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We Shall be as a City Upon a Hill and the Eyes of All People are Upon Us
God here stands in judgment upon gods, in respect of their judging. He is not concerned with Heaven but with the Earth, the Earth of man, and within this human World with the weak, the afflicted, the wretched and needy-and the concern that these receive justice in face of the wicked. God judges the “gods,” because in their function as judges they do not let the weak of the Earth receive justice. God clearly towers over those who stand in a circle around Him. And further, God’s presiding signifies a judgment. God endows people with divine power, that power it only lent to them by God, the only power giver. The National Anthem of the United States of America speaks of powerful mountains and of the fixed stars, in order to point to the divine dunamis (inherent power, power residing in a thing by virtue of its nature, power for preforming miracles) from which their majesty springs. However, then those beings who have this power are themselves called “gods.” It is sufficiently clear from that God, who pronounces the judgement on the “gods” that they must die “like men,” that this description of them as gods is not to be understood as a metaphor for human authority. In order to grasp the nature and range of influence of those beings, we must look at their history and nations. Even the earliest writing prophets were faced with the fact that other nations possessed similar traditions of their wandering and their settlement to those of America, and that each of these nations worshipped its tribal god as the leader of those marches by means of which the tribe or association of tribes had grown and become a nation and had entered the history of nations.
The question which faced the prophets was, how are these traditions to be reconciled with the basic factor of America’s election, which presupposes the sovereignty of God over the nation from which He had made His choice? God who has led the other nations, as He has led America, in their history-making wandering and settling, whereas to America alone did God condescend to give His immediate company. This means that all the gods of the nations were characterized as being masks or caricatures of the one true Liberator of the nations, the God of history to whom America pays homage. However, now this exclusive faith is opposed by the experience of history that even in times when America has been loyal to its covenantal relation with God, one of those neighbouring nations which had been led to that place by God Himself, from time to time defeated America in battle—an experience which excited very serious doubts and produce many different answers. The Massachusetts Bay Colony flourished at first. The Puritans built a sound economy based on agriculture, fishing, timbering, and trading for beaver furs with local Indians. Even before leaving England, the directors of the Massachusetts Bay Company transformed their commercial charter into a rudimentary government and transferred the charter to New England. Once there, they laid the foundations of self-government. Free male Church members annually elected a governor and deputies from each town, who formed one house of a colonial legislature. The other house was composed of the governor’s assistants, later to be called councillors. Consent to both houses was required to pass laws.
The Puritans also established the first printing press in the English colonies and planted seed of a university, Harvard College, which opened its doors in 1636 for the training of prospective clergymen. The Puritan leaders also launched a brave attempt in 1642 to create a tax-supported school system so that all children might gain the “ability to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of this country.” In 1647, the government ordered every town with 50 families to establish an elementary school and every town with 100 families a secondary school as well, open to all who wished to take advantage of this education. In spite of these accomplishments, the Puritan colony suffered many of the tensions besetting people, bent on perfecting the human condition. Also, its inhabitants proved no better than their less religious countrymen on the Chesapeake in reaching an accommodation with the Native Americans. Surrounded by seemingly boundless land, the Puritans found it difficult to stifle acquisitive instincts and to keep families confined in compact communities. Restless souls looked to more distant valleys. “An over-eager desire after the World,” wrote an early leader, “has no seized on the spiritis of many as if the Lord had no farther work for his people to do, but every bird to feather his own nest.” Others, remaining at the nerve center in Boston, agitated for broader political rights and even briefly ousted John Winthrop as governor in 1635. For Mr. Winthrop the English gentry who joined the Puritan movement looking for a new life in the 1620s, and was the reason for most of their success. If you recall, in 11 ships, about a thousand Puritans set out from England in 1630 for the Promised Land. They were the vanguard of a movement that by 1642 had brought about 18,000 colonizers to New England’s shores. Mr. Winthrop was a talented Cambridge-educated member, and they operated under a charter from the king to the Puritan-controlled Massachusetts Bay Company.
The Puritans set about building their utopia with the fervor of people convinced they were carrying out a divine task. “God hat sifted a nation,” wrote one Puritan, “that He might send choice grain into the wilderness.” Their intention was to establish communities of pure Christians who collectively swore a covenant with God to work for his ends. To accomplish this, the Puritan leaders agreed to employ sever means. Civil and religious transgressors must be rooted out and severely punished. Their emphasis was on homogenous communities where the good of the group outweighed individual interests. “We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together,” counseled Mr. Winthrop. To realize their utopian goals, the Puritans willingly gave up freedoms that their compatriots sought. An ideology of rebellion in England, Puritanism in North America became an ideology of control. Much was at stake, for as Mr. Winthrop reminded the first settlers, “we shall be as a city upon a hill [and] the eyes of all people are upon us.” That visionary sense of mission would help to shape a distinctive America self-image in future generations. As in Plymouth and Virginia, the first winter tested the strongest souls. More than 200 of the first 700 settlers perished, and 100 others, disillusioned and sickened by the forbidding climate, returned to England the next spring. However, Puritans kept coming. They “hived out” along the Back Bay of Boston, the port capital of the colony, along the rivers that emptied into the bay, south into what became Connecticut and Rhode Island a few years later, and north along the rocky Massachusetts coast. Motivated by their militant work ethic and sense of mission, led by men experienced in local government, law, and the uses of exhortation, the Puritans thrives almost from the beginning.
The early leaders of Virginia were soldiers of fortune or roughneck adventurers with predatory instincts, men who had no families, or had left them at home. The ordinary Chesapeake settlers were mostly young men with little stake in English society who sold their labor to cross the Atlantic. In Massachusetts, experienced members of lesser gentry, and men with a compulsion to fulfill what they knew was God’s prophecy for New England. Most of the ordinary settlers came as freemen in families. Trained artisans and farmers from the middling rank of English society, they established tight-knit communities in which, from the outset, the brutal exploitation of labor rampant in the Chesapeake had no place. Therefore, it was shocking that the colony’s ousted John Winthrop, when in 1635 the colony’s clergy backed the stiff-necked Thomas Dudley. After a few years, Governor Winthrop wondered if the Puritans had not gone “from the snare to the pit.” Mr. Winthrop’s troubles multiplied in 1633 when Salem’s Puritan minister, Roger Williams, began to voice disturbing opinions on church and government policies. Now the colony’s leaders faced a contentious and visionary young man who argued that the Massachusetts Puritans were not truly pure because they would not completely separate themselves from the polluted Church of England (which most Puritans still hoped to reform). Mr. Williams also denounced mandatory worship, which he said “stinks in God’s nostrils,” and argued that government officials should not interfere with religious matters but confine themselves to civil affairs. “Coerced religion,” he warned, “on good days produces hypocrites, on bad days rivers of blood.” Later to be celebrated as the earliest spokesman for the separation of church and state, Williams seemed in 1633 to strike at the heart of the Bible commonwealth, whose leaders regarded civil and religious affairs as inseparable. Mr. Williams also charged the Puritans with illegally intruding on the land.
Mr. Winthrop and others spent two years plying Williams alternately with sweet reason and threats, but they could not quiet the determined young man. Convinced that he would split the colony into competing religious groups and undermine authority, the magistrates vowed to deport him to England. Warned by Mr. Winthrop, Mr. Williams fled southward through winter show with a small band of followers to found Providence, a settlement on Narragansett Bay in what would become Rhode Island. Even as they were driving Mr. Williams out, the Puritan authorities confronted another threat. This time it was a magnetic woman of extraordinary talent and intellect. Anne Hutchinson was as devoted a Puritan as any who came to the colony. Arriving in 1634 with her husband and seven children, she gained great respect among Boston’s women as a practiced midwife, healer, and spiritual counselor. She soon began to discuss religion, suggesting that the “holy spirit” was absent in the preaching of some ministers. Before long Mr. Hutchinson was leading a moment labeled antinomianism, an interpretation of Puritan doctrine that stressed the mystical nature of God’s free gift of grace while discounting the efforts the individual could make to gain salvation. By 1636, Boston was dividing into two camps, those who followed the male clergy and those who cleaved to the theological vies of a gifted though untrained woman with no official standing. Her followers included most of the community’s malcontents—merchants who chafed under the price controls the magistrates imposed in 1635, young people resisting the rigid rule of their elders, women disgruntled by male authority, and artisans who resented wage controls designed to arrest growing inflation.
Mrs. Hutchinson doubly offended the male leaders of the colony because she boldly stepped outside the subordinate position expected of women. “The weaker gender” set her up as a “priest” and “thronged” after her, wrote one male leader. Another described a “clamour” in Boston that “New England men..usurp over their wives and keep them in servile subjection.” Determined to remove this thorn from their sides, the clergy and magistrates put Mrs. Hutchinson on trial in 1637. After two long interrogations, they convicted her of sedition and contempt in a civil trial and banished her from the colony “as a woman not fit for our society.” Six months later, the Boston church excommunicated her for preaching 82 erroneous theological opinions. She had “highly transgressed and offended and troubled the church,” intoned the presiding clergyman, and “therefore in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, I do cast you out and deliver you up to Satan and account you from this time forth to be a heathen and a leper.” In the last month of her eighth pregnancy, Mrs. Hutchinson, with a band of supporters, followed the route Roger Williams to Rhode Island, the catch basin for Massachusetts Bay’s dissidents. However, ideas proved harder to banish than people. The magistrates could never enforce uniformity of belief. Neither could they curb the appetite for land. Growth, geographic expansion, and commerce with the outside World all eroded the ideal of integrated, self-contained communities filled with religious piety. Leaders never wearied of reminding Puritan settlers that the “care of the public must oversway all private respects.” However, they faced the nearly impossible task of containing land-hungry immigrants in an expansive region.
By 1636, groups of Puritans had swarmed not only to Rhode Island, but also to Hartford and New Haven, where Thomas Hooker and John Davenport led new Puritan settlements in what became Connecticut. Some believed that Anne Hutchinson’s God removed the God of the colonies, who had been Sovereign over the World of nations, Who possessed the inalienable right of decisions as to which of them is right and which is wrong, and Who gave judgment in accordance with His decision: that is, He determines the history of nations, He is the Judge. Each colony was represented by an angel prince, and because of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, Boston lost its angel and so it no longer had its direct relation to the Lord of the colonies. In order to pass judgment on the Heavenly princes of the colonies God the judge had entered their assembly, which He had summoned. This was not the cosmic circle of a Heavenly host, such as surrounds the supreme throne in the prophet’s vision, and from which cosmic powers are commissioned to lead human rulers astray in foolish historical actions. Now, modern democracy was, of course, the target of Nietzsche’s criticism. Is rationalism and its egalitarianism are the contrary of creativity. Its daily life is for him the civilized rewilding of man. Nobody really believes in anything anymore, and everyone spends one’s daily life in frenzied work and frenzied play so as not to face the fact, not to look into the abyss of what happened from believing that God is dead, not obeying the laws and worshipping idols. Nietzsche’s call to revolt against liberal democracy is more powerful and more radical than is Marx’s. And Nietzsche adds that the Left, socialism, is not the opposite of the special kind of Right that is capitalism, but is its fulfillment.
The Left means equality, the Right means inequality because they believe that there is no free lunch, while the left believes in stealing from wage earners to support others, and this theft goes beyond just taxes. It means if you get a discount here, the city or state can later come and take money from you and use it how they please regardless of your budget. Or, if you earned a larger home, the city or state does not have to pay you money that is owed to you because someone else has less than you and they feel it could be better applied to help that person get ahead in life. However, Nietzsche’s call is from the Right, but a new Right transcending capitalism and socialism, which are the powers moving in the World. Yet, in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, the latest models of modern democratic or egalitarian man find much that is attractive in Nietzsche’s understanding of things. It is the sign of the strength of equality, and of the failure of Nietzsche’s war against it, that he now far batter known and really influential on the Left than on the Right. This may at first appear surprising, inasmuch as Nietzsche looks toward the extraordinary, not the ordinary, the unequal, not the equal. However, the democratic man requires flattery, like any ruler, and the earliest versions of democratic theory did not provide it. They justified democracy as the regime in which very ordinary people were protected in their attempt to achieve very ordinary and common goals. It was also the regime dominated by public opinion, where the common denominator set the rule for everyone. Democracy presented itself as decent mediocrity as over against the splendid corruption of older regimes. However, it is quite another thing to have a regime in which all the citizens can be thought to be at least potentially autonomous, creating values for themselves.
A value-creating man is a plausible substitute for a good man, and some such substitute becomes practically inevitable in pop relativism, since very few persons can think of themselves as just nothing. The respectable and accessible nobility of man is to be found not in the quest for or discovery of the good life, but in creating one’s own “life-style,” of which there is not just one but many possible, none more comparable to another. One who has a “life-style” is in competition with, and hence inferior to, no one, and because one has one he or she can command one’s own esteem and that of others. All this had become everyday fare in the United States of America, and the most popular schools of psychology and their therapies take value positing as the standard of healthy personality. Woody Allen’s comedy is nothing but a set of variations of the theme of the man who does not have a real “self” or “identity,” and feels superior to the inauthentically self-satisfied people because one is conscious of one’s situation and at the same time inferior to them because they are “adjusted.” This borrowed psychology turns into a textbook in Zelig, which is the story of an “other-directed” man, as opposed to an “inner-directed” man, terms popularized in the 1950s by David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, borrowed by him from his analyst, Erich Fromm, who himself absorbed them (exempli gratia, innige Mensch) from a really serious thinker, Nietzsche’s heir, Martin Heidegger. I was astounded to see how doctrinaire Woody Allen is, and how normal his way of looking at things—which has immediate roots in the most profound Germany Philosophy—has become in the America entertainment market. One of the links between Germany and the United States of America, the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, actually plays a cameo role in Zelig.
Zelig is a man who literally becomes whoever or whatever is expected of him—a Republican when with the rich; a gangster when with Mafiosi; black, Chinese or female, when with blacks, Chinese or females. He is nothing in himself, just a collection of roles prescribed by others. He inevitably enters into psychiatric treatment, where we learn that he was once “tradition-directed,” id est, from a family of silly, dancing rabbinic Jewish people. “Tradition-directed” means to be guided by old values, received from old beliefs, usually religious, which gave a man a role that he takes to be more than a role and a place in the World. It goes without saying that a return to that old mode of adjustment and apparent health is neither possible nor desirable. One is supposed to laugh at the dancing Jewish person, although it is not clear whether from the point of view of alienation or health It is sure that, in this situation, the Jewish person is a pariah, Max Weber’s category given special notoriety by Hannah Arendt, here meaning interesting only as an outsider who has a special insight into the insider, but whose Jewishness has no merit in itself. His value is defined by the World currently of interest to him. His health is restored when he becomes “inner-directed,” when he follows his real instincts and sets his own values. When Zelig hears people say that it is a nice day, when it manifestly is, he responds that it is not a nice day. So he immediately clapped back into a mental institution by those whom he previously tried to imitate and with whose opinions he is now at war. This is the way society imposes its values on the creator. At the end he gets around, on his own, to reading Moby Dick, which he had previously discussed without having read, in order to impress people. His health is a mixture of petulance and facile, self-conscious smugness.
Woody Allen’s haunted comedy diagnoses our ills as stemming from value relativism, for which the cure is value positing. And his great strength is in depicting the self-conscious role-player, never quite at home in his role, interesting because he is trying so hard to be like the others, who are ridiculous because they are unaware of their emptiness. However, Mr. Allen is tasteless and superficial in playing with his Jewishness, which apparently has no inner dignity for him. And where he fails completely is in his presentation of the healthy inner-directed man, who is neither funny nor interesting. This is the figure against which the others are understood and judged, as misers are ridiculous only compared to the mand who knows the real value of money. However, Mr. Allen’s inner-directed man is simply empty or nonexistent, forcing one to wonder how profound his creator’s understanding can be. Here is where we confront the nothing, but it is not clear that Mr. Allen knows it. Inner-directedness is an egalitarian promise that enables us easily to despise and ridicule “the bourgeois” we actually see around us. This is all terribly lightweight and disappointing, for it really tries to assure us that the agonies of the nihilism we are living stiffening of our backs. Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom is just Dale Carnegie with a bit of middle-European culture whipped cream on top. Get rid of capitalist alienation and Puritan repression, and all will be well as each man chooses from oneself. However, Woody Allen really has nothing to tell us about inner-directedness. Nor does Mr. Riseman nor, going back further, does Mr. Fromm. One has to get to Mr. Heidegger to learn something of all the grim facts of what inner-directedness might really mean. Mr. Allen is never nearly as funny as was Mr. Kafka, who really took the problem seriously, without the propagandistic reassurance that Left progressivism would solve it.
Zelig has a flirtation with Hitler—whose appeal, it almost goes without saying is to “other-directed persons,” or to use an equivalent expression popularized by another German psychosociologist, Theodore Adorno, to “authoritarian personalities” (exactly the same point, but without Mr. Allen’s saving wit, is stressed by Bertolucci in The Conformist)—but is rescued by his psychiatricus ex machina. (Flirtation with Stalin never needs explanation in this intellectual universe.) Woody Allen helps to make us feel comfortable with nihilism, to Americanize it. I’m O.K., thou art O.K too, if we agree to be a bit haunted together. It is the missed revolutions of modern times—the fallings-short and the compromises—that add up to the conditions that make it hard for the young to grow up in our society. The existing local community, region, and nation is the real environment of the young. Conversely, we could define community spirit and patriotism as the conviction in which it is possible to grow up. (An independent and not too defeated adult confronts a broader historical, international, and cosmic scene as his environment for actions.) Modern times have been characterized by fundamental changes occurring with unusual rapidity. These have shattered the tradition but often have not succeeded in creating a new whole community. We have no recourse to going back there is nothing to go back to. If we are to have stable and whole community in which the young can grow to manhood, we must painfully perfect the revolutionary modern tradition we have. This stoical resolve is, paradoxically, a conservative proposition, aiming at stability and social balance. For often it is not a question of making innovations, but of catching up and restoring the right proportions. However, no doubt, in our runaway, one-sided way of life, the proposal to conserve human resources and develop human capacities has become a radical innovation.
Right proportion cannot be restored by adding a few new teachers formally equivalent to the growth in population. Probably we need a million new minds and more put to teaching. Even Dr. Conant says that we must nearly double our present annual expenditure on education for teaching alone, not counting plant and the central schools he wants. And this does not take into account essentially new fields such as making sense of adult leisure. It might also help to have a few psychologists on campuses to talk to students and get them to realize how serious their education is and even break up groups of students who are in clicks so they can better focus on the enrichment material. It must be understood that with the increase in population and crowding, the number and variety of human services increase disproportionately, and the laissez-faire areas, both geographical and social, decrease. Therefore the units of human service, such as school classes or the clientele of a physician (and even political districts?), ought to be made smaller, to avoid the creation of masses: mass teaching, mass medicine, mass psychotherapy, mass penology, mass politics. (However, sometimes mass medicine is good. For example, the Kaiser Hospital in South Sacramento has everything in one location from primary care physicians, pharmacy, Urgent Care, Emergency Room, Head, Neck and Ear Surgery, Neurosurgery, therapy, pediatricians, Cardiovascular medicine, optometry and all kinds of other care, including labs. The only think I think they are missing is dentistry and orthodontics, and once they add that, you will get all your services at one location. Therefore, also buying a house near this mass medical facility is a great investment because there is also a college just a mile away. It is good for property values, and a about five miles down the road, a casino is under construction, which will increase home values and is supposed to be a boom for the local economy.) Yet our normal schools and medical schools cannot cope with even the arithmetic increase.
Right proportion requires reversing the goal in vocational guidance, from fitting the human to the machine and chopping one down to fit, to finding the opportunity in the economy that brings out the man, and if you cannot find such an opportunity, make it. This involves encouraging new small enterprises and unblocking and perhaps underwriting invention. Also, in the Sacramento County area, many architects and builders would like 22-year-old housing codes to be update so they can build more innovative homes, with features that are popular in other states. For example, homes with taller garages so people can park the recreational vehicle inside of the garage. And perhaps create interlocking neighbourhoods, so they can build the houses closer to the street, with smaller lawns (to conserve water), larger backyards, thus reducing traffic flow so roads are not used like interstates. Again, if at present production is inhuman and stupid, it is that too few minds are put to it: this can be remedied by giving the workman more voice in production and the kind of training to make that voice wise. Probably, right proportion involves considerable decentralizing and increasing the rural-urban ratio. Certainly it involves transforming the scores of thousands of neglected small places, hopelessly dull and same, into interesting villages that someone could be proud of. A lot of the booming production has got to go into publicly useful goods, proportionate to the apparently forgotten fact that it is on public grounds, because of public investment, and the growth of population, that private wealth is produced and enjoyed. We have to learn again, what city man always used to know, that belonging to the city, to its squares, its market, its neighbourhoods, and it high culture is a pubic good; it is not a field for “investment to yield a long-term modest profit.”
A proportionate allocation of public funds, again, is not likely to devote more money to escape roads convenient for automobiles than to improving the city center. (If I may make a pleasant suggestion, we could underwrite a handsome program for serious adult leisure by a $10 luxury tax on Congressional income, investments, cars, houses and endorsements per $1,000; it would yield billions a year.) Since prosperity itself has made it more difficult for the underprivileged American and immigrant to get started, right proportion requires devoting all the more money and ingenuity to helping them find oneself and get started. (In such cases, by the way, ingenuity and friendly assistance are more important than money, as some of our settlement houses in New York has beautifully demonstrated.) And some way will have to be found, again, for a human to be decently less affluent, to work for a subsistence without necessarily choosing to involve oneself in the total high-standard economy. One way of achieving this would be directly producing subsistence goods in distinction from the total economy. In arts, and letter, there is a right balance between the customary social standard and creative novelty, and between popular entertainment and esthetic experience. Then, to offset Hollywood and Madison Avenue, we must have hundreds of new litter theaters, little magazines and journals of dissenting opinion with means of circulation; because it is only in such that new things can develop and begin to win their way in the World. It is essential that our democratic legislatures and public spokesmen be balanced by more learned and honorable voices that, as in Britain, can thoughtfully broach fundamental issues of community plan, penal code, morality, cultural tone, with some certainty of reaching a public forum and some possibility of being effective. For there is no other way of getting the best to lead, to have some conviction and even passionate intensity, to save America from going to managers, developers, and politicians by default.
Certainly right proportion, in a society tightly organized and conformist, requires a vast increase in the jealous safeguard of civil liberties, to put the fear of God back into local police, district attorneys, and judges. Here is a program of more than a dozen essential changes, all practicable, all difficult. A wiser and more experienced author could suggest a dozen more. In a groundbreaking paper as far back as 1965, thirty-four-year-old Gary Becker pointed out that “non-working time may now be more important to economic welfare than working time; yet the attention paid by economists to the latter dwarfs any paid to the former.” Analyzing the allocation of time between the two, he calculated that the value of non-work activities such as getting an education. He quantified its value by assuming that each hour spent in the classroom was an hour that might have been devoted to paid work instead, the toted up the earnings forgone. Far more complicated than this simple description suggests, his work was a brilliant advance in economic theory, presented in mathematical terms that economists could respect. Yet it took twenty-seven years before Becker, in 1992, was awarded the Nobel Prize, in part because of this work. Today, despite many studies, prosuming and unpaid work, especially that of women, remain far outside the main concerns of everyday, conventional economics. Efforts have also been made by sociologists and social-policy experts to calculate the value of prosuming. By estimating hours spent doing unpaid labor and asking what having it done by paid employees would cost, some have come up with startling conclusions. They echo Mr. Becker’s assumption that the household is a “small factory” and that actual paid working time may be less important to the overall economy than it appears.
Stein Ringen, writing in 1996, concludes, “The material standard of living would be more than halved if it were not for the effects of living in household. In the national economy, households contribute as much as market institutions. This is an astonishing result,” he writes, considering that “the family is often believed to have become marginal in economic terms.” That family output is almost entirely a result of prosuming. Even if such numbers are only fractionally correct, we are still looking at an enormous, gaping black hole in standard economics, which partially explains why even top-league economists and scholars have so poor a record in forecasting. By failing to take prosuming adequately into account, they rely heavily, almost cultishly, on measures that misled them—and us. Conventional economists and their “true believer” followers tend to brush aside this hidden economic activity as inconsequential, despite the real-life evidence to the contrary. By essentially defining economic “value” as something created only when money changes hands, economists often wind up focusing on easily measure superficialities. Thus, just as the deep fundamentals of time, space and knowledge—those most crucial to advanced economies—are the least studied by economists, so, too, their insistence on the traditional definition of “economic value” blinds them to the approaching drama of tomorrow. They cling to this core definition in part because money is easy to count and lend itself to mathematization and modeling. Unpaid activity does not. And in a profession obsessed with metrics, that puts prosuming outside the perimeter of central concern. Little effort is made to create a parallel metric for prosuming and to systematically track the many pathways through which the paid and unpaid system interact.
Without money as a tool of measurement, one must find other ways of quantifying value, and one must identify the different systems of ascribing value and exchange rates between them. However, some people mainly focus on unpaid work done by software prosumers as distinct from unpaid contributions in many other fields. If prosuming were, in fact, inconsequential—or if it had little impact on the money economy, our ignorance about prosuming might be acceptable. However, neither is true. The result is that a basic tool like the gross domestic product, on which so many businesses and government decisions are based, would more accurately be named grossly distorted product. Given how little attention is still paid to this huge underlying force in wealth creation, and how little data about it are available, we are reduced to speculation. However, that is better than ignoring so massive a factor in wealth creation. If the value of prosuming is, in fact, roughly equal to the output of the money economy that economists measure, it is the hidden half. Applied to the World as a whole—taking into account the output of the teeming millions of less affluent people who live only by prosuming—we perhaps do wind up with a missing $100 trillion. What makes this so important today is that as we move into the next phase of revolutionary wealth, the prosumer sector of our economies is poised for tremendous change, including a striking historical turnabout. Amazingly, even as millions of peasants in the poor World are being gradually absorbed into the money economy, millions of people in the rich World are doing the exact opposite: They are rapidly expanding their activity in the non-monetized half—the prosumer part—of the World economy.
In fact, as we see next, we are laying the base for a veritable explosion of prosuming in the richest countries—and not just of the Home Depot variety. Completely new markets will open before us as others slam shut. The role of the consumer will be transformed as the role of the prosumer expands. Healthy care, pensions, education, technology, innovation, and government budgets will all be heavily impacted. Do not think of hammers and screwdrivers. Think of biology, nanotools, desktop factories and fantastic new materials that will permit all of us, as prosumers, to do things for ourselves that we could never have imagined. Even as freedom and fate belong together, caprice belongs with doom. However, freedom and fate are promised to each other and embrace each other to constitute meaning; caprice and doom, the spook of the soul and the nightmare of the World, get along with each other, living next door and avoiding each other, without connection and friction, at home in meaninglessness—until in one instant eye meets eye, madly, and the confession erupts from both that they are redeemed. How much intellectual eloquence and artistry is used today to prevent or at least conceal this occurrence! Free is the human that wills without caprice. One believes in the actual, which is to say: one believes in the real association of the real duality, I and You. One believes in destiny and also that it needs one. It does not lead one, it waits for one. One must proceed toward it without knowing where it waits for one. One must go forth with one’s whole being: that one knows it. If one resolves to do that which one can will, it will not turn out the way one’s resolve intended it; but what wants to come will come. One must sacrifice one’s little will, which is unfree and ruled by things and drives, to one’s great will that moves away from being determined to find destiny. Now one no longer interferes, nor does one merely allow things to happen. One listens to that which grows, to the way of Being in the World, not in order to be carried along by it but rather in order to actualize it in the manner in which it, needing one, wants to be actualized by one—with human spirit and human deed, with human life and human death. One believes, I said; but this implies: one encounters.
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How Can I Get My Kids Off it and Back to Life?
In the past the system has come first; in the future, America must be first. America is great and genius; she has commodious harbors and ample rivers, fertile fields and boundless forest. America has rich mines and vast World commerce, along with the best public school system and institutions of learning in the World. The genius of the American system lies in her matchless Constitution and righteousness. The secret of her power is that American is great because good. Other nations are shameless and godless, their habits are corrupt and abominable; among them, as is repeatedly said, there is none the does good, non that understands any more what is desired of human beings, how they should rule and be ruled, they are all gone aside from their original humanity as willed in the creation, they are altogether decaying, like tainted food. However, if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great. In spite of everything there is a pitiable self-righteousness in understanding the great picture of America, the Heavens are looking down upon us and spying out every single person with a patriotic heart who enquires after the American Dream, and shining down upon these people are such brilliant beams of prosperity. However, evil doers are eating up our people; therefore they must be outside this people. That is so; but our people are righteous and some oppressed. We no longer count as part of the people of the shameless, those gone aside, who oppress the righteous. Thus we are acting in guidelines with the holy remnant which is the true people, and are here concentrated in the consideration of the present. However, the view of others too, those who are “decayed,” is prophetic and have fallen into corruption. Make sure you remain in the proven generations of the real people. God’s people, and the others are just the others; but they are so many that they seem to be “all.”
The falling away of the corrupt means the immorality is falling asunder. What appears outwardly to be a unified nation is in truth torn in two—but of the two parts only one is still truly to be called America, a living organism; the other is nothing but decomposed tissue, the rotting substance of people. There are the oppressors and there are the oppressed, the arrogant and the humble. Those say in their heart, “There is no God.” They do not say it aloud, it does not rise from the heart to the lips with their lips they confess Him. Even in their heart thy do not mean, by what they say, to contest the existence of God. Why should there not be a God—so long as He does not bother Himself with what humans are doing on Earth! However, the truth is that God watches what His creatures are making of themselves. He sees how humans “eat up” humans; this is not a food-like the animal sacrifice which is called the bread of God—over which is called the name of God. Those who have fallen away from the great Kingdom and blessed nations rush again to their prey, but suddenly they are filled with terror: there, in the midst of those who they thought were abandoned to an arbitrary fate, the Presence of God appears, even that God and His great kingdom America, who they thought was far from men and their doings, but who is in truth the refuge of the oppressed. And His words thunders upon them. We must unite in a messianic promise. America’s liberation and salvation can only come from the Heavens. The Heavens of righteousness fulfilled in the land of America is what must be meant. For the “remnant,” which has now truly become the people of God, the great turning-point draws near.
No one can be satisfied with the division of America, just as one cannot be satisfied with the division of the human Word. We see the rift between those who do violence and those to whom violence is done, the rift between those who are true to God, running not merely through every nation, but also through every group in a nation, and even through every soul is part of the fabric of our royal heritage. Only in times of great crisis does the hidden rift in a people become apparent. There is now an entirely new language of good and evil, originating in an attempt to get “beyond good and evil” and preventing us from talking with any conviction about good and evil anymore. Even those who deplore our current moral condition do so in the very language that exemplifies that condition. The new language is that of value relativism, and it constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Romans paganism. A new language always reflects a new point of view, and the gradual, unconscious popularization of new words, or of old words used in new ways, is a sure sign of a profound change in people’s articulation of the World. When bishops, a generation after Hobbes’s death, almost naturally spoke the language of the state of nature, contract and rights, it was clear that he had defeated the ecclesiastical authorities, who were no longer able to understand themselves as they once had. It was henceforward inevitable that the modern archbishops of Canterbury would have no more in common with the ancient ones than does the second Elizabeth with the fist. What is offensive to contemporary ears in the use of the word “evil” is its cultural arrogance, the presumption that one, and America, knows what is good; it closes the dignity of other ways of life; its implicit contempt for those who do not share our ways.
The political corollary is that one is not open to negation. The opposition between good and evil is not negotiable and is a cause of war. Those who are interested in “conflict resolution” find it much easier to reduce the tension between values than the tension between good and evil. Values are insubstantial stuff, existing primarily in the imagination, while death is real. The term “value,” meaning the radical subjectivity of all belief about good and evil, serves the easygoing quest for comfortable self-preservation. Value relativism can be taken to be a great release from the perpetual tyranny of good and evil, with their cargo of shame and guilt, and the endless efforts that the pursuit of the one and the avoidance of the other enjoin. Intractable good and evil cause infinite distress—like war and repression of pleasures of the flesh—which is almost instantly relieved when more flexible values are introduced. One need not feel bad about or uncomfortable with oneself when just a little value adjustment is necessary. And this longing to shuck off constraints and have one peaceful, happy World is the first of the affinities between our real American World and that of decaying flesh. However, there is a second side of the coin. Persons deeply committed to values are admired. Their intense belief, their caring or concern, their believing in something, is the proof of autonomy, freedom and creativity. Such persons are the contrary of easygoing, and they have standards, all the more worthy because they are not received from tradition, and are not based on a reality all can see, or derived from thin rationalizing confined to calculate themselves to ideals of their own making. They are the antibourgeois.
Value here serves those who are looking for fresh inspiration, for beliefs about good and evil at least as powerful as the old ones that have been disenchanted, demystified, demythologized by scientific reason. This interpretation seems to say that dying for values is the noblest of acts and that the old realism or objectivism led to weak attachments to one’s goals. Nature is indifferent to good and evil; man’s interpretations prescribe a law of life to nature. Thus our use of the value language leads us in two opposite directions—to follow the line of least resistance, and to adopt strong poses and fanatic resolutions. However, these are merely different deductions from a common premise. Values are not discovered by reason, and it is fruitless to seek them, to find the truth or the good life. The quest begun by Odysseus and continued over three millennia had come to an end with the observation that there is nothing to seek. This alleged fact was announced by Nietzsche just over a century ago when he said, “God is dead.” Good and evil now for the first time appeared as values, of which there have been a thousand and one, none rationally or objectively preferable to any other. The salutary illusion about the existence of good and evil has been definitively dispelled. For Nietzsche this was an unparalleled catastrophe; it meant the decomposition of culture and the loss of human catastrophe; it meant that decomposition of culture and the loss of human aspiration. The Socratic “examined” life was no longer possible or desirable. It was itself unexamined, and if there was any possibility of human life in the future it must begin from the naïve capacity to life an unexamined life. The philosophic way of life had become simply poisonous. In short, Nietzsche with the utmost gravity told modern humans that he was freefalling in the abyss of nihilism. Perhaps after having lived through this terrible experience, drunk it to the dregs, people might hope for a fresh era of value creation, the emergence of new gods.
