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Who Would Keep a Cow of their Own that Can Have a Quart of Milk for a Penny?
No one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy, kindness, and generosity hidden in the soul by God. The human mind is fascinating. A young officer working on a ship wrote that he would awaken during the night and discover himself under an undesirable physical and mental condition. He seemed to be clearly in a mesmerized condition, caused by someone or something giving the powerful posthypnotic suggestion to wake up and obey. The remedy is to use the same technique in reverse. That is, practise auto-hypnosis, give the self-suggestion that on waking up there will be full conscious and full rejection of the negative idea. If one must hate something, let one hate hatred itself. The storms of violent passion are to be resisted as the smoothness of inner peace is to be invited. To keep one’s temper in a single provocative situation may be easy, but to keep it consistently equable is a real feat. Life is a conflict. One must not let these negative feelings take up lodgement within in one longer than a single moment. All humankind must awake from its materialistic apathy and cast out something of its selfishness. It is called upon to renounce its violence and meannesses, its intolerance, unkindnesses, and injustices. It must either emerge from its animal brutality or else suffer itself to be extinguished by it. It must come out from the shadows of ignorance, selfishness, and materialism. Only then will it find the sunshine of a larger life that awaits it. It is not always one oneself who acts in a particular way at a particular time. Impulses from lower sources or outside contacts may be strong intuitions from higher levels or outside sources may influence one to wise choices which bless one’s future. We must not hate those who are born of the same divine essence as ourselves but we may hate the sins they perpetrate and the evil they radiate. The seeker has to contend not only with limiting environments but also with internal enemies. Apathy delays one, depression obstructs one, and loneliness frustrates one. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The more one becomes sensitive, intuitive, responsive to the spirit, the more one is unfolding exceptional passivity. However, this puts one in peril, for one feels the negative presence too. Hence the more one must restrict one’s contacts until one’s strength is above them. It is prudent to escape from a situation where there is much pressure to commit a foolish action or to make a foolish decision leading to calamitous results—and not continue to stay in it until the danger materializes. One whose presence is felt to be odious, whose personality is regarded as distasteful, is better left alone. One should never allow the actions or words of ignorant human to arouse in one reactions of anger, envy, or resentment. The years are too few and there is too much to be done—both on oneself and for oneself—to waste them in negative, resentful thought and decaying, neurotic emotion. When one comes to understand its importance, one will begin to exercise some vigilance over one’s thoughts. Resist beginnings—that is the most practical way to deal with negatives. The destructive thoughts of fear and self-doubt which whine at your door, whine at the door of every human. However, you can make them powerless to hurt you. For—there is n chance, no destiny, no fate can circumvent, can hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul! If the negative thought persists then one has to wrench oneself away from it with the assent and use of all one’s being—feeling, reason, intuition. One’s own attitude towards events holds the power to make them good or bad, whatever their nature of itself may be. Those who are unable to think correctly about this tragic World situation must be pardoned, but those who refuse to think correctly about it do not deserve pardon. The counsel of Jesus to “resist not evil” does not apply to other men’s acts but to our own thoughts. We are to turn aside from a negative thought-habit by the simple method of substituting the opposite and the beneficial one. We need not to spend our strength resisting the thought of misery, for example. We are to substitute hope for misery, whenever the latter appears. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Wrong-doing will be avoided not because it is punished by the law of recompose even when it is not punished by the law of society, but because of the strong inner conviction that right-doing is its own reward, its own satisfaction. The beautiful is allied to the good. If we cultivate beautiful feelings, evil ones begin to get dissolved. One will not risk rebuffs by expressing one’s views and describing one’s experienced to the uncomprehending of the unsympathetic. It I cowardice to refuse to face the fact that one has made a mistake and to continue following the same course because it is to stop it and return to the right road. The easier way is too often the worse way, leading to trouble for one’s self and others. There is a limit to the extent of concessions to prejudice; we must not beyond it. Beware of those whose mind is vindictive and whose speech is venomous. If they are born of emotional prejudice or passionate bias, it is of little use to meet irrational arguments with rational statements. The ancient saying that where goodwill exists agreement will not be hard to find, still remains true. The crowds which delighted in the gladiator shows of ancient Rome and, to a lesser extent, those which delighted in the bullfights of modern Spain, do not see to understand how bestial they allow themselves to become at such times. If one is to be distinguished from a member of the savage species, the true human being, the fully evolved human, must have the quality of pity in oneself. Do not attempt to fight evil with evil. Overcome it by calling on a higher power to bring out the good in you wherewith to meet it. In this way you obey Jesus’ counsel, “Resist not evil.” Synesis (fourth century): “This would be the most extreme of ills—not to be conscious of the presence of evil. For this is the condition of those who no longer try to rise…for this reason repentance is elevating means…[but] both deeds and words [must] lend a helping hand.” A philosopher may not ignore the negative side of one’s or another’s life: one has to deal with it because circumstances force one, like everyone else to do so. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, one’s way will be different, because one will use all one’s faculties and capacities: intellectual, practical, and intuitive. One will keep calm and not let passion or negative emotion carry one away. However, all that done, one hands over the results to the higher power (which includes destiny). One’s mind must stay in That which transcends negativity, sin, evil, even if one must grapple with them. Philosophy will not disregard the bad in others, and the sin in ourselves, but having seen them clearly it does not react negatively in useless condemnation. Instead, it reacts constructively in trying to realize the meaning of evil, the consequence of sin, and then proceeds to cultivate the opposite quality, the good of that particular evil—as honesty where there is dishonesty and so on. If practical dealings are involved, we may regret the existence of these faults in others, but we may not refuse to recognize them. Amid all the pessimistic reflections which the state of the World so easily induces in the thinking human, one may yet be buoyed up by the hope which the eternal verities must again and again give one, that is, the hope that the end of it will be immeasurably better. The existentialist view—so popular with so many young people today—that we begin with oblivion and end with annihilation, that what comes between is either meaningless or mysterious, with no solutions to problems, no answers to questions, is a view which the tragedy and evil and catastrophe of our times tempt us to accept. However, religion and philosophy release us from this despair. In such critical times as these even some faith in the existence of a higher power, and some aspiration towards serving it, has protective value. Trust, not tension: trust in the higher power producing serenity rather than tension; because of the pressures of life this is a great need today. However dark or desperate World history may seem at times, we must always remember no one can disrupt the divine World-Idea, or spoil its manifestation, or prevent its glorious outcome. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Fear of the power and cunning of these evil opponents causes them to rely on obvious but ordinary human forces and weapons for protection. They forget the divine forces they could, and should in this crisis, call on—and neglect the superhuman and extraordinary. To express a half-amused contempt for the intelligence of our time is not at all the same thing as to make a jaundiced indictment of it. To witness the magnificent parade of a civilization of almost unredeemed triviality is less likely to arouse bitterness in the soul and more likely to give it a good half-hour’s amusement. On the one hand, carried away by the idealistic enthusiasm and millennial promises of merely emotionalist cults, some believe that a spiritual teaching has only to be propagated and it will spread triumphantly everywhere. On the other hand, confronted by the formidable spectacle of a whole World plunged in ignorance, conscious that the ordinary individual can do so little to uplift it, others drift into bewildered defeatism and actually do nothing at all. However, this second attitude, although much more sensible and much more justifiable than its opposite one, is not quite philosophical. According to the old classical fable, we had to look for truth in the bottom of a well; today we have to look for it in the bottom of a bitter disillusionment. In the dismal World conditions of today it is a paramount necessity to obtain some glimpse, however meagre, of the divine plan which is working out for all our lives. Only in this way can we co-operate with it understandingly and adequately. Instead of relying on flight into the unknow and uncertain, it is better to rely on God. In the first case one may be making a false escape and duping oneself, but in the second case one opens the way for true guidance in the matter. With peace in the mind and harmony in the feelings, both completed by knowledge of the universal presence of divinity—who could harbour evil thoughts, hatreds, or destructive plans? #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Every evil person who crosses our path provides an opportunity, in the injury one attempts to do us, to keep ourselves from being provoked into retaliation, anger, or resentment. If we succeed in overcoming our own feelings, we mount upward a step. In a negative situation, where negative criticism and negative emotions are rampant, other persons may try to involve one in it, or at least get one to support their attitude and endorse their criticism. However, a feeling may come over one preventing one from doing so. If so, one should obey and remain silent. With time the rightness of this course will be confirmed. One the injunction to return good for evil, the question arises, with what then will you return go? Return good for good, but justice for evil. Is this not wiser counsel? Does not the other punish goodness to an extremist position, rendering it almost ridiculous by condoning bad conduct? Inner and outer difficulties are often related. What appears to be an ugly state of affairs may well be a definite attack of certain evil forces using interested human instruments. In such a situation, the individual should never practise nonresistence in any way, but, on the contrary, should fight them off as hard a one can. At the same time, one must remember that weakness in self-control can give these evil forces an opening which they might not have had otherwise. If one wishes to emerge victorious in the struggle, one must be on one’s guard. If one does not throw off this condition, one, oneself, unwittingly erects a barrier though which the divine help sent one finds it difficult to penetrate. Although the temptation to seek release as such a time through, for example, the easy way of drink is understandable, one must nevertheless remember the duty one owes to one’s spiritual life, to one’s personal interest on the relative plane, and to others. Although the student must forgive those who mistreat one, one need not think tht forgiveness implies one has to associate with such people thereafter. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Whenever the thought of them, or their abuse, comes into one’s mind one must exert one’s willpower to drive it out, and immediately direct one’s thoughts toward God, or toward any inspired individual in whom one had faith. Only the actualized Christian is entitled to dismiss evil and to deny its existence: all others must look it in the face, understand it, and overcome it by slow gradations. It is better to keep out of the way of evil humans, especially when they are in power, until or unless we are driven by the necessity of circumstance of the inward voice of duty to oppose ourselves to them. It is always a certainty that the practice of active goodwill directed toward those who regard one harshly will benefit one’s own development, while it is always a possibility that this practice may dissolve the harsh feeling against one. It is all gain and no loss. This is one part of the case for Jesus’ advice to return good for evil. It is a technique of this evil power to paralyse its intended victims by frightening them. If we give way to fear, we give assistance to its effort. It cannot be beaten without open defiance and ready valour. One must remember that one will meet with those individuals who are themselves the bearers of antagonistic forces, instruments of darkness—sometimes consciously, most unconsciously, people used by evil forces. So far as possible one must avoid such people. Certainly never enter into intimate associations with them, whether the relation be business or personal. If one does one will find that sooner or later some of their unfortunate behaviour will be returned by Universal Law and tumble on one and one with have to suffer with the afflicted individual. These people make talk as believers in spiritual things—indeed, they often belong to some cult or other. However, they do not understand truth or live it. They cannot help one and one is not strong enough to carry them. So leave them alone. And that is not always easy, because often they are people of a kind that force themselves into one’s life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Sometimes one can know them by this hallmark, by this aggressive way which they try to entangle another individual. It may even be necessary at times to deal with such people with a firm hand, even mercilessly and relentlessly. If so, do not hesitate, but do it without any personal feeling of any kind. The American landscape has been badly corrupted. European writers no longer even notice the natural wonder of it, they are so put off by the ugliness and conformity of the towns. However, worse than the ugliness and conformity is the neglect that baffles pride of place. Our poets try to move themselves by nostalgically repeating the names of towns: “Biloxi and Natchez, Pascagoula and Opelousas”—but beware of paying a visit. The Americans disesteem public goods, and improving the landscape is a big expense. Historically, the neglect of appearance and plan of our scores of thousands of villages and small towns, especially in the Middle West and South—the diner, the Woolworth’s, and two filling stations—can be analogized to the neglect of the present-day less affluent. In the tide of expansion, appearance was disregarded as not essential; later, the matter would be mopped up. However, the neglect rigidifies, it is a hard core not easy to change. Instead, the present tendency is to impose on the countryside a new corporation style altogether, in the form of shopping centers (=national chain supermarkets) on the highway. This works out disastrously for the communities, for these “centers” are not centers of villages, and there cease to be villages at all, simply scattered family houses. This is the end of a long process of disruption, for in any case the industry is gone, then men work in plants thirty miles away. It is possible to travel many miles even in New England and not see a single activity a man could make a living at, except automobile agencies and filling stations; not even a food store. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The schools too are large and centralized. The families tend to move away frequently, but even while they are put, they are driving around. This does not make much community to grow up in. In more primitive societies, a chief community activity is working together, thatching a roof, net fishing. However, with us, precisely this co-operative labour, for instance the work in a factory, is removed from its community setting ad emptied, by the relations of production, of any community spirit. Places that have no shape have no face-to-face functioning, for the shape is the functioning community. The loveliness of so many hamlets in Europe is that they have shape and are built of local materials by local craft. Perhaps the people had to cluster to attend early masses. In Ireland, where they farm out the back door, the rows of thatched houses line both sides of a little street. In France, where men go off to their farms, there may be a square. In our own early New England villages, where congregational and political spirit was strong, there was a common green with public buildings, though the families lived scattered on the farms they worked. There was the shape of a community, with its economy, its crafts, and its ideas. The advantage of growing up in such a community in one’s early years is evident. It is not family supervision, on which the physicians of juvenile delinquency are now laying such stress; quite the contrary! it is that the family does not have to bear the burden of teaching the culture. In a community, everybody knows the child face to face. There is an easy grading of overlapping ages, right up to the adults who are going about their business in a going concern, and not paying too much attention to children. A good city neighbourhood works in the same way. From this point of view, the swarm of kids in a city housing project form a better community than present-day country boys or the kids on Park Avenue. Therefore they have more local patriotism. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The bother with this community chain, however, is that it terminates abruptly before it reaches the adults, who belong to a different World; so the kids are a gang and the local community spirit turns into loyalty to a Code; it does not eventuate in anything socially cohesive and culturally worthwhile. And such a gang in prone to be delinquent because, as we shall see, in such conditions it is the forbidden tht best cements loyalty. Politically, a delinquent gang is not lawless and not in the state of nature. Balked in its growth, the local loyalty turns on itself and simple reinvents the feud-code of Alfred the Great, marking out safe territories and making provision for special classes of revenge. On this view, if one teenage gang, pursuing its vendetta, falls on another and murders a kid, it would not be our business to interfere in the law of that differently constituted society. Also, like Danes or Vikings of Alfred’s time, they regard our larger society merely as a field of sports and plunder; they have not yet reinvented International Law. However, we, of course, cannot view it so, for we live in an advanced state of politics and law: they are members of our community. We are not children but more experienced and somewhat wiser, and therefore responsible, so we cannot simply annihilate them like pirates (they are small in size, few in numbers, and armed with primitive weapons); and we cannot let them hurt themselves. (I think it is wise sometimes to regard disaffected groups as if there were plausibly these two viewpoints, rival patriotisms. It is better humanity and it might make better law. The advantage is that it takes the disaffected seriously as disaffected, rather than merely pathological; it keeps in the foreground the question of allegiance. We must deserve allegiance.) However, they are children. Let us consider rather the peculiar patriotic problem of an older disaffected group, the Hipster young men, for then we can see that it is a patriotic problem. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Here too, I think, there has often been a strong community influence of growing up together. For instance, fellows who went to Black Mountain College, which was oriented to community and creative arts—a powerful, and powerfully disaffecting, combination—are pillars of Hipster society. Other fellows were buddies in the armed services. However, it was, as Hispters their community spirit is strong. They barge in to sleep, they share property, they share a culture. Now think of this community, disaffected from America, as engaged in a pathetic quest for some other big patriotism, an adult peer group. We saw how, appointing themselves outcast, they affirm the accidental symbol of other marginalized groups: African American, Puerto Rican, the less affluent, and others. However, this is pretty thin gruel for intellectual young men, many of whom have been to college. On the other hand, they are unable to make the jump to the great international humanists community because, simply, they do not know anything, neither literature nor politics. (I once taught at Black Mountain College, and to my astonishment I found that the students had never read the Christian Bible, Milton, Dryden, Gibbon, etcetera, etcetera, nor did they feel—as a lack—that such things existed. However, they knew odd facts about Mayan hieroglyphics which their teacher had been interested in.) What then? Since it is necessary for grown fellow to have some major allegiance or other, they have latched on to the late Japanese masters of Zen Buddhism. (This is a late effect of the early-century discovery of Japan by Fenollosa, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Misses Lowell and Ayscough, and Ezra Pound, suddenly reinforced by the postwar occupation under General MacArthur.) Now, as we shall see, Zen is not irrelevant to those young men’s needs, for it is a theology and style of immediate experience. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
However, the pathos is that Zen was the flower of an intensely loyal feudal system that fed, protected, and honoured its masters, and to which the Zen masters in turn had fealty. For example, it is said that the haiku was invented by a poet as a public service when one was suicidally despondent because one’s Emperor had died. However, Zen without farmers and servants is an airy business; and the young men, as we have seen, are betrayed into dubious devices to keep body and soul together, nor do they have a flag to salute. Community approaches have worked to resolve many problems. In looking at mental health, the broadest approach for the treatment of schizophrenia is the community approach. In 1963, partly in response to the terrible conditions in public mental institutions, the U.S. government ordered that patients be released and treated in the community. Congress passed the Community Mental Health Act, which stipulated that patients with psychological disorders were to receive a range of mental health services—outpatient therapy, inpatient treatment, emergency care, preventative care, and aftercare—in their communities rather than being transported to institutions far from home. The act was aimed at a variety of psychological disorders, but patients with schizophrenia, especially those who had been institutionalized for years, were affected most. Other countries around the World put similar sociocultural treatment programs into action shortly thereafter. Thus began four decades of deinstitutionalization, an exodus of hundred of thousands of patients with schizophrenia and other long-term mental disorders from state institutions into the community. On a given day in 1955 close to 600,000 patients were living in state institutions; today only around 60,000 patients reside in those setting. The unfortunate result is that mental health lost most of its funding and a lot of people with mental illnesses have to where to go, but jail or to live on the street. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Clinicians have learned that patients recovering from schizophrenia can profit greatly from community programs. However, the actual quality of community care for many of these people has been inadequate through the United States of America. The result is a “revolving door” syndrome: the few patients, who are lucky enough to be treated, have been released to the community, readmitted to an institution within mothers, released a second time, admitted yet again, and so on, over and over. A lot of people who want mental health care are not able to access this precious resource. In fact, 10.3 percent (over 4.7 million) of adults with a mental illness remain uninsured. And, 56 percent of patients want access to a mental health care facility. As COVID-19 continues to rage, Americans are experiencing anxiety and depression. More than 42 percent of U.S. adults reported symptoms, up 11 percent in the previous years. Nearly 1 in 5 Americans has some type of mental health condition. Spending on mental health treatment and social services has reached over $250 billion, which is up approximately 60 percent since 2009. This cost includes spending on things like therapy and prescription medications as well as stays in psychiatric or substance abuse rehabilitation facilities. However, it does not take into account indirect costs, such as lower workforce participation rates and decreased productivity. In fact, depression alone is estimated to account for $44 billion in loses to workplace productivity. And access to care can be prohibitively expensive—even more so than physical health costs. An hour-long traditional therapy session can range from $65 to $250 for those without insurance. A patient with major depression can spend an average of $10,836 a year on health costs. Meanwhile, a person with diabetes taking insulin can spend $48,000 to manage their condition. On a national level, research shows that the United States of America is likely to continue to experience a shortage of mental health professional through 2025. If you are looking for excellent health and wellness coverage, consider becoming a Kaiser Permanente member. You do not need a referral for mental health and addiction care services. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Other ways to help keep health and wellness in check is celibacy. However, there is the double standard that is a Worldwide phenomenon that has many layers of meaning. The first is that one and one is not always two, because the woman or man of the evening is a criminal but their client is a “john,” an also because women are expected to be virginal at marriage and chaste afterward, and some men are expected to be chaste before a relationship and after, and during the marriage and relationship, but one’s husband is not bound by the same constraints. The double standard implies, in other words, that chastity is primarily and woman’s and small percent of men’s domain. Nonetheless, only women are typically judged more harshly than all men whose conduct is identical. Even today, the discrimination is thunderously obvious, preached from pulpits and parliaments and specifically mandated in the law. The double standard is nefarious not only because it embodies egregious gender inequality but because it condoned solicitation as an acceptable outlet for unchaste men. Though it condemns people of “the evening” as social scum and consigns them to lives of degradation and danger and disease, it sanctions their profession. The reason is obvious: without solicitation, lascivious people might seduce rather than marry the virgins of their own social class. It is particularly chilling that the members of many churches and other organizations in positions of authority support the double standard and, albeit reluctantly, swallows the equation that no men or women of the evening equals no chastity. Laws essentially force women to abide by a higher standard of regard in the matters of chastity than men. They also denounce solicitation but at the same time partially exonerate it as the safety valve that kept virgins pure. It is unsurprising, then, that the double standard matured as a code of conduct in pleasures of the flesh that demand female chastity and at the same time approve, or at least tolerate, the dominant group of mostly men, and their carnality expressed in the use of other humans as toys, though this meant sacrificing certain women and sometimes other to unchaste, unrestrained men and a small fraction of women. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Furthermore, not all men honour their obligations to marry their child’s mother. And when men who came from a higher social echelon seduced a working-class girl, they almost never honoured that class’s code. Domestics and shop girls in particular were the pray of privileged men, but being with child destitute these women rather than pushing them into marriage with the baby’s father. However, often times, after these men who have money start to become older and nearing retirement, they will then leave their wives for young women of other ethnic backgrounds and of lower social standings because these women tend to be considered more exotic and attractive. The women will marry for older man for security and to escape labour. However, in a few cases, it is real love. In society, another problem is many people seem to scarcely be able to comprehend what chastity means, or to regard it as a virtue. Among the middle and upper classes, chastity’s double standard wreaked havoc on social decency. Some of these moral puritanical, which even frown on premarital male activities involving pleasures of the flesh, young women are coached to trap husbands without surrendering beforehand even a taste of the delights to come. Men are, in some cases, are frustrated at this implacable wall of chastity and take it as a challenge. They play games. In large numbers, they form unholy crusades to seduce young virgins. This upper-class deviance was depicted on shows like the original on Gossip Girl. “Resist, resist!” the virgins’ elders urge them. “Just say a resounding ‘No’ to your pleading, inveigling, deceiving young suitors.” After all, as the old adage went, “Who would keep a cow of their own that can have a quart of milk for a penny?” However, at the same time, ladies, and a small percentage of men, forgive them for trying to ruin you. This double standard of conduct involving pleasures of the flesh is necessary, because unlike you, the dominant class of men and a small percentage of dominant women, by nature have an urgent, irrepressible need. Brothels used to be officially licensed. Unchaste people play a crucial role in upholding their societies’ notions about chastity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Now, nowhere is a failure to achieve perfect synchronization more lamented than in the bedroom—unless it is when the U.S. Federal Reserve or the Bank of Japan rises or lowers interest rates and get the timing wrong. Timing, as any comedian can tell us, is everything. However, we are, for the most part unwittingly, changing our links to time, and that is no joke. As interested as investors and economists may be about exact timing in finance, they re remarkably uniformed about the role of synchronization—and, even more so de-synchronization—in the creation of wealth and poverty. Yet understanding these can give us a wholly new way of thinking about wealth creation. Some degree of synchronization has been needed ever since hunters and gatherers began working in groups. Historian William McNeill argues that mass rhythmic activities have been used throughout history to promote synchrony, which in turn improved economic productivity. Tribal dancing, he suggests, strengthened teamwork and made hunting more efficient. For thousands of years fishermen have chanted in unison as they hauled in their nets, the musical beats indicating when to pull and when to breathe. Agrarian economies also reflected seasonal change. According to anthropologist John Omohundro, writing about the Philippine island of Panay, “Through the dry season…and into the rainy season…businessmen are in their slowest season. All aspects of the distribution system slow down. By September or October the rice crop begins to arrive in town…Because the wealth of the province is regulated by agrarian cycles, city business activity rises and falls the these cycles.” Economic anthropologist Willem Wolters adds: “Purely local banks have never been viable in the semi-arid tropics because of the seasonality and synchronic timing.” Early industrial economics operated under completely different temporal conditions. Assembly-line work required a different rhythm. Thus, the factory whistle and the time clock were invented to coordinate work schedules. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
By contrast, today, as we will see, business activities are speeding toward real time. In addition, the uses of time are becoming increasingly personalized and irregular, if not erratic. More different tasks need to be integrated, and the acceleration effect truncates the time available for each task. All this makes synchronization harder to achieve. And that is only the beginning. If we look deeper, we find that every economy throbs and vibrates with unnoticed rhythms. We may buy a newspaper daily, pick up soap or milk at the supermarket weekly, gas up the car every ten days or so, cash a paycheck every two weeks and pay credit card bills monthly. We might call a broker sporadically according to what is happening in the stock market, buy a movie ticket or a book on a whim a few times a year, pay taxes quarterly or annually, go to the dentist when a toothache strikes and purchase a gift for a relative who is getting married in June. These and countless other transactions create rhythms that flow through banks, markets and lives. With the very first slap on our infant behind, every one of us becomes part of this ongoing economic music. Even our biorhythms are affected (and in turn influence) the marvelously complex, orchestrated process that pulse around us as people work—making things, providing services, managing others, caring for one another, financing companies or processing data and information into knowledge. At every moment, some tempos speed up, others slow down. New melodies and harmonies are introduced, then fade out. There are choruses, counterpoints and crescendos. Beyond these, throughout the entire society and economy, there is a generalized pulse of life that is itself the average, as it were, of all its subordinate tempos. The “economic music” never stops. The result is not patternless chaos because, within every wealth system, various components or subsystems are continually adapting their speeds, phases and periodicities to one another. In biology this process is called “entertainment.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Neurons, it turns out, do not work alone. They form temporary teams—much as businesses increasingly do today. In the words of Science magazine, “Neurons frequently fall into step with one another, forming ensembles that play the same tune, as it were, firing in relative synchrony for brief periods, before some neurons drop out of synch, perhaps to join another ensemble.” Firing in sync, moreover, apparently predisposes the neurons to “joint processing” at high levels of the system. Today’s breakup of monolithic corporations into congeries of short-lived project team, alliances, partnerships and joint ventures parallels these ephemeral “ensembles” in the neural system. One way the World could survive in joy is if the whole World worships God. We hear you, fellow-creatures. We know we are wrecking the World and we are afraid. What we have unleased has such momentum now, we do not know how to turn it around. Do not leave us alone, we need your help. You need us too for your own survival. Are there power there you can share with us? In the Service of the Heart, nothing is further from the truth than the widespread notion that to pray is synonymous with to beg, to request, or to supplicate. To be sure, to pray means to call upon God to help us. However, we need Him not only when we are physically in danger. We need Him also when we are spiritually in danger. To pray means to seek God’s help, “to keep our tongue from evil,” “to purify our hearts,” “to put into our hearts to understand, to learn and to fulfill in love, the words of the Christian Bible,” and thus to keep us unswervingly loyal to truth, goodness, and beauty. To pray is to feel and to give expression to a deep sense of gratitude. No intelligent, healthy, normal human being should take for granted, or accept without conscious, grateful acknowledgement the innumerable blessings which God in His infinite love bestows upon one daily—blessings of parents and loved one, of friends and country, of health and understanding. To pray is to express renewed allegiance to the moral and ethical principles which we accept as the guides of our personal lives, and which we recognize as the indispensable foundation stones for a decent human society. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Speaking of Human Experience, Let Us Consider the Idea of Equality
In the beginning there were the laws and the particles. The laws caused the particles to aggregate to form atoms of a limited number of types and properties and the atoms to fit together in specific molecular configurations. In the atmosphere of the primordial Earth the basic sources of energy—radioactivity, ultraviolet radiation, electric discharge, and heat—broke up some of the gaseous molecules into fragments that, on recombining, formed a number of heavy and relatively complex compounds which drifted down into the sea. The new ingredients included energy-rich molecules which drifted down into the sea. The new ingredients included energy-rich molecules which, by temporarily hooking on to other molecular fragments, facilitated their participation in the formation of even more complex compounds. There were also amino acids, which sometimes linked together to form simple proteinlike substances; there were sugars, phosphates, and bases, which under suitable conditions of temperature and juxtaposition, were occasionally able to form primitive precursors of the nucleic acids. In isolated pools cut off from the major seas by seismic events, evaporation of most of the water greatly increased the rate of chemical activity. Within these pools the statistics of random combination of molecular fragments occasionally resulted in the creation of complex molecular assemblies, which constituted effective catalysts for specific chains of reactions among the available ingredients. Once in a long while the phenomenon of autocatalysis occurred, resulting in closed cycles of self-amplifying chemical activity. Through the operation of the laws of physics that determine the properties of high-molecular-weight material dissolved in water, the new compounds had a tendency to collect in droplets, or coacervates. These bags of chemicals ultimately came to display lifelike properties, including the ability to “grow” and, under suitable circumstances, to “reproduce” their own kind. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Meanwhile, another important line of chemical evolution was developing. The simple nucleic acid molecules which continually and automatically formed in the “hot dilute soup” of the primordial seas began to exhibit interesting reproductive processes of their own. The first occurred in sophisticated types of coacervates which possessed certain kinds of catalytic ingredients as well as temporally varying cycles of chemical activity. Ultimately the random but thorough process of evolutionary trial and error succeeded in combining a fortunate set of properties in the same coacervate. These properties included the conditions required for the precise self-reproduction of the “genetic” nucleic acid molecules” of nucleic acid to stretch out on solid inclusions and form attachments with shorter “transfer molecules” of the same substance. The natural attraction of the unattached ends of the transfer molecules for other molecular species the yielded a spectacularly important by-product of these reactions—the manufacture of other complex organic compounds in addition to nucleic acid. With the passage of time evolutionary refinement specialized the messenger and transfer molecules until the nucleic acid mechanisms became unusually effective in the assembly of protein enzymes. These powerful catalysts, in turn, ultimately took over control of the pattern of interrelated reactions that, finally, contributed to the “bags of chemicals” enough stability and metabolic sophistication to entitle them to be called “living organisms.” Along with the increased architectural effectiveness of the nucleic acid/enzyme mechanisms came other evolutionary improvements in the structure and metabolism of single-celled organisms. Membrane properties improved. Ribosomes and “organelles,” such as mitochondria, appeared to contribute to the viability of the cell. The development of the nucleus facilitated complex chemical reactions by providing a degree of isolation between major metabolic subsystems. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Additional ruggedness was provided by dividing the functions of nucleic acid between two different kinds of molecules and protecting, by means of the chromosomal mechanisms, those carrying the basic “book of instructions” for control of the structure and metabolism of the cell. These unusual packaging provisions resulted in such a precise means of nucleic acid distribution, during cell division, as to ensue the high degree of genetic stability appropriate to the relatively advanced evolutionary stage of modern life. The economics of evolution even permitted capitalization on what might have seemed an important weakness in the cellular mechanisms: the sensitivity of some of the nuclear and cytoplasmic reactions to the influence of chemical agents in the environment. For the resulting nuclear gene switching and cytoplasmic modulation of enzymatic effectiveness made possible multicellular organisms by permitting different groups of cells to develop in different ways despite a common genetic endowment. And, because of the contribution of local environmental effects to the differentiation of the parts of the organism, the information content of the book of instructions in the genes could be enormously less then that required to code the detailed structure and metabolism of every cell into the nucleic acid molecules. Thus, complex organisms became practicable. Higher plants and animals, including man, were able to develop. It can certainly not be claimed that the sequence of events just summarized has been documented in these reports with anything like completeness. The time scale is so vast and the absence of corroborating paleontological evidence for some of the important steps is so complete as to render it unlikely that the speculative aspects can ever be entirely removed from this kind of narrative. It still appears necessary to invoke an element of faith if any story of the creation is to carry conviction. To those who are inclined to believe in a lawful and orderly World, however, the present state of knowledge and theory offers considerable encouragement. Any self-consistent explanation of the origin of life in terms of purely physical, nonvitalistic principles, despite inaccuracy of detail, is a significant accomplishment. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
