, certain kinds of visual information are harder to capture than others. News producers will always choose the more easily communicable image. Edward Epstein, in his very important New From Nowhere, interviews television news producers, seeking to define an inherent bias in the news that is related to technical and other factors. He observes: “The one ingredient most producers interviewed claimed was necessary for a good action story was visually identifiable opponents clashing violently. This, in turn, requires some form of stereotype: military troops fighting civilians, different cultures of students clashing, workers wearing hardhats manhandling bearded peace demonstrators, were cited by producers as examples of the components for such stories. Demonstrations or violence involving less clearly identifiable groups make less effective stories, since, as one CBS producer put it, ‘It would be hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.’ Since news stories tend to be constructed from those aspects of a happening that can be easily filmed and recorded, and not form the poorly lit, softly spoken or otherwise inaccessible moments, events tend to be explained in terms of what one producer called ‘visual facts.’ One correspondent pointed out, for example, even if they are insignificant trash can fires, television coverage of riots or protests at night tends to focus on fires, since they provide adequate light for filming. Hence urban riots tend to be defined in terms of ‘visual facts’ of fires, rather than more complicated factors. Visual facts, of course, cover only one range of phenomena, and thus tend to limit the power of networks to explain complex events. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Americans, so often in the forefront of science and technology, have a curious difficulty in thinking about the future. Language seems to have something to do with it. If something sounds futurelike, we call if “futuristic.” If that does not step the conversation, we say that it “sounds like science fiction.” These descriptions remind listeners of laughable 1950s fantasies like rockets to the Moon, video telephones, ray guns, robots, and the like. Of course, all these become real in the 1960s, because the science was not fiction. Today, we can see not only how to build additional science-fictional devices, but—more important, for better or worse—how to make them cheap and abundant. We need to think about the future and name-calling will not help. Curiously, the Japanese language seems to lack a disparaging word for “futurelike.” Ideas for future technologies may be termed mirai no (“of the future,” a hope or a goal), shorai-teki (an expected development, which might be twenty years away), or kuso no (“imaginary” only, because contrary to physical law or economics). To think about the future, we need to distinguish mirai no and shorai-teki, like nanotechnology, from mere kuso no like antigravity boots. A final objection is the claim that there is no point in trying to think about the future, because it is all too complex and unpredictable. This is too sweeping, but has more than a little truth. It deserves a considerable response. Technocracy gave us the idea of progress, and of necessity loosened our bonds with tradition—whether political or spiritual. Technocracy filled the air with the promise of new freedoms and new forms of social organization. Technocracy also speeded up the World. We could get places faster, do things faster, accomplish more in a shorter time. Time, in fact, became an adversary over which technology could triumph. And this meant that there was no time to look back or to contemplate what was being lost. There were empires to build, opportunities to exploit, exciting freedoms to enjoy, especially in America. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
There, on the wings of technocracy, the United States of America soared to unprecedented heights as a World power. That Jefferson, Adams, and Madison would have found such a place uncomfortable, perhaps even disagreeable, did not matter. Nor did it matter that there were nineteenth-century American voiced—Thoreau, for example—who complained about what was being left behind. The first answer to the complaints was, We leave noting behind but the chains of a tool-using culture. The second answer was more thoughtful: Technocracy will not overwhelm us. And this was true, to a degree. Technocracy did not entirely destroy the traditions of the social and symbolic Worlds. Technocracy subordinated these Worlds—yes, even humiliated them—but it did not render them totally ineffectual. In nineteenth-century America, these still existed holy men and the concept of sin. There still existed regional pride, and it was possible to conform to traditional notions of family life. It was possible to respect tradition itself and to find sustenance in ritual and myth. It was possible to believe in social responsibility and the practicality of individual action. It was even possible to believe in common sense and the wisdom of the elderly. It was not easy, but it was possible. We have only to think of the declaration in His mouth that humans, now that they have acquired moral consciousness, must not be allowed to attain aeonian life as well! The meaning of this “knowledge of good and evil” is nothing else than: cognition in general, cognizance of the World, knowledge of all the good and bad things there are, for this would be in line with Biblical usage, in which the antithesis good and evil is often used to denote “anything,” “all kinds of things.” And this interpretation, the is the favourite one today. “Therefore I have written this epistle, sealing it with mine own hand, feeling for your welfare, because of your firmness in that which ye believe to be right, and your noble spirit in the field of battle,” reports Nephi 3.5. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Cooperation itself has received comparatively little attention from biologists since the pioneer account of Trivers; but an associated issue, concerning restraint in conflict situations, has been developed theoretically. In this connection, a new concept—that of an evolutionarily stable strategy—has been formally developed. Cooperation in the more normal sense has remained clouded by certain difficulties, particularly those concerning initiation of cooperation from a previously asocial state and its stable maintenance once established. A formal theory of cooperation is increasingly needed. The renewed emphasis on individualism has focused on the frequent ease of cheating. Such cheating makes the stability of even mutually advantageous symbioses appear more questionable then under the old view of adaptation for species benefit. At the same time, other cases that once appeared firmly in the domain of kinship theory now begin to reveal that the players are not closely enough related for much kinship-based altruism to be expected. This applies both to cooperative breeding in birds and to cooperative acts more generally in primate groups. Either the appearances of cooperation are deceptive—they are cases of part-kin altruism and part cheating—or larger part of the behavior is attributable to reciprocity, however, underemphasize the stringency of its conditions. In a biological context, the model is novel in its probabilistic treatment of the possibility that two individuals may interact again. This allows light to be shed on certain specific biological processes such as aging and territoriality. The analysis of the evolution of cooperation considers not only the final stability of a given strategy, but also the initial viability of a strategy in an environment dominated by non-cooperating individuals, as well as the robustness of a strategy in a variegated environment composed of other individuals using a variety of more or less sophisticated strategies. This approach allows a richer understanding of the full chronology of the evolution of cooperation than has previously been possible. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The applications include behavioral interaction at the microbial level. This leads to some speculative suggestions of rationales able to account for the existence of both chronic and acute phases in many diseases, and for a certain class of genetic defects, exemplified by Down’s syndrome. Many of the benefits sought by living things are disproportionally available to cooperating groups. While there are considerable differences in what is meant by the terms “benefits” and “sought,” this statement, insofar as it is true, lays down a fundamental basis for all social life. The problem is that while an individual can benefit from mutual cooperation, each other can also do even better by exploiting the cooperative effort of others. Over a period of time, the same individuals may interact again, allowing for complex patterns of strategic interactions. The Prisoner’s Dilemma allows a formalization of the strategic possibilities inhere in such situations. Apart from being a solution in a theory of problem solving, defection in a single encounter is also the solution in biological evolution. It is the outcome of inevitable evolutionary trends through mutation and natural selection: if the payoffs are in terms of fitness, and the interactions between pairs of individuals are random and not repeated, then any population with a mixture of heritable strategies evolves to a state where all individuals are defectors. Moreover, no single differing mutant strategy can do better than others when the population is using this strategy. When the players will never meet again, the strategy of defection is the only stable strategy. In many biological settings, the same two individuals may meet more than ones. If an individual can recognize a previous interactant and remember some aspects of the prior outcomes, then the strategic situation becomes an iterated Prisoners Dilemma with a much richer set of possibilities. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
A strategy could use the history of the interaction so far to determine the likelihood of its cooperating or defecting on the current move. However, as previously explained, if there is a known number of interactions between a pair of individuals, to defect always is still evolutionarily stable and is still the only strategy which is. The reason is that defection on the last interaction would be optimal for both sides, and consequently so would defection on the next-to-last. The model developed is based on the more realistic assumption that the number of interactions is not fixed in advanced. Instead, there is some probability, w, that after the current interaction the same two individuals will meet again. Biological factors that affect the magnitude of this probability of meeting again include the average lifespan, relative mobility, and health of the individuals. For any value of w, the strategy of unconditional defection (ALL D) is always stable; if everyone is using this strategy, no mutant strategy can successfully invade the population. If a population of individuals using that strategy cannot be invaded by a rare mutant adopting a different strategy, then stated formally, a strategy is evolutionarily stable. There may be many evolutionarily stable strategies. In fact, when w is sufficiently great, there is no single best strategy regardless of the behavior of the others in the population. Just because there is no single best strategy, it does not follow that analysis is hopeless. On the contrary, it is possible to analyze not only the stability of a given strategy, but also its robustness and initial viability. Surprisingly, there is a broad range of biological reality that is encompassed by this theoretic approach. To start with, an organism does not need a brain to employ a strategy. Bacteria, for example, have a basic capacity to play games in that bacteria are highly responsive to selected aspects of their environment, especially their chemical environment; this implies that they can respond differentially to what other organisms around them are doing; these conditional strategies of behavior can certainly be inherited; and the behavior of a bacterium can affect the fitness of other organisms around it, just as the behaviour of other organisms can affect the fitness of a bacterium. Recent evidence shows that even a virus can use a conditional strategy. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
While the strategies can easily include differential responsiveness to recent changes in the environment or to cumulative averages over time, in other ways their range of responsiveness is limited. Bacteria cannot “remember” or “interpret” a complex past sequence of changes, and they probably cannot distinguish alternative origins of adverse or beneficial changes. Some bacteria, for example, produce their own antibiotics, called bacteriocins. These are harmless to bacteria of the producing strain, but are destructive to others. A bacterium might easily have production of its own bacteriocin dependent on the perceived presence of like hostile productions toward an offending initiator. Real transformation in a corporation, a school or any institution implies significant changes in its main functions, its technology, financial structure, culture, people and organizations. A good example is IBM’s (“Big Blue”) strategic shift from a corporation whose chief activity was manufacturing “things” to one whose first priority has become the sale of services. Revenues reached $57.35 billion in 2021—and it has 282,000 employees. There was an increase of 3.93 percent revenue from 2020. At Kodak, too, the belated decision to enter the digital-camera field was transformational. For nearly a century, one of Kodak’s main functions was to manufacture, develop and print silver-halide film—processes largely eliminated by digital photography. By 2004 it was well on its way to dominating the new field. Real transformation is possible in the public sector, too, as William J. Bratton showed when he took command of New York’s 37,000-person police force in 1994. Its function, he declared, was no longer just to catch criminals but to focus on the future and prevent crimes as well. Until Bratton arrived, the NYPD measured its performance vis-à-vis other police departments on the basis of FBI data supplied only once every six months. Bratton forced unwilling, overworked and sometimes angry police captains to prepare weekly reports for his new CompStat database showing which particular types of crime were increasingly or diminishing in their districts. Then they were asked—once a week—to explain what they were doing about it. The better, faster feedback from the field quickly improved performance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
His most publicized innovation was implementation of the “broken window” policy, which directed police to crack down even on minor crimes like breaking windows, scrawling graffiti or bothering motorists by wiping their windshields and demanding money. Catching small fry in these “quality of life” offenses discouraged the commission of more serious felonies and demonstrated to the city that the police meant business. Organizationally, Bratton shifted power downward toward the local precincts, and culturally he raised police morale by vigorously rooting out corruption and talking tough about crime. He gave his force new respect and a conviction that he would fight politicians and the public on its behalf. With innovations at all these levels, Bratton turned the NYPD around. Crime statistics even now are tricky at best. Nevertheless, Bratton is widely credited with reducing homicides in New York by 44 percent and “serious crime” by 25 percent in the twenty-seven months of his tenure there. He transformed the department, and as of 2013, William Bratton’s police force drove down crime and Los Angeles County and found favor among marginalized groups and the wealthy. However, the trajectory of power, and even violence, remain part of the World of business and it should not surprise us. What should raise our eyebrows is the remarkable change in the way force is applied. A slavemaster feudal lord transplanted from antiquity into today’s World would find it hard to believe, even astonishing, that we beat workers less—and they produce more. A ship’s captain would be amazed that sailors are not physically abused and forced into service. Even a journeyman carpenter or tanner from the 18th century would be nonplussed at the idea that he could not legally hash his fist into a sassy apprentice’s mouth. See, for example, William Hogarth’s color engraving entitled “Industry and Idleness,” printed in England in 1796. In it we see two “ ’prentices”—one working happily at his loom, the other dozing. At the right, the boss approaches angrily brandishing a stick with which to beat the idler. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Both custom and law now restrain this open use of force in the modern World. This vestigialization of violence in the economy, however, did not spring from Christian charity or gentle altruism. What happened is that, during the industrial revolution, the elites in society shifted from a primary reliance on the low-quality power produced by violence, to the mid-quality power produced by money. Money may not produce the immediate result of a fist in the face or a gun in the ribs. However, because it can be used both to reward and punish, it is a far more versatile, flexible tool of power—especially when the ultimate threat of violence remains in place. Money could not become the main tool of social control earlier, because the vast majority of humans were not part of the money system. Peasants in the preindustrial ages basically grew their own food, made their own shelter and clothing. However, as soon as factories replaced farms, people no longer grew their own food and they became desperately dependent on money for survival. This total dependence on the money system, as distinct from self-production, transformed all power relationships. Violence, as we have just seen, did not disappear. However, its form and function changed as money became the prime motivator of the work force and the main tool of social control during the three industrial centuries. It is this which explains why smokestack societies, capitalist and socialist alike, have proved more grasping and acquisitive, more money-obsessed than far less affluent, preindustrial cultures. Greed no doubt goes back to Paleozoic times. However, it was industrialism that made money into the prime tool of power. In sum, the rise of the industrial nation-state brought the systematic monopolization of violence, the sublimation of violence into law, and the growing dependence of the population on money. These three changes made it possible for the elites of industrial societies increasingly to make use of wealth rather than overt force to impose their will on history. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
This is the true meaning of powershift. Not simply a transfer of power from one person or group to another, but a fundamental change in the mix of violence, wealth, and knowledge employed by elites to maintain control. Today, just as the industrial revolution transmuted violence into law, so we are transmuting money—indeed, wealth in general—into something new. And just as the smokestack age saw money assume a primary role in gaining or maintaining power, so today, at the edge of the 21st century, we face another twist in the history of power. We are on the brink of a new powershift. Television is another powerful force in the World today, some would argue, it is one of the most powerful devices known to modern man. However, roughly speaking, the experience of looking at a TV picture is like looking at the World through a tea strainer. The picture is located along the grids. You fill in the blanks. Compare the image of your television screen with any other image in your television room: the bookcase, the table, the fug Obviously the actual object is vivid in comparison with the television image. Television production people are exquisitely aware of this. There is an electronics term to describe it: “signal-to-noise ratio.” Ordinarily applied to sound, the term can be applied to images as well. The “signal” is the primary image that they are attempting to covey. The “noise” is the background, the fuzz, from which the signal has to stand out to be seen properly. A “clear” picture is one in which the signal and noise are well differentiated. In television, however, since the differentiation is difficult to achieve, program decisions and production styles have to be chosen to maximize what is possible. As a result, there is a tendency to concentrate on images which offer a large signal-to-noise distinction. An enormous percentage of television images are close-ups of faces. This is not accidental. Faces in close-up are about the sharpest signal that television can produce while still conveying content. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Even so, if the background behind the face is complex, filled with varieties of objects and color tones, the face merges with the background and it all becomes a confusing jumble. So even while showing faces, television producers must keep the background “clean,” stark, unencumbered. Dramatic programs are constructed so that there are very few adornments and props. This avoids a cluttered image and increases the potential for the primary image to communicate something. This limitation does not exist to the same extent with movies, where the signal-to-noise ratio is much greater, allowing for images filled with detail. However, when a movie is played on television, much detail is lost. If you will think back to a time when you first saw a film in a theater and then saw it on television, you will realize how much richness is lost in the translation from one medium to the other. There is also a low signal-to-noise ratio in television sound. It is very low fidelity, although it could be greatly improved. High-fidelity sound, equal to recording sound, is possible with television speaker technology, and has become an industry standard. An additional factor fuzzing up the sound is the high-pitched whistle that emanates from all television sets. Caused by the interaction of the audio and visual electron fields, this whistle is unavoidable with television technology, at least in marketable price ranges. And so both television picture and sound remain fuzzy. This problem of indistinctness, rarely noted of discussed by critics of television, cannot be overestimated. It is a major factor influencing all decisions made by television producers. It skews all programming—both choices of subject and treatment of the choices—toward those that offer highest possible contrast between foreground and background, signal and noise, color and tone. This leads to image which tend to the larger as opposed to the smaller, to the broad as opposed to the detailed, to the simple as opposed to the complex, to the obvious rather than the subtle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Because of these tendencies, inexorably imposed by the technology itself, the communicable content of all programs is affected. Beyond confining the visual images and the choices of sound, these tendencies affect the emotional content. Because the images are indistinct, subtle feelings are more difficult to transmit through television than the larger emotions—the foreground emotions, as it were—that can be depicted efficiently by larger facial expressions, or even by noncloseup body movements. Even with a reliance on facial close-ups, what television can convey is a reduced version of what is possible in real life or even in still photography or film. The human relationships which are shown on television, therefore, tend to be those that can be shown on television. These dwell on the grosser end of the human emotional spectrum. The more subtle expression, those which express intimate, deeply personal feelings, are lost in the blur. In recent years there has emerged a very vocal group of outraged psychologists, educators and parents who speak of the urgent need to show beneficial behavior, such as loving, caring, sharing, and warmth, in television programs. They deplore the emphasis on “antisocial” behavior that is common on TV. Unfortunately these reformers are doomed to fail in their efforts because the medium is far better suited technically to expressing hate, fear, jealousy, winning, wanting and violence. These emotions suffer very little information loss when pushed through the coarse imagery of television. Like other gross personal expressions—hysteria, or ebullience, or the kind of one-dimensional joyfulness usually associated with some objective victory—the facial expressions and bodily movements of antisocial behavior are highly visible. Hate, anger, competitiveness are obvious broad-band feelings with broad-band expressions. Mot of them can be well communicated solely through body movement. No detail is needed to get the point, and neither is any special talent on the part of actor or director. They come through the filter of television with a minimum of information loss. The signal-to-noise ratio is really high. For these technical reasons, among others we will get to later, there is an emphasis on sports and violence in television programming, and there is greater viewer interest in them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The popularity of such programming is not so much a sign that public tastes are vulgar, as they are assumed to be in many quarters (“People want that kind of programming”), as it is a sign that these programs are the ones which manage to communicate something, at least, through television. Rather than illustrating the limits of the public mentality or taste, they illustrate the limits of the medium itself. The public wisely chooses programs which work best in a medium in which anything of a more subtle nature loses so much in translation as to be noncommunicative. This is not to say that the business people who are the television powers that be are not predisposed to further the values of competition and social Darwinism which they understand best and which are inherent in sports ad violence programs. However, no matter what their inclination, the fact exists that the kind of programming in which the least information is lost is the grosser forms: sports, violence, police action, MTV Award’s Shows, as well as quiz shows, game shows, soap opera, situation comedy and documentaries about nature, new about murder, war, conflict, power politics and charismatic leaders. All of these categories of programming communicate on television because they deliver clear, easily grasped visual and auditory signals, together with broad-band emotional content, all of which make them highly efficient in a low-definition medium. On the other hand, the kinds of feelings and behavior which the reformers like to call prosocial cannot be conveyed through television by obvious facial expression or physical movement. While it may be possible to show friendship in a dramatic context, it cannot be explored very far visually, because expression of such feelings exists in an inward rather than outward realm of experience. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Love is simply not as easy to demonstrate through coarse imagery as anger or competition. The heights of intimate feeling—between lovers, or parents and children, or among children—are actually experienced in life’s quietest moments. Ordinarily they do not involve any visually obvious action, unless it is the most subtle facial expression—peace, tranquility, satisfaction—not easily captured in any photography, but damned near impossible in the coarse imagery of television. How would you show caring on television? You could present images of people who presumably care about each other doing things which express that feeling. Yet, the things people usually do to express real caring are very small, intimate things. The inner feeling may be strong but, unlike rage, the acts which express it are rarely sweeping. What about warmth? Well, you could illustrate warmth with hugging or tender smiles. It is not that it cannot be done, it is just not as easy to show on television as coldness it. The behavior of The Flash, for example—coldness, determination, efficiency, domination—is easy to see because t can be demonstrated with nearly no facial expression at all. Therefore, this sort of behavior communicates more efficiently on TV. However, with The Flash interacts with Iris, you can tell her cares about her because his face looks softer, the tone of his voice is more concerned and compassionate, and his body language around her is more relaxed or protective. Even if a given subtle emotion can be conveyed from times to time, in most cases one could never build an entire program on its as one could on violent emotions. In signal-to-noise terms the entire program would become indistinct in comparison with the background of more aggressive, expressive and efficient action shows. A little known Sanskrit book called the Pasupata Sutras formulates a practice in detailed, under the heading of the Seeking of Dishonor. The practice is enjoined to court contempt and abuse from one’s fellow humans by behavior deliberately contrived as the most inappropriate and offensive for the situation, whatever it may be. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
In Shamanic context such practices had demonstrated the shaman’s special status beyond convention, his ability to breach at will either metaphysical or ethical boundaries. In yogic terms the goal of the practice was the effacement of ego by the normalization of types of experiences usually destructive to self-image. The shaman, the yogic seeker of dishonor, and the ritual scapegoat figure all offered themselves as targets for calamity, to draw it away from the communities they served. They were the individuals who went out on the razor’s edge and, protected in part by the brackets of religious performances, publicly breached the taboo of the times. Today the exhibitionistic breaching of age and gender taboos, as well as other forays into the darkness of the disallowed within the brackets of the art performance, replicates this ancient custom, sometimes with the same cathartic intention. As the shoals of history break and flow and reassemble, to break and flow again, these and other primitive practices have resurfaced, in something like their original combination, in an altogether different context. The preparation of one’s own body as a magico-sculptural object, for example, is a regular and essential part of the shaman’s performance. An Australian shaman may cover his body with mud (symbol of recent arrival from the netherworld) and decorate it with patterns of bird down fastened on with his own blood; an African shaman may wear human bones, skulls, and so forth, and may surgically alter his or her body in various ways; a Central Asian shaman’s body is tattooed or sacrificed or painted with magical symbols. Similarly, Schneemann has presented herself as a “body collage” decorated with symbols from ancient fertility religions. In a mixture of archaic and Christian materials, Linda Montano in The Screaming Nun, 1975, “dressed as a nun, danced, screamed, and heard confessions at Embarcadero Plaza [in San Francisco].” Other pieces by Montano have involved dancing blindfolded in trance, drumming for six hours a day for six days, shape-changing and identity-changing, self-injury (with acupuncture needles), and astral travel events. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Mary Beth Edelson’s “Public Rituals” have involved the marking of her naked body with symbols from ancient goddess cults, the equation of her body with the Earth, and the declaration of the end of patriarchy (Your Five Thousand Years Are Up). Kim Jones, as Mud Man, or Bill Harding emerging covered with mud from a hole in the ground in the middle of a circle of fire, are reconstituting before our eye’s images from the elementary stratum of religious forms. A motif that is absolutely central to shamanism, and that often also involves body decoration, is the attempt to incorporate the power of an animal species by imitation of it. Shamans in general adopt the identities of power animals, act out their movements, and duplicate their sounds. The claim to understand animal languages and to adopt an animal mind-set is basic to their meditation between culture and nature. Echoes of the practice are, of course, common in the animals of performance art. In Joseph Beuys’ conversation with the dead rabbit, the knowledge of an animal language combines with a belief in the shamanic abilities to communicate with the dead. In Chicken Dance, 1972, Montano, attired in a chicken costume, appeared unannounced at various locations in San Francisco and danced wildly through the streets like a shaman possessed by the spirit and moved by the motions of her animal ally. Terry Fox slept on a gallery floor connected with two dead fish by string attached to his hair and teeth, attempting, like a shaman inviting his animal ally to communicate through a dream, to dream himself into the piscine mind in Pisces, 1971. Not only is the kind of behavior art, but it is also considered religious. Now when it comes to politics, the problem with charismatic political is that it is also impossible to define. There may be examples of it in the past, but they are inimitable. If politics is like art styles (a thought picked up in Weber’s invention of the term “life-style”), nothing can be prescribed to it beforehand. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
