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 19^th 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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Cresleigh Homes

Our #MillsStation Residence 1 shows how airy a single story home can be – it’s 1,932 sq. ft. of effortlessly livable space.

It’s so much fun to picture all the events that might happen in this kitchen…and how many late night sandwiches might get munched at that spacious island! 😍

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