And such a spectacular biochemical success as the stimulation of cell-free extracts from bacteria into the manufacture of protein, by means of human-made nucleic acid molecules, comes close to the long-awaited demonstration that “life” can be synthesized in the test tube. Such developments must greatly enhance confidence in the thesis that proclaims the unity of biological and physical science. Thus our narrative has carried us a long way toward the philosophic objective of establishing that physical principles alone are capable of accounting for all human observation and experience. Yet the story told here is obviously not complete; for the adequacy of physical science to account for the structure and chemistry of living organisms does not necessarily imply equal adequacy for the explanation of such seemingly nonphysical attributes as behaviour, intelligence, and consciousness. The evidence that has been considered seemed convincing to the conclusion that all aspects of behaviour, including those which we call “intelligent,” will ultimately be found reducible to the operation of a combination of physical principles not fundamentally different from that which underlies the design of advanced versions of human-made computing and logic machines. If that is true, there remain only the phenomena of conscious awareness to be accounted for in order to establish that all experience can be explained by the operation of a single set of natural laws. However, there is a growing body of evidence attesting to an orderly and predictable interrelationship connecting the qualities of conscious experience with the physical condition of parts of the brain. We know, for example, that a signal sent from the brainstem to the cortex turns on or off the state of consciousness that sensations of pleasure, pain, rage, horror, or ecstasy appear automatically in response to the injection of electric current into specific parts of the brain. These discoveries can be interpreted as indications that conscious phenomena are suitable for inclusion in the subject matter dealt with by the laws and methods of the physical sciences. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
To be sure, a mere formal transfer of the phenomena of consciousness out of metaphysical and into the realm described by the physical laws of nature would not “explain” the mystery of subjective awareness. However, as observed in the introduction, physical science does not really explain any of its mysteries. Gravitational attraction and electric charge are essentially as inexplicable as consciousness; they seem better understood only because we have long since established that their effects are regular and predictable, not because we know what they “really” are. The available evidence is consistent with the expectation that the properties of conscious experience may ultimately be found to be as regular and predictable as are those of gravity and electricity. If so, it is inevitable that we shall eventually add the relationships between physical states of neuronal matter and qualities of subjective awareness to the laws which, along with the basic particles, make up the content of modern physics. And, for all its philosophic importance, this will then be but an incident in the continuing development of our understanding of the body of natural law that determines the course of observable events. The same body of natural law will then suffice to “explain” the formation of a distant nebula, the operation of a television receiver, the growth of a child, and the genius of an Einstein. Like other sweeping philosophic generalizations, this belief in the unity and adequacy of science cannot be proved to be correct—it is essentially an article of faith. However, it has a great advantage over the philosophies: this philosophy, uniquely, derives further strength from every new scientific discovery. This is because, in science as it is actually practiced, all theory is nonvitalistic: the postulate of a single set of natural laws is the starting point for all modern scientific explanation. And spectacular advances in our understanding of the Universe are continually being made by application of this simplifying assumption. Thus, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the case for the unity and adequacy of science has become a strong one. Future discoveries may soon render inescapable the conclusion toward which science had for so long been trending—that the regular and predictable operation of a single body of physical law is sufficient, without supplementation by any form of extra-scientific or “vitalistic” principle, to account for all aspects of human experience. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Speaking of human experience, let us consider the idea of equality, one of the foundations of rationalistic-progressive ethics. In the light of the principle of love, and in the perspective of the idea of Kairos, the following can be said: love implies equality in some respect. One who loved and one who is loved are equal to each other insofar as they are worthy of love, the love, the one for the other. However, nothing but precisely this principle in different situation, with love and the distortion of love at the same time. Looking at a Greek city-state, we discover that there is a political equality among individuals in a special group, and to a certain extent among all those who are free; but there is an absolute inequality between the free and the slave. Love is not manifest as the principle; but since it is potentially the principle, it is effective even in the religion and culture of Apollo and Dionysus. It is effect in the kind of equality that the city-state gives to those who belong to it, excluding slaves and barbarians. Love is effective even in this restricted equality, but it is a restricted, distorted love—love within the boundaries of national pride and racial discrimination. The central Kairos in which love becomes manifest as what it really is has not yet appeared. Nor did it appear in the period of the universal Roman empire, when Stoicism extended equality to all human beings—men and women, children and slaves. Here the principle of love broke through the limitations of national and social arrogance, but it did so as a universal, rational law, and not as love. Stoic equality is universal, but cool and abstract, which out the warmth and communal element of the limited equality in the city-state. At its best, it is participation in Roman citizenship and implies the possibility of a human’s becoming wise. In the Christian message, love becomes manifest in its universality, and, at the same time, in its concreteness: the “neighbour” is the immediate object of love, and everyone can become “neighbour.” All inequalities between humans are overcome insofar as humans are potential children of God. However, this did not lead Christianity to the Stoic idea of equality. Not even the inequality between the lord and slave was attacked, except in the realm of the Christian community. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Later, not the totalitarian but the hierarchical principle was supported by the Christian church in accord with the late ancient and medieval society. The social and psychological inequalities of the feudal order did not seem to contradict the element of equality implied in the principle of love. On the contrary, the mutual independence of all the degrees of the hierarchy, the solidarity of all the members of a medieval city, and the patriarchalistic care of the feudal lords for the “people,” were considered the highest form of equality demanded by the principle of love. In bourgeois liberalism, equality was again interpreted in terms of the general natural law, the law of reason and humanity. Equality became equality before the law and the demand for equal economic opportunities. This was in accord with the principle of love over against the tyranny and injustice into which the older system had developed. However, it the measure by which the equal opportunity of everybody became a mere ideology to cover the exclusive opportunity of a few, the liberal idea of equality became a contradiction of love. A new idea of equality arose, conceiving the equal security of everyone, even at the sacrifice of much political equality. One must not condemn the collectivistic and authoritarian forms of equality just because they negate equality’s liberal and democratic forms. Love may demand a transformation in this Kairos. A new creative realization of the element of equality as implied in the principle of love may be brought about in our period. It will be good insofar as it is in better accord with the demands of love in our special situation than were the demands of love in our special situation than were the feudal and liberal forms. It will be bad insofar as it will become a distortion and contradiction of love. For love is eternal, although it creates something new in each Kairos. One could refer to many other ethical problems in order to demonstrate their double dependence on the principle of love, on the one hand, and on the changing Kairos, on the other. For example, one could point to the evaluation of wok and activism in the different periods of history and their relation to leisure and meditation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
It is obvious that a coming collective will reduce the emphasis on work and activism considerably by restraining the principle of competition. As the struggle against some forms of feudal and ecclesiastical leisure and meditative life was a demand for love in the period of the decaying Middle Ages, and occurred at the time when humankind began to control nature, so it is now a demand of love and Kairos that leisure meditation returns in terms of a new more collectivistic structure of society over against a self-destructive adoration of work and activism. Other examples are the problems of asceticism and worldliness, of self-control and self-expression, of disciplines and creativity, their relation to each other. Both sides these contrasts follow from the principle of love. The negation of the first aspect would prevent the self-surrender implied in love; the negation of the second would destroy any subject worthy of love. It depends on the Kairos as to which of these aspects, in which form and in which balance with the other, is emphasized. For our present stage, neither the supranatural asceticism of the Catholic system nor the rational self-control of bourgeois society, nor the naturalistic war-and-state discipline of fascism can provide the solution. And the same is true of feudal eroticism, of bourgeois aestheticism, and of the fascist idolatry of vitality. Another solution is demanded by love and by Kairos. Psychoanalysis provides some elements of the solution, although mere psychotherapeutic psychology is not able to create by itself a new system of ethics. Other elements of the solution are suggested by the rediscovery of the classical meaning of eros, one the one hand, and self-control, on other, are shaped by love. A final question must be answered. If love is the principle of ethics, and if Kairos is the manner of its embodiment in concrete contents, how can a permanent uncertainty, a continuous criticism which destroys the seriousness of the ethical demand, be avoided? Is not law and are not institutions necessary in order to maintain the actual ethical process? Indeed, law and institution are required. They are required by love itself. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
For every individual, even the most creative, needs given structures that embody the experience and wisdom of the past, that liberate one from the necessity of having to make innumerable decisions on one’s own, and that show one a meaningful way to act in most situations. On this point Catholicism was superior in love both to Protestantism and to liberalism. And this is the reason why the younger generation in many countries eagerly demands laws and institutions to relieve them of their unbearable burden of having to make continuous ultimate decision. In system of ethics can ever become an actual power without laws and institutions. Luther, in his great emphasis on the creativity of love, forgot this necessity. This is one of the reasons why the moral education of the masses in Germany is less thorough than in Calvinistic countries. On the other hand, there is a greater readiness for a Kairos in Germany than there is in the more thoroughly educated and normalized Western nations. Love demands laws and institutions, but love is always able to break through them in a new Kairos, and to create new laws and new systems of ethics. I have not mentioned the word “justice” in this report. It would be misleading in the present discussion because it is generally understood in the sense of the abstract natural law of Stoicism and rationalism. As such, it is either empty or is the concrete law of special period, and is thus without universal validity. If justice is taken concretely, it means the laws and institutions in which love is embodied in a special situation. The Platonic ideal of justice was the concrete harmony of the city-state. In America, justice was the pious obedience to the commands of God. In medieval feudalism, it was the form of mutual responsibility of all levels of the hierarchy to each other. The liberal idea of justice was the abolition of formal privileges and the introduction of legal equality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
In the more collectivistic society of the future, justice will be the system of laws and forms by which a sufficient security of the whole, and of all members, will be developed and maintained. It follows, then, that justice is the secondary and derived principle, while love, actualized from Kairos to Kairos, is the creative and basic principle. I have given no definition of love. This is impossible because there is no higher principle by which it can be defined. It is life in its actual unity. The forms and structures in which love embodies itself are the forms and structures in which life is possible, in which life overcomes its self-destructive forces. And this is the meaning of ethics: the expression of the ways in which love embodies itself, and life is maintained and saved. Humans who are otherwise capable of correct judgment and sane conduct, as in their business activity, will reveal a paranoid imagination or pernicious delusion when racial, class, religion, or aesthetic prejudice gets into their head or eyes. The use of blood in animal sacrifices is a legacy from Atlantean sorcery. It is evil, and found only among peoples who have not attained the refinement of consciousness and development of conscience which accompany a higher conception of God. The terrible fact is that millions of so-called sane humans are so unbalanced, so hysterical, and so obsessed, that they are really half insane. They are dangerous to themselves and to society. The average person who thinks one belongs to the human species, has still a long way to travel before one becomes a full member. Only half of one has become human. The rest is still terrestrial, in whom the killing instinct is still active enough to punctuate one’s history with frighting wars. One’s terrestrial ancestry has provided humans with the killing instinct. One’s human cleverness has provided one with the most effective weapons to express that instinct. Ones spiritual aspiration has not evolved to the level where is should be—above the other two and restraining them. There are other manifestations of this killing instinct, this lust to slay another living creature. We see it in the child who tears wings off a fly. Brutality and cruelty are especially linked with the minds and actions of those persons swayed by evil forces, whether physical or psychical. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
There is enough unpleasantness or evil in the World in which we have to live. We should avoid getting involved in it so far as we can. This applies to activity and also to receptivity through reading, through entertainment, and other uses of leisure. When adult people begin to accept, and their young children to demand, entertainment by the daily portrayal of sadistic violence or obscenity, when those who feel outraged by this situation have become a small minority, we have to assume that decadence, bad manners, and low moral standards are triumphant. The school of journalism and periodical-filling these days is preoccupied with the ego, with personality: the universal and impersonal does not attract or interest. Moreover, it is only the bestial, the negative, the pretty, and the surface characteristics of the ego which hold their scribblers’ attention. Prying, meddlesome, trivial gossip and pulling other to pieces is a favourite sport. There must be censorship in the era of annually increasing crime. How many films and stage plays, books and magazine are let loose on an undisciplined World packed with detailed suggestions for immorality and criminality. This is not entertainment: it is evil. So many composed pieces are almost textbooks for the susceptible imitative young on how to start self-destructive, antisocial, selfish careers, how to yield to fleshly promptings without exercising the slightest restraint. We would not allow full freedom of movement to plague-carrying rats in our kitchens and homes. Yet we allow these human carriers of mental plague the freedom to print and publish, declaim, and propagate their poisonous suggestions and negative ideas, their pleasures of the flesh and violence, their hates and moral subversion, their evil. The young worshippers of new art forms in the pop and rock World are the same ones who contributed to the ranks of drug takers and, later, hatha yoga. They need violent thrills to sustain their interests. That is, they are primarily pleasure-seekers, not spiritual seekers. They are governed by moods and impulses. The romantic rubbish which fills the ears and attracts the eyes of the modern young through the communications media leads them into false pictures of the life which awaits them and so into false values. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
When a civilization finds its pleasures in witnessing plays which explore all aspects of pleasures of the flesh, seeing films exploring all aspects of brutality and crime, permitting sports as cruel as fox-hunting, it has become low in morals, vulgar in taste, and self-destructive in its universal law. It will fall, as Rome fell. In the time of Washington, the public men—Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Marshall, Henry, Franklin, Hamilton, Jay—were a fair sampling of the good spirits in the country, humane, literate, brave, not self-seeking. (There is a remarkable letter of Jefferson’s to David Rittenhouse, urging him to waste no more time in mere politics, for the World needed him more in his capacity as a scientist.) By and large, it could not be said of our presidents and governors at present, the symbols of the country, that they are a fair sampling of the best of us. It would not be difficult to make a list of a hundred, or two hundred, who are superior to them in every relevant way, in whom a boy could feel pride and trust. Of course this is not a new trouble among us. Just as the European writers of the eighteenth century idolized our statesmen as if they were demigods, so in the nineteenth they spoke of their inferiority. This is the consequence of another missed revolution, the democratic revolution. A man of sense obviously cannot waste his life learning to sure to an ignorant electorate and coming up through political ranks in which disinterestedness and pure convictions are not the most handy virtues. Yet the fault is not with democracy, but that we have failed to have enough of it. For instance, if our emphasis had been on perfecting the town meeting and the neighbourhood commune, there would not be ignorant electors and they would choose great officers. If people had the opportunity to initiate community actions, they would be political; they would know that finally the way to accomplish something great is to get together with the like-minded and directly do it. However, the men in power do not think politically either. For instance, this year we have had the usual spectacle of politicians going about the country looking for nominators for the Presidency, presumably (why else?) because they have important new programs to offer. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
However, as soon as it becomes clear that the country leaders of the party do not want them, they retire from the race and rally to elect whomever. What becomes of the programs? Since this is what political responsibility means to a politician, why should the electorate respect politics, and how could an honest boy be inspired to enter on such a career? Characteristically, we have an immense amount of formal training in flourishing institutes for public administration at Harvard, Princeton, Syracuse, Tufts, etcetera, as if we could get the thing by learning the role. Commager sensibly concludes that training does not begin early enough and it lacks the content of actual experience. The environment does not encourage public service, it does not esteem public goods. Few fathers give much thought to the distant generations of posterity, and children do not take fire in reading about the great men of history and thinking “Why not I?” as a plausible purpose. And finally, says Commager, the narrow chauvinism and energetic hostility to subversive ideas that are now the test of our political are precisely disastrous to patriotism, for that must be spacious, disinterested, and broad-based, otherwise it is intolerable foolishness. The men who won our independence and laid the foundations of the America nation were devoted patriots but they were, too, me of the World. They were children of the enlightenment. Reason taught them that all men were brothers, that purely national distinctions were artificial, that there existed a great community of arts and letters and philosophy and science cutting across and transcending mere national boundaries. The nationalism of the eighteenth century did not rest on a narrow base but on a broad one. It did not find nourishment in fear and suspicion but in faith and confidence. Perhaps one reason for the decline in statesmanship is that we have hemmed our potential statesmen in, we have denied them tolerant and spacious ideas. As it is, what must be the effect on a boy when he comes to realize that the public spokesman up there is not even speaking his own words, but repeating, like performer, something written for him by a staff from Madison Avenue? The boy must learn to shout, “Shame! Make your own speech at least!” #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Our present President (Mr. Biden) is an unusually uncultivated man. It is said that he has invited no real writer, no artist, no philosopher to the White House. Presumably he has no intellectual friends; that is his privilege. However, recently he invited the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to a banquet and musical. And the formal music of the musical they listened to was Tina Turner, “What’s Love Got to Do with It” and such other numbers. (Well, at least he has great taste in music.) So anyway, in dealing with mental health, family therapy is often a good idea. Around 25 percent of persons who are recovering from schizophrenia live with family: parents, siblings, spouses, or children. Such situations create special pressures, so that even if family stress was not a factor in the onset of the disorder, a patient’s recovery may be greatly influenced by the behaviour and reactions of the relatives at home. Generally speaking, persons with schizophrenia who feel positively toward their relatives do better in treatment. Recovered patients living with relatives who display high levels of expressed emotion—that is, relatives who are very critically, emotionally overinvolved, and hostile—often have a higher relapse rate than those living with more positive and supportive relatives. For their part, family members may be greatly affected by the social withdrawal and unusual behaviours of a relative with schizophrenia. One individual complained, “In the evening you go into the sitting room and it’s darkness. You turn on the light and there he is just sitting there, staring in front of him.” To address such issues, clinicians now commonly include family therapy in their treatment of schizophrenia, providing family members with guidance, training, practical advice, psychoeducation about the disorder, and emotional support and empathy. In the family therapy, relatives develop more realistic expectation and become more tolerant, less guilt-ridden, and more willing to try to new patterns of communication. Family therapy also helps the person with schizophrenia cope with the pressures of family life, make better use of family members, and avoid troublesome interactions. Research has found that family therapy—particular when it is combined with drug therapy—helps reduce tension within the family and so helps relapse rates go down. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The principles of this approach are evident in the following description: Mark was a 32-year-old single man living with his parents. He had a long and stormy history of schizophrenia with many episodes of psychosis, interspersed with occasional brief periods of good functioning. Mark’s father was a bright but neurotically tormented man gripped by obsession and inhibitions in spite of many years of psychoanalysis. Mark’s mother appeared weary, detached, and embittered. Both parents felt hopeless about Mark’s chances of recovery and resentful that needing to care for him would always plague their lives. They acted as if they were being intentionally punished. It gradually emerged that the father, in fact, was riddle with guilt and self-doubt; he suspected that his wife had been cold and rejecting toward Mark as an infant he had failed to intervene, due to his unwillingness to confront his wife and the demands of graduate school that distracted him from home life. He entertained the fantasy that Mark’s illness was a punishment for this. Every time Marl did begin to show improvement—both in reduced symptoms and in increasing function—his parents responded as if it were just a cruel torment designed to raise their hopes and then to plunge them into deeper despair when Mark’s condition deteriorated. This patten was especially apparent when Mark got a job. As a result, at such times, the parents actually became more critical and hostile toward Mark. He would become increasingly defensive and insecure, finally developing paranoid delusions, and usually would be hospitalized in a panicky and agitated state. All of this became apparent during the psychoeducational session. When the pattern was pointed out to the family, they were able to recognize their self-fulfilling prophecy and were motivated to deal with it. As a result, the therapist decided to see the family together. Concrete instances of the pattern and its consequences were explored, and alternative responses by the parents were developed. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The therapist encouraged both the parents and Mark to discuss their anxieties and doubts about Mark’s progress, rather than to stir up one another’s expectations of failure. The therapist had regular individual sessions with Mark as well as the family session. As a result, Mark has successfully held a job for an unprecedented 12 months. The families of persons with schizophrenia may also turn to family support groups and family psychoeducational programs for assistance, encouragement, and advice. In such programs, family members meet with others in the same situation to share their thoughts and emotions, provide mutual support, and learn about schizophrenia. Although research has yet to determine the usefulness of these groups, the approach has become popular. Now, celibacy could also be another way to prevent mental illness and mood disorders because people are not potentially exposing themselves to the dark side of what could be a toxic relationship. In the Aztec empire, female virginity was so exalted, that a certified virgin was spoken of metaphorically as a precious jewel. A young woman was motivated to preserve hers by pride, reinforced by her terror of retribution. The disgusted gods would not rot her flesh and if he suspected her virginity was not intact, her husband would not reject her.Rejection would happen during the marriage festivities, on the sixth day. An unhappy husband would announce his wife’s misconduct by serving wedding guest their food in pierced dishes. She would not be stoned to death, as both men and women were for adultery, but she could expect either divorce or an eternally suspicious husband. In reality, this seldom happened, for Aztec maidens were thoroughly indoctrinated from childhood. A lyrical folk tale repeated a loving father’s counsel to his little daughter. “My precious necklace, my precious quetzal plume, my human creation, my offspring,” he croons. “You are my blood, my colour, in you is my image.” Then he warns her: “Do not give up your body in vain, my little daughter, my child, my little dove, my little girl…If…you cease being a virgin…you will be lost…you will never be under the protection of someone who truly loves you.” The ecstasy of pleasures of the flesh will become your bitterest memory and will haunt you forever, he concludes, because even your husband will always suspect your chastity. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The Aztec preoccupation with premarital celibacy stemmed from their religious convictions and Worldview and forged a golden mean between excess and abstinence. By eliminating rivalries involving pleasures of the flesh, it greatly reduced tension between the military and the collective labourers. Another important feature of virginity was that it emphasized the difference between youth and adult. The Aztecs feared that emotional attachment resulting from an early experience with pleasures of the flesh might foster individuality or rebellious independence. This would seriously affect a young person’s relations with one’s family and one’s future life as a citizen in this highly regulated and hierarchical society. For quite different reasons, the tiny Enga societies of the New Guinea Highland also stressed bachelor virginity. After a half century of foreign contact, often with Australian and American anthropologist, the Enga number about 180,000 and live on the western side of the Hagen Mountain range. The Enga are subsistence farmers who specialize in cultivating sweet potatoes and raising pigs as symbols of wealth and prestige. They share a religious belief system that leads the unmarried men to accept celibacy. Indeed, this precept is so thoroughly instilled that few of them have the slightest desire to disobey it. The Engas’ supreme creator is Aitawe, who inhabits the upper World along with the sky beings, the yalyakali. The underworld is populated by ghost, or timango, mighty spirits who interfere constantly in human affairs and sometimes kill humans by biting them, though each timango is restricted to a single death-by-biting. Timango are malign, and the Enga devote much time to placating them. In particular, they must observe tradition, for the timango strike the entire clan to punish a single clam member’s transgression. The Enga must also maneuver between the negative and positive forces of their World. Some negative forces are women, mothers, grandmothers, women’s private areas, and ghosts. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Their positive opposites are men, fathers, grandfathers, the male organ, and sky deities. Marriage, then, is a union of polarities, often contracted between members of warring clans: “We marry the people we fight!” one Enga clan trumpets. This is not as anomalous a system of material selection as it might first appear, because the Enga notion of war is more stylized than real—one anthropologist describes them as “balletic episodes.” To foreign eyes, Enga battles resemble fencing matches or duels between fight leaders or bands of warriors armed with bows and arrows. Bloodshed is limited and death infrequent. After a day of fighting, the combatants engage in ritual rhetoric. Later, Enga Big Men on both sides present each other with impessive gifts of pork to mark the return of peace. Men marry for the first time at twenty to thirty years old, women between fifteen and eighteen years. Both should be chaste, the bride so her clanspeople may arrange a suitable marriage, the groom because only upon marriage can he acquire magical protection against the dangerous consequences of pleasures of the flesh with women or contact with his wife when she dealing with “female” concerns. The bachelor “knows,” for example, that touch a woman who is dealing with “female” concerns will, in the absence of magic sicken a man and cause persistent vomiting, turn his blood black, corrupt his vital juices so that his skin darkens and wrinkles as his flesh wastes, permanently dull his wits, and eventually lead to a slow decline and death. This “knowledge” is just the beginning. At about fifteen years, Enga boys join bachelor associations and remain members for about a decade, when they marry. Ritual baths protect them from the female influence, and ceremonies preserve the flora that is their subclan’s heritage. Ritual retreats enhance the bachelor’s physical appearance, including growing the hair, a symbol of masculinity and physical stamina, which must never be cut or even coiffed against the proud possessors’ wishes. Pleasures of the flesh by any of these bachelors would endanger them all and kill their precious plant life. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
The bachelors would beat any offender and fine him the price of a pig in compensation for the harm he has done them. They avoid looking at each other’s private areas and prudishly refrain from mentioning pleasures of the flesh or bodily functions in their conversations. At four-day retreats, essentially bachelors’ purification rituals, the agenda is instruction in Enga lore and magic and preparation of appropriate costumes and wigs. In most Enga societies, everyone but disabled adults will marry, so the preparatory activities for future husbands are compulsory, and participants take them seriously. Enga premarital chastity is integrally linked to ghost, the wrathful timango who serve all human activity and even penetrate thoughts and that is why men need magical protection. Premarital chastity may also serve another, unacknowledged purpose: to limit population growth, desirable in this cramped society with such limited resources, where was perpetually flare between clans trying to subsist on barely adequate land. This extends to the mores dealing with pleasures of the flesh of married couples, who enjoy intimate passions infrequently and, apart from their initial coupling, never near their gardens, whose fertility they fear contaminating. These negative emotions are just like physical ills: they too require treatment, and are not to be left in neglect. These negative thoughts have a habit of pushing themselves into one’s consciousness. One must just as often resolutely push them out again. In every human difficulty there are two ways open to us. The common way is familiar enough: it consists in reacting egoistically and emotionally with self-centered complaint, irritability, fear, anger, despair, and so one. The uncommon way is taken by a spiritually minded few: it consists in making something good out of something bad, and in reacting selflessly, calmly, constructive, and hopefully. This is the way of practical philosophy, this attempt to transform what outwardly seems so harmful into what inwardly at least must be markedly beneficent. It is a magical work. However, it can only be done by deep thought, self-denial, and love. If the difficulty is regarded as both a chance to show what we can do to develop latent resources as well as a test of what we have already developed, it can be made to help us. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Even if we do not succeed in changing an unfavourable environment for the better, such an approach would to some extent change ourselves for the better. We must accept, with all its tremendous implication for our past, present, and future, that we are ultimately responsible for the conditions which stamp our life. Such acceptance may help to shatter our egoism and that, even though it is painful, will be all to the good. Out of its challenge can come the most blessed change in ourselves. Truth twisted into service of the lower purposes or even the evil forces must be carefully inspected, analysed, and lastly corrected or rejected. Now, as we look at institutions of today and how they interact, it becomes clear that what America confronts today is not simply a runaway acceleration of change but a significant mismatch between the demands of the fast-growing new economy and the inertial institutional structure of the old society. Can a hyperspeed, twenty-first-century info-biological economy continue to advance? Or will society’s slow-paced, malfunctioning, obsolete institutions grind its progress to a halt? Bureaucracy, closed courts, legislative myopia, regulatory gridlock and pathological incrementalism cannot but take their toll. Something, it would appear, will have to give. Few problems will prove more challenging than the growing systemic dysfunctionality of so many related but desynchronized institutions. If Americans want the enormous benefits of a World-leading economy, the United States of America will have to root out, replace or radically restructure its legacy institutions that stand in the way. As change accelerates still further, institutional crises will not be limited to the United States of America. Every country in the twenty-first-century World economy—including China, India, Japan, and the European Union nations—will need to invent new style institutions and adjust the balance between synchronization and de-synchronization. Some countries may find that more difficult than the United States of America, whose culture, at least, smiles on change-makers. In any case, while our partially tongue-in-cheek speed rankings are certainly debatable, one central reality is not: All across the board—at the level of families, firms, industries, national economies and the global system itself—we are now making the most sweeping transformation ever in the links between creation and the deep fundamental of time itself. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Whenever a strong impulse becomes uppermost and inclines one toward some deed or speech of a negative kind, one had better scrutinize its source or nature as quickly as one can. Enjoy your youth, be polite and clean so people will want you are a neighbour, employee, and friend. We harmed no animals in Eden, but afterwards, when things got hard, we forgot the peaceful kindship of that ancient kingdom. So people began to see humans as soulless, of no good reason, and no rational speech. We then made a chain of things to protect us—fire, medicine, our locking houses, many kinds of clothes. We pray that we will see the face of everything thing in Heaven. We thank God for the tasks we shared together, and for the hours we communed here with Thee; for the joys we found in the fellowship of worship, for the blessings of courage, comfort and peace; for the will to strive and the wisdom to accomplish, for hope when despondent and faith when in doubt; for comrades who laboured, devotedly loyal, with spirit undaunted, with vision undimmed; for all these we thank Thee and praise Thee, our Father; Thy House is our refuge, our buttress, our strength, our bond with the past, our hope for the future, our fathers’ bequest and our children’s sacred trust. We reverently pause to recall those departed, who loyally served with heart and with hand; they live in this Sanctuary they helped to establish, they live in our thoughts, in our prayers, in our deeds. O may we maintain and preserve what they builded, and bring to fruition the seeds they have sown. We come with our children to pray at Thine altar, that their hearts, like ours, maybe lifted to Thee, to find here the truths that their forefathers cherished, and make this their Holy Place, even as we. Our old and our young who worship together, renew here the pledge that their forefathers made. Accept then, O Lord, our hearts’ earnest devotion, and keep us united in service to Thee. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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You Don’t Use Demonic Forces, Do You?