There are no fixed principles and no program of action. All that one can say is “Be yourself!”; “Be original!”; “Let go!” or something of the kind. Charisma is a formula for extremism and immoderation. Moreover, the leader must have followers, so there is every temptation for one to act out one’s role as they define it. And, finally, genuine charisma is so difficult to judge. Persuasive tests for the genuineness of the charismatic leader, whose grace comes from God, were notoriously hard to come by. The leader whose grace emanates from the much more enigmatic self proves practically impossible to test. The modern situation as diagnosed by Weber requires radical remedies, and the charismatic leader is such a prescription. Just over the horizon, when Weber, lay a political dictator. He was a leader; Fuhrer, who was certainly neither traditional nor rational-bureaucratic He was the mad, horrible parody of the charismatic leader—the demagogue—hoped for by Weber. This particular dictator proved to the satisfaction of most, if not all, that the last man is not the worst of all; and his example should have, although it has not, turned the political imagination away from experiments in that direction. Weber was a good man of decent political instincts who would have had anything but disgust at and contempt for this particular dictator. What he wanted was a moderate corrective to the ills of German politics—about the same as De Gaulle brought to French politics. However, when one ventures out into the vast spaces opened up by Nietzsche, it is hard to set limits. Measure and moderation are the real aliens there. Weber was just one of many serious persons who were affected by Nietzsche himself asserted is the result of positioning oneself beyond good and evil. The open-ended future contains many surprises, and all these followers of Nietzsche prepared the way by helping to jettison good and evil along with reason, without assurance of that the alternatives might be. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Weber is of particular interest to us because he was the chosen apostle for the American promised land. It is not only the popularity of the heavily freighted language he bequeathed us that is surprising, but also the persistence among supposedly serious persons of his articulation of the political phenomena. The political dictator in questions did not cause a rethinking of politics here or in Europe. All to the contrary—it was while we were fighting him that the thought that had preceded him in Europe conquered here. That thought, which gave him, remains dominate. We also must not omit mentioning the rise and fall of the much-maligned Luddite Movement. The origin of the term is obscure, some believing that it refers to the actions of a youth named Ludlum who, being told by his father to fix a weaving machine, proceeded instead to destroy it. In any case, between 1811 and 1816, these arose widespread support for workers who bitterly resented the new wage cuts, child labor, and elimination of laws and customs that had once protected skilled workers. Their discontent was expressed through the destruction of machines, mostly in the garment and fabric industry; since then the term “Luddite” has come to mean an almost childish and certainly naïve opposition to technology. However, the historical Luddites were neither childish nor naïve. They were people trying desperately to preserve whatever rights, privileges, laws, and customs had given them justice in the older World-view. They lost. So did all the other nineteenth-century nay-sayers. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton might well have been on their side. Perhaps Bacon as well, for it was not his intention that technology should be a blight or a destroyer. However, then, Bacon’s greatest deficiency had always been that he was unfamiliar with the legend of Thamus; he understood nothing of the dialectic of technological change, and said little about the negative consequences of technology. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Even so, taken as a whole, the rise of technocracy would probably have pleased Bacon, for there can be no disputing that technocracy transformed the face of material civilization, and went far toward relieving what Tocqueville called “the disease of work.” And though it is true that technocratic capitalism created slums and alienation, it is also true that such conditions were perceived as an evil that could and should be eradicated; that is to say, technocracies brought into being an increased respect for the average person, whose potential and convenience became a matter of compelling political interest and urgent social policy. The nineteenth century saw the extension of public education, laid the foundation of the modern labor union, and led to the rapid diffusion of literacy, especially in America, through the development of public libraries and the increased importance of the general-interest magazine. To take only one example of the last point, the list of nineteenth-century contributors to The Saturday Evening Post, founded in 1821, included William Cullen Bryant, Harriet Beecher Stowe, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe—in other words, most of the writers presently included in American Lit. 301. The technocratic culture eroded the line that had made the intellectual interests of educated people inaccessible to the working class, and we may take it as a fact, as George Steiner has remarked, that the period from the French Revolution to World War I marked an oasis of quality in which great literature reached a mass audience. Something else reached a mass audience as well: political and religious freedom. It would be an inadmissible simplification to claim that the Age of Enlightenment originated solely because of the emerging importance of technology in the eighteenth century, but it is quite clear that the great stressed placed on individuality in the economic sphere had an irresistible resonance in the political sphere. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In a technocracy, inherited royalty is both irrelevant and absurd. The new royalty was reserved for men like Richard Arkwright, whose origins were low but whose intelligence and daring soared. Those who possessed such gifts could not be denied political power and were prepared to take it if it were not granted. In any case, the revolutionary nature of the new means of production and communication would have naturally generated radical ideas in every realm of human enterprise. In a democratic society, only a few people need an in-depth understanding of how a technology works, but many people need to understand what it can do. People are concerned about the implications of nanotechnology and its impact on our lives, the environment, and the future. Nanotechnology can bring great achievements and solve great problems, but it will likewise present opportunities for enormous abuse. Research progress is necessary, but so is an informed and cautious public. Our motivation in presenting these ideas is as much a fear of potential harm, and a wish to avoid it, as longing for the potential good and a wish to seek it. Even so, we will dwell on the good that nanotechnology can bring and give only an outline of the obvious potential harm. The coming revolution can best be managed by people who share not only a picture of what they wish to avoid, but of what they can achieve. If we as a society have a clear view of a route to follow, we will not need a precise catalog of every cliff and mine field to the side of the road. Some will hear this emphasis and call us optimistic. However, would it really be wise to dwell on exactly how a technology can be abused? Or to draw up blueprints, perhaps? Still, sitting here, preparing to tell this story, is an uncomfortable place for a researcher to be. In his book How Superstition Won and Science Lost, historian John C. Burnham tells of the century-long retreat of scientists from what they once saw as their responsibility: presenting the content and methods of science to a broad audience, for the public good. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Today, the culture of science takes a dim view of “popularizations.” If you can write in plain English, this is taken as evidence that you cannot do math, and vice versa. Robert Pool, a member of the news staff of the most prestigious American scientific journal, Science, acknowledges this negative attitude in writing that “some researchers, either by choice or just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, make it into the public eye.” So how can a researcher, either by choice or just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, make it into the public eye.” So how can a researcher keep out of trouble? If you stumble on something important, wrap it in jargon. If people realize that it is important, run and hide. Robert Pool gently urges scientists to become more involved, but the social pressures in the research community are heavily in the other direction. In response to this negative attitude toward “popularization,” we can only ask that scientists and engineers try to act in a thoroughly professional fashion when judging a given proposal—which is to say, that they pay scrupulous attention to the scientific and technical facts. This means judging the validity of technical ideas based on their factual merits, and not on their (occasionally readable) style of presentation, or on the emotional response they may stir up. Nanotechnology matters to people, and they deserve to know about its flesh-and-blood human consequences, its impact on society and nature. Years of discussion with scientists and engineers—in public, in private, at conferences, and through the press—indicate that the case for nanotechnology is solid. Japanese and European industry, government, and academic researchers are forging ahead on the road to nanotechnology, and more and more U.S. research is applicable. Some researchers have even begun to call it an obvious goal. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Some people think nanotechnology going too far, much like when Eve ate the apple in the garden of Eden and opened her life, Adam’s life, and the World to a new reality. The whole incident is spun out of play and dream; it is irony, mysterious irony of the narrator, that spins it. It is apparent: the two doers know not what they do, more than this, they can only do it, they cannot know it. There is no room here for the pathos of the two principles, as we see it in the ancient Iranian religion, the pathos of the choice made by the Two themselves and by the whole of humankind after them. And nevertheless both of them, good and evil, are to be found here—but in a strange, ironical shape, which the commentators have not understood as such and hence have not understood at all. The tree of whose forbidden fruit the first humans eat is called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; so does God Himself also call it. The serpent promises that by partaking of it, they would become like God, knowers of good and evil; and God seems to confirm this when He subsequently says that they have thereby become “as one of us,” to know good and evil. This is the repetitive style of the Bible, the antitheses constantly reappear in fresh relationships with one another: its purpose is to demonstrate with super clarity that it is they we are dealing with. However, nowhere is their meaning intimated. The words may denote the ethical antithesis, but they may also denote that of beneficial and injurious, or of delightful and repulsive; immediately after the serpent’s speech the woman “sees” that the tree is “good to eat,” and immediately upon God’s prohibition followed His dictum that it was “not good” that man should be alone—the adjective translated by “evil” is equally indefinite. Why could Eve not stay content with the lofty enchanted valley of unimaginable glory and beauty, and sleep in the golden sunlight. There were meads, meadows, groves, glades, prodigality of flowers, such soft richness, such flush and glow, such rhapsodies of color—it was a dream! Through it poured four shinning rivers, pictured with reflections, which wound hither and thither down the mellow distances of that Heaven of solitude and pace, and faded out in the dim remoteness where Earth and the sky melted together and became one. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The poor Earth, which had seemed so beautiful before—she must have wondered how to reach the happy valley! Eve thought she would descend into it, and live there always. “There I shall find Satan, there I shall find Adam,” she said; “there I shall not be alone anymore.” However, Eve could find no opening in the precipice. She wandered eagerly up and down, seeking, but there was no way. And all the time the sun was skinning. At last the darkness closed down, and through her tears she saw that land of her longing fade and disappear. Eve was just a young lady, she sat down and cried. However, the animals came and comforted her, and tried to tell her she had friend, and not to grieve; and she rose up and went with them, seeing a bed-place. They lay down, and they snuggled about her, and their furs warmed her and she fell asleep. She woke at dawn, and a strange thing was happening. A white powder was sifting down from above, and where it fell upon ger skin it turned to water. She was frightened, and climbed to her place on the elephant, and cared not whither he went, so he got Eve away from this strange invasion of the skies. She named it snow—and that is indeed what it was. The elephant carried her down the mountain; then for two weeks they skirted the base of the highlands, trying to find where those rivers came out, so that she could enter the Happy Valley; but they never found ay trace of the, and at last they went back home in sorrow, for Eve had come to think that the Valley must have been only a vision, not a reality. She was not contented for long. Daily and nightly the vision rose before her in its dreamy loveliness, and tormented her with unappeasable longings to see it again. Her surroundings had lost their charm; they seemed commonplace and poor; she no longer took pleasures in them. And every day, Eve fed her spirit with the vision, then search for a way down to the precipice. “Wherefore, ye need not suppose that I and my father are the only ones that have testified, and also taught them. Wherefore, if ye shall be obedient to the commandments, and endure to the end, ye shall be saved at the last day. And thus it is. Amen,” reports 1 Nephi 22.31. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Faith in Machinery is Mankind’s Greatest Menace
Along with the venality of its controllers, the technology of television predetermines the boundaries of its content. Some information can be conveyed completely, some partially, some not at all. The most effective telecommunications are the gross, simplified linear messages and programs which conveniently fit the purposes of the medium’s commercial controllers. Television’s highest potential is advertising. This cannot be changed. The bias is inherent in the technology. A good way to think about television—in fact all the media—is as a kind of telescope in the sky, flying around, constantly looking. Then from it perch in the sky, it zooms down to a single spot on the planet, a small group of people shooting each other. It takes this single event out of billions and billions of other little events and sends it zooming through space to television antennas, and then out through an electron gun into (on average) 120 million people sitting at home in dark rooms with their eyes still. The event gets reconstructed in the brains of these people as an image. Recorded. All these 120 million people have recorded the same image from this single distant spot where they are not. This becomes their experience of that moment. If the telescope has selected a shooting from an entire planet’s worth of activities, in the next moment it may choose a Super Bowl game, or a threatening remark by someone who is unhappy with America, or a program of people trying to win prizes, or a movie about the Old West. All others subjects were not selected, at least in this moment. The telescope did not select views of the ocean as the tide comes in, or people sitting on front porches, or young people knocking on doors to tell a neighbourhood about a zoning hearing. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
If there is logic in this selection is the question to ask. Are there reasons why the telescope selects one thing and not another? There certainly are. Dozens of them. The first and most obvious of these reasons is the one that most critics of television devote themselves to. The people who control television, businessmen, operate strictly out of considerations of budget and profit, in addition to brining alone their own political, perceptual, and social biases. It was to allay their influence that so many thousands of media reformers devoted years of effort to democratizing access to the medium and its content. And yet at present there are still no poor people running television, no marginalized group, no ecologist, no political radicals, no Zen Buddhists, no factory workers, no revolutionaries, no artists, no Communists, no Luddites, no hippies, no botanists, to name only a few excluded groups. To have only businessmen in charge of the most powerful mind-implanting instrument in history naturally creates a boundary to what is selected for dissemination to nearly 335 million people. If other categories of people had control, there can be little disagreement with the point that the choices would be different. If television is a medium of brainwash, then with it now being a more diverse brainwashing system, it is surely an improvement over the sort we got in the past. Still that is debatable because with less diversity in the past, the programs were more family friendly. The overriding bias of television, then, the bias which contains all the other biases, is that it offers preselected material, which excludes whatever is not selected. Now, of course, this is utterly obvious. And, yes, it is true of all experiences. When you are doing one thing, you exclude everything else that you might be doing. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
When we forget that someone has selected our experience for us, and we have given up awareness, information and experience that is not part of television, this only then becomes significant concerning television. When you are spending time in front of the television, you are not doing other things. The young child of three or four years old is in the stage of the greatest emotional development that human beings undergo. And we only develop when we experience things, real-life things: a conversation with Mother, touching Father, going places, doing things, relating to others. This kind of experience is critical to a young child, and when the child spends thirty-five hours per week in front of the TV set, it is impossible to have the full range of real-life experience that a young child must have. Even if we had an overabundance of good television programs, it would not solve the problem. The act of sitting in front of television is itself a replacement of other modes of experience and the awareness these would bring. In this way, television is an acceleration of a condition that began with our artificial environments. We are already separated from most experiences with an unmediated planet. We have given up our personal sensory informational systems. The artificial forms around us already limit our experience and awareness. Our knowledge of the outside World was confined to a narrower field even before television was invented. With television, however, the artificial information-field is brought inside our darkened rooms, inside our stilled minds, and shot by cathode guns through out unmoving eyes into our brains, and recorded. We have no participatory role in gathering data. Our information is narrowed to only what the telescope provides. If we do not experience a wider information field, we lose knowledge of that field’s existence. We become the hermit in the cave who knows only what the TV offers. We experience what is, not knowing what is not. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The people who control television become the choreographers of choosing information. We live within their conceptual frameworks. We travel to places on the planet which they choose and to situations which they decide we should see. What we can know is narrowed to what they know, and then narrowed further to what they select to send us through this instrument of theirs. The kind of people who control television is certainly a problem. However, this is only the beginning. While our field of knowledge is constrained by their venality and arrogance, the people who run television are constrained by the instrument itself. Television is no open window through which all perception may pass. Quite the opposite. There are many technological factors that conspire to limit what the medium can transmit. Some information fits and some does not. Some information can pass through, but only after being reshaped, redefined, packaged, and made duller and coarser than before. Some ways of mind can be conveyed and some cannot. The wrinkle in the story is what can be conveyed through television are the ways of thinking and the kinds of information that suit the people who are in control. This is why they like it so much. It is obviously efficient for them to concentrate their communications within a medium that is good at conveying their forms of mind, just as a person with a drive for power is more apt to express that in politics than in gardening. Conversely, it is logical that the medium will not respond well to people or attitude that defy its limits. It will throw them off, or distort their messages, as a computer would shun anyone who wishes to use it to express feelings of loving tenderness. It might program such a message, but only the words will come out on the tape; not the loving tenderness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
So we have a chicken-egg problem. It is difficult to tell which came first, the technology or its controllers. It may not be that the corporate mentality won the war to control television. The technology itself picked its master, through the inexorable technological factors that confine its use. Molecules matter because matter is made of molecules, and everything from air to flesh to spacecraft is made of matter. When we learn how to arrange molecules in new ways, we can make new things, and make old things in new ways. Perhaps this is why Japan’s MITI has identified “control technologies for the precision arrangement of molecules” as a basic industrial technology for the twenty-first century. Molecular nanotechnology will give thorough control of matter on a large scale at low cost, shattering a whole set of technological and economic barriers more or less at one stroke. A molecule is an object consisting of a collection of atoms held together by strong bonds (one-atom molecules are a special case). “Molecule” usually refers to an object with a number of atoms small enough to be counted (a few to a few thousand), but strictly speaking a truck tire (for instance) is mostly one big molecule, containing something like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. Counting this many atoms aloud would take about 10,000,000,000 billion years. Scientists and engineers still have no direct, convenient way to control molecules, basically because human hands are about 10 million times to large. Today, chemists and materials scientists make molecular structures indirectly, by mixing, heating, and the like. The idea of nanotechnology begins with the idea of a molecular assembler, a device resembling an industrial robot arm but built on a microscopic scale. A general-purpose molecular assembler will be a jointed mechanism built from rigid molecular parts, driven by motors, controlled by computers, and able to grasp and apply molecular-scale tools. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Molecular assemblers can be used to build other molecular machines—they can even build more molecular assemblers. If given the raw materials, assemblers and other machines in molecular-manufacturing systems will be able to make almost anything. In effect, molecular assemblers will provide the microscopic “hands” that we lack today. (Chemists are asked to forgive this literary license; the specific details of molecular binging and bonding do not change the conclusion.) Nanotechnology will give better control of molecular building blocks, of how they move and go together to form more complex objects. Molecular manufacturing will make things by building from the bottom up, starting with the smallest possible building blocks. The nano in nanotechnology comes from nanos, the Greek word for dwarf. In science, the prefix nano– means one-billionth of something, as in nanometer and nanosecond, which are typical units of size and time in the World of molecular manufacturing. When you see it tacked onto the name of an object, it means that the object is made by patterning matter with molecular control: nanomachine, nanomotor, nanocomputer. These are the smallest, most precise devices that make sense based on today’s science. (Be cautious of other usages, though—sone researchers have begun to use the nano– prefix to refer to other small-scale technologies in the laboratory today. As we use it, nanotechnology means the precise, molecular nanotechnology of the future. British usage also applies the term to the small-scale and high-precision technologies of today—even to precision grinding and measurement. The latter are useful, but hardly revolutionary.) #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Digital electronics brought an information-processing revolution by handling information quickly and controllably in perfect, discrete pieces: bits and bytes. Likewise, nanotechnology will bring a matter-processing revolution by handling matter quickly and controllably in perfect, discrete pieces: atoms and molecules. The digital revolution has centered on a device able to make any desired patterns of bits: the programmable computer. Likewise, the nanotechnological revolution will center on a device able to make (almost) any desired pattern of atoms: the programmable assembler. The technologies that plague us today suffer from the messiness and wear of an old phonography record. Nanotechnology, in contrast, will bring the crisp, digital perfection of a compact disc. Say only, “It is here.” However, when did ‘here’ begin? When did Bacon’s ideology become a reality? When, to use Siegfried Giedion’s phrase, did mechanization take command? To be cautious about it, we might locate the emergence of the first true technocracy in England in the latter half of the eighteenth century—let us say with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1765. From that time forward, a decade did not pass without the invention of some significant machinery which, take together, put an end to medieval “manufacture” (which once meant “to make by hand”). The practical energy and technical skills unleashed at this time changed forever the material and psychic environment of the Western World. An equally plausible date for the beginnings of technocracy (and, for Americas, easier to remember) is 1776, when Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published. As Bacon was no scientist, Smith was no inventor. However, like Bacon, he provided a theory that gave conceptual relevance and credibility to the direction in which human enterprise was pointed. Specifically he justified the transformation from small-scale, personalized, skilled labour to large-scale, impersonal, mechanized production. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Smith not only argued convincingly that money, not land, was the key to wealth, but gave us his famous principle of the self-regulating market. In a technocracy—that is, a society only loosely controlled by social custom and religious tradition and drive by the impulse to invent—an “unseen hand” will eliminate the incompetent and reward those who produce cheaply and well the goods that people want. It was not clear then, and still is not, whose unseen mind guides the unseen hand, but it is possible (the technocratic industrialists believed) that God could have something to do with it. And if not God, then “human nature,” for Adam Smith had named our species “Economic Man,” born with an instinct to barter and acquire wealth. In any case, toward the end of the eighteenth century, technocracy was well underway, especially after Richard Arkwright, a barber by trade, developed the factory system. In his cottons-pinning mills, Arkwright trained workers, mostly children, “to conform to the regular celerity of the machine,” and in doing so gave an enormous boost to the growth of modern forms of technocratic capitalist. He exemplified in every particular the type of nineteenth-century entrepreneur to come. As Siegfried Giedion has described him, Arkwright created the first mechanization of production “[in] a hostile environment, without protectors, without government subsidy, but nourished by a relentless utilitarianism that feared no financial risk or danger.” By the beginning of the nineteenth century, England was spawning such entrepreneurs in every major city. By 1806, the concept of the power loom, introduced by Edmund Cartwright (a clergyman no less), was revolutionizing the textile industry by eliminating, once and for all, skilled workers, replacing them with workers who merely kept the machines operating. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
By 1850, the machine-tool industry was developed—machines to make machines. And beginning in the 1860s, especially in America, a collective fervor for invention took hold of the masses. To quote Giedion again: “Everyone invented, whoever owned an enterprise sought ways and means to make his goods more speedily, more perfectly, and often of improved beauty. Anonymously and inconspicuously the old tools were transformed into modern instruments.” Because of their familiarity it is not necessary to describe in detail all of the inventions of the nineteenth century, including those which gave substance to the phrase “communications revolution”: the photograph and telegraph (1830s), rotary-power printing (1840s), the typewriter (1860s), the transatlantic cable (1866), the telephone (1876), motion pictures and wireless telegraphy (1895). Alfred North Whitehead summed it up best when he remarked that the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the idea of invention itself. We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done, it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers—that it to say, as market. Not everyone agreed, of course, especially with the last notion. In England, William Blake wrote of the “dark Satanic mills,” which stripped men of their souls. Matthew Arnold warned that “faith in machinery” was mankind’s greatest menace. Carlyle Ruskin, and William Morris railed against the spiritual degradation brough by industrial progress. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
In France, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola documented in their novels the spiritual emptiness of “Economic man” and the poverty of the acquisitive impulse. The nineteenth century also saw the emergence of “utopian” communities, of which perhaps the most famous is Robert Owen’s experimental community in Scotland called New Lanark. There, he established a model factory community, providing reduced working hours, improved living conditions, providing reduced working hours, improved living conditions, and innovative education for the children of workers. In 1824, Owen came to America and founded another utopia at New Harmony, Indiana. Although none of his or other experiments endured, dozens were tried in an effect to reduce the human costs of a technocracy. In America charisma is not just a description but something good that has to do with leadership. It even seems to confer an extralegal title to leadership by virtue of “something special” inhering in the leader. Although Webber was thinking of Moses and Buddha, or of Napoleon, the gang leader formally suits his definition of charisma. Weber sought to make a place in politic for things that political legalism excludes and that claim to have a title to attention although they are not founded on reason or consent—the only titles to rule in liberal democracy. It is not to be wondered at, then, that all the demagogic appetites frustrated by our constitutional system should latch on to a word that appears to legitimize and to flatter them. Moreover, democratic individualism does not officially provide much of a place for leaders in a regime where everyone is supposed to be one’s own master. Charisma both justifies and excuses followers. The very word gives a positive twist to rabble-rousing qualities and activities treated as negative in our constitutional tradition. And its vagueness makes it a tool for frauds and advertising men adept at manipulating image. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Charisma, as Weber knew perfectly well, is God-given grace, which confers leadership through God’s sanction. In keeping with his analysis in the Protestant Ethic, he treats the self’s value-positing as the human truth of God-given grace. His account of it appears to be merely descriptive, but it becomes prescriptive. In passages deeply influenced by Nietzsche, he analyzes the state as a relation of domination of man by man, founded on legitimate violence—that is, violence that is considered to be legitimate. If they have certain beliefs, men inwardly accept being dominated. There is no more foundation to legitimacy than the inner justification the dominated make to themselves in order to accept the violence of those who dominate them. These justifications are, according to Weber, of three kinds: traditional, rational, and charismatic. Some men submit because that is the way it has always been; others consent to obey competent civil servants who follow rationally established rules; and other are enchanted by the extraordinary grace of an individual. Of the three, charismatic legitimacy is the most important. No matter what conservatives think, traditions had a beginning that was not traditional. They had a founder who was not a conservative or a traditionalist. The fundamental values informing that tradition were his creation The tradition is the continuing half-life of the charmed moment when a happy few could live on the heights of inspiration with the creator. Tradition adjusts that inspiration to the ordinary, universal motives of man, such as greed and vanity; it routinized the charisma. It is what it is because of that original impulse. So charisma is the condition of both the charismatic and the traditional legitimacies. It is also the splendid form of legitimacy. The rational is not informed by charisma, and the civil servants—bureaucrats—are therefore unable to make real decisions or take responsibility. They cannot, as we would say, determine the broad outlines of policy or, put more classically, establish ends. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Mere competence can only serve already established goals and decide according to the established rules. It must be at least supplemented by charismatic leadership in order to be pointed in the right, or any, direction. So again charisma comes out on top. Value creation, the activity that writes the table of laws by which a people is constituted and lives, is, as Nietzsche tells, the nut in the shell of existence. Whatever the merit of Weber’s analysis and categories, they became holy writ for hosts of intellectuals. They were, as Weber recognized, not only an academic exercise. They expressed his vision of the crisis of the twentieth century. This is a case where the alleged facts also spoke the values. The tradition-based regimes had exhausted their impulse and were on their way to extinction. The ones based on rationality were simply becoming the administration for “the last man,” the intolerable negative pole. Imperative, then, was a stab at some form of charismatic leadership in order to revitalize the politics of the West. The whole undertaking rested on the assurance that Nietzsche was right that the last man is also the worst possible man, or more generally that his critique of reason was correct. Foresight is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation. The theory of biological evolution is based on the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest. Yet cooperation is common between member of the same species and even members of different species. Before about 1960, accounts of the evolutionary process largely dismissed cooperative phenomena as not requiring special attention. This dismissal followed from a misreading of theory that assigned most adaptation to selection at the level of populations or whole species. As a result of such misreading, cooperation was always considered adaptive. Recent reviews of the evolutionary process, however, have shown no sound basis for viewing selection as being upon benefits to whole groups. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Quite the contrary. At the level of a species or a population, the processes of selection are weak. The original individualistic emphasis of Darwin’s theory is more valid. To account for the manifest existence of cooperation and related group behaviour, such as altruism and restraint in competition, evolutionary theory has recently acquired two kinds of extension. These extensions are, broadly, genetical kindship theory and reciprocity theory. Most of the recent activity, both in fieldwork and in further developments of theory, has been on the side of kindship. Formal approaches have varied, but kindship theory has increasingly taken a gene’s-eye view of natural selection. A gene, in effect, looks beyond its mortal bearer to the potentially immortal set of its replicas existing in other related individuals. If the players are sufficiently closely related, altruism can benefit reproduction of the set despite losses to the individual altruist. In accord with this theory’s predictions, almost all clear cases of altruism, and most observed cooperation—apart from their appearance in the human species—occur in context of high relatedness, usually between immediate family members. The evolution of the suicidal barbed sting of the honeybee worker could be taken as paradigm for this line of theory. Conspicuous examples of cooperation (although almost never of ultimate self-sacrifice) also occur where relatedness is low or absent. Mutually advantageous symbioses offer striking examples such as these: the fungus and alga that compose a lichen; the ants and ant-acacias, where the trees house and feed the ants and ant-acacias, where the trees house and feed the ants which, in turn, protect the trees; and the fig wasps and fig tree, where wasps, which are parasites of fig wasps and fig tree, where wasps, which are parasites of fig flowers, serve as the tree’s sole means of pollination and seed set. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Usually the course of cooperation in such symbioses is smooth, but sometimes the partners show signs of antagonism, either spontaneous or elicited by particular treatments. Although kindship may be involved, as will be discussed later, symbioses mainly illustrate the other recent extension of evolutionary theory—the theory of reciprocity. In societies where the shamanic profession is intact, shamans have been perhaps the most fully rounded and powerful cultural figures in history. The poets, mythographers, visual artists, musicians, medical doctors, psychotherapists, scientist, sorcerers, undertakers, psychopomps, and priests of their tribal groups, they have been one-person cultural establishments. They have also been independent, uncontrollable, and eccentric power figures whose careers have often originated in psychotic episodes—what anthropologists call the “sickness vocation.” As a result, when societies increase their demands for internal order, the old shamanic role, with its unassimilable combination of power and freedom, is broken up into more manageable specialty professions; in our society, the doctor, the poet, the artist, and so on, have each inherited one scrap from the original shaman’s robe. Beginning with the Romantic period an attempt was made to reconstitute something like the fullness of the shamanic role within the art realm; poets especially were apt to attribute both healing and transcendentalizing powers to the art experience. This project has been acted out in the last twenty years by those artists whose work appropriates its material from the early history of religion. Perhaps the most shocking element in the various performance works mentioned here is the practice of self-injury and self-mutilation. This has, however, been a standard feature of shamanic performances and primitive initiation rites around the World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Siberian shamans cut themselves while in ecstatic states brought on by drugs, alcohol, drumming and dancing. Tibetan shamans are supposedly able to slit their bellies and exhibit their entrails. Related practices are found in the performance art under discussion. Chris Burden crawled through broken glass with his hands behind his back. Dennis Oppenheim did a piece in which for half an hour rocks were thrown at him. Linda Montano inserted acupuncture needles around her eyes. The Australian performance artist Stelarc, reproducing a feat of Ajivika ascetics in India, has had himself suspended in various positions in the air by means of fishhooks embedded into his flesh. The number of instances could be easily multiplied. The element of female imitation, found in the works of Brus, McCarthy Jones, and others, is also a standard shamanic an initiatory motif, involving sympathetic magic. Mae shamans and priests around the World, as well as tribal boys at their puberty initiations, adopt female dress to incorporate the female and her powers. In lineages as far apart as North Asian and Amerindian, shamans have worn women’s clothing and ritually married other men. Akkadian priests of Ishtar dressed like their goddess, as did Ramakrishna in nineteenth-century India. A Sanskrit religious text instructs the devote to “discard the male (purusa) in thee and become a woman (prakriti).” Various tribal rites involve the ritual miming, by men, of female menstruation and parturition, as in the works of McCarthy. Freudian and Jungian theories of bisexuality of the psyche and the need to realize it are relevant both to archaic and to modern exercises of this sort. Female imitation and self-mutilation combine in certain practices of ritual surgery found in primitive cultures around the World, though most explicit in Australia. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