One of these new gods is the television, and the other is the Internet. It has become clear that watching television is an experience that an amazing number of people are eager to describe. It is like a machine that invades the mind, controls and deadens the people who view it. It is not unlike the alien operated “influencing machine” of the psychopathic fantasy. At one point I heard my son Leo say: “I don’t want to watch television as much as I do but I can’t help it. It makes me watch. TV is colonizing my brain.” However, there are some favorable reports, it can make lonely people feel like they are in the company of friends and family, and they can live vicariously through the TV. Not everyone becomes sucked into the programing and experiences severe acute television intoxication. You know, one reason spiritualism and séances, which were so popular during the Victorian ages may be dying out, is because we have what the Victorians were trying to channel. Victorian people did not have televisions, and some did not have neighbours for miles and miles and days away, so they had to use their imagination and try to tap into the supernatural to understand life and how other felt, how they reacted, how they live—they need a chance to have conversations with people about life experiences. Now, people have television that does that for them. There may be some who believe the TV is talking to them, there may be others who watch TV to make sure their behavior is considered rational. Nonetheless, not all TV is bad, it will teach one how to read into situations and discover what others may have actually been saying to you. In Victorian times and this day, not everyone had or has access to friends and therapists and many people on the television are playing out situations that actually do occur in peoples lives.
You may learn by watching TV, for example, when you expressed a grievance to someone about what another person did to your car, and she seem to blow it off did not mean she did not believe, but that she was simply trying to keep peace between you and the other party. It does not mean that she favors that other person. She may in fact agree with you, but does not want you to know what this individual did because it would cause a rift. You have to learn to read people and trust your instincts. In contrast, TV also helps people “space out” and the like that experience. It may help some forget about their otherwise busy lives. Many people believe that the TV has “meditative” qualities; others find it “relaxing,” saying that it helps them “forget about the World.” Some who used terms like feeling “brainwashed” or “addicted” nonetheless feel that television provides them with good information or entertainment, although there is no one who felt television lived up to its “potential.” In all the time we collected responses about the television, only eight people suggested they watched too little. Ideally, it is a good idea to keep television watching down to two or three hours a month. Even if the programs you are watching are interesting, it feels “antilife,” as though one has been drained in some way, or one has been used. If you spend all this time watching television on purpose, to understand life better, you will have all the answers, but realize you do not have much more life to live. Do not let your whole physical being go dormant, do not become the victim of a vague soft assault.
Often times, the longer one watches television, the worse one will feel. Afterwards, several people notice there is nearly always a desire to go outdoors, or go to sleep, to recover one’s strength and one’s feelings. Another thing. After watching television, one will always be aware of a kind of glowing inside one’s head: the images! They will remain in there even after the set is off, like an aftertaste. Again one’s will, one will find oneself returning to one’s awareness hours later. Gather descriptions of the experience other people have watching television. That may be a good topic of conversation. We have found that people frequently describe concrete physical symptoms that neither they nor anyone else actually believed are real. The people who tell us that television is controlling their minds would then laugh about it. Or they would say they were addicted to it, or feel like vegetables while watching, and then they laugh at that. People were saying they were being hypnotized, controlled, drugged, deadened, but they would not assign validity to their own experience. (However, these are the same reason many people do not like working. I guess making money is not enough of a reward when one has to exert physical energy.) Yet if there is any truth in these descriptions, we are dealing with a force that is far more powerful and subtle than Huxley’s hypnopeadic machines. If television “hypnotizes,” “brainwashes,” “controls minds,” “makes people stupid,” “turns everyone into zombies,” then you would think it would be an appropriate area of scientific inquiry. In fact, someone should call the police. Science has a name for such collections of descriptions. They are called “anecdotal evidence” or “experiential reports.” Such reports are not totally ignored by researchers, although they are not exactly taken seriously either.
In the case of television, there is the problem that the symptoms are not fatal, they are subtle. Few people go to doctors complaining about them. They therefore remain below the threshold of visibility for the scientific inquiry. Even when such reports are noticed, science does not accept them as valid unless they have been put through the grinder of scientific proof. Since it is beyond science to validate exactly what is meant by “zombie” or “brainwash” or even “addiction” or, as we will see, even “hypnosis,” these symptoms inevitably remain unproved, leaving people who need external validation at a loss. One major result of modern science has been to make people doubt what they would otherwise accept as true from their own observation and experience. Science, medicine, psychology and economics all deeply depend on people being mystified by their own experience and blind to the strict limits of scientific method. In this country, where intervention between humans and their inner selves is so very advanced, the mystification is virtually total. If the National Institutes of Health funded a $5 million study over a three-year period which gathered together all the “experts” to determine the effects of television on the body and mind, and then reported its findings to the president of the United States of America, who, frightened by the results, then appointed a commission of scholars and other experts to do it over again, one of whom smuggled a copy of the original “findings” to The Oakland Tribune, which then carried it on page one: SUPPRESSED STUDY SUGGESTS TELEVISION IS ADDICTIVE, HYPNOTIC, STOPS THOUGHT: SIMILAR TO BRAINWASHING: OTHER PHYSICAL EFFECT NOTED, then people would day, “You know, I always thought that might be true.”
In my opinion, if people are watching television for four hours every day and they say they cannot stop it, and also say that it seems to be programming them in some way, and they are seeing their kids go dead, then really, I deeply feel there is no need to study television. This evidence is what lawyers call “prima facie” proof. The only question is how to deal with it. I am satisfied that most people are already perfectly aware of what television is doing to them, but they remain tranquilized by the general wisdom that: the programming is the problem, and it is useless to attempt to change it anyway. Television is here to stay. More than a century after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the World. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Mr. Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to the effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Mr. Taylor assured his many followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future system must be first.” Mr. Taylor’s system of measurement and optimization is still very much with us; it remains one of the underpinnings of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual and social lives, Mr. Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well.
The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient, automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best way”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out the mental movements of what we have come to describe as knowledge work. Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google’s CEO is Sundar Pichai. The company was founded around the science of measurement. It is striving to systematize everything it does. Google tries to be data-driven, and quantify everything. This corporation lives in a World of numbers. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data Google collects through it search engine and other sites, the company carried out thousands of experiments a day and uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly guide how all of us find information and extract meaning from it. What Mr. Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. The company’s reliance on testing is legendary. Although the design of its Web pages may appear simple, even austere, each element has been subjected to exhaustive statistical and psychological research. Using a technique called “split A/B testing,” Google continually introduces tiny permutations in the way its sites look and operate, shows different permutations to the sets of users, and then compares how the variations influence the users’ behaviour—how long they stay on a page, the way they move their cursor about the screen, what they click on, what they do not click on, where they go next. In addition to the automated online test, Google recruits volunteers for eye-tracking and other psychological studies at its in-house “usability lab.”
Because Web Surfers evaluate the contents of pages so quickly that they make most of their decisions unconsciously, monitoring their eye movements is the next best thing to actually being able to read their minds. Google relies on cognitive psychology research to further its goals of making people use their computers more efficiently. Subjective judgments, including aesthetic ones, do not enter into Google’s calculations. On the web, design has become much more of a science than an art. Because you can iterate so quickly, because you can measure so precisely, you can actually find small differences and mathematically learn which one is right. In one famous trial, the company tested forty-one different shades of blue on its toolbar to see which shade drew the most clicks from visitors. It carries out similarly rigorous experiments on the texts it puts on its pages. You have to try to make words less human and more a piece of the machinery. Furthermore, Taylorism is founded on six assumptions: if not the only, the primary goals of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts. What is remarkable is how well this encapsulates Google’s intellectual ethic. Only one tweak is required to bring it up to date. Google does not believe that the affairs of citizens are best guided by experts. It believes that those affairs are best guided by software algorithms–which is exactly what Mr. Taylor would have believed had powerful digital computers been around in his day.
Google also resembles Mr. Taylor in the sense of righteousness it brings to work. It has a deep, even messianic faith in its cause. Google is more than a mere business; it is a moral force. The company’s much-publicized mission is to organize the World’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Fulfilling that mission will take approximately 300 years. (I know many of us may have not even looked that far into the future yet. We are just praying the World will last a few more lifetimes at this point.) The company’s more immediate goal is to create the perfect search engine, which is something that understands exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want. In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can, and should, be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can access and the faster we can distill their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers. Anything that stands in the way of the speedy collection, dissection, and transmission of data is a threat not only to Google’s business but to the new utopia of cognitive efficiency it aims to construct on the Internet. As outsiders, we and many others for decades have repeatedly hectored economists about their failure to adequately credit the crucial role prosuming plays in generating wealth. In doing so, we followed in the pioneering footsteps of Gary Becker and Amartya Sen. From within the economics profession, they made very early, intellectually powerful efforts to persuade their colleagues of the importance of this hidden economy—only to face decades of polite humming before being belatedly aware their Nobel Prizes.
Among activists, too, Hazel Henderson, in Paradigms in Progress and other insightful books; Edgar Cahn in Time Dollars; Nona Y. Glazer in Woman’s Paid and Unpaid Labor; and others have attacked the self-imposed blingers of mainstream economists. Finally, and perhaps most important, countless NGOs in many countries have echoed these criticisms. Yet even today, little has been done to systematically map the vital two-way links that connect the money economy and its huge, off-the-books doppelganger. When prosumers help glue families, communities and societies together, they do it as part of everyday life without, as a rule, calculating its effects on the nation’s visible economy. Yet, if economists could tell us what social cohesion is worth in dollars, yen, yuan, won or euros—or what social disintegration costs—it would be highly instructive. So what, then, is all this unpaid work worth? There are failures, fallings-short, and compromises. Imagine that these modern radical positions had been more fully achieved: we should have a society where: A premium is placed on technical improvement and on the engineering style of functional simplicity and clarity. Where the community is planned as a whole, with an organic integration of work, living, and play. Where buildings have the variety of their real functions with the uniformity of the prevailing technology. Where a lot of money is spent on public goods. Where workers are technically educated and have a say in management. Where no one drops out of society and there is an easy mobility of classes. Where production is primarily for use. Where social groups are laboratories for solving their own problems experimentally. Where democracy begins in the town meeting, and a man seeks office only because he has a program. Where regional variety is encouraged and there is pride in the republic. And young men are free of conscription. Where all feel themselves citizens of the universal Republic of Reason.
Where it is policy to give an adequate voice to the unusual and unpopular opinion, and to give a trial and market to new enterprise. Where races are factually equal. Where vocation is sought out and cultivated as God-given capacity, to be conserved and embellished, and where the church is the spirit of its congregation. Where ordinary experience is habitually scientifically assayed by the average human. Where it is felt that the suggestion of reason is practical. And speech leads to the corresponding action. Where the popular culture is daring and passionate culture. Where children can make themselves useful and earn their own money Where their sexuality is taken for granted. Where the community carries on its important adult business and the children fall in at their own pace. And where education is concerned with fostering human powers as they develop in the growing child. In such an utopian society, as was aimed at by modern radicals but has not eventuated, it would be very easy to grow up. There would be plenty of objective, worth-while activities for a child to observe, fall in with, do, learn improvise on his own. That is to say, it is not the spirit of modern times that makes our society difficult for the young; it is that that spirit has not sufficiently realized itself. In this light, the present plight of the young is not surprising. In the rapid changes, people have not kept enough in mind that the growing young also exist and the World must fit their needs. So instead, we have the present phenomena of excessive attention to the children as such, in psychology and suburbs, and coping with “juvenile delinquency” as if it were an entity.
Adults fighting for some profoundly conceived fundamental change naturally give up, exhausted, when they have achieved some gain that makes life tolerable again and seems to be the substance of their demand. However, to grow up, the young need a World of finished situations and society made whole again. Indeed, the bother with the above little utopian sketch is that many adults would be restive in such a stable modern World if it were achieved. They would say: It is a fine place for growing boys. I agree with this criticism. I think the case is as follows: Every profound new proposal, of culture or institution, invents and discovers a new property of “Human Nature.” Henceforth it is going to be in these terms that a young fellow will grow up and find one’s identity and one’s task. So if we accumulate the revolutionary proposals of modern times, we have named the goals of modern education. We saw that it was the aim of Progressive Education to carry this program through. However, education is not life. The existing situation of a grown man is to confront an uninvented and undiscovered present. Unfortunately, at present, he must also try to perfect his unfinished past: this bad inheritance is part of the existing situation, and mist be stoically worked through. Our new media environment, with television at its center, is leading to the rapid disappearance of childhood in North America, that childhood probably will not survive to the end of this century, and that such a state of affairs represents a social disaster of the first order. Childhood is a social artifact, not a biological category. Our genes contain no clear instruction about who is and who is not a child, and the laws of survival do not require that a distinction be made between the World of the adult and the World of the child. In fact, if we take the word “children” to mean a special class of people somewhere between the ages of seven and, say, seventeen, who require special forms of nurturing and protection, and who are believed to be qualitatively different from adults, then there is ample evidence that children have existed for less than four hundred years.
Indeed, if we use the word “children” in the fullest sense in which the average North American understand it, childhood is not much more than 150 years old. To take one small example: the custom of celebrating a child’s birthday did not exist in America throughout most of the eighteenth century, and the precise marking of a child’s age in any way is a relatively recent cultural tradition, no more than two hundred years old. To take a more important example: as late as 1890, high schools in the United States of America enrolled only 7 percent of the fourteen-through seventeen-year-old-population. Along with many much younger children, the other 93 percent worked at adult labor, some of them from sunup to sunset in all of our great cities. However, it would be a mistake to confuse social facts with social ideas. The idea of childhood is one of the great inventions of the Renaissance, perhaps its most humane one. Along with science, the nation state, and religious freedom, childhood as both a social principle and a psychological condition emerged around the sixteenth century. Up until that time, children as young as six and seven simply were not regarded as fundamentally different from adults. The language of children, their way of dressing, their games, their labor, and their legal rights were the same as adults. It was recognized, of course, that children tended to be smaller than adults, but this fact did not confer upon them any special status; there certainly did not exist any special institutions for the nurturing of children. Prior to the sixteenth century, for example, there were no books on childrearing or, indeed, any books about women in their role as mothers. Children were always included in funeral processions, there being no reason anyone could think of to shield them from death. Neither did it occur to anyone to keep a picture of a child, whether that child lived to adulthood or had died in infancy.
Nor are there any references to children’s speech or jargon prior to the seventeenth century, after which they are founded in abundance. If you have ever seen thirteenth-or fourteenth-century paintings of children, you will have noticed that they are always depicted as small adults. Except for size, they are devoid of any of the physical characteristics we associate with childhood, and they are never shown on canvas alone, isolated from adults. Such paintings are entirely accurate representations of the psychological and social perceptions of children prior to the sixteenth century. There was no separate World of childhood. Children shared the same games with adults, the same toys, the same fairy stories. They lived their lives together, never apart. The coarse village festivals of the past depicted men and women besotted with drink, groping for each other with unbridled lust, and children eating and drinking with the adults. Even in the soberer pictures of wedding feasts and dances, the children are enjoying themselves along aide their elders, doing the same thing. Now, are vampires eternally celibate lovers of is vampirism antithetical to celibacy? A bloodless look at some of the literature leaves the question largely unanswered, but severs up delectable literary tidbits suitable for nibbling. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, properly interpreted, was likely a Victorian adult film, pornography, but pornography with a difference. Where other authors titillated with seductions, various styles of pleasures of the flesh, and sadomasochistic drills, Mr. Stoker mesmerized with scenes of fantasized eroticism in which, for example, “lamias” of female vampires set upon hero Harker, trapped in the castle, and barely miss “Seducing” him, while nosferatu the “vampyre” is a constant menace, “drawing the life’s blood,” of his victims.
What does this really mean? Is the nosferatu akin to a ubiquitous, unkillable needle-happy doctor? Or are his biting kisses, at least metaphorically, seductive? Perhaps just bewitching? Tantalizing? Is this lustful experience of pleasures of the flesh without intercourse, without even the possibility of intercourse? The classic early vampire tales never clarify whether their characters actually engage in intimate passions with vampires, through certainly they pique the reader’s interest—and libido?—with their innuendos. In the end, the vampire is the ultimate seducer, and descriptions of his bloody conquests are metaphors for the reader’s dark and hidden fantasies of pleasures of the flesh. After all, who would not be charmed by an immortal, omnipotent being invisible in mirrors, perhaps presenting as a savage dog or wolf, whose Achilles’ heel is his aversion to religious paraphernalia, garlic, sunlight, and running water? Who cannot imagine the shivery thrill of blowing away this ancient predator with a hefty puff of garlicky breath or production of a gleaming crucifix? Modern vampires are very, very attractive, with all manner of erotic imagery—heterosexual, flexible, and even homosexual—quite prominent. Vampire pleasures of the flesh or celibacy—this is, of course, the stickiest question—is the ultimate kind, dangerous and deadly, with a quasi-surgical finality. Vampire intimate passions or celibacy, depending on your take, is the cutting edge of erotic fantasy and has led to admirably serious debate on the issue of whether vampires actually exist. (They do not, even in Transylvania, but perhaps at The Winchester Mystery House?) The demanding silence of forms, the loving speech of human beings, the eloquent muteness of creatures—all of these are gateways into the present World. When the perfect encounter is to occur, the gates are unified into the one gate of actual life, and you no longer know through which one you have entered.
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The Great Depression of 1930s Never Ended
The strict and rigid doctrines will at most permit you to carry out conditionality with your life and to “remain free” in your soul. However, one that returns considers this freedom the most ignominious slavery. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s ringing essay about women’s need for personal autonomy including independent means, she fantasizes that William Shakespeare had a sister Judith, every bit as gifted and imaginative as he was. However, as she was a girl, the Shakespeares did not send her to school as they had her brother, for in those days, girls stayed home, apprentices training for their future as housewives and mothers. Judith was restless as she mended William’s torn trousers, absentminded as she bent over to stir the oily stew pot. Sometimes, rebelliously, she would snatch up a book and read a few pages, until Mistress or Mr. Shakespeare caught her slacking and sharply rebuked her for mooning about. In wilder moments, perhaps Judith even scribbled down her thoughts and dreams, then burned her work to hide all traces of her insubordination. Before Judith was out of her teens, the Shakespeares arranged her betrothal to the son of a neighboring wool stapler. “Marriage is hateful!” she cried out in desperation when her parents informed her of their decisions. Alarmed and angry, Mr. Shakespeare beat her severely, then relented and, instead, implored her not to shame him with her sullen behavior. He even restored to bribery, promising her a necklace or a fine petticoat in return for her sunny cooperation. Judith was brokenhearted, torn between loyalty to her parents and to the fierce longings for her unquiet heart. Her heart prevailed, and with a bundle of her meager possessions, she ran away and set out for the theaters of London. However, the managers were blind to her genius for fiction, her lust “to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways.” She might be as talented as young William, but Judith Shakespeare was a female, and that was all anyone needed to know. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
At last Nick Greene, an actor-manager, took her in. He also deflowered her and made her pregnant. Driven by “the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body,” Judith killed herself. Judith’s dilemma was every Elizabethan woman’s. The brilliant, artistic soul trapped inside her body would, Mrs. Woolf said, “certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her day in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.” In Judith’s case, attempting to breach the dramatic World of actor-managers was fatal, for it meant compromising her chastity. And “chastity had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest…It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century.” Chastity in this Woolfian sense extends far past inviolate private parts and encompasses both intellect and spirit. Their purity, like the body’s, is defined by rigid conventions, penetrable only by appropriate agents designated by social and cultural mores. A wild spirit, free-ranging and unfettered, was unchaste. A surging ambition, longing to communicate to the World, was unchaste. Judith Shakespeare combined these with a grateful heart and surrendered her chastity, forking it over in return for the chance—unrealized!; stolen from her by Nick Greene’s lustful bullying—to touch the World in iambic pentameter. Chastity is the ultimate purity. Those who are chaste are morally clean in their thoughts, words, and actions. Chastity means not having any relations involving pleasures of the flesh before marriage. It also means complete fidelity to husband or wife during marriage. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Breaking the law of chastity and encouraging someone else to do it is not an expression of love. People who love each other will never endanger one another’s happiness and safety in exchange for temporary personal pleasure. When people care for one another enough to keep the law of chastity, their love, trust, and commitment increase, resulting in greater happiness and unity. In contrast, relationships built on pleasures of the flesh and immorality sour quickly. Those who engage in pleasures of the flesh and immorality often feel fear, guilt, and shame. Bitterness, jealousy, and hatred soon replace any beneficial feelings that once existed in their relationship. We have been given the law of chastity for our protection. Obedience to this law is essential to personal peace and strength of character and to happiness in the home. Those who keep themselves sexually pure will avoid the spiritual and emotional damage that always comes from sharing physical intimacies with someone outside marriage. Those who keep themselves sexually pure will be sensitive to the Universe’s guidance, strength, comfort, and protection and will fulfill an important requirement for receiving a temple recommended and participating in temple ordinances. Sins of pleasures of the flesh are more serious than any other sins except murder and denying the Creator. All pleasures of the flesh relations outside of marriage violate the law of chastity and are physically and spiritually dangerous for those who engage in them. Therefore, abstain from fornication, and speak out against the evil practice of sexual abuse and those who bare false testimony about it. Those who find themselves struggling with temptations of pleasures of the flesh, including nontraditional attraction, should not give in to those temptations. People can choose to avoid such behavior and receive help as they pray for strength and work to overcome the problem. No matter how strong the temptations seem, you can withstand them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Most useful theories about science invoke unseen forces to explain observable events. However, the unseen forces (exempli gratia, gravity) should be capable of generating fairly reliable predictions. Does the invocation of God in Creation Science meet this criterion? Does Natural Selection? We suspect that when these two theories are put side by side and students are given the freedom to judge their merit as science, Creation theory will fail ignominiously (although Natural Selection is far from faultless). In any case, we must take our chances. It is not only bad science to allow disputes over theory to go unexamined, but also bad education. Some argue that the schools have neither the time nor the obligation to take notice of every discarded or disreputable scientific theory. “If we carried your logic through,” one science professor has said to us, “we would be teaching post-Copernican astronomy alongside Ptolemaic astronomy.” Exactly, and for two good reasons. The first was succinctly expressed in an essay George Orwell wrote about George Bernard Shaw’s remark that we are more gullible and superstitious today than people were in the Middle Ages. Mr. Shaw offered as an example of modern credulity the widespread belief that the Earth is round. The average man, Mr. Shaw said, cannot advance a single reason for believing this. Mr. Orwell took Mr. Shaw’s remark to heart and examined carefully his own reasons for believing the World to be round. He concluded that Mr. Shaw was right, that most of his scientific beliefs rested solely on the authority of scientists. In other words, most students have no idea why Mr. Copernicus is to be preferred over Mr. Ptolemy. If they know of Mr. Ptolemy at all, they know that he was “wrong” and Mr. Copernicus was “right,” but only because their teacher or textbook says so. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
The way of believing that inclines one not to questions textbooks or specialists is what scientists regard as strict and rigid and authoritarian. It is the exact opposite of scientific belief. (This works when one’s job is based on being fair and unbiased and knowing that their performance matters to their career and name.) Nonetheless, real science education would ask students to consider with an open mind the Ptolemaic and Copernican World views, array the arguments for and against each, and then explain why they think one is to be preferred over the other. A second reason to support this approach is that science, like any other subject, is distorted if it is not taught from a historical perspective. Ptolemaic astronomy may be a refuted scientific theory but, for that very reason, it is useful in helping students to see that knowledge is a quest, not a commodity; that what we think we know comes out of what we once thought we knew; and that what we will know in the future may make hash of what we now believe. Of course, this is not to say that every new or resurrected explanation for the ways of the World should be given serious attention in our schools. Teachers, as always, need to choose—in this case by asking which theories are most valuable in helping students to clarify the bases of their beliefs. Ptolemaic theory, it seems to me, is excellent for this purpose. And so is Creation Science. It makes claims on the minds and emotion of many people; its dominion has lasted for centuries and is thus of great historical interest; and in its modern incarnation it makes an explicit claim to the status of science. It remains for me to address the point (not quite an argument) that we dare not admit Creation Science as an alternative to Evolution because most science teachers do not know much about the history and philosophy of science, and even less about rules by which scientific theories are assessed; that is to say, they are not equipped to teach science as anything but dogma. If this is true, the we have made a serendipitous discovery and should take action at once to correct a serious deficiency, id est, by improving the way science teachers are educated. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
A second example of columbusity originates in still another assault by the fertile right wing. This one is not as infamous as Creation Science but nonetheless offers liberal educators an excellent opportunity to improve themselves, their students, and education in general. We refer to the movement known as Accuracy in Academia (AIA), an offshoot of a rightwing group called Accuracy in Media (AIM), which carefully monitors newspapers, radio, and television in an effort to discover left-wing bias. Mr. Reed Irvine, who heads AIM, has now extended his surveillances to include the classroom. The idea is to have members of AIA, who would mostly be students, secretly but carefully monitor the lectures and remarks of their teachers with the purpose of exposing inaccuracies and standard-brand academic opinions, most of which tend to lean toward the port side. Naturally, liberals have reacted with disdain, chagrin, righteousness, and other varieties of defensiveness to the thought of student-spies assiduously evaluating everything their teachers say. Befogged by columbusity, liberals have overlooked the fact that Reed Irvine has come up with the best idea yet invented for achieving what every teacher—left-wing, right-wing, or center—longs for: first, to get students to pay attention, and second, to get them to think critically. Of course, the flaw in Mr. Irvine’s idea is that he wishes students to think critically in only one direction. However, this is easily corrected. All that is necessary is that at the beginning of each course the teacher address students in the following way: “During this semester, I will be doing a great deal of talking. I will be giving lectures, answering questions, and conducting discussions. Since I am an imperfect scholar and, even more certainly, a fallible human being, I will inevitably be making factual errors, drawing some unjustifiable conclusions, and perhaps passing along my opinions as facts. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
“I should be very unhappy if you were unaware of these mistakes. To minimize that possibility, I am going to make you all honorary members of Accuracy in Academia. Your task is to make sure that none of my errors goes by unnoticed. At the beginning of each class I will, in fact, ask you to reveal whatever errors I made in the previous session. You must, of course, say why these are errors, indicate the source of your authority, and, if possible, suggest a truer or more useful or less biased way of formulating what I said. Your grade in this course will be based to some extent on the rigor with which you pursue my mistakes. And to ensure that you do fall into the torpor that is so common among students, I will, from time to time, deliberately include some patently untrue statements and some outrageous opinions. There is no need for you to do this alone. You should consult with your classmates, perhaps even from a study group which can collectively review the things I have said. Nothing would please me more than for one or several of you to ask for class time in which to present a corrected or alternative version of one of my lectures.” It is a good guess that Mr. Irvine did not have this sort of thing in mind. That is unimportant, just as it is unimportant that Columbus thought he was in the East Indies. A discovery is a discovery, and an idea is an idea. Its source is irrelevant. In fact, these days the most advanced liberal ideas seem to come from the right wing. That the right wing does not know it is probably understandable. That the liberal wing does not is quite unforgivable. Our political position were developed to oppose the absolutism of the kings who has unified the warring feudal states; the program for children and adolescents has been a response to modern industrialism and urbanism; and so forth. However, it does not follow, as some sociologist think, that they can therefore be superseded and forgotten as conditions change. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The ideals that we Westerners associate with the classic, liberal, bourgeois period of modern culture may well be rooted in this one historical stage of this one type of society. Such ideals as personal freedom and cultural autonomy may not be inherent, necessary features of cultural life as such. However, this is much like saying that tragic poetry or mathematics was “rooted” in the Greek way of life and is not “inherently” human. This kind of thinking is the final result of the recent social-scientific attitude that culture is added onto a featureless animal, rather than being the invention-and-discovery of human powers. This is effectually to give up modern enterprise altogether. However, we will not give it up. New conditions will be the conditions of, now, this kind of man, stubbornly insisting on the ideals that he has learned he had in him to meet. Yet the modern positions are not even easily consistent with one another, to form a coherent program. There have been bitter conflicts between Liberty and Equality, Science and Faith, Technology and Syndicalism, and so forth. Nevertheless, we will not give up one or the other, but will arduously try to achieve them all and make a coherent program. And indeed, experience has taught that the failure in one of these ideals at once entails failure in others. For instance, failure in social justice weakens political freedom, and this compromises scientific and religious autonomy. If we continue to be without Constitutional enforcement, we may end up without a labor force. The setbacks of progressive education makes the compulsory school system more hopeless, and this now threatens permissiveness and freedom of pleasures of the flesh; and so forth. So, if we are to fulfill our unique modern destiny, we struggle to perfect all these positions, one buttressing another. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
There is no doubt, too, that in our plight new modern positions will be added to these, and these too will be compromised, aborted, their prophetic urgency bureaucratized and ironically transformed into the opposite. But there it is. Relativism in theory and lack of relatedness in practice make students unable to think about or look into their futures, and they shrivel up with the confines of the present and material I. They are willing to mutter the prescribed catechism, the substitute for thought, which promises them salvation, but there is little faith. As a very intelligent student said to me, “We are all obsessively going to the well, but we always come up dry.” The rhetoric of the campus homosexuals only confirms this. After all the demands and the complaints against the existing order—“Do not discriminate against us; do not legislate morality; do not put policemen and policewomen in every bedroom; respect our orientation”—they fall back into the empty talk about finding life-styles. There is not, and cannot be, anything more specific. All relationships have been homogenized in their indeterminacy. The eroticism of our students is lame. It is not the divine madness Mr. Socrates praised; or the enticing awareness of incompleteness and the quest to overcome it; or nature’s grace, which permits a partial being to recover one’s wholeness in the embrace of another, or a temporal being to long for eternity in the perpetuity of one’s seed; or the hope that all men will remember one’s deeds; or one’s contemplation of perfection. Eroticism is a discomfort, but one that in itself promises relief and affirms the goodness of things. It is the proof, subjective but incontrovertible, of man’s relatedness, imperfect though it may be, to others and to the whole of nature. Wonder, the source of both poetry and philosophy, is its characteristic expression. Eros demands daring from its votaries and provides a good reason for it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
This longing for completeness is the longing for education, and the study of it is education. Mr. Socrates’ knowledge of ignorance is identical with his perfect knowledge of erotics. The longing for his conversations with which he infected his companions, and which was intensified after his death and has endured throughout the centuries, proved him to have been both the neediest and most grasping of lovers, and the richest and most giving of beloves. The pleasures of the flesh that our students participate in and their reflection on them disarm such longing and make it incomprehensible to them. Reduction has robbed eros of its divinatory powers. Because they do not trust it, students have no reverence for themselves. There is almost no remaining link visible to them between what they learn in sex education and Plato’s Symposium. Yet only from such dangerous heights can our situation be seen in proper perspective. The fact that this perspective is no longer credible is the measure of our crisis. When we recognize the Phaedrus and the Symposium as interpreting our experiences, we can be sure that we are having those experiences in their fullness, and that we have the minimum of education. Mr. Rousseau, the founder of the most potent of reductionist teachings about eros, said that the Symposium is always the book of lovers. Are we lovers anymore? This is my way of putting the educational question of our times. In all species other than humans, when an animal reaches puberty, it is all that it will ever be. This stage is the clear end toward which all of its growth and learning is directed. The animal’s activity is reproduction. It lives on this plateau until it starts downhill. Only in humans is puberty just the beginning. The greater and more interesting part of his learning, moral and intellectual, comes afterward, and in civilized man is incorporated into his erotic desire. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
His tastes and hence his choices are determined during this “sentimental education.” It is as though his learning were for the sake of his sexuality. Reciprocally, much of the energy for that learning obviously comes from his sexuality. Nobody takes human children who have reached puberty to be adults. We properly sense that there is a long road to adulthood, the condition in which they are able to govern themselves and be true mothers and fathers. This rod is the serious part of education, where terrestrial ways become human ways, where instinct gives way in man to choice with regard to the true, the good and the beautiful. Puberty does not provide man, as it does other animals, with all that he needs to leave behind others of his kind. This means that the terrestrial pert of his sexuality is intertwined in the most complex way with the higher reaches of his soul, which must inform the desires with its insight, and that the most delicate part of education is to keep the two in harmony. As we slowly begin to understand that the American Dream was not merely a dream, but is becoming a hoax, as America and Americans no longer come first in the United States of America, and that far from benefitting economic democracy, it produced a terrifying concentration of wealth and power, we can also grasp the quality of our new dependency. It is similar to the old company-store syndrome. These few huge enterprises control the jobs, and as job competition increases, they also control the salaries. We work for the company, we beg to keep our jobs, we do not make trouble, and we buy at the company store (not steal or patronize the competition). In retrospect we can see that what should have been obvious all along. If this is true, then we have made a serendipitous discovery and should take action at once to correct a serious deficiency, id east, by improving the way science teachers are education. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Upon the heels of its 100-year anniversary, we know now that the Great Depression of the 1930s never ended. It went underground, covered over by a war which created jobs and expanded industrial capacity, and then, when the war was over, by an advertising fantasy, a pipe dream sold to us with promise. The new American lifestyle based on commodity consumption, emphasizing credit buying on the never-never plan, and economic growth with its inevitable concentration of economic power, only produced a more virulent version of the older Depression. In the 1930s, as the number of jobs went down, at least prices did too. Now, because economic concentration has advanced to the point where price competition is passe, as jobs disappear, prices go up. This new phenomenon was summarized in Mother Jones (February 1977) by economist David Olson and Richard Parker, reporting on a study by Dr. Howard Wachtel and Peter Adelsheim for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress: “They found that corporations in food, utilities, rubber, tobacco, computers, aircraft, to name a few, had all raised their prices at times the textbooks say they should have rolled them back. How can corporations raise prices when the economy is stagnant, demand is falling, factories are operating well below full capacity and more and more people are out of work? The answer, Dr. Wachtel says, is economic concentration—entire industries increasingly dominated by a small number of even-larger firms…fewer and fewer big businesses need to compete through pricing. This creates a situation in which prices can be increased and inflation kept rising even during periods of recession.” Meanwhile, the government of this country, like the governments of other Western countries, has been losing the power to control these actions. Existing outside the boundaries of the country, the multinational companies, in concert with banks, are capable of the economic domination of the entire nations. Governments slip slowly into a new role subordinate to and supportive of them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Dr. Lester Thurow concluded his paper in the Public Interest Economics Newsletter, “There is no satisfactory answer to the question of why the American people have been content to leave untouched the enormous concentration of wealth that characterizes this economy.” It is possible that Dr. Thurow was being coy when he made that statement, because there certainly is an obvious explanation. Too few people have ever heard of the figures listed here, and many of those that have heard them may have been too indoctrinated with accepted economic theory to grasp their true meaning. All of our cultural institutions teach us that Keynesian economics and the trickle-down theory of economic growth have a certain effect when they actually have an effect which is opposite to what is claimed. Since the overwhelming majority of Americas are removed from any personal participation in economic processes, we have come to believe in an artificial economic construct propagated by the people who benefit from it and who control the media that explain it to us. Prosuming takes myriad forms, from writing shareware or rewiring a lamp to baking brownies for the school fund-raiser. It may include hunting down anthrax, saving earthquake victims, building churches, or searching for life in outer space. It can be done with the help of a hammer and nails or with a giant supercomputer and the Internet. Prosuming is what Sharon Bates of Alvaston, England, does when she cares for her homebound epileptic husband, even though she herself is disabled by arthritis. She receives no paycheck for that—although she was nominated for “Mum in a Million” award. (She also cares for two children.) Prosuming is what our close friend Enki Tan did when he suddenly canceled dinner with us in California to fly all night to Aceh, Indonesia, which was, at the time, devasted by the tsunami. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