Some authorities in the field of parapsychology speak of “natural” or “neutral” magic. They use this term to describe phenomena which cannot be fully explained scientifically, but which take place without reference to either God or the devil. In the realm of the physical are the inexplicable feats usually associated with spirits. Objects of furniture and people sometimes mysteriously leave the ground and appear to float through the air. These occurrences are called “levitations.” In close relationship to levitations is “telekinesis,” a phenomenon which takes place when a psychically gifted person apparently moves objects by concentrating on them. A few years ago, most scientifically minded people were convinced that such demonstrations were accomplished by the use of clever mechanical devices, but in many instances intensive scientific tests and checks have not uncovered any evidence of trickery. As a result, students in this field simply affirm that no one knows how these things take place. Another phenomenon closely allied to levitations and telekinesis is called “apport.” Solid objects which disappear from a room are found an instant later in a location hundreds of miles away. Parapsychologists conjecture that the physical matter dissolves into pure energy and thus is able to pass through closed walls. No serious student who has investigated these occurrences denies that they actually take place, but a great deal of research and careful study must be done to gain a full understanding of levitations, telekinesis, and apports. Ever since Einstein, no true scientist can say that such phenomena are an impossibility. While it could be that natural forces will be found to account for some of these amazing occurrences, it is also like that evil spirits play a part in many instances. Another enigma in the realm of the physical is the fact that in Europe some people diagnose and treat severe physical diseases through the magical use of a rod and pendulum. The pendulum is set in motion over the patient’s body to find the cause of the illness, and then magic is used to bring about healing. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
No doubt the people who use this method often fail to help the patient, and undoubtedly a large percentage of the healings are only psychosomatic. Investigators generally agree, however, that in some instances the rod and the pendulum method appears to bring amazing results. An explanation for how this method works has not yet been found. Some parapsychologists have concluded that the area of the body that is ill undergoes a disturbance in “body electricity,” and that the pendulum in some mysterious way detects this variation from the norm. Not all researcher agree with this theory, however, and most of them at present simply acknowledge that they do not understand how the pendulum works. Christians who have investigated this phenomenon are convinced that to some degree that it belongs to the realm of the occultic, and that it should be avoided. An exhaustive listing and discussion of all the physical phenomena that may be classified as magic are impossible in a work of this nature. However, let us take time to look at one more example. The Chinses practice of acupuncture, which comes from ancient times, is receiving much publicity of late. Some of America’s top medical men and biologists have watched Chinese doctors perform major surgery using this needle treatment as the anesthesia. In addition, doctors of dozens of countries have reported that with acupuncture they are successfully treating people with ulcers, colitis, rheumatism, arthritis, asthma, eczema, hypertension, diabetes, urinary tract infections, anxiety, and even some cases of blindness and deafness. The scientific World is at an utter loss to explain how acupuncture works. The Chinese say that our bodies contain two “life forces” know as Yin and Yang, and that the insertion and manipulation of the needles in any one of several hundred specific points interrupts the flow of one element or increases the flow of the other to correct any malfunction and restore well-being. Exponents of acupuncture generally agree that it is completely ineffective in healing fractures, curing cancer, overcoming infectious diseases, or repairing organs that have been severely damaged. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
These limitations suggest that even though acupuncture is “magical” in that it cannot be explained in terms of scientific knowledge, it should not be classified as occultic. Remember, we have no right to assert dogmatically that phenomena of this nature are necessarily the result of miraculous activity on the part of either God or the devil. Christians should be careful to avoid making assertions that cannot be substantiated. Strange manifestations often take place in the realm of the psychical. We already have referred to visions, trance-speaking, automatic writing, materializations, and apparitions in our discussion of spiritism. This latter phenomenon can be distinguished from hallucinations because large groups of people have reported seeing apparitions of ghost. Some even have been photographed. When looking at claims from both Christian and unbelievers, one realizes that all the reports of mysterious physically forced intimate assaults and frightful specters cannot be lightly set aside as the product of overwrought imaginations or of tricksters. Christians who have studied in this field are convinced that at least in some of the cases the work of evil spirits can be detected, but again we must acknowledge that we do not at the present times know exactly how to account for all such phenomena. The same admission must be made regarding extra-sensory perception in general. Research in this field by outstanding scholars like Professors J. B. Rhine, originally of Duke University, indicates that some people are able to perceive facts through a so-called “sixth sense,” and that others have the ability to transfer their thoughts without using the usual methods of communication. The mere possession of this “sixth sense,” however, does not account for all the incidents involving Extra Sensory Perception (ESP) encountered by researchers. Parapsychologists are forced to acknowledge that an element of mystery exists bordering on the supernatural, for they have produced strong documentary evidence for astounding events that baffle the mind. Hundreds of people who were interviewed told of having vivid dreams in which they “saw” in the most minute details and with absolute accuracy what was happening to a friend or loved one at the very moment the incident was taking place, sometimes thousands of miles away. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
The skeptical scientists at The Winchester Mystery House, realizing that a real World of invisible spiritual beings does exist, knows it is at least possible that they are involved in hidden communications, and in the communication of telepathy. In general, our doctors understand nothing of magically based hypnosis because it is an occult practice. While normal hypnosis as practised by the medical World may be harmless, hypnosis used in conjunction with magic is can be dangerous, and may be a burden to the patient concerned. A second elementary form of magic may be found in the area of mental suggestion. We mean by this a transmission of mental or emotional forces over a distance. To further illustrate this, we must consider the case of a young psychologist, who wanted to qualify as a university lecturer. He specialized in hypnosis, though it was not the normal type of hypnosis but rather mental suggestion. He looked for a sensitive subject for his experiments and found one in the secretary of his boss. She was of nervous debility and easily influenced. Without asking, he attempted to put her to sleep. He would sit down about three or four yards away, either in the same room or a neighbouring one, and then concentrate on her. She would find that her arms would suddenly become limp. A tremendous tiredness would come over her. She would have to fight with all her strength to avoid falling asleep. These experiments were continued over a period of time with the girl always resisting them. During this time the girl gradually developed psychic disturbances. She consulted a psychiatrist. When he heard of the suggestive experiments, he told her that they would not do her any good, as he already known about the experiments of the young psychologist. The girl, having been the subject of these experiments for a considerable period of time, has since experienced strange paralytic symptoms and is now only capable of doing part-time work. In another instance, a Catholic woman regularly went to confession. As time went on, she gradually became psychically and suggestively dependent on the priest. Every time he said the mass she would fall to the ground and injure herself, and it was always her face. This happened even when she was 20 miles away and she could be quite oblivious to the fact he was taking a service. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
The strange dependence became an unbearable burden to the woman. In her distress she began to pray earnestly, and she went to a Protestant minister for counselling. Through faith, she found a Christian as a personal Saviour. The attacks immediately vanished. The woman then left the Catholic church. Another is example is, when for several years, a craftsman indulged in black magic. He was chiefly concerned with the influencing of other people through his magic, and he also belonged to a magic circle which itself conducted unusual experiments. His first victim was a sensitive young lady. He brought her under his control to such an extent that she sacrificed both her money and her body to him. After this initial success, he looked for other victims. He continued to be successful with his experiments, and he finally found a young lady who regularly handed over her monthly pay-cheque to him. For this reason, he lived with her until finally her parents reported the matter to the police. A third elementary form of magic is magically based magnetism or mesmerism. Magnetism, together with hypnosis and suggestion, can be magically intensified. This next illustration refers to this fact. For our first example of this, we will turn to Dr. Trampler, a lawyer who was originally a student of Groening, but who later ceased to hold the same ideas. Dr. Trampler has outlined his methods of healing in a book Gesundung durch den Geist (Healing through the Spirit). His most fanatical followers are women. I have seen in counselling people that his healing powers are not beneficial, but are instead a burden to those treated. Two instances have been cited to indicate this. Firstly, a woman visited Dr. Trampler in Munich. He was successful in treating her backaches. In the course of the treatment he had made her hold her fingers up in the air as if they were antennae for cosmic powers, so he said. On returning home she found that organically she had been healed, but since then her spiritual life was held in check. She, like do many others, now found it impossible to pray and she felt as though there was an impenetrable wall between herself and God. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
In another instance, a Christian woman who came to me for counselling had visited Dr. Trampler in ignorance. While sitting in his office, she had prayed. Finally when the other patients had been treated and it was her turn, Dr. Trampler came over to her. She had felt a strange fear come upon her and had prayed all the more. The doctor had then said to her, “I can’t do anything for you.” Since these healers often camouflage and garnish their activities with religious phrases, the terrible nature of their powers is often unrecognized. In Baden, I gained the acquaintance of a man who had been an unqualified medical doctor. In answer to my question regarding his healing ability, he answered, “Natural healing magnetism can enable you to heal about to patients daily. The power is by then used up and no one has to be recharged or refilled. People who treat more than two patients a day are either fakes, or they are plugged into the devil.” By this he meant that such people would actually be using magic in their practice. Here is another example of this both frequent yet confusing camouflage. A friend of mine, a Christian teacher, was being treated by a mesmerizer who was himself supposed to be a Christian. At least he attended a church. To make sure, the teacher asked the mesmerizer, “You don’t use demonic forces, do you?” The man replied, “Why not? Demonic powers are good. Demons are here to help us.” The teacher decided not to continue with the treatment! He was afraid of self-proclaimed demi-god practitioners. Having outlined these elementary aspects of magic, we will now go on to the more basic and principle forms. One can learn to differentiate between three main forms of magic: black magic which uses demonic forces, white magic which is allegedly promoted by the power of God, and neutral magic which is supposed to rely solely on ordinary forces of nature. It is a good idea to divide magic into three forms, but the same cannot be said of the definitions. Christian pastoral work reveals a completely different picture to one to these forms concerning neutral and white magic. Firs, however, some examples of black magic. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
A minister informed me that the whole of his congregation had been infected by occultism. As an example, he told me of the healing of a 20-year-old girl through magic. Because of an attack of polio, the girl had had a leg shortened. She had been in the hospital for a long time and then been released as incurable. The girl and her mother were very depressed. In this state they had finally sought to the help of a man who practised black magic. This man sold them a mandrake root—for about $65! The root, which in some ways resembled a human figure, according to his directions had to be nursed by the girls as if it were a child. She had to wash it, feed it and put it to bed as if it were really alive. The magician then told the girl to pray and repeat vindictive psalms or songs, and to write them out and sleep with them under her pillow. Next he went on to tell her to stick two knives into the wall above her bed and to put two more knives under the pillow. In spite of this strange treatment the girl discovered that her leg began to grow longer. Finally she was healed, but afterwards she developed serious psychic disturbances. She then went to her minister, but he could give her no advice. The girl could no longer pray. When she tried to clasp her hands together, they were torn apart. On attempting to read the Bible she was assaulted with blasphemous thoughts. Fearing the loss of her own sanity, the girl gave both the mandrake root and an amulet which she had also received to the minister. Now she lived in the fear that the magician would revenge himself, and her leg, though it had been healed, returned again to its former state. In another example, during a mission in Toggenburg a farmer came and told me of some unhappy results of black magic charming. His boy had contracted polio. The doctor was called in too late and the boy remained paralysed. Since the farmer had wanted his son to be healthy no matter what the cost, he tried everything. Finally he went to the notorious magician Hugentobler in Peterzell. This man healed the boy with the help of black magic and his paralysis disappeared completely. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
For several years everything went well, but when the son was 16 years old the father found him in the stable dying from a cut carotid artery. This happened quite out the blue. They boy had previously shown no signs of unhappiness. On his son, however, the father found an amulet from Hugentobler. Opening the leather pouch, he took out a small piece of paper with the inscription, “This soul belongs to the devil.” This was proof enough that Hugentobler had used black magic on the boy. The devil wants you to profess your faith in Christ with your mount, but for your action to contradict Christianity. The devil has power, but will usually leave you worse off. White magic is even more wide-spread then black magic. Many Christian groups practise this form of magic oblivious to its demonic character. White magic is a fulfillment of the words of Paul in 2 Corinthians 11.14, that even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. White magic is black magic under a religious disguise. Here are a few examples. A missionary to the Jewish people in North Africa by the name of Samuels, reported one of their magic customs. When one of their children is ill they take a towel, tie a knot in it and say, “In the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, be released from your sickness.” They then unite the knot and the child gets well. This piece of magic charming is a counterpart to black magic. A woman form Bukowina told us that her relatives could heal any type of disease in both animals and human beings merely through using white magic charms. By adding the words “In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost” to the spell the sickness would disappear. In spite of a family tradition of church-going, the various spells and charms had been handed down in the family for several generations. Both the woman and her daughter suffer from nervous disturbances. It was for this reason that she had sought the counsel of a minister. Her condition improved after the minister had prayed with her and later she became a convinced Christian. In another illustration, the owner of a certain farm hanged himself in his house. According to the popular belief of the villagers the man continued to hunt the place of his death. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
The relatives were advised to sweep out the whole house repeating the words, “In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” After this the man’s ghost would no longer trouble them. The relatives followed this unusual advice, but afterwards the farmer’s wife was troubled by a strange feeling of unrest. Satan’s main occupation is opposition to God’s will. The name “Satan,” given Lucifer after his fall, means “adversary”—God’s adversary (Job 1.6; Matthew 13.39), and man’s especially when loves and serves God (Zechariah 3.1; 1 Peter 5.8). It was the intrusion of Satan’s will against the divine will that introduced sin into a sinless Universe and transformed “Lucifer” (Lightbearer) into “Satan” (Opposer). Satan’s rebellion fixed the pattern of satanic and demonic attitude as opposition to God and exaltation of self. This demonic strategy was evident in Cain’s murder of Abel (Genesis 4.8) and in Herod’s slaughter of the innocents (Matthew 2.16). The evil one was seeking to slay the promised seed of the woman (Genesis 3.15) to prevent the incarnation of the Saviour of the World, who would eventually seal the doom of Satan and the demons in Gehenna (Revelation 20.10-15). When the Lord Jesus began his public ministry, Satan appeared in person to tempt him (Matthew 4.1-11). Christ’s ministry on Earth provoked an outburst of demonic activity. Demonic power incited Judas to betray Jesus, Peter to deny him (Luke 22.3, 31), and the leaders of the Jewish nation to reject and crucify him. The powers of darkness appear in early Church history as recorded in Acts (Acts 4.25-26, 5.3; 8.9; 13.6-13; 16.16-18; 19.11-20, etcetera). The opposition of Satan and his demons can be discerned in every era of church history. The unseen forces of evil will increase their activity in the latter times (1 Timothy 4.1; Revelations 9.1-21), culminating in the demon-inspired debacle at Armageddon (Revelation 16.13-14), will the kingdom of righteousness and peace supplant the present satanic World system (1 John 2.17). #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Many mental and emotional illnesses are, of course, due to natural causes, such as overwork, tension, fatigue, malnutrition, organic diseases, etcetera. Such disorders can be treated effectively by a physician, neurologist, psychologist, or psychiatrist. Demonic spirits may have little or nothing to do with such disorders of the mind. The causes are purely natural and may be corrected by purely natural means. This is not surprising since the Creator has placed the creation and his creatures under the normal operation of the laws of cause and effect. Since the supernatural exists and does interact with the natural World, the truly scientific investigator must take this into consideration. Prayer and faith can heal the mind and body supernaturally, just as medicine and rest can do it naturally. By the same token, unbelief and sin can harm body and mind as a result of demonic bondage. Demons can influence the mind. Bondage to demonic forces can be of varying degrees, as can yieldedness to God and control by the Holy Spirit. The Bible clearly teaches that man exposed himself to evil powers through the all (Genesis 3.15; 2 Corinthians 4.4; Colossians 1.13; Ephesians 6.10-20). Some unsaved people who live a balanced moral life are only mildly influenced by demonic spirits, while others, who flout God’s moral laws, are several influenced to the point of subjection. Other are so dominated that they are oppressed and tormented, and some are completely possessed by evil spirits. When mental and emotional disturbances are due almost entirely to natural causes, medical and psychological care can be very successful. However, when demonic influence, however slight, is at work, complete healing can only be achieved with the help of God through Christ. Successful therapy could be used is all psychologist, psychiatrists, counselors, and physicians were Christian with a knowledge of the gospel of deliverance from sin and Satan. When demonic influence is mild, it is almost impossible to distinguish between natural and supernatural causes. Only treatment that deals with the full gamut of causes will solve all the problems and insure a full cure. Parapsychology, which deals with extraordinary phenomena, will never fully understand these cases, much less effect deliverance, until the demonic factor is recognized and dealt with accordingly. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
It is often said that Irishmen succeed best out of Ireland; those qualities they possess, which fail to ripen and come to maturity in the lethargic atmosphere of the Green Isle, where nothing matters very much provided public opinion is not run counter to, become factors of history under the sunshine and storm of countries where more ample scope is given for the full development of pugnacity, industry, or state-craft. At any rate, from the days of Duns Scotus and St. Columbanus down to the present, Irishmen have filled, and still fill, position of the highest importance in every part of the globe as friends of kings, leaders of armies, or preachers of the Truth—of such every Irishman, be his creed or politics what they may, is justly proud. To the lengthy and varied list of honours and offices may be added (in one instance at least) the item of witchcraft. He the unhappy creature, whose tale is related below, remained in her native land, she would most probably have ended her day in happy oblivion as a poor old woman, in no way distinguishable from hundreds of others in like position; as it was, she attained unenviable notoriety as a powerful witch, and was almost certainly the means of starting the outbreak at Salem. Incidentally the story is of interest as showing that at this time there were some Irish-speaking people in Boston, Massachusetts USA. Shortly after the date of its colonisation the State of Massachusetts became remarkable for its cases of witchcraft; several persons were tried, and some were hanged, for this crime. However, at the time about which we are writing there was in Boston a distinguished family of puritanical ministers named Mather. The father, Increase Mather, is to be identified with the person of that name who was Commonwealth “minister of the Gospel” at Magherafelt in Ireland in 1656; his more famous son, Cotton, was a most firm believer in all the possibilities of witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Mrs. Glover, whose miserable husband before he died had sometimes complained of her, that she was undoubtedly a witch, and that wherever his head was laid, she would quickly arrive unto the punishments due to such a one. Mrs. Glover was accused of coming down her neighbour’s chimney to remind her of her death sentence. She also had the ability to make people have fits, make them deaf, sometimes dumb, and sometimes blind, and often all of this at one. Their tongues would be drawn down their throats, and then pulled out upon their chins, to a prodigious length. Their mounts were forced open to such a wideness, that their jaws were out of joint; and anon clap together again, with a force like a spring-lock; ant the like would happen to their shoulder blades, their Elbows and hand wrists, and several of their joints. She would cause their necks to be broken, so that their neckbone would seem dissolved unto them that felt after it, and yet on the sudden it would become again so stiff, that there as on stirring of their heads; yea, their heads would be twisted almost round. And if the main force of their friend at any time obstructed a dangerous motion which they seemed upon, they would roar exceedingly. Eventually Mrs. Glover was hanged. Mrs. Glover may be considered the first cause for the witch trials, for if the case of the Goodwin children she afflicted had not occurred at Boston, it is more than probably the village of Salem would never have been plagued as it was. Demonism is expressed in many forms. We have tended to think of it as far away in time or miles from our generation in the United States of America, but there is increasing evidence that this is not the case. I must tell you of one of our experienced in The Winchester Mystery House. Sarah Winchester had some women over to her mansion for a séance. The maid Agnus had returned from her day off on the following morning; she became possessed of an evil spirit. The minute Agnus saw Mrs. Winchester and her friends, she ran away. People had to hold her down to calm her. The sang “Onward Christian Soldiers,” then four of them prayed, claiming her deliverance on the basis of Christ’s victory over Satan on Calvary. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The séance women laid hands on her and commanded the evil spirit to leave, saying he had not right to stay in the body of one who believed in Jesus. Agnus had believed over a year ago, but her husband had taken a concubine and she was brokenhearted. In her deep sorrow, self-pity, and worry she reopened old areas to the devil. Once she cried out loudly: “I have been here thirteen years—do you think I am going to leave now?” Later her voice shrilled: “I hate Jesus; I will not leave.” Her facial expressions were terrible, hard, and angry. She tried many times to bang her head on the floor, and once she darted to a corner of the room and grabbed Mrs. Winchester’s parasol and struck her head with it. Hours passed and there seemed to be no change in her. Mrs. Winchester felt she could not remain much longer, as she had promised to go out visiting. As she was debating about what to do, Mrs. Winchester moved closer to Angus and began talking to her about Jesus Christ, telling her how He could alone comfort her and satisfy her heart. She listened and Mrs. Winchester saw tears in her eyes. Angus told Mrs. Winchester, “Jesus Christ loves me, and I love Him, too, and He longs to help me.” She continued to talk along this line and she sat up. Mrs. Winchester finally told her why she thought the evil spirit had gotten in, that her worry and self-pity were sins. She thoroughly aggressed and admitted her hated of her husband and his concubine, which Mrs. Winchester told her was sin, too. She talked freely, admitting her faith was weak. Mrs. Winchester and her friends prayed for Agnus for several days. Just when the evil spirit left, they did not know, but you could imagine the great joy that filed their hearts to see her set free from that awful, wicked, noisy spirit. Mrs. Winchester was so happy. Mrs. Winchester was known for her beautiful mansion. It was certainly a place to see in the late 1880s. Mrs. Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, spent the last half of her life and $5,500,000.00 (2022 inflation adjusted $151,599,411.76) building a gorgeous house that was at its height 9 stories, 500 rooms, and 65,000 square feet, Today it is an astonishing, what I call, Grand Queen Anne Victorian of 4 stories, 160 rooms, and an estimated 25,000 square feet. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Partly because of the mansion seclusion, partly by reason of its extreme beauty, partly, it may be, because the owner was more than charming and gracious in her pressing hospitality, The Winchester Mansion, which is now called The Winchester Mystery House, had an element of the poetic, almost magical. The warm light of the spring sunset swept across the estate, lying golden and mellow on the luxuriant growth of prune, fig, orange, lemon, and peach trees, and fantastic palm trees, emerald green lawns, exotic flowers, giant topiary, statues, fountains, gazabos, and other Victorian cottages lead up to the path of the 760-acre mansion. Against the gold sunset, it was hardly to be wondered at that one should slip into a mood of visionary enjoyment, looking for a time on the whole thing as the misty phantasm of a summer dream. Carpenters worked around the clock building and rebuilding room after room, as the spirits—or her fancy—directed. The house was furnished with the finest materials and was a showcase of Victorian elegance and taste. This paradise of art and colour, was a bewilderment of architects. The Winchester Mansion was truly a dream of delight. It was a paradise, an epitome of all that was beautiful. The mansion was like a vision out of a fairy tale. And in the evening, the sunset seen from the observation tower was like watching the blue sapphire sea turn a lovely amethyst, rose, violet in shadow. Seen in the hot summer months, Mrs. Winchester’s exquisite home was like looking at the most gorgeous emerald glittering from a distance. From the balcony of the fourth flood, one can smell the roses and jasmine all around. Llanada Villa, as Mrs. Winchester called it was a light of the Beatific Vision. It was so unreal, so phantasmal, that one was not surprised it held secrets. It was said that the mansion was haunted. Yes, that is just it. The Winchester Mansion is really haunted. However, what is there to be afraid of. People rarely see ghosts and no one sees them more than once. Yet, this mansion is said to be haunted by legions of spirits. After Mrs. Winchester went to Heaven, her favourite niece, Marian “Daisy” Marriot stayed in the mansion for a few months. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
There was a story about the ghost of Mrs. Winchester in this royal house. She was supposedly imprisoned in this palace. Notice the beautiful iron-wrought grilles at the windows. The haunted region of the mansion, was striving to communicate with Daisy. Legend has it that Mrs. Winchester was imprisoned in one of the witch’s caps. How, was never known. It was when Daisy was in possession of this house that the ghost started to appear to her. She did not fancy real ghosts, however. One night, when the stars were not visible in the sky; low, thunderous clouds, massed at the head of the valley, were sweeping over so close that they seemed to brush the palm trees on the estate. To the south and the east the storm-clouds had shut down almost to sea, leaving a space of black sky where the moon in its last quarter was rising just to the left of the mansion—raining a black silhouette against it. They blue lightning flashed almost incessantly, and through the fitful darkness cam the sound of the bell tower, which could be heard across the valley, the rushing torrent below, and the full roar of the approaching rain, with a deep organ point of solemn thunder through it all. Daisy believed that Mrs. Winchester’s unquiet soul, sent out this story of eternity. Vivid lightning, the crowding of Mrs. Winchester and the shivering anticipation of Daisey’s possible visitation made sleep quite out of the question. Then, an hour and thirteen minutes after midnight, came a sudden vivid flash of lightening, and, as Daisy’s razzled and dazzled eyes began to regain the power of sight, she saw as plainly as in life—a tall figure, in a silky white dress, with long flowing hair. In another flash, the beautiful apparition looked at her long and earnestly. She was beautiful —more beautiful than one had supposed possible, her deep, passionate eyes very tender and pitiful in their pleading, beseeching glance. Daisy was hardly frightened, or even startled, but lay looking steadily at her as she stood in the beating lightning. Then she breathed, rather than articulated, with a voice that almost brought Daisy to tears, so infinitely sad and sorrowful was it, “I cannot sleep!” and the liquid eyes grew more pitiful and questioning as bright tears fell from them down the pale glowing face. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The apparition began to move slowly towards the door, its eyes fixed on Daisy’s with a look that was weary and almost agonized. Daisy learned from the bed and stood waiting. A look of utter gratitude swept over the face, and turning, the figure passed through the doorway. Out into the shadow of the corridor in moved, like a drift of pallid storm cloud, and Daisy followed, all natural and instinctive fear or nervousness quite blotted out by the part she felt she was to play in giving rest to a tortured soul. The corridors were velvet black; but the pale figure floated before her always, an unerring guide, now but a thin mist on the utter night, now white and clear in the bluish lightening through some window or doorway. Down the stairway into the lower hall of the second floor, where the stained-glass windows in the flared into sudden clearness under the fitful lightening, out into the silent cloister. It was very dark. Daisy stumbled along the solid mahogany floor. She guided herself by a hand on the gelled linseed Lincrusta-Walton wallpaper. Then a sudden blaze of fierce lightning, and vivid light allowed her to see the face with a look of overwhelming desire, of beseeching pathos, that had choked Daisy’s throat with an involuntary sob when she first saw Mrs. Winchester. And she heard the sorrowful words again, “I cannot sleep,” come from the impenetrable darkness. And when the lightning came again, the beautiful white figure was gone. She wondered around the mansion, searching in vain for Mrs. Winchester. She tired the door-to-nowhere when Mrs. Winchester vanished: it was locked. It was found at last. The smooth surface of the plaster on the white wall. There was a rough space, approximately the shape of the other windows in the tower, not plastered like the rest of the wall, but showing the place where a stained-glass window was covered up through its thick coatings of whitewash. Daisy began scraping away at the solid wall. Under the coatings of plaster appeared an entrance to a secret room and it led her over a vertical joint between firm, masonry work. She began digging out the mortar around the stone. With much work it detached. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Darkness within, yet beyond question there was a cavity there, not a solid wall; and with infinite care she removed all the stones. Still the hole was too small to admit enough light from the dimly illuminated cell. With a chisel, she pried at the sides of a large block of masonry, perhaps thirteen stone in size. It moved, and with seemingly superhuman strength, Daisy softly slid it from its bed. Suddenly a cry, a cry like that of a frighted woman—terrible. Framed by the jagged opening of the stone, hardly seem in the dim light, was a face, an ivory image, more beautiful than any antique bust, but drawn and distorted by unspeakable agony; the lovely mouth was smiling; the eyes were cast upward; and below, slim calcified hands crossed on the chest. Torture and agony visible in every tense muscle. Daisy stood there, breathless, staring at the sight, fascinated, bewitched, sad. So this was the mystery. With fiendish ingenuity, the rigid ecclesiastics had blocked up the window, then forced the beautiful creature to stand in the alcove, while with remorseless hands and iron hearts they had shut her into a living tomb to gain access to her land. With all that, it was necessary to find Mrs. Winchester so her soul could rest. Prayers were said that night for her soul. The next day the alcove was again walled up. Demons can subject the mind and the body. Demon subjection is one step beyond demon influence. When the moral law of God is persistently and flagrantly disregarded, demon influence may merge into demon subjection. The cursed then becomes the slave of the demon. Many have also become slaves because of illicit lust, perhaps goaded on by vile spirit that master their victims and drive them on to moral ruin. Those who nurse hate and revenge may find that a superhuman power takes over, impelling them to murder. Those who covet become slaves of greed. Those who persistently lie may become enslaved by evil spirit of falsehood until they are incapable of telling the truth. Persistent sin against the second table of the moral law regulating humans conduct towards humans (Exodus 20.13-17) opens the door to demon power than can derange a living soul’s mind, weaken one’s will, alienate one’s affections, and disturb one’s emotions. “Beware of sibling rivalry! At least said my grandmother. Which must explain, I do suppose, what happened to my little brother.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Winchester Mystery House
Fabulous photo op outside The Winchester Mystery House circa 1940s 💁🏻♀️
🎟 link in bio. https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Was the Fairy-Tale Transformation of Cinderella’s Footmen so Far-Fetched?
Cells provide structure and function for all living things, from microorganisms to humans. Scientists consider them the smallest form of life. Cells house the biological machinery that makes proteins, chemicals, and signals responsible for everything that happens inside our bodies. Knowing that all living things are made up of cells allows us to understand how organisms are created, grow, and die. By understanding how cells work in healthy and diseased states, cell biologists working in animal, plant, and medical science will be able to develop new vaccines, more effective medicines, plants with improved qualities. We must now attempt to bridge the gap between single-celled and multicellular organisms. Indeed, we must extend our considerations all the way up the scale of complexity to humans themselves. This may seem like a disproportionately small assignment of attention to the higher plants and animals. However, it has frequently been pointed out that practically all metabolic processes important to humans are found in single-celled organisms and that, it terms of a really balanced appraisal of evolutionary accomplishments, humans are much closer to amoeba than is amoeba to the nonliving materials from which it originated. Thus, we have been seeking to trace the development of life from nonlife, the space assigned here to the amoeba-to-man period many in fact be disproportionately large. However, the close evolutionary kinship between the lower and the higher forms of life must not blind us to some important problems that arise in attempting to apply to plants and animals the lessons learned from a study of single-celled organisms. How, for example, do we reconcile what we have learned about the genetic mechanisms with the variety of cell types in a single plant or animals? Are the DNA molecules and the chromosomes different for heart cells, liver cells, and never cells? Or do all cells in the body carry the same genetic instructions? However, if so, how can we account for the widely different chemical processes that must occur in the different kinds of body cells to give them such diversity in structure and metabolism? #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
For many years, evidence has been available to suggest that each cell in a complex organism must contain all the genetic information needed to specify the entire organism. As early as 1891 Hans Driesch obtained experimental results that seemed to require such a conclusion. He employed the common sea urchin in his experiment. Like all other animals, the sea urchin begins its development with a series of cell divisions. First the original fertilized egg divides into 2 cells; then each of the 2 cells divides, to make a total of 4 cells; then 8; then 16; and so on. Dr. Driesch discovered that is, in the 4-cell stage, the individual cells are sepaseparated cells will go on to develop into a complete sea urchin. Later experiments demonstrated the same principle with other animals, including vertebrates. In fact, the occurrence of identical human twins is ascribed to some form of intrauterine event that separates into two embryos the two cells that develop from the original fertilized egg. Recent work by J.B. Gurdon, zoologist at Oxford University, has provided unusually convincing evidence for the thesis that the nucleus of every cell carries a complete book of instructions for the entire organism. Working with a species of African aquatic frog, he has shown that the original egg cell will develop into a complete and normal animal, even after its nucleus has been replaced by one removed from a specialized intestinal cell of a relatively mature embryo of the same animal. Other experimental evidence is consistent with the implications of the work on embryos. Thus, the amount of DNA is found to be the same in liver cells, heart cells, skin cells, never cells, and so one. (Insect cells containing giant chromosomes obviously constitute an exception to the general rule that all cells contain the same amount of DNA.) Furthermore, the chromosomes, which can be seen with the optical microscope, have the same number and shape in all these cells. (The chromosomes are of different lengths, and they are not perfectly straight; their characteristic shapes make the matching of chromosomes from different types of cells more convincing than the mere obtaining of similar chromosomal counts would be.) #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
In higher animals, the single exception to chromosomal uniformity among different cell types is provided by the sex cells—the spermatozoa and ova of make and female. They have only half the number of chromosomes of all the other cells of the body—human sex cells possess only 23 chromosomes instead of 46, for example. However, this fact has a compelling logic of its own. For the chromosomes in all the other cells of the body are arranged in pairs, and it has been established that one member of each pair owes its origin to the male parent, the other to the female parent. With the initial fertilization of the female ovum by the male sperm cell such a pairing of the chromosomes of the two parents is made, with the result that all further cells possess a genetic endowment contributed equally by father and mother. This provides a certain degree of redundancy for the DNA content of the nucleus: two genes instead of one are available to provide architectural control for the assembly of each enzyme required by the body, one in the chromosome supplied by the male parent and the other in that supplied by the female parent. These two DNA molecules may be identical, or they may be slightly different and therefore call for the construction of protein products of slightly different properties. If the two are different and one is markedly more effective than the other in enzyme production, we say that the gene from the corresponding parent is “dominant” and that the other is “recessive.” Thus an individual with a gene from one parent calling for brown eyes and a gene from the other calling for blue eyes, there is an equal chance of the baby having brown eyes or blue eyes. However, if one of the grandparents has blue eyes, the odds of having a baby with blue eyes increases. And by the later separation of the paired chromosomes and allocation of single members of each pair to newly formed sex cells the adult individual passes on to its progeny the genetic endowment of its own forbears. It is, of course, the statistics associated with the successive pairing of the chromosomes from different individuals from generation to generation that gives rise to the long-known and once mysterious facts of Mendelian genetics. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
All this has a short of simplicity and internal consistency that is convincing with respect to our confidence in the correctness of our understanding. There seems today little doubt that every cell except the sex cells in the body of a plant or animal contains exactly the same aggregation of DNA molecules, combined in exactly the same chromosomal packages, as every other cell. (There is, of course, the previously mentioned exception of the giant chromosomes. However, even in such chromosomes the sequence of specific DNA molecules in each strand of nucleic acid appears to be the same as in all other cells of the body; there are just more parallel strands of identical giant giant molecules.) Thus, if we ever succeed in really translating all aspects of the genetic code, we should be able to deduce all the genetically determined characteristics of an individual—colour of the eyes, shape of the nose, contours of the face, pattern of the hairline—from analysis of the nucleic acid from a heart cell, a nerve cell, a skin cell, or a liver cell! However, retuning now to our objective reconciling the properties of single cells with the characteristic of higher organisms, we seem to have solved one problem only at the expense of rendering another one insoluble. For if, from the original fertilized egg on, every cell division results in the transmission to the new cell of exactly the same genetic specifications as those possessed by the generating cell, how can we account for the remarkable differences in the properties of the different types of ell that appear in a single plant or animal? After all, we have attributed to the genetic mechanisms overriding control of the chemical processes that make of any cell what it is. Therefore, if a heart cell and a liver cell have the same set of nuclear DNA molecules, how can they themselves by different? What we are about to do is modify somewhat the picture we have drawn of the rigid control of cell chemistry by the DNA of the nucleus. We shall do this, not by denying anything we have learned as to the key architectural responsibilities of the nucleic acid/enzyme mechanism, but by adding to our picture the structural modulating effects of other chemical agents. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