In Central Australian initiation rites, for example, a vulvalike opening is cut into the urethral surface of the male organ, symbolically incorporating the female principle into the male body. Bruno Bettelheim has observed this motif in the fantasies of disturbed children. Brus, in a performance, once cut a vuvalike slit in his groin, holding it open with hooks fastened in his flesh. Ritual surgery to create an androgynous appearance is common in archaic religious practice generally, as an attempt to combine male and female magical powers into one center. The emphasis on the mutilation of the male genitals in much of the Viennese work is relevant here. In classical antiquity the priests of Cybele castrated themselves totally (both the male organ and testicles) in their initiation, to become more like their goddess; thereafter they dressed like women and were called “females.” In subsequent ecstatic performances they would cut themselves in the midst of frenzied dancing and offer blood to the goddess. The public performance of taboo acts is also an ancient religious custom with roots in shamanism and primitive magic. Both art and religion, through the bracketing of their activities in the half-light of ritual appropriationism, provide zones where deliberate inversions of social custom can transpire; acts repressed in the public morality may surface there, simultaneously set loose for their power to balance and complete the sense of life, and held safely in check by the shadow reality of the arena they occur in. Art can be very unusual and interest and even reflect things that we may have never considered as forms of art. However, many different cultures and many different people all enjoy different ways to express life, emotion, feel, and creativity. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
When it comes to business, we sometimes find striking cases of sham transformation, at the global level, and this particularly case was fond in the halls of the United Nations (UN). Facing a sever crisis in the U.N., Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced in 2003 the “urgent need” to restructure the Security Council to reflect the new “geopolitical realties” of the twenty-first century. The Security Council today reflects power as it was half a century ago, just after the United States of America, Britain, Russian, France, China and their allies defeated the attempt by Germany, Italy and Japan to jointly take over the World. Each of the main victors was rewarded with a permanent Security Council seat and the right to veto any proposed action by the full council. Since then, some of the Big Five have lost power while such countries as Japan, India Brazil, and Germany have gained in global economic and diplomatic importance, yet lack permanent seats and vetoes. Annan wants to fix this problem. However, it will take much more than a redistribution of seats among nation-states to save the United Nations. The U.N.’s influence in the World today is bleeding away because, as a group, nations and/or states are themselves losing power. As we shall see shortly, other forces are gaining clout—global corporations, bond and currency markets, resurgent World religions, tens of thousands of NGOs, sub- and supranational regional units. All these vitiate the dominance of individual nations and states. Collectively, to an even greater extent, they dilute the U.N.’s power. If the United Nations, therefore, really wants to represent the new realities in the twenty-first century, it must bring these newly powerful global players into its fold, giving them, and not just nations and/or states, voting power as well. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
We see, then, in these very different examples involving very different institutions, the same underestimation of the revolutionary character of the knowledge-based wealth system, the same ignorance about the deep fundamentals, and the same forlorn hope that sake transformation can save them. One reason that overt corporate or business violence is now so rare is that over the years it has been increasingly “contracted out.” Instead of business producing their own violence, they have, in effect, bought the services of government. In all industrial nations, state violence replaces private violence. The first thing any government tries to do, from the moment it is formed, is to monopolize violence. Its soldiers and police are the only ones legally permitted to exert violence. In some cases the state is politically controlled by the corporations, so that the line between the exercise of private and public power in hair-thin. However, the old Marxist idea—that the state is nothing more than the “executive committee” of the ruling corporate power—ignores what we all know: that politicians more often act on their own behalf than on the behalf of others. Moreover, the Marxist assumed that only capitalist corporations or governments would ever use force against unarmed workers. That was before communist police, armed with tear gas, fire hoses, and more ominous equipment, tried to stamp out Poland’s Solidarity union movement in the early 1980s, and China had a standoff with its students and workers near Tiananmen Square, behaving exactly like the soldiers and police of Pinochet’s Chile or any number of other vehemently anticommunist countries. By seizing into its own mailed first the technologies of violence, and attempting to eliminate or control all violence, the state reduces the independent manufacture of violence by the corporation and other institutions. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Another reason why direct physical aggression seems to have almost vanished from ordinary business life is that violence has been sublimated into law. All business, capitalist, and socialist alike, depends upon law. Every contract, every promissory note, every stock and bond, every mortgage, every collective bargaining contract, every insurance policy, every debit and credit is ultimately backed by the law. And behind every law, good or evil, we find the barrel of a gun. Currently 33 percent of American making over $250,000 a year are living pay check to pay check. As tersely put by former French President Charles de Gaulle, “The law must have force on its side.” Law is sublimated violence. Thus when one company sues another, it ask the government to bring the force of law to bear. It wants the government’s guns (concealed behind obscuring layers of bureaucratic and judicial rigmarole) stuck into the ribs of its adversary to compel certain actions. It is not entirely accidental that corporate lawyers in the United States of America are called “hired guns.” The very frequency of recourse to the law (as distinct from other ways of resolving business disputes) is a fair measure of force in the economy. By this criterion, the United States of America has a “force-full” economy. Today, there are 32.5 million businesses establishments in the United States of America and 1,327,910 lawyers—id est, approximately one lawyer for twenty-four businesses. More than a than 46,443 civil lawsuits are painfully processed by the clogged district court systems every business day of the year. U.S. businessmen complain loudly about the allegedly unfair intimacy between Japanese businesses and government. Yet ironically, when it comes to settling disputes, it is the Americans, not the Japanese, who rush to litigate, thereupon calling upon the power f the state to intervene on their behalf. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
From the smallest commercial litigation to the multibillion-dollar lawsuit involving a dispute between Pennzoil and Texaco over a takeover bid, law masks force—which, in the end, implies the potential application of violence. Corporate campaign contributions can be seen as another camouflaged way of getting a government to pull a gun out of its holster in the interest of a company or industry. In Japan, passed out huge amounts of stock at below-market price to top politicians in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, his attempt to curry favor was so blatant it outraged the press and pubic and led to the resignation of Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita. The scandal bore some resemblance to the earlier case of the Flick empire in West German, whose executives channeled illegal funds to various political parties. The Japanese also spend over $60 billion a year—more than they spend for their automobiles—in 14,500 garishly lit “pachinko parlors,” where they play a game that involves guiding a stainless-steel ball downward past obstacles into an appropriate slot. Winners receive prizes, some of which they can exchange for money. Like game arcades in the United States of America, pachinko is a cash business, made to order for tax evasion and money laundering. Criminal gangs siphon off protection money from the parlors and sometimes war with one another for control of the most lucrative one. To ward off legislation aimed at opening their books to the police, parlor operators have made large contributions to both leading parties. Whenever business funds are passed to candidates or political parties, the presumption is that a quid or pro quo is expected. In the United States of America, despite repeated reforms and changes in the laws governing campaign contributions, every important industry pipes funds to one or both of the parties to buy, at a minimum, as hearing for its special point of view; and ingenious methods—inflated speaking fees, the purchase of otherwise unsalable books, the “loan” of real estate, the granting of low-interest loans—are constantly invented to avoid or evade the legal restrictions. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
The mere existence of government creates a set of indirect, often hidden, and unintentional cross—subsidies and cross-penalties in the economy. To the extent that government actions are ultimately backed by force—by guns and soldiers and police—the nation of power-free or violence-free economics is puerile. However, the last, and most important, reason why corporations—and even governments—resort to open violence less often than in the preindustrial past is that they have found a better instrument with which to control people. That instrument is money. Coins, paper, digital currency, certificates, are a medium people use as payment for goods or services. It is sometimes a symbol of materialism. Materialism is the tendency to consider material possessions as more important than spiritual values “To find real happiness, we must seek for it in a focus outside ourselves. No one has learned the meaning of living until one has surrendered one’s ego to the service of one’s fellow man. Services to others is akin to duty, the fulfillment of which brings true joy,” reports President Thomas S. Monson. For better of worse, money can change lives and has the potential of blessing lives or drawing a person away from God. As becomes manifest subsequently, the serpent is both right and wrong in denying that this will be the consequence: Adam and Eve do not have to die after eating, they merely plunge into human mortality, that is, into the knowledge of death to come—the serpent plays with the word of God, just as Eve played with it. And now the incident itself begins: the woman regards the tree. She does not merely see that it is a delight to the eye, she also sees in it that which cannot be seen: how good its fruit tastes and that it bestows the gift of understanding. This seeing has been explained as a metaphorical expression for perceiving, but how could these qualities of the tree be perceived? “And this he said unto them having been commanded of God and they did walk uprightly before God, imparting to one another both temporally and spiritually according to their needs and their wants,” reports Mosiah 18.29. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Not in Frequently the Mafia Helped Employers “Deal With” Militant Workers
Francis Bacon, born in 1561, was the first man of the technocratic age. In saying this, one may be disputing no less an authority than Immanuel Kant, who said that a Kepler or a Newton was needed to find the law of the movement of civilization. Perhaps. However, it was Bacon who first saw, pure and serene, the connection between science and the improvement of the human condition. The principal aim of his work was to advance “the happiness of mankind,” and he continually criticized his predecessors for failing to understand that the real, legitimate, and only goal of the sciences is the “endowment of human life with new inventions and riches.” He brought science down from the Heavens, including mathematics, which he conceived of as a humble handmaiden to invention. In this utilitarian view of knowledge, Bacon was the chief architect of a new edifice of thought in which resignation was cast out and God assigned to a special room. The name of the building was Progress and Power. Ironically, Bacon was not himself a scientist, or at least not much of one. He did no pioneering work in any field of research. He did not uncover any new law of nature or generate a single fresh hypothesis. He was not even well informed about the scientific investigation of his own time. And though he prided himself on being the creator of a revolutionary advance in scientific method, posterity has not allowed him this presumption. Indeed, his most famous experiment makes its claim on our attention because Bacon died as a result of it. He and his good friend Dr. Witherbone were taking a coach ride on a wintry day when, seeing snow on the ground, Bacon wondered if flesh might not be preserved in snow, as salt. The two decided to find out at once. They bought a hen, removed its innards, and stuffed the body with snow. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Poor Bacon never learned the result of his experiment, because he fell immediately ill from the cold, most probably with bronchitis, and died three days later. For this, he is sometimes regarded as a martyr to experimental science. However, experimental science was not where his greatness lay. Although others of his time were impressed by the effects of practical inventions on the conditions of life, Bacon was the first to think deeply and systematically on the matter. He devoted much of his work to educating men to see the links between invention and progress. In Novum Organum he wrote, “It is well to observe the force and effect and consequence of discoveries. These are to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the World; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes; insomuch that no empire, no sect, no start seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these changes.” In this passage, we can detect some of Bacon’s virtues and the source of his great influence. Here is so sleepwalker. He knows full well what technology does to culture and places technological development at the center of his reader’s attention. He writes with conviction and verve. He is, after all, among the World’s great essayists; Bacon was a master propagandist, who knew well the history of science but saw science not as a record of speculative opinion but as the record of what those opinions had enabled man to do. And, if not the World, he was ceaselessly energetic in trying to convey this idea to his countrymen. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
In the first two books of Novum Organum, which consists of 182 aphorisms, Bacon sets out nothing less than a philosophy of science based on the axiom that “the improvement of men’s minds and the improvement of his lot are one and the same thing.” It is in this work that he denounces the infamous four Idols, which have kept man from gaining power over nature: Idols of the Tribe, which lead us to believe our perceptions are the same as nature’s facts; Idols of the Cave, which lead us to mistaken ideas derived from heredity and environment; Idols of the Market-place, which lead us to be deluded by words; and Idols of the Theater, which lead us to the misleading dogmas of the philosophers. To read Bacon today is to be constantly surprised at his modernity. We are never far from the now familiar notion that science is a source of power and progress. In The Advancement of Learning, he even outlines the foundation of a College for Inventors that sounds something like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bacon would have the government provide inventors with allowances for their experiments and for traveling. He would have scholarly journals and international associations. He would encourage full cooperation among, scientists, an idea that would have startled Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, who used some of their genius to devise ways of concealing their work from one another. Bacon also believed that scientists should be paid well to give public lectures, and that information the public of the utility of invention was as important as invention itself. In short, he conceived of the scientific enterprise as it is conceived today—organized, financially secure, public, and mankind’s best weapon in the struggle to improve his condition and to do so continuously. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
As I have said, Bacon is the first man of technocracy, but it was some time before he was joined by the multitude. He died in 1626, and it took another 150 years for European culture to pass to the mentality of the modern World—that is, to technocracy. In doing so, people came to believe that knowledge is power, that humanity is capable of progressing, that poverty is great evil, and that life of the average person is as meaningful as any other. It is untrue to say that along the way God died. However, any conception of God’s design certainly lost much of its power and meaning, with that loss went the satisfactions of a culture in which moral and intellectual values were integrated. At the same time, we must remember that in the tool-using culture of the older European World, the vast majority of people were peasants, impoverished and powerless. If they believed their afterlife was filled with unending joy, their lives on Earth were nonetheless “nasty, brutish, and short.” As C.P. Snow remarked, the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, which was the fruit of Baconian science, was the only hope for the poor. And if their “true Deity became mechanism,” as Thomas Carlyle said, it is probable that by then most people would not have traded their Earthly existence for life in a Godly integrated tool-using culture. If they would, since there was little use in lamenting the past, it did not matter. The Western World had become a technocracy from which there could be no turning back. Addressing both those who were exhilarated by technocracy and those who were repulsed by it, Stephen Vincent Benet gave the only advice that made any sense. In John Brown’s Body he wrote: “If you at last must have a word to say, say neither, in their way, ‘It is a deadly magic and accursed,’ Nor ‘It is blest,’ but only ‘It is here.’” #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
The transfusion of this religious mythmaking or value-positing interpretation of social and political experience into the American bloodstream was in large measure effected by Max Weber’s language. His success here is, I am tempted to say, miraculous. A good example is his invention, the Protestant Ethic. I read his book of that name in my first social-science course at the University of Chicago when I was being initiated into the modern mysteries. This course was a survey of social-science “classics,” among which was also Marx—not only the Communist Manifesto but also goodly chunks of Capital. Of course, neither Locke nor Smith, the official spokesman for “capitalism,” who might very well even be considered its founders, was on the list, because we were dealing with thinkers whom a contemporary social scientist could take seriously. Marx explained the emergence of capitalism as a historical necessity, in no one’s control, the result of class conflict over material property relations. For him Protestantism was just an ideology reflecting capitalist control of the means of production. I did not see, and I am not sure that my teachers saw, that, if Weber was right, Marx—his economics and his revolution, in short, Marxism and the kinds of moral sympathies it inevitably engenders—was finished. Weber purported to demonstrate that there was no such material necessity, that men’s “Worldviews” or “values” determined their history, spirit compelling matter rather than the other way around. This has the effect of restoring the older view that individual men count for something, that there is human freedom and the need for leadership. Weber said it was Calvin’s charisma and the vision allied to it, routinized by his followers, that was decisive for the development of capitalism. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
However, how different Weber’s charismatic leader is from the rational statesmen looked to by Locke, Montesquieu, Smith and the Federalist. They strive for ends grasped by reason and self-evidently grounded in nature. No values, no creative visions are required for them to see what all reasonable men should see—that hard work is required to have sober, secure and prosperous freedom. Marx is arguably closer to the core of their belief in that respect; although men, according to him, are in the grip of the historical process, that process itself is rational and has as its end the rational freedom of man. Man remains, somehow, the rational animal. Weber, on the other hand, denies the rationality of the “values” posited by the Calvinists; they are “decisions,” not “deliberations,” imposed on a chaotic World by powerful personalities, “Worldviews” or “World-interpretations” with no foundation other than the selves of the Protestants. Those “values” made the World what it was for the Protestants. They are acts that are primarily of the will, and constitute the self and the World at the same time. Such acts must be unreasonable; they are based on nothing. In a chaotic Universe, reason is unreasonable because self-contradiction is inevitable. The prophet becomes the pure model of that stateman—with very radical consequences. This was something new in American social science and should have, but did not, make it clear that a new kind of causality—entirely different from that know to natural science—had entered the scene. In spite of this, the Weberian language and the interpretation of the World it brings with it have caught on like wildfire. I have read about the Japanese Protestant ethic, the Jewish Protectant ethic. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
The manifest absurdity of such locutions appears to have struck some, so now “work ethic” is gradually replacing “Protestant ethic,” but this is merely an adjustment and barely disguises the point of view that still remains underneath it. Those interested in the free market do not seem to recognize, when they use this language, that they are admitting that this morality is not itself rational—or at least the choice of it is not rational, as they understand reason. Delay of gratification may make sense for the system as a whole, but it is unarguably good for the individual? Is increase of wealth self-evidently superior to poverty for a Christian? If the work ethic is just one choice among many equally valid choices, then the free-market system itself is also just one choice among many. So proponents of the free market should not be surprised when they see that what was once generally agreed upon no longer compels belief. One had to go back to Locke and Adam Smith in a serious way not just for a set of quotes, to find arguments for the rational moral basis of liberal society. This they no longer do; and because they have lost the habit of reading serious philosophic books or of considering them really essential, they probably could not do so. When the liberal, or what came to be called the utilitarian, teaching became dominant, as is the case with most victorious causes, good arguments became less necessary; and the original good arguments, which were difficult, were replaced by plausible simplifications—or by nothing. The history of liberal thought since Locke and Smith has been one of almost unbroken decline in philosophic substance. When the liberal economic thought or way of life was manifestly threatened, its proponents, in order to defend it, took whatever came to hand. A religion must, it seems, be wakened in order to establish it. And religion, contrary to containing capitalism’s propensities, as Tocqueville though it should do, is now intended to encourage them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
It goes without saying that Weber never for a moment considered whether Calvin might actually have had a revelation from God—which would certainly change the looks of things. Weber’s atheism was dogmatic, but he was not interested in proving that Calvin was a charlatan or a madman. He rather preferred to believe in the authenticity of Calvin and other such founding figures as representing peak psychological types who can live and act in the World, who know how to take responsibility, who have an inner sureness or commitment. The religious experience is the thing, not God. The old quarrel between reason and revelation is a matter of indifference, because both sides were wrong, had faulty self-understandings. However, revelation teaches us what man is and needs. Men like Calvin are the value producers and hence the models for action in history. We cannot believe in the ground (God) of experience, but that experience is critical. We are not interested in finding out how they understood themselves but rather in searching in the self for the mysterious substitute for their ground. We cannot have, and do not want to have, their peculiar illusions; but we do not want values and commitments. The result of this atheistic religiosity is the mysterious musings and language of Weber and many others (think of Sartre) about belief and action, which culminate in something very different from what either religious leaders or rational statesmen ever said or did. It fuses the two kinds of men, but with greater weight given to the former, to the necessity of faith and all that goes with it. The intellectual apparatus accompanying this analysis tends to obscure the alternatives to it, particularly the rational alternatives. As a result there is a continuous skewing of historical perspective towards religious explanations. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Secularization is the wonderful mechanism by which religion becomes nonreligion. Marxism is secularized Christianity; so is democracy; so is utopianism; so are human rights. Everything connected with valuing must come from religion. One need not investigate anything else, because Christianity is the necessary and sufficient condition of our history. This makes it impossible to take Hobbes or Locke seriously as causes of that history, because we know that superficial reason cannot found values and that these thinkers were unconsciously transmitting the values of the Protestant ethic. Reason transmits, routinizes, normalizes; it does not create. Philosophy’s claims are ignored; religious claims are revered. Dogmatic atheism culminates in the paradoxical conclusion that religion is the only thing that counts. Out of this “Worldview” issues the gaudy religious word “charisma” which has had such fateful political consequences while becoming one of the most tiresome buzzwords in America. In Chicago there is a Charisma Cleaners, and every street gang leader is called “charismatic.” The origins, maintenance, and destruction of the live-and-let-live system of trench warfare are all consistent with the theory of the evolution of cooperation. In addition, there are two very interesting developments within the live-and-let-live system which are new to the theory. These additional developments are the emergence of ethics and ritual. The ethics that developed are illustrated in this incident, related by a British officer recalling his experience while facing a Saxon unit of the German Army. “I was having tea with A Company when we heard a lot of shouting and went out to investigate. We found our men and the Germans standing on their respective parapets. Suddenly a salvo arrived but did no damage. Naturally both sides got down and our men started swearing at the Germans, when all at once a brave German got on to his parapet and shouted out ‘We are very sorry about that; we hope no one was hurt. It is not our fault, it is that damned Prussian artillery.’” #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
This Saxon apology goes well beyond a merely instrumental effort to prevent retaliation. It reflects moral regret for having violated a situation of trust, and it shows concern that someone might have been hurt. The cooperative exchanges of mutual restraint actually changed the nature of the interaction. They tended to make the two sides care about each other’s welfare. This change can be interpreted in terms of the Prisoner’s Dilemma by saying that they very experience of sustained mutual cooperation altered the payoffs of the players, making mutual cooperation even more valued than it was before. The converse was also true When the pattern of mutual cooperation deteriorated due to mandatory raiding, a powerful ethic of revenge was evoked. This ethic was not just a question of calmly following a strategy based on reciprocity. It was also a question of doing what seemed moral and proper to fulfill one’s obligation to a fallen comrade. And revenge evoked revenge. Thus both cooperation and defection were self-reinforcing. The self-reinforcement of these mutual behavioral patterns was not only in terms of the interacting strategies of the players, but also in terms of their perceptions of the meaning of the outcomes. In abstract terms, the point is that not only did preferences affect behaviour and outcomes, but behaviour and outcomes also affected preferences. The other addition to the theory suggested by the trench warfare case is the development of ritual. The rituals took the form of perfunctory use of small arms, and deliberately harmless use of artillery. For example, the Germans in one place conducted “their offensive operations with a tactful blend of constant firing and bad shooting, which while it satisfies the Prussians causes no serious inconvenience to Thomas Atkins.” Even more striking was the predictable use of artillery which occurred in many sectors. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
“So regular were they [the Germans] in their choice of targets, ties of shooting, and number of rounds fired, that, after being in the line one or two days, Colonel Jones had discovered their system, and knew to a minute where the next shell would fall. His calculations were very accurate, and he was able to take what seemed to uninitiated Staff Officers big risks, knowing that the shelling would stop before he reached the place being shelled.” The other side did the same thing, as noted by a German soldier commenting on “the evening gun” fired by the British. “At seven it came—so regularly that you could set your watch by it….It always had the same objective, its range was accurate, it never varied laterally or went beyond or fell short of the mark. There were even some inquisitive fellows who crawled out…a little before seven, in order to see it burst.” These rituals of perfunctory and routine firing sent a double message. To the high command they conveyed aggression, but to the enemy they conveyed peace. The men pretended to be implementing an aggressive policy, but were not Ashworth himself explains that these stylized acts were more than a way of avoiding retaliation. “In trench war, a structure of ritualized aggression was a ceremony where antagonists participated in regular, reciprocal discharge of missiles, that is, bombs, bullets and so forth, which symbolized and strengthened, at one and the same time, both sentiments of fellow-feelings, and beliefs that the enemy was a fellow sufferer.” Thus these rituals helped strengthen the moral sanctions which reinforced the evolutionary basis of the live-and-let-live system. The live-and-let-live system that emerged in the bitter trench warfare of World War I demonstrates that friendship is hardly necessary for cooperation based upon reciprocity to get started. Under suitable circumstances, cooperation can develop even between antagonists. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