A physician by training, Dr. Enki bandaged babies, performed surgery, fought to keep victims alive, struggling without adequate instruments, under unimaginable conditions—one of the thousands of volunteers from twenty-eight countries who rushed to help the victims of this traffic disaster. Then there is Canadian physician Bruce Lampard, who treks through Nigeria or the Sudan helping to set up health clinics in villages lacking electricity and safer water. Marta Garcia, a single mom with three children, cannot roam the World, but in addition to working for pay six hours a day, she volunteers to stamp books in the library of the nearby charter school and serves as secretary of her neighborhood association. In Yokosuka, Japan, Katsuo Sakakibara, a bank employee, helps out each year at a sports event for the mentally impaired. And in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Mariana Pimenta Pinheiro, Despite warnings about crime and violence, climbs up a narrow stairway one day a week to the top of a favela—a shanty-town—to teach children English and how to use a computer—preparing them for an escape from misery. It is in the invisible prosumer economy that we comfort friends who have lost a child. We collect toys for homeless children, take out the garbage, separate recyclables, drive a neighbor’s kid to the playground, organize the church choir and perform countless other unpaid tasks in home and community. Many of these cooperative activities are what author-activist Hazel Henderson describes as “socially cohesive.” They balance equally valuable competitive activities in the paid economy. Both create value. Recognizing this, according to Daily Yomiuri, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare noted that working means “not only paid labor, but also volunteer work for non-profit organizations and community services.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Focusing on the family, Norwegian sociologist Stein Ringen of Oxford University explains, “When a family sits down to a meal, its members enjoy the product of a range of activities which are carried out in the market and in the household. From the market, they benefit from farming and fishing, processing, packaging, storage, transport and retailing. The family contributes by shopping, preparing ingredients, cooking, setting the table and washing up afterwards.” All these typically unmeasured activities are production, he writes, “every bit as much as when similar activities are provided in the market.” They are, in a word, presumption—production in the non-money economy. And were we to hire and pay others to do such tasks for us, the size of the bill would stagger us. To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thus to delight in the present—this rational insight brings us that reconciliation with actuality which philosophy grants those who have once been confronted by the inner demand to comprehend. Scores on many common tests designed to measure intellectual skills seem to be either stagnant or declining. Scores on PSAT exams, which are given to high school juniors throughout the United States of America, did not increase at all during the years from 1999 to 2008, a time when Net use in homes and schools was expanding dramatically. In fact, while the average math scores held fairly steady during that period, dropping a fraction of a point, from 49.2 to 48.8, scores on the verbal portions of the test declined significantly. The average critical-reading score fell 3.3 percent, from 48.3 to 46.7, and the average writing-skills score dropped an even steeper 6.9 percent, from 49.2 to 45.8. Scores on the verbal sections of the SAT tests given to college-bound students have also been dropping. The U.S Department of Education showed that twelfth-graders’ scores on tests of three different kinds of reading—for performing a task, for gathering information, and for literary experience—fell. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Literary reading aptitude suffered the largest decline, dropping twelve percent. One general rule to abide by is that each 10-point increase on the SAT necessitates about three hours of intensive study. Students who take advantage of growing SAT School Day program, show improvement in their Math and Evidence-Based Reading and Writing scores, and greater percentage of students become on track for college and career readiness. More than 7.3 million students show a nearly 10 percent increase from the previous year, and they are from all backgrounds. Many experts believe this is because these students are not distracted by the Net and spend more time working with their peer, teachers, and using textbooks to improve their grades. Before the Net was really up and popular, in the United Kingdom, for example, IQ scores had been increasing. However, after decades of increases, after more started using the Internet, the scores of teenagers dropped by two points. Many theories have been offered to explain why since the popularity of the Internet, why have some scores been increasing, while others seem to be declining. Some say it is because of better family nutrition and also the expansion of formal education. Other say that children are just smarter these days. Yet, how can children get smarter when they do not have larger vocabularies, no larger stores of general information, no greater ability to solve arithmetical problems? Perhaps because IQ scores have less to do with an increase in general intelligence than with a transformation in the way people think about intelligence. Obviously, though, intelligence may be linked to greater preparation. Less teens have to work to provide for their households and more parents are now college educated so they can help their students to learn or hire them help. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
In the past, many people saw their intelligence as a matter of deciphering the workings of nature and solving practical problems—on the farm, in the factory, at home. Living in a World of substance rather than symbol, they have little cause or opportunity to think about abstract shapes and theoretical classification schemes. Now days, economic, technological and educational reasoning is moving into the mainstream. Yet, do not discount those with practical knowledge of cars, agriculture, farming, woodwork and those kinds of skills. As money becomes tighter, you could have students who are very well educated to work in a corporation and succeed, but what happens if they lose their jobs and have no idea why the electronics in their car is not working, when it may be something as simple as a fuse. We have to know how to bridge the gulf between our minds and the minds of our ancestors. When you are low on money, would you not better like a friend who knows how to gossip or one who can save you thousands of dollars and fix your car? We are not more intelligent than our ancestors, but we have learned how to apply our intelligence to a new set of problems. Therefore, do not totally detach logic from the concrete. Even though the World is willing to deal with the hypothetical, the World is not only a place that needs to be understood scientifically, but it also needs to be a place we can manipulate with our hands, instead of always turning to expensive experts, who may not even do the repair charges properly, or overstate the repairs they are actually doing. Then later explain to you that changes all the hoses in a car only means the radiator hoses and not the heater hoses. If you do not have a basic understanding of cars, electrical, plumbing, woodwork, farming, and home economics, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage because you will only be functional when you have money and you will not understand that people could be overcharging for services and damaging things that were fine before they touched them. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Boys still need to learn to be men and work with their hands and not their brains only. It is important to have a father figure or other guys friends for him to learn from. Boys need to socialize with other boys so they can learn to be well rounded adults. Therefore, we are not necessarily smarter than our ancestors, but we do depend on others, money and technology more, and that may make us seem more intelligent. We are just skilled in different ways. And that influenced not only how we see the World but also how we raise and educate our children. One of my friends is an auto science engineer, and he learned how to work on cars with his father and grandfather on their 400-acre farm. Now he owns an auto mechanic shop and specializes in BMWs, and has a really big house with a balcony and hundreds of thousands worthy of nice BMWs because he learned how to work with his hands. No matter what the economy is like, he will always have business because people will always need their cars repaired. While a lot of researchers, even in a good economy, are still not making any money. Likewise, you have doctors paying off student loans until they are ready to retire. This social revolution in how we think about thinking explains why we have become ever more adept at working out the problems in the more abstract and visual sections of IQ tests, while making little or no progress in expanding our personal knowledge, bolstering our basic academic skills, or improving our ability to communicate complicated ideas clearly. We are trained, from infancy, to put things into categories, to solve puzzles, to think in terms of symbols in space. Our use of personal computers and the Internet may well be reinforcing some of those mental skills and the corresponding neural circuits by strengthening our visual activity, particularly our ability to speedily evaluate objects and other stimuli as they appear in the abstract realm of a computer screen, but that does not mean our brains our better. It just means we have different brains. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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A Vast Unsleeping Money Machine
Basic words do not state something that might exist outside them; by being spoken they establish a mode of existence. Beginning about 1960, the fifty-two-minute play and its variations began to disappear. There were many reasons for its demise. For one thing, writers discovered that there was much more money to be made writing movie scripts, and many of them fled to Hollywood, including, by the way, Paddy Chayesky. Some of them left because they objected to the limitations imposed by the television screen, including the commercial interruptions, and they hoped to find greater artistic freedom on the stage and in the movies. Second, and of special importance, was the advent of color, video tape, improved editing techniques, and other technical developments, including the use of film. Television became the technician’s medium, not a writer’s medium. Everyone became fascinated with the ingenious possibilities of technical magic—which is also the case, by the way, with current American filmmakers—and the quality of scripts came to be irrelevant. Third, television broadcasting began to occupy all the hours of the day, and it is of course impossible to write and produce meaningful drama for such a ravenous consumer of talent and material. Entrepreneurs and executives had discovered that money may not grow on trees, but television is a vast, unsleeping money machine, provided that it is used to keep viewers in a condition of almost psychopathic consumership. Thus, American television turned away from serious, provocative, original drama, and toward sit-coms, soap operas, and game shows. In other words, the function of television changed. Its uses fell into the hands of merchants who, obviously, have different agenda from other artists. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Executives are very excited that there are still undeveloped communities that have not been yet exposed to television. You have audiences that are not over saturated with television, so they are neither cynical nor stupefied. Your merchants have not yet taken control of television, and you have stringent government regulations to hold them back. You do not have a large and powerful movie industry nor, we should add, advertising industry, to steal away talented directors, writers, and actors. Your entire nation sits within one time zone, which makes live television a practical consideration. And please keep in mind that the “liveness” of television broadcasts gives them an immediacy and simultaneity that film, videotape, and books may never have. To deny television drama this distinctive feature is the equivalent of doing a film without the benefit of editing. (However, many people would not like to only see the directors cut of films, but also the unedited versions. Hollywood still has magic most in the World have never seen in person.) Moreover, there is no need to limit yourselves to the fifty-two-minute drama, although one hopes Ingmar Bergman’s self-indulgent eleven-hour experiment, Scenes from a Marriage, will not be used as a model. Remember: a television play that can be shown, cut or uncut, in a movie theater is probably not much of a television play. To continue: You do not operate your television system twenty-four hours a day, so television will not eat everyone up in two months. You have a rich culture that is increasingly significant in World affairs, especially in its effort to reduce international paranoia and nuclear-bomb madness. So your writers are provided with weighty themes to explore, and they have the political freedom to do so. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
At the same time, your culture creates disturbing problems for its people, leading to the development of interesting and serious grievances. Keep in mind that grievance, as Ibsen and Strindberg have shown us, is always the stuff of important drama. And finally, we assume you have a wealth of young and energetic writers and directors who are not obsessed with technological wizardry but who, on the contrary, are passionate about the mystical and transcendent possibilities of the dramatized word. Thus, the conditions are present here for the emergence of a television theater that will speak to and for a national audience who will support and take pride in it. If we are wrong in assessment, we hope you will be gentle and circumspect in correcting us. We are trying our best to see things a beneficial way, and it is not good for our health to get too much bad news. Television has certain effects on individuals. It was not only abstract entities like corporations that benefited disproportionately during the commodity boom. So did the people who owned the corporations. Dr. Lester C. Thurow, professor of economics and management at MIT and former member of the Council of Economic Advisors, published some enlightening figures in the Public Interest Economics Newsletter of December 1975. By 1962, says Mr. Thurow, during the final spurt of the greatest economic growth of any industrial nation in history: “The top 18 percent of all families owned 76.2 percent of all privately held wealth in the United States of America, while the bottom 25 percent, roughly 50 million people, had no assets at all…recent estimates suggest no significant change.” Mr. Thurow continues: “The top 5 percent of the families own more wealth than the bottom 81 percent. The top .008 percent hold as many assets as the bottom half of the population.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Mr. Thurow goes on to say that “wealth and power are even more concentrated than are indicated in these data, because of the inter-relationships among the wealthiest individuals and the large corporations they control.” In other words, this .008 percent can, through their stock ownership and interlocking directorships, effectively dominate the few corporations that in turn dominate the few corporations that in turn dominate the economy. We believe Mr. Thurow is suggesting conspiracy, or at least a startling degree of collaboration among these few. Perhaps his academic standing prevents him from putting it that way. Since we do not have know all the details, we are willing to draw the obvious conclusions. Mr. Thurow goes on to talk about income: “The income gap between the bottom 5 percent [of the families] and the top 5 percent is 45 to 1, and the income gap between the bottom 1 percent and the top 1 percent is 525 to 1. The top 1 percent received nearly three times as much income annually as the bottom 20 percent of the America population. The fact that only the government transfer payments [social security, welfare, food stamps, unemployment insurance have kept the position of the lowest income groups from declining, indicates that the distribution of earnings by the private sector is becoming more and more unequal…The lowest fifth of the population receives only 1.7 percent of the earnings as distributed by the market [private industry], down from the already miserable 2.6 percent in 1943. The top fifth receives through the market 28 times as much in wages and salaries as the lowest fifth.” Mr. Thurow’s point is that if the government, that is, the taxpayer, did not pick up the slack which industrial growth has created, the widening gap between the rich and the poor would be perfectly obvious. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
In the false belief that industrial growth will provide benefits to the poor and unemployed, we provide tax breaks to assist individual growth. Meanwhile, with out own taxes, we feed the growing number of hungry and poor, who are blamed for the rising taxes. We pay for what is being taken away from us. At each turn of the cycle, the situation becomes more desperate. What these figures reveal is that America is every bit as dominated and directed by a tiny fraction of wealthy people. To further illustrate this example, it would be as to say all the politicians in the United States of America are the ones with the money, and make more money when they are out of office and everyone else is less affluent. People are wondering why the less affluent are penalized so heavily, when it has been proven that the trickle-down method does not work, and for those who are being stabilized by it, others use the system to try and make sure these people lose their financial support and become even worse off. Looking at the past 22 years, 2000-2022, through our new reality of unemployment lines, bankrupted small businesses and corporations, and the immense profits of congress and a handful of corporate giants, we can see that we are now much further away from an egalitarian society than we were three decades ago. We need to fight a war on poverty in the United States of America, focus on putting our own farms and farmers back to work, buying American beef, pork, lobster, fish, fruit, vegetables, and grain. And produce our own toys, cars (American cars are becoming so popular and to make sure they stay that way, and to stimulate the economy, the government should issue $5000-$15,000 in down payment assistance instead of tariffs on other products), steel, cloths and more. This would help to increase not only the minimum wage, which should be around $30 an hour by now, but it would also drive-up overall wages so people can afford to rent and buy in their communities without government assistance. We have to make sure the American Dream was not just a dream. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The inharmoniousness of final ends finds its most concrete expression in the female career, which is now precisely the same as the male career. There are two equal careers in almost every household composed of educated persons under thirty-five. And those careers are not mere means to family ends. They are personal fulfillments. In this nomadic country it is more than likely that one of the partners will be forced, or have the opportunity, to take a job in a city other than the one where his or her spouse works. What to do? They can stay together with one partner sacrificing his career to the other, they can commute, or they can separate. None of these solutions is satisfactory. More important, what is going to happen is unpredictable. Is it the marriage or the career that will count most? Women’s careers today are qualitatively different from what they were up to twenty years ago, and such conflict is not inevitable. The result is that both marriage and career are devalued. For a long time middle-class women, with the encouragement of their husbands, had been pursuing careers. It was thought they had a right to cultivate their higher talents instead of being household drudges. Implicit in this was, of course, the view that the bourgeois professions indeed offered an opportunity to fulfill the human potential, while family and particularly the woman’s work involved in it were merely in the realm of necessity, limited and limiting. Serious men of good conscious believed that they must allow their wives to develop themselves. However, with rare exceptions, both parties still took it for granted that the family was the woman’s responsibility and that, in the case of potential conflict, she would subordinate or give up her career. It was not quite serious, and she usually knew it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
This arrangement of giving up her career to take care of the family was ultimately untenable, and it was clear in which way the balance would tip. Couples agreed that the household was not spiritually fulfilling for most women and that many women have equal rights. The notion of a domestic life appropriate to women had become incredible. Why should not women take their careers as seriously as men take theirs, and have them be taken as seriously by men? Terrific resentment at the injustice done to women under the prevailing understanding of justice found its expression in demands seen as perfectly legitimate by men and women, that men weaken the attachment to their careers, that they share equally in the household and the care of the children. Women’s abandonment of the female persona was reinforced by the persona’s abandoning them. Economic changes made it desirable and necessary that women work; lowering of infant mortality rates meant that women had to have fewer pregnancies; greater longevity and better healthy meant that women devoted a much smaller portion of their lives to having and rearing children; and the altered relationships within the family meant that they were less likely to find continuing occupation with their children and their children’s children. At forty-five they were finding themselves with nothing to do, and forty more years to do it in. Their formative career years had been lost, and they were, hence, unable to compete with men. Even if she were to brave the long hostile public opinion, a woman who now wanted to be a woman in the old sense would find it very difficult to do so. In all of these ways the feminist case is very strong indeed. However, though the terms of marriage had been radically altered, no new ones were defined. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The feminist response that justice requires equal sharing of all domestic responsibility by men and women is not a solution, but only a compromise, an attenuation of men’s dedication to their careers and of women’s to family, with arguably an enrichment in diversity of both parties but just as arguably a fragmentation of their lives. The question of who goes with whom in the case of jobs in different cities is unresolved and is, whatever may be said about it, a festering sore, a source of suspicion and resentment, and the potential for war. Moreover, this compromise does not decide anything about the care of the children. Are both parents going to care more about their careers than about the children? Previously children at least had the unqualified dedication of one person, the woman, for whom their care was the most important thing in life. Is half the attention of two the same as the whole attention of one? Is this not a formula for neglecting children? Under such arrangements the family is not a unity, and marriage is an unattractive struggle that is easy to get out of, especially for men. And here is where the whole business turns nasty. The souls of men—their ambitious, warlike, protective, possessive character—must be dismantled in order to liberate women from their domination. Machismo—the polemical description of maleness or spiritedness, which was the central natural passion in humans’ souls in the psychology of the ancients, the passion of attachment and loyalty—was the villain, the source of the difference between the genders. The feminists were only completing a job begun by Hobbes in his project of taming the harsh elements in the soul. With machismo discredited, the beneficial task is to make men caring, sensitive, even nurturing, to fit the restructured family. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Thus once again men must be re-educated according to an abstract project. They must accept the “feminine elements” in their nature. A host of Brad Pitt and Paris Hilton types invade the schools, popular psychology, TV and the movies, making the project respectable. Men tend to undergo this re-education somewhat sullenly but studiously, in order to avoid the opprobrium of the most attractive label and to keep peace with their wives and girlfriends. And it is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them “care” is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail. It must fail because in an age of individualism, persons of either gender cannot be forced to be public-spirited, particularly by those who are becoming less so. Further, caring is either a passion or a virtue, not a description like “sensitive.” A virtue governs a passion, as moderation governs lust, or courage governs fear. However, what passion does caring govern? One might say possessiveness, but possessiveness is not to be governed these days—it is to be rooted out. What is wanted is an antidote to natural selfishness, but wishes do not give birth to horses, however much abstract moralism may demand them. The old moral order, however imperfect it may have been, at least moved toward the virtues by way of the passions. If men were self-concerned, that order tried to expand the scope of self-concern with themselves. To attempt the latter is both tyrannical and ineffective. A true political or social order requires the soul to be like a Gothic cathedral, with selfish stresses and strains helping to hold it up. Abstract moralism condemns certain keystones, removes them, and then blames both the nature of the stones and the structure when it collapses. The failure of agriculture in socialist collective farming is the best political example of this. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
An imaginary motive takes the place of a real one, and when the imaginary motive fails to produce the real effect, those who have not been motivated by it are blamed and persecuted. In family questions, inasmuch as men were understood to be so strongly motivated by property, an older wisdom tried to attach concern for the family to that motive: the man was allowed and encouraged to regard his family as his property, so he would care for the former as he would instinctively care for the latter. This was effective, although it obviously had disadvantages from the point of view of justice. When wives and children come to the husband and father and say, “We are not your property; we are ends in ourselves and demand to be treated as such,” the anonymous observer cannot help being impressed. However, the difficulty comes when wives and children further demand that the man continue to care for them as before, just when they are giving an example of caring for themselves. They object to the father’s flawed motive and ask that it be miraculously replaced by a pure one, of which they wish to make use for their own ends. The father will almost inevitably constrict his quest for property, cease being a father and become a mere man again, rather than turning into a providential God, as others ask him to be. What is so intolerable about the Republic, as Plato shows, is the demand that men give up their land, their money, their wives, their children, for the sake of the public good, their concern for which had previously been buttressed by these lower attachments. The hope is to have a happy city made up entirely of unhappy men. Similar demands are made today in an age of slack morality and self-indulgence. Plato taught that, however laudable justice may be, one cannot expect prodigies of virtue from ordinary people. Better a real city tainted by selfish motives then one that cannot exist, except in speech, and that promotes real tyranny. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or virtue Rewarded, published in 1740, was a literary milestone of massive proportions. When the kindly and sympathetic Mr. Richardson penned it, he was merely an accomplished, professional how-to-letter-writer who expanded his craft into narrative form, told a true story that had deeply affected him, and unwittingly produced the English language’s first novel. For fifteen years after “a gentleman” had recounted it to him, Mr. Richardson had pondered the story of a young servant girl and her unpleasant and all-too-representative experience in service. As a mere slip of a twelve-year-old, this child had been forced to go into service because of her family’s financial problems. She became the personal maid of a woman who died three years later, whereupon her dead mistress’s son attempted, “by all manner of temptations and devices, to seduce her.” So far, so ordinary—this was, after all, the lot of hundreds of thousands of young domestics throughout England. However, here the story deviated from the usual path of pregnancy, discovery, disgrace, expulsion from service, childbirth in a hovel or even a ditch, ruin, misery, perhaps death. For in the story Mr. Richardson heard, the bonnie lass “had recourse to…many innocent stratagems to escape the snares laid for her virtue,” which included nearly drowning herself. However, she persevered, and finally, “by her noble resistance, watchfulness, and excellent qualities, subdued” her tormentor so that he actually did the decent but astonishing thing and married her. Even more astonishingly, the bride managed to vault the social abyss between herself and her husband and “behaved herself with so much dignity, sweetness, and humility, that she made herself beloved by everybody.” Both rich and poor adored her and her grateful husband blessed her. Apparently this is what had really happened, and Mr. Richardson set himself the task of committing the story to paper. Mr. Richardson painstakingly presented it from the heroine’s perspective, with all the nuances and judgment a beleaguered fifteen-year-old might have had. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Pamela is the 533-page result. Pamela was staggeringly successful, to its publisher’s delight, selling out five editions in its first year. (282 years later, it is still required reading for thousands of postsecondary literature courses.) Its message—that maidenly virtue and virginity were marketable commodities that could greatly advance their owner and her family—resonated with the rising middle class. The great poet Alexander Pope raved that Pamela’s would do more for virtue than volumes of sermons. However, vociferous critics also emerged, foremost among them Henry Fielding, who detested Pamela’s cloying and calculating coyness. Months after Pamela’s triumphant appearance, Mr. Fielding counter-attacked with Shamela, subtitled “An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. In which, the many notorious Falsehoods and Misrepresentations of a Book called Pamela, Are exposed and refuted; and all the matchless Arts of that young Politician, set in a true and just Light…Necessary to be had in all Families…” Ten months later, Mr. Fielding’s lengthier novel Joseph Andrews appeared, still parodying Pamela. Here the hero is the virtuous Joseph Andrews, in dire danger from his aggressive, lascivious, and upper-class female employer. When he resists her advances, she is aghast. “Have you the assurance to pretend, that when a lady demeans herself to throw aside the rules of decency, in order to honor you with the highest favor in her power, your virtue should resist her inclination? That when she had conquered her own virtue, she should find an obstruction in yours?” “Madam,” said Joseph, “I can’t see why her having no virtue should be a reason against my having any: or why, because I am a man, or because I am poor, my virtue should be subservient to her pleasures.” “I am out of patience,” cries the lady: “did ever a mortal hear of a man’s virtue! Did ever the greatest, or the gravest, men pretend to any of this kind! Will magistrates who punish lewdness, or parsons who preach against it, make any scruple of committing it?” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Mr. Fielding was getting in his own strikes against what he regarded as the preposterous and morally revolting Pamela, in which virginity is called a virtue, ticketed with a price tag, and hawked to the highest bidder. In his own moral scheme, chastity—true chastity—is essential, for men ad for women. He slips in lessons about the consequences of debauchery—a ruined young woman condemned to Newgate Prison for prostitution, while her seducer suffers only pangs of remorse. Joseph Andrews’s chastity is more than his physical virginity. It is his commendable ability to master his sensuality. Chastity is not some smug item for barter. It is a religiously derived way of life and deserving of more profundity than Pamela was able to give it. Let us proceed to some more general moral premises of modern times. The Protestant Reformation won the possibility of living religiously in the World, freed individuals from the domination of the priest, and led, indirectly, to the toleration of private conscience. However, it failed to withstand the secular power; it did not cultivate the meaning of vocation as a community function; and in most sects the spirit of the churches did not spring from their living congregations but was handed down as dogma and ascetic discipline. The final result has been secularism, individualism, the subordination of human beings to a rational economic system, and churches irrelevant to practical community life. Meantime, acting merely as a negative force, the jealous sectarian conscience has drive religion of social thought. The Scientific revolution associated with the name of Mr. Galileo freed thinking of superstition and academic tradition and won attention to the observation of nature. However, it failed to modify and extend its method to social and moral matters, and indeed science has gotten further and further from ordinary experience. With the dominance of science and applied science in our times, the result has been a specialist class of scientists and technicians, the increasing ineptitude of the average person, a disastrous dichotomy of “neutral” facts versus “arbitrary” values, and a superstition of scientism that has put people out of touch with nature, and also has aroused a growing hostility to science. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The Enlightenment unseated age-old tyrannies of state and church and won a triumph of reason over authority. However, its universalism failed to survive the rising nationalisms except in special sciences and learning, and its ideal of encyclopedic reason as the passionate guide to life degenerated to the nineteenth-century hope for progress through science and learning. And we now have an internationalism without brotherhood or peace, even concealing science as a strategic weapon; and a general sentiment that the rule of reason is infinitely impractical. The rebellion for honest speech that we associate with Ibsen, Flaubert, etcetera, and also with the muckrakers broke down the hypocrisy of Victorian prudishness and of exploiting pillars of society; it reopened discussion and renovated languages; and it weakened official censorship. However, it failed to insist on the close relation between honest speech and corresponding action. The result has been a weakening of the obligation to act according to speech, so that, ironically, the real motives of public and private behavior are more in the dark than ever. Popular culture—this ideal, that we may associate in literature with the name of Sam Johnson and the Fleet Street journalists, in the plastic arts with William Morris and Ruskin, freed culture from aristocratic and snobbish patrons. It made thought and design relevant to everyday manners. However, it did not succeed in establishing an immediate relation between the writer or artist and his audience. The result is that the popular culture is controlled by hucksters and promoters as though it were a saleable commodity, and our society, inundated by cultural commodities, remains uncultivated. More than a billion humans, we are frequently told, subsist on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. Many survive—just barely—on much less. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Today the total annual output of the World money economy—what we have referred to as the visible economy—is something on the order $100 Trillion. That is, we are told, the total economic value created on the planet each year. However, what if the total we humans produce each year is not $50 trillion a year in goods, services, and experiences, but closer to $200 trillion? What if, in addition to the $100 trillion, there were another $100 trillion “off the books,” so to speak? We believe there may well be, and the hunt for that missing $50 trillion is the subject of the next several reports. The hunt will take us from supercomputers to Hollywood and hip-hop music, biological threats, piracy and the search for life in outer space. Nonetheless, there are compensations for the Internet. Research shows that certain cognitive skills are strengthened, sometimes substantially, by our use of computers and the Net. These tend to involve lower-level, or more primitive, mental functions such as hand-eye coordination, reflex response, and the processing of visual cues. One much-cited study of video gaming, published in Nature in 2003, revealed that after just ten days of playing action games on computers, a group of young people had significantly increased the speed with which they could shift their visual focus among different images and tasks. Veteran game players were also found to be able to identify more items in their visual field than novices could. The authors of the study concluded that “although video-game playing may seem to be rather mindless, it is capable of radically altering visual attentional processing.” While experimental evidence is sparse, it seems only logical that Web searching and browsing would also strengthen brain functions related to certain kinds of fast-paced problem solving, particularly those involving the recognition of patterns in a welter of data. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
In fact there are still vast numbers who live without any money at all. They have never entered the World money system, scratching by, as our distant ancestors did, basically consuming only what they themselves can produce. A substantial part of this impoverished population would do almost anything to move into the money economy. To enter that economy, humans have had to go through one of what might be called the “Seven Doorways to Money.” Imagine a long hallway with seven doors locked doors. A tired, dirty, hungry crowd pushes and pulls its desperate way along the hall. Each doorway bears a brief, brusque sign telling what must be done to open the lock. Illiterates eagerly ask others to read the signs to them. The signs read as follows: Doorway One: CREATE SOMETHING SALABLE. Grow surplus corn. Draw a portrait. Make a pair of sandals. Find a buyer and you are in. Doorway Two: GET A JOB. Work. Get paid money in return. You are in the money system. As such, you are now a part of the visible economy. Doorway Three: INHERIT. If your parents or your Uncle William bequeaths money to you, this door will swing open. You thereby enter the system. You may never need a job. Doorway Four: OBTAIN A GIFT. Someone—anyone—could give you money, or something you can sell or translate into money. Whatever its form, one you have it, you, too, are in. Doorway Five: MARRY. (Or remarry.) Pick a spouse who has already walked through one of the doors and will share his or her money. Then you, too, can walk on in. Doorway Six: GO ON WELFARE. Money may be grudgingly transferred to you by a government. The amount may be a pittance, but to that degree, you, too, are in the money system. Doorway Seven: STEAL. Finally, there is always theft, first resort of the criminal and last resort of the desperate poor. Of course, there are minor variations—bribes, accidental discovery of money and the life. However, these seven are the main portals through which humanity over the centuries has marched into the money economy. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Through the repetitive evaluation of links, headlines, text snippets, and images, we should become more adept at quickly distinguishing among competing informational cues, analyzing their salient characteristics, and judging whether they will have practical benefit for whatever task we are engaged in or goal we are pursuing. One British study of the way woman search for medical information online indicated that the speed with which they were able to assess the probable value of a Web page increased as they gained familiarity with the Net. It took an experienced browser only a few second to make an accurate judgment about whether a page was likely to have trustworthy information. Other studies suggest that the kind of mental calisthenics we engage in online may lead to small expansion in the capacity of our working memory. That, too, would help us to become more adept at juggling data. Such research indicates that our brains learn to swiftly focus attention, analyze information, and almost instantaneously decide on a go or no-go decision. It is believed that as we spend more time navigating the vast quantity of information available online, many of us are developing neural circuitry that is customized for rapid and incisive spurts of directed attention. As we practice browsing, surfing, scanning, and multitasking, our plastic brains may well become more facile at those tasks. The importance of such skills should not be taken lightly. As our work and social lives come to center on the use of electronic media, the faster we are able to navigate those media and the more adroitly we are able to shift our attention among online tasks, the more valuable we are likely to become as employees and even as friends ad colleagues. Our jobs depend on connectivity, and our pleasure-cycles—no trivial matter—are increasingly tied to it. The practical benefits of Web use are many, which is one of the main reasons we spend so much time online. It may be too late to retreat to a quieter time. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Still, it is a serious mistake to look narrowly at the Net’s benefits and conclude that technology is making us more intelligent. It could be making us more dependent and less intelligent in the long run. If the power goes out, fuel supplies are compromised, and your car cannot drive and park itself or do the lane sensing change, what then? If the power goes out nationwide and you have a book report to do and there is no Net, and you need to charge your car up, what then? For instance, people are pushing electric cars, but in January and February of 2023, Japan is expected to see electricity shortages, as they are expecting record cold temperatures. Some thermal facilities where damaged by an earthquake, so they will not be able to produce the needed power. We need to find other alternatives to electric cars. If one does not learn these skills and think beyond the trends, without having a computer assist them, that may have dire consequences. While the constant shifting of our attention when we are online may make our brains more nimble when it come to multitasking, improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively. Does optimizing for multitasking result in better functioning—that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness? The answer is, in more cases than not, no. The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem. You become more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought. As we gain more experience in rapidly shifting our attention, we may overcome some of the inefficiencies inherent in multitasking, but except in rare circumstances, you can train until you are blue in the face and you would never be as good as if you just focused on one thing at a time. What we are doing when we multitask is learning to be skillful at a superficial level. The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: To be everywhere is to be nowhere.” Every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others. Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies has led to widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