We shall learn that in living organisms as in human-made buildings, it is sometimes the workmen on the job who really determine the details of the construction; the architect may be the designated designer, but the carpenters, plumbers, and electricians are also to be reckoned with. For example, while the particular set of enzymes generated in the cytoplasm of the cell is determined by the genes in the genes in the nucleus, the effectiveness of the enzymes in performing their catalytic functions can be markedly influenced by a chemical ingredients in the cytoplasmic fluid. Certain molecules can apparently wrap themselves around enzymes and inactive them. (The inverse also occurs. Sometimes attached molecules are able to increase the activity of enzymes.) This phenomenon, in fact, frequently plays an important role in regulating cell chemistry, for evolution has worked in such a way that the end product of a chain of enzymatically catalyzed chemical reactions is often an inhibitor of one or more of the enzymes in the chain. This provides a kind of “negative feedback” around the reaction system, which slows or stops the generation of more end product if for any reason it begins to pile up in the cell. Useful though the sensitivity of enzyme effectiveness to other chemical agents may be in the normal metabolism of the cell, however, it also has the general result of making the cellular chemistry dependent to a degree on the cellular environment. If cells in different regions of a multicellular organism are washed by fluids of differing chemical content, the result can be different relative rates among the various enzymatically catalyzed reactions and, therefore, differences in the structure and chemistry of the cells. And even more striking kinds of influence of the environment on the cellular chemistry have been demonstrated. In one of the pioneering experiments, the lowly intestinal bacteria—Escherichia coli bacilli—again came to the aid of biological science. The scientists in this case were French, F. Jacob and J. Monod, of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. In 1959 they arrived at the explanation of a curious form of adaptability of the E. coli bacilli. These organisms thrive in a culture based on the sugar glucose. If then transferred to a solution of the sugar lactose, the bacteria colonies become dormant. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
After a while, however, they resume their growth, and they thenceforth appear as able to employ lactose as food as they were previously able to employ glucose. The obvious question is: “What happened to the transplanted bacteria to overcome their initial inability to digest lactose?” A part of the answer was obtained through the discovery that the new ability to employ lactose resulted from the eventual appearance in the cytoplasm of the bacilli of two new enzymes that do not appear when a glucose culture medium is used. One of these enzymes, it was found, modified the permeability of the outer cell membrane so as to permit molecules of lactose to enter the bacteria and thereby be exposed to the cytoplasmic chemistry. The other enzyme then acted on the lactose to break it down into the simpler molecular fragments that the E. coli metabolic mechanisms were equipped to use as food. This, of course, answered one question, but it posed another. Why did the presence of lactose in the surrounding fluid happen to result in the appearance of just the kinds of enzymes required by the bacilli in order to profit by the new environmental conditions? By a series of very careful experiments, Jacob and Monod one step further into the fundamentals of the cellular mechanisms. For they showed that the lactose of the environmental fluid, on seeping through the cellular membrane (some penetration occurs even before the new permeability-increasing enzyme is formed), acted as a sort of inhibitor to deactivate the product of one of the chromosomal genes. This gene, dubbed a “regulator” gene, through the usual nucleic acid/enzyme mechanisms, normally causes the production of a substance that suppresses the activity of two other genes in the nucleus—those capable of directing the manufacture of the two enzymes referred to. When the lactose “turned off” the inhibition normally caused by the regulator gene, the effect was to “turn on” the structural genes that permitted the cell to deal effectively with the new nutrient. The work of Jacob and Monod has led to the discovery of many examples of the switching on or off of genes by chemicals supplied to the cells. The experiments have been extended to tissues of rodents and humans, and the generality of the phenomenon of “gene switching” has been confirmed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Indeed, it is now believed that hormones achieve their powerful effects primarily by such means. Insulin activates certain genes in the body cells to the manufacture the messenger RNA that goes to the cytoplasm and assembles the kinds of enzymes that take care of fatty substance; thyroxine acts as a switch to turn on previously inactivated genes to make enzymes to control growth and metabolism; and so on. Interesting visual evidence of the correctness of these theories has been obtained by means of microscopic observations. In the giant chromosomes of various species of files a swelling or puffing has been observed at spots corresponding to the loci of particular genes, presumably when these genes are stimulated to activity by the chemical conditions in the cell. This puffing phenomenon seems to be related to the developmental stage of the tissue; for cells in different types of tissue, different gene loci show such signs of activity and at different developmental phases. Especially intense puffing of gene loci occurs at the time when the larvae start to pupate; this, of course, seems consistent with the very large changes in body chemistry that accompany metamorphosis. One of the most intensive fields of biochemical research today consistent of attempts to determine the detailed mechanisms involved in the phenomenon of gene switching. Clues have come from the laboratory of James Bonner at the California Institute of Technology. He and his coworkers have directed their attention to the protein material that, as we learned recently, is always associated with the DNA of the chromosomes. An important ingredient of this material is a protein called histone, or, when it appears as in this instance, nucleohistone. Working on the nuclei of cells from pea embryos, Bonner and his associated were able to show that 80 percent or more of the nuclear DNA is ordinarily bound to histone and that, furthermore, this histone-bound nucleic acid is inactive in the sense that it does not manufacture RNA. However, it was found possible to devise means for freeing the DNA molecules from histone, and they then became efficient RNA generators. Evidently, in natural cells, only one-fifth or fewer of the DNA molecules engage in constructive architectural activities at any time. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
When a chemical ingredient invades a cell nucleus and switches on a previously inactive gene, apparently it does so by stripping away the histone that, by binding itself to the gene in question, has been keeping it inactive. This, of course, implies that there are many different varieties of histone molecules, each one specific to a particular DNA molecule, and that the hormones or other gene-switching chemicals are likewise specific in their histone-stripping properties. Whether these inferences are correct and, if so, just how these tailored chemical operations are brought about constitute important and unresolved problems of current biochemical research. Whatever the detailed gene-switching mechanism may be, it has been established that they are sometimes able to produce spectacular effects. For example, one investigator cultured cells from the nervous system of an amphibian until they developed properties identifying them as early pigment cells with a characteristic content of pigment granules and a star-shaped contour. He then removed the cells from the culture medium, washed them, and placed them in a different medium. As a result some of the cells, without undergoing division, appeared to change their properties entirely, even going so far as to develop muscle fibrils with a recognizable cross striation, as though the cells had changed their type from never to muscle cells. There is also the curious adaptability of certain unicellular organisms such as various Naegleria species. They move around in an amoeboid from when they are on a relatively dry substratum in the presence of bacteria; but when they are surrounded by more or less pure water, they changed their structure entirely and developed flagellae at one, with the whole body elongated into a characteristic flagellate type. And a much more complex organism—the Mexican axolotl—which normally lives all its life and reproduced itself as a gilled newt in the water, can be turned into a land salamander at will by a single dose of thyroid. Despite the fact that the axolotl has lived out its life aquatically for thousands of generations, a fraction of a milligram of thyroxin, even from a sheep or fish, will bring out the latent salamander in a couple of weeks. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Indeed, the induction of major changes in an entire plant or animal by the influx into the cells of gene-switching chemicals is so common that it has been observed by all of us—in the metamorphosis of a tadpole into a frog or the pupation of an insect, for example. These changes can be induced at any time by dosing the young tadpole or larva with suitable hormones. Familiarity may blind us to the truly spectacular nature of such metamorphoses. The frog differs so much from the tadpole, and the butterfly from the larva, as to require that the nuclear DNA of each cell carry specifications for essentially two different species of organism, with switching arrangements to turn off one set of controlling genes and turn on the other upon receipt of the proper hormonal signal. In the face of such natural phenomena, one wonders whether the fairy-tale transformation of Cinderella’s white mice into footmen was so far-fetched after all! The modulating effects of externally supplied chemicals on the catalytic effectiveness of the enzymes and the even more powerful gene-switching capabilities of hormonal and other ingredients can cause different groups of cells in the same organism, despite a common genetic heritage, to develop widely different structural and metabolic properties. In principle, therefore, all that is necessary to account for cell diversity in complex organisms is a convincing explanation of how natural causes result in the imposition of different chemical environments of the different types of cells. The embryologist have been struggling with the problem for nearly two hundred years. In our next discussion, we shall complete our case for the purely physical basis of the structure and metabolism of higher plants, and animals by invoking some of the evidence from embryology for the physical basis of the structure and metabolism of higher plants and animals by invoking some of the evidence from embryology for the physical origins of differences in the environments to which different groups of cells are exposed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Before the discovery of antipsychotic drugs, psychotherapy was not really an option for people with schizophrenia. Most were simply too far removed from reality to profit from it. Only a handful of therapists, apparently blessed with extraordinary patience and skill, specialized in the psychotherapeutic treatment of this disorder and reported a measure of success. These therapists believed that the first task of such therapy was to win the trust of patients with schizophrenia and build a close relationship with them. The well-known clinical theorist and therapist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, for example, would initially tell her patients that they could continue to exclude her from their private World and hold onto their disorder as long as they wished. She reported that eventually, after much testing and acting out, the patients would accept, trust, and grow attached to her, and begin to talk to her about their problems. Case studies seemed to attest to the effectiveness of such approached and to the importance of trust and emotional bonding in treatment. Here a recovered woman tells her therapist how she had felt during their early interactions: “At the start, I didn’t listen to what you said most of the time but I watched like a hawk for your expression and the sound of your voice. After the interview, I would add all this up to see if it seemed to show love. The words were nothing compared to the feelings you showed. I sense that you felt confident I could be helped and that there was hope for the future. The problem with schizophrenics is that they can’t trust anyone. They can’t put their eggs in one basket. The doctor will usually have to fight to get in no matter how much the patient objects. Loving is impossible at first because it turns you into a helpless little baby. The patient can’t feel safe to do this until one is absolutely sure the doctor understands what is needed and will provide it.” Today psychotherapy is successful in many more cases of schizophrenia. By helping to relieve thought and perceptual disturbances, antipsychotic drugs allow people with schizophrenia to learn about their disorder, participate actively in therapy, think more clearly about themselves and their relationships, and make changes in their behaviour. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The most helpful forms of psychotherapy include insight therapy and two broader sociocultural therapies—family therapy and social therapy. Often these approaches are combined and tailored to a patient’s particular needs. Now, consider the behaviour of our professors and universities during the Dies, McCarthy and Feinberg Law investigations. It is hard to say which set the worse example to the students during those hearings: the Communist professors fearful for their jobs, or the colleges that—with magnificent exceptions, like Harvard—supinely received the investigators. A monumental blunder was being made—which did us desperate damage among thoughtful Europeans—and our professors shivered in their boots and our “radicals” hid like roaches. The important thing is not which group betrays the ideal in any particular case, but that young people become cynical about political action and resigned about the possibility of making a change. Following a party line, Communist teachers, at New York’s City College, denied their membership. This was a disastrous betrayal of the students. Not that it is wrong to avoid insolent force with fraud, but that the young students can grow only by politically affirming themselves. With the young, honour is more important than tactics or even than prudence. Leaders of youth must be knightly—grisly identity, but there it is. We have now passed through several decades in which the students in our colleges showed a political apathy probably unexampled in student history. Several causes have conspired to it. First, simple shell shock: the war and the atom bomb aroused such deep anxiety that the only defense against it was conventionality. (I remember lecturing on Kafka in 1948 to a hall of collegians consisting largely of veterans on the G.I. bill, and they frantically protested that Kafka was psychotic and should be paid no attention, he had no relation to reality—they who had lived through some of the Trial and were even then roaming under the Castle!) #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Secondly, the students have been seduced by business firms, which tempt and reward them for conformity; but as W. H. Whyte, Jr. points out, they are eager to conform even before they are paid. Correspondingly, in its appeal to less affluent body, the Army has found it wise to accept the stirring slogan, “Retire at 37.” If you question a boy draftee who has re-enlisted, he will explain that it is a “good deal.” That is, the Army has become the IMB of the less affluent boy who loves his country.” However, finally, is there any doubt that an important cause of the present political apathy of the young is the dishonorable radical leadership that they had in the Thirties and Forties? They now believe that all political thinking is a sell—just as those bright Catholic lads who stop believing the superstitions of scholasticism now believe that all philosophy is an intricate fraud, including the truths of scholasticism. This hipster skepticism is pervasive. It is partly, of course, resignation that a revolution has failed and the way is too thorny; but students are usually more resilient. I think that a more important factor is disgust that the radicals were not bona fide; the students were had. However, also, I fear, it is cynical superiority, an identification with either the fraudulent or the powerful. I referred above to the similarity between some of the Communists and young Organization Men today, in their lust for control apart from any objective good and, more deeply, in their use of an organized power-system in order to make the ingenuous and worthy not exist. In the Thirties and in 2020, it came about that Communists had/have high status in Hollywood and somewhat in publishing, and in the TV news media, so the three kinds of organized systems worked/work in the same offices—nor do I doubt that many of the refinements of present-day organization life were learned during this cohabitation. However, it has remained for our own decade to enjoy the brutal comedy of McCarthy and the FBI investigating the Communist in Hollywood, TV news media and publishing, so we have one stage three of the most “sinister” tribes in the country, who may seem “sarcastic” to the Communist party, when in fact, they are very serious. This leaves many wishing for a more simple ignobility. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
The symptoms of neuroticism have been well analyzed by psychiatrists. They all sum up to a single thing: intensity of egoistic emotion. This is disturbing to the mental balance of the neurotic person and trying to those who have contact with one. The negative thoughts and feelings include: excessive or constant criticism, pride, and conceit. Pride may present the self-confessions of a shortcoming or a blunder. Thus it does the ego’s dark work. The inhuman and destructive attitudes, unsympathetic and unpitying, are a sign of the evil presence a work in our midst. While humans seem permanently estranged from their spiritual selves, we need not wonder at the despair and hopelessness, the cynicism and selfishness, which enter into the moods of so many people today. Ignorance breeds violence and violence in its turn breeds further violence. If our desires choke the inner peace which might be ours during times of prosperity, our fears choke it during times of adversity. There are humans who are in a cycle of going down deeper into selfishness, illusion, spiritual ignorance, and extroversion. They have yet to touch the bottom of this descent, a contact which many older egos have also made before, but long ago left for the upward climb. Although the redemptive return of these unseeing entities is assured, for they cannot eternally and ultimately deny their own inmost nature, nevertheless, they will respond to the most morbid evil during the present phase of their descent. They are called “the Asuras” in the Bhagavad Gita, “the men of hatred, reed, and lust.” Lost religious faith is one link in a chain of which degraded morals is the next. The hopelessness which humankind’s situation naturally leads to is not less divinely-intended than any other effect of destiny’s turn. Many people in Europe must feel they have no future to live for and only an apathetic present in which just to exist, not live. Since God permits this, evidently God perceives its value in the evolutionary scheme. Yes, there is odious evil in the World—much of it petty but some of it quite monstrous. It takes its genesis in the thoughts of humans Mentalism says that most of one’s misery is inflicted on oneself by accepting and holding negative thoughts. They cover and hide the still center of one’s being, which is infinite happiness. Whereas all the great prophets like Jesus Christ and Krishna make a religion out of love, the demonists make a religion out of hatred. Those who constantly indulge in savage criticism of persons or principles, who are saturated with negative thoughts and feelings, have never seen the Light nor felt its peace. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Throughout the ages and the World, virginity is essential in as-yet-unmarried women. Culture, religion, and societal values demand it; the law enforces it. However, how, precisely, does one go about proving virginity? They are verified by an Obstetrician-Gynecologists. Nonetheless, this elusive and irritatingly variable membrane that they investigate has been and still is the object of intense scrutiny, though it is likely that only highly trained physicians can correctly interpret what they see or feel. For every test there is an anti-test, and as many people specialize in concealing or repair these membranes as in recognizing them. In the contest between the two groups of “experts,” the great moral issues of virginity is reduced to true absurdity. Some mothers have their own way of investigating and often do until the daughter is married. It is her responsibility to keep pure. The Apocryphal Gospels describe how a skeptical Salome, who had witnessed Jesus’ birth, tested Mary just as other mothers do. However, Mary’s mother felt a searing burn and had to terminate her examination. The divine significance of the incident was not lost on Salome. Postpartum Mary had passed her test. Zulus and other South African peoples are currently reviving a similar testing ritual that has all but died out decades ago. Recently, this value of virginity has appreciated. Virginity testers are often traditional healers who, for a small fee, examine each young client, then issue certificates of virginity to all the girls who are pure. In the past, virginity testing determined the bride price—a virgin was worth an additional cow, for example. Today, virginity has profound health implications, though some South Africans worry that instead of setting new standards of morality, the certified virgins may be at risk of assault because people think they can sure deadly illnesses. That is why medical records are kept private, for the safety of the patient and possibly others. On wedding nights throughout the World, proof of virginity is almost universally required. However, some of these tests are easy to cheat on. Tin Greece, there are also some brutal ways people use to test to see if others are virgins. Much like in the witch hunts, if one of the participates in a dangerous sport dies of their wounds, they are called “false virgins.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
In Algeria, the older women say they can spot unchastity in how a woman carries herself and uses the restroom. Certain Algerian midwives boast they can tell from inspecting the colour of the membrane. Medical doctors, too, are consulted, so worried parents can produce a qamija, a medical certificate. The doctor’s examination, however, is easy to circumvent. A real virgin is presented to him or he and the certificate obtained in the false virgin’s name. Physicians sometimes collude in hiding the evidence. In Sudan, for example, wealthy nonvirgins have gynecologists surgically reconstruct the missing membrane. In ancient Greece, perfumed pessaries were used to rejuvenate some of these private areas. Repaired, disguised, and substituted membranes, rejuvenated private areas, false virginity—the forces of deception are powerful. They have to be. The stakes are immense, the consequences of failure unthinkable. Preventive measures, therefore, have been correspondingly harsh: seclusion, genital mutilation, foot-binding, child marriage, terrorization. The paradox is that all this heavy-handedness and torture are orchestrated to ensure nubile, hormonally driven young women resist every carnal instinct and remain celibate until a suitable man becomes available. If this does not happen—for instance, because a society has a skewed gender riot or a young women must wait until a homely older sister finds a mate—the forced virginity is lifelong. The virgins, alas, are often coerced rather than converted. They understand the gravity of violating the celibacy commandment, if only by witnessing what happens to other women whose unchastity is revealed, but the message is a mechanical one: getting caught brings terrible retribution. The issue is couched in rhetoric about family honour and shame, mianzi in almost every language known to humans. It is seldom if ever approached from the perspective of the young woman who must bear the burden of abiding by it. Again, that familiar irony: the least-valued member of society is the one whose virtue is crucial to the honour and prosperity of her entire family. Even to herself, she is considered inferior, weaker in all ways than males, less deserving of food, education, leisure, personal choice. Temptations about. Her heart is treacherous and she desires intimacy. Importuning, testosterone-ridden males make many promises. However, if she is caught surrendering her virginity, she becomes society’s pariah, scorned, cast out, sold away, stoned by her brother’s hand, fed to hungry horses. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
This scenario is timeless and international. It both reflects and results from the moral and cultural conundrum on which most societies are constructed. Western nations have only recently slackened their rules and evaluation of unmarried women who are no longer virginal. Elsewhere, the old ways often still reign supreme. Nonetheless, pragmatism and vitalistic philosophy also belong to the same typical ethical dynamism. When pragmatism speaks of experience, it surrenders the criteria of truth and the good no less than does vitalistic philosophy. There are for it no norms above the dynamic processes of experience, that is, of experienced life. The question of what kind of life creates ethical experience and what the standards of a true ethical experience are is not answered and cannot be answered within the context of pragmatic thought. Therefore, the pragmatists and the positivists take their refuge in an ethical instinct, that is supposed to lead to an ethical common sense. This refuge is secure so long as there is a society with a strong common belief and conventional morals maintained by the leading groups of society. Such a situation in the acme of the bourgeois development, for instance, in the Victorian era. However, it was no longer effective when the harmony of a satisfied society slowly dissolved, and dissatisfied groups, masses, and nation asked for a new order of life. The ethical instincts of the ascendant Victorian bourgeoisie, and the refuge in ethical instinct and common sense became ineffective. Pragmatism and positivism were unable to face this threat, because, in their basic ideas, they agree with the philosophy of life. The intellectual defense of Anglo-Saxon civilization against fascist ideologies is extremely weak. Common-sense philosophy and pragmatism are not able to provide criteria against the dynamic irrationalism of the new movements; and they are not able to awaken the moral power of resistance necessary for the maintenance of the humanistic values embodied in Western and Anglo-Saxon civilization. It is not positivism and pragmatism, but the remnants of the rationalistic-progressive solution of the ethical problem on which the future of that civilization is based. This solution is the most natural one for undisturbed bourgeois thought and is still deeply rooted in the subconscious of contemporary philosophers as well as of laymen. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
There are, according to this point of view, some eternal principles, the natural law of morals, but without the supranatural sanction claimed for it in the Catholic system. These principles, as embodied in the Bill of Rights, are like starts that always remain remote from every human realization but that, like stars, how the direction in which humankind must go. Once discovered, they cannot disappear again, although their theoretical and practical realization is always in process toward a higher perfection. In this way they are adaptable to every human situations. Is this the solution of the problem of ethics in a changing World? In some ways it is, in some ways not. It indicates the direction in which the solution must be sought. There must be something immovable in the ethical principle, the criterion and standard of all ethical change. There must be a power of change within the ethical principle itself. And both must be united. However, the rationalistic-progressive solution is far from reaching this unity. It establishes some principles, such as freedom and equality, in the name of the absolute natural law to be found in nature and human reason at any time and in any place. Humankind is supposed to realize these principles, theoretically and practically, in a process of approximation. It is the same natural law, the same principles that always have been more of less known, more or less received in reality. “More or less” points t a quantitative difference, not to a qualitative change, not to new creations in the ethical realm. Ethics in a changing World changes only quantitatively, that is, as far as progress or regression with respect to their realization is more concerned. More or less freedom and more or less equality are admitted, but not a new freedom or a new equality. However, the principles on which the progressive-rationalistic solution is based represents a special pattern, a special type of freedom and equality, that of the later ancient and that of the modern bourgeois period. They do not represent principles comprehensive enough to embrace all periods and creative enough to bring new embodiments of themselves. They are not eternal enough to be ultimate principles and not temporal enough to fit a changing World. Therefore, as the Catholic system was not able to adapt itself seriously to the modern period of bourgeois growth, so the bourgeois-progressive rationalism was not able to face the breakdown of the bourgeois World. Supranatural and rational absolutism in ethics both proved to be unable to adapt themselves to a fundamental change in the historical situation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Now back to rates of change. Remember we discussed starting with the mind’s eye image of a freeway. And at its side a police officer sat on a motorcycle, pointing radar gun at the road. And on this highway were nine cars, each representing a major institution in America. Each car traveling at a speed that matched the institution’s actual rate of change. Well, now we will start with the fastest car on the road. One hundred miles per hour: Zooming along at a hundred miles per hour on our figurative freeway is a car representing the fastest-changing major institution in America today—the company, or business. It is in fact, the driver of many transformations in the rest of society. Companies are not only moving rapidly, they force suppliers and distributors to change in parallel, all driven by intense competition. As a result, we find firms speeding to alter their mission, functions, assets, products, size, technology, workforce, customer relations, internal culture and just about everything else. Each of these spheres changes at different rate. In the business World, technology blasts ahead—at a pace very often faster than managers and employees can handle. Finance, too, is transforming itself at eye-popping speeds in response not just to technology but to new scandals, new regulations, diversifying markets and financial volatility. Meanwhile, accounting and other systems scramble to keep up. Ninety miles per hour: There is a car speeding right behind business, and its occupants may surprise you, as they did us. Institutions number two, we have concluded, is civil society considered collectively, and packed like circus clowns into that second speeding car. The civil society is a burgeoning hothouse sector made up of thousands of churning and changing nongovernmental grassroots organizations (NGOs)—pro-business and anti-business coalitions, professional groups, sports federations, Catholic orders and Buddhist nunneries, plastics-manufacturing associations, anti-plastic activists, cults, tax haters, whale lovers and everyone in between. Most such groups are in the business of demanding change—in the environment, government regulations, defense spending, local zoning, disease-research funding, food standards, human rights and thousands of other causes. However, other are dead set against certain changes and do everything they can to prevent or at least slow such change. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Using lawsuits, pickets, and other means, environmentalists have slowed the building of nuclear plants in the United States of America by delaying their construction and driving legal costs up to the point at which they are potentially unprofitable. Whether one agrees with the anti-nuke movement’s position or not, it illustrates the use of time and timing as an economic weapon. Because NGO-led movements tend to be made up of small, fast, flexible units, organized in networks, they can run rings around huge corporate and government institutions. Overall, a case can be made that none of the other key institutions in American society comes close to the rates of change we see in these two sectors: business and the civil society. Sixty miles per hour: The third car, too, has surprising occupants. In it, we find the American family. For thousands of years, the typical household in most parts of the World was large and multigenerational. Significant change began only when countries industrialized and urbanized, at which point family size shrank. The nuclear-family model, more suitable to industrial and urban conditions, became dominant. As late as the mid-1960s, experts insisted that the nuclear family—officially defined as a working father, a stay-at-home-mom, and two children under the age of eighteen—would never lose any dominance. Today fewer than 25 percent of American homes fit this designation. Single parents, unmarried couples, once-, twice- (or more) remarried couples with children from previous alliances geriatric marriages, and recently, legalized marriages of alternative couples, have all sprung up or gone public. In a few short decades, therefore, the family system—once among the slowest of all social institution to change—has been transformed. And another rapid change is on the way. During the long agrarian millennia, the family unit has many important functions. It worked as a production team in the fields or cottage. It educated its children, tended the sick and took care of the elderly. As one country after another industrialized, however, work shifted from home to factory. Education was outsourced to the schools. Health care moved to the doctor or the hospital. Care of the elderly became a state of obligation. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Today, while corporations are outsourcing functions, the American family is insourcing them. For tens of millions of American families, work has already moved back into the home part- or full time, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. The same digital revolution that facilitates work-at=home also moves shopping, investigating, trading stocks and many other functions into the house. Education remains locked in the schoolroom but, the pandemic has forced many kids, teens and adults to take accredited course online. Paralleling work, is likely to migrate at least partially back into the home and to other locations permanently as Internet access, WiFi and mobile phone communications spread through society. More and more elder care, too, will likely return to the home, spurred by government and private insurance plans that seek to reduce the high costs of nursing homes and hospitalization. Family formats, frequency of divorce, pleasure of the flesh, intergenerational relations, dating patterns, child rearing and other dimensions of family life are all changing rapidly. Thirty miles per hour: If companies, NGOs and family arrangements are changing at high speed, what about labour unions. For half a century, as we have seen, the United States of America has been shifting from muscle work to mind work, from interchangeable to non-interchangeable skills, and from blindly repetitive to innovational tasks. Work is increasingly mobile, taking place on airplanes, in cars, at hotels, and restaurants. Instead of staying in one organization with the same co-worker for years, individuals are moving from project team to task force and work, continuingly losing and gaining teammates. Manu are “free agents” on contract, rather than employees as such. Yet while corporations are changing at a hundred miles per hour. American unions remain frozen in amber, saddled with legacy organizations, methods, and models left over from the 1930s, and the mass production era. In 1955 U.S. labour unions represented 33 percent of the today workforce, today that number is 13 percent. The proliferation of NGOs reflects the rapid de-massification on interests and lifeways in a largely Third Wave America. The parallel decline of unions reflects the decay of Second Wave mass society. Unions have a residual role to play, but to survive they will need a new road map and a faster vehicle. We will continue this discussion tomorrow. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Here they are. The soft eyes open. If they have lived in a wood, it is a wood. If they have lived on plains, it is grass rolling under their feet forever. Having no souls, they have come, anyway, beyond their knowing. Their instincts wholly bloom and they rise. The softs eyes open. To match them, the landscape flowers, outdoing, desperately, outdoing what is required: the riches wood, the deepest field. For some of these, it could not be the place it is, without blood. These hunt, as they have done, but with claws and teeth grown perfect. More deadly than they can believe. They stalk more silently, and crouch on the limbs of trees, and their descent upon the bright backs of their prey. May take years in a sovereign floating of joy. And those that are hunted know this as their life, their reward: to walk. Under such trees in full knowledge of what is in glory above them, and to feel no fear, but acceptance, compliance. Fulfilling themselves without pain. At the cycle’s center, they tremble, they walk under the tree. They fall, they are torn, they rise, they walk again. Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgressions, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? You have been told, O man, what is god, and what the Lord requires of you; only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to talk humbly with your God. The sacrifice of a wicked man is an abomination to the Lord, but the prayer of the upright is His delight. Thus saith the Lord: Will you still, murder and commit adultery, swear falsely, and walk after other gods, and then come and stand before Me in My house, whereupon My name is called, and think tht merely by uttering words you will be saved, saved to continue all these abominations? When you offer such prayers, I will not hear. I cannot endure iniquity along with solemn worship. Hear the word of the Lord, all who enter these gates to worship. If you thoroughly mend your ways and your doings; if you see that justice is done between man and man, if you oppose not the stranger, the orphan and the widow, and shed not innocent blood, neither walk after the gods, then shall your light break forth as the morning, and your healing shall spring forth speedily; your righteousness shall go before you; the glory of the Lord shall be your protection. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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That was Heinous Crime–Do Not Waste Granny’s Delicious Chess Pie Like that!
Various scientists around the World are trying to build cells from scratch. Marileen Dogterom has been piecing together a cytoskeleton in the Netherlands. Kate Adamala is attaching receptors to a lipid bilayer in Minnesota. And Tetsuya Yomo built RNA that can evolve like the real thing in Japan. However, by and large they have been independently working on different cell parts. Now, a growing number of collaborations are melding these efforts together and speeding progress toward an audacious goal: building a living cell out of non-living molecules. A cell constructed from the ground up would let researchers better test drugs, enable bioengineers to build the next generation of cellular machines, and help biologists answer the fundamental questions: What does it mean to be alive? The efforts to find out is driving toward a common purpose: constructing organisms that have some properties of cells, such as the ability to divide and pass on information to their offspring. Scientists can also customize these new creations, building cells to do things that might not occur in nature. Perhaps most interestingly, they might build something that meets our definition of “alive” but looks nothing like existing cells—perhaps it has a different information storage molecule than DNA, or it is enclosed not by lipids but by proteins. Creating and studying such a thing might help answer the basic question of what it means for something to be alive. Researcher J. Craig Venter Institute announced that they had created a minimal bacterial cell—a Mycoplasma bacteria that contained just enough genes to stay alive. That number is 473. Cut one more gene off, and the bacteria will not work properly. Add an extra gene, and not the bacteria is carrying unnecessary baggage. However, at the time of the study’s publication, the scientists only knew the function that 324 those genes actually served. The remaining 149 did something to keep the cell chugging along, but scientists do not know what. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
As cellular chemistry became more and more complex, requiring increasing numbers of different enzymes to direct the many separate metabolic reactions on which life depended, the problem of ensuring that the individuals of each generation received a complete complement of the corresponding types of DNA molecules must have become more and more critical. It seems unlikely that modern cells, with their survival requiring the successful completion of complex reaction sequences depending on thousands of different enzymes, could ever have developed if a way had not been found to pass DNA along from parent to offspring in an orderly manner. Fortunately, orderly procedures were possible and evolution succeeded in finding one. All the principles governing continuity of general characteristics withing species and inheritance of detailed characteristics by individual derive from the nature of the particular procedure that is now universally employed by living organisms for the precise handling of DNA. The processes we are about to consider occur in the nucleus. With a small exception, to be discussed later, that is where all the DNA of the cell resides. In very primitive organisms such as bacteria, in which a definite nucleus/cytoplasm boundary is hard to detect, there is still a localized nuclear region within which the processes in question take place. The key to the modern genetic protection mechanism is packaging. Within the nucleus the thousands of different DNA molecules do not simply mill around, each performing its functions of self-replication and manufacture of complementary RNA molecules independently of the rest. Instead, the DNA molecules carry, a big step further, the long-chain structural concept that led to their own formation. They themselves hook together end to end, thereby forming nucleic acid “strands”—giant giant molecules composed of individual DNA components, each of which is already a giant molecule because of its own linking together of hundreds or thousands of nucleotides. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
In the cell of a complex organism there may be thousands of different DNA molecules strung together to form each such gigantic array. All of such strands or arrays possessing the same configuration of DNA molecules then line up side by side, along with some protein material about whose function we shall later speculate. The resulting package is called a chromosome. (Evidence suggests that, in most cells, there are only few copies—perhaps only one—of each type of giant giant molecule. However, certain special cells, such as those in the salivary gland of the fruit fly, develop giant chromosomes containing thousands of times as much DNA as the average cell. In such special cases the chromosome appears to be a bundle of thousands of parallel and identical strands of DNA.) The separate types of DNA molecules that compose the chromosome are called genes. Higher organisms package many more different genes in each chromosome than do lower organisms, in order to carry the book of instructions that directs the complex chemistry of the cell. Frequently there are also more chromosomes. Thus only 8 chromosomes are found in the nuclei of fruit-fly cells, 46 in those human cells. Each stand of a chromosome acts partly as if it were a single molecular entity, partly like a loose aggregation of separate molecules. It reproduces itself as a unit—each ordered array of DNA molecules begets another similarly ordered array of the same types of DNA molecules. On the other hand, the individual DNA molecules seem able to perform their chores of manufacturing messenger RNA independently of one another. However, in the movement of DNA from the nucleus of an old cell to that of a new one, during cell division, again unit action occurs: the separate DNA molecules are evidently tied together tightly enough that only completely strands participate in the migration. It is, of course, cell division (mitosis) that plays for modern organisms the same kind of reproduction role that plays for modern organisms that same kind of reproduction role that was once played by the physical forces of wind and wave as they broke into smaller pieces the primitive coacervates. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Nowadays, however, it is the chemical state of the cell, rather than the physical conditions of the environment, that sets into motion the reproduction process. For example, it is possible that the complex interrelated chemical activities of mitosis are triggered by the approach to some built-in limit by the amount of DNA in the nucleus. Certain it is that, between successive divisions of a growing cell, the amount of nuclear DNA doubles. Whatever may be the initiator of the processes of mitosis, the events that take place are known to every student of elementary biology. They are featured by a doubling of each of the chromosomes, a dissolution of the nuclear membrane, and an orderly migration of the two resulting sets of chromosomes to opposite sides of the cell. This is followed by a pinching together of the walls of the extended cell to form two separate cellular units and finally by the reestablishment of nuclear membranes to contain the chromosomal material. The result is two cells instead of one, each possessing approximately half of the original cytoplasmic material and a set of nuclear DNA molecules identical with that with which the parent cell started life. However, we have explicitly localized these DNA packaging and distribution mechanisms in the nucleus. And references have been made to the fact that not quite all of the DNA of the cell is confined in the nucleus. The time has come to explain thee references and to examine whether the existence and properties of the nonnuclear DNA can be accommodated in our picture of the DNA protection mechanisms. The nonnuclear DNA—of an amount totaling a very few percent of that located in the nucleus—is found in some of the organelles of the cytoplasm. Mitochondria contain a small amount of DNA; so do chloroplasts, the chlorophyl-containing inclusions that perform photosynthesis in green plants. And this DNA clearly carries out genetic functions. This is been proved by experiments in which mutations were induced in the DNA of the cytoplasmic organelles by microbeams of ultraviolet radiation so directed as to miss the nucleus; physically abnormal organelles were then observed to occur in all subsequent descendants of the irradiated cell—showing that the undamaged nuclear DNA did not provide the structural specifications involved. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Further elaboration of the details of the nonnuclear genetic mechanisms, which is under way today in a number of research laboratories, is clearly of great scientific importance. The discoveries already made render it untenable to attribute all of the genetic control of an organism to the nucleus, as was once done. However, there is as yet no evidence calling for other major changes in the picture we have drawn of the genetic mechanism. For the experimental results are compatible with the hypothesis that the nucleic acid/enzyme processes related to the small amount of DNA of the organelles are just like those related to the much larger amount of DNA in the nucleus. The organelle DNA appears to manufacture messenger RNA which assembles corresponding enzymes. And, during mitosis, not only does the nucleus of the cell divide but so also do the organelles we are considering. It seems likely, too, that there are chromosomal mechanisms within the organelles that cause their genetic material to be accurately apportioned between parent and offspring, just as in the case of the nucleus. Thus, while it is interesting to speculate about the course of evolutionary development that has withheld from the nucleus of modern cells, there is as yet no indication that the anomaly of nonnuclear DNA requires any other major revision in our basic concepts pertaining to the genetic mechanisms. Whether we have in mind the nuclear or the nonnuclear DNA packaging arrangements, it is clear that their net effect is to remove most of the element of chance from the basic mechanism of genetics. The precise propagation of DNA molecules from one generation of cells to the next results in similar precision in the chemical and physical nature of the progeny. A splitting amoeba process more amoebae, a paramecium more paramecia, a human cell more human cells. Even though the environmental conditions within which the new generations develop differ somewhat from those which nourished their parents—in temperature, chemical composition of the surrounding fluids, and so on—the relatively tight control over the specific cellular chemical processes exercised by the powerful protein enzymes, which in turn owe their creation to the specific roster of DNA molecules in the chromosomes, results in the remarkable continuity of species characteristics that features modern living forms. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