One thing the soldiers in the trenches had going for them was a fairly clear understanding of the role of reciprocity in the maintenance of the cooperation. However, there are biological examples that demonstrate that the participants are not really necessary for cooperation to emerge and prove stable. The use of force to extract wealth did not end with the age of the steam engine. In the 21th century, violence has been used on a truly grand scale. In placed like the United States of America, millions of Americans and others provide dirt-cheap labour for logging, and mining. These are used to suppress the political opposition to the 2000s revolution of hyperinflation; and they are also a means of solving purely economic tasks. Many people complain of being basically forced into slave labour in most industries in America because the wages are not keeping up with the cost of living and have not been for decades. However, not until the COVID-19 crisis sweep the World and the war in the Ukraine did these cries for help and more become widespread, but they are still not yet being acknowledged because there is no emergency relief, which leaves people feeling like the end of the World is near. All over the World, the COVID-19 Pandemic and now the Monkey Pocks are turning munitions, chemicals—and corpses. And America’s brutal treatment of every class of citizen from homeless and working class, upper middle class and wealth has been a form of labour control based on restrictions of homeless camps, panhandling, taxes, high fuel costs, high houses cost, rising food costs, low wages, truncheons, and tear gas. The history of the labour movement in the United States of America, as in other nations, is steeped in repressive violence and occasional terrorism. From the Molly Maguires, who tried to organize the Pennsylvania coal fields in the 1870s, to the Knights of Labour: from the Haymarket massacre in 1886 at the start of the campaign for an eight-hour workday, to the great textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929 and the Memorial Day Massacre at Republic Steel in Chicago in 1937, employers and police attempted to prevent the organization of unions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
As recently as the late 1930s in the United States of, companies hired strong-arm men to break strikes or to intimidate union organizers and their followers. Harry Bennett and his infamous “goon squads” were routinely called out to bust heads when Ford Motor Company employees asked for raises or threatened to organize. Not infrequently the Mafia helped employers “deal with” militant workers. In South Korea today many companies have set up “Save the Company” squads to break strikes and prevent unionization. At the Motorola plant in Seoul, violence reached the point at which two workers doused themselves with gasoline and set themselves on fire to protect the company’s refusal to recognize a union. Japanese employers in the early postwar period called on the Mafia-life Yakuza to intimidate union activists. And in Japan, even today, despite its advanced stage of economic development, the Yakuza factor has not completely vanished. Yakuza-linked sokaiya—pointy-shoed hooligans and thugs—often to embarrass or to protect the management. In 1987 the first meeting of shareholders following the privatization of the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Company (NTT) was marked by disruption when a garishly dressed sokaiya accused a director of punching his secretary. Dozens of others leaped to their feet to drag out the discussion. One demanded to know why he had to queue up for the toilets in the building. When an officer apologized, the man asked why an NTT employee had committed an indecent act. To groans from the audience, he hit his stride with questions about missing promissory notes worth a few thousand dollars and about telephone bugging. The sokaiya did not stop this harassment, intended to embarrass rather than reform the company, until suddenly, as though from nowhere, a large number of husky young men surrounded the room—at which point the sokaiya quietly made their exit. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Not all business crime ends so peacefully, as Japan discovered when Kazuo Kengaku, a well-known investment fund manager with links to the Yakuza, was found encased in concrete in Osaka. The Yakuza are also involved deeply in real estate speculation and supply strong -arm men to frighten residents or small shop-owners reluctant to move out of the way of high-rise developments. So well known are these tactics that they provided the substance for Juzo Itami’s 1989 movie, A taxing Woman’s Return. Valuable real estate also lay behind a recent case in which the collapse of a financial deal led to fraud litigation. An American lawyer in Tokyo, Charles Stevens of Coudert Brothers, representing a U.S. firm, received threatening calls and wound hp keeping a baseball bat at his desk. Violence in the business demimonde takes on bizarre forms on occasion—especially on the fringes of the entertainment business. In South Korea local film distributors have tried to frighten customers away from theaters showing U.S. films by releasing snakes in the theaters. In France, when Saudi Arabian investors, together with the French government, built Mirapolis, a $100 million amusement park, carnival workers, fearing competition, poured sand in the gears of thrill rides. (The park turned out to be a disaster for other reasons.) Similarly, Japanese sarakin, like loan sharks the World over, sometime rely on physical “persuasion” to coerce borrowers in repaying usurious debts—the money from these activities flowing smoothly into major bans and other financial institutions. In the United States of America, as in many other countries, force is sometimes used to shut the mouth of corporate “whistle blowers”—employees who call attention to questionable practices of their bosses. This was the role of Silkwood chose for herself. Silkwood was killed in a car crash after protesting her employer’s handling of nuclear materials, and there are those who still, years after the event, question whether the crash was accidental. They will never stop believing that her company had killed her. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Of course, all these cases are dramatic precisely because they are exceptions in the advanced economies. The daily experience of an American executive with a sheaf of printout in hand, the Japanese salaryman on his telephone, or the salesperson spreading a sample on a counter is so remote from any hint of violence that even to mention it is to draw skeptical looks. Yet just because most transactions in business involve no direct violence does not mean that violence had vanished. The reality is that violence has been contained, transmuted into another form—and hidden. Although institutions in Europe, Japan, and other economies are also being shaken by changes in their deep fundamentals, it is the United States of America—precisely because it has advanced farther than other beyond the industrial age—that the need to create a new institutional infrastructure is most pressing. And nowhere, therefore, is there more loose talk of “transformation”—and so little understanding of what it implies. Take the case of education. All recent U.S.A. presidents have wanted to be known as the “education president,” Obama was the only exception—he wanted to known as a rebel and entertainer. The absolute key to any real improvement in education in the United States of America is recognition of the changes required by an economy primarily based on knowledge production and distribution. Education is more than occupational preparation, but it surely cheats students if it seeks to ready them for jobs that will not be there. Yet today’s mass-production schools—out of sync with the real economy—still mainly emphasized rote, repetitive, factory-like learning. The supposedly radical Trump plan, not only emphasized curiosity, thought, creativity, individuality and self-starting entrepreneurialism—traits needed in knowledge-based economies—but it also calls for yet more routine, standardized testing of students, teachers, and schools—tools to make obsolete schools run more efficiently. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
An equally striking example of what might be called fake “transformation” can be found in Washington’s bureaucratic response to the 9/11 attack—the creation of a Department of Homeland Security. This big-budget, cabinet-level department crunched together twenty-two preexisting pyramidal bureaucracies into a single mega-pyramid. Washington, in short, did what it knows how to do best: Construct industrial-style bureaucracies. The resultant institution is massive, vertical and hierarchical, with countless competing units, and is supposed to plug into and support tends of thousands of smaller municipal and state bureaucracies. By contrast, terrorist organizations are designed to run rings around bureaucracies. Comprising tiny, loosely networked cells whose members know the identity of only one or two other people, most can make decision quickly, are trained to hit, run, and vanish—or to blow themselves up. Compared with the Department of Homeland Security, Al Qaeda is flat as a pancake. And its members do not belong to civil-service unions. Sham transformation is not uniquely American. It is widespread in Europe, where companies and public-sector institutions at the national level are being forced to submit to growing, rigidifying constraints imposed by the European Union, itself a prime example of industrial-age bureaucratic organization. In 1965 Nitsch formed the Wiener Akitonismus group in conjunction with Otto Muhl, Gunter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Much of their work focused on the motifs of self-mutilation and self-sacrifice that were implicit, though not foregrounded, both in Klein’s career and in the OM Theatre performances. Brus, during his performing period (1964-1970), would appear in the performance space dressed in a woman’s black stockings, brassiere, and garter belt, slash himself with scissors till he ran with blood, and perform various acts ordinarily taboo in public settings, such as defecating, eating his own feces, vomiting, and so on. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Schwarzkogler’s pieces presented young males as mutilated sacrificial victims, often wounded in the genitals, lying fetally contracted and partially mummy-wrapped as if comatose, in the midst of paraphernalia of violent death such as bullet cartridges and electrical wires. Not only the individual elements of these works, but their patterns of combination—specifically the combination of female imitation self-injury, and the seeking of dishonour though the performance of taboos acts—find striking homologies in shamanic activities. The same motifs reappeared, not necessarily with direct influence from the Viennese, in the works of several America performances artists who have stretched audiences’ sympathies beyond the breaking point Paul McCarthy, a major exponent of the art of the taboo gesture, first heard the calling not from the Viennese but from Klein. As a student at the University of Utah in 1968, he leapt from a second story window in emulation of Klein’s Leap into the Void. By about 1974 his work had found its own distinctive form, developing into a modernized shamanic style so difficult for audiences to bear that the pieces were usually published only as video tapes. These performances, like Schneemann’s, were often developed from dream material, indicating their intimate relation both with shamanic magic and with depth psychology. Like Brus, McCarthy has sometime appeared dressed as aw woman, and has worked, like Schwarzkogler, with the themes of self-mutilation and castration; some pieces have acted out of the basic female imitation of feigning menstruation and parturition (magical pantomimes that are common in primitive initiation rites). In others, McCarthy has cut his hand and mixed the blood with food and water in bowls, clearly echoing various sacramental rites from the Dionysian to the Christian. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
In still others that, like Nitsch’s, have sometimes been shut down by the police, he has acted out the seeking of dishonour as an exploration of the Dionysian-Freudian depths of psychobiological life. In Sailor’s Meat, a videotape from 1975, for example, he appeared in a room in a wino hotel wearing black lace panties smeared with blood and a blonde female wig and lay on the bed having pleasures of the flesh with piled of raw meat and ground hamburger with his male organ painted red and a hot dog shoved up his rear end As Old Man in My Doctor, 1978, he slit a rubber mask over his head to form a female organ—slanted opening on it and from the opening gave birth to a ketchup-covered doll. The piece was a conscious remaking of the myth of the birth of Athena from the cleft brainpan of Zeus, a myth that reverts to the age when male priests and their divinities sought to incorporate the female principle and its powers. In Baby Boy, 1982, McCarthy gave birth to a doll from between his ketchup-covered male thighs as he lay on his back with his feet in the air like a woman in missionary-style pleasures of the flesh. In these and other works self-mutilation, female imitation, and the performance of taboo acts are combined in a structure of roughly parallel to that of Brus’ work, though with a great range of expressiveness. Similar materials recur in the work of Kim Jones. In a performance in Chicago in 1981, Jones appeared naked except for a mask made of woman’s pantyhose, covered himself with mud (as both African and Australian shamans do when performing), and lay naked on the fire escape in the cold to accumulate energy (a shamanic practice knowns Worldwide but most famous from Tibet). Returning to the performance space, he produced a mayonnaise jar filled with his own feces, and smeared himself with it, embraced members of the audience while covered in it, and finally burned sticks and green plants till the smoke drove the remaining audience from the gallery. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
In another piece, Jones cut himself with a razor blade twenty-seven times in a pattern suggesting the body’s circulatory system, then pressed himself against the gallery wall for a self-portrait. Understandably, to audiences habituated to the traditional boundaries of art, to audiences for whom easel painting was still the quintessential art activity, these performances were offensive and even insulting. Of course, the point of such works when they first appeared was in part their seeming to be radically even horrifying, out of context. However, for twenty years they have been part of the art scene, if somewhat peripherally, legitimized by art World context and critical designation again and again. In order to understand the wellsprings of such works, in order to approach them with a degree of sympathy and clarity, it is necessary to frame them somewhat in cultural history, where in fact they have a clear context. Many of the artists discussed here feel that shamanic material and primitive initiation rites are the most relevant cultural parallels to their work. However, most of them feel that the tone of their work arose first, often under Freudian and Jungian influence, and was later confirmed and further shaped by some study of shamanic literature. The question of origins, then—whether from shamanic literature, or from the Jungian collective unconscious, or from the Freudian timeless repository of infantile memory, or from all these sources—though it is worthwhile to state, cannot be answered. In any case it is important in terms of any theory of the function of art that these artists have introduced into the art realm material found elsewhere only in the psychiatric records of disturbed children and in the shamanic thread of the history of religion. Western society, biased toward the objective mental mode of experience, tends to be blind not only to the power of images but also to the fact that we are nearly defenseless against their effect. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Since we are educated and thoughtful, as we like to think, we believe we can choose among the things that will influence us. We accept fact, we reject lies. We go to movies, we watch television, we see photographs, and as the images pour into us, we believe we can choose among those we wish to absorb and those we do not. We assume that our rational processes protect us from implantation, or brainwashing. What we fail to realize is the difference between fact and image. Our objective processes can help us resist only one kind of implantation. There is no rejection of images. Raise your eyes from the page for a moment. Look about your room. Can you reject what you are seeing? In Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, the main character is a visitor from another planet who arrives on Earth and is slowly transformed by what he sees. He becomes transfixed by television. At one point, in a fit of madness, he screams at the TV screen: “Stop it, get out of my mind, go back where you came from.” However, the images do not go bac. They remain. He goes crazy. You are watching Walter Cronkite. He is reporting the news. It is impossible for you to judge the truth of most of what he tells you. He reports events from a thousand miles away. You take his information on faith, or you decide that he is wrong. Then he says the bank you work in was robbed today. “Not true,” you shout, “wrong bank.” You have rejected the news. You could reject it because it came as a fact that you could check. You could halt its entry into you. However, one of the most bizarre things is allowing the news to do its own “fact checking.” They will tell you what they believe to be true, which may be misinterpreted or down right a lie. Meanwhile, however, you have ingested Cronkite. His smile, his hand movements, his tone of voice, the way he holds his head. The images enter your cells. Style is also content. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
If you are watching The Flash, or the president explaining a policy, or Brad Pitt talking to his beautiful women friends, or Fallon Carrington on Dynasty, you are receiving several levels of information at the same time. There is the verbal information and the ideas connected to this. Then there are the images, the way people behave, their movements, mannerisms, forcefulness or peacefulness, their style of emoting, their tone of voice, their way of relating to each other, the kind of people they are, their seriousness, grimness, lightness, joyfulness, heaviness and so on. We absorb these along with the objective news. They are all content. If you see Trump or Cronkite or The Flash, or slaps on the back or kisses or violence—the images of these are not in the realm of correct or incorrect. They just are. There is nothing to disagree with. There is no way to resist them. They flow inward, passing through all discernment processes. Even if you could keep your mind alive while watching—no mean feat—the images would still enter into your unconscious storage area. You have got them. They are yours. You may not believe Jimmy Carter when he speaks. However, you have got Jimmy Carter inside of you. You may believe that Brad Pitt is an actor, and your kinds may believe this too. However, they slowly become like Brad Pitt. They move and walk as he does. You may believe The Flash is fiction, but his image lives within you. If I ask you to, you can bring it to mind. It is part of your image pool. You may draw on it forever. You may watch the television and “know” those are actors performing, but the image of one person stabbing another is in you. You have got it. It is yours. Thinking will not halt its entry into you or into thirty million others. You may watch the actor playing doctor in the commercial, speaking seriously, professionally, authoritatively. You know this is an actor, but you ingest him nonetheless. His authoritativeness becomes yours. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
We all become more like Cronkite, like Carter, like The Flash. We all become more fast or more Bradlike, or display a TV-announcer authority. Once they are in your mind and stored, all images are equally valid. They are real whether they are toothpaste, Walter Cronkite, Kojak, President Carter, Mary Hartman, The Flash, Brad Pitt, Justin Bieber, Pete Rose, a BMW 3 Series, a cougar, Elvis Priestly, Mary Hartman, Anton LaVey, Rhoda, or your mother and father. Once inside your head, they all becomes images that you continue to carry in memory. They become equally real and equally not-real. Our thinking process cannot save us. To the degree that we are thinking as we watch television, a minute degree at most, the images pass right through anyway. They enter our brains. They remain permanently. We cannot tell, for sure, which images are ours and which came from distant planets. Imagination and reality have merged. We have lost control of our images We have lost control of our minds. The man—and with him his woman, who was not created till after the prohibition had been pronounced, but who appears to have become cognizant of it in some peculiar manner whilst still a rib within the body of the man—may give or withhold his obedience, for he is at liberty; they are both at liberty to acceded to their creator or to refuse themselves to Him. Yet their transgression of the prohibition is not reported to us as a decision between good and evil, but as something other, of whose otherness we must take account. The terms of the dialogue with the serpent are already strange enough. It speaks as though it knew very imprecisely what it obviously knows very imprecisely what it obviously knows very precisely. “Indeed, God has said: You shall not eat of every tree of the garden…” it says and breaks off. Now the woman talks, but she too intensifies God’s prohibition and adds to it words which he did not use: “…touch not, else you must die.” “And the chief judge stood before them, and smote them again, and said unto them: If ye have the power of God deliver yourselves from these bands, and then we will believe that the Lord will destroy this people according to your words,” reports Alma 14.24. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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In the “Judgement” it is Existence Which is at Stake
Mutual cooperation can emerge in a World of egoists without central control by starting with a cluster of individuals who rely one reciprocity. When conditions are right, cooperation can evolve even without friendship or foresight, with is much more conducive than mutual treachery. Sometimes cooperation emerges where it is least expected. During World War I, the Wester front was the scene of horrible battles for a few yards of territory. However, between these battles, and even during them at other places along the five-hundred-mile line in France and Belgium, the enemy soldier often exercised considerable restraint. A British staff officer on a tour of the trenches remarked that he was, “astonished to observe German soldiers walking about within rifle range behind their own line. Our men appeared to take no notice. I privately made up my mind to do away with that sort of thing when we took over; such things should not be allowed. These people evidently did not know there was a war on. Both sides apparently believed in the policy of “live and let live.” This is not an isolated example. The live-and-let-live system was endemic in trench warfare. It flourished despite the best efforts of senior officers to stop it, despite the passions aroused by combat, despite the military logic of kill or be killed, and despite the ease with which the high command was able to repress any local efforts to arrange a direct truce. This is a case of cooperation emerging despite great antagonism between the players. As such, it provides a challenge for the application of the concepts and the theory we developed in past reports. In particular, the main goal is to use the theory to explain: How could the live-and-let-live system have gotten started? How was it sustained? Why did it break down toward the end of the war? Why was it characteristic of trench warfare in World War I, but of few other wars? #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
A second goal is to use the historical case to suggest how the original concept and theory can be further elaborated. The Historical situation in the quiet sectors along the Western Front was an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. In a given locality, the two players can be taken to be the small units facing each other. At any time, the choices are to shot to kill or deliberately to shoot to avoid causing damage. If a major battle is ordered in the sector, for both side, weakening the enemy is an important value because it will promote survival. Therefore, in the short run it is better to do damage now whether the enemy is shooting back or not. This established that mutual defection is preferred to unilateral restraint (P>S), and that unilateral restraint by the other wise is even better than mutual cooperation (T>R). In addition, the reward for mutual restraint is preferred by the local units to the outcome of mutual punishment (R>P), since mutual punishment would imply that both units would suffer for little or no relative gain. Taken together, this establishes the essential set of inequalities: T>R>P>S. Moreover, both sides would prefer mutual restraint to the random alternation of serious hostilities, making R> (T + S)/2. This the situation meets the conditions for a Prisoner’s Dilemma between small units facing each other in a given immobile sector. Two small units facing each other across one hundred to four hundred yards of no-man’s-land were the players in one of these potentially deadly Prisoner’s Dilemmas. Typically, the basic unit could be taken to be the battalion, consisting of about one thousand men, half of whom would be in the front line at any one time. The battalion played a large role in the life of an infantryman. It not only organized its members for combat, but also fed, paid, and clothed them as well as arranged their leave. All of the officers and most of the other soldiers in the battalion knew each other by sight. For our purposes, two key factors make the battalion the most typical player. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
On the one hand, it was large enough to occupy a sufficient sector of the front to be “held accountable” for aggressive actions which came from its territory. On the other hand, it was small enough to be able to control the individual behavior of its men, through a variety of means, both formal and informal. A battalion on one side might be facing parts of one, two, or three battalions on the other side. Thus each player could simultaneously be involved in several interactions. Over the course of the Western Front, there would be hundreds of such face-offs. Only the small units were involved in these Prisoner’s Dilemmas. The high commands of the two sides did not share the view of the common soldier who said: “The real reason for the quietness of some sections of the line was that neither side had any intention of advancing in that particular district….If the British shelled the Germans, the Germans replied, and the damage was equal: if the Germans bombed an advanced piece of trench and killed five Englishmen, an answering fusillade killed five Germans.” To the army headquarters, the important thing was to develop an offensive spirit in the troops. The Allies, in particular, pursued a strategy of attrition whereby equal losses in men from both sides meant a net gain for the Allies because sooner or later Germany’s strength would be exhausted first. So at the national level, World War I approximated a zero-sum game in which losses for one side represented gains for the other side. However, at the local level, along the front line, mutual restraint was much preferred to mutual punishment. Locally, the dilemma persisted: at any given moment it was prudent to shoot to kill, whether the other side did so or not. What made each trench warfare so different from most other combat was that the same small units faced each other in immobile sectors for extended periods of time. This changed the game from a one-move Prisoner’s Dilemma in which defection is the dominant choice, to an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma in which the theory’s predictions: with sustained interaction, the sable outcome could me mutual cooperation based upon reciprocity. In particular, both sides followed strategies that would not be the first to defect, but that would be provoked if the other detect. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Now, running a business can be a lot like fighting in a war. Business may be turning out products and profits. However, it is hard to resist the suspicion that it is also becoming a popular form of theater. Like theater, it has heroes, villains, drama, and—increasingly—it has stars. The names of business tycoons ricochet through the media like those of Hollywood celebrities. Surrounded by publicists, trained in all the arts of self-promotion, characters like Donald Trump, Paris Hilton, or Elon Musk have become living symbols of corporate power. They are satirized in the comics. They (and their writers) crank out best sellers. All of these people have even been mentioned—or perhaps arranged to have themselves mentioned—as potential candidates for the presidency of the United States of America, and one has actually been elected as president. Business has arrived in the Age of Glitz. Business had its stars in the past, too, but the very context of stardom is different today. The tinselly new glamour acquired by business is a superficial facet of the new economy, in which information (including everything from scientific research to advertising hype) plays a growing role. What is happening is the rise of an entirely new “system for wealth creation,” which brings with it dramatic changes in the distribution of power. This new system for making wealth is totally dependent on the instant communication and dissemination of data, ideas, symbols, and symbolism. It is, as we will discover, a super-symbolic economy in the exact sense of that term. Its arrival is transformational. It is not, as some still belatedly insist, a sign of “de-industrialization,” “hollowing out,” or economic decay, but a leap toward a revolutionary new system of production. This new system takes us a giant step beyond mass production toward increasing customization, beyond mass marketing and distribution toward niches and micro-marketing, beyond the monolithic corporation to new forms of organization, beyond the nation-state to operations that are both local and global, and beyond the proletariat to a new “cognitariat.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The collision between forces favoring this new system of wealth creation and defenders of the old smokestack system is the dominant economic conflict of our time, exceeding in historical importance the conflict between capitalism and communism or among the United States of America, Europe, and Japan. Moving from an economy based on smokestacks to one based on computers requires massive transfers of power, and it largely explains the wave of financial and industrial restructuring that has been ripping through the corporate World, throwing up new leaders, as companies desperately seek to adapt to fresh imperatives. Takeovers, raids, acquisitions, leveraged buy-outs, corporate buy-backs, all made financial headlines throughout the 1980s, and involved not only U.S.A. firms but many foreign companies as well, despite legal and other restrictions that limit “unfriendly” takeovers in countries like Germany, Italy, or Holland. It would be an exaggeration to say that all these wild doings on Wall Street and the thrashing about in companies around the World are direct manifestations of the shift to a new kind of economy. Tax considerations, the integration of Europe, financial liberalization, old-fashioned greed, and other factors all play a role. Indeed, if anything, people like Trump, Hilton, Musk, and Iacocca represent heralds of the past and the new. Successfully lobbying Washington to bail out a failing auto maker, Iacocca’s chief claim to fame, or putting one’s name on flashy skyscrapers and gambling casinos hardly make one business revolutionary. In a revolutionary period, however, all sorts of strange flora and funa appear—atavists, eccentrics, publicity hounds, saints, and crooks, along with visionaries and genuine revolutionaries. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Beneath all the razzle-dazzle, the refinancings and reoganizations, there is an emerging pattern. For what we are seeing is a change in the structure of business and the beginnings of a shift of power from “smokestack money” to what might be called “super-symbolic money”—a process we will explore in more detail later. This broad restructuring is necessary as the entire wealth-creation system, driven by competitive pressures, steps up to a more advanced level. Thus, to picture the takeover frenzy of the late eighties as nothing more than an expression of me-first greed is to miss its larger dimensions. Nevertheless, the new economy has rewarded well those who first saw it coming. In the smokestack era any list of the richest people in the World would have been dominated by car makers, steel barons, rail magnates, oil moguls, and financiers, whose collective wealth ultimately came from the organization of inexpensive labor, raw materials, and the manufacture of hardware. By contrast, Forbes magazine’s latest list of the ten richest American billionaires includes fully seven whose fortunes were based on media, communications, or computer—software and services rather then hardware and manufacturing. They reflect what the Japanese call the new “softnomics.” The spasm of mergers, takeovers, divestitures, and financial reshuffling is, however, only one aspect of the transition to the new economy. At the same time that they are trying to fend off raiders or to make acquisitions, companies are also frantically striving to cope with an info-technological revolution, a restructuring of markets, and a host of other related changes. It adds up to the biggest shake-up the business World has known since the industrial revolution. So deep a restructuring does not happen without anguish and confrontation. As happened at the start of the industrial revolution, millions find their incomes threated, their ways of work made obsolete, their futures uncertain, their power slashed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Investors, managers, and workers alike are thrown into conflict and confusion. Strange alliances spring up. New forms of judo are invented. In the past, labor unions exerted power by striking or threatening to do so. Today, in addition, they hire investment bankers, lawyers, and tax experts—purveyors of specialized knowledge—hoping to become part of a restructuring deal rather than its victim. Managers seeking to head off a takeover, or to buy out their own firm, along with investors seeking to profit from such upheavals, are increasingly dependent on timely, pinpointed information. Knowledge is a key weapon in the power struggles that accompany the emergence of the super-symbolic economy. So is the ability to influence the media—thereby shaping what others know (or think they know). In this volatile environment, flashy personalities skilled at manipulating symbols have a distinct advantage. In France the epitome of the entrepreneur is Bernard Tapie, who claims to have built a privately held business with annual revenues of $1 billion. Tapie hosts his own TV show. In Brain, Richard Branson, who founded the Virgin Group, breaks speedboat records and, in the words of Fortune, enjoys “the sort of celebrity once reserved for rock stars or royalty.” As an old system cracks, the faceless bureaucrat-managers who run it are blown away by a guerrilla army of risk-taking investors, promoters, organizers, and managers, many of them antibureaucratic individualists, all of them skilled at either acquiring knowledge (sometimes illegally) or controlling its dissemination. The arrival of the new super-symbolic system for creating wealth not only shifts power but changes its style as well. One need only compare the temperaments of, say, John DeButts, the slow, solemn who ran the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in the 1970s before it was broken up, with that of William McGowan, who cracked AT&T’s monopoly and created MCI Communications Corporation to compete with it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Impatient and irreverent, the son of a railroad unionist, McGowan began by peddling alligator purses, wound up raising funds for Hollywood producers Mike Todd and George Skouras when they made the wide-screen version of Oklahoma, and then founded a small defense contracting firm before zeroing in on AT&T. Or compare the cautions “business statesmen” who ran General Electric for a decade or two, with Jack Welch, who gained the nickname “Neutron Jack” as he tore up the giant and reshaped it. The stylistic shift reflects changed needs. For the task of restructuring companies and whole industries to survive in the super-symbolic economy is not a job for nit-picking, face-saving, bean-counting bureaucrats. It is, in fact, a job for individualists, radicals, gut-fighters, even eccentrics—business commandos, as it were, ready to storm any beach to seize power. It has been said that today’s risk-taking entrepreneurs and deal-makers resemble the “robber barons” who originally built the smokestack economy. Today’s Age of Glitz, indeed, does bear a resemblance to the so-called Gilded Age, just after the American Civil War. That, too, was a time of fundamental economic restructure, following the defeat of agrarian slavery by the rising forces of the industrializing North. It was the era of conspicuous consumption, political corruption, wild spending, financial peculation and speculation, peopled by larger-than-life characters like “Commodore” Vanderbilt, “Diamond Jim” Brady, and “Bet a Million” Gates. Out of that era, marked by anti-unionism and contempt for the poor, came the decisive burst of economic development that thrust American into the modern industrial age. However, if today’s breed are more buccaneer than bureaucrat, they could be termed “electronic pirates.” The power they seize is dependent on sophisticated data, information, and know-how, not just bags of capital. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Say California financier Robert I. Weingarten, describing the corporate takeover process, “The first thing you do is create a computer screen which lists your criteria. Then you search for a target company that meets them by running these criteria against various data bases until you identify the target. And the last thing you do? The last thing you do is call a press conference. You start with the computer and end with the media. “In between,” he add, “you call in a host of highly specialized knowledge workers—tax lawyers, proxy war strategists, mathematical modelers, investment advisers, and PR experts—most of whom are also very dependent on computers, facsimile machines, telecommunications, and the media. “Nowadays the ability to make a deal happen very often depends more on knowledge than on the dollars you bring to the table. At a certain level it is easier to obtain the money than the relevant know-how. Knowledge is the real power lever.” Because takeovers and restructure challenge power, they produce high drama, hence heroes and villains. Names like Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens become household words around the World. Feuds breakout. Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer and once the boy wonder of American industry, resigns after a corporate coup d’etat by John Sculley, despite Job’s vast holdings in the company. Iacocca continues his interminable vendetta against Henry Ford II. Roger Smith of General Motors is satirized in a movie, Roger & Me, and savaged in public by Ross Perot, the computer millionaire whose company Smith acquired. The list lengthens each day. To imagine that takeovers are peculiarly American, an artifact of inadequate regulation of Wall Street, is to miss their deeper significance. In Britain, Roland “Tiny” Rowland battles bitterly for control of Harrods department store and Sir James Goldsmith, the burly, brash financier launches a $21 billion raid of BAT Industries PLC. Carlo de Benedetti, head of Olivetti, battles with Gianni Agnelli of the Fiat empire and il salotto buono—the inner circle of entrenched industrial power in Italy—and shocks all of Europe with a sudden bid for control of Societe Generale de Belgique of Brussels, a group that controls a third of the entire Belgian economy. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Groupe Bull, the French computer firm, eyes the computer operation of Zenith in the United Sates of American. Groupe Victorie takes over Germany’s second-largest insurer, Colonia Versicherung A.G., while the Dresdner Bank buys out the French Banque Internationale de Placement. In Spain, where drama often turns into melodrama, the public has been treated to what the Financial Times has called “probably the most riveting and, ultiamately, tasteless, display in decades,” and explosive battle between “los beautiful people” and “los successful people”—old and new money. Focused on control of the nation’s three largest banks and their related industrial empires, the battle pitted Alberto Cortina and his cousin Alberto Alcocer against Mario Conde, a brilliant, Jesuit-trained lawyer who capture control of Banco Espanol de Credito and tried to merge it with Banco Central, already the largest bank in the country. The battle hit the pages of the soft-porn press when one of “los Albertos” fell in love with a twenty-eight-year-old marquesa who was photographed in a nightclub wearing a miniskirt san undies. In the end the grand merger, touted by the Spanish Prime Minister as “possibly the economic event of the century,” broke apart like shattered glass, leaving Conde fighting to survive in his own bank. All this is exciting fodder for the media mills, but the international character of the phenomenon tells us that something more is involved than glitz, greed, and local regulatory failures. As we will see, something more serious is happening. Power is shifting on a hundred fronts at once. The very nature of power—the mix of force, wealth, and knowledge—is changing as we make the transition to the super-symbolic economy. Has anyone noticed how complicated sports have become? Once upon a time, recreational and even professional sports formed a relatively simple part of a modern economy. Today we seem more and more teams, more leagues, more rules and many multifaceted relations between teams and leagues. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Moreover, the sports World finds itself entangled in everything from drug laws, television, politics, labor unitions and gender conflict to urban planning and intellectual-property issues. And sports, as a business, is increasingly linked to other industries, new technologies, and audiences, forming a far more complex mesh of constantly changing relationships. Ohio University notes that its graduates now work in “intercollegiate athletics, professional sports, public assembly facilities, sports tours, motor sports, corporate sports organizations, sports media, and the entertainment industries.” The engineering department of the University of Cape Ton in South Africa offers studies in “hardness testing of cricket bats, the drag of bicycle wheels, mountain bike tire aerodynamics….and the heat transfer of cycling helmets.” A software company advertises that, “the increased attention that the big sports events draw has resulted in complex scheduling problems” that its customizing software can handle. The greater the variety and number of interacting components in any system, and the faster the changes among them, the greater its complexity. And this is not just a matter of soccer and skating. Each of history’s three great wealth systems—agrarian, industrial and knowledge-based—differs in its levels of complexity. Today we are experiencing a historic, system-wide leap toward greater economic and social complexity. And it affects everything from business to politics, and from child rearing to shopping. Malls are filled with more and more styles of flashy sneakers. Pizza comes with more exotic toppings. Bottled water is available in multiple flavors. Pharmaceutical houses move toward drugs customized for each patient. Not surprisingly, everything in daily life now seems more complex and interdependent: Choosing a mobile phone, a credit card or an Internet provider—even, in fact, the way our kids choose their friends. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
For young people, the choice of a portable digital gizmo affects the games one plays and the groups one hangs out with. The social group, in turn, affects the clothes one wears, the music one listens to, who is “in” and who is “out.” The very criteria that snobs apply have become more complicated. It is this combination of diversity and interdependence that makes life so complex. Nietzsche finds these decadents, pessimists or protonihilists revelatory, as he does the fakers of great deeds and passions who are the reverse side of the coin, in particular Wagner. He has contempt for the former, not because they lack honesty or because their characterization of the World around them is inaccurate, but because they know that once there were gods and heroes and that they were the products of poetic imagination—which means that poetic imagination can make them again—yet do not have the courage or the resolve themselves to create. Therefore they are hopeless. They alone can still long; but they are secret believers in the Christian God or, at least, in the Christian Worldview and cannot believe in the really new. They are afraid to set sail on stormy, uncharted seas. Only Dostoyevski has a vitality of soul, proof against decadence. His unconscious, filtered through a Christian conscience, expresses itself in forbidden desires, crimes, acts of self-abasement, sentimentality and brutality; but he is alive and struggling and proves the continuing health of the animal and all that is in ferment down under. The artists is the most interesting of all phenomena, for one represents creativity, the definition of humans. One’s unconscious is full of monsters and dreams. It provides the pictures to consciousness, which takes them as given and as “World,” and rationalizes them. Rationality is only the activity of providing good reasons for what has no reason or is unreasonable. We do what we do out of a fate that is our individuality, but we have to explain and communicate. This latter is the function of consciousness; and when it has been provided with a rich store by the unconscious, its activity is fruitful, and the illusion of its sufficiency is even salutary. However, when it has chopped up and chewed over its inheritance, as mathematical physics has now done, there are not enough nourishing plants left whole. Consciousness now requires replenishment. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Thus Nietzsche opened up the great terrain explored by modern artists, psychologist and anthropologists, searching for refreshment for our exhausted culture in the depths of the darkest unconscious or darkest Africa. Not all that Nietzsche asserted is plausible, but its charm is undeniable. He went to the end of the road with Rousseau, and beyond. The side of modernity that is less interesting to Americans, which seeks less for political solutions than for understanding and satisfaction of man in his fullness or completeness, finds it profoundest statement in Nietzsche, who represents the culmination of that second state of nature. Above all he was a friend of artists, who were the first to recognize him when he was disreputable among academics; and among them his influence was clearly most fertile. One need only think of Rilke, Yeats, Proust and Joyce. The greater philosophic tribute to him is Heidegger’s book Nietzsche, the most important part of which is entitled “The Will to Power as Art.” In Vienna in the early 1960s, Hermann Nitsch began presenting a series of performances that, in 1965, he would consolidate as the OM, or Orgies Mysteries, Theatre. His work was a focused exercise to bring the performance genre to its darkest spaces, its most difficult test, at once. In OM presentations the performers tear apart and disembowel a lamb or bull, cover themselves and the environment with the blood and gore, pour the entrails and blood over one another, and so on. These events last up to three hours (though Nitsch is planning one that will last for six days and nights). They have occasionally been shut down by the police. They have occurred in art galleries and have been reported in art magazines and books. The OM Theatre performances open into dizzyingly distant antiquities of human experience. In form they are essentially revivals of the Dionysian ritual called the sparagmos, or dismemberment, in which the initiates, in an altered state produced by alcohol, drugs, and wild dancing, tore apart and ate raw a goat that represented the god Dionysus, the god of all thrusting and wet and hot things in nature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
It was, in other words, a communion rite in which the partaker abandoned his or her individual identity to enter the ego-darkened paths of the unconscious and emerged, having eaten and incorporated the god, redesignated as divine. In such rites ordinary humanity ritually appropriates the aura of godhood, through the ecstatic ability to feel the Law of Identity and its contrary at the same time. Euripides, an ancient forerunner of the Viennese artists, featured this subject in several works. Like Nitsch, he did so partly because this was the subject matter hardest for his culture, as for ours, to assimilate in the light of day. In the Bacchae especially he presents the dismemberment as a terrifying instrument of simultaneous self-abandonment and self-discovery. The Appollonian tragic hero, Pentheus, like our who rationalist culture, thought his boundaries were secure, his terrain clearly mapped, his identity established. Rejecting the Dionysian rite, which represents the violent tearing apart of all categories, he became its victim. Disguising himself as Maenad, or female worshipper of Dionysus, he attempted to observe the ritual, but was himself mistaken for the sacrificial victim, torn apart, and eaten raw. In short, his ego-boundaries were violently breached, the sense of his identity exploded into fragments that were then ground down into the primal substrate of Dionysian darkness which both underlies and overrides civilization’s attempts to elevate the conscious object above nature. Nitsch writes of his work in consciously Dionysian terms as celebrating a “drunken, all-encompassing rejoicing,” a “drunken ecstasy of life,” a “liberated joy of strong existence without barriers,” “a liturgy of exultation, of ecstatic, orgiastic, boundless joy, of drugged rapture…” He has created, in fact, a purely classical theory for it, based on Freudian and Jungain reinterpretations of the scape goat as the wellspring of purification for the community. Another state of the OM ritual finds a young male standing or lying naked beneath a slain carcass marked with religious symbols and allowing the blood and guts to flow over his naked body. Again an ancient source has been appropriated. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
In the initiation rite called the taurobolium, the aspirant was placed named in a pit over which, atop a lattice of branches, a bull representing the god, was slain and disemboweled. When the initiate emerged covered with the bull’s blood and entrails, he was hailed as the reborn god emerging from the Earth womb. These works demonstrate the category shift involved in the appropriation process. In part this shift from the sone of religion to that of art represents the residual influence of Romanticism: the artist is seen as a kind of extramural initiation priest, a healer or guide who points the alienated soul back towards the depths of the psyche where it resonates to the rhythms of nature. In addition, it is the neutrality of the unbounded category that allows the transference to occur. Religious structures in our society allow no setting open enough or free enough to equate with that of ancient Greek religion, which was conspicuously nonexclusionary; the art realm in the age of boundary dissolution and the overflow did offer such a free or open zone. Gunter Brus, another Viennese performer, has claimed that placing such contents within the art realm allows “free access to the action”—a free access that the category of religion, with its weight of institutionalized beliefs, does not allow. The assumption, in other words, is that in the age of the overflow the art context is a neutral and open context which has no proper and essential context of its own. Art, then, is an open variable which, when applied to any culturally bound thing, will liberate it to direct experience. That is was the age of psychedelic drugs, and that psychedelic drugs were widely presumed to do the same thing, is not unimportant. As the tradition advanced along the path to the underworld, it was increasingly influenced by psychopharmacology with its sense of the eternally receding boundaries of experience. Soon after Nitsch’s first performances in Vienna, Carolee Schneemann presented a series of now-classic pieces also based on the appropriation of ritual activities from ancient and primitive sources. The general shape of these works arose, as among ancient shamans and magicians, from a variety of sources, including dream material and experience with psychedelic drugs. Like Nitsch’s work, Schneemann’s are based both on depth psychology and on the appropriation of contents from the neolithic stratum of religious history, especially the religious genre of the fertility rite. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Some also consider television a form of art because of its visual images, but that can lead to some issues because it is also mistaken as reality. Several people confuse television with real life because there are images of real people on the screen, and they are often doing logical, amusing and interesting things. It is difficult to get at exactly what is going on here. After all, there is it. Those are real people. It is happening. It is real. When people are watching television, they are watching people do things, and they are doing them. It is the same as the south-flying birds. The things that some see are real. It is just that they are made-up real. But that is pretty subtle. The question of what is real and unreal is itself a new one, abstract and impossible to understand. The natural evolutionary design is for humans to see all things as real, since the things that we see have always been real. Seeing things on television as false and unreal is learned. It goes against nature. Yet how is a child to understand that? When some of the audience is watching a television program, a few have no innate ability to make any distinction between real and not-real. Once an image is inside the box and then inside the child’s mind, having never existed in any concrete form, there is no operable distinction. All such images are equally real and the child is correct to see it that way. Only after the image is ingested can it be noted as unreal, and by then it is too late. It does not work. The images are already stored in the brain, with all these other images. Whatever one can say about the images being in a separate category called “unreal” has only superficial meaning. Images are images. They run through the audience’s dreams the same way whether they are real or not. They occupy one’s mind, whether real or not. The Bionic Man’s movements, his way of speaking, his attitudes, his way of relating to people, are in some people’s mind no matter what one tells them about reality and unreality. This causes people to suffer severe acute television intoxication. They believe TV is reality and that they can do the things people on TV do. And that they can just make up plots and assume that they are true and that others are on the same wavelength and understand what game they are playing. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
By now, people with severe acute television intoxication have learned although they have questions on al this, they had better not ask too many of them. Even people who are in touch with reality get annoyed with them, and other adults may actually laugh. Slowly, as people mature, they are becoming educated. They will finally know how to discern what adults in our modern World mean by real and not real an can remind oneself of that as they watch television. Humanity is learning to repress millions of years of genetic programming to accept all images as real, and to interfere with their own instincts, substituting interpretation. In this way one becomes more adult, which is to say, alienated from oneself. One learns, as we have, that images from television cannot be relied upon automatically as true and believable and that they have to be evaluated in some way: separated, categorized, dealt with differently from other images. One is developing sensory cynicism. One does this, as we all do, by placing one’s intellect above one’s senses, as a kind of judge, reporter, observer upon one’s own experience. One says to oneself, “This is real to me but I have learned that there are things in this World which are not real, even though they look perfectly real; many of these things are on television. Somebody wrote this program and those are actors playing the parts so it is not real, so I do not believe it.” However, one does believe it. Of course you and I can tell the difference between real and not real on television. Correct? Well, friend, maybe we can, but there is sure a lot of evidence that everyone else is pretty confused. Now, this is an area that has been studied. There have been hundreds of reports showing that adults are having only a slightly less-hard time than children separating what is television from what is life. A majority of adults, nearly as high a percentage as children, use television to learn how to handle specific life problems: family routines; relationships with fellow workers; hierarchical values; how to deal with rebellious children; how to understand deviations from the social norm, sexually, politically, socially and interpersonally. The overall fare of television situation-comedies and dramatic programs is taken as a valid, useful, informative, and, true to life. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Most viewers of television programming give the programming concrete validity, as though it were not fictional. When solving subsequent, similar problems in their own families, people report recalling how the problem was solved in a television version of that situation. They often make similar choices. Practical knowledge and methods of problem-solving lead the list of knowledge reported acquire through these programs. Furthermore, these dramatic programs are most often seen as realistic. Many viewers then seem to be seeing the shows they value as directly relevant to their own lives…[they] evidently take the fictionalized content of dramatic programs more seriously and literally than most social thinkers and behavioral scientists have recognized. Technology is very helpful, but we are still coming to understand affects it is having on people. Behind a village school in the forest a stone’s throw from the Congo River, a desktop computer with a thousand times the power of an early 1990s supercomputer lies half-buried in a recycling bin Indoors, Joseph Adoula and his friends have finished their day’s studies; now they are playing together in a vivid game universe using personal computers each a million times more powerful than the clunker in the trash. They stay late in air-conditioned comfort. Trees use air, soil, and sunlight to make wood, and wood is inexpensive enough to burn. Nanotechnology can do likewise, making products as cheap as wood—even products like supercomputers, air conditioners, and solar cells to power them. The resulting economics may even keep tropical forests from being burned. In Earth’s atmosphere, the twenty-first century rise in carbon-dioxide levels has halted and reversed. Fossil fuels are obsolete, so pollution rates have lessened. Efficient agriculture had free fertile land for reforestation, so growing trees are cleansing the atmosphere. Surplus solar power from the World’s repaved roads is being used to break down excess carbon dioxide at a rate of 5 billion tons per year. Climates are returning to normal, the seas are receding to their historical shores, and ecosystems are beginning the slow process of recovery. In another twenty years, the atmosphere will be back to the pre-industrial composition in had in the year 1800. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Kepler was Born in 1571, he began his career by publishing astrological calendars, and ended it as court astrologer to the duke of Wallenstein. Although he was famous for his service as an astrologer, we must credit him with believing that “Astrology can do enormous harm to a monarch if a clever astrologer exploits his human credulity.” Kepler wished astrology to be kept out of sight of all head of the state, a precaution that in recent years has not always been taken. His mother was accused of being a witch, and although Kepler did not believe this specific charge, he would probably not have denied categorically the existence of witches. He spent a great deal of his time corresponding with scholars on question concerning chronology in the age of Christ, and his theory that Jesus was actually born in 4 or 5 B.C. is generally accepted today. In other words, Kepler was very much a man of his time medieval through and through. Except for one thing: He believed that theology and science should be kept separate and, in particular, that angels, spirits, and the opinions of saints should be banished from cosmology. In his New Astronomy, he wrote, “Now as regards the opinions of the saints about these matters of nature, I answer in one word, that in theology the weight of authority, but in philosophy the weight of Reason alone is valid.” After reviewing what various saints had said about the Earth, Kepler concluded,”…but to me more sacred than all these Truth, when I, with all respect for the doctors of the Church, demonstrate from philosophy that the Earth is round, circumhabited by antipodes, of a most insignificant smallness, and a swift wanderer among the stars.” In expressing this idea, Kepler was taking the first significant step toward the conception of a technocracy. We have here a clear call for a separation of moral and intellectual values, a separation that is one of the pillars of technocracy—a significant step but still a small one. No one before Kepler had asked why planets travel at variable rates. Kepler’s answer was that it must be a force emanating from the sun. However, this answer still had room in it for God. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
In a famous letter sent to his colleague Maestlin, Kepler wrote “The sun in the middle of moving stars, himself at rest and yet the source of motion, carries the image of God the Father and Creator….He distributes His motive force through a medium which contains the moving bodies even as the Father creates through the Holy Ghost.” Kepler was a Lutheran, and although he was eventually excommunicated from his own church, he remained a man of sincere religious conviction to the end. He was, for example, dissatisfied with his discovery of the elliptical orbits of planets, believing that an ellipse had nothing to recommend it in the eyes of God. To be sure, Kepler, building on the work of Copernicus, was creating something new in which truth was not required to gain favor in God’s eyes. However, it was not altogether clear to him exactly what his work would lead to. It remained for Galileo to make visible the unresolvable contradictions between science and theology, that is, between intellectual and more points of view. One who in one’s own activity serves the God Who reveals Himself—even though one may by nature be sprung from a mean Earthly realm—is transplanted by the streams of water of the Direction. Only now can one’s own being thrive, ripen and bring forth fruit, and the law by which seasons of greenness and seasons of withering succeed one another in the life of the living being, no longer holds for one—one’s sap circulates continually in undiminished freshness. These, who are constant in the way of God, stand in contrast to those two other classes of humans, the sinners and the wicked. It is essential to distinguish these two classes from one another. The parallelism in the form means here, as so often, not a mere correspondence but a completion. “Wicked” here really describes a kind of human, a persistent disposition, whereas “sinners” describes rather a condition, a fit which from time to time attacks the human, without adhering to one. The sinner does evil, the wicked human is evil. That is why it is said only of the wicked, and not of sinners, that their way peters our and that they “do not stand,” there is a fundamental distinction. The wicked do not stand “in the judgment,” while the sinners do not stand only “in the congregation of the proven ones.” In the “judgement” it is existence which is at stake. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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By the Way of King Diamond and Diamond Baby
Black metal, as a 1990s phenomenon, is a creature with an identity largely distinct from its parent heavy metal music. Growing like a poisonous fungus away from the light of mainstream media and interest, it developed its own bizarre sounds, imagery and philosophies. Fostered upon a diet of xeroxed fanzines with names like Thanatograpy (after Thanatos, Greek god of death), Hammer of Damnation and Baphomet, its teenage male exponents were keen to make their mark with a genre too willfully obnoxious for outsiders. Visually, bands tried to outdo each other with outrageously macabre or offensive imagery: fire-breathing; tattered black clothing or robes; blood-soaked or naked flesh; medieval weaponry; bullet belts and spiked leather; insane calligraphy—spattered with profane images—which rendered band names illegible or scarcely identifiable. The most striking black-metal “fashion statement,” however, was the sepulchral black-and-white make-up worn by many bands which became known as “corpse paint”—a mutated offspring of the theatrical greasepaint worn by KISS in the 1970s, by way of King Diamond. At the movements genesis, few band members had racked up enough years of experience to excel at their instruments in the traditional fashion—instead, they concentrated on producing unearthly, crazed, bizarre sounds with guitars, drums, the human voice and keyboards. Specialist independent record labels, founded by fans or the bands themselves, sprang up as a truly international underground: Osmose Productions in France; Blackground Records 2.0 and Wild Rags in America; Candlelight Records in Spain. The list continues to proliferate to the present day, but the most influential of all was a small Scandinavian label called Deathlike Silence—of which, much more later. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
One of the more arresting rock artists of the early 1990s bridged the gap between the musical extremes of black metal and rock “n” roll’s demonic roots in the blues. Far subtler than most black metal bands, Glenn Danzig still operated at the infernal end of the spectrum. An anomaly who stubbornly refused to bow to the expectations of either purists or populists, Danzig began his career at the height of the punk revolution in 1977 as vocalist for New Jersey band the Misfits. No ordinary punk band, Danzig’s classic rock “n” roll delivery gave a quasi-1950s feel to their abrasive sound, while they spurned the usual punk look in devour of an all-year-round Halloween image. Sporting monstrous black quiffs they dubbed “devil locks,” the Misfits often took the stage in skeletal garb—indeed, Danzig’s skull make-up was prescient of the “corpse paint” popular among the 1990s black metal bands. The Misfits were one of the first punk bands whose songs possessed a strong gothic undercurrent. Many reflected their love of fascinating schlock movies, such as “Teenagers from Mars” and “Return of the Fly,” but others were genuinely disturbing explorations of hat and violence. Their second recording, Bullet, featured a song entitled “Hollywood Babylon,” inspired by magus and film-maker Kenneth Anger, while another track included an authentic Latin chant for effecting a werewolf transformation. In what was to become a familiar pattern, Danzig tired of the more tongue-in-cheek aspects of the Misfits, forming Samhain (pronounced “Sow-En”—the precursor to Halloween, a Celtic festival dedicated to fire and death) who released their first album, Initium, in 1984. This was a stark journey into primal evil, threatening rhythms and bleak guitars combining with Danzig’s lupine vocals to create a musical beast that howled at the World. It was all too bleak for most audiences and, in 1987, the vocalist dissolved the band in order to enter his third incarnation—called simply Danzig. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Danzig was in many ways the singer’s most innovative project, as well as the most overtly Satanic. Voodoo blues as deep and black as Mississippi mud met predatory heavy metal, with vocal style redolent of early rock “n” roll’s late-fifties/early-sixties crooners. Typically, Glenn Danzig’s insistence on treating his Satanic subject matter without a trace of irony did not endear him to the press. Short, powerfully built, with raven black hair and prominent side-burns, the music media dubbed him as “Evil Elvis” or, more irreverently, “Fonzig.” Some audiences were also perplexed: younger black metal fans wanted a less subtle Satanism, while rock fans who appreciated Danzig’s musical approach found his lyrical preoccupation off-putting. Nevertheless, the ban attracted a dedicated fan base, appreciative of a familiarity with demonic subject matter that most shock-horror rockers could only envy. Nietzschean howls of defiance against the Creator, such as “Godless,” complemented more traditional takes on hellish suffering like “Tired of Being Alive.” At his quietest, Danzig was at his most sinister—like the poet William Blake, Danzig identified love as “a Devil’s thing.” In 1994, when MTV picked up on the video for the anthemic “Mother, the band received mainstream attention; in the same year, an uncompromising Glenn Danzig released a solo project entitled Black Aria: an album of quasi-classical music retelling the story of Satan’s fall from grace. In 1996, after four albums of powerfully-infernal rock music, Danzig took his eponymus band in a new direction. BlackAcidDevil was predominantly an industrial record, many fans mourning the passing of the classic Danzig sound and dismissing at as “poor man’s Nine Inch Nails.” In truth, when the industrial grind is layered with the dark velvet of Danzig’s seductive tones—as on “Come to Silver,” an exploration of temptation—then the material becomes really interesting. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The indifferent sales and reviews that greeted BlackAcidDevil tested Danzig’s already-strained relationship with the music business. He let the band slip back into the cult status he was perhaps happiest with, and began spending the money he had made from his musical career on other projects—most notably a comic-book company named Verotik. As the company’s name suggests, these comics are crammed with violence and erotica, combined with the fascination for all things infernal that has become Glenn Danzig’s trademark. Scripting many of the comic-strips himself, Danzig introduced overly devilish characters, like the vamp Satanika, to stake his claim as one of the main modern contributors to Satanic popular culture. On the continent of Europe, particularly in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, things were being taken to a less subtle extreme. Deathlike Silence was an independent record label owned by a young man who re-named himself Euronymous—according to some folklore traditions, a cannibalistic demon with skin the bluish-black colour of a meatfly’s carapace—who also ran a dank, dingy specialist record store named Helvete (meaning “Hell”) and founded a band called Mayhem. Mayhem formed in 1984, just as the original black metal scene was peaking, debuting with a demo called Pure Fucking Armageddon and an album called Deathcrush. Interest in Satanic imagery, with its attendant gothic spikes-and-leather garb, was faltering among audiences at this time, but Mayhem clung onto its uncompromising style. They sounded like a rawer, more grinding version of Venom, screaming and thundering between militaristic marches and growling rage. As the tastes of young underground fans in the 1990s swung further towards the diabolical excess, Euronymous’ obsessive dedication made him a potent force on the newly-burgeoning black metal scene. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