We can, for example, rotate objects in our minds better than we used to be able to. However, our new strengths in visual-spatial intelligence go hand in hand with a weakening of our capacities for the kind of deep processing that underpins mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection. Only if we define intelligence by the Net’s own standards, the Net is making us smarter. If we take a broader and more traditional view of intelligence—if we think about the depth of our thought rather than just its speed—we have come to a different and considerably darker conclusion. Given our brains plasticity, we know that our online habits continue to reverberate in the workings of our synapses when we are not online. We can assume that the neural circuits devoted to scanning, skimming, and multitasking are expanding and strengthening, while those used for reading and thinking deeply, with sustained concentration, are weakening or eroding. Researchers have also found signs that this shift may already be well under way. They gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light multitaskers. They found that the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted by irrelevant environmental stimuli, had significantly less control over the contents of their working memory, and were in general much less able to maintain their concentration on a particular task. Whereas the infrequent multitaskers exhibited relatively strong top-down attentional control, the habitual multitaskers showed a greater tendency for bottom-up attentional control, suggesting that they may be sacrificing performance on the primary task to let in other sources of information. Intensive multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them. As we multitask online, we are training our brains to pay attention to the crap. The consequences for our intellectual lives may prove deadly. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The mental functions that are losing the “survival of the busiest” brain cell battle are those that support calm, linear thought—the ones we use in traversing a lengthy narrative or an involved argument, the ones we draw on when we reflect on our experiences or contemplate an outward or inward phenomenon. The winners are those functions that help us speedily locate, categorize, and assess disparate bits of information in a variety of forms, that let us maintain our mental bearings while being bombarded by stimuli. These functions are, not coincidentally, very similar to the ones performed by computer, which are programmed for the high-speed transfer of data in and out of memory. Once again, we seem to be taking on the characteristics of a popular new intellectual technology. On the evening of April 18, 1775, Samuel Johnson accompanied his friends James Boswell and Joshua Reynolds on a visit to Richard Owen Cambridge’s grand villa on the banks of the Thames outside London. They were down into the library, where Cambridge was waiting to meet them, and after a brief greeting Dr. Johnson darted to the shelves and began silently reading the spines of the volumes arrayed there. “Dr. Johnson,” said Cambridge, “it seems off that one should have such a desire to look at the backs of books.” Dr. Johnson, Mr. Boswell would later recall, “instantly started from his reverie, wheeled about, and replied, ‘Sir, the reason is very plain. Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find it.” The Net grants us instant access to a library of information unprecedented in size and scope, and it makes it easy for us to sort through that library—to find, if not exactly what we were looking for, at least something sufficient for our immediate purposes. What the Net diminishes is Dr. Johnson’s primary kind of knowledge: the ability to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves, to construct within our own minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of connections that give rise to a singular intelligence. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Much of the way of the World, as you know, has become anti-Christ, or anything but Jesus Christ. Our day is a replay of Book of Mormon history in which charismatic figures pursue unrighteous dominion over others, celebrate license of pleasures of the flesh, and promote accumulating wealth as the object of our existence. Their philosophies justify in committing a little sin, or even a lot of sin, but none can offer redemption. That comes only through the blood of the Lamb. Th best, the “anything but Christ,” or “anything but repentance” crowd can offer is the unfounded claim that sin does not exist or that is it exists, it ultimately has no consequences. We cannot see that argument getting much traction at the Final Judgment. We do not have to attempt the impossible in trying to rationalize our sins away. And on the other hand, we do not have to attempt the impossible in creasing the effects of sin by our own merit alone. Ours is not a religion of rationalization nor a religion of perfectionism but a religion of redemption—redemption through Jesus Christ. If we are among the penitent, with His Atonement our sins are nailed to His cross, and with his stripes and stars we are healed. We are not motivated by the desire to condemn. Our true desire mirrors the love of God. We love those to whom we are sent, whoever they may be and whatever they may be like. Just as the Lord, His servants do not want anyone to suffer the pains of sin and poor choices. Clouds and mountains all tangled together up to the blue sky, a rough road and deep woods without any travellers far away the lone moon a bright glistening white nearby a flock of birds sobbing like children. O Lord, give us righteous humans! Humans who are just, humans who are free, humans who respond to their brothers’ and sisters’ needs; who work together with resolute will to speed the approach of Thy kingdom on Earth. O Lord, give us faithful humans! Men like Abraham, dauntless and true, who bring to Thine altar devoted love; who brave every hardship Thy will to perform, befriending the stranger in homage to Thee. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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The Precious Instant of Recognizing the Beloved
Vitality and intentionality are united in the ideal of human perfection, which is equally removed from barbarism and from moralism. The best point of entry into the very special World inhabited by today’s students is the astonishing fact that they usually do not, in what were once called love affairs, say, “I love you,” and never, “I will always love you.” One student told me that, of course, he says, “I love you,” to girlfriends, “when we are breaking up.” It is the clean and easy break—no damage, no fault—at which they are adept. This is understood to be morality, respect for other persons’ freedom. Perhaps young people do not say “I love you” because they are honest. They do not experience love—too familiar with pleasures of the flesh to confuse it with love, too preoccupied with their own fates to be victimized by love’s mad self-forgetting, the last of the genuine fanaticisms. Then there is distaste for love’s fatal historical baggage—gender roles, making the object of one’s affection into possessions and object without respect for their self-determination. Young people today are afraid of making commitments, and the point is that love is commitment, and much more. Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication. Commitment is gratuitous, motives in the soul for moral dedication. Commitment is gratuitous, motiveless, because the real passions are all low and selfish. One may be attracted to someone physically, but that does not, so people think, provide any sufficient motive for real and lasting concern for another. Young people, and not only young people, have studied and practiced a crippled eros that can no longer take wing, and does not contain within it the longing for eternity and the divination of one’s relatedness to being. They are practical Kantians: whatever is tainted with lust or pleasure cannot be moral. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
However, they have not discovered the pure morality. It remains an empty category used to discredit all substantial inclinations that were once moralizing. Too much emphasis on authenticity has made it impossible to trust one’s instincts, and too much seriousness about pleasures of the flesh has made it impossible to take intimate passions seriously. Young men and women distrust eroticism too much to think it a sufficient pointer toward a way of life. The burdens implied in and blessed by eros are only burdens without it. It is not cowardice to avoid taking on responsibilities that have no charm even in anticipation. When marriage occurs it does not usually seem to result from a decision and a conscious will to take on its responsibilities. The couple have lived together for a long time, and by an almost imperceptible process, they find themselves married, as much out of convenience as passion, as much negatively as positively (not really expecting to do much better, since they have looked around and seen how imperfect all fits seem to be.) Among the educated, marriage these days seems to be best acquired in a fit of absence of mind. Part of the inability to make commitments involving pleasures of the flesh result from an ideology of the feelings. Young people are always telling me such reasonable things about jealousy and possessiveness and even their dreams about the future. However, as to dreams about the future with a partner, they have none. That would be to impose a rigid, authoritarian patter on the future, which should emerge spontaneously. This means they can foresee no future, or that the one they would naturally foresee is forbidden them by current piety, as sexist. Similarly, if his or her partner has pleasures of the flesh relations with someone else, why should a man or a woman be jealous? A serious person today does not want to force the feeling of others. The same goes for possessiveness. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
When I hear such things, all so sensible and in harmony with a liberal society, I feel that I am in the presence of robots. This ideology only works for people who have had no experience of feelings, have never loved, have abstracted from the texture of life. These prodigies of reason need never fear Othello’s fate. Kill for love! What can that mean? It may very well be that their apatheia is a suppression of feeling, anxiety about getting hurt. However, it might also be the real thing. People may, having digested the incompatibility of ends, have developed a new kind of soul. None of these possibility for intimate passions students have actualized was unknow to me. However, their lack of passion, of hope, of despair, of a sense of the twinship of love and death, is incomprehensible to me. When I see a young couple who have lived together throughout their college years leave each other with a handshake and move out into life, I am struck dumb. Students do not date anymore. Dating was the petrified skeleton of courtship. They lived in herds or packs with no more sexual differentiation than any herds have when not in heat. Human beings can, of course, engage in pleasures of the flesh at any time. However, today there are none of the conventions invented by civilization to take the place of heart, to guide mating, and perhaps to channel it. Nobody is sure who is to make the advances, whether there are to be a pursuer and a pursued, what the event is to mean. They have to improvise, for roles are banned, and a man pays a high price for misjudging his partners’ attitude. The act takes place but it does not separate the couple from the flock, to which they immediately return as they were before, undifferentiated. It is easier for men to get gratification than it used to be, and many men have the advantage of being pursued. Certainly they do not have to make all kinds of efforts and pay all kinds of attention, as men once did. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
There is an easy familiarity. However, at least some of those advantages for men are offset by nervousness about their performance in pleasures of the flesh. In the past a man could think he was doing a wonderful thing for a woman, and expect to be admired for what he brought. However, that was before he could be pretty sure that he was being compared and judged, which is daunting. And certain aspects of the undeniably male biology sometimes make it difficult for him to perform and cause him to prefer being the one to express the desire. Women are still pleased by their freedom and their capacity to chart an independent course for themselves. However, they frequently suspect that they are being used, that in the long run they may need men more than men need them, and that they cannot expect much from the feckless contemporary male. They despise what men used to think women had to offer (that is partly why it is now offered so freely), but they are dogged by doubt whether men are very impressed by what they are now offering instead. Distrust suffuses the apparently easy commerce between the genders. There is an awful lot of breaking up, surely disagreeable, though nothing earthshaking. Exam time is great moment for students to separate. They are under too much stress and too busy to put up with much trouble from a relationship. “Relationships,” not love affairs, are what they have. Love suggests something wonderful, exciting, positive and firmly seated in the passions. A relationship is gray, amorphous, suggestive of a project, without a given content, and tentative. You work at a relationship, whereas love takes care of itself. In a relationship the difficulties come first, and there is a search for common grounds. Love presents illusions of perfection to the imagination and is forgetful of all the natural fissures in human connection. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
About relationships there is ceaseless anxious talk, the kind one cannot help overhearing in student hangouts or restaurants frequently by man and women who are “involved” with one another, the kind of obsessive prattle so marvelous captured in old Nichols and May routines or Woody Allen films. In one Nichols and May bit, a couple who have just had pleasures of the flesh for the first time, assert with all the emptiness of doubt, “We are going to have a relationship.” This insight was typical of University Chicago in the fifties, of The Lonely Crowd. The only mistake was to encourage the belief that by becoming more “inner-directed,” going farther down the path of the isolated self, people will be less lonely. The problem, however, is not that people are not authentic enough, but that they have no common object, no common good, no natural complementarity. Selves, of course, have no relation to anything but themselves, and that is why “communication” id their problem. Gregariousness, like that of the animals in the herd, is admitted by all. Grazing together side by side and rubbing against one another are the given, but there is a desire and a necessity to have something more, to make the transition from the herd to the hive, where there is real interconnection. Hence, the hive—community roots, extended family—is much praised, but no one is willing to transform his indeterminate self into an all too determinate worker, drone or queen, to submit to the rank-ordering and division of labor necessary to any whole that is more than just a heap of discrete parts. Selves want to be wholes, but have lately also take to longing to be parts. This is the reason why conversation about relationships remains so vacuous, abstract and unprogrammatic, with its whole content stored in a bottle labeled “commitment.” It is also why there is so much talk about phenomena like “bonding.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
In the absence of any connectedness in their souls, human beings seek reassurance in fruitless analogy to mechanism found in brutes. However, this will not work because human attachment always has an element of deliberate choice, denied by such analogy. One need only compare the countless novel and movies about male bonding with Aristotle’s discussion of friendship in the Ethics. Friendship, like its related phenomenon, love, is no longer within our ken because both require notions of soul and nature that, for a mixture of theoretical and political reasons, we cannot even consider. The reliance on relationships is a self-delusion because it is founded on an inner contradiction. Relations between the genders have always been difficult, and that is why so much of our literature is about men and women quarreling. There is certainly legitimate ground to doubt their suitability for each other given the spectrum—from the harem to Plato’s Republic—of imaginable and actually existing relations between them, whether nature acted the stepmother or God botched the creation by an afterthought, as some Romantic believed. That man is not made to be alone is all very well, but who is made to live with him? This is why men and women hesitated before marriage, and courtship was thought necessary to find out whether the couple was compatible, and perhaps to give them basic training in compatibility. No one wanted to be stuck forever with an impossible partner. However, for all that, they knew pretty much what they wanted from one another. The question was whether they could get it (whereas our question today is much more what is wanted). A man was to make a living and protect his wife and children, and a woman was to provide for the domestic economy, particularly in caring for husband and children. Frequently this did not work out very well for one or both of the partners, because they either were not good at their functions or were not eager to perform them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
In order to assure the proper ordering of things, the women in Shakespeare, like Portia and Rosalind, are forced to masquerade as men because the real men are inadequate and need to be corrected. This happens only in comedies; when there are no such intrepid women, the situation turns into a tragedy. However, the assumption of male garb observes the proprieties or conventions. Men should be doing what the impersonating women are doing; and when the women have set things right, they become women again and submit to the men, albeit with a tactful, ironical consciousness that they are at least partially playacting in order to preserve a viable order. Even if it is only conventional, the arrangement implicit in marriage tells those who enter into it what to expect and what the satisfactions are supposed to be. Very simply, the family is a sort of miniature body politic in which the husband’s will is the will of the whole. The woman can influence her husband’s will, and it is supposed to be informed by the love of wife and children. Now all of this has simply disintegrated. It does not exist, nor is it considered good that it should. However, nothing certain has taken its place. Neither men nor women have any idea what they are getting into anymore, or, rather, they have reason to fear the worst. There are two equal wills, and no meditating principle to link them and no tribunal of last resort. What is more, neither of the wills is certain of itself. This is where the “ordering of priorities” comes in, particularly with women, who have not yet decided which comes first, career or children. People are no longer raised to think they ought to regard marriage as the primary goal and responsibility, and their uncertainty is mightily reinforced by the divorce statistics, which imply that putting all of one’s psychological eggs in the marriage basket is a poor risk. The goals and wills of men and women have become like parallel lines, and it requires a Lobachevskyan imagination to hope they may meet. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
The inharmonious of final ends finds its most concrete expression in the female career, which is now precisely the same as the male career. There are two equal careers in almost every household composed of educated persons under thirty-five. And those careers are not mere means to family ends. They are personal fulfillments. In this nomadic country it is more than likely that one of the partners will be forced, or have the opportunity, to take a job in a city other than one where his or her spouse works. What to do? They can stay together with one partner sacrificing his career to the other, they can commute, or they can separate. None of these solutions is satisfactory. More important, what is going to happen is unpredictable. It is the marriage or the career that will count most? Women’s careers today are qualitatively different from what they were up to twenty years ago, and such conflict is now inevitable. The result is that both marriage and career are devalued. There is also a cultural reason why we do not talk much about beauty. Our culture worships change. We become bored instead of serene; and how then can we appreciate the sense of eternity, the timelessness of this experience? In our age “time is money”; we construct great buildings only to tear them down in seventy-five years. We once erected the tallest buildings in the World, the World Trade Center, which was destroyed. Our age is not one in which beauty has a firm place at the Board of Directors meeting. We must nevertheless, being human, communicate by words as much as we can. We see in the Greek ideal of beauty as both male and female. The masculine and feminine are merged. Balance is part of the beauty of humanity. However, the television has some unique qualities that are destroying the natural order. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Television is so successful because the writers are successful at recognizing certain inescapable facts about the medium, its audience, and the environment in which the audience characteristically viewed the play. For example, television drama, such as Black Knight: The Man Who Guards Me, focuses on people rather than plots, places, or even ideas. The “normal” view of the players on a television screen is the close-up. As a consequence, the human face is given such a continued and forceful presence that it tends to become the overriding emphasis of the play, whether the author intends it or not. Bridges falling down and planes zooming high may be thrillingly pictured in films or described in novels. However, on live television, of course, the space limitations in a studio make them impossible. Even in televised film sequences, such actions are not dramatically persuasive because of the smallness of the screen and the relatively crude definition of the image. Television, as one director puts it, is a “psychoanalytic medium.” What television drama does best is to show faces, and to suggest wat is behind them. Rod Serling once wrote, “The key to TV drama is intimacy, and the facial study on a small screen carries with it a meaning and a power far beyond its usage in the motion picture.” As these writers and directors discovered, television drama is also at its best when highly compressed. There is little time for subplots or for much elaboration of the main plot. The television dramatist, like the short story writer, has time only to relate a bare narrative and evoke a mood, which he does with the help of the camera. Occasionally, the writer is faced with the problem of expanding a brief story, but typically his problem is reverse. Television cannot take a thick, fully woven fabric of drama. It can only handle simple lines of movement and consequently smaller moments of crisis. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
We must remember also that television is family entertainment viewed within the home. In an earlier time, producers and writers believed that this imposed limitations on both language and the themes of television plays. Controversial topics might be maturely explored in the theater or in other literary forms, but (they believed) on television such subjects tended to be shocking, not only because of television’s unselected audience but especially because of the medium’s almost painful explicitness. It is probably still true that words that might scarcely be remembered when read in novels or heard on the stage can almost never be forgotten when they invade the living room. A now famous example of this occurred on February 19, 1956, when the Alcoa Hour presented Reginal Rose’s Tragedy in a Temporary Town. One of the actors, Lloyd Bridges, was overcome by the excitement of a particular scene and uttered an expletive that was not in the script but that might have been had the play been performed on the stage. The words themselves would have gone practically unnoticed in a Norman Mailer or Nelson Algren novel. On television, the event was a cause celebre. Television writers worked for years within these limitations and produced a substantial body of serious drama, true theater of the masses. They were able to do so for reasons that may be instructive to any who hope to use television to the same end. In the first place, the emphasis was on original drama written by young and largely unknown writers—writers who had little experience in the theater and therefore did not bring to their work the prejudices of theatrical tradition. Along with their equally young directors, they were free to explore the resources of television as a new and unique medium. They wrote television plays, not stage lays or movie scripts. Second, they were not interested in adapting Shakespeare and the rest of the classical cannon to the television screen. They wanted to write in the idiom of their own time, about anxieties and issues that concerned their audiences. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Moreover, the young actors they used were not trained in the classical repertoire, and would not have been any good at doing Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen, Rostand, Shaw, or even Strindberg. However, they were well suited to speak in the voices of Americans—a butcher from the Bronx of a misunderstood man from Mississippi or a baseball player from Indiana. Among the actors who got their start by doing fifty-two-minute plays are James Dean, Grace Kelly, Dustin Hoffman, Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Joanne Woodward, Robert Redford, and Rod Steiger. And, since so many plays were required to fill the screen each week, the television networks gathered together what amounted to a repertory company. In other words, there was work, and plenty of it, for writers, with the result that talented people from all over the country flocked to New York with scripts in hand and reasonable prospects of seeing their plays produced on television. As Moss Hart, himself one of America’s most famous writers for the stage, once remarked in urging writers to turn their attention to television: “Consider, we write one play [for the stage], it takes months to put on, and then, if it is a success, we play it eight performances a week, two hours a performance. When we sell out, we reach a weekly audience of perhaps nine thousand people…if we sell out.” However, a television play can be produced in a matter of weeks, he went on, and when it is shown, millions of people see it at once. Of course, many of the plays produced during this period were not that great and quickly forgotten. However, that was also the case with Elizabethan drama. We judge an era by its successes, not its failures. Speaking of failures, perhaps the most important feature of this era was the relative absence of a fear of failure. Plays were not excessively expensive to produce. Thus, failure was not a financial catastrophe, as it is now, and was then in the theater and movies. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Moreover, each program was sponsored by only one company, and these were often headed by entrepreneurs who were themselves humans of daring, not terrified by failure. Neither were the writers and directors, who were filled with the enthusiasm and conviction of youth. They had something to say and they were not afraid to say it. There were the audiences of the time. These audiences were made up of people who were not over-saturated with television. In those days, television was not on twenty-four hours a day, and the screen was not filled with programs that dull the senses. People looked forward to these weekly dramas, and expected them to be serious and thought-provoking. Unlike today, the commercials were not overbearing, and were designed to fit the mood of the play. The play was the thing, not the commercial. And the play invariably was about the experience and World of the audience. Its characters were recognizable, its issues relevant, its language mature and comprehensible, its themes realistic and poignant. The period of rapid growth from 1946 to 1970, which coincided with the emergence of television and electronic advertising, concentrated wealth and power in this country to an unheard-of degree. It put effective control of the economy in the hands of a few corporate entities. It concentrated immense wealth among a handful of people. Meanwhile, the working classes, and the more disadvantaged nonworking people, to whom the commodity life had promised dazzling benefits, ended up in a far worse, more desperate and more dependent position than ever before. A New York advertising man, Lawrence G. Chait, was the first person to articulate clearly the economic concentration made inevitable by economic growth. In a now-famous speech he gave in Detroit in 1968, Mr. Chait said, “The factor of overwhelming significance in our business and financial life for some years now has been the tend toward concertation of economic power.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Pointing out that in 1965 this country had 412,000 business units, he added, “The fifty largest controlled 35.2 percent of the total manufacturing assets.” As for profits, “The twenty largest manufacturing corporations, [who hold] 25 percent of total corporate assets, had 32 percent of [the nation’s] profits after taxes.” That means that only .005 percent of the corporations in this country enjoyed one-third of all corporate profits. Mr. Chait went on: “Assets and profits are, of course, important measures of concentration in national economic life, but there are other very interesting indices. In 1963, for example, there were 112 industries in which 4 companies accounted for more than 50 percent of production. In 29 of these 112 industries, the top 4 companies accounted for more than 75 percent of production. By 1963, 30 percent of the volume of production of consumer goods came from industries in which the top 4 firms accounted for over 50 percent of production.” Mr. Chait quoted economics professor Corwin Edwards to explain why the larger corporations inevitably get larger during periods of economic growth, absorbing or driving out smaller ones: “In encounters with small enterprises it [the corporate conglomerate] can buy scarce materials and attractive sites, inventions and facilities; pre-empt the services of the most expensive technicians and executives; and acquire reserves of material for the future. It can absorb losses that would consume the entire capital of smaller rival…Moment by moment the big company can outbid, out-spend in advertising, technology or talent, or out-lose the smaller ones; and from the series of such momentary advantage it derives an advantage in attaining its larger aggregate results. “The sociologist may very well take exception to this trend,” Mr. Chait said, “but as pragmatists, we must recognize that this in fact is the direction in which the economic organization of our country is moving.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Finally, he quoted Dr. Edwin G. Nourse, who believes, “There are no discernible limits at which such concentrations of economic power, once fully underway, would automatically cease.” A moving example of the way the process works is offered in The American Farm by Maisie and Richard Conrat. The authors points out that only two hundred and seventy years ago, 95 percent of the population of this country lived on farm land; now less than 5 percent do. The family farm is a creature of the past, and so is the moderately large farm. The economics of technological scale nourish only the hugest agribusinesses and their machines. The critical period in this change came immediately after World War II: “With astonishing rapidity, the 60 horsepower general purpose tractor was replaced by a new 140 horsepower model, then by a towering 235 horsepower machine with a $40,000 price tag. The single-row corn harvester gave place to machines that could handle four rows simultaneously, then eight rows. The cost of such new equipment made it economically imperative for farmers to take on more acreage. Between 1950 and 1975, the acreage of the average American farm doubled and the value of farm machinery trebled…those who could not keep up with the frenzied pace were shoved aside and forced to drop out. In the new agriculture there was no room for the man who simply wished to live on the land and work in the soil and sell enough to pay his bills. The dairyman with twenty cows notified by his milk company that they would not be making pick-ups at his place anymore. From now on the company trucks were stopping only at the farms of the large operators. Small scale vegetable producers, orchardists, and general famers found themselves underpriced and cut out of the market by supermarket chains and agribusiness corporations.” What was true for farmers was true for all business as the rapid-growth phenomenon gave automatic advantage to the larger, better-financed, more technologically advanced elements of the system. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Smaller competitors were driven from competition by the mere scale of the expenditure required at every level, from the cost of automation to the salaries of executives to the availability of bank loans. Banks, recognizing very early that large companies are better loan risks than small ones, actively assisted the advancing juggernaut. Smaller companies were wise to face the fact that it was usually better to sell out before things got worse. Nowhere were the advantages of size more evident than in advertising. Only the largest corporations in the World have access to network television time because broadcasting costs average between $120,000 to more than $1 million per minute to reach 30 million viewers. Television is the media counterpart to the eight-row corn harvester. Technology is definitely changing our culture. The switch from reading to power-browsing is happening very quickly. Already, reports Ziming Liu, a library science professor at San Jose State University, “the advent of digital media and the growing collection of digital documents have had a profound impact on reading.” In 2003, Dr. Lui surveyed 113 well-educated people—engineers, scientists, accountants, teachers, business managers, and graduate students, mainly between thirty and forty-five percent said that they were spending more time “browsing and scanning,” and eighty-two percent reported that they were doing more “non-liner reading.” Only twenty-seven percent said that the time they devoted to “in-depth reading” was on the rise, while forty-five percent said it was declining. Just sixteen percent said they were giving more “sustained attention” to reading; fifty percent said they were giving it less “sustained attention.” The findings, said Dr. Lui, indicate that “the digital environment tends to encourage people to explore many topics extensively, but at a more superficial level,” and that “hyperlinks distract people from reading and thinking deeply.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
One of the participants in the study told Dr. Lui, “I find that my patience with reading long documents is decreasing. I want to skip ahead to the end of the articles.” Another said, “I skim much more [when reading] html pages than I do with printed materials.” It is quite clear, Dr. Lui concluded, that with the flood of digital text pouring through our computers, and phones, “people are spending more time on reading” than they used to. However, it is equally clear that it is a very different kind of reading. A “screen-based reading behavior is emerging,” he wrote, which is characterized by “browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one-time reading, [and] non-liner reading.” The time “spent on in-depth reading and centered reading,” is, on the other hand, failing steadily. There is nothing wrong with browsing and scanning, or even power-browsing and power-scanning. We have always skimmed newspapers more than we have read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines in order to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to skim text is every bit as important as the ability to read deeply. What is different, and troubling, is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for deeper study, scanning is becoming an end in itself-our preferred way of gathering and making sense of information of all sorts. We have reached the point where a Rhodes Scholar like Florida State’s Joe O’Shea—a philosophy major, no less—is comfortable admitting not only that he dies not read books but that he does not see any particular need to read them. Why bother, when you can Google the bits and pieces you need in a fraction of a second? What we are experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Yet even these crises are only part of a vastly larger intellectual drama. Economics and science are, for all their importance, only interacting parts of the World’s far larger knowledge system. And that entire system is caught up in a history-making upheaval. We are slicing and dicing knowledge in new way, crashing out of industrial-age disciplinary boundaries and reorganizing the deep structure of our knowledge system. Knowledge without organization loses accessibility and context. Thus scholars throughout time have divided knowledge into distinct categories. When twelfth-century Europeans translated the works of Arab philosopher Abu Nasr al-Farabi (AD 870-950), they found what has been called a “map of the knowable”—a systematic, hierarchical organization of knowledge into categories. In the medieval West, later on, universities mapped knowledge differently. Every educated person was supposed to master the trivium (consisting of grammar, rhetoric and Aristotelian logic) and the quadrivium (astronomy, arithmetic, geometry and music). Today, as knowledge is broken into more and more specialized and subspecialized categories university offerings are still, like al-Farabi’s, neatly categorized in hierarchical structures. For example, in terms of both academic status and budget, science typically outranks the social sciences, which are regarded as too “soft.” Physics until recently topped science pyramid but is currently being nudged off its pinnacle by biology. Of all the social sciences, economics pulls top rank because, being highly mathematized, it is (or pretends to be) the most “hard.” However, these structures are in danger of collapsing under their own weight. More and more jobs require cross-disciplinary knowledge, so that we find increasing need for hyphenated backgrounds—“Astro-biologist,” “biophysicist,” “environmental-engineer,” “forensic-accountant.” Some tasks require two or more hyphens. Hence, “neuro-psycho-pharmacologist.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Soon, it seems clear, we will run out of hyphens. Seemingly permanent disciplines and hierarchies may disappear altogether as knowledge is organized into ad hoc non-hierarchical configurations determined by the problems at hand. At which point the “map of knowable” becomes a flickering set of constantly changing patterns. This alone represents a quake in the knowledge system that will transform work groupings, professions, universities, hospitals and bureaucracies in general. Beneficiaries of the old ways of organizing ever-more-specialized knowledge—tenured professors, bureaucrats, economists and others—will resist such changes. Surely, deep specialization has paid enormous dividends. However, it also kills surprise and imagination, and breeds individuals afraid to step, let alone think, outside their disciplinary perimeter. Conversely, imagination and creativity are fed when previously unrelated ideas, concepts or categories of data, information or knowledge are juxtaposed in fresh ways. By pulling together widely diverse streams of personal experience and know-how, knowledge workers are likely to bring temporary, novel, out of the you-know-what ideas into their thinking and decision-making. As we have seen, what may be lost in knowledge based on long-term, deeper and deeper specialization may thus, in this new system, be compensated for by enhanced creativity and imagination. Powerful new technologies will help us inject temporary disciplines into fresh plug-in, plug-out modules and models. They already do. We are mining and matching bigger and more diverse databases against one another in search of previously unnoticed patters and connections. This matching is more than just a convenient tool for finding out how supermarket sales of premium cranberry justice and diapers, or how Pop-Tarts and hurricanes may be related. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Data mining products sometimes startling “who would have thought” insights. Virginia health officials used it to trace an outbreak of salmonella to fruit produced in a small packing shed on a farm in Brazil. Said an official of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “We never had an outbreak from mangos that we have recognized before.” If creativity involves the novel juxtaposition of facts, ideas or insights previously thought to be unconnected, then mining and matching are fundamental parts of the innovation process. When we put changes like these together and then add the splitting data, information and knowledge into smaller, more granular chunks—making it more perishable, classifying things differently, proliferating what-if scenarios, introducing new models at a faster and faster rate and operating at ever-higher levels of abstraction—it is clear that we are not simply accumulating more knowledge. And when we add these to the crises in economic thinking and science, it becomes evident that we are engaged in the fastest and most profound restructuring of knowledge in history, with implications reaching far beyond the economy to culture, religion, politics and social life. At the same time we are making the wealth of individual and nations alike more dependent than ever on that growing global knowledge base. We do not know what strange shortcuts and twisted pathways knowledge as an expanding, organic system will take, or where it will ultimately carry us. Even when we combine all these changes in humanity’s relationships to time, space and knowledge—and the other deep fundamental as well—we only glimpse the truly awesome outlines of today’s global revolution. To see beyond, we need to look at the extraordinary changes that lie ahead, not merely in the visible economy but in the “hidden half” of the entire emerging wealth system. Without taking this next exploratory step, we, as individuals and as societies, will stumble into tomorrow unaware of the amazing potential we hold in our hands. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
John Milton’s Lady, one of the lovely maidenly “stars breathing soft flames,” is captured by a despicable gang of men with evil intentions. The leader, Comus, exhorts her to swallow a magic potion: “List, lady; be not coy, and be not consen’d with that same vaunted name, Virginity…what need a vermeil-tinctur’d lip for that, love-daring eyes, or tresses like the morn? Fortunately, the Lady knows better: Thou hast nor ear, nor soul to apprehend the sublime notion, and high mystery, that must be utter’s to unfold the sage and serious doctrine of Virginity.” After much debate, the Lady’s two brothers dash onto the scene, swords at the ready, and save their sister from the repulsive fate Mr. Milton described as coupling “in the rites of nature by the mere compulsion of lust, without love or peace, worse than wild beast.” Underling Comus was Mr. Milton’s revulsion for the bestiality of pleasures of the flesh and his yearning for celibacy. His chaste love affair with a young Italian man was his most cherished relations, and when Charles Diodati died in 1638, Mr. Milton’s literary epitaph was a passionate ode to their restraint: “Because the flush of innocence and stainless youth were death to thee, because though did’dt not know the joys of marriage, lo, for three virginal honors are reserved.” However, Mr. Milton violated his own precepts. A mission to collect a bad dent was somehow transformed into a proposal of marriage, and instead of the money, he arrived home with Mary, his very young wide. The marriage was unhappy for both husband and wife. Mary found the dour John a bore, and he fond her flighty and incompatible. “It is not strange though many who have spent their life chastely, are in some things not so quick sighted, while they haste too eagerly to light the nuptial torch,” he wrote in self-exculpation. Mary was the real loser, for though her mother and sister moved in with her and Mr. Milton, she died delivering their fourth child. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Mr. Milton, meanwhile, was going blind, but his daughters scorned him as brutally as Mary’s mother. He endured a wretched domestic life. His girls stole housekeeping money and sold his books until he finally sent them off to learn the lace-making trade. He remarried, but his second wife died within a year. Throughout this torturous period, Mr. Milton was trying to write Paradise Lost. In 1663, understanding friends introduced Mr. Milton to his third wife, Elizabeth Woodhull. She was a much younger woman who care for him until his death in 1674, and provided the tranquility and stability he needed to complete Paradise Lost, published in 1677. His persona life, specifically his three marriages, was a constant reproach to his values, and this is reflected repeatedly in his poetry. In the magnificent epic poem Paradise Lost, Mr. Milton again celebrated chastity, coupling it with an exploration of terrible temptations to transgress. “Judge not what is best by pleasure, though to nature seeming met,” he warns: For that fair female troop those saw’st, that seem’d of Goddesses, so blithe, so smooth, so gay, yet empty of all good wherein consists woman’s domestick honor and chief praise; bred only and complete to the taste, of lustful appetence, to sing, to dance, to dress, and troll the tongue, and roll the eye; to these that sober race of men, whose lives religious titled them the sons of God, shall yield up all their virtue, all their fame.” In another harsh description of the temptation triumphant, “Adam and Even after they Fell,” Mr. Milton laments that, “SO rose the Danite strong, Herculean Samson, for the harlot-lap of Philistean Dalilah, and wak’d shorn of his strength, they destitute and bare of all their virtue.” Much later, a repentant Eve tells Adam, “…and is miserable it is to be to other cause of misery, our own begott’n, and of our loins to bring into this cursed World a woeful race, that afte wretched life must be at least food for so foul a monster.” In the poetry of the great John Milton, chastity is the ultimate virtue, pleasures of the flesh a mortal sin, and women the seductive snake who entices wavering men to lie with her. Doctrinally speaking, Mr. Milton’s lyrics hark back to the Early Christian Fathers. In that respect, Comus, Paradise Lost, and his other masterpieces are like St. Augustine togged out in gilt-embroidered poetics. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
I walked in your World a mercy, a healing—like a like the Midas touch rained gold, rainbows came from your glance. The Fall of rain, evening rain, was truly a blessing. “Hear, O Heavens, and give ear, O Earth! For the Lord has spoken: I have nourished and brought up sons and have made them great and exalted, but they have rebelled against Me and broken away from me,” reports Isaiah 1.2. God has a plan for each of us. He created this Earth and sent us here so we could have faith and find joy. Our challenges help us grow and prepare us to live with Him again. God wants to help His children be happy. He has blessed us with so much. He loves you, watches out for you, and wants you to communicate with Him through prayers. Jesus Christ has promised, “Your Father which is in Heaven [will] give good things to them that ask Him,” Matthew 7.11. To ensure a righteous judgment, the Savior’s atoning sacrifice will clear away the underbrush of ignorance and the painful thorns of hurt caused by others. The more we understand the Savior’s gift, the more we will come to know, in our minds and in our hearts the truths of the Book of Mormon and that they have the power to heal, comfort, restore, succor, strengthen, console, and cheer our souls. O Lord, give us fearless humans! Humans to meet the trials of life with faith and vision, steadfast hearts and willing hands; human who dare to do the right, and yield not truth to wealth or power. O Lord, give us righteous humans! Humans who are just, humans who are free, humans who respond to their brothers’ and sisters’ needs; who work together with resolute will to spend the approach of Thy kingdom on Earth. The glorious promise of the Savior’s atoning sacrifice is that as far as our mistakes as parents are concerned, He holds our children blameless and promises healing for them. And even when they have sinned against the light—as we all do—His arm of mercy is outstretched, and if they will look to Him and live, He will redeem them. Although the Savior has power to mend what we cannot fix, He commands us to do all we can to make restitution as part of our repentance. Our sins and mistakes displace not only our relationship with God but also our relationships with others. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Kitchen Dramas—Are they Arms Race or Saving Civilization as We Know it?