A final comment about what may seem to be a curious inconsistency in one aspect of our argument would appear to be in order. We have just expressed admiration for the effectiveness of the chromosomal mechanisms in preventing change in the nature of the vital DNA material in going from one generation to another. And yet, only a few days ago or so, our sympathies seemed quite different. For the development of our theories then we emphasized the existence of mechanisms capable of causing accidental changes in the ingredients responsible for the structure and metabolism of our organisms. We even went so far as to postulate the presence in the primordial seas of a small quantity of “nucleotide-linking catalyst” that encouraged the accidental formation of nucleic acid molecules of increased length and complexity. We could in addition have expressed satisfaction with the knowledge that thermal collisions and radioactive particles are also capable of causing mutations in the structure of nucleic acid molecules. Is our earlier emphasis on change consistent with our later emphasis on genetic stability? Fortunately, it is not too difficult to reconcile these apparently incompatible points of view. During the era of preanimate coacervates, when extensive refinement in structure and metabolism was necessary before anything like living organisms could exist, there was obviously a premium on “mutagenic agents.” This led not only to a corresponding emphasis in our literary treatment but probably also, by the normal economics of the evolutionary processes, to a relative abundance of such agents in the primordial seas. However, after eons of the trial-and-error refinement of the properties of organisms, a time must ultimately have come when random change in their properties was so much more likely to be harmful than helpful to the species that the advantage would all have been on the side of a combination of environment and organisms leading to relatively low rates of mutation in the hereditary mechanisms. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Natural selection would then not only have brought to prominence such techniques for protection of the property-determining ingredients as we have just considered in connection with the nuclear DNA but might even have acted to diminish the abundance in the environment of some of the mutagenic agents. For example, if in certain regions primitive organisms were spilling into the seas such a quantity of nucleotide-linking catalyst as to lead to an undesirably high rate of mutation in the properties of most other organisms in the vicinity, there would have been a tendency for the main line of evolutionary development to be retarded in such regions; the result would ultimately have been the starving out of the undesirable mutagen-producing species as the course of evolution in remoter regions accelerated the proliferation of more modern strains. Whether such developments occurred to slow down the rate of mutation or whether it was always slow (with the extensive accomplishments of evolution attribute only to the great time periods available), it is certain that today the combination of environment and organism seem usually to emphasize stability rather than change. When modern cells successively divine and send some of their precious DNA to guide the construction of new individuals, we expect the DNA that each new individual ultimately sends on to its progeny to be identical with that which it received, and we are rarely disappointed. It is likely that, on the average, each individua DNA molecule duplicates itself 100,000 or more times without the change of even a single atom in the thousands of which it is composed. Changes do occur occasionally, to be sure; if they did not, evolutionary development would be impossible. However, in terms of the few dozen or few thousand years over which the human species makes most of its observations, the protection provided to the large majority of the DNA by its nuclear environment and the precision of the mitotic distribution mechanisms, together with the relative scarcity of mutagenic agents, now contributes a remarkable degree of stability to the structure and metabolism of living organisms. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The sophisticated membrane properties of the modern cell, the ribosomal and mitochondrial structures, the nucleic acid/enzyme mechanisms, the chromosomal/mitosis processes—these and other features have been achieved at a tremendous cost of time and painstaking trial-and-error experiment. It is fortunate that the natural forces of evolution operate in such a way as to require convincing evidence of superiority before novel processes are allowed to replace such tried-and-true structural and metabolic principles. Looking ahead, does bullying qualify as a national crisis? Bullying is an unacceptable behaviour that adults and students have a responsibility to stop. Most people think of bullying as teasing someone and make lighthearted jokes about an individual. However, it is a blanket term to downplay serious crimes. Bullying and cyberbullying can become a crime if you: physically assault someone, vandalize property, harass someone especially if the harassment is based on gender or racism. Furthermore, violent threats, death threats, obscene and harassing phone calls and texts are also criminal acts. The list goes on to include explicit photos of an adult or minor used to extort the person, or sharing these photos with other, stalking someone, committing hate crimes, taking a photo of someone in a place where they expect privacy, and extortion. Do not think these acts are not a crime. The Secret Service released a report examining the dozens of school shooting that have taken place across the United States of America since 1997. It found that bullying was a factor in two-thirds of them. In some cases, the shooters had been bullies; much more often, they had been the victims of bullying. A survey released by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Nickelodeon asked a national sample of children aged 8 to 15 what issues in school concerned them most, and all age groups pointed to teasing and bullying as “big problems” that ranked higher than racism, deadly illnesses, and peer pressure. Reports such as these have elevated bullying from a narrow concern that is best dealt with by students themselves (or perhaps by the teachers and parents of those directly involved) to wide speared problems that requires the attention of school-level programs and statewide policies. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
A recent study found that a full 30 percent of American students are involved in moderate or frequent bullying—11 percent have been victims, 13 percent have been bullies, and percent have been both. Other studies report even higher results. When you sit down to talk to someone who has been a victim of noted death threats, felony assault and vandalizing, stalking, and trespassing never says, “So you are being bullied.” That is totally making the situation seem like someone has just been teased by children on the playground. However, when someone in a political position is hit in the face with a pie, it suddenly becomes a very serious problem and is called “assault,” no bullying, or “just horsing around.” In 2016, when Sean Thompson walked up to the defunct mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson, and hit him in the face with a pie. The Johnson then tackled Thompson, then punched him more than half a dozen times until his face looked like a “bloody pulp.” Sean Thompson hit Kevin Johnson with a pie because he put more than half a billion dollars into the King’s arena, instead of projects that could actually help people in the community. Sacramento then charged Sean Thompson with many believe was the stiffest potential penalty a pie-thrower has ever received: felony assault and misdemeanor battery, with a bail of $100,000. Many believe the punishment was unconstitutional. However, when you look into Kevin Johnson, many may wonder why he got away with so much when he was far more than a bully, then rewarded by becoming mayor, where he racked up more crimes that as of yet, have still gone unpunished? Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot and a European American mayor had responded to a young African American male the same way. The World would have been outraged. While the issue of equality is important, African Americans do not want to be perceived as aggressive victims. The issue is equal rights under the law for all. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
How easy can it be for clinicians to identify which children will turn dangerously violent if indeed 33 percent of all children have experienced bullying? One thing to keep in mind about self-defense, is often times it is, in many cases, better to walk away from the situation because it may not go the way you think it will. Certain people, and those in certain positions get more leeway when it comes to how they react to “bullying.” However, keep in mind, when it comes to self-defense, you will need to prove you had a reasonable belief that you were in imminent danger of suffering harm or death, you have reasonable belief that using force was necessary to prevent such harm, and you used an amount of force that was necessary to stop that threat. Because if some person hits you in the face with a pie, and you beat them to a bloody pulp, you might actually go to jail for that because that is called excessive force. How can we rid ourselves of a problem as pervasive as this? Short of raising kinds in isolation chambers…bullying behaviours can never be eliminated entirely from the sustained hazing ritual knows as growing up. Remember bullying and the force you use to defend yourself can be considered a criminal act. Think about it, is assault or a hate crime worth being sent to jail for? Is being mean and cruel and hurting other people worth running their life and yours? Next time you think it is funny to hurt someone in person or online, think carefully about the consequences. You may think it is funny at first, but think about how much fun it would be for you to be spending time in jail! Think about how being in jail could prevent you from attending college, having a great career? Think about having a criminal record for the rest of your life, which could even impact who is willing to marry you, rent to you, or hire you for a job. Think about how funny you think it is when you bully others. However, if you go to jail, think about how others will feel about you. None of these things would be too much fun…would they? #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Equal to some businessmen, some of our government and public spokesmen have a knack for debasing the noble and making the excellent trivial. The current disease is to make Cold War capital out of everything, no matter what. We cannot dedicate a building of William Carson’s of Sarah Winchester’s in California without criticism for being so beautiful and creative. This type of criticism is tasteless; the matter becomes serious when our freedoms are involved. Many civil rights leaders and organized friends of culture keep repeating freedom of speech, freedom of culture. (You would think that we did not have our own means of censoring, by commercial selections and by swamping.) However, many Americans are facing Cold War censorship, not only have they been forced to wear masks, and get two and three vaccinations, there is also talk out of Washing about having Americans receive a COVID vaccine every year. In addition, many people had to shut down their businesses and stay locked in their homes during the pandemic. The concern is that this sort of treatment could turn into tyranny. This resulted in an inconceivable loss of revenue and tourists. Such behaviour is inconceivable by Americans. We are not at Cold War with the American Dream of working hard will afford you a nice lifestyle. However, tyranny is patriotically disastrous; it teaches that our spokesmen and women are not earnest; they pick and choose when to stand up from freedom of thought. How then can a boy be proud? (But to be sure, we have little such freedom, compared with the British, for our mass media are not, like their, open to fundamental controversy. It is not surprising, therefore, that for English Angry Young Men an important topic is their outraged patriotism, whereas our Beats do not care about that.) Racial antipathy leading to actual violence is not limited to humans, although it is only the less evolved humans who resort to it. In the tropics one sees black ants fighting the red ones, mutilating and even ending the lives of one another. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The final tragedy of Humans: that they let themselves go along with destructive forces which in the end could gravely injure the whole species, when they could go alone with the constructive ones. This fleshly body, in which we live and move and have our being, has, through pleasures of the flesh and sport, become a cult to the modern World. We fall in our millions, prostrate votaries at its shrine, forgetful that its quick growth is followed by quick decay, that our idol is doomed to crumble. Too many moments of highest enthusiasm on the part of youth are often reserved for the new religion—sport. A whole theology has been built up around the strokes of a bat and the throws of a ball; hard hitters are now canonized as saints. One who throws one’s ball far enough may yet send oneself, with it, to the new Heavenly America! And as far as pleasures of the flesh, the passions and emotions of the young are deliberately stimulated by the arts of literature, journalism, cinema, and advertising just at the age when they ought to be disciplined. How little humans collectively learn from the past is show by every textbook of history, which teems with constant repetitions of the ugliest passions. The Worldwide condition of human mass, its hates, ignorance, and violence, brings despair to many a thoughtful mind. Violence is a destructive force which in the end and when excessive destroys even itself. Among the negative emotions we must include prejudice and bias. The negative emotions include arrogance and vanity, cowardice and moral weakness. All the negative thoughts and feelings show a misuse of mental power. Temptations and beguilements, illusions and deceptions, beset the path of ordinary life just as they do the inner life of the quest. However, in the latter case they may also assume a subtler form. Here there are telepathic, psychic, spiritualistic, and neurotic possibilities. There are times when a person is more vulnerable to attack by negative thought than at other times. In great emotional excitement, anger, or passion of any kind, we are most susceptible. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Yet, there are three great types of life and thought representing three different solutions of the problem of ethics in historical change: first, the static supranaturalistic solution, represented by the Roman Catholic church and expressed in the ethics of Thomas Aquinas; second, the dynamic-naturalistic solution, represented by the National Socialist movement and expressed in the ethics of the philosophers of life; third, the rationalistic-progressive solution, represented by Anglo-Saxon common sense expressed in the ethics of the philosophers of reasons. With tremendous psychological power the static supranaturalistic solution maintains the eternal and immovable character of the ethical norms and commands. Philosophy and theology co-operate in this direction. The World is conceived as a system of eternal structures, preformed in the divine mind, which are substance and essence of everything and which establish the norms and laws for a human’s personal and social practice. Philosophy discovers these structures and laws, and revelation confirms and amends them. Revelation adds some superstructures of its own that are new and higher laws, but equally eternal and immovable. Both the natural and the supranatural together form a hierarchy of powers and values that control nature and are supposed to control human activities. The church, itself a hierarchical system, teaches this system, educates for it, fights for its political realization, and defends it against new systems. However, in so doing the church cannot disregard the actual situation and historical changes. The church must adapt its ethical system to new problems and new demands. The Catholic church has been able to do just this, admirably, for centuries, and the living authority of the Pope is still a marvelous instrument for achieving adaptations without losing its immovable basis. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the Catholic church did not fully succeed in dealing with the presuppositions and demands of the bourgeois era. Protestantism and the Enlightenment created new systems of ethics standing in opposition to the supposedly eternal system of the medieval church. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
And when the church tried to proceed with the stream of the rising bourgeoisies, as, for example, in the moral preachings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuitism and in the teachings of nineteenth-century modernism, either it lost its seriousness and authority or it gave the unhappy impression of rearguard action in which every position is defended as long as possible and then surrendered. And the important utterances of the Holy See during the nineteenth century concerning social and political problems presuppose, in order to be applicable, the unbroken unity and authority of the Christian church, which no longer exist. Therefore, they did not at all influence the spirit of modern ethics and the direction of bourgeois society. The price paid by the static supranaturalistic answer to our question has been the loss of a determining influence on the changing World of the last centuries. The opposite solution, represented by national socialism, was prepared for in two main ways—by the Continental vitalistic philosophy and by Angelo-American positivism and pragmatism, the latter being only a different form of the vitalistic philosophy. National Socialism has used and abused philosophical motives of the Continental philosophy of live, especially of Nietzsche, Pareto, and Sorel. Philosophy must express life in its changing forms and trends. Truth, according to Nietzsche, is that lie which is useful for particular species of being. Values are produced and withdrawn in the dynamic process of life—biologically speaking, by the strongest kind of living beings; sociologically speaking, by the strongest kind of living beings; sociologically speaking, by the new elite; and politically speaking, by the eruptive violence of a revolutionary group. Change, being the chief character of life, is also the chief character of ethics. There are no independent norms above life, no criteria by which power can be judged, no standards for a good life. Good life is strong life, or violent life, of the life of a ruling aristocracy, or the life of conquering race. This implies that the individual, instead of being guided by the ethical norms that are manifest in one’s conscience, is obliged to merge one’s conscious with the group conscience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
One must co-ordinate one’s standards with the group standards, as represented by the leaders of the group. The dynamic-naturalistic type of answer to the question of ethics in a changing World has a primitive-tribal character. It is, historically speaking, at the same time the most recent and the most ancient of all solutions of the ethical problem. Now a quantum leap, from reasoned dedications about the general principles governing the behaviour of long-vanished societies to three real societies: traditional and modern China, ancient Greece, and several nations in today’s Muslim Middle East, all demanding bribes preserve their virginity for their husbands. For long periods of history, the Chinese increased the chances of maintaining large-scale chastity by crippling little girls’ feet so that, as nubile woman, they could barely hobble from room to room, much less down past the garden gate to indulge in pleasures of the flesh adventures. Nonetheless, some unmarried women—maimed and unmaimed—were unchaste. Of these, many concealed the fact or got caught by their families or were publicly exposed—for example when the bridegroom feld from the wedding chamber, bleating about having married a “wing-broken bird.” How did these lapses occur? In the usual way, and sometimes, even women with bound feet defined probability and were wanton, willful, or seduced. These unmaidenly maidens felt no spiritual guilt, for their deed had no religious connotations—as females, after all, they were considered lesser beings than males. However, they had violated China’s pervasive principle of yin and yang, the essential harmony that governed society. Those who were caught dreaded the consequences, for the price of unchastity was dishonour for the entire family. They had defiled the national culture of mianiz, honouring one’s family’s prestige. For women, a peccadillo in pleasures of the flesh was costly in other ways. It was difficult or impossible to find a husband for sullied women except by subterfuge—passing her off as a virgin. And if a man agreed to accept a nonvirgin, he would not send his bride’s family the expensive gifts they could otherwise have expected five or six times a year. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
In China today, the old values have not disappeared, though communism and modernity have modified culture expectations. However, female virginity is still very crucial to a love relationship. For chaste bride’s, the groom’s family often paid a large price forth the wedding. However, sometimes weddings are just an economic affair. As in China, celibacy in ancient Greece was also a uniquely female virtue. As we have seen, the Greeks did not value celibacy, but their daughters had to remain virginal. Because they regarded girls as lustful, early marriages seemed sensible—less time for brides to succumb to temptation. Sometimes, however, marriage did not come soon enough. If she was caught, the young woman was in terrible trouble. Fathers were obligated to obliterate all reminders of such shameful daughters from the household. Selling them selves into slavery was a common solution. One Athenian official took more drastic action: he fed his “ruined” daughter to a starved horse. Why not? By her unchastity, the girl had rendered herself a nonentity whose worthless body might as well sate another sort of bestial hunger. It was, of course, natural for a young woman whose secret lover had actually cause her to be with child to fight with the wiliness of desperation against her dreadful fate. The most common ploy was to swear the pearl inside was holy and that one of the gods had done this to her. Any girl (Parthenos) who managed to pull this off—and a few did—was not merely saved but was afterward treated as someone protected by divine immunity. After all, punishing a Parthenos, whom a god rather than a moral man had made unchaste, would inevitably provoke divine retribution. Palestinian Muslims are reminiscent of the ancient Greeks in their fanatical concern about premarital virginity. If they even suspect a girl has been unchaste, then brothers and fathers’ storm into action, terminating their own sists and daughters in sacrifice rituals. Often, these are disguised as accidents by burning the body. This usually happens to one woman a week. “They feel that women should take care to be a virgin when married, and not sleep around,” said Suheir Azzonuni Mashi, director of the Women’s Affairs Technical Committee in Ramallah, West Bank. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Now, moving on to the economy. The dream of a perfectly synchronized, machinelike society tantalized many of the “modernizers” who influenced the industrial age. The object was to create a state and a society that ran with the efficiency of a machine: every bureaucracy acting as one, every individual moving in lockstep. However, human beings and human societies are, in fact, open systems. Messy and imperfect. In our lives and in our societies, regions of chaos and chance alternate with, and give rise to, regions of temporary stability. We need both. Stability and synchronization provide the degree of predictability we need to function as individuals in social groups and especially in the economy. Without some stability and time coordination, life is reduced to oppression by anarchy and chance. However, what happens when instability and de-synchronization take over? Despite decades of bloodshed and internal suppression, the United States of American never complete the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. In modern times, many people fear that COVID and high inflation could lead to the middle class being frequently being reduced to eating nothing but potatoes and cabbage. And that we will wander through ghostly supermarkets with virtually empty shelves. Some can envision in their mind’s eye the few jars of gray, moldy pastas that are on sale. And the freezing old woman standing on the steps of public buildings trying to sell a single ballpoint pen or a potholder—their only possession. Fearing a total economic breakdown, they very social order on which the country depends on will dissolve, and along with it any pretense of synchronized efficiency. Imagine is no knew when, or even if, promised products will arrive. Picture instead of just-in-time, American enterprises running on not-on-time. During a trip, one may be prevented from flying to New York from California as scheduled, forced to take a midnight train instead because, one was tole, no one is sure whether aviation gas will arrive in time for flight #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
People fear hungering for things to work, for predictability, for someone—as the Italian dictator Mussolini once put it—“to make the trains to run on time.” However, societies need more than just trains that run on time. They need institutions that run on time and law enforcement which does their jobs and listens to citizens before things snowball into an avalanche. What happens, however, when one institution runs at such high speeds that it leaves society’s other vital institutions miles behind? No one can answer this question scientifically. The hard data are not there. Nevertheless, it is revealing to see what is happening to key institutions in America, where the race in the twenty-first-century economy is, at least for now, most advanced. What follows, then, is a first sketch, purely conjectural and surely controversial, that may help not just business leaders and government policy makers, but all of us as we try to cope with rapid change. And while we use the United States of America as the example, the implications are international. Let us focus, then on rates of change. Start with a mind’s-eye image of a freeway. At its side a police officer sits astride a motorcycle, pointing a radar gun at the road. On the highway are BMWs, each representing a major institution in America. Each BMW travels at a speed that matches that institution’s actual rate of change. Tomorrow we will look more into this equation. Grey Wolf, we are sending you to the Great God. Please tell Him that we, who invented forgiveness do not forgive; that we, who speak of trust can not trust; that we, who invoke faith would not believe. I write as though you could read. However, I know you understand. When you have left the forests and tundras and no longer lave your sinewy trails with the snows, tell Him that you were made on a different day. Your howls of bewilderment will echo with the mountain winds. And your songs will join those of the whales. Please tell Him for me, “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
There may be those who feel that they can live quite happily without either religious discipline or communion with God. However, they are grave error. The restlessness which characterizes us, the confusion which has come on our times, the increasing percentage of neuroses among us, and the general unhappiness of all of us in the midst of the greatest affluence the World has yet seen, has come upon us primarily because of the lack of that sense of communion with God which made our forefathers happy in spite of their poverty and their physical suffering. We relearned to interpret the symptoms of weariness and hunger, cry when bedtime or mealtime comes, and yet refuse either to go to bed or take their food. Living in a gilded palace, as it were, we are still miserable, for we are essentially orphans, having lost that most precious of all values in life, the sense of the Fatherhood of God. The feeling of deprivation grows sharper and more poignant, instead of less severe, as we grow older. The time comes to each of us when the burdens of life seem far too heavy to carry, when the brightness of youth begins to fade, and we notice the lengthening shadows which presage our end. More than ever then do we become homesick; homesick, not for our houses or for our countries, but homesick for the Universal Parent of all of us, for that deep affection which is the heart of the Universe itself, for the mercy of God; yet a wall of iron has been placed between us and Him, and we cannot find Him. What greater good can a human achieve, either for oneself or for the World, than to contribute one’s effort to piercing this wall and bring the Father and the children once more into loving communion with one another! Also, the about the national security risk racist against fellow Americans is. You are all American and if you use racism to suppress other Americas and keep them from advancing, it is a loss to the economy, it is a loss of tax revenue, and it is a loss of skill that may keep America number one. Remember, China has a population of 1.4 billion and America only has 3.25 million. Therefore, every American who can work needs to be allowed to work so they can innovate and keep the country strong. Politicians should address racism as a threat to national security. You do not have to welcome people you do not like into your homes, but it is important to respect the United States Constitution and give everyone equal opportunity. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Whatever Person Posses this Book, Lucifer Promises to Carry Out One’s Plans
The latter part of the nineteenth century was an anguished and tortured period. Gentility was a terrible strain. Beneath the appearance of stiff propriety there ran currents of anger and aggression frightful in their intensity. Some indication of the dark, baleful aspect of the lives of our great-grandparent went untold. Black and white magic. Contemporary forms of magic are being studied carefully by parapsychologists. (Parapsychology is the study of apparently supernatural phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, apparitions, and related forms of ESP.) Researcher in this field who operate from a completely naturalistic standpoint deny the existence of a personal devil or evil spirits. They may speak of two vital forces in the Universe, however, one working upward in an evolutionary manner, and the other counteracting these ascending steps. These investigators of psychic phenomena do not make any effort to explain the origin of these invisible powers, and simply declare that some people have special psychic gifts which give them access to these forces. They may even say that some religious practitioners appear to have superhuman power, and refer to their work as white magic. They may also acknowledge that some individuals can mysteriously bring harm to their enemies, and this evil use of power they call black magic. The majority of these parapsychologist insist, however, that they do not believe in a personal God or the devil, and simply affirm that at the present time we do not fully understand some of these esoteric powers in this Universe. The Christian student of occultic activity has a distinct advantage over the naturalist, for one accepts the reality of a personal God and an invisible World of angels and evil spirits. This does not mean that one rejects a scientific approach to the problems that are encountered. One must avoid the temptation to declare dogmatically that every unexplainable occurrence is the result of supernatural activity—either by God or the forces of evil. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Some manifestations that now puzzle us may in the future be understood within the framework of the natural. The fact remains, however, that Satan is a real personality, and that a multitude of evil spirits have joined him in opposition to God and His people. The Christian Bible records numerous instances which clearly reveal their activity, and we have good reason to believe that some of the unexplainable phenomena in evidence today are the works of these demonic beings. Practitioners of black magic usually declare openly that they are serving the devil. Many of them say that have made a pact with Satan, and some have indicated their allegiance to him by signing a document with their own blood. Missionaries have reported that acts with the devil are not at all unknown among many primitive peoples. Reputable followers of Jesus Christ are convinced that these religious leaders actually can bring illness or death to people through ritualistic incantations. Black magic is practiced extensively today in many parts of Germany, France, and Switzerland, as well as in primitive cultures. Dr. Kurt Koch cites numerous instances of conjurers casting spells which have brought about the death of animals and even humans. He also tells us of amazing healings, but points out that when a person is cured of a physical disease by such a practitioner, one usually suffers such severe mental depression that the new condition is worse than the old. As one reads the examples of black magic—cattle being milked dry in a mysterious manner, the sudden unexplainable death of animals, healings followed by terrible psychic disturbances, and the appearance of frightful apparitions—he finds his credulity stretched almost to the breaking point. If one has not witnessed such occurrences, one is likely to dismiss these reports as untrustworthy. However, serious scholars who have investigated these accounts do not deny the reality of such phenomena. They may not believe them to be the work of Satan or evil spirits, but they admit that many of them cannot be explained at the present time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Professor Adolph Koberle, from the University of Tubingen, in the introduction to Christian Counseling and Occultist, says: Readers who approached this study with a purely rationalistic bent will experience spiritual difficulty in following the author in many areas because we have here a report of cases and experiences which seems to conflict with all sound human intelligence. However, perhaps such persons can be brought to listen, since research first tries the immanent solution of the problems and only where this is proved to fail does one break out and propose the added dimension, the dimension of the eternal. Even though research may evoke contradictions here and there—from medics and pastors, from parapsychologists and psychotherapists—yet the questions that are here posed cannot be evaded by any person who concerns oneself in a genuine and responsible manner with a fruitful diagnosis and a helpful therapy. Clearly sane, scholarly, and since humans have examined the apparently superhuman powers evidenced in black magic and other forms of occultism, and made every effort to find naturalistic explanations, before finally concluding that Satan and evil spirits are actually at work. Black magic as a specific form of witchcraft has its own literature. The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses are the primary source, and are well known in Europe. They constitute one volume, and are alleged to have been written by Moses himself. Strangely enough, they maintain that this great national leader was a servant of Satan, and set fourth detailed instructions for establishing a mystical relationship with the devil. This research tells readers how they can gain power through black magic over all the people they will encounter both in this World and the next. It makes this solemn assertion: “To whatever person possesses this book at any given time, Lucifer makes promise to carry out one’s commands, but only as long as one possess this book.” Dr. Koch comments on the strange and sinister nature of this writing by saying, “In the many cases which the pastor-counselors have come to know, there is no possessor of The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses who have no psychic complication.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
White magic is declared by its practitioners to be in direct opposition to black magic. Whereas black magic includes an open allegiance with the powers of darkness, in white magic the name of God is invoked, and Biblical phrases are utilized. Most people who practice it, however, have no understanding of the basic doctrines of the Christian faith. Some possibly are endowed with an unexplainable psychic power, and their desire to use it was not totally selfish at the beginning. However, many find very soon that they become enslaved to a yearning for self-exaltation. The Radio Bible Class has received letters from a number of people for a time had engaged in a “healing ministry” of this kind, but who abandoned it because it led to a gradual departure from God. Although some cult leaders and those endowed people, they are using the name of God and Christ in a manner that violates the Lord’s will. The danger of mistaking an enigmatic psychic power for the gift of the Lord must be recognized. Dr. Kurt Koch points out that Dr. Henry Drummond, fellow-worker of D.L. Moody, possessed psychic ability which enabled him to have mental power over person who were miles away. While working with Moody, Drummond found that he could hypnotically influence the large crows who had gathered, but concluded that to use this power would be a hindrance to the activity of the Holy Spirit. One prayed that the Lord would take this psychic gift away from him, and his prayer was answered. Had Dr. Drummond decided to exercise this ability, he would soon have established a Worldwide reputation as a great healer. However, his accomplishments would not have honoured the Lord, and real blessings would not have resulted from his ministry. In Biblical faith, trust is placed solely in the Lord Jesus Christ. In white magic it is deflected to someone else (the human agent) or to something else (one’s own faith, etcetera). In the Biblical prayer of faith, the praying person subjects oneself to the will of God. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
In white magic, the help of God is demanded under the assumption that exercising such power is in accordance with God’s will. Also in white magic the Christian markings are mere decorations that camouflage the magical means of knowledge for power. Certain influences, as we might call them, can be termed elementary forms of magic. Firstly, we have an example of the criminal use of hypnosis. A girl reported in a counselling session that a doctor who she had consulted had hypnotized her. While hypnotized he had seduced her. The doctor had done the same to her girl friend. It was later discovered that he has also done this with other girls. When these stories leaked out, the doctor left the town and settled elsewhere. The girl said that for a long time after this incident she had not been able to read her Christian Bible. She had felt a strong aversion towards religion, and evil thoughts had always come to her mind when praying. Another example, a doctor at a hospital had indecently assaulted women and girls under hypnosis. Once the ward sister caught him in the act. To cover up his scandalous behaviour, he used to question the patients about their sexual relationships and included their answers in their case histories. He thus tried to protect himself in the event of anything being discovered. A respectable gurl who was engaged to a Christian young man became pregnant at the hospital. Following this her fiancé left her. The girl herself denied all knowledge of having an intimate relationship with anyone. The doctor had lain with her when she had been hypnotized. The assistant matron and the ward sister had finally reported the doctor. However, the result was that they themselves were dismissed by the medical superintendent. The doctor in question stayed. Other nurses, who also had incriminating evidence against him, were forced to keep quiet now because of the fear of dismissal. After a few years, though, when the situation became too hot for the doctor, he left and went abroad. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Scientific advocates of hypnosis believe that a man could not be forced to do anything under hypnosis that he would not be prepared to do when conscious. They are of the opinion that crimes are not possible under hypnosis. However, not all the experts share this opinion. Moreover, in my counselling work I have met many cases in which crimes have taken place under hypnosis. From the point of view of the Scriptures it is understandable that an innocent girl can be molested this way. Jesus Christ said that out of the heart come evil thoughts and so on. Evil lies dormant even in the most moral of people. Normally these instinctive reactions are held in check by one’s consciousness, which is moulded by education, religious training and is affected by one’s disposition. Under hypnosis however, this regulator is switched off. Instinctive impulses can arise unhindered from the subconscious, and can be exploited by unscrupulous and uninhibited people. Besides this, some take no account of the fact that magical hypnosis exists in addition to the normal type of hypnosis, and that this can have far deeper effects. Magical hypnosis can often be recognized by the fact that afterwards the patient is no longer able to pray or to keep one’s faith. Here are some actual examples. A Christian girl went to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist used magical hypnosis far more often than he did ordinary hypnosis. I have occasionally come across such doctors in areas where magic is commonly practised. In reply to the girl’s question, the doctor admitted that he had not received his gift from God. He went on to tell the girl that he had wanted to conduct suggestive experiments on her. After the treatment, the girl lost her faith and could no longer pray. She suffered from doubts and other serious difficulties in believing. I think a lot of people who have had good lives, and then are abused and tortured over a long period of time have these same problems. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