During the early 1990s, Euronymous’ store became the focus for a small circle of likeminded Scandinavian metal fans who all started their own bands. This loose group named itself variously the Black Metal Circle, Satanic Terrorists or Black Metal Mafia, and was influenced by the supposedly Satanic doctrines of Euronymous—based around a vague reading of the biblical concept of war between Heaven and Hell. For Euronymous, siding with Satan meant endorsing everything that was considered evil, spiteful, hateful. Hate motivated his philosophy, coloured by the cold, depressive morbidity that characterizes the negative edge of the Scandinavian psyche. All of the releases on Deathlike Silence were stamped with the “Anti-Mosh” symbol (moshing is a raucously combative form of dancing common to thrash and death metal fans). Around the symbol were stamped the messages “No Mosh,” “No Core” (a reference to the hardcore punk revival), “No Trends” and “No Fun”—these sentiments taking against those metal audiences who were introducing splashes of gaudy mainstream colour, in the form of Bermuda shorts, baseball caps and skateboards. In the center of the “No Moshing” symbol was a red line struck through those figures Euronymous professed to hate most: Scott Burns, the Florida-based record producer whose work had come to dominate the death metal scene, and curiously, Anton LaVey. Euronymous divorced himself from all Satanic tradition, loathing LaVey because of the Church of Satan’s philosophy of self-empowerment and individualism. Euronymous’ simple faith expressed all that was negative: a cold core for violent code of self-destructive nihilism. Joining Mayhem in their isolated World of hate were several other extreme bands. Burzum—chiefly a vehicle for Count Grishnackh (given name Kristian Vikernes, though he legally changed his first name to Varg, Norwegian for “wolf”), who had lived in the damp, lightless cellar of the Helvete record shop for some time—were a prominent presence. Burzum were an odd blend of frustrated insanity and strange, sad, ambient mood music, pained pathos and gibbering fury—oddly effective, but distinctly disturbed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Founder member Grishnackh took his name from one of the evil “orc” characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings, while Burzum meant “darkness” in the orcish language conceived by Tolkien. Perverse as this seems, it should be remembered that The Bible is just a book of stories—in this light, perhaps using The Lord of the Rings as the basis for an (im)moral philosophical code is not wholly ludicrous. However, it does an infernal philosopher’s credibility no favours to identify too closely with “hobbits” (glorified goblin). Grishnackh’s personal mythology combined the darkness-versus-light motifs of “mystic quest”/sword-and-sorcery sagas with the violent Viking tradition he believed true Northern Europeans belonged to. While this seems symptomatic of Scandinavia’s peripheral removal from—and distorted imitation of—Western pop culture, it also has an authentic dark side. As is common among Norse pagan revivalists, the Black Metal Circle began to espouse race-based Nazi political views. (Though totalitarian-loving Euronymous also expressed admiration for communist despots and Cambodian genocidalist Pol Pot.) Also pivotal in this new movement were the bands Emperor, Immortal, Enslaved and Arcturus. The last to join Euronymous’s Norwegian cadre were Dark Throne, who had already recorded one death metal album, Soulside Journey, in 1990. In the following year, they disowned their debut, donned corpse-paint and joined the “Satanic Mafia” with their album A Blaze in the Northern Sky. If Euronymous exemplified the nihilistic hate at the heart of the Black Metal Circle, and Burzum represented its violent Norse/Nazi fantasies, then Dark Throne symbolized the Circle’s isolation and sociopathic need for solitude. Taking their country’s sombre, anti-social reputation to extremes, the band never met to record, spoke little, and spent increasing periods alone in the frost-bitten Norwegian wilderness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In the spring of 1991, Mayhem’s vocalist died: a Swede who, by way of black comedy, had re-named himself “Dead.” Dead blew his head off with a shotgun, leaving a note to day that he felt he was not of this World, but belonged instead to the cold solitude of the forest. He also apologized for the mess. As in common with obsessively inward-looking groups like the Black Metal Circle, a crisis of this type either causes the grouping to dissolve, or re-enforces their convictions. The latter instance applied, and the Circle hailed Dead as a hero. Euronymous, who found the corpse, rushed out for a camera to take his final photograph of Dead before altering the authorities—claiming a morsel of brain to make into soup and a fragment of skull to fashion into a necklace. At this point, the Black Metal Circle were no longer merely a group of disaffected teens and early-twentysomethings, but a subculture who believed themselves to be at the center of significant, apocalyptic events. Euronymous’ demented, anti-social rants were making him a regular feature in the underground metal fanzines; despite the continued indifference of the global music media, black metal was rising from the grassroots across the World. The “legend of Dead” contributed to a growing international interest in extreme, Scandinavian Satanic metal, with Deathlike Silence treating the grim event as a grotesque promotional gimmick. For the first time, European countries bordering the Mediterranean also began throwing up a slew of black metal acts—most notably the Greek band Rotting Christ. In contrast to the could hatred of the Northerners, the Southern European scene was inclined to a less self-destructive, more LaVeyan approach—though Anton LaVey would have regarded many of them as blasphemy-fixated novices, struggling to topple the repressive Christianity that dominates their culture. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Much of black metal is supposed to be inspired by demons. They cannot be any worse than human being, right? Many of them just have never possessed a body of their own. They are souls who have been lurking around before humanity. Before the dinosaurs. They are the darkness. The reason God created life so that life could flourish and grow and rest when it is dark. Demon possession is a condition in which one or more evil spirits or demons inhabit the body of a human being and can take complete control of their victim at will. By temporarily blotting out one’s consciousness, they can speak and act through one as their complete slave and tool. The inhabiting demon (or demons) comes and goes much like the proprietor of a house who may or may not be “at home.” When the demon is “at home,” one may precipitate an attack. In these attacks the victim passes from one’s normal state of possession. The condition of the afflicted person in the “possessed” state varies greatly. Sometimes it is marked by depression and deep melancholy, sometimes by vacancy and stupidity that resemble idiocy. Sometimes the victim may be ecstatic or extremely malevolent and wildly ferocious. During the transition from the normal to the abnormal state, the victim is frequently thrown into a violent paroxysm, often falling to the ground unconscious, foaming at the mouth with symptoms similar to epilepsy or hysteria. The intervals between attacks vary greatly from an hour or less to months. Between attacks, the subject may be healthy and appear normal in every way. The abnormal or demonized stages can last a few minutes or several days. Sometimes the attacks are mild; sometimes they are violent. If they are frequent and violent, the health of the subject suffers. The chief characteristic of demon possession or demonomania is the automatic projection of a new personality in the victim. During attack the victim’s personality is completely obliterated, and the inhabiting demon’s personality takes over completely. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The inhabiting demon uses the victim’s body as a vehicle for one’s own thoughts, words, and acts. The demon even speaks out of the victim’s mouth and declares emphatically that one is a demon. Frequently one gives one’s name and dwelling place. The new personality reveals itself in a different voice and sometimes uses a different language or dialect on a completely different educational or cultural level. Pronouns are used to emphasize the new personality. The first personal pronoun consistently designates the inhabiting demon. Bystanders are addressed in the second person. The victim is referred to in the third person and looked upon during the attack as unconscious and for all practical purposes as nonexistent during this interval. Demonomania should be clearly differentiated from the insanity in which a person imagines oneself to be someone else, often a famous personality such as Liz Taylor, Julius Caesar, of William Randolph Hearst. The demoniac, when in the demonized state characterized by the new personality, speaks and acts in all respects like a completely different person. By contrast, the insane person is one’s own diseased self, one’s assumed personality being a transparent unreality. In cases of demon possession the new personality clearly and constantly recognizes the distinct existence and individuality of its “possessed” victim, speaking of that victim in the third person, an element entirely lacking in cases of insanity. Because various inadequate theories have left demon possession largely unexplained, it is quite probable that some patients in mental hospitals are demon possessed rather than insane. This was the conviction of the famous nineteenth-century specialist in mental diseases, Dr. Forces Benignus Winslow (1810-1874). He correctly recognized the demoniac by a strange duality; and by the fact that, when temporarily relived from the oppression of the demon, he is frequently able to describe the force which takes control of one and compels one to act and speak shamefully. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
While in the demonized state many persons give evidence of knowledge which cannot be accounted for naturally. The demon who takes control of the body of one’s victim is obviously the source of the superhuman knowledge. While demon possessed, many persons recognize the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and display an aversion to and a fear of Him (Mark 1.23-24; 5.7). The case of Mrs. Winchester, who lived in Santa Clara County, illustrates how a woman came under demon domination through practicing séances. Being centered within our own God like power is of utmost importance. Even when evoked to create change directly, keep in mind that you are the God that wields these powers for the cause of Counter Creation. Just be careful! As a God you will be tested and so how these powers are wielded is a powerful initiatic test in its own right. Mrs. Winchester was in her Blue Séance Room, she lite a candle on her left first, and then a candle on her right. A sacred serpent was sacrificed over the wood sigil and the blood was left to drain upon the idol. Then the body of the serpent was encircled around it, she chanted “I do invocate and conjure thee, O Spirit, Sabnock; and being with power armed from the SUPREME MAJESTY, I do strongly command thee, by BERALANENSIS, BALADACHIENSIS, PAUMACHIA, and APOLOGIAE SEDES; by the most Powerful Princes, Genii, Liachidae, and Ministers of the Tartarean Abode; and by the Chief Prince of the Seat or Apologia in the Ninth Legion, I do invoke thee, and by invocating conjure thee. And being armed with power from the SUPREME MAJESTY, I do strongly command thee, by Him Who spake and it was done, and unto whom all creatures be obedient. Also I, being made after the image of GOD, endued with power from GOD and created according unto His will, do exorcise thee by that most mighty and powerful name of GOD, EL, strong and wonderful; O thou Spirit Sabnock. And I command thee and Him who spake the Word and HIS FIAT was accomplished and by all the names of God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
“Also by the names ADONAI, EL, ELOHIM, ELOHI, EHYEH, ASHER EHYEH, ZABAOTH, ELION, IAH, TETRAGRAMMATON, SHADDAI, LORD GOD MOST HIGH, I do exorcise thee and do powerfully command thee, O thou Spirit Sabnock, that thou dost forthwith appear unto me here before this Circle in a fair human shape, without any deformity or tortuosity. And by this ineffable name, TETRAGRAMMATON IEHOVAH, do I command thee, at which being heard the elements are overthrown, the air is shaken, the sea runneth back, the fire is quenched, the Earth trembleth, and all the hosts of the celestials, terrestrials, and infernals do tremble together, and are troubled and confounded. Wherefore come thou, O Spirit Sabnock, forthwith, and without delay, from any or all parts of the World wherever thou mayest be, and make rational answers unto all things that I shall demand of thee. Come thou peaceably, visibly, and affably, now, and without delay, manifesting that which I shall desire. For thou art conjured by the name of the LIVING and TRUE GOD, HELIOREN, wherefore fulfill thou my commands, and persist thou therein unto the end, and according unto mine interest, visibly and affably speaking unto me with a voice clear and intelligible without any ambiguity. I do invocate, conjure, and command thee, O thou Spirit Sabnock, to appear and to show thyself visible unto me before this Circle in fair and comely shape, without any deformity or tortuosity; by the name and in the name IAH and VAU which Adam heard and spake; and by the name of God, AGLA, which Lot heard and was saved with his family; and by the name IOTH, which Jacob heard from the angels wrestling with him, and was delivered from the hand of Esau his brother; and by the name ANAPHAEXTON which Aaron heard and spake and was made wise; and by the name ZBAOTH, which Moses named and all the rivers were turned into blood; and by the name ASHER EHYEH ORISTON, which Moses named, and all the rivers brought forth frogs, and they ascended into the house, destroying all things. #RandolpHarris 11 of 21
“And by the name ELION, WHICH Moses named, and there was a great hail such as had not been since the beginning of the World; and by the name ADONAI, which Moses named, and there came up locusts, which appeared upon the whole land, and devoured all which the hail had left; and by the name SCHEMA AMATHIA which Ioshua called upon, and the sun stayed his course; and by the name ALPHA and OMEGA, which Daniel named, and destroyed Bel, and slew the Dragon; and in the name EMMANUEL, which the three children, Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, sang in the midst of the fiery furnace, and were delivered; and by the name HAGIOS; and by the SEAL OF ADONI; and by ISCHYROS, ATHANATOS; and by these three secret names, AGLA, ON, TETRAGRAMMATION, do I adjure and constrain thee. And by these names, and by all other names of the LIVING and TRUE GOD, the LORD ALMIGHTY, I do exorcise and command thee, O Spirit Sabnock, even by Him Who spake the Word and it was done, and to Whom all creatures are obedient; and by the dreadful judgments of GOD; and by the uncertain Sea of Glass, which is before the DIVINE MAJESTY, mighty and powerful; by the four beasts before the throne, having eyes before and behind; by the fire round about the throne; by the holy angels of Heaven; and by the mighty wisdom of GOD; I do potently exorcise thee, that thou appearest here before this Circle, to fulfill my will in all things which shall seem good unto me; by the Seal of BASDATHEA BALDACHIA; and by this name PRIMEUMATON, which Moses named, and the Earth Opened, and did swallow up Kora, Dathan, and Abiram. Wherefore thou shalt make faithful answers unto all my demands, O Spirit Sabnock, and shalt perform all my desires so far as in thine office thou art capable hereof. Wherefore, come thou, visibly, peaceably, and affably, now without delay, to manifest that which I desire, speaking with a clear and perfect voice, intelligibly, and to mine understanding. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
“Tbatlu! Bualu! Tulatu! Labusi! Ubisi!—Let thee also appear and being before me the Spirit of Sabnock. Sovar, merciless leader of Divs come forth! Inner eye behold the demon before me. Sovar awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Shahrewar! I stand alone as the embodiment of the Adversary known as Ahriman, the Black Dragon of Chaos and becoming! I devour the natural order of stasis brought forth by Ahura Mazda and forge my destiny through the power of the Black Sun! Taromat, beautiful Div or rebellion come forthy! Inner eye behold the demoness before me. Toramat awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Spandarmad! Ahirman, Lord of Darkness divine, I thank you for your presence within this unholy temple of counter creation. I have offered you the life of this noxious creature as a gateway to your manifestation within this realm to stand before me! You are Angra Mainyu who is the Lord of counter creation, whom has brought forth the mountains to the plains! You have brought forth the beasts to the field and the creatures of the night! Ahriman with your infernal blessing I ask that you would bring forth the baneful powers of the wolf kin to fill this oil with their essence that it may be compelled according to my will! I offer my nails as fangs which will devour that which stands in my way! I offer my hair to embody their predatory essence! I give my blood as a gateway to empower them to act within this world according to my will and purpose!” Then Mrs. Winchester heard the distant howling of wolves and she perceived their phantom shadows as they began to surround her and encroach. She was focused on Sabnock and dared not fear that which she had just conjured. SABNOCK—of course is the Forty-third Spirit of the Winchester Mansion. He is a Marquis, Mighty, Great, and Strong, appearing in the Form of an Armed Soldier with a Lion’s Head, riding on a pale-coloured horse. His office is to build high Towers, Castles and Cities, ad to furnish them with Armour, etcetera. Also he can conflict Men for many days with Wounds and with Sores rotten and full of Worms. He giventh Good Familiars at the request of the Exorcist. Commandth 50 Legions of Spirits; and his Seal is this, etcetera. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Mrs. Winchester fell down unconscious, frothing at the mouth, and was carried to her room, outside where the crescent hedge is planted. A doctor was called in gave her large doses of medicine to no avail. He left and refused to have anything more to do with the case as he saw with in hours gables and towers rise, wings of the mansion extended right before his eyes, and gardens grow from sprouts and spring up to mature plants and trees before night fall. For five of six days Mrs. Winchester raved wildly, and her staff and friends were in great distress. In desperation they proposed giving Mrs. Winchester more medicine. However, the demon, speaking through her, replied: “Any amount of medicine will be of no use.” Daisy then implored, “If medicine will be of no use, what shall we do?” The demon replied, “Burn incense to me, and submit yourself to me, and all will be well.” The staff knelt down and worshiped the demon, imploring him to torment Mrs. Winchester no longer. During that time Mrs. Winchester was in a state of complete unconsciousness. A little later when the demon drove Mrs. Winchester to renewed frenzy, her distraught staff repeated their promise to worship and serve him. They also promised that they would urge their Mrs. Winchester to do likewise. When Mrs. Winchester regained consciousness, she reluctantly consented to do so. The demon gave explicit directions regarding the proposed worship. On the first and fifteenth of each month, incense was to be burned, food offered, and the require prostration made before the shrine of himself, SABNOCK. Periodically the demon came, sometimes every few days, sometimes after a month’s lapse. Each time, Mrs. Winchester felt fluttering of her heart, a sense of overwhelming fear, and inability to control herself. She would quietly as Daisy to fetch a neighboring woman whenever the demon came. The two would burn incense to the demon in Mrs. Winchester’s stead and receive his directives, which they then communicated to the possessed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Although these communications were spoken by the Mrs. Winchester’s (the victim) lips, she was completely unaware of them, since she was in the demonized state. The demon often bade the audience not to be afraid, protesting he would not harm them, but rather help them in various ways. He declared he would instruct the victim in the healing art, so that people would flock to her and be cured of their sickness. This soon proved true, although may diseases were not under the demon’s control. Apparently only those afflicted by evil spirits were completely cured. Mrs. Winchester’s long-ill child was not helped. The demon declared he controlled many inferior spirits. He also frequently outlined his plan for Mrs. Winchester’s life and work. He promised he would help her grow more proficient as a healer, and the people would compensate her for her services. Gifts thus earned were donated to the nearby ancient pagan temple. As certain parts of the Winchester mansion would appear but once every seventeen years, SABNOCK was never seen save on the eve of some awful calamity, visitors to the mansion had a very slight chance of seeing his physical body. There could be no doubt though of the existence of the mansion and SABNOCK, for everybody knows he was one of the greatest of the giants during his natural lifetime, nor could any better evidence be asked then the facts that he guided Mrs. Winchester into turning stone, wood, and class into the World’s most beautiful and bizarre mansions. The door-to-nowhere was also known as Lovers’ Leap;” from which Mrs. Winchester once flung herself when she was a state of deep morning, and survived unharmed. The path SABOCK made from the door-to-nowhere to the mountains was used by him when he would leave his island and come to shore. Upon being informed of the variety and amount of legendary material collected about the Winchester mansion and Mrs. Winchester’s doings, many people unhesitatingly pronounced the entire assortment condemned all the gathered treasures as creations of the supernatural. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
It was very well beknown that in them old days there were giants in plenty hereabouts, but they did not make the make an appearance at the estate very often. But everyone knows that there were giants, because if there were not, no one would know of them at all. They were just like human beings, except in the matter of size, and one of them could make a dozen like men that live now. When they walked, they carried oak trees for sticks and lived in the forest of the giants, and carved the mountain and caves. (It should be noted that spiritistic visions of this nature are quite likely to occur in the course of reading occult literature. Sometimes people mistake these visions for genuine religious experiences. However, it is again a case of Satan disguising himself as an angel of the light.) Yet, there are more than 20,000 accounts of spirits, ghost, angels and demons being seen in the Winchester mansion. The uncanny phenomena places one under a charm. The pattern of the courts during this early period in the 1800s was erratic, sometimes convicting, sometimes throwing cases out of court for lack of evidence, something awarding damages for slander to those who had been maligned as witches by accusers. This vacillation sprang from the fact that the judicial bodies that heard the causes were not religious but secular, and therefore had little competence in dealing with matters that were primarily religious. As far as control was concerned, in adhering to the principles of congregationalism, the responsibility for suppressing heresy and enforcing religious behavior within the communities went to the state. The trial judges were not the sure, steadfast, confident Dominican Inquisitors or Protestant prosecutors of the Old World, but merely secular officials of the valley who had been forced into the position of trying heresy for lack of anyone else to do it. Mary Johnson, who was hired at the Winchester mansion in 1887, as a cook, admitted have had “familiarity with the Devil” and was executed by the state. She confession to have pleasures of the flesh with demons and other sorted things. She made no mention of mass meetings; rather, her Devil seems to have been a personal one, coming to her assistance when needed. #RandolphHarri 16 of 21
Dolls were sometimes used as a means of projecting curses, and Mary said she had attended meetings with Satan and his consorts. Witches’ pact with Satan was attributed as part of God’s inscrutable plan of the Universe. The Puritan settlers in Santa Clara Valley believed in the doctrine of Original Sin wholeheartedly; their pessimistic outlook proclaimed that all men were unworthy until God saw fit to bestow His grace upon them. They believed that the God allowed the Devil to afflict not only the guilty but also anybody else that might happen to get in the way. If He had to teach misguided humans a lesson, He might punish an entire community for the sins of the most wicked in that community. And it appeared to the God-fearing Puritans that He was doing just that. The Puritans were highly intolerant and has a paranoiac distrust of other religious groups, some were farmers at the Winchester mansion, and did not always like the rituals that were performed, but they were very loyal and protective of Mrs. Winchester. Many of the people who worked at the Winchester mansion were often under suspicion of witchcraft. The Puritans came to the Winchester mansion because they felt it was a true kingdom of God on Earth, and they could help Mrs. Winchester live peacefully. However, what they found was something different. They found that the vast acres of the estate had bitterly cold winters, and the terrain could be inhospitable. They found themselves in a wilderness, surrounded by demonic tribes whom they considered to be the legions of Hell incarnate. Having come to settle in this last stronghold of the Devil, they were plagued by him constantly for the very reason that they were God’s chosen people, thus the most likely target for unholy temptation. The fact that the new settlers in the Santa Clara Valley were being attacked by Satan seemed incontestable. The estate was ravaged by smallpox, and had suffered constant harassment by envious local town’s people and demonic tribes. Mrs. Winchester wondered what she had done to offend God that He should allow the Devil such free range. She experimented with the spirits to bring peace to her life and home. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Mrs. Winchester had an answer: Judgment Day was at hand and Satan was therefore stepping up his activities in one last desperate move. It was simply the nova-like burst of the energy from a dying star. She glibly stated that “there will again be an unusual Range of the Devil among us, a little before the Second Coming of the Lord, which will be to give the last stroke in destroying the works of the Devil.” This theory found wide acceptance among the servants and laity of Santa Clara Valley, for not only did it offer a simple explanation for all their maladies and misfortunes, but it also gave them hope, promising cooly a quick end to their hardships. Satan is most able to seduce human in periods o great discontent, for human, in times of poverty and affliction, will turn knowingly to whatever hands will feed them. The valley had had a difficult time of it up to that time, and famines had reduced the population drastically. However, as if labouring under the most severe environmental handicaps was not enough, Puritan perfectionism went even further in making life unbearable. In seeking to establish a holy kingdom, according to Heaven’s law, self-indulgence in any form was strictly repressed. Severe punishments were meted out for drinking, swearing, and licentiousness; in Santa Clara, it was a punishable offense to walk on the streets on Sunday, except when going to and from church. And witches, people possessed by demons, and others also attended church to blend in and keep the peace. On top of it all, there stood the Calvinistic doctrine of election, holding that as soon as man was born, eh was judged to be headed for either Heaven or Hell, this choice being made according to God’s immutable law. However, even if a human thought oneself to be damned, the civil punishment for one’s indulgence were still exacted upon one. It was into this environment that the waters of the witchcraft flood would soon pour. The good people of Santa Clara clearly saw signs of Satanic activity in their midst, and an investigation was launched. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Mrs. Winchester confessed to having attended witches’ Sabbaths and of having met with the Devil, who was a tall, black man from New Haven, Connecticut. Soon the witch fever spread, and more people from the valley became posses by demons. The common belief was that at that time witches, when entering into a Covenant with Satan, because the owners of specters, with the help of which they could do harm to any person of their choosing. People believe that God—the Alpha and Omega was both God and Satan. That He has a soul and character. He is not just this futile entity but someone you can see many aspects to. Some people fled to Satanism because they had to deal with so much evil from Christians that they wanted another source of power to exalt them. Satanism is supposed to be something to be something secret, something people do not know anything of. One goes to America and in the telephone directory one can see “Church of God,” “Church of Jesus,” and “Church of Satan.” One calls, and a person answers: “Church of Satan, how may I help you?” One thinks, “This is not Satanism!” The Church of Satan deny Satan, they say He does not exist, yet they act as if He dd, they rebel against God. They call themselves Satanists because He also rebelled against God, but they are basically light and life worshipping individualists. Well, the phone is tapped, so I think you better write what you know. Some people have disappeared. And of course the normal grave yard desecration. Anne Winchester’s headstone was recently stolen, but replaced. Normal people just disappear and never show up again. It could have a Satanic connection. Every human is life, and some hate life, especially human life. That is why people disappeared. These people may have disappeared for some form of sacrifice. Something like that would be called a Satanic murder. The murder is the ritual sacrifice. These murders gain power from whoever was responsible. Everybody has their own aura, and auras can be stolen by sacrificing an individual, this allows one to gain more power. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Places of worship, such as churches, have their own spirit—the Winchester Mystery House, for example, has been worshipped in for maybe hundreds of years and has thus gained a lot of spirit in that time, it could qualify as a church and gain charitable tax exemption. But that is not the point. A person who sacrifices that will gains a lot of power and grows stronger. Some people fear the Winchester mansion, because there are a lot of different energies. There is fear, terror and suspense, but others feel a lot of light, happiness, and goodness. Sometimes the energy is mixed. Anton LaVey really surprises me. If your every rea his work, he seems very intelligent and not scary at all, but I guess it depends on what one reads. I have read parts of his Bible, and it is very straightforward, it is stuff people tell their kids every day. Stand up for yourself and do not let people run you over. I think that the Winchester mansion should also open on nights of a full Moon, not just Friday the 13th. During the full Moon, there is a lot of energy and symbolic value. A lot of people believe in the full Moon and a lot of people believe in virgins. That makes both the full Moon and the virgin more powerful because of belief in them. God was first and He created the World. Of course, a lot of scientists would deny that. However, I would challenge their view because I believe God used evolution, which is why it took so long, which is why we have evidence like dinosaur bones. Yet, some Gnostic Christians have suggested Satan created the World. Everybody will be taken as slaves except the warlords. Euronymus, who we talked about earlier, was murdered in August 1993, Aaliyah 2001. Some say that is a month when sacrifices are made. Grishnackh killed Euronymous, and a few hours later, he was laughing and joking, saying, “Ha ha, Euronymous is dead, I’m going to dance and piss on his grave.” It reminded of the jokes Howard Stern made about Aaliyah. It was not funny. These are not the rantings of someone who is all there. Grishnackh talked about the dynamite he had and how he was going to blow things up. Basically, they took things to illogical extremes, but it all made sense in their own heads. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
It is possible when dabbling with occultism for one to make an unconscious contract with the powers of darkness. The gift of discernment is absolutely necessary in life. It is generally not wise to lay one’s hands on a person who is occultly subjected. The retuning spirits will often attempt to creep back under the guise of some pious camouflage. It is in this way that evil can often enter unnoticed into one’s Christian life. A maid at the Winchester mansion once accepted the invitation of one of her coworkers to attend some spiritistic meetings. At first she felt as though she had gain something from going along to the meetings but later on she began to notice some psychic changes taking place in herself. She began to notice some psychic changes taking place in herself. She began to suffer from depression which resulted in her consulting a neurologist. During the course of the treatment she was committed to a lunatic asylum. However, as her condition improved, she could no longer attend the spiritistic séances. At the hospital the chaplain came to see her through his help and counsel she was able to make a complete recovery. One of the farmers at the estate wanted to see if charms actually worked, and some of them He. He practiced in the basement of the Winchester mansion. He drew a magic circle on the ground and drew some other magic symbols in the circle. He then used a charm three times in order to invoke the spirit. However, no spirit came. Yet, as he repeated, the charm he fell down in the magic circle and lay there unconscious for some time. The result was that for several weeks following this event he was semi-paralysed and drained of all his physical strength and will-power. After a few weeks, he died. Frequently identified as a common spot where the “wheelbarrow Ghost” is sighted, Steam Alley is one of the most well-known paranormal hot-spots in the mansion. Have you ever seen anything in the basement? #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Some stroll Sarah’s lovely gardens this Memorial Day Weekend. There is a beautiful parrot which Mrs. Winchester used to pet, it talks! He is supposed to be happy and impudent, and talks and laughs and screeches all the time. Maybe you may catch a glimpse at this wooded, flowery estate. It is such a beautiful spectacle, all of that life and grace and animation, and sun-smitten flash and sprinkle of rich colour.
This impressive mansion dates back to the 1880s, when it was developed by Sarah Winchester and the spirits, whose project enobed and enriched the community. It once had a nine-story military watchtower. Mrs. Winchester further developed the grounds of the 160 room mansion, introducing a Victorian garden at the hands of World renowed architect Gino Coppede around the turn of the century.
These adaptions made this idyllic mansion a unique asset, tinged with the signs and influences of eclecticism and Liberty, juxtaposed to the ancient Architectural characteristics of its medieval heritage. This mansion presents itself as impressive and spectacular. The building now spreads on four floors plus the basment, for a total of approximently 25,000 feet square.
There is lovely gift shop and cafe, and it is also an ideal venue for hosting private events, conventions and/or ballrooms are located on the back overlooking the internal garden with its panoramic position which glows thanks to its night-time lighting.
Inside the property there are splendid rooms filled with historial furniture, decorated ceilings and flamboyant fireplaces, vaulted ceilings and richly frescoes walls. In addition, there are several bedrooms, nine kitchens. and thirteen bathrooms, which made the structure a perfect luxurious accommodation for guests, and is now a tourist destination.