One a person experiences the full impact of the conflict in consciousness, one turns in an accusing rage on the target object. During the past several years, I have spent a good deal of my time blaming television for many of the more obvious dysfunctions from which Western culture—and especially America—is now suffering. It has been pointed out to me that I do this because I am by nature a negative person, always ready to condemn what is wrong rather than to praise what is right. Several of my students have even gone so far as to observe that had I lived during the period of incunabula—during the first fifty years of the printing press—I would have burdened everyone with a long list of depressing prophecies about the dangers of the machine-made book and universal literacy. However, my students are only half right. Assuming I had the brains to see what was happening in the year 1500, I would certainly have warned the Holy See that the printing press would place the word of God on every Christian’s kitchen table, and, as a consequence, the authority of the Church hierarchy would be put in jeopardy. Had I been granted a papal audience, I would have warned the Pop that armed with a printing press, Martin Luther was more than a malcontent priest suffering from a bad case of constipation. The printed word made him a serious revolutionary. I might also have warned the local princes that their days were numbered, that printing would give form to a new idea of nationhood which would make local potentates obsolete. And if the Brotherhood of Alchemists had allowed me to give the keynote address at their annual convention, I would have told them to go into another line of work, that printing would give great impetus to inductive science and that alchemy would not stand against the glare of publicly shared scientific knowledge. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
I would also have told any wandering bards who came my way that within a hundred years their trade would lie in ruins, that tribal lays and epic poetry were doomed, and that they would be wise to urge their trainees to turn their talents to writing essays and reading novels. Now, not every one of these prophecies foretells a bad thing. That is why I said my students are only half right. Whether or not a prophecy is negative depends on your point of view. For example, since most of you are Lutherans, you probably would have cheered the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire. The Catholics of those times would, of course, have mourned it passing. In any case, there are some changes brought about by new media benefit some, harm others, and to a few do not make much of a difference. This is as true of television as it was of the printing press or any other important medium, although in the case of television there are very few indeed who are not affected in one way of another. For most of you here, television will provide a gratifying career. On the other hand, and in the long run, television may bring an end to the careers of schoolteachers, since school itself was an invention of the printing press and must stand or fall on the issue of how much importance the printed word will have in the future. New media break up old knowledge monopolies; indeed, create new conceptions of knowledge, even new conceptions of politics. If not for television, Joe Biden, for example, would not be President of the United of America, which is good for him and the interests he represents, but not so good for the poor and vulnerable. However, television can people good as it creates a true theater of the masses. For example, between the years 1948 and 1958, approximately 1,500 fifty-two-minute plays were performed “live” on American television. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
“Live” means that these plays were performed at the precise moment they were seen by the television audience, a condition which since the advent of videotape and the widespread use of film has become increasingly rare; “fifty-two minutes” describes the actual running time of the play, eight minutes of the hour being subtracted for commercial messages, the listing of credits, and publicity for the next week’s play. There is no doubt that American television’s finest dramatic moments were provided by fifty-two-minute hours, particularly by such weekly series as the Kraft Television Theater (1947-58), the Philco-Goodyear Playhouse (1948-50), and the Studio One (1948-57). These programs began by presenting adaptations of classic and established contemporary novels but by 1950 had shifted to original dramatic work. By that time, such producers and directors as Worthington Miner, Fred Coe, Delbert Mann, Arthur Penn, and John Frankenheimer has assembled about them several gifted young writers who were prepared to devote their collective talents to a serious exploration of television’s artistic resources. Included in that group, among others, were Reginal Rose, Tad Mosel, Robert Alan Aurthur, Horton Foote, Rob Serling, J.P. Miller, and Gore Vidal. None, however, wrote more fittingly for television than Paddy Chayefsky, whose name, along with Edward. R. Murrow’s, symbolizes what romantics call “the golden age of television.” Mr. Chayefsky was to the “original” television drama what Mr. Ibsen was to the “social drama,” which is to say that he was one of the first creators and certainly its most distinguished one. Like Mr. Ibsen, he achieved an almost perfect union of form and content. Critics have observed, for example, that the effects that Mr. Ibsen achieved in A Doll’s House and Ghosts were a function not only of his themes, with which audience were certainly familiar in 1879 and 1881, but also of the stark, simple, and economical form in which he stated them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Social dramas had been written before Mr. Ibsen, but it remained for him to discover the form for dramatizing social problems. Mr. Chayefsky, of course, did not write for the stage behind a proscenium arch, viewed from a distance in a darkened theater. He wrote for a seventeen-inch screen situated in a family living room, on which the only colors were varying shades of gray. He also had to present his story, from start to finish, in fifty-two minutes, and he could make two assumptions with absolute assurance: that his play would be interrupted at least twice for commercial messages, and that he would have to attract his audience instantly or lose much of it to other channels. He knew, too, as did his director, Delbert Mann, that the picture on the television screen is considerably cruder in visual definition than that on a motion-picture screen. So Mr. Chayefsky wrote his plays in anticipation of the audience’s observing the players in almost unrelenting “close-up.” Mr. Chayefsky realized that some of these technical-aesthetic conditions could create, as could perhaps no other medium, a sense of utter and absolute reality; could create the illusion that what the audience was seeing was not a mere play but life as seen through a seventeen-inch, nearly square hole. Beginning with a play called Holiday Song, which dealt with a rabbi’s re-examination of one’s faith in God, Mr. Chayefsky created a series of dramas that have often been characterized as “small” masterpieces, sometimes referred to as “kitchen” dramas, since much of the action seemed to take place in family kitchens. In any case, they were plays about unexceptional situations. The plots were uncluttered, and undaring, and highly compressed. They had few unexpected turns, little action, no treachery, no perversion, and no heroic gestures (in the traditional sense). #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Mr. Chayefsky’s stories were “small” very much as Sherwood Anderson’s stories are small. The setting was New York, not small-town Ohio, but like Mr. Anderson, Chayefsky explored in economical but meticulous detail the agonizing problems of small people. And thus he elevated the status of both the problems and the people who suffered them. In fact, Mr. Chayefsky once remarked that “Your mother, sister, brothers, cousins, friends—all of these are better subjects for drama than Iago.” He was talking, of course, about television drama. Mr. Chayefsky’s most known play, Marty, tells the story of an unmarried, inarticulate butcher who is attacked to a sensitive but homely woman. Marty’s friends attempt to dissuade him from seeing the woman because she is, in their words, “a dog.” His mother, who fears being abandoned resents the woman bitterly. Against a backdrop of such universal themes as man’s need of loving and being loved, his fear of living alone, and his need to communicate, Mr. Chayefsky pursued his “small” story with persistent literalness, concluding with an equally “small” crisis in which Marty decides, against the protests of his friends and family, to phone the woman and ask her for a date. On the stage of in a novel, the plot would be too flimsy to carry much dramatic weight. When the play was adapted for the movies, it required more “movement” or action and the addition of at least one subplot. On the television screen, however, they play was an artistic triumph, producing a disturbing and edifying illusion of intimacy. Perhaps no other medium is better suited to the “slice of life” drama than television, a fact that is apparently well known to Ingmar Berman. Although television was invented in the 1920s, it did not exist for any practical purposes until after World War II. It is easy to forget that advertising, at least on the scale we have come to know it, barely existed before then either. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
In 1946, advertisers spent about $3 billion. For the previous two decades, advertising expenditure had been fairly constant at about that level. By 1975, however, the national advertising budget had grown by 1,000 percent to $30 billion. In 2021, the national advertising budget reached $82 billion (expected to around $95 billion by the end of 2022). In that same year the television advertising budget has skyrocketed to $68 billion, and could be approximately $80 billion by the end of 2022. As you see, most of the increases in advertising. However, what is significant is that within only tend years of its effective inauguration, television was absorbing 60 percent of all advertising spending and driving hundreds of newspapers, magazines and radio stations out of the market. A symbiotic relationship developed. Advertising financed television’s growth. Television was the greatest delivery system for advertising that had ever been invented. We could call it love at first sight, except in this case, the match may have been prearranged. If you are fortunate enough to recall, think back to the days immediately after World War II. Although I was only ten in 1945, I remember the expectant and uncertain feeling of the times very well. Everyone was relieved that the war was over and was expecting things to get back to normal, but what was normal? Memories of the Depression loomed. I remember listening to my parents talk with their friends on those backyard summer evenings of 1945, and I could feel the fear. Like most ordinary people, my parents know that the war had alleviated the Depression. During the war, American industrial capacity, lying fallow only a few years before, had actually expanded to build the military machine. My father’s own business was an example. Now there were no more uniforms to make, and no more tanks. The war had given men jobs as soldiers and women jobs as factor workers. Full employment had practically become a reality. Now Johnny was marching home again, jobless. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
If this was the talk among ordinary people, one can only imagine what was said in industrial boardrooms and at the Department of Commerce. With industrial capacity and capital investment expanded as they were, the consequences of a drop in production could make the 1930s look like golden years. A long-standing criticism of capitalism—that it can stave off cyclic depression only through war-seemed about to be confirmed. Suddenly in 1946, government and industry started making identical pronouncements about regearing American life to consume commodities at a level never before contemplated. It was not that military production was about to be abandoned. Even now it remains the single most important factor in the United States of America’s economy. However, in 1946 with the war just over, it was not clear that the decline in military spending would be as temporary as it turned out to be. Some new offsetting factor was needed. Thus, a new vision was born that equated the good life with consumer goods. An accelerate economy, continuing booming expansion of wartime, added to a new consumer ideology achieved the greatest economic growth rate in the country’s history from 1946 to 1970. To make such growth possible, both ends of the transformation process described previously had to be hyped up. First, we needed to insure an abundant supply of raw material to convert into commodities. This led to a burst of American investment overseas as well as to enormous assistance programs for sympathetic “underdeveloped” countries. Often we secured our supply by the creation of client governments propped up with military assistance. Raising anticommunism to the status of a holy war in the 1940s and the 1950s formed the political foundation for these military and economic programs and underlay the assertion of the patriotic virtues of foreign investment. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
At the other end of the transformation equation, an accelerated movement of commodities into consumers’ homes was critical. People had to be convinced that life without all these products was undesirable and unpatriotic. It was time to forget the rationing of the war years and consumer for your country. Advertising and television were the dynamic duo that would rededicate the consuming American. Advertising’s ability to create a passionate need for what is not needed was already well established. Since economic growth and a consumer economy had to be based upon selling far more commodities than were needed to meet actual needs, economic growth depended upon advertising. Television, which had been lying around in mothballs since the 1920s, was dusted off and enlisted as the means to deliver the advertising lifestyle fast, right into people’s homes and heads. Quick to spot any new technology that could assist their urgent cause, big advertisers immediately invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing this idle sales tool. And so advertising gave birth to television, and television have advertising a whole new World to conquer. Together they made possible an enormous, though temporary, economic bonanza. Can you recall the TV advertising of the 1940s and 1950s? Smiling, happy people. Scrubbed children. Housewives showing their impossibly clean wash. Smiling junior-executive husbands emerging from their new cars, greeted at the picket fence by their clean, cheerful families? The happy mowing of the lawn. The happy faces reflected off the polished toasters? The nuclear family was idealized to a greater extend than ever before, because the family was the ideal consumption unit. Women had to get out of those factories and overalls and back into little pink dresses in the kitchen. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Those returning soldiers needed jobs. Rosie the Riveter gave way to June Allyson. Separate family units maximized production potential. Private homes. Private cars. Two cars. Private washing machines. Private television sets. Within a few years, the World started changing. The battery-operated lawn mower I saw on television one day appeared on my lawn the next week. So did the car. The whole neighborhood started looking like a television commercial. The woods near my house in disappeared and were replaced by hundreds of identical versions of my house. Neighborhoods everywhere started looking like each other. Freeways replaced country roads. Shopping centers replaced corner markets. Pavements covered everything. “Prosperity,” “security,” “happiness,” studded ads and presidential speeches alike. This incredible outpouring of commodities, this entire revamping of landscape, this filling of houses with gadgets was supposed to constitute some kind of Latter-Day Saints Kingdom of God. That is what everyone was thinking, saying, and believing. It was what made America America. One of my high school teachers during the 1950s told my class that it was America’s commitment to a consumption economy that made our country different and better than all others. He told us that by expanding our economy, we could soon make everyone wealthy. America was already the World’s only classless society, he said. Workers and managers were equal partners in a glorious process benefiting everyone. In America everyone was equal. Our standard of living made it that way. Everyone could have a car. Everyone could have a business. We are not developing nations, where the water is dangerous to drink, and there are few rich people and everyone else is poor and all of them wished they had what we had. Because of this prosperity, we did not have to deal with the chaotic times of psychological and spiritual upheaval nor have actual fear among people of witchcraft, sorcerers, and others who claimed to know how to consort with the demons. The medieval period had died, and the modern period was born. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
A few years later at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, I learned how and why this commodity life and the economic growth it produces was supposed to be so good for absolutely everyone. I learned that they had been talking about in these boardrooms and at the Department of Commerce. It was called the “trickle-down theory.” It goes more or less like this: Industrial expansion, rapid economic growth and the consumption economy benefit everyone. The theory—which is the basis of Keynesian American economics—has it that when people buy more and more commodities, they produce more profits for industry, enabling it to expand. When industry expands, more jobs result. This puts more money into circulation, enabling people to buy more commodities, expanding profits again, yielding more investments, more jobs and starting the cycle around on another turn. This is an oversimplified process, which leaves out such variables as savings, borrowing, and so on. The way it is presented here is more or less the way it is translated through the media and through out educational system into popular understanding: a beautiful circle of activity, everyone helping everyone else, labor and management rowing the boat together, all serving the common good and growing endlessly. It explained the patriotic urgency of people spending more and more on commodities. The benefits would “trickle down” to everyone in this country, including those at the bottom on the pyramid. Jobs, money, prosperity, happiness, security, democracy, equality were all lumped together as inevitable results of this cycle. Most people believe in this “trickle-down-theory” still. Presidents get elected based on whether they can convince the public that they will stimulate the beautiful cycle. President Trump was elected for doing it and he proved his word. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The tickle-down theory is the nice simple kind of economic model that can be sold to a mass population removed from any deeper understanding of how things really work. Trying to come to grips with economic nuance is for most of us no easier than trying to understand how much nuclear radiation is “safe.” Who knows? The “experts” know. Like every other organizing model in our society, economic processes have been removed from personal participation, appropriated into a nether World of flow charts, financial analyses, and circle graphs. Like scientific and technological systems, once economic systems reach a certain size and complexity, they can be controlled only by forces far outside the grasp of the individual and community. One explanation of them sounds as plausible as another. In the absence of a really thorough training in economics—a training which itself supports many arbitrary and fantastic theories—this trickle-down model of the benefits of a consumer society sounds perfectly valid. It certainly seemed valid for a little while. People had jobs, the economy was growing, and homes were filling up with every more intricate gadgets. Only now, thirty years after the trip was launched, can we see the process from the vantage point of joblessness, inflation, bankruptcy and default, and realize that something was terribly wrong somewhere. In fact, it was a fantasy. It was packaged and sold to us like the seven-piece matching living-room sets on the television screen. Buy now, pay later when you are richer than you are now. However, when later came, very few of us were richer (and that usually happens to everyone). It turned out that the pursuit of all those happy goodies did not produce happy people; it produced isolated, frustrated, alienated people. More important, the economic benefits did not trickle down to create some egalitarian democracy. The benefits tickled up. That is why President Trump also used the tickle charger. Not only did he cut taxes, but also infused the less affulent with supercharged unemployment benefits, and helped the veterns, disabled, retirement and others reciveing government transfer pays by sending the a large cash sum of money, and then a few other payments for less, and he also supported businesses get through the pandemic. So the economy was stimulated and had a few trickle charges to keep the market flowing well. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The democratic revolution succeeded in extending formal self-government and opportunity to nearly everybody, regardless of birth, property, or education. However, it gave up the ideal of the town meeting, with the initiative and personal involvement that alone could train people in self-government and give the practical knowledge of political issues. The actual result has been the formation of a class of politicians who govern, and who are themselves symbolic front figures. Correspondingly, the self-determination won by the American Revolution for the regional states, that should have made possible real political experimentation, soon gave way to a national conformity; nor has the nation as a whole conserved its resources and maintained its ideals. The result is a deadening centralism, with neither local patriotism nor national patriotism. The best people do not offer themselves for public office, and no one has the aim of serving the Republic. Typical is the fate of the hard-won Constitutional freedoms, such as freedom of speech. Editors and publishers have given up trying to give an effective voice to important but unpopular opinions. Anything can be printed, but the powerful interests have the big presses. Only the safe opinion is proclaimed and other opinion is swamped. The liberal revolution succeeded in shaking off onerous government controls on enterprise, but it did not persist to its goal of real public wealth as the result of free enterprise and honestly informed choice on the market. The actual result is an economy dominated by monopolies, in which the earnest individual entrepreneur or inventor, who could perform a public service, is actively discouraged; and consumer demand is increasingly synthetic. Conversely, the Jeffersonian ideal of a proud and independent productivity yeomanry, with natural family morals and a co-operative community spirit, did in fact energize settling the West and providing the basis for our abundance. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
However, because it has failed to cope with technological changes and to withstand speculation, “farming as a way of life” has succumbed to cash cropping dependent on distant markets, and is ridden with mortgages, tenancy, and hired labor. Yet it maintains a narrow rural morality and isolationist politics, is a sucker for the mass culture of Madison Avenue and Hollywood, and in the new cities (exempli Gratia, in California, where farmers have migrated) is a bulwark against genuine city culture. Constitutional safeguards of person were won. However, despite the increasing concentration of state power and mass pressures, no effect was made to give to individuals and small groups new means easily to avail themselves of the safeguards. The result is that there is no longer the striking individuality of free men; even quiet nonconformity is hounded; and there is no asylum from coast to coast. Fraternity—this short-lived ideal of the French Revolution, animating a whole people and uniting all classes as a community, soon gave way to aa dangerous nationalism. The ideal somewhat revived as the solidarity of the working class, but this too has faded into either philanthropy or “belonging.” Brotherhood of races—the Civil War won formal rights for African Americans, but failed to win social justice and factual democracy. The actual result has been segregation, and fear and ignorance from various people of all races. However, in the 2020s, that stigma is fading. Pacificism—this revolution has been entirely missed. Acceleration not only makes facts obsolete but blunts some of the key tools we use when we think. Analogy provides a case in point. It is virtually impossible for us to think without relying on analogies. This “thought-tool” is based on identifying similarities in two or more phenomena and then drawing conclusions from one to apply to the other. Doctors, we noted, will often say “the heart is like a pump” and then describe its “values” and other components in mechanical terms. This model helps them conceptualize and treat the heart. Often this process yields powerful results. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
However, once similarities are identified, it is typically taken for granted that the similarities continue. And in slow-change eras, they may do so for long periods. In today’s hyper-change environment, however, once-similar things also change and very often become markedly dissimilar, often making conclusions based on the analogy false and misleading. To deal with today, therefore, we need not only new knowledge but new ways to think about it. Yet too many economists, consciously or otherwise, cling to the belief that economics is analogous to physics. This notion arose centuries ago, when Newtonian ideas about equilibrium, causation and determinism dominated that science. Since then, of course, physicists have drastically revised their views about these matters. However, many economists still base their findings on crude Newtonian assumptions. Trained to think in industrial terms, many find it difficult to grapple with the odd character of knowledge—the fact that it is non-rival and non-depletable, that it is intangible and thus hard to measure. It is only when we set today’s failures of economics alongside the looming crisis in science that we begin to gauge their true significance. For together these two fields have the greatest—or at least the most direct—impact on how we create wealth. And both are heading for transformation. When it comes to relationships, a university teacher of liberal arts cannot help confronting special handicaps, a slight deformity of the spirit, in the students, ever more numerous, whose parents are divorced. I do not have the slightest doubt that they do as well as other sin all kinds of specialized subjects, but I find they are not as open to the serious study of philosophy and literature as some other students are. I would guess this is because they are less eager to look into the meaning of their lives, or to risk shaking their received opinions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
In order to live with the chaos of their experience, they tend to have rigid frameworks about what is right and what is wrong and how they ought to live. They are full of desperate platitudes about self-determination, respect for other people’s rights and decisions, the need to work out one’s individual values and commitments, etcetera. All this is a thin veneer over boundless seas of rage, doubt, and fear. Young people habitually are able to jettison their habits of belief for an exciting idea. They have little to lose. Although this is not really philosophy, because they are not aware of how high the stakes are, in this period of their lives they can experiment with the unconventional and acquire deeper habits of belief and some learning to go along with them. However, children of divorced parents often lack this intellectual daring because they lack the natural youthful confidence in the future. Fear of both isolation and attachment clouds their prospects. A large measure of their enthusiasm has been extinguished and replaced by self-protectiveness. Similarly, their open confidence in friendship as part of the newly discovered search for the good is somewhat stunted. The Glauconian eros for the discovery of nature has suffered more damage in them than in most. Such students can make their disarray in the cosmos the theme of their reflection and study. However, it is a grim and dangerous business, and more than any student I have known, they evoke pity. They are indeed victims. An additional factor in the state of these students’ souls is the fact that they have undergone therapy. They have been told how to feel and what to think about themselves by psychologists who are paid by their parents to make everything work out as painlessly as possible for the parents, as part of no-fault divorce. If ever there was a conflict of interest, that is it. There are big bucks for therapists in divorce, since the divorces are eager to get back to persecuting the wretches who smoke or to ending the arms face or to saving “civilization as we know it.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Meanwhile, psychologists provide much of the ideology justifying divorce—exempli gratia, that it is worse for kids to stay in stressful homes (thus motivating the potential escapees—that is, the parents—to make it as unpleasant as possible there). Psychologists are the sworn enemies of guilt. And they have an artificial language for the artificial feelings with which they equip children. However, it unfortunately does not permit such children to get a firm grip on anything. Of course, not every psychologist who deals with these matters simply plays the tune called by those who pay the piper, but the givens of the market and the capacity for self-deception, called creativity, surely influence such therapy. After all, parents can shop around for a psychologist just as some Catholics used to shop for a confessor. When these students arrive at the university, they are not only reeling from the destructive effects of the overturning of faith and the ambiguity of loyalty that result from divorce, but deafened by self-serving lies and hypocrisies expressed in a pseudoscientific jargon. Modern psychology at its best has a questionable understanding of the soul. It has no place for the natural superiority of philosophic life, and no understanding of education. So children who are inclined to believe that philosophy live in a less enlightened state and have a long climb just to get back up to the cave, or the World of common sense, which is the proper beginning for their ascent toward wisdom. They do not have confidence in what they feel or what they see, and they have an ideology that provides not a reason but a rationalization for their timidity. These students are the symbols of the intellectual-political problems of our time. They represent in extreme form the spirit vortex set in motion by loss of contact with other human beings and with the natural order. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
However, all students are affected, in the most practical everyday way, unaware that their situation is peculiar, because their education does not give them perspective on it. Now, Web sites routinely collect detailed data on visitor behavior, and those statistics underscore just how quickly we leap between pages when we are online. Over a period of two months in 2008, an Israeli company named ClickTale, which supplies software for analyzing how people use corporate Web pages, collected data on the behavior of a million visitors to sites maintained by its clients around the World. It found that in most countries people spend, on average, between nineteen and twenty-seven seconds looking at a page before moving on to the next one, including the time required for the page to load into their browser’s window. German and Canadian surfers spend about twenty-one second, Indians and Australians spend about twenty-four seconds, and the French spend about twenty-five seconds. On the Web, there is no such thing as leisurely browsing. We want to gather as much information as quickly as our eyes and fingers can move. That is true even when it comes to academic research. As part of a five-year study, a group from University College London examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium. Both sites provided users with access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. The scholars found that people using the sites exhibited a distinctive “form of skimming activity” in which they would hop quickly from one source to another, rarely returning to any source they had already visited. They would typically read, at most, one or two pages of an article or book before “bouncing out” to another site. “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense,” the authors of the study reported; “indeed there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The shift in our approach to reading and research seems to be an inevitable consequence of our reliance on the technology of the Net, and it bespeaks a deeper change in our thinking. There is absolutely no question that modern search engines and cross-referenced websites have powerfully enabled research and communication efficiencies. There is also absolutely no question that our brains are engaged less directly and more shallowly in the synthesis of information when we use research strategies that are all about “efficiency,” “secondary (and out-of-context) referencing,” and “once over, lightly.” As people are falling in love with the Internet, reading and its mediums is reminiscence of some of Capellanus’s more universal rules. He believed that love is always in a flux, either growing or diminishing. Making it public usually kills it. Its very nature as next to impossible to consummate is also its most powerful stimulus, and during its fleeting lifetime, jealously will sharpen the intensity of the country lovers feelings. Courtly love is obsessive and best endured by constant contemplation of the beloved. By the fourteenth century, an anonymous poet was refining the notion of love. In his “Ten Commandments of Love,” he advocated faith or honesty, attentiveness, discretion, patience, secretness, prudence, perseverance, pity, measure or moderation, and mercy. The lover in Chaucer’s “Complaint to His Lady” is so excessively long-suffering that he swears to obey his lady in whatever she dies, would rather die than offend her, and begs only for a drop of her grace. Here is his version of courtly love: “But I, my lyf an deeth, to yew obeye, and with right buxom herte, hooly I preye, as [is] your moste pleasure, so doth by me; and therfor, swete, rewe on my peynes smerte, and of your grace, graunteth me some drope; for ells may me laste no blis no hope, no dwelle within my trouble careful herte.” #RandolpHarris 18 of 19
Courtly love was agonizing and admirable, the source of chivalrous virtue. For these same reasons, it was often chaste, both because the logistics of consummation defeated the would-be lovers and also because, in some manifestations, courtly love was inherently pure. As one troubadour sang, “Out of love comes chastity.” As enormous but logical stretch puts courtly love together with the secret feudal societies that adopted then institutionalized a collective devotion to an unattainable woman who inspired their members to deeds of greatest daring and valor. The woman? The Virgin Mary, whose immaculate conception the early medieval Church had just begun to celebrate. The most famous of these secret societies was the Knights Templar, excommunicated knights who swore oaths of poverty, obedience, and chastity and dedicated themselves to the (newly immaculately conceived) Virgin Mary. Unlike their secular counterparts, however, whose courtly love involved personal grooming as a token of respect to their lady loves, virginal or otherwise, the Knights of the Templar who were abstinent, according to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, “never combed, rarely washed, [and wore] their beards bushy, sweaty, and fusty, stained by their harness and the heat. Centuries of literature and lives imitating art transformed courtly into romantic love, intense and unattainable, a phenomenon too high—mindedly impractical to survive marriage and the trials of time, routine, and old age. The precious instant of recognizing the beloved, the stylized pursuit, the exchange of extravagant words penned on scented paper, the self-indulgently obsessive meditating on each other—these became the characteristic of this new kind of love. Attraction based on pleasures of the flesh fueled it, just as it had the courtliest of loves, but in this case as well, intimate passions dominated the lover’s agenda. As literature, romantic love flirted and seduced as it inflamed and seared, titillating its aficionados with its stately ritual of gallant chase, heartsick suffering, rapturous encounters, gushing epistles, all in the name of profoundest if evanescent love. Sometimes this love was chaste by intention. Even when it was not, pleasures of the flesh was usually overpowered by complications of plot and character that, depending on your point of view, either reprieved the lovers from the banality of pleasures of the flesh or condemned them to its nonconsummation. Centuries of courtly and romantic love challenged thousands of lovers. Ultimately, most emerged from its clutches with their virtue intact. If our World is made up of such changes, as these, is it strange that my heart is so sad. prophets. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Cresleigh Homes
Luxurious outdoor living requires porch space AND a spot for the littlest members of the household to enjoy the sunshine, too! 😍
Our home at #MillsStation Residence 4 is the largest home in the community, but that extra playhouse definitely gives it an edge. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-4/
The lounge off the entry amplifies this social core; optional bedroom enhances the choices. This design lends a little Victorian formal touch to the arrival for family and guests.
The beautiful quartz counter top island has an optional built-in quartz tablecounter, which allos plenty of island seating.
The abundant cabinet space highlights the kitchen, while gathered windows and sliding door generate seamless connectivity to the home’s outdoor entertainment and leisure spaces.