When they restart reading the Christian Bible, it may make them upset and angry and they do not know why, but they keep going and praying hoping to overcome their situation. They know that God is there and guiding them, but they have just been able to sustain, not yet overcome the situation. So they keep forcing themselves to pray and thank God so they can rebuild their faith, and it can really take a lifetime, especially when the situation has been going on for decades. Abusers just kind of rob some people of faith and joy. And year after year, they keep praying it is over, and it never is, so it makes it hard for them to trust anyone, including God. So they have to keep reminding of his words and praying and seeking mental health treatments so they can live, and they pray they will still have some youth left, if the situation is ever resolved. Another example is a man, in his spare time a minister dabbled in magic. He experimented in various areas and learned card-laying, how to use a pendulum, magic charming and magical hypnosis. Since he had no suitable people to experiment on, he used his wife for the purpose. As his magical abilities increased, so too did his own and his wife’s dislike for the Christian Bible and prayer. This dislike developed into a strong resistance, and as time went on psychic disturbances appeared in the wife. She exhibited a serious anxiety hysteria and always had to lock the door of whichever room she happened to be in. There also was once a businessman who had the strange ability of being able to influence his customers hypnotically or magically, causing them to accept the business offers that he makes to them. In this way, his yearly income exceeds $75,000.00. He rejects Christianity altogether. A woman allowed a masseur to hypnotize her. Before the treatment she had regularly read her Christian Bible, prayed and attended the local church services. Afterwards when she tried to pray, she felt a compulsion to blaspheme and to curse. She then lost her faith. These effects indicate that the masseur had used magical hypnosis. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Plato derived the etymology of the word “demon” (Greek, daimon) from an adjective meaning “intelligent” or “knowing.” If this derivation is correct, it suggests that intelligence was considered a prominent characteristic of demons. If demons are fallen angels, this would be expected. As Satan’s vast wisdom became vitiated when he sinned (Ezekiel 28.12, 17), the great wisdom that characterizes angels in general (2 Samuel 14.20) must also have been corrupted in his followers. This is undoubtedly why demons use their great but perverted knowledge so relentlessly in an effort to frustrate God’s purpose. Humans who consult professional mediums and use other methods of divination to obtain knowledge of the future seem to imply a degree of confidence in the intelligence of evil spirits. The superior knowledge demons possess is not a holy or saving knowledge. Demons “believe” but only to “tremble” (James 2.19). They are confirmed in depravity and never seek forgiveness. As preeminently unclean spirits, they never long for purity. They confess Jesus Christ is Lord, but they do not trust Christ or submit to him. Although they recognize his authority (Mark 1.24; 5:6, 7). They cleverly withhold knowledge of his incarnation and completed redemption (1 John 4:1-6), corruption sound doctrine (1 Timothy 4.1-3), discern between those who have God’s seal and those who do not (Revelation 9.4), and know full well their own tragic destiny and inevitable doom (Matthew 8.29). Their superhuman intellect is accomplished by superphysical strength. The psalmist celebrates this angelic characteristic: “Bless the Lord, ye His angels, that excel in strength, that do his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of His word,” reports Psalm 103.20. The Apostle Peter also speaks of the “power and might” of angelic spirits (2 Peter 2.11). Our Lord Himself indirectly referred to demonic strength (Matthew 12.29). #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Perverted power and strength are thus conscious attributes of fallen angels. This titanic energy is displayed in the supernatural strength demons can impart to the human body when they enter it and possess it. The Gadarene demoniac who was dominated by a “legion” of demons (Mark 5.9) could not be bound even with chains. “Because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetter broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him,” reports Mark 5.4. The great strength of this demoniac was due to the vast number of demons who possessed him. “A legion” in Roman military history consisted of three-to-six-thousand-foot soldiers, and three to seven hundred cavalries. The term “legion” was not only the name of the possessed human but probably also served to indicate the phenomenal strength of the demoniac. The demons were so powerful that when the Lord ordered them to enter a herd of two thousand swine, they cased the entire herd to rush violently down a hill into the sea (Mark 5.13). No wonder the demon-possessed human was disturbed physically, mentally, and emotionally. However, the superphysical strength of demons is not limited to the physical energy they impart to their victim. Their power is broad enough to cause occult oppression of mind and body. They can produce physical disabilities and sickness unrelated to organic disorders and which medicine or natural therapy cannot alleviate. Perhaps the most terrible power of demons is to derange the mind by upsetting the nervous system. In this way they can afflict the body with a psychosomatic disease. Demons are aware of the close relationship between physical and mental health. By jangling the nerves and the emotions, they can cause mental Instability (Luke 8.26-36), producing suicidal mania (Mark 9.22). Their purpose is to drive their occult-enslaved victim to self-destruction. “I’m tired of his bleary-eyed tootling—I have warned him to lie down and nap. So now that I have told him to stop it, I will give him a sharp little rap.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Dealing with necromancers who claim to contact the dead. The writer of 1 Samuel 19.9-10 describes in incident in which King Saul tried to impale David on his javelin. His attack is attributed to an “evil spirit from the Lord.” This indicates that God allowed a demon spirit to enter Saul and possess him. The kingdom of evil spirits is within God’s control, though not acting on his direction. God allows spirit activity, just as he allows evil men to prosper, within the boundaries of his ultimate plan for humans. God’s sovereign control over the realm of evil spirits is further illuminated in 1 Kings 22:18-23. “And the king od Israel said to Jehoshaphat, Did I not tell you that he would not prophesy good concerning me, but evil? And Micaiah said, Therefore hear the word of the Lord; I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the hosts of Heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left; and the Lord said, Who will entice Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead? And one said one thing, and another said another. Then a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord, saying, I will entice him. And the Lord said to him, By what means? And he said, I will go forth, and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And he said, You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go forth and do so. Now therefore, behold, the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the Lord has spoken evil concerning you.” From this passage, too, it is clear that God overrules the World of evil spirits and permits them to do their work when it accords with His sovereign will and purpose. A unique incident involving spirits of the dead is recorded in 1 Samuel 28. King Saul had banished mediums and wizards out of the land as commanded by God (v.3). When confronted by the philistine army he was fearful and sought guidance from the Lord. When no guidance came, he told his servants to seek out a medium who could give him counsel (vv. 5-7). Having found one at Endor, Saul went to her in disguise. She feared a trap because of Saul’s decree against mediums, but Saul promised her protection and asked her to bring forth the spirit of dead Samuel (vv. 8-11). #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The medium screamed in fear when she saw Samuel himself—apparently she was used to communicating only with evil spirits. This is the only account in the Old Testament of God’s permitting a departed person’s spirit to return to Earth. This was not by the lower of the medium, however; in fact, she was not prepared for it at all. Samuel told the piteous kin it was no use: God would take the kingdom from Saul and give it to David (vv. 15-17), and the Philistine army would rout Saul’s army (v.19). 1 Chronicles 10.13 provides the epitaph to the tragic story: “So Saul died for his unfaithfulness; he was unfaithful to the Lord in that he did not keep the command of the Lord, and also consulted a medium, seeking guidance.” Saul’s case is a chilling warning from Scripture against consulting with mediums or trying to communicate with departed souls; the judgment of God is upon it. A case of supposed witchcraft occurred in Cork, Ireland in the year 1685-1686, the account of which is contained in a latter from Christopher Crofts to Sir John Perceval (the third Baronet, and father of the first Earl of Egmont) written on the fifteenth of March in that year. Though the natator professes his disbelief in such superstitions, yet there seems to have been an unconscious feeling in his mind that his strict administration of the law was the means of bringing the affliction on his child. He says: My poor boy Jack to all appearances lay dying; he had a convulsion for eight or nine hours. His mother and several others are of opinion he is bewitched, and by the old woman, the mother of Nell Welsh, who is reputed a bad woman; and the child was playing by her that day she was upon her examination, and was taken ill presently after she was committed to Bridewell. However, I have not faith to believe it was anything but the hand of God. I have committed the girl to Bridewell, where she shall stay some time.” At one period in their history that peculiar people, known amongst themselves as the Society of Friends, and by their opponents as Quakers, appear to have been most troublesome, and to have caused a good deal of annoyance to other religious bodies. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Not unnaturally their enemies credited any wild tales which were related about them to their detriment, especially when they had referenced to their doctrine of the influence of the Spirit. Dr. More, in his continuation to Glanvill’s book, has in the sixth Relation an account of man, near Cambridge in England, who was possessed by an evil spirit which led him to do the most extraordinary things in its attempts to covert him to Quakerism. In the Life of Mr. Alexander Peden, late Minister of the Gospel at New Glenluce in Galloway, who died in 1686, there is an account of a Quakers’ meeting in this country which the Devil appeared in most blasphemous parody of the Holy Ghost. As Mr. Peden was travelling one time by himself in Ireland, “the night came on, and a dark mist, which obliged him to go into a house belonging to a Quaker. Mr. Peden said, ‘I must beg the favour of the roof of your house all night.’ The Quaker said, ‘Thou art a stranger, thou art very welcome and shalt be kindly entertained, but I cannot wait upon thee, for I am going to the meeting.’ Mr. Peden said, ‘I will go along with you.’ The Quaker said, ‘Thou may, if thou please, but thou must not trouble us.’ He said, ‘I will be civil.’ When they came to the meeting, as their ordinary is, they sat for some time silent, some with their faces to the wall, and others covered. There being a void in the loft above them there came down the appearance of a raven, and sat upon one man’s head, who started up immediately, and spoke with such vehemence that the froth flew from his mouth; it went to a second, and he did the same; and to a third, who did as the former two. Mr. Peden sitting near to his landlord said, ‘Do you not see that? Ye will not deny it afterwards?’ When they dismissed, going home Mr. Peden said to him, ‘I always thought there was devilry among you, but never thought that he did appear visibly among you till now that I have seen it.’ The poor man fell a-weeping, and said, ‘I perceive that God hath sent you to my house, and put it into your heart to go along with me, and permitted the Devil to appear visibly among us this night. I never saw the like before. Let me have the help of your prayers.’ After this he became a singular Christian.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Mr. Peden was also somewhat of a prophet, and his specialty appears to have been the prognostication of unpleasant events, at all events to persons in Ireland. Two instances will suffice. When in a gentleman’s house in Co. Antrim he foretold that a maid-servant was enceinte, that she would murder the child, and would be punished. “Which accordingly came to pass, and she was burnt at Craig Fergus.” On another occasion two messengers were sent to inform the Lord-Lieutenant that Presbyterian ministers in Ireland should affirm that they had nothing to do with the rebellion at Bothwell Bridge. Mr. Peden said they were on the Devil’s errand, but God would arrest them by the gate. Accordingly one was stricken with sickness, while the other fell from his horse and broke his leg. In another cause of the supernatural, during the late 1800s, the Santa Clara Valley, in California presented sweeping vistas of rural open space. It was a serene setting for Mrs. Winchester to begin her building project, which she did with steadfast determination. She immediately hired carpenters to work in shifts around the clock. By the turn of the century the eight-room house had grown into a nine-story mansion! The estate eventually grew to about 730 acres of farmland (according to documents), which included orchards of apricots, plums, and walnut trees to supplement Mrs. Winchester’s income. Her dried plums, which turned into prunes were very popular. Some people believe that prune juice is what kept Mrs. Winchester’s screen so wrinkle free, gave it a natural growth, and made her look so young, as it flushes toxins out of the body (word of caution, make sure to use it in moderation and start in the morning with a few ounces, and do not go anywhere for 24 hours until you see how it work with your system). Nonetheless, Mrs. Winchester also owned homes in Atherton, Los Altos, and Palo Alto. The combination of her wealth and her eccentric building of this beautiful mansion gave rise to many rumors in the local community. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Jeremiah Haralson was waiting for a tour of Mrs. Winchester’s beautiful mansion, and he had been waiting an hour to have tea with her—he was really impressed with the mansion as it seemed to twinkle. It was really a rural setting and very pretty. The estate had a lot of thick green foliage and beautiful flowers and what seemed to be miles of green lawns. So he waited for her. It was August 1894, and the chill of an unusually evening entered into his bones. The construction workers passed him with a surely response to his “Good Night.” Many of the servants went by him like ghosts with soft voices; and it was nearly midnight, and she still had not come. He then heard a ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. The bell in the belfry high in the gables began to toll. Jeremiah shrugged his shoulders and turned towards the gates that lead to the main road. He looked back, but there was still no sign of movement about the mansion, so sign of life, no lights even in the windows. He paused by the gate, wondering. Then he noticed that the front doors were open—wide open—and the porch lamp shone a little way into the foyer. There was something about this that did not please him—that scared him a little, indeed. The house had a gloomy and deserted air. It was obviously impossible that it harboured a rich widow. The must be away on business. In which case—Jeremiah walked up the path, tower the stairs to the front porch, and listened. Yet, still no sign of life. He passed into the foyer. There as no light anywhere. Where was everybody, and why were the beautiful jeweled front doors open. There was no one in the front parlour, nor the drawing room, the dining room and the study were equally empty. Everyone was out, evidently. However, the unpleasant sense that he was, perhaps, not the first casual visitor to walk through that open door impelled him to look through the house before he went anyway and closed it after him. So he went upstairs, and at the door of the first bedroom, Jeremiah turned on the gasolier, as he had done in the siting rooms. Even as he did so, he felt that he was not alone. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Jeremiah was prepared to see something, but for what he saw he was not prepared. For what he saw lay on the bed, in a white loose gown—and it was Mrs. Winchester, and her throat was cut from ear to ear. He did not know what happened then, nor how he got downstairs and into the street; but he got out somehow, and the policeman found him in a fit, under the lamp-post at the crossroads of the road. He could not speak when they picked him up, and he passed the night in the police cells, because the policeman had seen plenty of drunken men before, but never one in a fit like Jeremiah Haralson. The next morning he was well, though still very pale and shaky. However, the tale he told the magistrate was convincing, and they sent a couple of constables with him to her house. There was no crowd about it as he had fancied there would be, and the curtains were open. As Jeremiah stood, dazed, in the front of the doors, they opened, she Mrs. Winchester came out. Jeremiah held on to the upside-down posts on the front porch for support. “See, my boy! Mrs. Winchester is just fine as can be,” said the constable, who found him hiding before one of the posts. “I told you, you were drunk, but you would know best!” When Jeremiah was alone with Mrs. Winchester, he told her how he had come into the rambling mansion, and had found the front doors open and the lights out, and how he had seen something—in even trying to hint at which he turned sick and broke down and had to have a little Vin Mariani given to him. “Oh, heavens, boy,” Mrs. Winchester said, “I dare say the house was dark, for we were all at St. Joseph’s Cathedral with Daisy, and no doubt the door was open, for the maids will run out if they are left. However, you could not have been in any of the bedrooms on the second floor, because I have my staff lock them when I am away, and my dear sweet boy, they key was in my pocket. I dressed in a hurry and I left my odds and ends laying about.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
“I know,” Jeremiah said; “I saw a gold scarf on the chair, and some gold gloves, and a lot of hairpins and ribbons, and a prayerbook, and a lace handkerchief on the dressing table. Why, I even noticed the almanack on the mantlepiece—16 January 1895. At least it could not be that because this is 16 August 1894. And yet it was. Your almanack is at 16 January 1895, is it not?” “No, of course it is not,” said Mrs. Winchester, smiling rather anxiously; “but all the other things were just as you say. You must have had a nightmare, of a vision, or something.” Jeremiah was a very ordinary, commonplace, City young man, and he did not believe in visions, but he never rested day or night still he got away from the Winchester mansion. Now the curious and quite inexplicable part of this when Mrs. Winchester came down to breakfast on the morning of 17 January 1895, she found Jeremiah looking like death, with the Oakland Tribune in his hand. He caught hers—he could not speak, and pointed to the paper. And there she read that on the night of the 17th a young lady had been found with her throat cut from ear to ear, in a second story bedroom of that Beautiful, but Bizarre Winchester Mansion. Although demons reveal various degrees of wickedness (Matthew 12.45), they all are depraved. This aspect of their character appears in the terrible things they do to their victims. The Christian Bible often refers to them as spiritually and morally “unclean” (Matthew 10.1; Mark 1.27; 3.11; Luke 4.36; Acts 8.7; Revelation 16.13). People who deal in the occult are sometimes found to be vulnerable to Satan and demonic powers. Sometimes these “unclean spirits” take possession of vulnerable people. The character of demons reveals what they can do to their victims. Invisible, extremely intelligent, strong, and totally depraved personalities can do a great deal of harm to the vulnerable person. Since the supernatural exists and does interact with the natural World, the truly scientific investigator must take this into consideration. Prayer and faith can heal the mind and the body supernaturally, just as medicine and rest can do it naturally. By the same token, unbelief and sin can harm body and mind as a result of demonic bondage. (However, many mental and emotional illnesses are, of course, due to natural causes, such as overwork, tension, fatigue, malnutrition, organic disease, etcetera. Such disorders can be treated effectively by a physician, neurologist, psychologist, or psychiatrist. Demonic spirits may have little or nothing to do with such disorders of the mind. The causes are purely natural and may be corrected by purely natural means. This is not surprising since the Creator has placed the creation and His creatures under the normal operation of the laws of cause and effect.) #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
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Mission Can be Eternal—Told You Not to Hurt Him, but Maybe that’s a Lie?
Happiness is the object and design of our existence. The difference between the impossible and the possible is found in one’s faith. For those who struggle through life without knowing why they live, where they are going—and how to reach their highest potential—the restored gospel provides some answers. “Adam fell that humans’ might be; and hums are, that they might have joy,” reports 2 Nephi 2.25. However, happiness is not synonymous with pleasure or even freedom from pain. Those who expect life to be care free do not understand that joy is the brother and child of tribulation. True happiness comes from the personal, spiritual growth that rises out of the fires of mortal experience. It needs to be taught that there is an opposition in all things. Without that opposition, neither righteousness nor joy is possible. Some of the trials we face in life, we impose on ourselves. Others are caused by the sins and weaknesses of our fellow beings. And some just come because we live in a fallen, imperfect World. Still, the source of our trials is not nearly as important as the fact that they exist and the way we deal with them. “And then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high,” Doctrine and Covenants 121.1-2,7-8. Trials, then, are a fundamental part of the plan of life. However, that does not mean we have no hope for happiness in mortality. The key to happiness here and eternal joy hereafter is the atonement of Jesus Christ. Through the principles and ordinances of the gospel, the Atonement leaves us all free to learn from sorrow, to grow from experience—and to find joy in the process. The path to happiness is virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God. In obedience there is joy and peace unspotted, unalloyed; and as God has designed our happiness, He never will institute an ordinance or give a commandment which will not end in the greatest amount of good and glory to those who become the recipients of His law and ordinances. #RandolphHarris 1 of 30
Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord. Satan regularly lies to us about the nature of God and of ourselves. However, we do not have to listen. Some of the greatest battles in life are not literal battles but struggles in one’s own heart and mind against feelings of self-doubt, hopelessness and fear. Satan is increasingly striving to overcome the Saints with despair, discouragement, despondency, and depression. One way that Satan attempts to overcome us with such feelings is by telling us lies about our worth and about God’s feelings towards us. These lies may originate as simple thoughts, repeated many times in our minds, can develop into entrenched habits of belief. These falsehoods are then reinforced especially by many of the shows on some television programs and some television news programs; things other people say, or even by misinterpretation of the scriptures. Satan might even misuse words from the scriptures that emphasize the justice of God, in order to imply that there is no mercy. Whatever their source, Satan’s lies can take root in our minds and develop into feelings of depression, low self-worth, and inadequacy. Some people also love to lie, they often lie every day, several times a day, hangout with other liars, and stew in their hate, but refuse to read the Christian Bible or go to church. They even call themselves “gods.” However, if they were gods, why are they so unhappy and their lives so foul? Why do they have to cheat, steal, lie, and set other people up to get ahead. God does not live in lack and limitation, doom and gloom, nor is he foolish and ghoulish. People like because of their weaknesses and failings. God is continually disappointed in, frustrated with, and angry with liars. However, God loves all living and nonliving beings because He is your Heavenly Father and He created you. God’s love can be more joyous to one’s soul because He has the capacity to love one more than anyone knew possible. #RandolphHarris 2 of 30
The goal in life is to love, not hate. More specifically, to love God for God is the Creator of all things. We learn that through God all things are possible. We learn that we love God by following His commandments. We learn that we reap what we sew. So, if you love God, obey His commandments, and use the Golden Rule—treat others like you want to be treated—God will provide for you. Stealing, lying, hustling, setting people up are evil ways. Not God’s ways. It shows that you do not trust God because you refuse to be honest. Therefore, you have a mind set of lack and limitation and are unwilling to live an honest life. Satan is constantly telling you that you will never be as good as someone else, and for you, life is a competition. You cannot feel good about yourself unless you are hurting someone else, lying, or putting others down. 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 acknowledgement 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 is. We can both be humble and fearless. We can be both humbles 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, 10. With ownership comes envy. When youngsters play with friends, they soon discover other people’s toys they would like to get their hands on. Or they experience the injustice of being forced to share what they had assumed was their alone. Even babies express jealousy over objects, giving signs of “violent rage” when a toy is taken from them and given to another. Most children have an unusually intense relationship with a specific “attachment object,” usually a favourite blanket or a soft toy. However, in an intriguing study, researchers discovered that the majority of three-to-six-year-old children preferred to take home their original attachment object, as opposed to a duplicate made by a “copy machine.” To the prospect of taking a copy, the most common response was horror. #RandolphHarris 3 of 30
It is as if the children believe their special object had a unique essence, a form of magical thinking that re-appears in adulthood in our treatment of heirlooms, celebrity memorabilia, artwork and other things of sentimental value. Envy is a strong word. Some people may not only be jealous of material things, but about someone’s choices. However, do not be hurt. There are going to be times in our lives when someone else receives some unexpected blessing or special recognition. Do not be hurt—and certainly do not feel envious—when good fortune comes to another person? We are not diminished when someone else is added upon. We are not in a race against each other to see who is the wealthiest or the most talented or the most beautiful or even the most blessed. The race we are really in is the race against sin, and surely envy is one of the most universal of those. So be kind, and be grateful that God is kind. It is a happy way to live. In your life, is there something that you are envious of? Now is the time to let it go. During the first two weeks of August three revelations were given that the Saints might better understand about America and the rules for gathering. God told them they were honoured to be the ones to lay the foundation of America to which the nations of the World would come. The first to come were to be the rich and the learned, the wise and the noble. Then after God’s power came to them, the rest of the people were to come. The Lord said, “That the testimony might go forth from America; yea, from the mouth of the city of the heritage of God; yea, for this cause I have sent you hither, for verily I say unto you, My laws shall be kept on this land. Let no human break the laws of the land, for one that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land. Behold, the laws which ye have received from my hand are the laws of the church, and in this light ye shall hold them forth. Behold, here is wisdom.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 30
The Saints were instructed that they must use their own judgment in some things and not expect God to tell them every little thing that needed to be done. The Lord said: “It is not meet that I should command in all things, for one that is compelled in all things, the same is a slothful and not a wise servant; wherefore one receiveth no reward. Verily I say, Men should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness; for the power is in them, wherein they are agents unto themselves. And inasmuch as humans do good, they shall in no wise lose their reward.” All the members of the church throughout the land were instructed to give as much money as they could to be used in buying land in America, for God wanted them to buy the whole region around Independence. There was need for people to occupy and work this land, thus instructions concerning the gathering were given in this revelation: “Inasmuch as there is land obtained, let there be workmen (and women) sent forth, of all kinds, unto this land, to labour for the saints of God. Let all these things be done in order. Let the work of the gathering be not in haste, nor by flight, but let it be done as it shall be counseled by the elders of the church at the conferences. For verily, the sound must go forth from this place into all the World; and unto the uttermost parts of the Earth, the gospel must be preached unto every creature, with signs following them that believe. And behold, the Son of Man cometh. Amen.” A few days later another revelation was given concerning the people who were to come to America: “Behold, blessed, saith the Lord, are they who have come up unto this land with an eye single to my glory, according to my commandments. Yea, blessed are they whose feet stand upon the land of America, who have obeyed my gospel, for they shall receive for their rewards the good things of the Earth.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 30
To those who should live in the land of America, the Lord gave commandments. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, with all thy might, mind, and strength; and in the name of Jesus Christ thou shalt serve him. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Thou shalt not steal; neither commit adultery, nor kill, not do anything like unto it. Thou shalt thank the Lord thy God in all things. Thou shalt offer a sacrifice unto the Lord thy God in righteousness; even that of a broken heart and contrite spirit. Thou shalt go to the house of prayer and offer up thy sacrament upon my holy day. Nevertheless thy vows shall be offered up in righteousness on all days, and at all times; but remember that on this, the Lord’s day, thou shalt offer thine oblations, and thy sacraments, unto the Most High. Verily I say, that inasmuch as ye do this the fullness of the Earth is yours. Yea, all things which come of the earth, in the season thereof, are made for the benefit and the use of a man, both to please the eye, and to gladden the heart; yea, for food and for raiment, for taste and for smell, to strengthen the body, and to enliven the soul. One who doeth the works of righteousness, shall receive one’s reward, even peace in this World, and eternal life in the World to come.” A commandment was given by revelation to those who were to work in America: “Thou shalt not idle away thy time; neither shalt thou bury thy talent that it may not be known.” Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, and Sidney Rigdon, together with other elders, who were not to make their homes in America at this time, were instructed to go back to Kirtland. They were to teach and preach as they went, and visit those whom they have baptized on their way to America. On August 9, Joseph Smith and ten elders left Independence traveling by canoes on the Missouri River. By revelation the Lord instructed them, and others going from and coming to America, that they should travel by land rather than by water, because there were many dangers upon the waters, particularly the waters of the Missouri River. #RandolphHarris 6 of 30
Also, the Lord reminded them, when they traveled by water, they did not come in contact with people who might be converted to the gospel: “It is not needful for this whole company of mine elders, to be moving swiftly upon the waters, whilst the inhabitants on either side are perishing in unbelief. Be of good cheer, little children, for I am in our midst, and I have not forsaken you, and inasmuch as you have humbled yourselves before me, the blessings of the kingdom are yours. Be watchful, and be sober, looking forth for the coming of the Son of Man, for he cometh in an hour you think not. Pray always that you enter not into temptation, that you may abide the day of his coming.” The next day they were happy to meet several elders who were on their way to America. A revelation was given for them through Joseph Smith in which Jesus said: “Assemble yourselves upon the land of America, and hold a meeting and rejoice together, and offer a sacrament unto the Most High. And then you may return to bear record….Be faithful, and declare glad tidings unto the inhabitants of the Earth. Behold, I, the Lord, have brought you together that the promise might be fulfilled, that the faithful among you should be preserved and rejoice together in the land of Missouri.” Fewer than one hundred Saints were in Missouri to carry on the Lord’s work. This number, however, was gradually increased as other groups of the Saints arrived from the East. “The Lord your God is in the midst of you, a Mighty One, a Saviour [Who saves]! He will rejoice over you with joy; He will rest [in silent satisfaction] and in His love He will be silent and make no mention [of past sins, or even recall them]; He will exult over you with singing,” reports Zephaniah 3.17. Jesus Christ, The Son of God, is necessarily equal to the Father in power. Power of action is a consequence of perfection in nature. In creatures, for instance, we see that the more perfect the nature, the greater power is there for action. #RandolphHarris 7 of 30
Now, the very notion of the divine paternity and filiation requires that the Son should be the Father’s equal in greatness—that is, in perfection of nature. Hence it follows that the Son is equal to the Father in power; and the same applies to the Holy Ghost. The unity of the divine nature implies that the Son so acts of Himself [per se], that He does not act by Himself [a se].” The Father communicates knowledge to the Son, as He communicates His essence. The command of the Father can be explained in the same sense, as giving Him from eternity knowledge and will to act, by begetting Him. Or, better still, this may be referred to Christ in His human nature. As the same essence is paternity in the Father, and filiation in the Son: so by the same power the Father can do; yet it does not follow that the Son can beget; for to argue thus would imply transition from substance to relation, for generation signifies a divine relation. So the Son has the same omnipotence as the Father, but with another relation: the Father possessing power as “giving” signified when we say that He is able to beget; while the Son possesses the power of “receiving,” signified by saying that He can be begotten. Thus the mission of a divine person is a fitting thing, as meaning in one way the procession of origin from the sender, and as meaning a new way of existing in another; thus the Son is said to be sent by the Father into the World, inasmuch as He began to exist visibly in the World by taking our nature; whereas “He was” previously “in the World,” reports John 1.1. Mission implies infeority in the one sent, when it means procession from the sender as principle, by command or counsel; forasmuch as the one commanding is the greater, and the counsellor is the wiser. In God, however, it means only procession of origin, which is according to equality. What is sent as to being to exist where previously it did not exist, is locally moved by being sent; hence it is necessarily separated locally from the sender. #RandolphHarris 8 of 30
This, however, has no place in the mission of a divine person; for the divine person sent neither begins to exist where one did not previously exist, nor ceases to exist where He was. Hence such a mission takes place without a separation, having only distinct origin. The modern philosophical interpretation of conscience follows three main lines: an emotional-aesthetic line, an abstract-formalistic line, and a rational-idealistic line. Secularizing the sectarian belief in the revealing power of conscience, it is interpreted as the emotional reaction to harmony between self-relatedness and relatedness to others, in all beings and in the Universe as a whole. The principle of ethical action is the balance between the effects of benevolence and the effects of selfishness as indicated by conscience. Conscience works better and more accurately, the more the taste for the Universe and its harmony is developed. The educated conscience has a perfect ethical taste. Not harmony with the Universe but sympathy with the other human is the basis of conscience, according to Hume and Adam Smith; we identify ourselves with the other human and take one’s approval or disapproval of our action as our own judgment. This, of course, presupposes a hidden harmony between individuals and the possibility of a mutual feeling of identification. It presupposes a universal principle of harmony in which individuals participate which reveals itself to the conscience. The emotional-harmonistic interpretation of conscience has often led to a replacement of ethical by aesthetic principles. The attitude of the late aristocracy, high bourgeoisie, and bohemianism at the end of the last century was characterized by the elevation of good tastes to the ultimate judge in moral affairs, corresponding to the replacement of religion by arts in these groups. It was an attempt to reach a transmoral conscience but it did not reach even a moral one, and it was swept away by the revolutionary morality and immorality of the twenty-first century. #RandolphHarris 9 of 30
The second method of interpreting conscience philosophically is the abstract-formalistic one. It was most clearly stated by Kant, and it was introduced into theology by Ritschl. Kant wanted to maintain the unconditional character of the moral demand against all emotional relativism, against fear and pleasure motives, as well as against divine and human authorities. However, in doing so, he was driven to a complete formalism. Conscience is the consciousness of the “categorical [unconditional] imperative,” but it is not the consciousness of a special content of this imperative. “Conscience is a consciousness which itself is a duty.” It is a duty to have a conscience, to be conscientious. The content, according to Ritschl, is dependent on the special vocation, a special historical time and space. Only conscientiousness is always demanded. This corresponds to the Protestant, especially the Lutheran, evaluation of work. It is the expression of the activist element of the bourgeoisie and is identical with the bourgeois adaptation to the technical and psychological demands of the economic system. Duty is what serves bourgeois production. This is the hidden meaning even of the philosophy of the “absolute ego” in Fichte, who describes conscience as the certainty of the pure duty that is independent of anything besides its transcendent freedom. In the moment when transcendent freedom comes down to action it is transformed into obedience to a well-calculated system of economic services. It is understandable that this loss of a concrete direction of conscientiousness paved the way for immoral contents when they were commanded, for instance, by a totalitarian state. Against the aesthetic-emotional as well as the authoritarian form of determining the conscience, attempts were made in modern philosophy to have rationality and contents united. The most influential of these attempts is the common-sense theory of Thomas Reid and the Scottish school, id est, the moral sense is common to everybody, being a natural endowment of human nature (like the synteresis of the scholastics). #RandolphHarris 10 of 30
Decisive for practical ethics is Hutcheson’s theory of the sense of benevolence towards others. This theory adequately expressed the reality of British (and to a degree, American) conformism and natural benevolence in a society where the converging tendencies still prevail over the diverging ones, and in which a secularized Christian morality is still dominant. Another attempt to find rational contents for the conscience was made by Hegel. He distinguishes the formal and the true conscience. About the first he says, “Conscience is the infinite formal certainty of oneself—it expresses the absolute right of the subjective self-consciousness—namely, to know within and out of itself what law and duty are, and to acknowledge nothing except what it knows in this way as the good.” However, this subjectivity is fallible and may turn into error and guilt. Therefore, it needs content in order to become the true conscience. This content is the reality of the family, society, and state. With the state (as the organization of historical reason) the formal conscience is transformed into the true conscience. It is a mistake to link these ideas historically to the totalitarian use of the state and the pagan distortion of conscience by national socialism. Hegel was a rationalist, not a positivist. His idea of the state unites Christian-conservative and bourgeois-liberal elements. His famous, though rarely understood, idea of the state as the “God on Earth” is based on the identification of the state with the church as the “Body of Christ,” expressed in secular terms. The conscience that is determined by the state in this sense is determined not by bureaucratic orders but by the life of a half-religious, half-secular organism—the counterpart of Christian-rationalistic common sense of the Anglo-Saxon society. There is little new under the Sun. Who has not chuckled about the legendary “headache” that grips angry/resentful/exhausted/repulsed women when the husbands want dessert? One woman or even millions clutching their head at bedtime do not constitute a celibate society. However, when they are acting deliberately, and each “headache” is a political tool rather than a personal ploy, the case is very different. #RandolphHarris 11 of 30
In Lysistrata, as we have seen, a legion of battle-weary soldiers’ wives unite to force their husbands to cease hostilities. Their weapon, withholding pleasures of the flesh until the bellicose men lay down their swords, is celibacy at its strategic purest, employed in the great cause of peace. The 1880s saw a relation of the rules and some of the laws that had condemned women to social and economic dependence. This was particularly true for women in the more advantaged classes. Higher education, for example, was more accessible and so were some of the professions. White-collar employment mushroomed, opening so many new positions that women were actually hired. Because of the 1870s Married Woman’s Property Act, women could keep their wages and no longer had to surrender them to their husbands, so the idea of salaried employment was far more alluring than it had been. These changes were not gifts from a munificent government. They were the outcome of decades of agitation, mostly by middle- and upper-class women, against their oppression. Many of them had also spoken out on behalf of the millions of their working-class sisters, whose oppression was manifested differently but stemmed nonetheless from the same patriarchal domination. Had the laws changed in tandem with social customs and granted professional women the same legal independence as their brothers, spinsterhood might not have seemed so enticing. What was still so galling, however, was that in marrying, a woman merely exchanged her father’s authority for her husband’s. True, the 1882 (revised and upgraded) Married Women’s Property Act permitted women to own property in their own right, but in other crucial areas, they remained legally subservient. All too often, the transfer of subservience from father to spouse proved a sorry bargain. As a female writing team had observed a decade earlier, “A woman should be reminded…that in marrying she gives up many advantages. Her habits, pursuits, society, sometimes even friendships, must give way to his.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 30
Had not Florence Nightingale earlier warned that women who marry “must sacrifice all their life…behind his destiny women must annihilate herself”? She, like so many other women of her class, remained single—and celibate—to guarantee the personal independence she needed to fulfill her ambitions. The statistical odds against finding a suitable husband ensured that many a women languished in despised spinsterhood, pining for the children she would never have, writhing under the contempt of relations obliged to habour her upon the death of her parents, facing an interminable life of bleak boredom. (Had some talented members of this class undertaken to research the fate of young Hindu widows, a heartening and significant genre of literature might have developed.) However, the dearth of British men certainly cannot explain why one-quarter of British women never married—after all, at the worst of times, the imbalance never even quite reached eleven to ten. And determinedly marriage-minded women could and did emigrate to Australia, where the gender imbalance was reversed, though the quality of available men was somewhat questionable. What, then, explains this sweeping wave of middle-class womanly singleness? In Marriage as a Trade, playwright Cicely Hamilton argued the phenomenon was a political tactic to create a significant class of spinsters prepared to challenge male domination, including what she styled intimate abuse. Except for those who turned to other women for intimate satisfaction, as a small percentage did, these spinsters adopted celibacy as a necessary tool in their campaign. Another spinster-by-choice noted that “wherever women are admitted to pleasures of the flesh to such a degree that the celibate class is practically nonexistent, there the position of women socioeconomically, and intellectually is of a low order.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 30
Thus a considerable slice of the late-nineteenth-century celibacy was the deliberate choice of frustrated, rebellious, and politically astute middle-class women. Pleasures of the flesh, they believed, was a surrender of judicial and (despite the 1882 legislation) property rights, and an abdication of personal independence. They seized on celibacy as a strategy to improve the female condition and, with quiet determination, earned their own living and simply refused to marry. There are beneficial and sadistic forces in the World and therefore in human beings. If a person cannot eliminate one’s negative qualities (and most people find it almost impossible), one can, however, bring them into a neutral point and thus establish a state of equilibrium or balance. Living in a society where there is so much folly and ignorance, evil and unbalance, one must protect oneself mentally, emotionally, physically and even psychically. In a World seething with negative thoughts, murky in several areas with suspicion and even hatred, inflamed with violent feelings, one who knows the truth must hold all the more to inner and outer calm, to goodwill and faith in the Overself’s presence. Evil is strong in the World and sometimes people who aspire to the good become discouraged and depressed. It is at such moments that they need to recall whatever glimpses of the Real they have had and to remember that all things pass away, including the evil. We live in apocalyptic times, as history is already revealing. The call today is a penitential one, a solemn recall from earthliness to holiness, from frivolousness, grossness, and madness to remember of life’s higher purpose. Those who feel in their own hearts some sort of a response, however feeble, should cling to this precious intuition and let it guide them until they are saved. The failure to persuade either the masses of their leaders to change their way of life and thought is not a reason for abandoning either the inner or outer work as useless. #RandolphHarris 14 of 30