This mansion is located within a private park of 4 acres and elegant Nineteenth-century Victorian-gardens, that offer areas of wide lawns, and further green spaces. There is also a parking area, with free parking. Currently used to host guided tours and private events and functions. The enitre porperty sits at a close distance from the mall, hotels, and resturants. The high-fashion outlet complex and gourmet food has brought further development and tourism to Santa Clara County. https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Drowned in Venomous Hatred of the Bourgeoisie
The World which is arising is still half-buried in the ruins of the World falling into decay…and no one can know which of the old institutions…will continue to hold up their heads and which in the end will go under. The FBI is a highly intelligent law enforcement group. However, the system can sometimes delay the process of investigation. Often times, many attacks and violence and threats are stopped before they happen. So often times, people do not realize how efficient law enforcement is. In a World in which business transactions (and criminal transactions) are accelerating, the FBI’s response time, like that of most bureaucracies, should be accelerated. When traces of anthrax turned in the Hamilton, New Jersey, postal facility and left five people dead, it took the FBI nearly a year to test all the mailboxes. When the Slammer virus rocketed out of nowhere to contaminate hundreds of thousands of computer systems, the FBI took thirteen hours to publicly acknowledge the threat, by which time private antivirus companies had already issued alerts. FBI experts were at home, a White House official explained, and it was hard to get “the right personnel” to respond However, this is not a story about the FBI, which, in fact, is little different from, and in many way better than, other government bureaucracies. Nothing it did in the sniper case matches, for example, the brilliance of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which—six moths after they crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center—issues student visas to the decidedly dead terrorists Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi. Meanwhile, referring to his agency’s general response to crisis, State Department official Marc Grossman lamented in 2005 that “decision cycles sped up so much that the way we do business at the State Department was now too slow…If we do not change…then we are going to go out of business.” After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the breakdown of the levee system, New Orleans did, in fact, go “out of business.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Bureaucracies at the level of nation, state and town were hopelessly unable to work together. The Federal Emergency Management Agency proved feckless, leaving hundreds of thousands of victims to fend for themselves. Would today’s bureaucracies, not just in the United States of America, but in Europe and Asia, be any more effective in the event of a flu pandemic? Well, the European Commission reported that between 60 percent and 80 percent of the EU population was estimated to be infected with COVID-19, as of the bloc enters a post-emergency phase in which mass reporting of cases was no longer necessary. Whereas in American 58 percent of the population was infected with COVID-19. Everywhere today we find slow-moving and slow-thinking bureaucracies struggling unsuccessfully to keep up with the acceleration of the acceleration of change. And given the many powerful, converging forces driving us in this direction, it will become worse. Extreme economic competition, the cumulative nature of scientific research, the increasing number of minds committed to innovation and the instantaneity of communication are just some of the pressures pushing and shoving transitioning societies toward real-time response rates—and leaving bureaucracies behind. Many are reeling from the “acceleration effect.” Worse yet, todays high-speed changes in the economy and society come unevenly and, by their very nature, magnify the de-synchronization effect. At the level of the firm, as we noted earlier, when one department shifts to precisely calibrated “just-in-time” operations, another is forced to resynchronize, causing de-synchronization in still other departments, not to mention their suppliers (and their suppliers). Much the same happens in government agencies. However, something far more basic is happening at a higher level. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Across the board, a time wedge is being driven between the private sector and the public sector—one racing faster and faster, the other falling farther and farther behind. This worsens relations between the two as companies and governments inadvertently bang into each other, interfering with each other’s schedules, obstructing each other, wasting everyone’s time and money. Political hostilities intensify. Bureaucrats are demonized as inept, lazy or corrupt. Businesspeople are stigmatized as greedy. Politics becomes even more polarized. And the dysfunctionality of our institutions grows—driven, at least in part, by today’s transformatory changes in our relationships to the deep fundamental of time. Time, however, is only one of the deep fundamentals on which our institutions depend. Growing disparities in our treatment of time are matched by growing disparities in space. Today a company may manufacture in one country, locate its accounting and back-office operations in another, write its software somewhere else, put its customer-service call centers in still another country, maintain sales offices all around the World, put certain tax-avoiding financial operations on a remote Caribbean Island and still nominally call itself an American firm. It may be Japanese like Sony—gets 70 percent of its stock overseas. The NGOs Greenpeace and Oxfam operate in forty and seventy countries respectively. However, while private-sector institutions and NGOs alike are increasingly global, most public-sector organizations operate only nationally or locally. In short, as faster communication connects the World, goods, services, people, ideas, crime, disease, pollution, and terrorists all spill beyond national boundaries. Eroding traditional notions of sovereignty, they outflank and outrun public-sector institutions designed for purely local or national purposes. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
These changes with respect to the deep fundamental of space amplify the disruptions in time. No wonder so many institutions—designed for slow-tempo operations in a pre-global World—find it almost impossible to carry out their assigned functions effectively. The looming institutional implosion is brought still closer by changes with respect to the deep fundamental of knowledge. And here, again, managers and workers in the public sector are often at a disadvantage. Rapid change reduces more and more of what all of us know—or think we know—to obsoledge. However, the speed at which obsolete knowledge is replaced, updated and reformulated is frequently faster in the private sector, where competitive pressures force quick response and better technology makes that possible. Thus, by the time much of the data, information and knowledge that public employees need to do their jobs reaches them in useful form, it has already been acted on by private-sector players. Public-sector workers cannot keep up. Worse yet, bureaucratic institutions in both sectors break up knowledge and its components, storing and processing them in separate compartments, or “stovepipes.” Over time, these stovepipes multiply as ever-more-narrow specialization increases the number of such uncrossable boundaries. This makes it extremely difficult to cope with fast-changing new problems requiring knowledge that falls beyond artificial departmental borders. On top of that, guarding each stovepipe is an executive whose power is enhanced by control over data, information and knowledge, with little incentive to share it. Yet today, as industrial-age boundaries break down, it is only by sharing that important problems can be solved. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
The reluctance to share within an organization is even more pronounced with respect to outsiders. Thus the CIA and FBI have historically refused to cooperate with each other, as post-9/11 investigations have shown. Local officers do not like sharing crime information with national police agencies. Sales organizations, political parties, even, increasingly, scientists, try to hold their cards close to the chest—sometimes at horrific costs. What we see, therefore, melting the bolts and corroding the wires holding our industrial-age institutions together, are interconnected changes in our relations to the deep fundamentals. Each change has its own effects. Each increase the likely implosion of institutions in country after country and at the global level as well. However, it is the combination of changes in all three-time, space, and knowledge—that is likely to topple our familiar institutions and hurl us, unprepared, into a strange new economic and social tomorrow. Say hello, then, to Complexorama. And if that sounds like the name of a theme park it is because tomorrow will be filled with thrills, surprises and, for those brought up in the middle of the twentieth century, a definite sense of unreality. Knowledge and communication systems are not antiseptic or power-neutral. Virtually every “fact” used in business, political life, and everyday human relationships is derived from other “facts or assumptions that have been shaped, deliberately or not, by the preexisting power structure. Every “fact” thus has a power-history and what might be called a power-future—an impact, large or small, on the future disputation of power. Nonfacts and disputed facts are equally products of, and weapons in, power conflict in society. False facts and lies, as well as “true” facts, scientific “laws,” and accepted religious “truths” are all ammunition in ongoing power-play and are themselves a form of knowledge, as the term will be used here. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
There are, of course, as many definitions of knowledge as there are people who regard themselves as knowledgeable. Matters grow worse when words like signs, symbols, or imagery are given highly technical meanings. And the confusion is heightened when we discover that the famous definition of information by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, who helped found information science, while useful for technological purposes, has no bearing on semantic meaning or the “content” of communication. In general, in the pages ahead, data will mean more or less unconnected “facts”; information will refer to data that have been fitted into categories and classification schemes or other patterns; and knowledge will mean information that has been further refined into more general statements. However, to avoid tedious repetition, all three terms may sometimes be used interchangeably. To make things simple and escape from these definitional quicksands, even at the expanse of rigor, in the pages ahead the term knowledge will be given and expanded meaning. It will embrace or subsume information, data, images, and imagery, as well as attitudes, values, and other symbolic products of society, whether “true,” “approximate,” or even “false.” All of these are used or manipulated by power-seekers, and always have been. So, too, are the media for conveying knowledge: the means of communication, which, in turn, shape the messages that flow through them. The term knowledge, therefore, will be used to encompass all of these. Besides its great flexibility, knowledge has other important characteristics that make it fundamentally different from lesser sources of power in tomorrow’s World. Thus force, for all practical concerns, is finite. There is a limit to how much force can be employed before we destroy what we wish to defend. The same is true for wealth. Money cannot buy everything, and at some point even the fattest wallet empties out. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
By contrast, knowledge does not. We can always generate more. If a traveler goes halfway to his destination each day, the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea pointed out that one can never reach his final destination, since there is always another halfway to go. In the same manner, we may never reach ultimate knowledge about anything, but we can always take one step closer to a rounded understanding of any phenomenon. Knowledge, in principle at least, is infinitely expandable. Knowledge is also inherently different from both muscle and money, because, as a rule, if I use a gun, you cannot simultaneously use the same gun. If you use a dollar, I cannot simultaneously use the same dollar. By contrast, both of us can use the same knowledge either for or against each other—and in that very process we may even produce still more knowledge. Unlike bullet or budget, knowledge itself does not get used up. This alone tells us that the rules of the knowledge-power game are sharply different from the precepts relied on by those who use force or money to accomplish their will. However, a last, even more crucial difference sets violence and wealth apart from knowledge as we race into what has been called an information age: By definition, both force and wealth are the property of the strong and the rich. It is the truly revolutionary characteristic of knowledge that it can be grasped by the weak and the poor as well. Knowledge is the most democratic source of power. Which makes it a continuing threat to the powerful, even as they use it to enhance their own power. It also explains why every power-holder—from the patriarch of a family to the president of a company or the Prime Minister of a nation—wants to control the quantity, quality, and distribution of knowledge within one’s domain. The concept of the power triad leads to a remarkable irony. For at least the past three hundred years, the most basic political struggle within all the industrialized nations had been over the distribution of wealth: Who gets what? Terms like left and right, or capitalist and socialist have pivoted on this fundamental question. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
Yet, despite the vast maldistribution of wealth in a World painfully divided between rich and poor, it turns out that, compared with the other two sources of Worldly power, wealth has been, and is, the least maldistributed. Whatever gulf separates the rich from the poor, an even greater chasm separates the armed from the unarmed and the ignorant from the education. Today, in the fast-changing, affluent nations, despite all inequities of income and wealth, the coming struggle for power will increasingly turn into a struggle over the distribution of and access to knowledge. This is why, unless we understand how and to whom knowledge flows, we can neither protect ourselves against the abuse of power nor create the better, more democratic society that tomorrow’s technologies promise. The control of knowledge is the crux of tomorrow’s Worldwide struggle for power in every human institution. These changes in the nature of power itself are revolutionaizing relationships in the World of business. From the transformation and capital to the growing conflict between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” business and the emergence of startling new organizational forms, we will trace the new trajectory of power. These deep changes in business and the economy are paralleled by significant changes in politics, the media, and the global espionage industry. This will allow us to see how today’s tremendous, wrenching powershift will impact on the impoverished nations, the remaining socialist nations, and the future of the United States of America, Europe, and Japan. For today’s powershift will transform them all. If one imagines a system starting with individuals who cannot be enticed to cooperate, the collective stability of humanity implies that no single individual can hope to do any better than go along an be uncooperative as well. A World of “meanies” can resist invasion by anyone using any other strategy—provided that the newcomers arrive on time. The problem, of course, is that a single new comer in such a mean World has no one who will reciprocate any cooperation. If the newcomers arrive in small clusters, however, they will have a chance to get cooperation started. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Now supposed several people use TIT FOR TAT. Now if the TIT FOR TAT newcomers are a negligible proportion of the entire population, the meanies will be almost always interacting with other meanies. Thus, even a small cluster of individual’s using TIT FOR TAT can achieve more success than the large population of meanies they enter. Because the people who use TIT FOR TAT do so well when they do meet each other, they do not have to meet each other very often to make their strategy the superior one to use. In this way, a World of meanies can be invaded by a cluster of TIT FOR TAT—and rather easily at that. To illustrate this point, suppose a business school teacher taught a class of students to initiate cooperative behavior in the firms the join and to reciprocate cooperation from other firms. If the students did act this way, and if they did not disperse too widely (so that a sufficient proportion of their interactions were with other members of the same class), then the students would find that their lesion paid off. Therefore, for instance, a firm switching to TIT FOR TAT would need to have only 5 percent of its interaction with another such firm for them to be glad they gave cooperation a chance. Even less clustering is necessary when the interactions are expected to be of longer duration or the time discount factor is not as great. Nietzsche’s new beginning in philosophy starts from the observation that a shared sense of the sacred is the surest way to recognize a culture, and the key to understanding it and all of its facets. Hegel made this clear in his philosophy of history, and he had found the same awareness in Herodotus’ studies of various peoples, Greek and barbarian. What a people bows before tells us what it is. However, Hegel made a mistake; he believed there could be a thoroughly rational God, one who conciliated the demands of culture and those of science. Yet somehow he also saw that this was not so when he said that the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, meaning that only when a culture is over can it be understood. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
Hegel’s moment of understanding of the West coincided with its end. The West had been demythologized and had lost is power to inspire and its view of the future. Therefore, it is evident that its myths are what animates a culture, and the makers of myths are the makers of cultures and of humans. They are superior to philosophers, who only study and analyze what the poets makes. Hegel admits that poetry has lost its prophetic power but consoles oneself with the belief that philosophy will suffice. The artists whom Nietzsche saw around him, those whose gifts were the greatest, attested to this loss. They were what he called decadents, not because they lacked talent or their art was not impressive, but because their works were laments of artistic impotence, characterizations of an ugly World that the poets believe they cannot influence. Immediately after the French Revolution there had been a stupendous artistic effervescence, and poets thought they could again be the legislators of humankind. The vocation provided for the artists in the new philosophy of culture heartened them, and a new classic age was born. Idealism and romanticism appeared to have carved out a place for the sublime in the order of things. However, within a generation or two the mood had noticeably soured, and artists began to represent the romantic visions as a groundless hoax. Men like Baudelaire and Flaubert turned away from the public and made the moralism and romantic enthusiasm of their immediate predecessors look foolish. Adulteries without love, sins without punishment or redemption became the more authentic themes of art. The World had been disenchanted. Baudelaire presented sinning man as in the Christian vision, but without hope of God’s salvation, piercing pious fraudulence, hypocrite lecteur. And Flaubert drowned in venomous hatred of the bourgeoisie, which had conquered. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Culture was just fodder for its vanity. The great dualisms had collapsed; and art, creativity and freedom had been swallowed up by determinism and petty self-interest. In his greatest creation, M. Homais, the pharmacist, Flaubert encapsulated everything that modernity was and is to be. Homais represents the spirit of science, progress, liberalism, anticlericalism. He lives carefully with an eye to health. His education contains the best that has been thought and said. He knows everything that has ever happened. He knows that Christianity helped to free the slaves, but that it has outlived its historical usefulness. History existed to produce him, the man without prejudices. He is at home with everything, and nothing is beyond his grasp. He is a journalist, disseminating knowledge for the enlightenment of the masses. Compassion is his moral theme. An all this is nothing but petty amour-propre. Society exists to give him honor and self-esteem. Culture is his. There are no proper heroes to depict nor audiences to inspire. They are all one way or another. Emma Bovary is Homais’ foil. She can only dream of a World and men who do not and cannot exist. In this sober World she is nothing but a fool. She, like the modern artist, is pure longing with no possible goal. Her only triumph and her only free act is suicide. The art of appropriation, then, is a kind of shadowy recreation of the Universe by drawing it, piece by piece, into the brackets of artistic contemplation. Artists engaged in this pursuit have concentrated on the appropriation of religious forms, of philosophical forms, of political forms, of popular forms, and more recently, of art historical styles. These enterprises have met different fates. The appropriation of religious contents has been the most unpopular, even taboo, while that that based on philosophy, even linguistic philosophy, for a while acquired and made chic. In this discrimination the Apollonian (to use Nietzsche’s dichotomy) surfaced over the hidden depth of the Dionysus, the unconscious, in which all things flow into and through oner another. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
In the Apollonian light each thing is seen clear and separate, as itself; in the Dionysian dark all things merge into a flowing and molten invisibility. That our culture, in the age of science, should favor the Apollonian, is not surprising. The value of light is beyond question; but where there is no darkness there can be on illumination. Rejection of the Dionysian does not serve the purpose of clear and total seeing. If it is to be practice with sufficient range of feeling not to trivialize life, universal appropriation has an exciting task. The levity, the sense of the will to entertain, that prevailed when Ben or Gilbert & George displayed themselves as sculptures was balanced by the sometimes horrifying order through which the appropriation of religious forms unfolded. It was necessary to descend from the pedestal, with its Apollonian apotheosis of the ego, into the Dionysian night of the unconscious, and to being into the light the logic of its darkness. There is a widespread belief that some things on television are “real” and some things are not real. Sports events are real; when we see them happening on television, we can count on the fact that they happen as we see them. Talk shows are real, although it is true that they happen only for television and they sometimes happen some days before we see them. Situation comedies are not real; neither are the police dramas, although they may be based on real events from time to time. Are historical programs real? Well, no, not exactly. Most are re-created various of events that happened a long time ago when cameras did not even exist. The people we see in them are actors, playing real people, or at least people who used to be real but are now dead. The actors are speaking for them, but they are usually not saying the exact words that the real people said. Also, some of the events in the historical treatment are dropped out—for reasons of time, or because they do not fit the line of the story—and some others are left in. So is it real? Or is it semireal? Or not real? #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Advertising is, of course definitely not real. Well, on the other hand, those are real people in those ads—we see them walking and talking—but the situations they are portraying are not real, although of course they may be true to life. Does this make them more real? How about Alice in Wonderland Sesame Street Are they real? Again, they are real people dealing with real subjects: animals, kids, math, jokes…but what does “real” mean in that context? Our society assumes that human beings can make the distinction between what is real and what is not real, even when the real and not-real are served up in the same way, intercut with one another, sent to us from many distant places and times and arriving one behind the other in our houses, shooting out of a box in our living rooms straight into our heads. What we see in our heads are real-looking human beings, walking and talking as though they were real, even though much of the time they are, or, that is, the parts they are playing are not real. At the University of Michigan, Joel Gregory grabs a molecular rod with both hands and twists it. It feels a bit weak, and a ripple of red reveals too much stress in a strained molecular bond halfway down its length. He adds two atoms and twists the rod again: all greens and blues, much better. Joel plugs the rod into the mechanical arm he is designing, turns up the temperature, and sets the whole thing in motion. A million atoms dance in thermal vibration, gears spin, and the arm swings to and fro in programmed motion. It looks good. A few parts are still mock-ups, but doing a thesis takes time, and he will work out the rest of the molecular details later. Joel strips off the compute display goggles and glovers and blinks at the real World. It is time for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. He grabs the computer itself, stuffs it into his pocket, and head for the student center. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
Researchers already use computers to build models, and “virtual reality systems” have begun to appear, enabling a user to walk around the image of a molecule and “touch” it, using computer-controlled goggles. We cannot build a super computer able to model a million-atom machine yet-much less build a pocket supercomputer—but computers keep shrinking in size and costs. With nanotechnology to make molecular parts, a computer like Joel’s will become easy to build. Today’s supercomputers will seem like hand cranked adding machines by comparison. In 1543, scholars and philosophers had no reason to fear persecution for their ideas so long as they did not directly challenge the authority of the church, which Copernicus had no with to do. Though the authorship of the preface to his work is in dispute, the preface clearly indicates that his ideas are to be taken as hypotheses, and that his “hypotheses need not be true or even probable.” We can be sure that Copernicus believed that the Earth or the planets moved in the manner described in his system, which he understood to consist of geometric fictions. And he did not believe that his work undermined the supremacy of theology. It is true that Martin Luther called Copernicus “a fool who went against Holy Writ,” but Copernicus did not think he had done so—which proves, I suppose, that Luther saw more deeply than Copernicus. The way is shown by God in his “direction,” the Torah. This God directs, that is, he teaches us to distinguish between the true way and the false ways. His direction, his teaching of the distinction, is given to us. However, it is not enough to accept it. We must “delight” in it, we must cling to it with a passion more exalted than all the passions of the wicked. Nor is it enough to learn it passively. We must again and again “mutter” it, we must repeat its living word after it, with our speaking we must enter into the word’ spokenness, so that it is spoken anew by us in our biographical situation of today—and so on and on in eternal actuality. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
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The annual inflation rate in the United States of America slowed to 8.3 percent in April 2022 from a 41-year high of 8.5 percent in March, but less than market forecasts of 8.1 percent. Energy prices increased 30.3 percent, below 32 percent in March, namely gasoline (43.6 percent vs 48 percent), while fuel oil increased more (80.5 percent vs 70.1 percent). On the other hand, food prices jumped 9.4 percent, the most since April 1981 and prices also rose faster for shelter (5.1 percent vs 5 percent) and new vehicles (13.2 vs 12.5 percent). To grasp the full meaning of this looming implosion, however, it is not enough to look inside America. For the United States of America, it turns out, is hardly alone. In fact, from Germany, France, and Britain to South Korea, and Japan, we find a similar epidemic of failure—widening cracks in key institutions, starting, as in the United States of America, with the nuclear family. In Japan, divorce rates, especially among married couples married for twenty years or more, are soaring to unprecedented high. Far more arresting, however, are results of a survey by Japan’s Youth Research Institute. It showed that 75 percent of American schoolgirls agreed with the statement “Everyone should get married”—but that “a staggering 88 percent of Japanese girls disagreed.” South Korea’s divorce rate, traditionally low, has become one of the highest in the World. In the United Kingdom, there is a steady decline in the nuclear family. In fact, the number of households headed by married couples has fallen below 50 percent for the first time, reflecting sweeping social changes in British family life. Educational crises, too, are no U.S. monopoly. “CLASSROOM COLLAPSE” GRIPPING SCHOOLS NATIONWIDE, screams a headline in the Japan Times. The New York Times reported: EDUCATORS TRY TO TAME JAPAN’S BLACKBOARD JUNGLES.
Simultaneously, as in the United States of America, Japan’s once highly admired corporate giants have been hit by scandal after scandal—“Enronitis” Japanese-style. Even as its banking system teeters under loads of nonperforming loans, Tokyo Electric Power Co. sees its president and chairman resign in disgrace because the company falsified safety data at its nuclear-power plants. Soon following TEPCO into ignominy were leaders of Mitsui, Snow Brand Food, Nippon Meat Packers, Mitsubishi Motors, Nissho Iwai and other top corporations. All these were followed by that beset the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2005. First a computer crash shut down all trading for the first time in the exchange’s fifty-six-year history. A few weeks later, observers repressed laughter when a trader from Mizuho Securities Co. mistakenly sold 610,000 shares of a stock for one yen apiece rather than one share for 610,000 yen—a minor glitch that cost his firm $340 million. And on April 19th 2022, Japan’s Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki said on Tuesday the damage to the economy from a weakening yen at present is greater than the benefits accruing to it, making the most explicit warning yet against the currency’s recent slump versus the dollar. The yen’s fall has worsened imported inflationary pressures in Japan amid a spike in global commodity and oil costs, and an increase in supply snags, which have intensified in the wake of the Ukraine crisis. “Stability is important and sharp currency moves are undesirable,” Suzuki told parliament, repeating previous comments as the Japanese currency weakened to fresh 20-year lows on the dollar. “A weak yen has its merit, but demerit is greater under the current situation where crude oil and raw materials costs are surging globally, while the weak yen boosts import prices, hurting consumers and firms that are unable to pass on costs,” Suzuki reports. The currency market shrugged off the ministers warning, sending yen to 127.80 to the dollar, its lowest level since May 2002. The yen has lost about 10 percent against the dollar so far this year.
Investors say verbal warnings will not have much of an impact as the yen’s weakness reflects fundamental, noting contrasting prospects for an aggressive streak of Federal Reserve tightening with that of the Bank of Japan’s commitment to maintain its powerful monetary easing plan. An April 1-11 poll of 5,400 Japanese firms conducted by private credit research firm Tokyo Shoko Research showed roughly 40 percent suffered a negative impact from a weak yen, with assumed dollar/yen rates being as low as 110 yen among listed manufacturers. Furthermore, a former Nissan executive Greg Kelly has been found guilty of assisting the Japanese car giant’s ex-CEO Carlos Ghosn to his part of 9.3 billion yen ($80.4 million) of his income from financial regulators. The court also fined Nissan $1.6 million USD (200 million yen) for failing to disclose Mr. Ghosn’s pay. The carmaker pledged guilty at the start of the 19-month trial. Mr. Kelly was sentenced to six months in jail suspended for three years. In 2019, Mr. Ghosn fled Japan to his home country of Lebanon hidden in a box on a private jet. There was a 30 percent drop in Nissan sales at the outbreak of this tragedy. However, recently, fugitive former car executive Carlos Ghosn, said in a recent interview from Beirut, Lebanon that Nissan’s alliance partner Renault SA is struggling because of the Japanese automaker’s lack of vision. He is not very “optimistic about the future of Nissan.” Recent corporate crises have been even more dramatic in South Korea, where scandals have led to the flight of the founder of Daewoo, the suicide of one of the sons of Hyundai’s founder and the imprisonment of the head of SK another great chaebol—the country’s megafirms. Most Korean consumers expect that normalcy will return to routines only after June 2022, yet there are signs of pre-COVID-19 routines returning. Korean customers have been less optimistic than those in other countries about the economic recovery. However, optimism in Korea is much higher now than two years ago. Half of consumers indicate a desire to splurge, with intent to do so being the strongest in Gen Z and millennials. One-eight of consumers say they have returned to out-of-home activities.
In Europe, the recent scandal list includes Volkswagen in Germany, Parmalat in Italy, Credit Lyonnais in France, Skandia in Sweden and the oil companies Elf and Royal Dutch/Shell. On top of that, a commodity crisis, and a supply chain crisis. What is next? A global recession? Markets are a total mess, with Walmart tanking 10 percent in one trading session on May 18, 2022. The last time that happened was the stock market crash of October 1987. Inflation, thanks to unpresented money printing and Universal Basic Income test-drives during an unprecedented China-style lockdown of the U.S. economy in 2020-2021, is now eroding living standards. The U.K. inflation print of May 18 was 9 percent. How transitory is this? If Europe keeps the pressure on commodities in its economic war with Russia, then the answer is—as long as Europe and Russia are sanctioning each other to smithereens. The S&P has been on a losing streak for six weeks. If it loses for 8 weeks in a row, that is a record breaker. It is down 20 percent year-to-date. The Nasdaq is in similar territory. As is China, as measured by the CSI-300. Europe can only get worse from here, barring the European Central Bank buying DAX and CAC-50 blue chips without telling us. France just went through an election, and Emmanuel Macron saw his populist opponent, Marine Le Pen win more votes of those under the age of 50, than Macron. There are parliamentary elections coming up this summer, another test for how the Macron government is handling a series of non-stop crisis since the pandemic started in 2020, and the adults and expert class returned to power in Washington. Speaking of which, the Democratic Party is worried. There is constant talk of pulling tariffs off China to fight inflation. However, this is highly unpopular. Rolling back tariffs is unlikely to have a meaningful impact on U.S. inflation. Midterm elections are expected to turn the tide in the House for the Republicans, and maybe in the Senate, as well. Pretending to fight inflation by opening the flood gates to China imports is a bad policy and against voters’ interests.