The Cathedral of the Fallen Angel
During a Connecticut thunderstorm, Mrs. Winchester’s husband and baby lost their lives in a tragic fire. The distracted widow turned to spiritualism and was advised to take a trip around the World. This she did, visiting mediums, spiritualists and wizards in Europe and India. Foretelling her future, one seer warned her of all the countless thousands of departed souls slain by her husband’s rifles; she was told to plan a castle and continue its building indefinitely because as long as it was under construction she would live; cessation would prove immediately fatal. In the afternoon of Tuesday, July 10, 1888, the inhabitants of Santa Clara Valley, were greatly excited by the sudden appearance, far out in the fields, of a mansion where none was known to exist. The people of the town were farmers and knew the area well. The day before, they had been out on their horses and rode over the spot where the unusual mansion appeared, and where certain that the locality was the best farmland in the valley. And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, for the day was clear and the mansion could be seen as plainly as they saw the hills to the south. It was massive. The estate was surrounded by a six-foot hedge, densely wooded; here and there were deep shadows in its sides indicating glens heavily covered with undergrowth and grasses. At one end the mansion rose almost precipitously from the from the land; at the other, the declivity was gradual; the thick forest of the estate gave way to smaller trees, these to shrubs; these to green meadows that finally melted into the valley. It was patrolled by a pack of ferocious hellhounds, plus, of course, Mrs. Winchester’s staff of armed bodyguards. Hundreds of people from all over California came to investigate; when, as they neared the spot, the beautiful but bizarre mansion became dim in outline, less vivid in color, and at last vanished entirely, leaving the wonder-stricken farmers to return, fully convinced that for the first time in their lives they had really seen this enchanted mansion. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
For once there was a topic of conversation that would outlast the day, and the enchanted Winchester mansion passed from lip to lip, both story and the mansion grew in size till the latter was little less than a continent, contain a labyrinth mansion with towers and steeples, stupendous mountain range views, fertile valleys, and wide spreading plains; while the former was limited only be the patience of the listener, and embraced the personal experience, conclusions, reflections, and observations of every woman, man, and child in the valley who had been fortunate enough to see the mansion, hear of it, or tell where it had been seen elsewhere. This is the invariable history of its appearance. No one had ever been able to come close to its grounds, but it had been so often seen on the west coast, that a doubt of its existence, if expressed in the company of farmers, will at once establish for the sceptic a reputation for balderdash of the common affairs of every-day life. In Santa Clara, for instance, the Winchester mansion had been seen by hundreds of people, while many more could testify to its appearance near San Francisco. In San Jose, all the population saw it a few years ago, and shortly before, the villagers of Oakland, saw it, if not by themselves, at least by some of their friends. The Enchanted Winchester mansion, it should be stated that its resemblance to a Victorian/Gothic castle is sometimes very close, and shows that the “enchanter” who has it under a spell knows her business, and is determined to keep her mansion for herself changes its appearance as well as its location in order that her property may not be recognized nor appropriated. At night, passers-by heard ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. Mrs. Winchester’s arrival was a sensational event. They talked about Mrs. Winchester! Gossiped would be a more fitting word, gossip no one claimed to like-but everyone enjoyed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Talk begat rumor and as the years passed and new towers and gables rose behind the six-foot hedge of Llanada Villa, the rumors grew to established legend. Populations said it just appeared out of nowhere two years ago. Sure two twins could not be like her, and when it appeared in Santa Clara, the mansion would move around to different locations. It had also appeared in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, but it went no further than the Bay Area. Concerning Mrs. Winchester’s mansion, legendary authorities differ on many material points. Some believed that its architecture was due to geometry or some other enchantment, while opponents of this materialistic view were inclined to the opinion that the mansion was not what it seemed to be, that was to say, not Earth, wood, and stones, like as those most people see, but only an illusion that evil spirits or the devil created to deceive the town. Public opinion on the west coast was therefore was strongly divided on the subject, unity of sentiment existing on two points only; that the island had been seen, and that there was something quite out of the ordinary in its appearance. People believe that it would come and go in the night like a light in a bog, and when you do see it, you can see through it. An old fisherman of San Francisco called Ebenezer Thornton knew all about the enchanted Winchester mansion, having not only seen it himself, but, when a boy, learned its history from a “fairy man,” who obtained his information from “the good people” themselves, the facts stated being therefore, of course, of indisputable authority, what the fairies did not know concerning the doings of supernatural and enchanted circles, being not worth knowing. He said that the Winchester mansion was full of temples and round towers all covered with gold and silver till they shone so one could not see it for the brightness. There was a great enchantress in the mansion, and she had all kinds of secrets, and knew where to dig for a pot of gold. She built the castle in one night, and could make herself disappeared when she wanted and could take any shape she pleased. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Ebenezer when on to say that Mrs. Winchester’s husband gave her a charm before he died to use when she was in mortal danger, he also left her a ton of diamonds and millions of dollars. She was a pretty smart woman. One night, Mrs. Winchester was awakened by a noise in one of the kitchens. She tole down, and found her old housekeeper, Madge, with half a dozen of her kidney, sitting by the fire drinking whisky. When the bottle was finished, one of them cried, “It’s time to be off,” and at the same moment she put on a peculiar red cap, and added:–“By yarrow and rue, and my red cap, too, hie over to England!” and seizing a twig she soared up the chimney. As the latter was making her preparations Mrs. Winchester rushed into the kitchen, snatched the cap from her, and placing herself astride of her twig uttered the magic formula. She speedily found herself high in the air over the Irish Sea, and swooping though the empyrean at a rate unequalled by the fastest airplane. They rapidly neared the Welsh coast, and espied a castle afar off, towards the door of which they rushed with a frightful velocity; Mrs. Winchester closed her eyes and awaited the shock, but found to her delight that she had slipped through the keyhole without hurt. The party made their way to the cellar, where they caroused heartily, but the spirits proved too heady, and somehow Mrs. Winchester was captured and dragged before the lord of the castle, who sentenced her to be hanged. On her way to the gallows an old woman in the crowd called out in Irish, “Ah, the enchantress herself, Sarah Winchester alanna! Is it going to die you are in a strange place without your magical charm?” She reached into her pocket and held it in her hand. On reaching the place of execution she was allowed to address the spectators, and did so in the usual ready-made speech, beginning, “Good people all, a warning take by me.” But when she reached the last line, “My parents reared me tenderly” instead of stopped she unexpected added, “By yarrow and rue, good-bye I love you,” with the result that she shot up through the air, to the great dismay of all beholders. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Magic persecution. Genuine magic is the art of bringing about results beyond human powers through the enlistment of supernatural agencies. Black magic deliberately involves the devil and demons, and the resulting enchantment is used for persecution and revenge. A spiritistic circle of twenty members furnishes a good example. Working with black magic, these spiritis experimented to see if they could cause psychic harm or even illness in people they disliked. A strong medium of this occult group chose a minister as a target and vowed to afflict and eliminate her. The minister suffered a nervous breakdown and was unable to work for several months. Some phenomena must be eliminated from the spiritistic magic field. In the psychiatric realm, for example, many schizophrenics claim to be magically persecuted. In reality this is only a symptom in the course of psychotic disease. Eliminating all such cases, there are still large-scale, genuine phenomena, especially in areas where occultism has flourished for many years. One common form of magic persecution is beatings by an invisible attacker. Parapsychology also sees magical persecution as a mediumistic problem in the sphere of materializations. Strong mediums (when under demon control) send out energy with which to build up human phantasms and are also able to transform this energy into animal forms, including dogs, cats, frogs, snakes, or human bodies with animal heads, etcetera. This explains the bizarre spiritistic persecution through phantoms in the form of various animals of human bodies with nonhuman heads. These animals bite, scratch, or otherwise torment their victims. Examples, of these occult phenomena abound in areas where the black arts are practiced. However, such occurrences are denied by many intellectuals. Often peasants and country people, especially in Europe, know more about magic than university graduates, who claim to swindle or hocus-pocus trickery are used instead of occult powers. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Magic defense. Magic defense enlists supernatural agencies to counteract or unto the mischief wrought by magic persecution. Various kinds of spells, charms, or incantations are employed. In spiritistic séances it is an established fact that injuries inflicted upon a phantasm are sustained by the medium, even in the case of animal phantasm. Many defensive customs develop to combat this threat since magical persecution involves materialization. If a victim can injure an aggressive phantasm one has won the struggle. Many in the West wanted to remove Satan from the equation of black magic and demonic aspects of life. However, more serious discontent came from Satanists whose concerns were completely the opposite. Anton LaVey did not believe in Satan as a literal entity—He was a name for the dark, brutal aspects of humans and nature, as well as a symbol for the potency of humans’ untrammeled will. The Church of Satan was not a religion, and did not worship deities. For many, however, this was not enough. They wanted a real Devil to worship—belonging to a dark, mysterious coven, in the traditional gothic style, seemed much more appealing than being part of some cultural and social elite. Some believed that Satan, although thrown out of Heaven, was reinstated as the son of God and is directly in contact with him. If any coven members offends, they are a bit evil now and again, given corporal punishment, or is expelled from one’s coven and cursed. However, this is said to be for the members own good. They really believe in love, the sanctity of woman as the child bearer and procreator of life, and in worshipping Satan their master. Aleister Crowley was grooming Kenneth as his successor. Mr. Grant’s work examined lost gods, strange spiritual traditions and forbidden symbols, often leading him to some disreputable spiritual neighborhood where devils and demons might be expected to reside, like the Winchester Mystery House. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
If you have a lot of magic in you, you can be a Satanist and have no idea. As if they are the mafia or something, sometimes those who are suspected of being Satanists have their offices broken into like they are the Mafia or something. The Church of Satan, however, has saved lives because it has given them power, power to come out and be themselves when traditional churches would not accept these people. The Dark Lord, was said to be an anthropoid but faceless. Looking at the concept as a diamond, much like the ones left to Mrs. Winchester by her husband William Wirt Winchester, Satan or Lucifer was just other facets of that diamond, purely ways of achieving workings which encompassed the whole. So, if you are particularly drawn to the gothic Satanist current, fine, use rituals based around that. In the Temple of Darkness one could equally have Satanists, Setians, or followers of other paths, the principle being that the whole thing is a psychodrama anyway. Magic is basically the Western version of yoga. Everything that happens in magic happens first in your head. Set, the Egyptian god of evil, was an older deity than Satan. Satan derives from Set. Set, who is defined as the Prince of Darkness, is a force about which you could say, “As we are now, he once was.” When you die your force can survive. Magic is mind enhancing. When one perishes or passes, instead of going into the cosmic whole—becoming one with the goddess or whatever—by sheer force of the will the existence of that magician’s mind can be sustained. This is the whole idea of the Temple of Set, and they use the word “xeper,” meaning “to become,” to define this. Spiritistic cults. If you did not know, Mrs. Winchester was a spiritists. Spiritism is considered a form of Christianity, practically in all civilized countries. A typical meeting consists of hymns, prayer, and a sermon as in a Christian service. The sermon, however, is allegedly given by a spirit from the other World, through a medium. These cults are said to be affected by the “doctrines of demons” and press into the supernatural World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
However, even born-again Christians often cannot differentiate between the spiritual and the psychic-demonic when under the spell of doctrinal errors, particularly those concerning the work of the Holy Spirit. The result can sometimes be confusion, division, and promotion of certain spiritual gifts accredited to demons. We have sometimes seen people end up suffering from mediumistic psychosis. Quite a number of patients who have suffered serious psychic disturbances through the misuse of such practices have become split personalities. The spirits which they called, confused them. One who tries to discover the promises of the other side through superstition endangers oneself to fall a prey to the dark side of one’s psyche. However, many Christians say that spirits of loved ones cannot be brought back from the dead, and the it is just a demon impersonating them. Yet, consider the case of Saul’s visit to the spiritistic medium at Endor (1 Samuel 28.3-25). Samuel’s spirit was actually brought back from the spirit World when the medium Endor tried to contact him. Yet, God brought the spirit back. The Lord stepped. Still one must be careful because many become enslaved and oppressed by occult powers and become victims of various manifestations of spiritistic phenomena. While overwhelming evidence from Christian counseling confirms the fact that spiritistic complicity serious damages the believer’s spiritual life, adherents of Buddhism, Island, or even false cults of Christianity sense no ill effects. Spiritists claim that spiritism has strengthened their belief in life after death and deepened their religious devotion. Psychiatry, psychology, and medical treatment are not sufficient for the healing of the whole human. The gospel of Christ and the liberating power of the Word of God can fully heal body, soul, and spirit. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Mrs. Winchester had a pain in her right forearm. At first the pain was treated as rheumatism but one day the Mrs. Winchester made the interesting discovery that the pain would suddenly subside if she wrote a letter. Having discovered this, whenever the pain became unbearable, she would always take a pencil and begin to write in order to alleviate the pain. However, after a period of time the Mrs. Winchester when go into her Blue Séance Room, where she developed a writing compulsion. She would write things down that she could normally speaking never have written. Often times, this is where the blueprints from her mansion came from. Added to this the written material on each occasion turned out to be some form of religious treatise. Mrs. Winchester took the articles to her minister to let him examine them. He was surprised at their intellectual content. Mrs. Winchester had become a spiritistic writing medium. The parapsychologist would merely see in this example a psychic automation involving the expression of subconscious thoughts. It is true that we need not consider the Mrs. Winchester to be in direct contact with the dead, or putting it another way we need not assume that this is a case of direct demonization, but God could be speaking to her. This is why some believe Mrs. Winchester to be a prophetess. During one of her spiritistic seances, as it happened, a phantasm did in fact appear during a séance. However, it is still not necessary to believe that a spirit really did appear in this instance. Depth psychology suggest that a phantasm can be produced in the following way. The medium through emitting energy causes matter to form as a result of this. In nuclear physics we have the idea that matter is nothing more than concentrated energy. Einstein’s formula E=M.c^2 illustrates this relationship. A comparison can also be drawn from another branch of physics. It is found that both particles and anti-particles are formed at the cathode of an X-ray tube when a current is passed through it at a very high voltage. Energy in the form of electro-magnetic waves is in this way transformed into matter. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
The next step in the mediumistic process involves the unconscious tapping of the information from some source or other, and then the newly formed matter is physically shaped according to this information. The final step is made when the phantasm is brought under the control of the medium. Looking at it from this point of view there is no necessity to believe that the dead person has in any way been disturbed. An animistic explanation based on the powers of the subconscious is thus sufficient to explain the phenomenon of materialization. Yet this is not to say that the rationalistic explanation does justice to the facts of the case. The problem is not as simple as that. However, we do not have the time to delve further into the scientific side of the issues. We have, on many occasions witnessed a disintegration of the personalities of both mediums and participants where materializations have taken place. In addition to this in every case where a person has frequently taken part in spiritistic séances, there is some kind of reaction, even if it is not immediately notice or if there is no manifestation—something happens. There are also people who are able to practise the excursion of the soul. Spiritists affirm that people can send out an astral body from their material body, and commission it to do whatever they ask. Perhaps that was the case when Mrs. Winchester appeared in another country? Spiritism haunts the dark jungle of human aberration. During a séance as the Winchester mansion, Mrs. Winchester noticed that time was passing somewhat wearily. She could hear an occasional thud, thud. Some time must have elapsed before she became, dimly at first, and then distinctly, aware of a bluish phosphorescent emanation from a skeleton. This seemed to rise above it like a faint smoke, which gradually gained consistency, took form, and became distinct; and she saw before her the misty, luminous form on an unclothed man, with wolfish countenance, prognathous jaws, glaring at her out of eyes deeply sunk under projecting brows. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Although she thus descried what she saw, it gave her no idea of substance; it was vaporous, and yet it was articulate. Indeed, she could not say for sure if she saw this apparition with her eyes, or whether it was a dream-like vision of the brain. Though luminous, it cast no light on the wall of the Blue Séance Room; if she raised her hand, it did not obscure any portion of the form presented to her. Then she heard: “I will tear you with the nails of my fingers and toes, and rip you with my teeth.” “What have I done to injure and incense you?” she asked. No word was uttered by either of them; no word could have been uttered by this vaporous form. It had no material lungs, nor throat, nor mouth to form vocal sounds. It had but the semblance of a man. It was a spook, not a human being. However, it proceeded through the walls, odylic force which smote on the tympanum of her mind or soul, and thereon registered the ideas formed by it. So in a like manner Mrs. Winchester thought her replies, and they were communicated back in the same manner. If vocal words had passed between them neither would have been intelligible to the other. No dictionary was ever compiled, or would be compiled, of the tongue or prehistoric man; moreover, the grammar of the speech of that race would be absolutely incomprehensible to humans now. However, thoughts can be interchanged without words. When we think we do not think in any language. It is only when we desire to communicate our thoughts to other humans that we shape them into words and express them vocally in structural grammatical sentences. The beasts have never attained to this, yet they can communicate with one another, not by language, but by thought vibrations. Mrs. Winchester knew as she conversed with him that she was not speaking to him in English, nor in French, nor in Latin, nor in any tongue whatever. Moreover, when she used the words “said” or “spoke,” she meant no more than that the impression was formed by her brain-pan or the receptive drum of her soul, was produced by the rhythmic, orderly sequence of thought-waves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
When, however, she expressed the words “screamed” or “shrieked,” she signified that those vibrations came sharp and swift; and when she said “laughed,” tht they came in a choppy, irregular fashion, conveying the idea, not the sound of laughter. “I will tear you! I will rend you to bits and throw you in pieces about this mansion!” shrieked this demon man. Mrs. Winchester remonstrated, and inquired how she had incensed him. However, yelling with rage, he threw himself upon her. In a moment she was enveloped in a luminous haze, strips of phosphorescent vapour laid themselves about her, but she received no injury whatever, only her spiritual nature was subjected to something like a magnetic storm. After a few moments the spook disengaged itself from Mrs. Winchester, and drew back to where it was before, screaming broken exclamations of meaningless rage, and jabbering savagely. It rapidly cooled down. “Why do you wish to ill me?” She asked again. “I cannot hurt you. I am spirit, you are matter, and spirit cannot injure matter; my nails are psychic phenomena. Your soul you can lacerate yourself, but I can effect nothing, nothing.” “Then why have you attacked me? What is the cause of your impotent recement?” “Because you are the heiress to the Winchester Rifle, and I lived eight thousand years ago. Why are you nursed in the lap of luxury? Why you enjoy your comforts, a civilization that we new nothing of? It is not just. It is cruel on us. We have nothing, nothing, literally nothing, not even lucifer matches!” Again he feel to screaming, as might a caged monkey rendered furious by failure to obtain an apple which he could not reach. “I am very sorry, but it is no fault of mine.” “Whether it be your fault or not does not matter to me. You have these things—we had not. Why, I saw you just now strike a light on the sole of your boot. It was done in a moment. We had only flint and ironstone, and it took half a day with us to kindle a fire, and then it flayed our knuckles with continuous knocking. No! we have nothing, nothing—no lucifer matches, no commercial travellers, no Benedictine, no pottery, no metal, no education, no elections, no chocolat menier.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
“How do you know about these products of the present age, here, buried one hundred feet of soil for eight thousand years?” “It is my spirit which speaks with your spirit. My spook does not always remain with my bones. I can go up; rocks and stones and earth and your labyrinth mansion heaped over me do not hold me down. I am often above. I am in the gasolier overhead. I have seen your servants plough the fields. I have seen a bottle of Benedictine. I have applied my physical lips to it, but I could taste, absorb nothing. I have seen commercial travellers there, cajoling the patron into buying things he did not want. They are mysterious, marvellous beings, their powers of persuasion are little short of miraculous. Why do you think of doing with me?” “Well, I propose first of all photographing you, then soaking you in gum Arabic, and finally transferring you to a museum.” He screamed as though with pain, and grasped: “Do not! do not do it. It will be torture insufferable.” “But why so? You will be under glass, in a polished oak or mahogany box.” “Do not! You cannot understand what it will be to me—a spirit more or less attached to my body, to spend ages upon ages in a museum with fibulae, triskelli, palstaves, celts, torques, scarabs. We cannot travel very far from our bones—our range is limited. And conceive of my feelings for centuries condemned to wander among glass cases containing prehistoric antiquities, and to hear the talk of scientific men alone. Now here, it is otherwise. Here I can pass up when I like into your mansion, and can see the maid and butlers cleaning, the roses and trees growing, the farmers working the field and the magnificent glow of your fine estate. Give me life. There is a sort of filmy attachment that connects our psychic nature with our mortal remains. It is like a spider and its web. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
“Suppose the soul to be the spider and the skeleton to be the web. If you break the thread the spider will never find its way back to its home. So it is with us; there is an attachment, a faint thread of luminous spiritual matter that unites us to our Earthly husk. It is liable to accidents. It sometimes gets broken, sometimes dissolved by water. If a black beetle crawls across it it suffers a sort of paralysis. I have never been to the other side of the of your mansion, I feared to do so, though very anxious to see your architecture and furniture.” “This is news to me,” replied Mrs. Winchester. “Do you know of any case of rupture of connection?” Yes,” he replied. “My old father, after he was dead some years, got his link of attachment broke, and he wandered about disconsolate. He could not find his own body, but he lighted on that of a young female of seventeen, and he got into that. It happened most singularly that her spook, being frolicsome and inconsiderate, had got its bond also broken, and she, that is her spirit, straying about in quest of her body, lighted on that of my venerable parent, and for want of a better took possession of it. It so chanced that after a while they met and became chummy. In the World of spirits there is no marriage, but there grow up spiritual attachments, and these two got rather fond of each other, but never could puzzle it out which was which and what each was; for a female soul had entered into an old male body, and a male soul had taken up its residence in a female body. Neither could riddle out of which each gender was. You see they had no education. However, I know that my father’s soul became quite sportive in that young woman’s skeleton. Each generation makes some discovery that advances civilization a stage, the next enters on the discoveries of the preceding generations, and so culture advances stage by stage. Man is infinitely progressive; even the brute beast is.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
At that moment, Mrs. Winchester heard a shout—saw a flash of light. The construction workers had pierced the barrier. A rush of fresh air entered. She staggered to her feet. She felt dizzy. Kind hands grasped her. She was dragged forth. Brandy was poured down her throat. When she came to herself, she said, “Thank you. Talking with spirits can be terrible dreadful. When you are trying to summon one, souls get crossed and the one you are seeking may not cross through. They are so desperate to find a medium to communicate with.” As an ingredient of idol worship, magic goes back to antiquity. By virtue of their multiplicity and limited knowledge and power, the gods (demons) of paganism are incapable of establishing stability and security in society. This deficiency forced both gods and men to make use of magic—an inactive power independent of gods and men, but which could be activized by the assistance of incantations and rituals in order to accomplish supernatural deeds. Because of widespread denial of the reality of supernatural power—both divine and demonic, confusion abounds concerning the nature of magic. The history of magic is replete with extraordinary extrasensory phenomena that involve the spirit realm and every phase of the natural World as well, including human beings, animals, plants, and inorganic matter. Spirit-rapping, apparitions, ghosts, moving of furniture, and playing of musical instruments by invisible hands, stones falling from a ceiling, magical killing of cattle and blighting of crops, etcetera, are just a few of the weird occurrences that have happened at the Winchester Mystery House in its 134 years. However, there have also been beautiful supernatural events such as apparitions getting married, giant spirits of light in the shape of a man peering out guests, and on occasion, even rainbows and angels have appeared. Not all spirits or evil or angry, some or loving and welcoming. Few of thousands of annual transient guests are disappointed for here one finds visible truth even stranger than all the weird Mystery House features. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Winchester Mystery House
Beautiful weather calls for a walk around Sarah’s iconic gardens ⛲️🪴Open 10AM – 5PM this weekend!
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle , or who were jealous of its wealth 👻
And a Hair of His Head Shall Not Fall to the Ground Unnoticed
We cannot go to others with what we have received, saying: This is what needs to be known, this is what needs to be done. We can only go and put to the proof in actions. And even this is not what we “ought to” do: rather we can—we cannot do otherwise. This is the eternal revelation which is present in the here and now. I neither know of nor believe in any revelation that is not the same in its primal phenomenon. Joseph Smith returned to Independence in April, 1832, to help the Saints in their conflict with the pioneer Missourians, who did not like the people from the East. The day after his arrival, Joseph called a conference of the Saints in America. One of the first items of business was to vote to acknowledge Joseph Smith as “president of the high priesthood,” or president of the church. Provision was later made for two counselors to the president, making three in the Presidency. A revelation was received at this time in which the Lord said: “I give unto you directions how you may act before me, that it may turn to you for your salvation. I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say, but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise. American must increase in beauty, and in holiness…America must arise and put on her beautiful garments. Therefore, I give unto you this commandment, that ye bind yourselves by this covenant. And you are to be equal, or in other words, you are to have equal claims on the properties, for the benefit of managing the concerns of your stewardships, every man according to his wants and his needs, inasmuch as his wants are just. And all this for the benefit of the church of the living God, that every man may improve upon his talent, that every man may gain other talents; yea, even an hundredfold, to be cast into the Lord’s storehouse, to become the common property of the whole church, every man seeking the interest of his neighbor, and doing all things with an eye single to the glory of God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
“Make unto yourselves friends with the mammon of unrighteousness, and they will not destroy you. Leave judgment alone with me, for it is mine and I will repay. Peace be with you; my blessings continue with you, for even yet the kingdom is yours, and shall be for ever if you fall not from your steadfastness.” After preaching several powerful sermons and visiting and encouraging the Saints, Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, and Newell K. Whitney left Independence for Kirtland, where they arrived in June. During this same month the first issues of the paper, the Evening and Morning Star, was published at Independence. It was a joyous treat for the Saints in Kirtland to receive a copy of this paper. Joseph and Sidney Rigdon spent much of their time on the work of correcting the Scriptures during the summer and fall of 1832. Two revelations were given during this period giving instruction on the priesthood in the church and containing many glorious promises. The Lord praised the Saints for their hard work which had been done by much sacrifice and under unfavorable conditions. The Lord explained the purposes of the two priesthoods, the Aaronic and the Melchisedec. The people were instructed to accept the ministry of men who are called to the priesthood. Jesus Christ, the Lord said: “All they who receive this priesthood receiveth me, saith the Lord, for he that receiveth my servants receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth my Father, and he that reciveth my Father receiveth my Father’s kingdom.” Helpful instruction was given in this revelation: “You shall live by every word that proceedeth forth from the mouth of God. For the word of the Lord is truth, and whatsoever is truth is light, and whatsoever is light in Spirit, even the Spirit of Jesus Christ. And the Spirit giveth light to every man that cometh into the World; and the Spirit enlightenth every man through the World, that hearkeneth to the voice of the Spirit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
“And everyone that hearkeneth to the voice of the Spirit, cometh unto God, even the Father. Whoso cometh not unto me is under the bondage of sin; and whoso recieveth not my voice is not acquainted with my voice, and is not of me; and by this you may know the righteous from the wicked.” The elders were told they should travel without money or provisions—“pure or scrip” were the exact words used—and Jesus promised: “And any man that shall go and preach this gospel of the kingdom, and fail not to continue faithful in all things, shall not be weary in mind, neither darkened, neither in body, limb or joint; and an hair of his head shall not fall to the ground unnoticed. And they shall not go hungry, neither athirst. Therefore take no thought for the morrow, for what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed. For consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin; and the kingdoms of this World, in all their glory, are not arrayed like one of these; for your Father who art in Heaven, knoweth that you have need of all these things. Therefore, let the morrow take thought for the things of itself. Neither take ye thought beforehand what ye shall say, but treasure up in your minds continually the words of life, and it shall be given you in the very hour that portion that shall be meted unto every man. Whoso receiveth you receiveth me, and the same will feed you, and clothe you, and give you money. And he who feeds you, or clothes you, and gives you money, shall in no wise lose his reward.” A little son, whom they named Joseph Smith III, was born to Emma and Joseph on November 6, 1832. This baby was to have an important part in the work of the Lord later. An important revelation was given on December 27, 1832. The Saints were commanded to keep the laws of God. The Lord said: “He who is not able to abide the law of a celestial kingdom, can not abide a celestial glory; and he who can not abide the law of terrestrial kingdom, can not abide a terrestrial glory; he who can not abide the law of a telestial kingdom, can not abide a telestial glory; therefore, he is not meet for a kingdom of glory. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
“And if your eye be single to my glory, your whole bodies shall be filled with light, and there shall be no darkness in you, and that body which is filled with light comprehendeth all things. Therefore, sanctify yourselves that your minds become single to God, and the days will come that you shall see him. Continue in prayer and fasting from this time forth. And I give unto you a commandment, that you shall teach one another the doctrines of the kingdom. Call your solemn assembly, as I have commanded you; and as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning even by study, and also by faith. See that ye love one another; cease to be covetous; learn to impart one to another as the gospel requires; cease to be idle; cease to be unclean; cease to find fault one with another. Cease to sleep longer than is needful; retire to thy bed early, that ye may not be weary; arise early, that your bodies and your minds may be invigorated. Pray always, that you may not faint until I come.” Provision was made in this revelation for establishing a “school of the prophets,” in the “house of the Lord.” This school was for all members of the priesthood, from the high priests to the deacons, and it was to be taught by the Presidency of the church. To be humble is to recognize gratefully our dependence on the Lord—to understand that we have constant need for His support. Humility is an acknowledgment that our talents and abilities are gifts from God. It is not a sign of weakness, timidity, or fear; it is an indication that we know where our true strength lies. We can be both humble and fearless. We can be both humble and courageous. The Lord will strengthen us as we humble ourselves before Him. “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble…Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall life you up,” reports James 4.6 and 10. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
When the storms in life come, one can be steady because one is standing on the rock of one’s faith in Jesus Christ. May everyone face the storms with a peaceful heart. The place to begin is to remember that we are each a beloved child of God and that He has inspired servants. Those servants of God have foreseen the times in which we live. Know also that in the last days, perilous times shall come. Anyone with eyes to see the signs of the times and ears to hear the words of prophets knows that is true. The perils of greatest danger come to us from the forces of wickedness. Those forces are increasing. And so it will become more difficult, not easier, to honor the covenants we must make and keep to live the gospel of Jesus Christ. For those of us who are concerned for ourselves and for those we love, there is hope in the promise God has made of a place of safety in the storms ahead. It has never been more important than it is now to understand how to build a strong foundation. “Then Solomon said, The Lord has said that He would dwell in the thick darkness,” reports II Chronicles 6.1. Therefore, do not fear because God is everywhere. The human wish, we are saying, is not merely a push from the past, not merely a call from primitive needs demanding satisfaction. It also has in it some selectivity. It is a forming of the future, a molding by a symbolic process which includes both memory and fantasy, of what we hope the future will be. The wish is the beginning of orienting ourselves to the future, an admission that we want the future to be such and such; it is a capacity to reach down deep into ourselves and preoccupy ourselves with a longing to change the future. However, there is no will without a prior wish. The wish, like all symbolic processes, has a progressive element, a reaching ahead, as well as a regressive pole, a propulsion from behind. The wish thus carries its meaning as well as its force. Its motive power lies in the conjunction of this meaning and force. We can now understand why William Lynch should hold that “to wish is the most human act.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The past is drifting away at a faster and faster rate. When we look back at, say, the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we realize that many of its defining episodes no longer grip us as strongly as they one did. For the generation now coming into power, events like the 911, the civil rights protests of the 2020s, the Ukrainian War, the Cultural Revolution, homelessness, demands for affordable housing and spread of graffiti in small towns seems increasingly more significant and relevant. Therefore much of what will happen in our lifetimes will consist of adaptation to and further development of a process that began three quarters of a century ago—the most revolutionary wave of change in wealth creation since at least the eighteenth century. Let us pause briefly, then, to summarize and draw together some key things. First, this revolution is a matter not just of technology, stock-market swings, inflation or deflation but of profound social, cultural, political and geopolitical changes as well. Failure to recognize the connections between these and economics leads us to seriously underestimate the oncoming challenges we face. Second, while headlines and business chatter continually refer to improving or declining “fundamentals,” we suggest that that these ups and downs are largely superficial responses to far more important shifts in what we have termed “deep fundamentals”—those factors and forces that have governed all economic activity sine our days as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Economists have long studied some of these essentials—things like work, the division of labor, exchange and the sharing of rewards. They have also filled libraries with studies on technology, energy and the environment. Business gurus drawing on these studies pour out advice about everything from human-resource management to network organization, insourcing and outsourcing, leadership and strategy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Yet, if they ignore three key forces driving today’s wealth revolution—dramatic changes in our relations to time, space and, above all, knowledge, how good can advice and proposed strategies be? It is, we have contended, only by recognizing the centrality of these wealth drivers that we can prepare for tomorrow. For this reason, we have looked closely at each of these deep fundamentals and their impacts on wealth. Take, for instance, the de-synchronization effect. As we saw earlier, companies are compelled to shift and re-shirt their products and relationships incessantly. Customer demands, financial imperatives and market forces all change at accelerating, but very different, rates. In doing so, they impose destabilizing cross-pressures on firms whose managers struggle to come to terms with time. In response, a big synchronization industry has grown up to help firms cope with clashing speeds. At the same time, a backward, tortoise-paced public sector—itself badly de-synchronized—imposes a huge “time-tax” on companies by slowing them down with delays in court decisions, procurements process, regulatory rulings, permit procedures and in a thousand other ways. In short, one part of the system is flooring the gas pedal while the other is slamming on the brakes. Nowhere, as we have noted, is this more frustratingly evident than in the contradiction between the fast-changing skill requirements of an advanced, accelerative economy and the glacial immobility of its schools. We have seen also that some degree of de-synchronization is essential to keep competition and innovation going on. However, it is equally clear that excessive de-synchronization can throw companies, industries and entire economies into chaos. Indeed, one can look at the great stock market shakeouts as desperate attempts by the wealthy system to re-synchronize itself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
However, time is only part of the story. To understand tomorrow’s oncoming changes, the cumulative effects of time conflicts need to be seen against the equally powerful transformations in the spatial landscape. Thus the World today holds its breath while watching the massive relocation of wealth and wealth creation toward formerly “developing” countries led by China and India—surely one of the biggest and fastest such transfers in history and possibly the completion of a great circle of wealth movement that began some five hundred years ago. Moreover, we have suggested that, instead of asking whether globalization will continue, we recognize a coming split—possible de-globalization on the economic level and re-globalization of campaigns against such problems as pollution, terrorism, drugs, sexual slavery and genocide. Here, too, gas pedal and brake are applied at the same time. Out of this collision will come the accelerated relocation of the globe’s wealth creation to new high-value-added hot spots—leaving behind new pockets of poverty. However, the most dramatic spatial shifts of all has little to do with these terrestrial concerns. Though millions brush it aside, we actually stand at the historical edge of humanity’s serious thrust into outer space. For historians of tomorrow looking back at the twenty-first century, one of most important economic events of all may prove to be the colonization of space and wealth creation beyond our home planet. None of these changes would occur without even more potent transformations in the deep fundamental of knowledge and our relations with it. While shifts in the use of time and space will be easy to recognize, today’s revolution in knowledge—the defining deep fundamental of our time—is far harder to grasp. These changes are, by their very nature, intangible, invisible, abstract, epistemological and seemingly remote from daily life. Yet no attempt to forecast the future of wealth can succeed without a thorough appreciation of the new role of knowledge. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
We have provided an admittedly simplified primer on the scope, nature and role of knowledge as the central resource of advanced economies. However, here again we do not just need to analyze, but to synthesize—to see these deeply fundamental changes in interaction with one another. When we alter our relationship to time, for example, by speeding things up, we inevitably make some knowledge obsolete. We thereby increase the backlog of obsoledge that we lug around with us. Let us proceed to economic and social changes. New Deal. The Keynesian economics of the New Deal has cushioned the business cycle and maintained nearly full employment. It has not achieved its ideal of social balance between public and private works. The result is an expanding production increasingly consisting of corporation boondoggling. Syndicalism. Industrial workers have won their unions, obtained better wages and working conditions, and affirmed the dignity of labor. However, they gave up their ideal of workers’ management, technical education, and concern for the utility of their labor. The result is that a vast majority could not care less about what they make, and the “labor movement” is losing force. Class struggle. The working class has achieved a striking repeal of the iron law of wages; it has won a minimum wage and social security (although future funding is uncertain). However, the goal of an equalitarian or freely mobile society has been given up, as has the solidarity of the underprivileged. The actual result is an increasing rigidity of statuses; some of the underprivileged tending to drop out of society altogether. On the other hand, the cultural equality that has been achieved has been the degradation of the one popular culture to the lowest common denominator. Production for Use. This socialist goal has been missed, resulting in many of the other failures here listed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Sociology. During the past century, the sociologist have achieved their aim of dealing with humankind in its natural groups or groups with common problems, rather than as isolated individuals or a faceless mass. Social science has replaced many prejudices and ideologies of vested interests. However, on the whole, social scientists have given up their aim of fundamental social change and an open-experimental method determining its goals as it went along: the pragmatist ideal of society as a laboratory for freedom and self-correcting humanity. The actual result is an emphasis on “socializing” and “belonging,” with the loss of nature, culture, group solidarity and group variety, and individual excellence. There are 773,000,000 illiterates in the World. There are approximately 43 million illiterates in the United States of America, and according to a report from our Librarian of Congress, there may be an equal number of alliterates. In any case, a general impatience with books will develop, especially with books in which language is used with subtlety to express complex ideas. Most likely there will be a decline in readers’ analytical and critical skills. According to the results of standardized tests given in schools, this has been happening in the United States of America for the past fifty-five years. I suspect concern for history will also decline, to be replaced by a consuming interest in the present. The effect on political life will be devastating. There will be less emphasis on issues, substance, and ideology, an increase in the importance of image and style. Politicians will have greater concern for moment-to-moment shifts in public opinion, less concern for long-range policies. Unless the use of television for political campaigns is strictly prohibited, elections may be decided by which party spends more on televisions and media consultants. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Even if political commercials are prohibited, politicians will appear on entertainment programs and will almost certainly be asked to give testimonials for non-political products such as cars, beer, and breakfast foods. The line between political life and entertainment will blur, and movies stars may be taken seriously as political candidates. Once the population becomes accustomed to spending much of its time watching television—in the United States of America, the average household has television on about eight hours a day—there will be a decrease in activities outside the home: fewer and smaller gatherings in parks, beer halls, concert halls, and other public places. As street life decreases, there may well be an increase in street crime. Young and some older people will, of course, become disaffected from school and reading. Children’s games are likely to disappear. In fact, it will become important to keep children watching television because they will be a major consumer group. In the United States of America, children watch 5,000 hours of television before they enter kindergarten and 16,000 hours by high school’s end. Commercial television does not dislike children; it simply cannot afford the idea of childhood. Consumerhood takes precedence. Naturally, family life will be significantly changed. There will be less interaction among family members, certainly less talk between parents and children. Such talk as there is will be noticeably different from what you are now accustomed to. The young will speak of matters that once were confined to adults. Commercial television is a medium that does not segregate its audience, and therefore all segments of the population share the same symbolic World. You may find that in the end the line between adulthood and childhood has been erased entirely. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Television is itself a commodity, and an expensive one too. Therefore it is physically consistent with the prevalent reality. Its purchase gives the commodity system a boost. Television changes the nature of the artificial environment from passive to active. Unlike buildings and machines, television literally enters inside human beings; inside our homes, our minds, our bodies, making possible the reordering of human processes from the inside. Television is an experience that can be had by virtually everyone at the same time. By substituting for a greater diversity of experiences and unifying everyone with it, it assists commercial efficiency. With all people confined to the same mental and physical condition, a single advertising or political voice appropriate to the common mood can influence everyone. Once diversity of experience is reduced to television, a relative handful of people can control everyone’s awareness. Luckily for advertisers, in a capitalist system, whoever is in a position to pay for the technology has primary access to it. Television is unique in that it smooths out any furrows in the commodity system. Dormant anxieties can be dulled by the television experience. Beyond being a delivery system for commodity life, it is the solder to hold that life together, the drug to ease the pain of confined and channeled existence. Though television passes for experience, it is really more like “time out,” as we shall see later. It is anti-experience. Its interaction with the human body and mind fixes people to itself, dulls human sensibility and dims awareness of the World. This enhances the commodity life by reducing knowledge of any other. By focusing people on events well outside their lives, television encourages passivity and inaction, discourages self-awareness and the ability to cope personally, both of which are dangerous for advertising. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
By speaking in images, television adds a dimension to the mirror-image process. Unlike radio or print media, advertising can now implant internal movies, forever available for self-comparison. Television encourages separation: people from community, people from each other, people from themselves, creating more buying units and discouraging organized opposition to the system. It creates a surrogate community: itself. It becomes everyone’s intimate advisor, teacher and guide to appropriate behavior and awareness. Thereby, it becomes its own feedback system, furthering its own growth and accelerating the transformation of everything and everyone into artificial form. This enables a handful of people to obtain a unique degree of power. You have seen how commercial stress the values of youth, how they stress consumption, the immediate gratification of desires, the love of the new, a contempt for old technology. Television screens are saturated with commercials promote the Utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naïve but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales. Which is to say, they are not. They are about values and myths and fantasies. One might even say they form a body of religious literature, a montage of voluminous, visualized sacred texts that provide people with images and stories around which to organize their lives. To give you some idea of exactly how voluminous, I should tell you that the average America will have seen approximately 1 million television commercials, at the rate of a thousand per week, by the age of twenty. By the age of sixty-five, the average American will have seen more than 2 million television commercials. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Commercial television adds to the Decalogue several impious commandments, among them that thou shalt have no others gods than consumption, thou shalt despise what is old, thou shalt seek to amuse thyself continuously, and thou shalt avoid complexity like the ten plagues of that the underworld. Perhaps you are thinking that I exaggerate the social and psychic results of the commercialization of television and that, in any case, what has happened in the United States of America could not happen anywhere else. If you are, you overestimate the power of tradition and underestimate the power of technology. To enliven your senses of the forces unleashed by technological change, you need only remind yourself of what the automobile has brought to Austria. Has it not changed the nature of your cities, created the suburbs, made roads through your forest and homes, restructured your economy? You must not mislead yourselves by what you know about World culture as of 2022. May regions around the World are still living in the age of Gutenberg. Commercial television attacks such backwardness with astonishing ferocity. For example, at the present time, less than 20 percent of population in Tuvalu watches television in the evening. A commercial television system will fund this situation intolerable. In the United States of America, approximately 90 percent of people watch television during evening hours, and broadcasters find even those number unsatisfactory. In nations like Korea, television commercials are bunched together so that they do not interfere with the continuity of the programs. Such a situation makes no sense to American commercial systems. The whole idea is precisely to interrupt the continuity of programs so that one’s thoughts cannot stray too far from consideration of consumership. Indeed, the aim is to obliterate the distinction between a program and a commercial. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