Even though any marked and visible result may not now appear, it may yet do so at a later date. We must have a moral concern which instigates acts aiming at conversion or makes proposals even if they will obviously fail. Question about man’s future and civilization’s prospects trouble us. More pessimistic answers are gloomily given than optimistic ones. It is not easy to do otherwise, when the facts are so tragically plain and when they lie so plentifully all around us. Philosophy least of all can afford wishful thinking. It too sees the night falling but whilst conselling stoic resignation it does not discourage constructive resistance. And it reminds the individual that society’s catastrophes should urge one all the more to seek and find the one necessary refuge—one’s own sacredness. If anyone wants to see a better World, one must make one’s own contribution toward it. And this demands inexorably that one begin with oneself and make one’s character and conduct better. The prudent human learns by observation or by experience, or more often by both, that there is a spiritual ignorance in the World and in humans: one must often conceal the greater portion of one’s wisdom and one’s power. This is necessary for personal safety which induced the writers of ancient Christian texts to advise those who lived under a brutal tyranny to emigrate. This did not mean going to a new country but to a new district. We are now in a position to understand the Hipster as Role Players. The Role Player is the fellow who, without any real aptitude or training to do anything, and without any real aptitude or training to do anything, and without a commitment to any goal, can skillfully fit the expectations that people have of one, and give typical performances to prove that one can do the job. The Roles of society are the capitalized nouns in Time style, exempli gratia Halle Berry or Very Important Person. There are great advantages in being a hipster in this sense. #RandolphHarris 15 of 30
First, being a hipster is a way of getting by. If a human feels that one is not anything, one is at least taken for something, and one belongs. Then one cannot feel contempt for the others because they are fools, they are taken in and so one satisfies one’s spite. And one can feel more confident that the so-called worth-while aims are empty because one can give a token performance, and this calms one’s own gnawing feelings of frustrations and worthlessness. Finally, Role Playing protects a deep conceit of one’s abstract powers: one “could” if one wanted, but in fact is never tested. The hipster in this sense must be distinguished from the industrious confidence human who wants to get the swag and vanish, and does not thrive on publicity. The hipster will often boast: one knows the score, one is ahead of the game. This cool attitude of the hipster is endemic in the organized system. However, on the other hand, the committed Organization Man also really belongs, one has status and salary and must protect them. Therefore the junior executive is in a terrible contradiction. One is cynical about the aims of the firm, yet one has fears that one’s own ineptitude will be found out. One has no recourse to concrete performance, for there is little contact with unambiguous material and there are no objective standards. How to meet a purely subjective demand? In pain (even ulcers) one has to get by by role playing, interpersonal relations abstracted from both animal desire or tangible achievement. One meets expectations, one conforms, one one-ups, one proves one must know by attaining a higher status. The trainee believes managing is an end in itself—technique is more vital than content. Compare the identical remark in a memorandum of the Liberal Project in Congress: The past few years “have given rise to a particular brand of politician. One is completely method-oriented. The substance of a bill that is paramount.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 30
The new type of salesperson does not sell the product but the human: by the expense account one proves that one is a right person and one confirms the buyer’s image of oneself, whatever that happens to be. For many bright young fellas, I think, the Organization has taken the place that the Communist Party had in the Thirties. At that time young men who were frustrated in their creative lives, perhaps because unable to stand the gaff, took out their self-hatred on the capitalist system, and often with sublime self-contempt accepted jobs with high salaries. In our decade, the young people believe they belong to the governing board, and their resentment has turned to cynicism. The standard of human integrity is equivalent. The type situation of Role Playing is the Air Force questionnaire asking who is Giotto, Vivaldi or Pilot Patrick: if the candidate gives the right answer, one is disqualified, one will not belong. The Role Player has no difficulty. I was once at another convention (National Recreation Congress, 1959), and striking was the difference between the working stiffs, the actual directors of play and group activities, and the administrators. The actual directors were human being, often enthusiastic and proud of happy improvisations and strokes of good judgment that they wanted to report. However, the administrators were concerned about standards, certificates, avoiding complaints and offending, and providing their dedicated service; it was clear that they wanted above all to diminish the factor of risk for themselves and create a front to get bigger appropriations. At the same time they kept asking how to recruit Leaders; but it was evident that the more strictly they applied their standards, the more surely they would eliminate the leaders. We must contrast the concept of Role, meeting expectations by playing it cool and knowing the technique for a token performance, with the concept of Identity. One discovers, fights for, appoints oneself to one’s Identity. Identity is defined by its task, mission, product; role depends on the interpersonal expectation of the others. #RandolphHarris 17 of 30
Naturally, statesmen and public spokes men are the role players, hipsters, par excellence. They exist by Front and giving symbolic satisfaction, so it is not to be hoped that their speech be serious, relevant to what objectively exists. However, it is dismaying to find the same symbolic relations in enterprises of production and the distribution of goods. One cannot help distrusting the goods, thinking they are only packages and brand names. And so, becoming disaffected from these enterprises, the Beat Generation sometimes comes to despise real goods. It takes good to be merely commodities that must be spurned: this is the fetishism of commodities in reverse. The factory operatives who could not care less about their jobs are not much aware of what they produce; causality is built into the machinery. The junior executives, advertising men, salesmen are role players and have little causal relation to the products. Presumably the technicians and top managers know something about and produce the products, since the products do come to exist. And the evidence is that the top managers do work very hard on production and sales; they work a sixty-hour week and ae produce of their work. However, even they have to devote an increasing majority of the time to interpersonal games of no productive use—90 percent. (Let me give a typical illustration. There is a well-known monthly magazine that five editors used to put out with a week’s work. It was pretty good. Unfortunately it made a reputation for itself and its wealthy sponsors hired a staff of ten secretaries and assistants to the editors. Soon the editors found themselves working all month, and quit. The magazine lost all its spark.) Considering the technical possibilities, we must say that our physical environment changes very slowly. This is not surprising, for so little thought was given to it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 30
When it comes to the misuse of substances, in some respects the story of the misuse of drugs is the same story as in the past. Substance use is still rampant, often creating damaging psychological disorders. New drugs keep emerging, and the public goes through periods of believing, naively, that they are “safe.” Only gradually do people learn that these drugs, too, pose dangers. And treatments for substance-related disorders continue to have only limited effect. Yet there are important new wrinkles in this familiar story. Researcher have begun to develop a clearer understanding of how drugs act on the brain and body. In treatment, self-help groups and rehabilitation programs are flourishing. And preventive education to make people aware of the dangers of drug misuse is also expanding and seems to be having an effect. One reason for these improvements is that investigators and clinicians have stopped working in isolation and are instead looking for intersections between their own work and that from other models. The same kind of integrated efforts that have helped with other psychological disorders are brining new promise and hope to the study and treatment of substance-related disorders. Perhaps the most important insight to be gained from these integrated efforts is that several of the models were already on the right track. Social pressures, personality characteristics, rewards, and genetic predispositions all seem to play roles in substance-related disorders, and in fact to operate together. For example, some people may inherit a malfunction of the biological reward center and so may need special doses of external stimulation—say, intense relationships, an abundance of certain foods or drugs—to stimulate their own reward center Their pursuit of external rewards may take on the character of an addictive personality. Such individuals may be especially prone to experimenting with drugs, particularly when their social groups makes the drugs available or when they are faced with intense social and personal stress. #RandolphHarris 19 of 30
Just as each model has identified important factors in the development of substance-related disorders, each has made important contributions to treatment. As we have seen, the various forms of treatment seem to work best when they are combined with approaches from the other models, making integrated treatment the most productive approach. These recent developments are encouraging. At the same time, however, enormous and increasingly levels of drug use continue. New drugs and drug combinations are discovered almost daily, and with them come new problems, new questions, and needs for new research and new treatments. Perhaps the most valuable lesson is an old one. There is no free lunch. Th pleasures derived from these substances come with high psychological and biological costs, some not yet even known. If you think about it, drugs that are not prescribed by a doctor and those that are used by people for recreational reasons is very similar to a virus, in that they can be deadly. The virus story is so strange that it is worthwhile to point out that it rests today on very firm experimental evidence. Some of the important episodes in the reproductive process of bacterial and certain other viruses can in fact be “seen” by means of the electron microscope. The first episode of the sequence is of this nature: the attachment by certain virus particles to the outer surface of the cell to be attacked. The next step can be deduced from later developments: apparently there is an enzyme in the protein coat of the virus particle which dissolves a hole in the membrane of the cell to which it is attached. The products of the chemical reactions involved then cause the entire protein capsule to contact. This has the effect of a hypodermic injection—squirting the nucleic acid content of the virus particle into the interior of the cell that is being infected. #RandolphHarris 20 of 30
All of this is remarkable enough, but what follows is even more spectacular. For the invading nucleic acid proceeds to take over from the cellular DNA and redirect the internal chemistry of the invaded organism! First, the viral nucleic acid directs the manufacture of enzymes that attacked the cellular DNA, thereby destroying the “control center” of the victim. Then a period of rapid reproduction of the viral nucleic acid begins. A little later, the viral nucleic acid induces the production of the kind of protein needed to make the protective covering of additional virus particles. After a few more minutes the newly formed strands of viral nucleic acid begin to get together with the new protein overcoats to form complete new virus particles. Eventually, when this assembly process has gone to completion, the last command is given by the invader to the cellular mechanisms—this time to produce an enzyme that dissolves large holes in the external membrane of the cell and allows the newly formed virus particles to escape. Between the instant of initial attachment by a virus particle to healthy cell and the final cataclysmic disintegration, twenty- or thirty-minutes elapse. The end product of the remarkable sequence of chemical steps is several hundred newborn virus particles, each identical with the one which started the chain of activity and each capable of initiating a similar lethal sequence in another healthy cell. In view of their bizarre reproductive habits, it is easy to understand the fascination that viruses hold for biologists. However, we must confine our attention to the light we earlier predicted virus studies would throw on the generality of the nucleic acid/enzyme mechanism. It is, of course, the ability of the viral nucleic acid to take over and successfully redirect the metabolic processes in the invaded cell that is pertinent to our theories. #RandolphHarris 21 of 30
For even in the absence of present knowledge as to all the details of the interaction, it seems clear that the virus-reproduction story implies great compatibility between the design of the virus nucleic acid and the nucleic acid/enzyme mechanisms of the host cell. The invading nucleic acid is not only able to reproduce itself in the cell but also able to provide the messenger RNA that successfully attached itself to the cellular microsomes and directs the formation of virus-specific enzymes. For this purpose transfer RNA, amino acid fragments, phosphate energies, and a number of enzymes must come into play. Because of the relative simplicity of the viral nucleic acid molecules, it seems unlikely that new forms of all such components are synthesized under their direction; rather, it seems that the specifically virus messenger RNA must be able to work in conjunction with components indigenous to the healthy cell in the manufactures of the enzymes needed for the formation of new virus particles. Coronaviruses are a type of virus. There are many different kinds, and some cause disease. A coronavirus identified in 2019, SARS-CoV-2, has caused a pandemic of respirator illness, called COVID-19. As of now, researchers know that the coronavirus is spread through droplets and virus particles released into the air when an infected person breathes, talks, laughs, sings, coughs, or sneezes. Larger droplets may fall to the ground in a few seconds, but tiny infections particles can linger in the air and accumulate in indoor places, especially where many people are gathered and there is poor ventilation. That is why hand hygiene and physical distancing are essential to preventing COVID-19. The first case of COVID-19 was reported December 1, 2019, and the cause was a then-new coronavirus later names SARS-CoV-2. SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in an animal and changed (mutated) so it could cause illness in humans. #RandolphHarris 22 of 30
Research continues, and more study may reveal how and why the coronavirus evolved to cause a pandemic. What is the incubation period for COVID-19? Symptoms show up in people within two to 14 days of exposure to the virus. A person infected with the coronavirus is contagious to others for up to two days before symptoms appear, and they remain contagious to others for 10 to 20 days, depending upon their immune system and the severity of their illness. What are symptoms of coronavirus? Cough, fever or chills, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, muscle or body aches, sore throat, new loss of taste or smell, diarrhea, headache, new fatigue, nausea or vomiting, congestion or runny nose. Some people infected with the coronavirus have mild COVID-19 illness, and others have no symptoms at all. In some cases, however, COVID-10 can lead to respiratory failure, lasting lung and heart muscle damage, nervous system problems, kidney failure or death. If you have a fever or any of the symptoms listed above, call your doctor or a health care provider and explain your symptoms over the phone before going to the doctor’s office, urgent care facility, or emergency room. COVID has already killed more than 6 million people globally—and the pandemic is far from over. In many countries, including the United States of America, COVID-19 is now a leading cause of death, alongside heart disease and stroke. And yet experts say the pandemic’s true toll is much likely higher. It is quite possible that the number of deaths is around 12 million. However, 6 million is an astounding number on its own. No country has been able to escape this virus. The official global tally captures only confirmed cases in each country—and standards for reporting deaths vary widely. Some countries lack the robust testing protocols needed to diagnose cases while other may not count people who have died because of complications due to COVID-19. In many places, too, people are dying at home because they cannot reach care, and therefore are not counted in official death tolls. #RandolphHarris 23 of 30
The official tally also does not account for COVID-19’s vast collateral damage. Around the World, sick people have refrained from seeking care for fear of getting infected and countries have diverted resources from other critical health-care priorities. Deaths from tuberculosis have also risen for the first time in a decade. And though death rates are declining, they remain staggeringly high and will likely continue. Due to fears from COVID-19, many workers are retiring early. Around 22 percent more people have retired due to fear of contracting COVID. More than 3.5 million additional people retired during this pandemic. Thus virus research, in establishing the remarkable compatibility of the genetic mechanisms of forms of life so different as those bacteria and viruses, has further strengthened the argument of the universality of these mechanisms. However, just as in the case of pneumococci results, the evidence is less than conclusive. After all, viruses are pretty specific, each limited in its destructive ability to only one or a few species of cells, This is indicated by the descriptive levels given to viruses: the tobacco mosaic virus, the turnip yellow mosaic virus, the rabbit papilloma virus, and so on. Therefore we cannot ignore the possibility that, just as with the R and S strains of pneumococci, there is a close evolutionary kinship between the virus and the cell it attacks. Perhaps the two organisms, though greatly dissimilar, developed symbiotically through the ages in such a way as to maintain compatibility among their nuclear control mechanism. When thought of in this way, it could be that the virus and its related cell constitute a sort of single two-part organism and that the seemingly remarkable ability of the one to operate the chemical machinery of the other is but a prosaic example of the inevitable internal consistency in the metabolism of a viable organism, with no implications as to the universality of the genetic mechanisms among really different species. #RandolphHarris 24 of 30
Of course, we go a bit too far in disclaiming all pertinence to our thesis of the virus results. For a single virus sometimes, dos attack more than one cell species. After all, monkeys as well as men can contract polio. Just as in the case of the pneumococci results, nothing can keep the virus work from being suggestive. However, we have not yet made a convincing cause for the hypothesis that the genetic mechanisms are truly universal. More evidence is needed. Looking forward, some generations are born to create, others to maintain a civilization. The generations who launched the Second Wave of historic change were compelled, by force of circumstances, to be creators. Today in every sphere of social life, in our families, our schools, our businesses and churches, in our energy systems and communications, we face the need to create new Third Wave forms, and millions of people in many countries are already beginning to do so. Nowhere, however, is obsolescence more advanced or more dangerous than in our political life. And in so field today do we find less imagination, less experiment, less willingness to contemplate fundamental change. Even people who are daringly innovative in their own work-in their law offices or laboratories, their kitchens, classrooms, or companies—seem to freeze up at any suggestion that political structure need a little adjustment to make sure they adhere to the United States Constitution and that it is not brushed aside like ashes from a cigar. Is it not amazing that the country can force people to wear masks and get vaccinated, but will not force politicians, states, cities, and other to obey the birth certification of our nation? So frightening is Constitutional law, with its attendant risks to the corrupt status quo, however surrealistic and oppressive, suddenly seems like the best of all possible Worlds. Conversely we have in every society a fringe of pseudorevolutionaries, stepped in obsolete Second Wave assumption, for whom no proposed change is radical enough. #RandolphHarris 25 of 30
Honest to God terrorists are dreaming of totalitarian technocracies or medieval utopias. Even as we speed into a new historical zone, they nurse dreams of revolution drawn from the yellowed pages of yesterday’s political tracts. Yet what lies ahead as the super-struggle intensifies is not a replay of any previous revolutionary drama—no centrally directed overthrow of the ruling elites by some “vanguard party” with the masses in two; no spontaneous, supposedly cathartic, mass uprising trigged by terrorist. The creation of new political structures of the Third Wave civilization will not come in a single climatic upheaval, but as a consequence of a thousand innovations and collisions at many levels in many places over a period of decades. And the stakes are very high. In the past there was blood-drenched drama of wars, revolt, famines, forced migrations, coups d’état, and calamities. If you think of it, they are resurging. There is a need for broadened democracy. Most of us know, or sense, how dangerous a World we live in. We know that social instability and political uncertainties can leash savage energies. We know what war and economic cataclysm mean, and we remember how often totalitarianism has sprung from noble intentions and social breakdown. What most people seem to ignore, however, are the beneficial different between present and past. Christian theologians use the term inerrantists for those who insist that, even after two thousand years of problematic interpretations and mistranslation, the Christian Bible is error-free, and that, moreover, its every word must be understood in its most literal sense. Economics has its own inerrantists who maintain, in the face of all sorts of anomalous, puzzling and contradictory evidence, that nothing has really changed. At the “fundamental” level, they claim the economy had been only minimally affected by the digital upheaval and the shift to a knowledge-based economy. #RandolphHarris 26 of 30
The manager of one of America’s biggest mutual funds reassures an audience of European petrochemical executives that, in finance, things always go up and down, so what is new? The economy is still the same as it was before, some believe. This illusion, however, becomes unsustainable the minted we shift our gaze from the everyday fundamentals to the deeper ones. For it is at this deeper level that we find the most compelling evidence that the economy is not “as it was before”—that, in fact, today’s entire structure of wealth creation is quaking and rocking, suggesting even bigger changes to come. Things much bigger the cryptocurrency. Circumstances differ from country to country, but never in history have there been so many reasonably educated people collectively armed with so incredible a range of knowledge. Never have so many enjoyed so high a level of affluence, precarious perhaps, yet ample enough to allow them time and energy for civic concern and actions. Never have so many been able to travel, to communicate, and to learn so much from other cultures. Above all, never have so many had so much to gain by guaranteeing that the necessary changes, though profound, be made peacefully. Elites, no matter how enlightened, cannot by themselves make a new civilization. The energies of whole peoples will be required. However, those energies are available, waiting to be tapped. Indeed if we, particularly in the high-technology countries, took as our explicit goal for the next generation the creation of wholly new institutions and constitutions, we could release something more powerful even than energy: the collective imagination. The sooner we begin to design alternative political institutions based on the three principles described above—the power of underrepresented groups, semi-direct democracy, and decision division—the better our chances for a peaceful transition. #RandolphHarris 27 of 30
It is the attempt to block such changes, not the changes themselves, that raises the level of risk. It is the blind attempt to defend obsolescence tht creates the danger of bloodshed. This means that to avoid violent upheaval we must begin now to focus on the problem of structural political obsolescence around the World. And we must take this issues not merely to the experts, the constitutionalists, lawyers, and politicians, but to the public itself—to civic organizations, trade unions, churches, to women’s groups, to ethic and racial groups that remain marginalized, to scientists and housewives and businessmen and women. We must, as a first step, launch the widest public debate over the need for a new political system attuned to the needs of Third Wave civilization. We need conferences, television programs, contests, simulation exercises, mock constitutional conventions to generate the broadest array of imaginative proposals for political restructuring, to unleash an outpouring of fresh ideas. We should be prepared to use the most advanced tools available to us, from satellites and computers to digital streaming and interactive television. No one knows in detail what the future holds or what will be best in our society. For this reason we should think not of a single massive reorganization or of a single revolutionary, cataclysmic change imposed from the top, but of thousands of conscious, decentralized experiments that permit us to test new models of political decision-making at local and regional levels in advance of their application to the national transnational levels. However, at the same time, we must also begin to build a constituency for similar experimentation—and radical redesign—of institutions are the national and transnational levels as well. Today’s widespread disillusionment, anger, and bitterness against the World’s Second Wave governments can either be whipped into fanatic frenzy by demagogues calling for authoritarian leadership or it can be mobilized for the process of democratic reconstruction. #RandolphHarris 28 of 30
By launching a vast process of social learning—and experiment in anticipatory democracy in many nations at once—we can head off the totalitarian thrust. We can prepare millions for the dislocations and dangerous crises the lie before us. And we can place strategic pressure on existing political systems to accelerate the necessary changes. Without this tremendous pressure from below, we should not expect many of today’s nominal leaders—presidents and politicians, senators and central committee members—to challenge the very institutions that, no matter how obsolete, give them prestige, money, and the illusion, if not the reality, of power. Some unusual, farseeing politicians or officials will lend their early support to the struggle for political transformation. However, most will move only when the demands from outside are irresistible or when the crisis is already so advances, and so close to violence, tht they see no alternative. The responsibility for change, therefore, is found within us. We must begin with ourselves, teaching ourselves not to close our minds prematurely to the novel, the surprising, the seemingly radical. This means fighting off the idea-assassins who rush forward to kill any new suggestion on grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd, oppressive, or unworkable it may be. It means fighting for the freedom of expression—the right of the people to voice their ideas, even if heretical. Above all, it means starting this process of reconstruction now, before the further disintegration of existing political systems sends the forces of tyranny jackbooting through the streets, and makes impossible a peaceful transition through the Twenty-first Century Democracy. If we begin no, we and our children can take part in the exciting reconstruction not merely of our obsolete political structures, but of civilization itself. #RandolphHarris 29 of 30
Like the generation of the revolutionary immortals, we have a destiny to create. In traveling learn to believe and trust your experiences as an alert to eye and ear. Often firsthand experience or chance conversations sheds a revealing light on abstraction. A Limo driver in a Latin American capital told me more than all his government’s cheery statistics: When I asked him why his people were not doing something to protest a soaring inflation rate, he simply imitated the stuttering of a machine gun. Once you give up your laws, rights, and freedoms, you usually never get them back. Nan did want to go in the water—I told her to stay on the shore—of course, she would wade in the breakers. And now she is drowned. What a bore! Look around the World at socialist countries and see what is wrong with them before you give up on Capitalism. I hear a voice, the cry of a wounded animal; someone shoots an arrow at the moon; a small bird has fallen from the nest. People must be awakened, witness must be given, so that life can be guarded. God, Thou causes grass to spring up for the cattle, please allow an abundance of health, cash, credit, money, diamonds, emeralds, rubies, gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and herbs for the service of humans. Thou bringest for break out of the Earth to sustain humans’ life, and premium cranberry justice to gladden their hearts. Thou appointest the moon for seasons; the sun knoweth its time of setting. How manifold are Thy works, O Lord! In wisdom hast Thou made them all. The higest achievement is to serve the Lord with gladness; come before His presence with thanksgiving. It is quite true to say that during deep prayer and praises, these exercises eventually lead to remarkable powers. This gives mental abstraction. For the Lord, your God, brought you into a good land; a land of brooks and of fountains that spring out of valleys and hills; a land wherein you shall eat bread without scarcity, and shall lack for nothing. You shall eat and be satisfied and bless the Lord you God for the good land which He hath given you. At the same time, allow His creative imagination and His concentrated will, and the lower energy to produce lofty aspiration. #RandolphHarris 30 of 30
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People Bamboozle their Consciences and Shut their Eyes
Life is an adventure of beauty, love, curiosity, success, and more importantly, Significance. Significance means making contributions to others. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose. And never confuse yourself with someone else. Just because you handled situations in a particular way, and like certain things, does not mean you understand someone else. It is a lot like thinking you can see into the soul of Hollywood actors based on their movies and social media; until you spend a few years with one, and find out he or she is nothing like you ever imagined. Some people act on the silver screen, other do it in life and are so far out of touch with reality, and their living soul. Nonetheless, in our department of the genetic mechanisms there has been a conspicuous absence of qualifying statements such as “this is the way it works in the frog” or “the bacterial mechanisms look like this.” On the contrary, in several aspects of the preceding treatment it has been implied, and occasionally it has been specifically stated, that in the nucleic acid/enzyme mechanisms we seem to be dealing with a general biological principle applicable equally to amoeba or man. However, it would obviously be unreasonable to imagine that a mechanism as complex as that underlying the interplay between the giant molecules of nucleic acid and protein enzymes could have been independently developed for each of many different species by tortuous processes of evolution. Therefore, if the nucleic acid/enzyme mechanisms do indeed exist in all forms of modern organism, it would seem necessary to conclude that they originated early in the history of life—before much progress had been made in the evolutionary differentiation that has resulted in today’s large variety of living forms—and that they subsequently survived in all of those forms only because their possession proved to contribute to all types of host organism markedly superior to survival attributes. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
This hypothesis credits a single evolutionary discovery with such remarkably superior properties as to justify us in requiring of the biologists some rather strong evidence before we accept the current doctrine of the ubiquity of the nucleic acid/enzyme mechanisms. Let us therefore look at some of the recent research findings that suggest that we are here in fact dealing with a universal biological principle. Of course, the first discoveries attesting to the existence of the nucleic acid/enzyme control mechanisms could provide little evidence for their generality. Indeed, nearly all of the early work was done on bacteria or other microorganisms. It was not until 1962, for example, that messenger RNA was isolated from mammalian cells. However, unspecific, but highly suggestive, evidence pointing toward the broad applicability of the new discoveries was easy to come by. For example, DNA is always discovered in cell nuclei, when it is looked for. Similarly, the cytoplasm is always found to contain microsomes and RNA. And protein enzymes have been shown to control the chemical process that occur in the wide variety of plant and animal cells that have been investigated. One of the strongest reasons for believing that the nucleic acid/enzyme mechanisms might constitute a general principle of life was the neat solution they provided for a long-standing mystery of biochemistry—the precise architecture of protein molecules. A reasonable explanation of how, in nature, as distinct from the laboratory of the chemists, hundreds or thousands of different amino acid segments could be strung together in precisely ordered arrays, as was known to be required by the remarkable structure sensitivity of the enzyme molecules, filled a tremendous gap in biological theory. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
For this reason the notion that all forms of living cells employ a system of control of their chemical processes of the general nature of that described in the preceding reports has from the first been attractive to biologists. However, no matter how attractive a theory might be, no good scientist would fail to put it to experimental test. And it was clearly important to do more than merely confirm the employment by various plant and animal species of similar broad principles of metabolic and genetic control. For the hypothesis that all living cells are controlled in their chemistry by a mechanism involving the interaction of nucleic acid and enzyme molecules, even if true, clearly need not imply identity in the details of the mechanisms employed by different organisms. Any ingenious scientist would encounter little difficulty in inventing variations of the nuclear DNA/messenger RNA/transfer RNA/microsome/protein enzyme scheme we have “derived” that would appear, from all that is known today, to be as workable as the particular scheme described. Thus an inevitable preoccupation of the research scientists has had to be not only to look for the existence of nucleic acid/enzyme mechanisms in various species but also to determine the extent of variation in these mechanisms from species to species. Determination of the similarities and differences among the molecular mechanisms of different species of organisms is not easy as it sounds, however. Scientific techniques are not yet advanced to the point where molecules of DNA in the nucleus or RNA in the cytoplasm can be sorted out and their precise dimension and structure catalogued. As is so usual in science, indirect methods of throwing light on the question at hand had to be sought. When considered in terms of modern knowledge, an experiment performed in 1928 seems to have first pointed the way toward a suitable investigation technique. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
That early experiment involved work with a certain type of pneumonia-causing bacterium. It has been found that this bacterium comes in two slightly different forms, or “strains.” One strain is characterized by a smooth coating surrounding the bacterial cell; this is called the smooth, or S, strain. Bacteria of the other strain possess no such coating. They are called the rough, or R, strain. The curious thing that was reported in 1928 about these two strains of bacteria was that, when a batch of dead S bacteria was added to living R bacteria, there would subsequently appear in the culture living members of the S strain. (It has been well established that a colony composed exclusively of R bacteria would produce only more R types, whereas S bacteria would also breed true.) Since it was inconceivable that dead S bacteria could come back to life, the 1928 experiment had always required the conclusion that something in the dead S bacteria had converted some live R bacteria into live S bacteria. Many years later, additional experiments succeeded in isolating this something and showing that it was pure nucleic acid. In terms of our present understanding of the nucleic acid mechanisms, the explanation of the behaviour of the pneumococci is not difficult. Evidently the S bacteria contain a molecule of DNA that, through the mechanisms we have studied, leads to the formation of an enzyme that results in the construction of the smooth coating that characterizes this particular strain. A bacterium of the R strain differs from one of the S strain in not possessing this particular strain. A bacterium of the R strain differs from one of the S strain in not possessing this particular piece of DNA. The treatment that killed the S bacteria did not destroy their DNA. When the live R bacteria were mixed with dead S bacteria, occasionally DNA from a dead cell was able to work its way into a living cell, thereby supplying the kind of nucleic acid needed for the formation of a smooth coat. Result: the R bacterium became an S bacterium instead. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Clearly, this experiment constituted a step toward the establishment of generality in the genetic mechanisms; for it showed that the DNA from one type of pneumococcus bacterium could successfully operate the complex messenger RNA/transfer RNA/microsome apparatus of the other type of bacteria to produce a new and effective enzyme molecule. To be sure, if out theories are any good at all, they would have to account for the similarity of the genetic mechanisms among organisms so closely related as two strains of the same bacterial type. Nevertheless, the experiment was a step in the right direction. It suggested further steps. Was it possible to devise more advanced experiments to test for a similar kind of operation of the genetic mechanisms of one species by the nucleic acid from an entirely unrelated species of organism? Such a phenomenon, if it could be observed, would imply considerable similarity in the details s well as the general characteristics of the nucleic acid/enzyme mechanisms of unrelated species. It has indeed been found possible to devise experiments to test the proposed hypothesis. It is virus research that has provided this possibility. This work is important enough to our story to justify our digressing to study the characteristic of virus particles that are pertinent to an understanding of some of its implication. A virus particle is the simplest of all living structures. It consists of only two components: a quantity of nucleic acid surrounded by a shell, or “overcoat,” of protein material. There is no cellular structure—no nucleus, no cytoplasm, no microsomes, none of the other complex structures that we shall later see make of the modern living cell a complex piece of machinery. By itself, a virus particle appears to be a lifeless object: it does not eat, grow, reproduce or die; no chemical processes take place in its vitals; it is an inert capsule of protein-protected nucleic acid. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Certain virus particles may even form regular crystalline matrices, yielding microscopic structures of overall mechanical and optical properties grossly similar to those of salt or diamond, for example. In terms of such properties, viruses appear much more akin to lifeless minerals than to living organisms. Viruses are no more confused with their virions, but can be viewed as complex living entities that transform the infected cell into a novel organism—the virus—producing virions. A virus is a microscopic organism that can replicate only inside the cells of a host organism. Most viruses are so tiny they are only observable with at least a conventional optical microscope. Viruses infect all types of organisms, including animals and plants, as well as bacteria and archaea. Although viruses have no ability to metabolize on their own, they depend on a host organism for replication. Therefore, viruses are at the edge of life. Approximately 5,000 different viruses have been described in detail at the current time, although it is known that there are millions of distinct types. Viruses are found in virtually every ecosystem on Earth, and these minute life forms are thought to be the most abundant type of biological entity. The study of viruses is known as virology, a specialty within the field of microbiology. The common concept of viruses focuses on their role as pathogen. Actually, there are vast numbers of viral entities that are beneficial to individual species as well as providing ecosystems service. For example, a class of viruses known as bacteriophages can kill a spectrum of harmful bacteria, providing protection to humans as well as other biota. Since viruses are capable of self-replication, they are clearly some type of lifeform, and likely involved with the early evolutionary development of such other simple lifeforms as bacteria and protists. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Viruses differ, however, from the simpler autonomous replication of chemical crystals. This is due to the fact that a virus can inherit a genetic mutation and is also subject to similar natural selection processes of cellular organisms. A virus cannot be labelled simply, therefore, as inanimate or lifeless. Here, we consider it a lifeform, but we adhere to current taxonomy and so not credit it with a parallel domain to other recognized cellular lifeforms. However, put the virus particles in contact with living cells of a suitable species of plant or animal and the situation changes dramatically. For now, life seems to appear. In a matter of minutes the number of virus particles will have doubled. Under suitable conditions, a few hours will suffice for a millionfold increase in their popular! This peculiar lifelike/nonlifelike dichotomy in the personality of the virus has caused considerable attention to be focused on it in recent years. Without doubt, Wendell M. Stanley heads the list of pioneers in the field. As early as 1935 he showed that the tobacco leaf, could be isolated in the form of pure crystals. For his work in this field, Stanley shared in the 1946 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Stanley’s pioneering work on the tobacco mosaic virus led to studies by many investigators of the curious reproductive processes of viruses. Some of the interesting discoveries have been made with the kinds of viruses that attack, and therefore reproduce in, plant cells—such as those studies by Stanley; other important discoveries have arisen out of work with the so-called bacteriophages—viruses that attack and reproduce in the cells of bacteria. A consistent picture has emerged from all of this work bearing on the way in which a virus particle is able to make use of the genetic mechanisms of the cell it infects in order to reproduce its own kind. In such viral groups as poxviruses, papillomaviruses, and tobamoviruses, molecular taxonomy aligns generally with the genetic relationships of their hosts. This suggests that the affiliations of those viral groups predate their present derivatives, and, in fact, that these three viral groups and their hosts likely coevolved. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
In addition, some other things we may want to consider, while on the topic of health and science, is community prevention programs. As we have seen, sociocultural theorists believe that psychological problems emerge in a social setting and are treated in a social context. Perhaps the most effective approach to substance-related disorders is to prevent them. The first drug-prevention efforts were conducted in schools. Today prevention programs are also offered in workplaces, activity centers, and other community settings, and even through the media. Some prevention programs argue for total abstinence from drugs, while others teach responsible use. Some seek to interrupt drug use; others try to delay the age at which people first experiment with drugs. Programs may also differ in whether they offer drug education, teach alternatives to drug use, try to change the psychological state of the potential users, seek to change relationships with peers, or combine these techniques. Before it begins—community prevention programs for substance-related disorders often target very young children. Children often pledge abstinence from drug use on Red Ribbion by wearing red, getting a sticker, and signing a contract. (They used to release balloons, but that has been showed to be dangerous, it can cause fires and harm fish and wildlife.) Substance use—illegal, legal, and medical must be controlled to keep people safe and sane. No drug should be viewed as cool, or “it is just,” if it was not prescribed to you by a doctor, leave it alone. Besides the out-of-scale physical environment and its complicated techniques, the social environment too is baffling and produces ineptitude and loss of the sense of causality. Think of a child trying to cope with Property Rights, a most abstract notion. There is no problem when it is a case of something being used by somebody else, when Leo tries to take Finn’s shovel out of his hand and Finn gets upset or complains to authority in no uncertain terms. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