This mother Janet Yellen warned President Biden that sanctions against Russia and retaliatory sanctions imposed by Russia against the U.S. and Europe risk plunging the World into a deep global recession. No one is getting Russian fertilizer or wheat. Oil will be cut off by the end of 2022, with a few exceptions. They are still buying natural gas, but claim to be trying to buy less as they wean themselves off of it to source from elsewhere, including Qatar, Nigeria, Algeria, and mor expensive American LNG. So what does a global recession mean? Well, it would be a period when many of the World’s economies are not successful and businesses experience a lot of problems: Huge increases in World energy costs are expected. Global recession can occur more easily in modern times because the economies of most countries are interdependent. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), total Worldwide economic growth of less than 3 percent constitutes a global recession. The most widely accepted definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. The United States of America is now facing the familiar precursors of a recession, including rising interest rates on the back of high inflation. Many economists are warning of a recession and Wall Street Gurus say those fears are exaggerated, even though the signs are here. Perhaps they are just being optimistic to keep funding their stocks and paychecks. If prices to do decelerate, as anticipated, the Fed faces a difficult path to stabilizing the economy. Still, the U.S economy is quite strong at the moment, but there is indeed some risk of slipping into recession. Its length and severity will depend in large part on the Fed’s response. Some of the nation’s largest and most influential retailers reported disappointing sales and profits this week because of higher costs and overstocked inventory issues, engineered to avoid supply chain disruptions, setting off a stock market meltdown. As reported earlier, Walmart stock plunged more than 11 percent. Target shares tumbled 26 percent, following a stunning 52 percent drop in quarterly profits, which executives attributed in part to cooling demand for big-ticket items such as TV’s, kitchen appliances and outdoor furniture.
Goldman Sachs this week revised down its forecast for second-quarter U.S. economic growth, to annualized rate of 2.5 percent, citing higher prices and continued supply chain disruptions. That follows an unexpected contraction in the first three months of 2022, when the economy shrank at a 1.4 percent pace, mostly because of a trade imbalance and drop in inventory purchases. The U.S. Dollar is becoming attractive to investor because it is very strong right now. However, national claims for unemployment insurance climbed up to 218,000 last week, a four-month high although still near historic lows, but some companies report they are overstaffed. Higher prices for basics like food, energy and housing are straining Americans’ budgets and clouding their view of the economy. If that were not enough to keep the headline writers busy, all these were paralleled, as the United States, by upsets and upheavals in the health sectors of many countries. In the United States of America, some politicians routinely point to the British health service as a model to be emulated. Yet, the British Council complains, “not a day goes by without another story about the ‘crisis’ in the National Health Service.” The German health service is described in the press as “collapsing,” and Sweden’s system as in “acute financial crisis.” And Japan’s health insurance system could also collapse. As for pensions, France’s prime minister claims its impending pension disaster threatens the survival of the republic. Nor is France alone. Europe faces a retiree crisis. Japan also has a crisis with the nation’s pension system, as does Korea. Underfunded corporate pensions just in America? Try Siemens in Germany, with is $10.6 billion pension-fund deficit. The same pattern continues right down the line. Thus the American media’s critical loss of credibility is mirrored, even before President Trump exposed the “fake news.” The crises at Le Monde and Le Figaro, France’s top daily newspapers; and at Asahi Shimbun in Japan.
How about charities? Scandals at the American Red Cross and United Way were paralleled rather spectacularly not long ago in Britain, where tenor Luciano Pavarotti, rock star David Bowie and playwright Tom Stoppard made headlines by publicly ending their support of War Child UK, a charity set up to help children in war-torn countries. Having discovered that its cofounder and a consultant had taken bribes from a contractor employed by the organization, Pavarotti led the walkout to disassociate himself, as a spokeswoman put it, from “anything that was corrupt.” Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement are dismissing allegations that they mismanaged millions of dollars after a scathing New York Magazine report revealed that they had purchased a $6 million home in Southern California with donated funds. The report revealed that the group secretly bought a 6,500 square-foot mansion in October of 2020 for its members to create content promoting social justice. The report only fueled questions about the organization’s finances, just a year after the foundation revealed a detailed look at its funds for the first tie. The Associated Press reported then that the foundation said it had taken in just over $90 million in 2020 and committed $21.7 million in grant funding to both official and unofficial BLM chapters, along with 30 other Black-led grassroots organizations. The foundation puts its operating budget at $8.4 million. Along with questions about the remainder of the $90 million, leaders from local chapters who said they had received little to no funding from the organization, and they wondered where money raised before 2020 had gone. History, it goes without saying, is replete with scandals, failures and crises. Our generation did not invent them. However, today’s outbreak in country after country are qualitatively different. Never—with the possible exception of the worst days of World War II—has a generation seen so many institutional breakdowns in so many countries, occurring within the same brief time frame and coming at so rapid a pace.
Never has so many institutional crises been as tightly interrelated—with powerful feedback flows linking family, education, work, health, retirement, politics, and media—all affecting the wealth system. And never has re-globalization sent the financial effects of these crises so quickly across so many borders. What is happening, therefore, is not a series of isolated upset but a truly systemic breakdown—a challenge to the survival of whole societies that depend on these shaking and rattling institutions. Today’s institutional upheaval is historically unique for yet another crucial reason. All these crises at national levels are taking place at a pivotal moment for global institutions, too, starting with the United Nations. Even as the U.N. has rocked the World over the past 17 years with the referral of 33 cases of sexual abuse and exploitation to national authorities globally. Over that same period, it has received 120 reports of sexual abuse and exploitation in Haiti alone. The alleged perpetrators include drivers, security guards, doctors, consultants, and senior staff. United Nations agencies’ employees have been charged with sexual misconduct repeatedly. Meanwhile there have been allegations of large-scale corruption in its oil-for-food program in Iraq, and one will remember when Secretary-General Kofi Annan came under fire for his son’s involvement with a company seeking contracts in Iraq, another scandal hit the headlines. This one centered on charges of pedophilia and sexual abuse of women by U.N. peacekeepers in Africa. Earlier, Annan had warned that the entire U.N. as an institution is in a potentially terminal crisis owning to its obsolete organization structure. The International Development Association is the part of the World Bank that is meant to help the World’s poorest countries. Its explicit mission is “to reduce poverty by providing zero to low-interest loans and grants for programs that boost economic growth, reduce inequalities, and improve people’s living conditions.” However, there is an internal war raging inside the World Bank even as outside analysts slam it for “incompetence, inefficiency and irrelevance.”
The uber-arrogant International Monetary Fund grudgingly admits that it, too, faces a crisis. The World Organization, meanwhile, is losing ground, along with many other intergovernmental agencies. At the global level, too, we are moving rapidly toward systemic crisis. And when institutional crises in the major nations converge with equally systemic breakdown of institutions at the global level, as they are likely to do, the combined, self-reinforcing impact will affect not just Americans. Affluent young latte sippers on Omotesando in Tokyo will feel the effects, as will coffee farmers in Central America, women on assembly lines in Chin, and small-business people in Germany’s Mittlestand, along with financial analysts and investors from Wall Street, London and Frankfurt to Singapore and Seoul. What happens will naturally be influenced by other powerful factors—war, terrorism, immigration, ecological disasters, geopolitical shifts. However, even without these, the mutually reinforcing convergence of national and global crises could trigger something far bigger and more dangerous than the failure of any single institution of an infrastructural implosion in any one country. This concatenation of breakdowns and scandals may cheer those who hate America and the West, or who hate rich nations in general. However, it would be wise for them to defer any celebration. For, as the Chinese have long known, crisis and opportunity walk together. Instead of a historical disaster, these interlinked crises can be turned to massive advantage. And not just for the countries experiencing them. To make that happen, we need to understand why in so many countries, and at the level of the global order itself, so many of our most important, interlinked institutions teeter on the brink of collective implosion. As you know, a revolution is sweeping today’s post-Bacon World. No genius in the past—not Sun-Tzu, not Machiavelli, not Bacon himself—could have imagined today’s deepest powershift: the astounding degree to which today both force and wealth themselves have come to depend on knowledge. (A power shift is a transfer of power. A “powershift” is a deep-level change in the very nature of power.)
Military might until not long ago was basically an extension of the mindless fist. Today it relies almost totally on “congealed mind”—knowledge embedded in weapons and surveillance technologies. From satellites to submarines, modern weapons are constructed of information-rich electronic components. Today’s fighter plane is a flying computer. Even “dumb” weapons today are manufactured with the help of supersmart computers or electronic chips. The military, to choose a single example, uses computerized knowledge—“expert systems”—in missile defense. Since subsonic missiles speed along at about 1,000 feet a second, effective defense systems need to react in, say 10 milliseconds. However, expert systems may embody as many as 10,000 to 100,000 rules elicited from human specialists. The computer must scan, weigh, and interrelate these rules before arriving at a decision as to how to respond to a threat. Thus the Pentagon’s Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has sent as a long-range goal the design of a system that can make one million logical inferences per second. Logic, inference, epistemology—in short, brain work, human and machine—is today’s precondition for military power. Similarly, it has become a business cliché to say that wealth is increasingly dependent on brainpower. The advanced economy could not run for thirty seconds without computers, and the new complexities of production, the integration of many diverse (and constantly changing) technologies, the de-massification of markets, continue to increase, by vast leaps, the amount and quality of information needed to make the system produce wealth. Furthermore, we are barely at the beginning of this “informationalization” process. Our best computers and CAD-CAM systems are still stone-ax primitive. Knowledge itself, therefore, turns out to be not only the source of the highest-quality of power, but also the most important ingredient of force and wealth. Put different, knowledge has gone from being an adjunct of money power and muscle power, to being their very essence. It is, in fact, the ultimate amplifier. This is the key to the powershift that lies ahead, and it explains why the battle for control of knowledge and the means of communication is heating up all over the World.
We have Caesar’s explanation of why Pompey’s allies stopped cooperating with him. “They regarded his [Pompey’s] prospects as hopeless and acted according to the common rule by which a man’s friends become his enemies in adversity.” Where a business is on the verge of bankruptcy and sells it accounts receivable to an outsider called a factor. This sale is made at a very substantial discount because once a manufacturer begins to go under, even one’s best customers begin refusing payment for merchandise, claiming defects in quality, failure to meet specifications, tardy delivery, or what-have-you. The great enforcer of morality in commerce is the continuing relationship, the belief that one will have to do business again with this customer, or this supplier, and when a failing company loses this automatic enforcer, not even a strong-arm factor is likely to find a substitute. Similarly, any member of Congress who is perceived as likely to be defeated in the next election may have some difficulty doing legislative business with colleagues on the usual basis of trust and good credit. There are many other examples of the importance of long-term interaction for the stability of cooperation. It is easier to maintain the norms of reciprocity in a stable small town or ethnic neighbourhood (which in modern times are affluent in some cases). Conversely, a visiting professor is likely to receive poor treatment by other faculty members compared to the way these same people treat their regular colleagues. A fascinating case of the development of cooperation based on continuing interaction occurred in the trench warfare of World War I. In the midst of this very brutal war there developed between the men facing each other what came to be called the “live-and-let live system.” The troops would attack each other when ordered to do so, but between large battles each side would deliberately avoid doing much hard to the other side—provided that the other side reciprocated.
The strategy was not necessarily TIT FOR TAT. Sometimes it was two for one. As a British officer wrote in his memoirs of the takeover of a new sector from the French: It was the French practice to “let sleeping dogs lie” when in a quiet sector…and of making this clear by retorting vigorously only when challenged. In one sector which we took over from them they explained to me that they had practically a code which the enemy well understood: they fired two shots for every one that came over, but never fired first. Such practices of tacit cooperation were quite illegal—but they were also endemic. For several years this system developed and elaborated itself despite the passions of the war and the best efforts of the generals to pursue a policy of constant attrition. The story is so rich in illuminating detail. Even without going further into the episode of trench warfare, the occurrence of a two-for-one strategy does suggest that one must be careful about drawing conclusions from a narrow focus on a pure TIT FOR TAT strategy. Just how broadly applicable was the proposition about TIT FOR TAT which said that it was collectively stable if and only if the future of the interaction was significantly important? The next proposition says that this result is very general indeed, and actually applies to any strategy which may be the first to cooperation. Any strategy which may be the first to cooperate can be collectively stable only when the risk is sufficiently large. The reason is that for a strategy to be collectively stable it must protect itself from invasion by any challenger, including the strategy which always defects. The interaction must last long enough for the gain from temptation to be nullified over future moves. This is the heart of the matter. The advantage of a nice rule in resisting invasion is that it attains to get the best results possible in a population consisting of a single type of strategy. It does this by getting the reward for mutual cooperation on each decision. However, both parties retaliate after a defection by the other. This observation leads to a general principle, since any collectively stable strategy which is willing to cooperate must somehow make it unprofitable for a challenger to try to exploit it. The general principle is that a nice rule must be provoked by the very first defection the other player, meaning that on some later move the strategy must have a finite chance of responding with a defection of its own.
For a nice strategy to be collectively stable, it must be provoked by the very first defection of the other party. The reason is simple enough. If a nice strategy were not provoked by a defection move, then it would not be collectively stable because it could be invaded by a rule which defected on one nonaggressive move. It is Nietzsche’s merit that he was aware that to philosophize is radically problematic in the cultural, historicist dispensation. He recognized the terrible intellectual and moral risks involved. At the center of his every thought was the questions “How is it possible to do what I am doing?” He tried to apply to his own thought the teachings of cultural relativism. This practically nobody else does. For example, Dr. Freud says that men are motivated by desire for pleasures of the flesh and power, but he did not apply those motives to explain his own science or his own scientific activity. However, if he can be a true scientist, id est, motivated by love of the truth, so can other humans, and his description of their motives is thus mortally flawed. Or if one is motivated by pleasures of the flesh or power, one is not a scientist, and one’s science is only one means among many possible to attain those ends. This contradiction runs throughout the natural and social sciences. They give an account of thing that cannot possibly explain the conduct of their practitioners. The highly ethical economist who speaks only about gain, the public-spirited political scientist who sees only group interest, the physicist who sins petitions in favor of freedom while recognizing only unfreedom—mathematical law governing moved matter—in the Universe are symptomatic of the difficulty of providing a self-explanation for science and a ground for the difficulty of providing a self-explanation for science and a ground for the theoretical life, which has dogged the life of the mind since early modernity but has become particularly acute with cultural relativism. Nietzsche, in response to this difficulty, self-consciously made dangerous experiments with his own philosophy, treating its source as the will to power instead of the will to truth.
The underlying question (and an insoluble knot in philosophy) is that of the relation between substance and attribute; specifically, how does one tell the agent from the activity? Certain Indian text, exploring imagistically the relation between god and the World, ask how one can tell the dancer from the dance. In the visual arts the question has always seemed easier, since the painter or sculptor or photographer has traditionally made an object outside him- or herself. However, universalizing appropriation has dissolved such a conception, and in performance art, as in the dance, the agent and activity often seem inseparable. In the last seventy years various performances by artists (James Lee Bryars, Chris Burden, Linda Montano, Aaliyah Haughton, Britney Spears, Beyonce, and others) carried this category shift or semantic rotation to its limit by moving into galleries and living there for extended periods as performances. In this situation even the minutest details of everyday life are temporarily distanced and made strange—made art, that is—by the imposition on them of a new category overlay that alters the cognitive focus of both the performer and the beholder. Something parallel, though with fewer possibilities for irony, occurs when novices in ashrams are advised to regard their experiences, at every moment of the day, as sacred and special. That these creations by designation are linguistic, involving a willed change in the use of the word “art,” does not altogether rob them of mystery and effectiveness. It should be emphasized that category shift by forced designation is the basis of many magical procedures. In the Roman Catholic mass, for example, certain well-known objects—bread and “spirits”—are ritually designated as certain other objects—flesh and blood—which, in the manifest sense of every day experience, they clearly are not; and the initiate who accept the semantic rotation shifts his or her affection and sensibility accordingly. Art has often been thought of as exercising a sort of magic; around 1960, some artists adopted an actual magical procedure—basically a linguistic form of what Sir James Frazer called “sympathetic magic.” At that moment art entered an ambiguous realm from which it has not yet definitively emerged.
For the magical rite is already an appropriation of a piece of reality into a sheltered or bracketed zone of contemplation; when it is reapportioned into the realm of art, a double distancing occurs. Furthermore, the universalization of any category, or the complete submission of its ontology to the process of a metaphor, blurs or even erases its individual identity. To be everything is not to be anything in particular. In regard to the universal set, the Law of Identity has no function. The semantical coextensiveness of art and life means either that art has disappeared into life, melting into it everywhere like a new spark of indwelling meaning, or (and this departs at once into theistic metaphor) that life has dissolved into art. In short it means ultimately that the terms have become meaningless in relation to one another, since language operates not by sameness but by difference, and two sets with the same contents are the same. Seeing is believing. Like many an axiom, this one is literally true. Only since the ascendancy of the media has this been opened to question. Throughout the hundreds of thousands of generations of human existence, whatever we saw with our eyes was concrete and reliable. Experience was directly between us and the natural environment. Nonmediated. Nonprocessed. Not altered by other humans. If we saw a flock of birds flying southward, then these birds were definitely doing that We could believe in it. We might interpret this concrete information in various ways, perhaps misinterpret it, but there could never have been a question as to whether it was happening. The information itself, the birds and their flight, could not be doubted. This is the case with all sensory information. Whatever information the senses produce the brain trusts as inherently believable. If the sense could not be relied upon, then the World would have been an utterly confusing place. Humans would have been unable to make any sensible choices leading to survival. If there were no concretely true information, there could have been no sane functioning; the species could not have survived. This belief in sense perception is the foundation, the given, for human functioning. This is not to say there is no illusion.
In a desert environment, as we know, mirage can cause some to believe they are seeing things that are not there. However, the humans who are fooled in this way are the humans who are new to that environment. It is a problem of experience and interpretation. Their senses are not yet attuned to the new informational context. People who live for generations in such places learn to allow for illusions and do not actually “see” them in the way that visitors do. They learn to look at the edges of images, like the shadow spaces of Castaneda’s Don Juan, and to perceive a reality which is different from the visitor’s. In jungle environments, and among certain creatures, there is a camouflage. Animals use it to fool each other, including humans. Humans also use it, or devise image tricks, to fool animals and other humans. In this way images become processed images, deliberately altered, and may serve to fool an observer whose senses and interpretations are not sufficiently sharp. These are the classical exceptions which prove the point, because the basis of success for camouflage and illusion is that humans will believe what they see. In this sense, camouflage is a kind of sensory jujitsu that only confirms the original point; the senses are inherently believable. In the modern World, information rom the senses cannot be relied upon as before. We attempt to process artificial smells, tastes, sights and sounds as though they could reveal planetary reality, but we cannot make anything of them because we are no longer dealing directly with the planet. The environment itself has been reconstructed into an already abstracted, arbitrary form. Our sense are no longer reacting to information that comes directly from the source. They are reacting to processed information, the manifestation of human minds. Our information is confined in advance to the forms that other humans provide. Now, with electronic media, our sense are removed a step further from the source. The very images that we see can be altered and are. They are framed, ripped out of context, edited, re-created, sped up, slowed down and interrupted by other images. They arrive from a variety of places on the planet where we are not and were filmed at times which are not the present. What is more, many of the images are totally fictional. The things that we see are not happening and never happened. That is, they happened, but it is only the acting that happened, not the event.
Obviously, in the present age, we ought not rely on images to the same degree that our ancestors relied on the image of flying birds. Meanwhile, the images proceed inward as though they were the same as natural, unprocessed imagery. They move, walk, talk, and seem real. We assume they are real in the way images have always been real. We are unaware of any alteration. The change is difficult to absorb. What is required is a doubting process, a sensory cynicism that would have been profoundly inappropriate, even dangerous, for all previous human history. To assume that some sensory data could be eliminated totally and other sense information made unreliable would have left humans totally confused, lost in space, without knowledge of how to do anything, as though sensory environment itself had somehow gone mad (Solaris). The synapse would be broken. Contact lost. That is the present situation. We are only the fifth generation that has had to face the fact that huge proportions of the images we carry in our heads are not natural images which arrived as though they were connected to the planet. Like the Inuit transplanted to the city, or the Native American from the jungle who must suddenly deal with metallic birds, we do not have the ability to cope. Evolution has not arranged for us to allow for varying degrees of absorption and reliance on visual and aural information. There is nothing in the history of the species which assist our basic senses in understanding that imagery can be altered in time, speed or sequence, or that an images can arrives from a distance. Without training in sensory cynicism, we cannot possibly learn to deal with this. It will take several generations to let go of our genetically coses tendency to soak up all images as though they are 100 percent real. And think if we do manage to do that, what will we have? Since nothing can be directly experienced, we will have creatures who cannot believe in their senses and who take everything as it comes. Without the human bias toward belief, the media could not exist. What is more, because of the bias is so automatic and unnoticed, the media, all media, are in a position to exploit, the belief, to encourage you to believe in their questionable sensory information. This bias to believe has commercial value for the media since it allows them to keep your attention, as though it were south-flying birds you were seeing. The media, all media but particularly moving-image media, which present data so nearly natural, effectively convert our naïve and automatic trust in the reliability of images into their own authority.
California Scout Troop 9731 has hiked for six days, deep in the second-wilderness forests of the Pacific Northwest. “I bet we are the first people every to walk here,” says Leo, one of the youngest scouts. “Well, maybe you are right about walking,” says Scoutmaster Justin, “but look up ahead—what do you see, scouts?” Twenty paces ahead runs a strip of younger trees, stretching left and right until it vanishes among the trucks of the surrounding forest. “Hey, guys! Another old logging road!” shout Charlie, an older scout. Several scouts pull probes from their pockets and fit them to the ends of their walking sticks. Justin smiles: It has been ten years since a California troop found anything this way, but the kids keep trying. The scouts fan out, angling their path along the scar of the old road, poking at the ground and watching the readouts on the stick handles. Suddenly, unexpectedly, comes a call: “I have got a signal! Wow—I have got PCBs!” In a moment, grinning scouts are mapping and tracing the spill. Decades ago, a truck with a leaking load of chemical waste snuck down the old logging road, leaving a toxic trail. That trail leads them to a deep ravine, some rusted drums, and a nice wide path of invisible filth. The excitement is electrifying. Setting aside their maps and orienteering practice, they unseal a satellite locator to log the exact latitude and longitude of the site, then send a message that registers their cleanup claim on the ravine. The survey done, they head off again, eagerly planning a return trip to earn the now-rate Toxic Waste Cleanup Merit Badge. Today, tree farms are replacing wilderness. Tomorrow, the slow return to wilderness may begin, when nature need no longer be seen as a storehouse of natural resources to be plundered. However, there is very little that need be taken from nature to provide humans with wealth, and it is post-breakthrough technologies can remove from nature toxic residues of twentieth and twenty-first century mistakes.
The modern technocracies of the West have their roots in the medieval European World, from which there emerged three great inventions: The mechanical clock, which provided a new conception of time; the printing press with movable type, which attacked the epistemology of the oral tradition; and the telescope, which attacked the fundamental proposition of Judeo-Christian theology. Each of these was significant in creating a new relationship between tools and culture. However, since it is permissible to day that among faith, hope, and charity the last is most important, I shall venture to say that among the clock, the press, and the telescope the last is also the most important. To be more exact (since Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and to some extent Kepler did their work without benefit of the telescope), somewhat cruder instruments of observation than the telescope allowed men to see, measures, and speculate about the Heavens in ways that had not been possible before. However, the refinements of the telescope made their knowledge so precise that there followed a collapse, if one may say it this way, of the moral center of gravity in the West. That moral center had allowed people to believe that the Earth was the stable center of the Universe and therefore that humankind was so special interest to God. After Copernicus, Kepler, and especially Galileo, the Earth became a lonely wanderer in an obscure galaxy in some hidden corner of the Universe, and this left the Western World to wonder if God had any interest in us at all. Although John Milton was only an infant when Galileo’s Messenger from the Stars was printedin 1610, he was able, years later, to describe the psychic desolation of an unfathomable Universe that Galileo’s telescopic vision thrust upon an unprepared theology. In Paradise Lost, Milton wrote: Before [his] eyes in sudden view appear the secrets of the horary Deep—a dark illimitable ocean, without bound, without dimension. Truly, a paradise lost. But it was not Galileo’s intention—neither was it Copernicus’ or Kepler’s—to so disarm their culture.
There were medieval men who, like Gutenberg before them, had no wish to damage the spiritual foundations of their World. Copernicus, for example, was a doctor of canon law, having been elected a canon of Frauenburg Cathedral. Although he never took a medial degree, he studied medicine, was private to his uncle, and among many people was better known as a physician than an astronomer. He published only scientific work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, the first completed copy arriving from the printer only a few hours before he death, at the age of seventy, on May 24, 1543. He had delayed publishing his heliocentric theory for thirty years, largely because he believed it to be unsound, not because he feared retribution from the church. In fact, his book was not placed on the Index until seventy-three years after it was published, and then only for a short time. (Galileo’s trial did not take place until ninety years after Copernicus’ death.) Through His contact with them God draws them out of the abundance of living creatures in order to communicate with them. This “knowing” of His, this reaching out to touch and grasp, means that the human is lifted out, and it is as those who have been lifted out that they have intercourse with Him. God knows the ways of Humans. The way, the way of life of these humans is so created that at each of its stages they experience the divine contact afresh. And they experience the divine contact afresh. And they experience it as befits a real way, at each stage they experience it in the manner specifically appropriate to the stage. Their experience of the divine “knowing” is not like any experience of nature, it is a genuinely biographical experience, that is, what is experienced in this manner is experienced in the course of one’s own personal life, in destiny as it is lived through in each particular occasion. However cruel and contrary this destiny might appear when viewed apart from intercourse with God, when it is irradiated by His “knowing” it is “success,” just as every action of this human, one’s disappointments and even one’s failures, are success. O the happiness of the man who goes the way which is shown and “known” by God!
New Homes Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch Residence 3
Residence Three at Mills Station boasts approximately 2,400 square feet in this expansive two story home. There are three bedrooms, with the option for adding one more bedroom, two and a half bathrooms, and a two car garage plus workshop!
The charming front courtyard welcomes you home and the high ceilings and thoughtfully designed floor plan let you know that you’ve made the right choice with Cresleigh. You can fully embrace the indoor/outdoor lifestyle so organic to Northern California with a covered patio located right off kitchen with sliding glass doors on all three sides.
The den on the first floor provides a private office if you work from home or play room for the kids to be nearby while offering an option for a bedroom on the first floor.
The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters. The openness in the design allows the Great Room and kitchen to interact with each other seamlessly. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-3/
Thank you for your interest in this highly coveted community. While homes at Brighton Station are no longer available, its neighboring community, Mills Station, is still actively selling with two new communities coming soon.
We look forward to meeting you!
Randolph Harris II International Institute 