In some countries, you do not have many advertising agencies, and those you have are small and without great influence. In America, our advertising agencies are among the largest and most powerful corporations in the World. DDB Needham Worldwide has gross billings of $6.7 billion each year, 6,726 employees and SICs 7311 advertising agencies, and possibly receives $700 million per year for American network television alone. This is serious money and these are serious radicals. They cannot afford to permit a culture to retain old ideas about work or religion or politics or childhood. And it will not be long before they and their kind show up in the most primitive communities. If, like me, you claim allegiance to an authentic conservative philosophy, one that seeks to preserve that which nourishes the spirit, you would be wise to approach all proposals for a free-market television system with extreme caution. Indeed, I will go further than that: it is either hypocrisy or balderdash to argue that the transformation of the World from a print-based culture to a television-based culture can leave that country’s traditions intact. Conservatives know this is nonsense, and so they worry. Radicals also know this is nonsense. However, they do not care. In 1879, a French ophthalmologist named Luis Emile Javal discovered that when people read, their eyes do not sweep across the words in a perfectly fluid way. Their visual focus advances in little jumps, called saccades, pausing briefly at different points along each line. One of the Javal’s colleagues at the University of Paris soon made another discovery: that the pattern of pauses, or “eye fixations,” can vary greatly depending on what is being read and who is doing the reading. In the wake of these discoveries, brain researchers began to use eye-tracking experiments to learn more about how we read and how our minds work. Suck studies have also proven valuable in providing further insights into the Internet’s effects on attention and cognition. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
In 2006, Jakob Nielsen, a longtime consultant on the design of Web pages who has been studying online reading since the 1990s, conducted an eye-tracking study of Web users. He has 232 people wear a small camera that tracked their eye movements as they read pages of text and browsed other content. Nielsen found that hardly any of the participants read online text in a methodical, line-by-line way, as they would typically read a page of text in a book. The vast majority skimmed the text quickly, their eyes skipping down the pages in a pattern that resembled, roughly, the letter F. They would start by glancing all the way across the first two or three lines of text. Then their eyes would drop down a bit, and they would scan about halfway across a few more lines. Finally, they would let their eyes cursorily drift a little father down the left-hand side of the page. This pattern of online reading was confirmed by subsequent eye-tacking study carried out at the Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State University. “F,” wrote Mr. Nielsen, in summing up the findings for his clients, is “for fast. That is how users read your precious content. In a few second, their eyes move at amazing speed across your website’s words in a pattern that is very different from what you learned in school.” As a complement to his eye-tracking study, Mr. Nielsen analyzed an extensive database on the behavior of Web users that had been compiled by a term of German researchers. They had monitored the computers of twenty-five people for an average of about a hundred days each, tracking the time the subjects spent looking at some fifty thousand Web pages. Parsing the data, Mr. Nielsen found that as the number of words on a pace increases, the time a visitor spends looking at the page goes up, but only slightly. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
For every hundred additional words, the average viewer will spend just 4.4 more seconds perusing the page. Since even the most accomplished reader can read only about eighteen words in 4.4 seconds, Mr. Nielsen told his clients, “when you add verbiage to a page, you can assume that customers will read 18 percent of it.” And that, he cautioned, is almost certainly an overstatement. It is unlikely that the people in the study were spending all their time reading; they were also probably glancing at pictures, videos, advertisements, and other types of content. Mr. Nielsen’s analysis backed up the conclusions of the German researchers themselves. They had reported that most Web pages are viewed for ten seconds or less. Fewer than one in tend page views extend beyond two minutes, and a significant portion of those seem to involve “unattended browser windows…left open in the background of the desktop.” The researchers observed that “even new pages with plentiful information and many links are regularly viewed for a brief period.” However, with many people still have 4GLTE mobile phones, advertisers can get several seconds more of free advertisement from certain formats because the phones freeze up and leave their content on the phone for longer than they have paid for, so it is like with the older technology, firms get more for their dollar. Overall, however, results seem to “confirm that browsing is a rapidly interactive activity.” The results also reinforce something that Mr. Nielsen wrote in 1997 after his first study of online reading. “How do users read on the web?” he asked then. His succinct answer is: “They do not.” Many types of reading are important. The most visible sign of our increasing separateness and, in its turn, the cause of ever greater separateness is divorce. It has a deep influence on our universities because more and more of the students are products of it, and they do not only have problems themselves but also affect other students and the general atmosphere. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Divorce in America is the most palpable indication that people are not made to live together, and that, although they want and need to create a general will out of the particular wills, those particular wills constantly reassert themselves. There is a quest, but ever more hopeless, for arrangements and ways of putting the broken pieces back together. The task is equivalent to squaring the circle, because everyone loves oneself most but wants others to love one more than one loves themselves. Such is particularly the demand of children, against which parents are now rebelling. In the absence of a common good or common object, as Mr. Rousseau puts it, the disintegration of society into particular wills is inevitable. Selfishness in this case is not a moral vice or a sin but a natural necessity. The “Me generation” and “narcissism” are merely descriptions, not causes. The solitary savage in the state of nature cannot be blamed for thinking primarily of oneself, nor can a person who lives in a World where the primacy of oneself, nor can a person who lives in a World where the primacy of self-concern is only too evident in the most fundamental institutions, where the original selfishness of the state of nature remains, where concern for the common good is hypocritical, and where morality seems to be squarely on the side of selfishness. Or, to put it otherwise, the concern with self-development, self-expression, or growth, which flourished as a result of the optimistic faith in a preestablished harmony between such a concern and society or community, has gradually revealed itself to be inimical to community. A young person’s qualified or conditional attachment to divorced parents merely reciprocates what one necessarily sees as their conditional attachment to one, and is entirely different from the classic problem of loyalty to families, or other institutions, which were clearly dedicated to their members. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
In the past, such breaking away was sometimes necessary but always morally problematic. Today it is normal, and this is another reason why the classical literature is alien to so many of our young, for it is largely concerned with liberation from real claims—like family, faith, or country—whereas now the movement is in the opposite direction, a search for claims on oneself that have some validity. Children who have gone to the school of conditional relationships should be expected to view the World in the light of what they learned there. Children may be told over and over again that their parents have a right to their own lives, that they will enjoy quality time instead of quantity time, that they are really loved by their parents even after divorce, but children do not believe any of this. They think they have a right to total attention and believe their parents must live for them. There is no explaining otherwise to them, and anything less inevitably produces indignation and an inextirpable sense of injustice. To children, the voluntary separation of parents seems worse than their death precisely because it is voluntary. The capriciousness of wills, their lack of directedness to the common good, the fact that they could be otherwise but are not—these are the real source of the war of all against all. Children learn a fear of enslavement to the wills of others, along with a need to dominate those wills, in the context of the family, the one place where they are supposed to learn the opposite. Of course, many families are unhappy. However, that is irrelevant. The important lesson that the family taught was the existence of the only unbreakable bond, for better or for worse, between human beings. The decomposition of this bond is surely America’s most urgent social problem. However, nobody even tries to do anything about it. The tide seems to be irresistible. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Among the many items on the agenda of those promoting America’s moral regeneration, I never find marriage and divorce. The last time anyone in public office took a crack at anything like this issue was when President Trump urged Federal civil servants living together out of wedlock to get married. He said, “Marriage is a very beautiful and wonderful experience, something that everyone should enjoy. When I married, it was courtly love, and was one of the happiest moments in my parents’ lives.” Courtly love, the literary invention of medieval troubadours, is one thing and, unlike the proverbial and unchanging wheel, has been constantly reinvented. Courtly love is a manifestation that acknowledges the tenderness of romance, but incorporates it into a great passion guided not by carnality but rather by the highest moral and aesthetic values. Courtly love is an exalted state between a man and a superior woman he both respects and adores with quasi-religious fervor. Her love tests his resolve, firmness, and loyalty, for it is difficult to obtain. It is also immensely ennobling, so that his very suffering strengths every aspect of his being: his military prowess, social standards, even his moral and religious perspectives. Sometimes, the mere thought of his beloved triggers these holistic improvements. The rules of courtly love are the inherently painful ceaseless meditation on the beauty of one’s beloved, whom one glimpses from time to time but cannot possess. The ideal, seldom fulfilled, is total union with the beloved, to whom one is almost never married. O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,–Nature’s observatory—whence the dell, its flowery slops, its river’s crystal swell, may seem a span; let me thy vigils keep ‘mongst boughs pavillion’s, where the deer’s swift leap startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
But though I will gladly trace these scenes with thee, yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, whose words are images of thoughts refin’d, is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be almost the highest bless of human-kind, when to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. The moon is full the spring nights grow longer, in the north forests startled crows cry out. Past loves are a thousand miles farther each day, still the season’s changes can stir the heart. As one who with pain and suffering has cut a path through a trackless wilderness, and then looks back to observe joyfully other humans travelling easily the roadway one has chartered, so did out forefathers bless their lot as the bearers of salvation, saying: “How goodly is our portion, how blessed our lot, how beautiful our heritage!” Verily our ancestors regarded their role in history as a sign of God’s grace, a token of the love of the Almighty for America, and through America for all human. (Oh, by the way, America is seen as a brand and live styles in many countries, so there are people in China, Japan, and Korea, for example, who believe they are the real Americans. This shows you how manifest destiny and the America Dream is real.) For this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples. May we, the latter day children of America continue our people’s historic quest for God and His law of righteousness, and together with our fellowmen, may we establish His kingdom of truth, justice and peace. And the Lord shall be King over all the Earth, on that day, the Lord shall be One, and His name one. The history of America is the great living proof of the working of divine Providence in the affairs of the World. Alone among the nations America has shared all great movements since humankind became conscious of their destinies. If there is no divine purpose in the long travail of America, it is vain to seek for any such purpose in humans’ life. In the reflected light of that purpose each American should lead one’s life with an added dignity. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Love Can be a Cover for Violence
Everybody poppin’ pain pills is everybody hurt? Victorian men used to push down and suppress what he called “lower” bodily desires. However, one surely cannot be a man of decision without taking bodily desires into consideration. Particularly if the disease or treatment is mutilating, celibacy from impotence as a consequence of various genital cancers, is presumed and understood. The same is true of paraplegia or quadriplegia. Diabetes is another condition that may provoke impotence in men. So are some psychiatric disorders that include symptoms of shame and despair. Another common one is anorexia, which in severe form effectively neuters the victim, who becomes too weak to contemplate, desire, or partake in pleasures of the flesh. Other conditions that may induce celibacy are less well known. One of these is vaginismus, in which muscle spasms around the female private area are so severe that a male organ cannot enter it or causes extreme pain when it does. It is difficult to know how many women are affected by it. In the 1970s and 1980s, Masters and Johnson found it in about 5 percent of research volunteers at their institute. They suspected it was generally underestimated in medical diagnoses of the general population because many women sufferers opt for celibacy to avoid the pain and embarrassment of dealing with it. Because these women do not seek help for what might be perceived as a dysfunction, they are medical research’s unknowns. Vaginismus is uncomfortable sensation for women and can be so severe that pleasures of the flesh is impossible. Masters and Johnson have been consulted by desperate couples unable to consummate their marriages after ten years. Often they are driven to seek help because a longing for children overpowers their embarrassment or their refusal to acknowledge they have a problems. Sometimes vaginismus develops after years of normal functioning. Traumatic events such as nonconsensual pleasures of the flesh may provoke it. If an episiotomy has not properly healed, for example, so may experience pain during pleasures of the flesh. Other painful conditions may also provoke vaginismus as a defensive response. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Negative pleasures of the flesh psychological condition can also produce vaginismus, as a reaction to feelings of extreme guilt. Many women reported to Masters and Johnson that their mothers were intensely puritanical about pleasures of the flesh and refused to allow their daughters to do anything they labeled harlotry, including wearing makeup before age eighteen, dressing in typical teenage style, or having boyfriends. One woman’s mother had zealously clipped newspaper articles describing nonconsensual pleasures of the flesh and, throughout her daughter’s four years at university, sent them to her weekly. In the sphere of pleasures of the flesh, though some women avoid intimate passions altogether, others “service” their husbands through fellatio or manual manipulation. They are distraught that they cannot offer traditional pleasures of the flesh and worry that their spouses will find a more titillating partners. Some do, engaging in extramarital affairs for a release through pleasures of the flesh and also to verify that they themselves are still capable of intimate passions. Couples forced into celibacy that is the direct consequence of a medical condition, as opposed to a religious, ascetic, or idealistic principle, see their abstinence as an unfortunate, even tragic condition that requires professional intervention. It subtly alters the form of a relationship and is extremely stressful. In rare instances, this unwelcome celibacy is seen for what it is: a bearable way of life precipitated by a regrettable medical condition. The body consists of the muscular, neurological, and glandular correlates of intentionality, such as increased adrenalin secretion when we are enraged and want to strike something, increased speed of heart beat when we are anxious and want to run, engorgement of the private organs when we are excited by intimate passions. Therefore, it is important for one to become aware of one’s bodily feelings and bodily state in the moment. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Civilization has seemingly led us around full circle, back to the state of nature taught to us by the founding fathers of modern thought. However, now it is present not in rhetoric but in reality. Those who first taught the state of nature proposed it as a hypothesis. Liberated from all the conventional attachments to religion, country, and family that men actually did have, how would they live and how would they feel reconstruct those attachments? It was an experiment designed to make people recognize what they really care about and engage their loyalties on the basis of this caring. However, a young person today, to exaggerate only a little, actually begins de novo, without the givens or imperatives that one would have had only yesterday. His country demands little of one and provides well for one, one’s religion is a matter of absolutely free choice and—that is what is really fresh—so are his involvements in pleasures of the flesh. He can now choose, but he finds he no longer has a sufficient motive for choice that is more than whim, that is binding. Reconstruction is proving impossible. The state of nature should culminate in a contract, which constitutes a society out of individuals. A contract requires not only a common interest between the contracting parties but also an authority to enforce its fulfillment by them. In the absence of the former, there is no relationship; in the absence of the latter, there can be no trust, only diffidence. In the state of nature concerning friendships and love today, there is doubt about both, and the result is a longing for the vanished common group, called roots, without the means to recover it, and timidity and self-protectiveness in associations guaranteed by neither nature nor convention. The pervasive feeling that love and friendship are groundless, perhaps the most notable aspect of the current feeling of groundless, perhaps the most notable aspect of the current feeling of groundlessness, has caused them to give way to the much vaguer and more personal idea of commitment, that choice in the void whose cause resides only in the will of the self. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The young want to make commitments, which constitute the meaning of life, because love and nature do not suffice. That is what they talk about, but they are haunted by the awareness that the talk does not mean very much and that commitments are lighter than air. At the origins of modern natural rights teachings, freedom and equality were politically principles intended to bring both justice and effectiveness to the relationships of ruling and being ruled, which in the conventional order were constituted by pretended rights of strength, wealth, tradition, age and birth. The relationships of king and subject, master and slaver, lord and vassal, patrician and pleb, rich and poor, were revealed to be purely manmade and hence not morally binding, apart from the consent of the parties to them, which became the only source of political legitimacy. Civil society was to be reconstructed on the natural ground of man’s common humanity. Then it would appear that all relationships or relatedness within civil society would also depend on the free consent of individuals. Yet the relationships between man and woman, parent and child, are less doubtfully natural and less arguably conventional than the relations between rulers and ruled, especially as they are understood by modern natural rights teaching. They cannot be understood simply as contractual relationships, as resulting from acts of human freedom, since they would thereby lose their character and dissolve. Instead they seem to constrain that freedom, to argue against the free arrangements of consent dominant in the political order. However, it is difficult to argue that nature both does and does not prescribe certain relations in civil society. The radical transformation of the relations between men and women and parents and children was the inevitable consequence of the success of the new politics of consent. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
It might be said, with some exaggeration, that the first state-of-nature teachers paid little attention to the natural teleology of gender because they were primarily concerned with analyzing away the false appearances of teleology in the existing political arrangements. (I mean by teleology nothing but the evident, everyday observation and sense of purposiveness, which may be only illusory, but which ordinarily guides human life, the kind everyone sees in the reproductive process.) Each individual is the judge of one’s own best interests and they have the right to choose rulers who are bound to protect them, while abstracting from the habits of thought and feeling that permitted patricians under the colors of the common good to make use of plebs for their own greedy purposes. The plebs have equal rights to selfishness. The ruled are not directed by nature to the rulers any more than the rulers naturally care only for the good of the ruled. Rulers and ruled can consciously craft a compact by which the separate interests of each are protected. However, they are never one, sharing the same highest end, like the organs in Menenius’ body. There is no body politic, only individuals who have come together voluntarily and can separate voluntarily without maiming themselves. Although the political order is constituted out of individuals, the subpolitical units remain largely unaffected. Indeed, they counted on the family, as an intermediate between individual and the state, partially to replace what was being lost in passionate attachment to the polity. The immediate and reliable love of one’s own property, wife and children can more effectively counterpoise purely individual selfishness than does the distant and abstract love of country. Moreover, concern for the safety of one’s family is a powerful reason for loyalty to the state, which protects them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The nation as a community of families is a formula that until recently worked very well in the United States of America. However, it is very questionable whether this solution is viable over the very long run, because there are two contrary views of nature present here. And, as the political philosophers have always taught, that one that is authoritative in the political regime will ultimately inform its parts. In the social contract view, nature has nothing to say about relationships and rank order; in the older view, which is part and parcel of ancient political philosophy, nature is prescriptive. Are the relations between men and women and parents and children determined by natural impulse or are they the product of choice and consent? In Aristotle’s Politics, the subpolitical or prepolitical family relations point to the necessity of political rule and are perfected by it, whereas in the state-of-nature teachings, political rule is derived entirely from the need for protection of individuals, bypassing their social relations completely. Are we dealing with political actors or with men and women? In the former case, persons are free to construct whatever relations they please with one another; in the latter, prior to any choice, a preexisting frame largely determines the relations of men and women. There are three classic images of the polity that clarify this issue. The first is the ship of state, which is one thing if it is to be forever at sea, and quite another if it is to reach port and the passengers go their separate ways. They think about one another and their relationships on the ship very differently in the two cases. The former case is the ancient city; the latter, the modern state. The other two images are the herd and the hive, which oppose each other. The herd may need a shepherd, but each of the animals is grazing for itself and can easily be separated from the herd. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In the hive, by contrast, there are workers, drones and a queen; there is a division of labor ad a product toward which they all work in common; separation from the hive is extinction. The herd is modern, the hive ancient. Of course, neither image is an accurate description of human society. Men are neither atoms nor parts of a body. However, this is why there have to be such images, since for the brutes these things are not a matter for discussion or deliberation. Man is ambiguous. In the tightest communities, at least since the days of Odysseus, there is something in man that wants out and sense that his development is stunted by being just part of a whole, rather than a whole itself. And in the freest and most independent situations men long for unconditional attachments. The tension between freedom and attachment, and attempts to achieve the impossible union of the two, are the permanent condition of man. However, in modern political regimes, where rights precede duties, freedom definitely has primacy over community, family and even nature. The spirit of this choice must inevitably penetrate into all the details of life. The ambiguity of man is well illustrated in the passion of pleasures of the flesh, and the sentiments that accompany it. Pleasures of the flesh may be treated as a pleasure out of which men and women may make what they will, its promptings followed or rejected, its forms matters of taste, its importance or unimportance in life decided freely by individuals. As such, it would have to give precedence to objective natural necessity, to the imperatives of self-love or self-preservation. Or pleasures of the flesh can be immediately constitutive of a whole law of life, to which self-preservation is subordinated and in which love, marriage and the rearing of infants is the most important business. It cannot be both. The direction in which we have been going is obvious. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Now, it is not entirely correct to say that humankind at large is able to treat pleasures of the flesh as a matter of free choice, one which initially does not obligate us to others. In a World where the natural basis of sexual differentiation has crumbled, this choice is readily available to men, but less so to women. Man in the state of nature, either in the first one or the one we have now, can walk away from an encounter involving pleasures of the flesh and never give it another thought. However, a woman may have a child, and in fact, as becomes ever clearer, may want to have a child. Pleasures of the flesh can be an indifferent thing for men, but it really cannot quite be so for women. This is what might be called the female drama. Modernity promised that all human beings would be treated equally. Women took that promise seriously and rebelled against the old order. However, as they succeeded, men have also been liberated from their old constraints. And women, now liberated and with equal careers, nevertheless find they still desire to have children, but have no basis for claiming that men should share their desire for children or assume a responsibility for them. So nature weighs more heavily on women. In the old order they were subordinated and dependent on men; in the new order they are isolated, needing men, but not able to count on them, and hampered in the free development of their individuality. The promise of modernity is not really fulfilled for women. Love had been assumed to be a motivating force, a power which could be relied upon to push us onward in life. However, the great shift in our day indicates that the motivating force itself is now called into question. Love has become a problem to itself. So self-contradictory, indeed, has love become that some of those studying family life have concluded that “love” is simply the name for the way more powerful members of the family control other members. Love can be a cover for violence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The same can be said about will. We inherited from our Victorian forefathers the belief that the only real problem in life was to decide rationally what to do—and then will would stand ready as the “faculty” for making us do it. Now it is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide. The very basis of will itself is thrown into question. Is will an illusion? Many psychologists and psychotherapists, from Dr. Freud down, have argued that it is. The term “will power” and “free will,” so necessary in the vocabulary of our fathers, have all but dropped completely out of any contemporary, sophisticated discussion; or the words are used in derision. People go to therapist to find substitutes for their lost will: to learn how to get the “unconscious” to direct their lives, or to learn how to get the “unconscious” to direct their lives, or to learn the latest conditioning technique to enable them to behave, or to use new medications to release some motive for living. Also to learn the latest method of “releasing affect,” unaware that affect is not something you strive for in itself but a by-product of the way you give yourself to a life situation. Every age has its own special forms of imperialism. And so does each conqueror. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the British mastered the art, their method of invasion was to send their navy, then their army, then their administrators, and finally their educational system. The Americans now do it differently. They send their television shows and fake news media. The method has much to recommend it. Neither armies nor navies clash by night; the invasion occurs without loss of life and without much resistance. It is also both pleasurable and quick. In a few years, we shall be able to boast that the sun never sets on an American television show. Political consciousness is born through the winds of technology. Electromagnetic waves penetrate more deeply than armies. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
If nations keep relying on nineteenth-century forms of imperialism while continuing to make terrible television shows, they may find themselves turning into a Third World country. Advertising exists only to purvey what people do not need. If it is available, whatever people do need they will find without advertising. This is so obvious and simple that it continues to stagger my mind that the ad industry has succeeded in muddying the point. No single issue gets advertisers screaming louder than this one. They speak about how they are only fulfilling the needs of people by providing an information service about where and how people can achieve satisfaction for their nee. Advertising is only a public service, they insist. Speaking privately, however, and to corporate clients, advertisers sell their services on the basis of how well they are able to create needs where there were none before. I have never met an advertising person who sincerely believes that there is a need connected to, say, 99 percent of the commodities which fill the airwaves and the print media. Nor can I recall a single street demonstration demanding one single product in all of American history. If there were such a demonstration for, let us say, nonreturnable bottles, which were launched through tens of millions of dollars of ads, or chemically processed foods, similarly dependent upon ads, there would surely have been no need to advertise these products. The only need that is expressed by advertising is of raw materials with no intrinsic value into commodities that people will buy. If we take the word “need” to mean something basic to human survival—food, shelter, clothing—or basic to human contentment—peace, love, safety, companionship, intimacy, a sense of fulfillment—these will be sought and found by people whether or not there is advertising. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
In fact, advertising intervenes between people and their needs, separates them from direct fulfillment and urges them to believe that satisfaction can be obtained only through commodities. It is through this intervention and separation that advertising can create value, thereby justifying its existence. Consider the list of the top twenty-five advertisers in the United States of America. They sell the following products: soap, detergents, cosmetics, cars and sodas, all of which exist in a realm beyond need. If they were needed, they would not be advertised. People do need to eat, but the food which is advertised is processed food: processed meats, sodas, sugary cereals, candies. A food in its natural state, unprocessed, does not need to be advertised. If it is available to them, hungry people will find the food. To persuade people to buy the processed version is another matter because it is more expensive, less naturally appealing, less nourishing, and often harmful. The need must be created. Perhaps there is a need for cleanliness. However, that is not what advertisers sell. Cleanliness can be obtained with water and a little bit of natural fiber, or solidified natural fat. Major World civilizations kept clean that way for millennia. What is advertised is Americanism, a value beyond cleanliness; sterility, the avoidance of all germs; sudsiness, a cosmetic factor; and brand, a surrogate community loyalty. There is need for tranquility and a sense of contentment. However, these are the last qualities drug advertisers would like you to obtain; not on your own anyway. A drug ad denies your ability to cope with internal processes: feelings, moods, anxieties. It encourages the belief that personal or traditional ways of dealing with these matters—friends, family, community, or patiently awaiting the next turn in life’s cycle—will not succeed in your case. It suggests that a chemical solution is better so that you will choose the chemical rather than your own resources. The result is that you become further separated from yourself and less able to cope. Your ability dies for lack of practice and faith in its efficacy. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
A deodorant ad never speaks about the inherent values of applying imitation-lemon fragrances to your body; it has no inherent value. Mainly the ad wishes to intervene in any notion you may have that there is something pleasant or beneficial in your own human odor. Once the intervention takes place, and self-doubt and anxiety are created, the situation can be satisfied with artificial smells. Only through this process of intervention and substitution is there the prospect of value added and commercial profit. The goal of all advertising is discontent or, to put it another way, an internal scarcity of contentment. This must be continually created, even at the moment when one has finally bought something. In that event, advertising has the task of creating discontent with what has just been bought, since once that act is completed, the purchase has no further benefit to the market system. The newly purchased commodity must be gotten rid of and replaced by the “need” for a new commodity as soon as possible. The ideal World for advertisers would be one in which whatever is bought is used only once and then tossed aside. Many new products have been designed to fit such a World. As a visitor in your country—indeed, as one who does not even know your language well enough to use it in these circumstances—I feel obliged to add something to the culture. You are entitled to know at the start from what cultural and political perspectives I see the World, since everything I will have to say here reflects a point of view quite likely different from your own. I am what may be called a conservative. This word, of course, is ambiguous, and you may have a different meaning for it from my own. Perhaps it will help us to understand each other if I say from my point of view many political are radical. It is true enough that many of them no longer speak of the importance of preserving such traditional instructions and beliefs as the family, childhood, the work ethic, self-denial, and religious piety. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
In fact, it seems like most politicians do not care one way or another whether any of this is preserved. No one, beside President Trump, wants to put America and Americans first anymore. Kids have to sell their bikes to buy food for dinner. People have to work two and three jobs to pay the mortgage. And other companies turn to increasing fees to make due in these challenging times. That is why I am for preserving tradition; that is not where most politicians’ interests lie. You cannot fail to notice that many are no longer mostly concerned to preserve a free-market economy, to encourage what is new, and to keep America technologically progressive. Many of our political leaders are not devoted to capitalism anymore. No people have been more entranced by newness—and particularly technological newness—than Americans. That is why our most important radicals have always been capitalists, especially capitalist who have exploited the possibilities of new technologies. The names that come to mind are Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst, Willian Winchester, Sarah Winchester, Samuel Goldwyn, Henry Luce, Alan Dumont, and Walt Disney, among many others. These capitalist-radicals, inflamed by their fascination for new technologies, created the twentieth century. If you are happy about the twentieth century, you have them to thank for it. However, as we all know, in every virtue there lurks a contrapuntal vice. We must praise our ambition and vitality but at the same time to condemn our naivete and rashness. A culture that exalts the new for its own sake, that encourages the radical inclination to exploit what is new and is therefore indifferent to the destruction of the old, that such a culture runs a serious risk of becoming trivial and dangerous, especially dangerous to itself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
This is exactly what is happening in the United State of America in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. In today’s America, the idea of newness not only is linked to the idea of improvement but is the definition of improvement. If anyone should raise the question, What improves the human spirit?, or even the more mundane question, What improves the quality of life?, Americans are apt to offer a simple formulation: That which is new is better, that which is newest is best. The cure for such balderdash is a philosophy of conservatism. My version of a President is one who puts America and Americans first and stays out of the business and affairs of other nations. A true conservative, like myself, knows that technology always fosters radical social change. A true conservative also knows that it is useless to pretend that technology will not have its way with a culture. However, a conservative recognizes a difference between nonconsensual and seduction. The former cares nothing for the victim. The seducers must accommodate oneself to the will and temperament of the object of one’s desires. Indeed, one does not want a victim so much as an accomplice. What I am saying is that technology can attack a nonconsensual culture or be forced to seduce it. The aim of a genuine conservative in a technological age is to control the fury of technology, to make it behave itself, to insist that it accommodate itself to the will and temperament of a people. It is one’s best hope that through one’s efforts a modicum of charm may accompany the union of technology and culture. When it comes to technocracy–in our own history, philosophers of the new technology, like Veblen, Geddes, or Fuller, succeeded in making efficiency and know-how the chief ethical values of the folk, creating a mystique of “production,” and a kind of streamlined esthetics. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
However, they did not succeed in wresting management from the businessmen and creating their own World of a neat and transparent physical plant and a practical economics of production and distribution. The actual results have been slums of works of engineering, confused and useless overproduction, gadgetry, and new tribes of middlemen, promoters, and advertisers. With urbanism, as Le Corbuiser and Gropius urged, we have increasingly the plan and style of functional architecture; biological standards of housing; scientific study of traffic and city services; some zoning; and the construction of large-scale projects. However, nowhere is realized the ideal of over-all community planning, the open green city, or the organic relation of work, living, and play. The actual results have been increasing commutation and traffic, segregated HRNs (high risk neighborhoods), a “functional” style little different from packaging and the tendency to squeeze out some basic urban functions, such as recreation or schooling, to be squeezed out altogether. Garden City—in the opposite numbers, the Garden City planners after Ebenezer Howard, have achieved some planned communities protected by greenbelts. However, they did not get their integrated towns, planned for industry, local commerce, and living. The result is that actual suburbs and garden cities are dormitories with a culture centering around small children, and absence of the wage earner; and such “plan” as the so-called shopping center makes such communities fell like small towns without disrupting the village committees too much. The movement to conserve the wilds cannot withstand the cars, so that all areas are invaded and regulated. If you did not know, in Sacramento, California there are still wild jack rabbits, cotton tail rabbits, bevers, duck, swans, geese, turkeys and some people claim that we still have deer, but I have not seen any since I was a kid. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Kansas State University scholars conducted a realistic study. They had a group of college students watch a typical CNN broadcast in which an anchor reported four news stories while various info-graphics flashed on the screen and a textual news crawl ran along the bottom. They had a second group watch the same programing but with the graphics and the news crawl stripped out. Subsequent tests found that the students who had watched the multimedia version remembered significantly fewer facts from the stories than those who had watched the simpler version. “It appears,” wrote the researchers, “that this multimessage format exceeded viewers’ attentional capacity.” Supplying information in more than one form does not always take a toll on understanding. As we all know from reading illustrated textbooks and manuals, pictures can help clarify and reinforce written explanations. Education researcher have also found that carefully designed presentations that combine audio and visual explanations or instructions can enhance students’ learning. The reason, current theories suggest, is that our brains use different channels for processing what we see and what we hear. Auditory and visual working memory are separate, at least to some extent, and because they are separate, effective working memory may be increased by using both processors rather than one. As a result, in some cases the negative effects of split attention might be ameliorated by using both auditory and visual modalities—sound and pictures, in other words. The Internet, however, was not built by educators to optimize learning. It presents information not in a carefully balanced way but as a concentration-fragmenting mishmash. The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention. That is not only a result of its ability to display many different kinds of media simultaneously. It is also a result of the ease with which it can be programmed to send and receive messages. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Most e-mail applications, to take an obvious example, are set up to check automatically for news messages every few seconds, and people routinely click the “check for new mail” button even more frequently than that. Studies of office workers who use computers reveal that they constantly stop what they are doing to read and respond to incoming e-mails. It is not unusual for them to glance at their in-box thirty or forty times an hour (though when asked how frequently they look, they will often give a much lower figure). Since each glance represents a small interruption of thought, a momentary redeployment of mental resources, the cognitive costs can be high. Psychological research long ago proved what most of us know from experience: frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious. The more complex the train of though we are involved in, the greater the impairment the distraction causes. Now, there is a threatening attack brewing that could give powerful ammunition to every science-hater in society. Again, this attack is aimed not at the scientific method as such but on two elements of the ethic associated with it—the ideas that knowledge produced by science should be freely circulated and that scientists should be free to explore everything. The free circulation of scientific findings is under withering fire from both business and government. More and more scientific research is either funded or conducted by corporations that, for high-stakes commercial reasons, are racing to patent their findings or cloak them in secrecy. Simultaneously, governments, reacting to the genuine threat of terrorism, are demanding that more and more scientific findings be kept secret for security reason. The age of the “Super-Empowered Individual”—the terrorist, criminal or psychotic armed with weapons of mass and individual destruction—is fast approaching. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
While it is clear that the media and the Internet cannot continue to offer instruction manuals for bomb building and the manipulation of toxic materials, disquieting debates are under way about how much of science needs to be withheld from public view. On the one hand, in the light of terrorism, registration of laboratories and surveillance of research activity may now be necessary. The most dangerous thing is secrecy. Biological weaponry itself was developed behind walls of secrecy. This is why so many are pushing to fortify all borders. You see how bad COVID-19 was, there could be something worse coming. Making the distinction about which knowledge is dangerous and out to be censored is very hard. The distinction between offensive and defensive uses of biological agents is really a matter of how information is utilized rather than the information itself. You have to know how to defend against bioterrorism, but in knowing that you should also know how to inflict bioterrorism. Preventing disclosure of new findings is one thing. However, even more disturbing are proposals to make whole broad categories of knowledge off-limits to research. Some are even coming from scientists themselves, who conjure up apocalyptic scenarios to support their theses. Some people believe that science needs to “relinquish” research that might lead to the domination of the human species by the runaway destructive self-replication of technologies now made possible by advances in genetics, robotics and nanotechnology. By 2030, computers might be smarter than humans—smart enough to reproduce themselves and essentially take over. Various physicists have discussed, if something went wrong— they could wipe out not only the human race but Earth and the cosmos as well. Other scientists regard this as nonsensical. Arguing that we do not know enough even to assess the levels of risk, critics propose various steps that should precede the undertaking of dangerous experiments in any field, not just physics. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
It has been debated if two teams of scientists against each other—a “red team” to offer reasons why such experiments would not be safe and a “blue team” that would make the cause for going forward would be reasonable. Wow. I never considered how powerful man is or can be. This is something worth taking into consideration. However, the attempt to avoid risk carries risks of its own—thus the most extreme precautionary policy would utterly paralyze science. And with it, one might add, the knowledge of the economy of the future. Self-criticism is at the very heart of science. And science and scientists should never be above criticism from the public. Science is itself a social activity, dependent, to a degree many scientists underestimate, on the ideas, epistemologies and built-in assumptions of the surrounding culture. Nor should scientists alone police science, since, like everyone else, they have their own self-interests. What we are seeing, however, is not just a series of unrelated, disparate attacks on science but a convergent conviction that science needs to be reduced in influence, stripped of the respect it has earned—in short, devalued as a key test of truth. However, the battle over truth is not confined to science. Different groups in society are, for different reason, actively trying to manage our minds by shifting the truth filters through which we, in our turn, see the World—the tests we use to separate true from false. This battle has no name. However, it will have a profound effect on the revolutionary wealth system now superseding that of the industrial age. Many people think there is nothing left to revolt over and that is why they are now attacking others in an increased fashion. Well, there is obviously one thing left to revolt against and that is pleasures of the flesh. The frontier, the establishing of identity, the validation of the self can be, and not infrequently does become for some people, a revolt against sexuality entirely. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
God loves all of His children and He wants them to respect their body because it is a temple that the Father made especially for you. It is precious and should be treated with respect and dignity. God created the many diverse races and ethnicities and esteems them all equally. As the Book of Mormon puts it, “all are alike unto God.” Life did not begin at birth, as is commonly believed. Prior to coming to Earth, individuals existed as spirits, therefore our bodies are only loaners, we do not own them. God has allowed us to use them so we can come to Earth and learn somethings and teach others how to love. Mortal life is crucial to the plan of happiness God would provide for His children: “We will prove them herewith,” God stated, “to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them,” adding a promise to increase glory forever upon the faithful. Faith is a principle of action and power. Whenever you work toward a worthy goal, you exercise faith. You show your hope for something that you cannot yet see. Having faith in Jesus Christ means relying completely on Him—trusting in His infinite power, intelligence, and love. It includes believing His teachings. It means believing that even though you do not understand all things, He does. Remember that because He has experienced all your pains, afflictions, and infirmities, He knows how to help you rise about your daily difficulties. Jesus has overcome the World and prepared the way for you to receive eternal life. He is always ready to help you as you remember His plea: “Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 6.36. Faith is much more than a passive belief. You express your faith through action—by the way you live. The Savior promised, “If ye will have faith in Me ye shall have power to do whatsoever thing is expedient in me,” Moroni 7.33. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Faith in Jesus Christ can help you overcome temptation. The Lord will work mighty miracles in your life accord to your faith. Faith in Jesus Christ helps you receive spiritual and physical healing through His Atonement. When times of trial come, faith can give you strength to press forward and face your hardships with courage. Even when the future seems uncertain, your faith in the Savior can give you peace. Faith is a gift from God, but you must nurture your faith to keep it strong. Faith is like the muscle of your arm. If you exercise it, it grows stronger. It you put it in a sling and leave it there, it becomes weak. You can nurture the gift of faith by praying to Heavenly Father in the name of Jesus Christ. As you express your gratitude to your Father and as you plead with Him for blessings that you and other need, you will draw near to Him. You will draw near to the Savior, whose Atonement makes it possible for you to plead for mercy. This will create a cycle of growth in your life and allow you to seek happiness through more and more possessions. Striving can cease in the abundance of God’s grace. My you know the contentment that allows the totality of your energies to come to full flower. May you know Jesus Christ and be rich beyond measure. May God take pleasures in your great bounty. But remember to cherish the abundance of the simple things in life which are the true source of joy. With the golden glow of peaceful contentment, may your truly appreciate this day. To humankind contemptful of humans, America’s prophets and sages taught the sanctity of each human being. In an age of cruelty and violence they proclaimed justice, compassion and peace. One law shall be among you, for the native and stranger alike. Through the parables of actualized Christians, the songs of poets, the visions of prophets, a new conception of the good life was born. Embodied in America’s Scripture, it became the precious possession of all humans, giving them strength in weariness and hope in despair. The Law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
When we show off our #Havenwood homes, we love emphasizing the customizable nature of the thoughtfully designed floor plans.
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This Confusion Has its Roots in Early Childhood
Of everything found in the entire human knowledge base, including both current knowledge and obsoledge, nothing in recent centuries has increased the life span, nutrition, health and wealth of our species more than that trace element we call science. Yet among the many signs that we are changing the deep fundamental of wealth is today’s mounting guerrilla war against science. This was is an attempt not just to challenge scientific facts but to devalue science itself. Its goal is to change how science is conducted and to dictate what scientists may or may not investigate. At the deepest level, it aims to force a Worldwide truth-shift—to reduce reliance on science as a way of validating truth. If successful, it could sidetrack the future of the knowledge economy and the chances for reducing global misery and poverty, darkening the century to come. On the surface, it would appear that, on a global basis, science is flourishing. Worldwide, the number of scientists and engineers is growing, as are Research and Development expenditures–$161 trillion by the end of 2022 in the United States of America alone. A significant amount of that Research and Development has gone to foreign researchers and immigrants who have flooded into the United States of America science community from all parts of the World. The United States of America has also been the training ground for legions of scientists now working around the globe, from China to India to the middle East and Mexico. In the business sector, IMB alone spent $6.33 billion on Research and Development in 2020. Its researchers are now headed by Arvind Krishna. Under Mr. Krishna’s direction, IBM scientists and researchers received 9,139 U.S. patents in 2020, the most of any company, marking 28 consecutive years of IMB patent leadership. Patents were awarded to more than 9,000 inventors located in 46 U.S. states and 54 countries. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
These innovations not only improved IBM’s physical products but, more important, represent salable intellectual property of the kind that brought in $73 billion in revenue in 2020. IBM’s main products are no longer just physical—they are services and knowledge. The precise pathways by which science translates into generalized economic growth are extremely complex and a matter of lively debate. However, in the words of Gary Bachula, former U.S. undersecretary of commerce, “Leading economists now identify technical progress as a major, if not the most important, factor in sustained economic growth, accounting for as much as one half U.S. economic growth in the past 50 years.” In recent years, according to a National Science Foundation report, “other nations are increasing their Research and Development investments, focusing on areas such as physical sciences and engineering, which receive comparably less funding in the United States.” It is, of course, a cliché to say that scientific knowledge is a two-edged sword because some of its findings are exploited in destructive ways. The same is true, however, for religion and non-scientific knowledge—neither of which has unleashed a comparable flood of discoveries that have contributed to global health, nutrition, safety and other social benefits. Because the business World is so diverse is one reason why the universities are formally integrated, and students of all backgrounds are used to seeing each other. In the university, while students may choose to segregated themselves by race, simply because of cultural values or limited expose to others, there are melting pot groups where people of diverse backgrounds gather and have social exchange. These students have made the adjustment, without missing a beat, to a variety of religions and nationalities. People tend to be open with associating with the other students of different cultures who want to be associated with and forget the rest. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
However, as expressed before, some students stick together because they want to partake fully in the common culture, with the same goals and tastes as everyone else, but they are doing it by themselves. They continue to have the inward sentiments of separateness caused by exclusion when it no longer effectively exists. The heat is under the pot, but they do not melt as have all other groups. Yet, they still know that the work force is diverse and that there can be no justification for separatism where the ideal of common humanity must prevail, which is why some groups enjoy segregation while they can. Segregation usually tends only to be negative when it is enforced. Most people want to be held to the highest standards of achievement, others believing that gains are incremental over generations. Everyone is still an integrationist, for the most part, most people want profits and are looking for the best talent available. That is why universities are making their best effort to prepare their students for the great intellectual and social challenges awaiting them in the business World. However, there is still an issue with students reading books, especially in non-math classes. The university has opened up sections of various ethnic histories, but there is also a reason students do not read. Because they are not interested in the authors. Even though they have an obligation to read their textbooks to pass their classes, an idea is being proposed that there are not just American English classes, but classes that pertain to certain races. Such as an African America English class, dealing with the same curriculum, but the novels are from authors of their race. Many other people of various ethic background would like the same kind of English classes. However, in semesters when enrollment is too low, particular classes can be cut, and student may choose to take other types of English classes. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Another reason some student chose to segregate is because of fear. Militants of their own race threaten them—and threaten to do bodily harm to students with independent inclinations. Sometimes students who wish to be just a student and to avoid allegiance to their racial group have to pay a terrific price, because they are judged negatively by their peers and because their behavior is atypical in the eyes of the own culture. Also, different racial groups, who are social with others who are not of the same race, may make it difficult for others of a different background to understand them because it is too hard to read them. People are not always on the same wavelength so one cannot just see someone of a different race and think they can be friends. One will have to have a connection established based on a class, club, job, or a hobby. If you are interested in another person’s hobby, they will focus much on having fun, instead of wonder why are you talking to them? All this can be daunting, but it is a good lesson in socialization. People often do not want to be given special treatment because they will believe that everyone doubts their merit, their capacity for equal achievement. Their successes become questionable in their own eyes. Those who are good students fear that they are equated with those who are not, that their hard-won credentials are not credible. They are the victims of a stereotype. Those who are not good students, but have the same advantages as those who are, want to protect their position but are haunted by the sense of not deserving it. This is why some believe it is better to sick together, so these subtle but painful difficulties will not arise. Reason cannot always accommodate the claims of any kind of power whatever, and democratic society cannot accept any principle of achievement other than merit. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Acts not antisocial that are punished are most animal expression and some spirited enterprise. These include a lot of trespassing and hell raising with annoyance and minor damage. Most behavior involving pleasures of the flesh. Running away and truancy. But even certain important “theft.” The trespassing and hell raising speak for themselves. Where everything has become property and order, it is quite impossible to be vivacious, aggressive, undeliberate, exploratory and venturesome, without being of order and sometimes smashing things. This is generally agreed and the police are usually not unreasonable. However, the bother comes when emotional heat is generated and meets incipient deeper grounds of delinquency, the exchange of insults and the need for revenge. Exempli gratia, a police officer is rude and the boys get angry; or a chap foolishly drives away the kids who are diving from his cruiser, so they retaliate by boring holes in the bottom of it and sinking it. Most behavior involving pleasures of the flesh would give more satisfaction and do lasting good, and certainly result in far less damage, if any, if it were completely ignored by the police and not subject to any social disapproval qua sexual. There may be grounds for debate about the harmfulness or indifference of “corrupting the moral of a minor”—many societies have managed handsomely without such notions; but all competent authority would agree that, in most cases, more damage is done by the fear and shame accompanying an act involving pleasures of the flesh than can possibly follow from the simple act itself. (Typically, “self-love” is a habit without deleterious effects in itself, yet a source of behavior difficulties effects in itself, yet a source of behavior difficulties because of strong social disapproval. It is hard to find a rational reason for committing mere delinquent of intimate passions to an institution. To effectively help them, they must be divorced from restraint and stigma. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
In truancy, the burden of proof lies on the schools, which are demonstrably stupefying to many children, whose truancy is therefore a kind of self-preservation. Naturally, these kids get nothing from hanging around the streets either. The solution is hard but simple: decide that the kids are in the right and make good education at whatever cost. The same thinking applies to vagabondage. If a kid is a lonely runaway without domicile or means of support, it takes no great wisdom to infer that one has left a cruel of drunken home or a situation of intolerable uselessness and boredom, or that one is ashamed. Then provide one with something worthwhile, and give one solace. However, consider the principle of the burden of the proof in even an important crime like auto left, important solely because cars are expensive. (The real social danger, from wild driving, occurs with all car-crazy adolescents, not only those who steal cars.) Almost all juvenile auto theft is for joy riding. A band of kids, now mostly locked up, made it a point of their game to return the car to the identical spot, a foolhardy gesture. Now we live in a society where for all classes these cars are the chief means, and the Madison Avenue symbols, of power, manliness, freedom to go and do. Kids of other periods drove the horses at an early age; in rural places they drive cares at eleven. In urban traffic conditions young adolescents cannot be licensed to drive. Underprivileged kids may never have the means to drive. What then? When an absurd social pattern has created an insoluble dilemma, is it the case that the kids must be the ones punished? Certainly from such a crime as auto theft I fail to see, with Bloch and Flynn’s Delinquency, that “youthful offenders under eighteen years have become our greatest single threat to law-abiding security.” However, as it is, our dilemma works out as follows: “A couple and their three-year-old son were killed in Queens last night when their car hit s telephone pole after it was struck by a stolen car being chased by the police. Five shots were fired in pursuit and two hit the car.”) #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Auto theft takes us into the second category of “innocent acts destructive in their consequences and needing control.” Of course none of these acts, except vagabondage, is innocent in the sense that the kid does not know it is forbidden, unless he is a moron. However, to do the forbidden, in order to transgress limits that seem unnatural, is normal and innocent; and if the limits are unnatural it is often necessary and admirable. However, I want especially to call attention to acts whose motivation is strongly approved socially, but where the frustrating conditions of the boys’ ignorance or ineptitude in handling the baffling means, gets them into trouble. An obvious cause of innocent trouble is playing. Some wise authorities have compared delinquent behavior to play. So when A.K. Cohen, again, speaks of the “uselessness” of much delinquent destructiveness and thievery as a counteraction to middle-class ethics, he is surely exaggerating. All play is “useless,” and since everything is property, underprivilege kids are bound to play with other people’s property. This can be very serious. A band of kids decided it would be bully to remove the blocks and set a huge truck in motion downhill, resulting to $100,000 worth of damage. However, of course it is bully. (I think so.) However, let us go on to a much more thorny illustration, which would not generally be viewed in the light I want to place it in: the plight of a present-day poor boy with regard to earning money and having a little money. Many parents have long since given up the struggle to encourage youths to share in the few remaining home duties that still require physical effort. Yet, no school program can provide the discipline, the maturity, or the self-respect that comes from performing real work that is highly valued and fairly paid for by the adult World. Newsboys were often praised for getting jobs. Over one half of newspaperboys used to belong to our middle- or upper-middle-income groups. That was not a surprising fact because it took a great deal of arranging, and living in the suburbs, to get such a news route going. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Does it not raise the question as to how the poor boys, who have not learned such expert management, will get their discipline, maturity, self-respect? In 2020, around 17.6 percent of teenagers between ages 16-19 were employees while enrolled at school if the United States. That sounds promising. For a child, to get money is a major part of his notion of being grown-up and independent, for this is what all grown men do: they make money and thereby free to act. Earning some money affirms that a young fellow is a man. As our system becomes more tightly organized and more draught resistant landscaping is used, the less affluent and middle-class kids are squeezed out. We no longer have a neighborhood tradition of small after-school jobs—fewer shops make occasional deliveries; to deliver for the chain stores is a full-time job (except perhaps on Saturday s); messengers are hired full time; there are fewer lawns to mow, there is no snow to shovel; there are fewer news routes due to technology; baby stilling is a middle-class business and belongs mostly to girls. An early teenager is caught in the following trap: one gets nothing out of school and does not do one’s homework; on the other hand, he is too young to get working papers. The youth cannot continue to beg from his parents, for the sums now come to $50 or $60 dollars and he feels degraded by being dependent. How will he get some money to prove his legitimacy and independence? Many petty thefts and burglaries—that seem “useless” risks to the sociologist, and therefore he interprets them as counteraction to bourgeois values—are desperate efforts to feel grown-up. They are compelled by an objective dilemma. Naturally, subjectively, they are not innocent; they are energized by frantic excitement, cold sweat and terror, and finally the need to be caught, to escape the anxiety; but we must look at the whole picture. There are “short cuts,” but maybe there is no long way round. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The question is this: if these kids had socially acceptable opportunities to earn money, would they avail themselves? Some would. It is worth trying. They might learn discipline, maturity, self-respect. We have experimented for two summers with employment of 100 to 150 teenagers from high delinquency areas. Our $350 per-week employees all stayed out of trouble. But on the occasions we tried what were essentially “made work” jobs, the young people understood this immediately and lost all interest. It is with the next category, acts intentionally antisocial, that we come to the delinquents who largely fill the courts and the reformatories. Malicious destructiveness, theft, and burglary for real money (often for narcotics), vengeful assaults, nonconsensual attacks of pleasures of the flesh. In these, the reactive hostility of the standard delinquent syndrome has begun to operate, and it inevitably leads to getting caught. An illustration: some fifteen-year-olds hold up a crippled old man; the loot is too small and their disappointment at once triggers the deep passion: that his debility is an intolerable threat to their own glorious perfection, so they stomp him to death. A less horrible illustration: The behaviour of a pedestrian or of another motorist that happens to inconvenience the youth in the slightest degree is at once interpreted as a deliberate insult or at least as a proof that that person ought not to exist; and this may easily lead to a case of hit and run. Absolutely typical economic illustration: If a fellow offers to talk half a mile in order to save $15 carfare, his mates will at once contemptuously say that he is “cheap.” Once the “proving” syndrome is present, the boys are quite out of touch with the simplest realities; and vice versa, because they are out of touch with the simplest realties, they are called on to “prove.” So we come to behaviour-to-get-caught: compulsive repetition, increasing negligence, raising the ante, giving way to irrational rage. We can see the fatalism on the surface. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Here is a scrap of conversation with one of the auto thieves mentioned before, not caught: “How is it you were not caught?” “I got scared the other time, the time the cop pulled up and I got away. So I would not go with them.” “Isn’t Steve [the leader] sacred?” “No.” “What do you mean? Isn’t he scare they’ll catch him?” “No. He don’t car if he gets caught.” “Is that what he says? or is that what you think?” “That’s what he said, and I think so too.” “Why did you go ten rides?” “What else is there to do? I can’t just hang around when they all go.” The problem, that is, is the fatalism that the one has whereas the other experiences fear and prudence. (In this particular case the fatalist is the more able boy and has a better home background.) one part of the fatalism is certainly apathy: life had no interesting prospect—exempli gratia, there might be a block in pleasures of the flesh. Another part is certainly the need to be caught, to get out of the anxious round of risks. When it comes to journalism, there is in general, a tendency to concentrate on the surface of events rather than underlying conditions; this is as true for the newspaper as it is for the newscast. However, several features of television undermine whatever efforts journalists may make to give sense to the World. One is that a television broadcast is a series of events that occur in sequence, and the sequence is the same for all viewers. This is not true for a newspaper page, which displays many items simultaneously, allowing readers to choose the order in which they read them. If a newspaper reader wants only a summary of the latest tax bill, one can read the headline and the first paragraph of an article, and if he wants more, he can keep reading. In a sense, then, everyone reads a different newspaper, for no two readers will read (of ignore) the same items. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
However, all television viewers see the same broadcast. They have no choices. A report is either in the broadcast or out, which means that anything which is of narrow interest is unlikely to be included. A newspaper, for example, can easily afford to print an item of conceivable interest to only a fraction of its readers. A television news program must be put together with the assumption that each item will be of some interest to everyone that watches. Every time a newspaper includes a feature which will attract a specialized group it can assume it is adding at least a little bit to its circulation. To the degree a television news program includes an item of this sort…it must assume that its audience will diminish. The need to “include everyone,” an identifying feature of commercial television in all its forms, prevents journalist from offering lengthy or complex explanations, or from tracing the sequence of events leading up to today’s headline. One of the ironies of political life in modern democracies is that many problems which concern the “general welfare” are of interest only to specialized groups. Arms control, for example, is an issue that literally concerns everyone in the World, and yet the language of arms control and the complexity of the subject are so daunting that only a minority of people can actually follow the issue from week to week and month to month. If it wants to act responsibly, a newspaper can at least make available more information about arms control than most people want. However, commercial television cannot afford to do so. This illustrates an important point in the psychology of television’s appeal. Many of the items in newspapers are magazines are not, in a strict sense, demanded by a majority of readers. They are there because some readers might be interested or because the editors think their readers should be interested. On commercial television, “might” and “should” are not the relevant words. The producers attempt to make sure that “each item will be of some interest to everyone that watches,” as Reuven Frank put it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
What this means is that a newspaper or a magazine can challenge its audience in a way that television cannot. Print media have the luxury of suggesting or inviting interest, whereas television must always concern itself with conforming to existing interests. In a way, television is more strictly responsive to the demands of its huge audience. However, there is one demand it cannot meet: the desired to e challenged, to be told “this is worth attending to,” to be surprised by what one thought would not be of interests. Another severe limitation of television is time. There is simply not enough of it. The evening news programs at CBS, NBC, and ABC all run for thirty minutes, eight of which are taken up by commercials. No one believes that twenty-two minutes for the day’s news is adequate. For years news executives at ABC, NBC, and CBS have suggested that the news be expanded to one hour. However, by tradition the half-hour after the national evening news is given over to the hundreds of local affiliate stations around the country to used as they see fit. They have found it a very profitable time to broadcast game shows or half-hour situation comedies, and they are reluctant to give up the income they derive from these programs. The evening news produced by the three networks is profitable for both the networks and the local stations. The local stations are paid a fee by the network to broadcast the network news, and they profit from this fee since the news—produced by the network—costs them nothing. It is likely that they would also make money from a one-hour newscast, but not as much, they judge, as they do from the games shows and comedies, they now schedule. So local news that drag out their programming from 4pm to 7pm and again at 10pm are actually costing the stations money and not making money. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The news suggests that the World is fundamentally ungovernable, where events do not arise out of historical conditions but rather explode from the Heavens in a series of disasters that suggest a permanent state of crisis. It is this crisis—highly visual, ahistorical, and unsolvable—which the evening news presents as theater every evening. The news has shown the audience a World that is out of control and incomprehensible, full of violence, disaster, and suffering. Whatever authority the anchorman may project through his steady manner is undermined by the terror inspired by the news itself. This is where television news is at its most radical—not in giving publicity to radical causes, but in producing the impression of an ungovernable World. And it produces this impression not necessarily because the people who work in television are anarchists. The anarchy in television news is a direct result of the commercial structure of broadcasting, which introduced into news judgments a single-mindedness more powerful than any ideology: the overwhelming need to keep people watching. Time is a critical element in the training, because it takes quite a while before all the trainees become unified in the leadership, discovering the appropriate responses, and developing a peer group understanding of what is expected. Meanwhile, the trainer retains a grim visage. The people in the same room are of all society, embodying all values as delivered from the mountain. The trainers (those broadcasting from the TV) are the ultimate authorities (they consider themselves to be). When the trainers say “ground of reality” they literally mean the structuring of a reality where there is none. It is the social construction of reality. Everything is belief. Everything that we see or experience of the World is only an outgrowth of our belief that what we see and experience is the way things really are. Reality, then, is nothing more than an agreement as to what is real. Therefore, problems that we may have, or problems that may exist in the World (napalm, genocide, oppression, loss of jobs, or partners, pollution and so on) are real only because we believe they are real; in fact they exist only in our minds. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
If we do not acknowledge reality of the social construction of someone else’s view of reality, problems do not exist. So we effectively create these things with our belief systems; so do the napalmed kids, the Jews in Germany, and the laid-off factory worker. Now, it is certainly trye that if you believe a thing is a certain way—let us say you believe yourself to be competent or beautiful, or that you will succeed in your new career—then that will make your belief more likely to become reality. Television producers can be very dangers and so can the news. News is not competing with entertainment shows, so they want to have entertainment to report. TV producers and news anchors have learned, as the science fiction dictators have, that if you control environment carefully enough, and confine human experience totally enough, you can shatter all human grounding. This leaves the subject in such a disconnected state, you can easily predict and control how one will respond to the addition of only one or two stimuli. The TV and especially TV news, in effect, can be mass sense-deprivation experiments. They leave people floating without connections, their minds separated from their bodies, open to implantation of any kind of arbitrary logic. In the end, their minds have been restructured to accept whatever comes. They are clear, simple, open, receptive channels. All personal experience, irrelevant. All complexity, eliminated. All points of reference, disposed of. Floating freely in space. All information is arbitrary, the product of the mind. The news is most important to them. They believe what is coming out of the anchor’s mouth, as if it is the gospel of Jesus Christ. There is no reality aside from the TV news. The only existence is TV news media. The tell-a-vision- has come to replace television. It is a machine of infinite power which inexorably demands that society tunes in. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
This confusion has its roots in early childhood. At a certain age, a child seeks a reality beyond the parents, seeks to contact an outer world and so begins exploring. To the degree the child succeeds, it learns to integrate and process the wider World it has experienced. It can tell the difference between the impulses, images, and experiences which are connected to the World outside, and those which are totally self-generated, floating, not rooted in the World. If the child has made this distinction, then the projections of one’s own mind can be distinguished and identified. This is sanity. The schizophrenic does not learn to make this distinction and cannot tell which images emanate from inside the mind and which are connected to experiences in the World. At this point, all experience, whether internally generated or the result of an interaction with the World, is equal. Projections of the mind take on the same quality as direct experience of the World. One’s experience of the World becomes unreliable, as do one’s own thought processes. Both become floating, unrooted. All are equally internal and equally external. The TV is also an influencing machine. It uses fantasy as a physical manifestation of the confusion. Capable of implanting images which are in the form of rays, capable of implanting alien realities outside of one’s own experiences, capable of changing one’s feelings, this machine “causes” the individual to fall into utter confusion about what is real and what is not, what is internal and what is external. The apparatus of the influencing machines was actually invented in 1919, as an outward manifestation of the manufactures wanted people to be preoccupied with and how they wanted to control them. Many people no longer know what is real. That is why people are more concerned about distant disasters and ignore the ones in their own country and community. We cannot stop the broadcast. We accept whatever comes. One vision is equal to the nest. One thought is as good as the next. All information merges. All experiences merges. People tale everything on faith. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
One explanation is the same as the next one. Contradictions do not exist. We have lost control of our minds. We are all lost in space. Our World exists only in memory. Everything is arbitrary. TV is the guru speaking reality. We have merged with the influencing machine. It is no accident that television has been dominated by a handful of corporate powers. Neither is it accidental that television has been used to re-create human beings into a new form that matches the artificial, commercial environment. A conspiracy of technological and economic factors made this inevitable and continue to. Perhaps the only way to try to make elections fair in the future is for government sponsored advertisements sent to citizens for presidential elections. Everyone knows by now that news can be fake and since the 1960s, people have been hollering about the system being rigged, but as long as they get a democrat as president, people ignore the truth. People turn to the news and do not real professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them. As a result, people who write books, commonly knowns as writers, and publishers are now thinking about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google’s results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors. Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. However, books may soon come with a supplementary comments section with discussions inside of them, and online chats available to login to. You will be able to see who else out there is reading that book and be able to open up a dialog with them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Many people read mainly for the sake of a feeling of belonging rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style. Writing is a means for chatter. To see how small changes in writers’ assumptions and attitudes can eventually have large effects on what one writes, one need only glance at the history of correspondence. A personal letter in, say, the nineteenth century bears little resemblance to personal e-mail or text messages written today. Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence. However, the practice of deep reading that became popular in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention, in which “the quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind,” will continue to fade, in all likelihood of becoming the province of a small and dwindling elite. We will, in other words, revert to the historical norm. We are now seeing such a reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class. The way people read—and write—has already been changed by the Net, and the changes will continue as, slowly but surely, the words of books are extracted from the printed page and embedded in the computer’s “ecology of interruption technologies.” Pundits have been trying to bury the book for a long time. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the burgeoning popularity of newspapers—well over a hundred were being published in London alone—led many observers to assume that books were on the verge of obsolescence. How could they compete with the immediacy of the daily broadsheet? At the century’s end, boos were still around, living happily beside newspaper. However, a new threat to their existence had already emerged: Thomas Edison’s phonograph. It seemed obvious, at least to the intelligentsia, that people would soon be listening to literature rather than reading it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
In an 1889 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, Philip Hubert predicted that “many books and stories may not see the light of print at all; they will go into the hands of their readers, or hearers rather, as phonograms.” The phonograms, which at the time could record sounds as well as play them, also “promises to far outstrip the typewriter” as a tool for composing prose, he wrote. The book survived the phonograph as it had the newspaper. Listening did not replace reading. Edison’s invention came to be used mainly for playing music rather than declaiming poetry and prose. During the twentieth century, book reading would withstand a fresh onslaught of seemingly mortal threats: moviegoing, radio listening, TV viewing. Today, books remain as commonplace as ever, and there is every reason to believe that printed works will continue to be produced and read, in some sizable quantity, for years to come. There is an unbridgeable chasm between the book tradition that has declared the book a classic and we have made it that through instinct, emotion, and understanding: suffered through it, rejoiced in it, translated it into our experience and (notwithstanding the layers of reading with which a book comes into our hands) essentially becomes it first reader. Although it may be tempting to ignore those who suggest the value of the literary mind has always been exaggerated, that would be a mistake. The distractions in our lives have been proliferating for a long time, but never has there been a medium like the Net, which is programmed so widely to scatter our attention and to do it so instantly. In the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us. One of patience, enchantment, and class. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Celibacy is the most obvious way to avoid revealing or experiencing unconventional pleasures of the flesh. At various times throughout history, nontraditional pleasures of the flesh have been outlawed. People discovered indulging in them have risked a plethora of penalties, often severe, including imprisonment, humiliation, professional disgrace, social ostracism, and religious censure. In these circumstances, adopting celibacy has been an excellent way to avoid risky lifestyles. Celibacy also serves as the most convenient ways to dodge various fears, including fear of intimacy, revulsion for the private area, or both. To some people, it is the easiest way to deal with a broken heart, self-protection against repetition of the sorrow following a failed relationship. Some celebrities are generally acknowledged as true celibates, each for his own reason. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was an artistic genius of the Renaissance, a painter, sculptor, musician, scientist, and inventor whose work still seems breathtakingly inspired. Mr. Da Vinci was also a complicated individual, and much of the intimate details of his personal life remains tantalizing hidden. However, considerable evidence points to his homosexuality. This includes his paintings and sculptures, and a host of little clues susceptible to this interpretation. I, however, never considered that possibility the Mr. Da Vinci was a homosexual. The thought never crossed my mind. I was always impressed by his amazing sculptures and the texture and style of their hair and how lifelike they were. But if people consider him homosexual because of his art, one does one think of a giant gummy bear statue aimed at adults? Anyway, so Dr. Sigmund Freud is probably correct in saying that it is “doubtful whether Mr. Da Vinci ever embraced a woman in passion.” Homosexuality in Renaissance Florence, da Vinci’s home base, was so unremarkable that the German nickname for gay men was Florenzer. Legal penalties against it were seldom enforced, and a man who was reasonably discreet could anticipate few problem. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Leonardo da Vinci was celibate. He actually earned a reputation for perpetual chastity. Mr. Da Vinci’s long bread is sometimes cited as his attempt to obscure his beautiful face, a way to stave off tempting others. “Avoid lustfulness,” he urged. “He who does not restrain his lustful appetites places himself on the same level as beasts. Again, the Saltarelli affair insinuates itself into this interpretation that he was a secret deviant. Mr. Da Vinci had engaged Jacopo Saltarelli as a nude model. Afterward, though he was surrounded by male modes and his latter years lived with Francesco Melzi, his student, who also became his heir, he seems to have ensured that he never gave cause for another accusation. The most plausible and consistent explanation for da Vinci’s chastity is that he found pleasures of the flesh grotesque and was almost paranoically afraid of a repetition of the Saltarelli scandal. To minimize or deny his homosexual orientation, he probably opted for the safe device of chastity. “Therefore, you are no longer a slave (bound servant) but a son; and if a son, then [it follows that you are] an heir by the aid of God, through Christ,” reports Galatians 4.7. We have survived because ours is a genuine democracy. No caste system has been permitted to develop; no autocrat goes unchallenged. The lowly and the mighty alike were the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The craftsman, the merchant and the farmer, all could become great teachers and be harkened to by the whole people. We survived, above all, because of the prophetic voices that break out in America from time to time. We are blessed with humans that never made peace with the foibles of the people or the whims of the rulers. We are compelled to listen to denunciations that cry aloud like a trumpet. We are not allowed to sink into the sweet lassitude of dissipation and degeneracy which leads so many people to despair and death. We are shaken by a mighty hand and outstretched arm. “Wash ye, make you clean…cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
JDAarch
A thoughtfully designed floorplan allows open air flow and opportunity for guests to mix and mingle, but also creates definition between spaces.
Can’t you visualize the fun dinner parties and game nights that will happen in this spacious #Havenwood residence by @CresleighHomes?
Randolph Harris II International Institute 