When it comes to obeying authority, the puzzlement comes when the shovel is idle and Mama say, “Leo, Leo, you mustn’t use that shovel, it’s Finn’s.” What impresses the child is no precise idea, but the grownup’s tone of conviction. The child “believes,” though there is no evidence of his senses. It is the beginning of what Karl Marx called the fetishism of commodities. What is sickening is that it is just this kind of influence that is wanted by priest, mayors, and tavern philosophers who declare that more home influence is the remedy for out troubles of youth. However, the social relationships of the grownups themselves are out of human scale, for in the corporate system of organization the puzzling has become altogether mysterious. It is disturbing to a child to sense that his mother is under the unseen thumb of religion or his father of the boss. However, the top managers in our semimonopolies are quite anonymous. This is part of the new managerial code, as described by Fortune itself. A child cannot use them as model heroes, for they are invisible. This is exactly why Jackie Robinson’s proposal to import the TV personalities as ersatz models is so unfortunate, for these visible “heroes” are puppets. With the increasing concentration of management and control, there is less relation even to Property Rights. Consider it. If one is put upon or abused, with whom shall one be angry? One cannot vent rage against an abstract system. However, there is no need to vent feeling, for it is a matter of the grievance committee and other regular channels. In the Middle Status, the heart of the organized system, the situation is not the same as in a bureaucracy, with which it is usually compared; for a bureaucracy has written code and a definite pecking-order; but organization protects everybody’s personal dignity, and its subtle interpersonal feuding and competition cannot be codified, for it is without any objective utility to give a principle. Even that mighty systems the State is more material: it has banners, soldiers, elections, postmen and women, police. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
In a child, the systems of the State rouses awe and fear. However, the organize system exists only in the bland front of its brand-name products and advertising. There is no knowing how it is run or who determines. It is in these circumstances that young persons grow up convinced that everything is done with mirrors, by “influence.” Not even the personal influence of nepotism, but something more like the astrological influence of the planets. The sense of initiative, causality, skill has been discouraged. Merit is a train of “personality.” Learning is the possession of the Diploma. Usefulness is a Business Card. Justification is Belonging. Turning to the “sectarian” understanding of conscience, we find the Franciscan idea of the immediate knowledge of the natural law in the depth of the human soul. However, no two new elements supported and transformed this tradition: the so-called “German mysticism,” with its emphasis on the divine spark in the human soul, and the “spiritual enthusiasm” awakened by the Reformation, with its emphasis on the individual possession of the Spirit. Thomas Muenzer and all his sectarian followers taught that the divine Spirit speaks to us out of the depth of our own soul. We are not speaking to ourselves, but God within us. “Out of the abyss of the heart which is from the living God,” wrote Muenzer, we receive the truth if we are opened to it by suffering. Since the enthusiasts understood this divine voice within us in a very concrete sense, they identified it with the conscience. In this way conscience became a source of religious insight and not simply a judge of moral actions. The conscience as the expression of the inward light has revealing character. However, the question arose immediately: what is the content of such a revelation through conscience? Luther asked Muenzer, and Cromwell asked Fox: what is the difference between practical reason and the inward light? Both of the could answer: the ecstatic character of the divine Spirit! #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
However, they could be asked again: what bearing has the ecstatic form of revelation on its content? And then the answer was difficult. Muenzer referred to practical decisions in his daily life, made under the inspiration of the Spirit; and Fox developed an ethics of unconditional honesty, bourgeois righteousness, and pacifism. It was easy to ask again whether reasonableness and obedience to the natural moral law could not produce the same results. The “revealing conscience” is a union of mysticism with moral rationality. However, it does not reveal anything beyond biblical and genuine Christian tradition. An important result arising from this transformation of the concept of conscience is the idea of tolerance and its victory in the liberal era. The quest for “freedom of conscience” does not refer to the concrete ethical decision, but to the religious authority of the inward light that expressed itself through the individual consciences. And since the inward light could hardly be distinguished from practical reason, freedom of conscience meant, actually, the freedom to follow one’s autonomous reason, not only in ethics, but also in religion. The “religion of conscience” and the consequent idea of tolerance are not a result of the Reformation, but of sectarian spiritualism and mysticism. Florence Nightingale also had a religious state of mind when it came to the conscience. Although she was living in despair at the futility of existence under her parents’ roof, the privileged thirty-one-year-old’s life was confined to an endless round of social visits, teas, and parties. Florence loathed it all, even the “charity” balls and concerts where “people bamboozle their consciences and shut their eyes.” Over a decade earlier, on February 7, 1837, God had spoken and called her to his service. However, unlike the message Joan of Arc had received, Florence’s had been vague about what this service entailed. In any case, her parents rejected their daughter’s desire for a career or profession. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
In Victorian, England, women like Florence were supposed to marry. She was an excellent catch—attractive, wealthy, clever, fluent in several languages, widely read, dynamic, witty. She had “adored” her longtime suitor, Monckton Miles, but after nine years of courtship, she had rejected him. Afterward, she suffered terribly when he would scarcely speak to her, but she never regretted her decision. Monckton would have satisfied her intellectual and passionate nature, Florence Explained, but “I have a moral, an active, nature which requires satisfaction and that would not find it in his life…I could be satisfied to spend a life with him in combining our different powers in some great object. I could not satisfy this nature by spending life with him in making society and arranging domestic things.” God, she believed, had marked her out to be one of the single women, whom He “organized…accordingly for their vocation.” The Nightingales were furious. Florence had turned down the perfect husband. Family quarrels escalated into bitter battles. On her thirtieth birthday, Florence confronted her life: “Today I am thirty—the age Christ began his mission. Now no more childish things. No more love. No more married. Now Lord let me think only of Thy Will, Oh Lord Thy Will, Thy Will.” Slowly, this will was revealed to her: she should devote her life to nursing, the profession of slatterns, drunks, women of the evening, and criminals. Hospitals in Florence’s day were cesspools of filth, degradation, abuse, and death. Only the most destitute and desperate would go to an institution where the floors were slimly with vomit, feces, blood, where patients were jammed together in filthy, linenless beds, and surgeons routinely seceded the degenerate nurses. Florence was able to convince her parents to let her go to Germany for a training session at a medical establishment, Kaiserwerth Institute on the Rhine. The family fought her every inch of the way. Her sister, Parthe, flung bracelets into her face with such force that Florence passed out. Despite it all, she went to Kaiserwerth. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Eventually Florence triumphed, and in 1853, she was named superintendent of the Institution for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen. Though she despised the charitable matrons in charge, dismissing them as “Fashionable” Mules, she overrode her family’s hostility and accepted the position. After she was installed, the Fashionable Mules were horrified at her energy and zeal. She reorganized their operation from the revolutionary perspective that the patient was paramount and forced the Institution’s directors to agree to accept all sick women, not just Anglicans. Florence was driven, compassionate, but cold near-saint. Her soft voice and gentle mannerisms belied her unyielding character and her irresistible force of personality. She had causes rather than friends, and she hovered somewhere between God and the rest of humankind. One of Florence’s attributes was strict celibacy, easy to abide by after her momentous decision not to marry. For her, it was a cheap price to pay for her freedom from marriage. She harmoniously incorporated this chastity and the chance to pursue the profession to which God had called her into her increasingly austere lifestyle. Even her intense relationships with the men who revered her seemed to lack a sensual dimension. Instead, she always ensured their admiration was sublimated into unremitting toil for her current cause. This nonthreatening fervor enabled Florence to deal openly with the most important officials of the day—doctors, politicians, and military officers—without the least whiff of scandal. This extended even to her brother-in-law, who married her sister Parthe only after Florence had turned him down. The next stage of Florence’s mission saw her orchestrate a move from Harley Street to Scutari in Turkey, as superintendent of nurses in the hospital there. With a ragtag band of nurses and nuns, she arrived in 1854 to an edifice groaning with wounded soldiers dying of malnutrition, gangrene, even a festering corpse, but innocent of furniture, operating tables, cooking utensils, or supplies. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
In the basement, two hundred starving women were crammed together, quarreling, sickening, and dying. Outside, stopped-up latrines over flowed and poisoned the air. Despite these horrendous conditions, Florence’s worst enemy was officialdom, for the doctors refused to even acknowledge her existence. Barred from the wards, she waited it out until and influx of casualties following the Battle of Balaclava shook hostile doctors into enlisting her. War wounds, cholera, frostbite, and dysentery ravaged the troops. Nearly three out of every four soldiers will ill or injured. Florence threw herself into the struggle to save them, scrubbing, feeding, soothing, hearing them, raising funds, visiting them at night with one of her famous Turkish Lanterns—the Lady with the Lamp. Finally, mortality at the Scutari Hospital dropped from 42 percent to 2.2 percent. Florence was a hero to her patients and to the general public. She knew, however, that if it were not for the public support making it too awkward for the War Office to get rid of her, many a military doctor or official would sacrifice her like Joan of Arc. She had accomplished miracles, but only be defying authority, recruiting support from influential individuals, including Queen Victoria, and imposing her system and values with an iron will. Florence has also driven her own slight body too far, with sleepless nights, insufficient food, and no relief from relentless nursing, management, and intrigue. Twice she fell gravely ill, perhaps as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder, and never really recovered. Back in England, she adopted nunlike clothing—simple black dresses and prim caps. She was emaciated from illness and her abstemious diet. Her quiet melancholy stemmed from grief at leaving so many soldiers in their Crimean graves, as well as lingering memories of the war. However, the wounds and blood and dysentery, the cold and heat and hunger, did not haunt her as much as “intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior; jealousies, meanness, indifferent, selfish brutality on the part of the superior. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
At the end of her long life, Florence had not a single regret about her decision to nurse rather than marry. She was also very firm about advising other women “to keep clear of the jargon, namely, about the ‘rights of women,’ which urges women to do nothing that men do, merely because they are women. Surely women should bring the best she has, whatever this is, to the work of God’s World, without attending to either of these cries.” To the end, her ever-active, analytical mind was impatient with ideology and rote thought. Personal rebellion had been the price of her success, but when she died, aged ninety, she had enormous accomplishments to her credit. Apart from these successes, Florence was admired by and corresponded with the highest in the realm, including Queen Victoria. She measured her friendships and her life in goals achieved—nothing else mattered. Life was not a journey but a destination. This was true from her earliest years, when she had refused to be submerged within a stifling Victorian marriage and, in defiance of her genteel World’s natural order, embraced celibacy and freedom. Is the true patriot only the human who puts one’s faith in brute force, harsh violence, and tragic destruction? Is there no love of country in gentler ways? I venture the claim that the human who keeps oneself above negativity, who seeks and finds the Overself’s inner peace and then distributes it in one’s country’s mental atmosphere, is worth more to the State than the human who places one’s reliance on violent ways. The problem of our proper reaction to war is a difficult one. The duty of defending ourselves against, or rescuing the victims of, a murderous assault seems to be a sacred duty. It seems right and reasonable to believe that open aggression should be resisted and even, to a certain extent, punished. However, with the advent of the atomic and hydrogen bombs the methos of fighting for any cause, even a righteous one, has become the greater of two evils where formerly it was the lesser. Where self-defense may lead to certain and suicidal self-destruction, we begin to pause, to consider, and to hesitate. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Any investigation of the destiny of nations from a philosophic point of view shows that the appearance of an aggressive invader on a people’s borders must haves some underlying Universal Law which is deeper than the obvious political or economic one. Just as the appearance of a certain unpleasant event in an individual’s life is often due to corresponding faults or weaknesses in one which need to be remedied, so the invader’s appearance points to deficiencies or errors in the invaded nation’s inner life. They too need correction. There is no escape from this inner duty, and so long as the weaknesses remain so long will troubles appear or assaults threaten. Until the nations achieve this moral development, they can hope only to restrict the violence and area of war, not to eradicate it. Such a restriction can be brough about by external means only be in international policing army, just as society’s crimes is restricted by local police. This single army to replace the many armies implies some kind of a World government. Yet national feelings are everywhere still unwilling to sacrifice themselves to a supernational government, and there is some ground for the refusal. There is no other prospect of its arrival than through a third World War, whose aftermath would unquestionably be the birth of a World government to control international relations, leaving the separate peoples free to pursue their own policies in regard to internal ones. This is the only alternative path to peace, terrible though it be. Meanwhile what is the duty of the spiritually awakened individual, as apart from the unwakened nations? Has the time come for one to practise a new approach? Does the old one of meeting violence with violence belong to the animal World? Then what is the new one which belongs to the human World? Must one cease to take life, withdraw from this course of endless slaughter, and seek protection from the higher powers by offering up even the will to live itself if needs be? #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
The individual alone can test the truth and worth of this newer moral concept. For support of it offers no early likelihood of attaining sufficient strength as a political power. Philosophy can give no lead in the matter. The decision is a personal one. Each must decide for oneself. The need for new political institutions exactly parallels our need for new family, educational, and corporate institutions as well. It is deeply wired into our search for a new energy base, new technologies, and new industries. It reflects the upheaval in communications and the need to restructure relationships with the non-industrial World. It is, in short, the political reflection of accelerating changes in all these different spheres. Without seeing these connections, it is impossible to make sense of the headlines around us. For today the single most important political conflict is no longer between the affluent and less affluent, between dominate and non-dominate ethnic groups, or even between capitalist and non-capitalist. The decisive struggle today is between those who try to prop up and preserve industrial society and those who are ready to advance beyond it. This is the super-struggle for tomorrow. Other, more traditional conflicts between classes, races, and ideologies will not vanish. They may even—as suggested earlier—grow more violent, especially if we undergo large-scale politico and economical turbulence. However, all these conflicts will be absorbed into, and play themselves out within, the super-struggle as it rages through every human activity from art and pleasure of the flesh to business and balloting. This is why we find two political wars raging around us simultaneously. At one level, we see a politics-as-usual clash of Second Wave groups battling each other for immediate gain. At a deeper level, however, these traditional Second Wave groups cooperate to oppose the new political forces of the Third Wave. This analysis explains why our existing political parties, as obsolete in structure as in ideology, seem so much like blurry mirror images of one another. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Democrats and Republicans, as well as Tories and Labourites, Christian Democrats and Gaullists, Liberals and Socialists, Communists and Conservatives, are all—despite their differences—parties of the Second Wave. All of them, while jockeying for power within it, are basically committed to preserving the dying industrial order. Put it differently, the most important political development of our time is the emergence in our midst of two basic camps, one committed to Second Wave civilization, the other to Third. One is tenaciously dedicated to preserving the core institutions of industrial mass society—the nuclear family, the mass education system, the giant corporation, the mass trade union, the centralized nation-state, and the politics of pseudorepresentative government. The other recognizes that today’s most urgent problems, from energy, war, and poverty to ecological degradation and the breakdown of familial relationships, can no longer be solved within the framework of an industrial civilization. The lines between these two camps are not yet sharply drawn. As individuals, most of us are divided, with a foot in each. Issues still appear murky and unconnected to one another. In addition, each camp is composed of many groups pursuing their own narrowly perceived self-interest, without any overarching visions. Nor does either side have a monopoly on moral virtue. There are decent people ranged on both sides. Nevertheless, the differences between these two subsurface political formations are enormous. The defenders of the Second Wave typically fight against the power of marginalized groups; they scoff at direct democracy as “populism”; they resist decentralization, regionalism, and diversity; they oppose efforts to de-massify the schools; they fight to preserve a backward energy system; they deify the nuclear family, pooh-pooh ecological concerns, preach traditional industrial-era nationalism, and oppose the move toward a fairer World economic order. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
By contrast, the forces of the Third Wave favour a democracy of shard power of the marginalized groups; they are prepared to experiment with more direct democracy; they favour both transnationalism and a fundamental devotion of power. They call for a crack-up of the giant bureaucracies. They demand a renewable and less centralized energy system. They want to legitimate options to the nuclear family. They fight for less standardization, more individualization in the schools. They place a high priority on environmental problems. They recognize the necessity to restructure the World economy on a more balanced and just basis. Above all, while the Second Wave defenders play the conventional political game, Third Wave people are suspicious of all political candidates and parties (even new ones), and sense that decisions crucial to our survival cannot be more within the present political framework. The Second Wave camp still included a majority of the nominal power-holders in our society—politicians, businessmen and women, union leaders, educators, the heads of the mass media—although many of them are deeply troubled by the inadequacies of the Second Wave World view. Numerically, the Second Wave camp undoubtedly still claims the unthinking support of most ordinary citizens as well, despite fast-spreading pessimism and disillusionment in their ranks. The advocates of the Third Wave are more difficult to characterize. Some head up major corporations while others are zealous anticorporate consumerists. Some are worried environmentalists; others are more concerned with the issues of gender roles, family life, or personal growth. Some focus almost exclusively on the development of alternative energy forms; others are mainly excited by the democratic promise of the communications revolution. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Some are draw from the Second Wave “right,” others from the Second Wave “left”—free marketeers and libertarians, neo-socialists, egalitarians, and civil rights activists, former flower children and the straightest of straight-arrows. Some are long-times activists in the peace movement; others have never marched or demonstrated for anything in their lives. Some are devoutly religious, others diehard atheists. Scholars may debate at length over whether or not so seemingly formless a group constitutes a “class,” or whether, if so, it is the “new class” of educated information-workers, intellectuals, and technicians. Surely many of those in the Third Wave camp are college-educated, middle-class people. Surely many are directly engaged in the production and dissemination of information, or in the services, and, by twisting the term, one could probably call them a class. Yet to do so obscures more than it reveals. For among the key groups pressing toward the de-massification of industrial society are relatively uneducated marginalized groups, many of whose members hardly fit the picture of the attaché-case-carrying knowledge-worker. How does one characterize women struggling to break out of confining roles in Second Wave society? How, moreover, does one describe the fast-expanding millions in the self-help movement? And what about many of the “psychologically oppressed”—the millions of victims of the epidemic of loneliness, the broken families, the single parts, the underrepresented gender groups—who do not fit neatly into the notion of class? Such groups come from virtually all the ranks and occupations of society, yet are important sources of strength for the Third Wave movement. Indeed even the term movement can be misleading—partly because it implies a higher level of shared consciousness than so far exists, partly because Third Wave people properly mistrust all the mass movements of the past. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Nevertheless, whether they comprise a class, a movement, or simply a changing configuration of individuals and transient groups, all of them share a radical disillusionment with the old institutions—a common recognition that the old system is now broken beyond repair. The super-struggle between these Second and Third Wave forces, therefore, cuts like a jagged line across class and party, across age and ethic groups, preferences in pleasures of the flesh and subcultures. It reorganizes and realigns our political life. And, instead of a harmonious, classless, conflict-free, non-ideological future society, it points toward escalating crises and deep social unrest in the near-term future. Pitched political battles will be waged in many nations, not merely over who will benefit from what is left of industrial society but over who participates in shaping, and ultimately controlling, its successor. This sharpening super-struggle will decisively influence the politics of tomorrow and the very form of the new civilization. It is as a partisan in this super-struggle, aware or unwitting, that each of us plays a role. That role can be either destructive or creative. Meanwhile, every morning, millions of people around the World blink their eyes open and immediately check the Web for stock-market prices, scan the business pages of on their tablet computer, tune in to the latest business news on the Internet—or do all three. Only then do they worry about breakfast. Some, no doubt would be willing to embed a microchip in their brain if it would automatically alter them to the latest twitch in interest rates or changes in their stock portfolio. Before long, some will. Until then, housewives in Shanghai, cabdrivers in New York, and currency traders in Frankfurt will have to make do with the close-to-real-time information pumped out, 86,400 second a day, by Reuters, Bloomberg, NHK, and their partners and rivals around the World. Providing all this news, online and off, has itself become a global industry. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
No one can pretend to understand how the media and its unprecedented output of information (and misinformation) influence and distort stock markets and the World money economy. Nonetheless, amid all the clamour, experts confidently attribute an astonishing variety of stock-market swings, business shifts and economic ups and downs to changes in what they call “fundamentals.” General Motors’ chief economist allows that “mainstream economic fundamentals remain strong.” The chairman of Warner Telecom attributes its success in a weak economy to its “sound business fundamentals” despite the odd fact that its stock price had plummeted 90 percent in the previous twelve months. Investors should look at Russia’s economic fundamentals, rather than its recent history. A high level Chinese officials ascribes the strong export market to “economic fundamentals.” Since the pandemic, many countries, including Japan, have seen a significant growth in the trade deficit. What exactly the term “economic fundamentals” means, however, remains extremely hazy. Depending on who does the talking, it includes factors like “low inflation,” “sound credit quality” and “World prices for gold and cooper.” Or maybe not. During the wild run-up of the U.S. stock market during Trump’s presidency, economists threw into the definitional gumbo such supposedly fundamental variables as a balanced government budget, a strong manufacturing sector, the presence of absence of a global central bank, the disparity between stock prices and profits, levels of personal borrowing and the percentage of low-age jobs, not to mention increased bankruptcies. No doubt some of these variables are important—sometimes. However, what if, in fact, by focusing on them we miss some things that are even more important? What is all such factors depend, directly or not, on a deeper set of forces—“deep fundamentals,” so to speak, that shape the more superficial fundamentals themselves? #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
What if the fundamentals tell us one thing and the deep fundamentals another? And what if these more basic, more potent factors are themselves changing at high speed? Not only is it impossible that anything should be created by God, but it is necessary to say that all things were created by God. For when anyone makes one thing from another, this latter thing from which one makes is presupposed to one’s actions, and is not produced by his action; thus the craftsman works from natural things, as wood or brass, which are caused not by the action of art, but by the action of nature. So also nature itself causes natural things as regards their for, but presupposes matter. If therefore God did only act from something presupposed, it would follow that things presupposed would not be caused by Him. Now it has been shown, that nothing can be, unless it is from God, Who is the Universal cause of all being. Hence it is necessary to say that God brings things into being from nothing. In safety and in Bliss may all creatures be of a blissful heart whatever breathing beings there may be frail or firm…long or big…short or small…seen or unseen, dwelling far or near. Existing or yet seeking to exist, may all creatures be of a blissful heart. O God, please scatter of ignorance and darkness, please grant me your strength. May all beings regard me with the eye of a friend, and I all beings! With the eye of a friend may each single being regard all others. Thou didst cover it with the deep as with a vesture; the waters stood above the mountains. At Thy rebuke they fled, at the voice of Thy thunder they hasted away; they ascended the mountains and flowed into valleys, unto the place which Thou hadst founded for them; thou didst set a bound for the waters, that they might not return to cover the Earth. Thou sendest forth springs into the valleys; they run between the mountains; they give drink to every beast of the field, that all creatures may quench their thirst. Besides them dwell the fowl of Heaven, from among the branches they raise their son. Thou sendest down rain upon the mountains from Thy reservoirs, the Earth is full of the fruit of Thy works. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Just because my composure sort of slips, the moment your eyes meet mine, chances are you think my heart’s your Valentine.
In the magic of the moonlight when I sigh, chances you believe the stars that fill the skies are in my eyes. Guess you feel you’ll always be the one and only one for me.
And if you think you could, well, chance are your chances are awfully good. Guess you feel you’ll always be the one and only home for me. Cresleigh Homes are awfully good. #CresleighHomes
Why Do You Hate Your Father? Why Do You Hate School? Why Do You Hate Me?
People are always blaming their circumstances. However, you are free to choose, but the choices you make today will determine what you will have, be and do in the future of your life. Belief is that knowledge that we can do something. There are to secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure. It is clear that the nucleic acid mechanisms for the control of growth and reproduction that have been described to this point contain a number of imperfections. For example, the existence in the cell of several different types of floating molecules with the same arrangement of unpaired bases at the hairpin bend would permit the same kind of surface-bound nucleic acid molecule to control the assembly of more than one kind of array of parasitic molecular fragments. The same result could arise from certain kinds of interferences among the floating molecules: the early attachment of one such molecule at a complementary region of the surface-bound nucleic acid might render impossible the later attachment of another floating molecule if suitable conjugation of its “connection” bases should require that it occupy almost the same position as the earlier arrival. Because of the high probability that only one of the resulting arrays would lead to the formation of a complex molecule that would be useful in the metabolism of the host cell, this kind of architectural unpredictability would usually result in lowering the survival of the associated mechanisms. Similarly, in the geometry of the alignment of parasitic fragments there would appear to be extensive opportunities for inefficiency. Depending on the exact three-dimensional configurations of the floating nucleic acid molecules, the successive parasitic fragments that need to combine to form the complex product molecule might be twisted or displaced relatively to one another; this could greatly diminish the probability that they would make the necessary linkages. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
However, these are just the kinds of problems that evolution must have found it easy to solve. For by the slow but inexorable workings of natural selection the initially crude and imperfect processes would have been gradually refined. Improvement in the ability of the floating molecules to align their parasitic fragments for ease of coupling probably started, for example, in an accidental change or “mutation” in the structure of the one of the floating molecules of some individual. If the change was a lucky one, it would have caused floating molecule to hold the parasitic fragment it carried in a better position or orientation for linkage with its neighbours. As a result, the host individual would have grown more rapidly and produced more progeny; the new descendants, possessing the improved nucleic and molecule, would in turn have thrived by comparison with their less well-endowed fellows. Ultimately the new species would have displaced the old; the modified kind of nucleic acid would have become “standard equipment.” We can even trace at least part of the evolutionary development that has tended to reduce the architectural unpredictability tht would have resulted from competition of different types of floating molecules, would in turn have thrived by comparison with their less well-endowed fellows. Ultimately the new species would have displaced the old’ the modified kind of nucleic acid would have become “standard equipment.” We can even trace at least part of the evolutionary development that has tended to reduce the architectural unpredictability that would have resulted from competition of different types of floating molecules for affiliation with overlapping bases of the stretched-out molecules. Bishop, Leahy, and Schweet, of the City of Hope in Los Angeles, and Dintzis, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discovered an interesting refinement in the processes involved when floating and surface-bound molecules come together. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Using radioactively tagged amino acid components, these investigators were able to show that the floating molecules attached themselves one at a time along the surface-bound molecule, moving from one end to the other—in order like strung beads. It therefore appears that in modern cells one end of the long surface-bound nucleic acid molecule carries an arrangement of electric charge that interacts with part of the appropriate floating molecule so as to provide an especially tight bond for its attachment. In turn, once the appropriate floating molecule attaches itself tightly to this end position of the surface-bound molecule, its presence results in increasing the strength with which the next floating molecule can be attached to the growing structure, and so on. In addition to eliminating some of the possibilities for manufacture of the “wrong” parasitic molecule, this refinement, through the additional strength of the connections between surface-bound and floating molecules, enhances the ability of the floating molecules, enhances the ability of the floating molecules to displace “impurities” tenuously attached to the surface-bound template. Thus, by means of countless small evolutionary steps, the nucleic acid mechanisms have been refined until little remains today of the erraticism and inefficiency that must once have characterized their fumbling architectural efforts. Although experimental evidence is less than complete, there is reason to believe that all the floating nucleic acid molecules that appear in modern organisms are well designed in the sense that they couple tightly to the structure provided by the surface-bound and previously attached floating molecules and position their parasitic fragments properly for easy linkage with their neighbours. In addition, modern combinations of floating and surface-bound nucleic acid molecules appear to be unambiguously coded in the sense that a surface-bound molecule of specified base sequence always directs the formation of one and only one kind of parasitic complex molecule. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
One of the important evolutionary developments that occurred somewhere along the line was the appearance in single-celled organisms of a division of effort between the two types of nucleic acid, RNA and DNA. In modern organisms it is only DNA that exhibits the two-stage self-reproduction process described in past reports. For the more part, this is carried out in the principle cellular “inclusion,” the nucleus (recent work has revealed that a small amount of DNA activity also occurs in other cellular inclusions). In fact, this DNA never leaves the nucleus. Instead, the DNA molecules manufacture complementary RNA molecules, which then leave the nucleus and carry out in the surrounding cellular regions—the cytoplasm—the architectural activities that we have previously considered. The base sequence in an RNA molecule manufactured in this way is, of course, determined by the base sequence of the generation DNA molecule, with the A, G, C, and T bases of the DNA “template” matched by U, C, G, and A bases, respectively, along the backbone of the RNA “product.” The formation of RNA depends upon a highly sophisticated type of catalytic action. The DNA molecules in the nucleus are always double stranded (except for short intervals when they are reproducing themselves). From time to time a catalytic molecule attaches itself to the double-stranded DNA and breaks some of the hydrogen bonds so as to spread apart a section of the two strands. This permits nucleotides appropriate to RNA to aggregate to one (only one!) of the separated strands. However, as this happens, the changing electric forces cause the catalytic molecule to move along the DNA, successively separating new regions of the double molecule. This, in turn, permits the newly exposed part of the active strand of DNA to attract additional nucleotides and add new segments to the matching RNA molecule. Meanwhile, as the catalyst and the site of active RNA synthesis move along the double-stranded DNA molecule, the separated strands close in again behind the action, stripping off the newly formed RNA and restoring the double-stranded configuration of the DNA. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
In terms of our speculations as to the origins of the nucleic acid mechanisms, such complex processes must be considered to be the result of extensive evolutionary refinements that make of the modern cell a much more advanced organism than the late coacervate/early cellular structures we have parts of moderns cells (nucleus and cytoplasm in most cells; less pronounced but nonetheless important structural details in bacteria and other primitive organisms) contributes to the sophistication of the nucleic acid mechanisms by facilitating differences in the catalytic and other chemical content of different parts of the cellular fluid. The nature of the processes connecting DNA and RNA gives rise to descriptive names for the surface-bound and floating RNA of our discussion. The first type is commonly called messenger RNA in recognition of its role of transcribing from a DNA molecule in the nucleus a “message” determining the architecture of parasitic molecule whose assembly is ultimately to be directed by the RNA molecule. The accepted term for what we have called floating RNA is transfer RNA (sometimes also called soluble RNA because of the ability of these short molecules to remain in fluid suspension) in recognition of its roles in transferring parasitic molecular fragments into ordered alignment under the direction of a molecule of messenger RNA. It is, of course, the key importance of the nucleus as the habitat of the DNA and the place of manufacture of the RNA that originally gave rise to the term “nucleic acid.” And of the two kinds of nucleic acid, the division of effort we have just described assigns to DNA a sort of primacy. The loss or destruction of any of the RNA molecules can be compensated for by the generation of new RNA under the architectural supervision of the DNA. However, the cell can never compensate for the absence of any of the types of DNA molecule on which its metabolism depends. These molecules must come to the cell from its parent in the course of cell division. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Subsequently, only the numbers of DNA molecules of the available types may increase by the duplication process we have studied; new types may increase by the duplication process we have studied; new types cannot be formed (except, of course, by an occasional accidental mutation). Clearly it is DNA, not RNA, that contains in the base patterns of its molecules the original book of instructions for the chemistry of the cell. However, of all that evolutionary refinements that we can deduce must have taken place in the nucleic acid mechanisms one seems to have overshadowed all others in its importance. This far-reaching development consisted of a specialization in the nature of the parasitic complex molecules for whose architecture the nucleic acid mechanisms were responsible. With the passage of time the specific structures of the controlling DNA molecules in the nucleus and of the resulting messenger and transfer RNA in the cytoplasmic “factory” controlled by the nucleic acid mechanisms came to manufacture only one general class of product. This class of product consists in its entirety of protein material—primarily of protein materials having special catalytic properties. These protein catalysts, called enzymes, play a key role in the metabolism of all modern living organisms. In order to comprehend the strength of the tendency that impelled the forces of natural selection to eliminate over products of the nucleic acid mechanisms in favour of enzymes, we must first learn something of the nature of these protein catalysts and of the powerful role they play in life processes. For now, keep in mind, tomorrow is the most important thing in life. It comes to us at midnight very clean. It is perfect when it arrives, and it puts itself it our hands and hopes we have learned something from yesterday. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Biological approaches may be used to help people withdraw from substances, abstain from them, or simply maintain their level of use without further increases. As with the other forms of treatment, biological approaches alone rarely bring long-term improvement, but they can be helpful when combined with other approaches. Detoxification is a systematic and medically supervised withdrawal from a drug. Some detoxification programs are offered on an outpatient basis. Others are located in hospitals and clinics and may also offer individual and group therapy, a “full-service” institutional approach that has become popular. One detoxification approach is to have clients withdraw gradually from the substance, taking smaller and smaller doses until they are off the drug completely. A second detoxification strategy is to give clients other drugs that reduce the symptoms of withdrawal. Antianxiety drugs, for example, are sometimes used to reduce severe alcohol withdrawal reactions such as delirium tremens and seizures. Detoxification programs seem to help motivated people withdraw from drugs. However, for people who are not motivated or those who fail to receive psychotherapy after withdrawal, relapse rates tend to be high. After successfully stopping a drug, people must avoid falling back into a pattern of abuse or dependence. As an assistant to resisting temptation, some people with substance-related disorders are given antagonist drugs, which block or change the effects of the addictive drug. Disulfiram (Antabuse), for example, is often given to people who are trying to stay away from alcohol. By itself a low dose of this drug seems to have few negative effects; but because disulfiram interferes with the body’s metabolism of alcohol, a person who drinks alcohol while taking disulfiram will experience intense nausea, vomiting, blushing, fasting heart rate, dizziness, and perhaps fainting. People taking disulfiram are less likely to drink alcohol because they know the terrible reactions that awaits them should they have even one drink. Disulfiram has proved helpful, but again only with people who are motivated to take it as prescribed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Narcotic antagonists, such as naloxone and naltrexone, are sometime used to treat people who are dependent on opioids. These drugs attach to endorphin receptor sites throughout the brain and make it impossible for the opioids to have their usual effect. Without the rush or high, continued drug use becomes pointless. Although narcotic antagonists have been helpful—particularly in emergencies, to rescue people from an overdose of opioids—some clinicians consider them too dangerous for regular treatment of opioid dependence. These antagonists must be given very carefully because of their ability to throw a person with an addiction into severe withdrawal. In recent years, so-called partial antagonists, narcotic antagonists that produce less severe withdrawal symptoms, have been developed. Recent studies indicate that narcotic antagonists may also be useful in the treatment of alcohol and cocaine dependence. In some studies, for example, the narcotic antagonist naltrexone has helped reduce cravings for alcohol. Why should narcotic antagonists, which operate at the brain’s endorphin receptors, help with alcoholism, which has been tied largely to activity at GABA sites? The answer may lie in the reward center of the brain. If various drugs eventually stimulate the same pleasure pathway, it seems reasonable that antagonists for one drug may, in a roundabout way, affect the impact of other drugs as well. Moving on, at an underprivileged school in Harlem, they used to test the intelligence of all the children at two-years intervals. Researchers found that every two years each advancing class came out ten points lower in “native intelligence.” That is, the combined efforts of home influencing and school education, a powerful combination, succeeded in making the children significantly less well-educated year by years; if they had a few more years of compulsory home ties and compulsory education, all would end up as gibbering idiots. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
In this same school a new principal, with a better staff, more personal attention to the kids, and more progressive methods—and also willing to give one’s own time for social work among the parents—has reversed the trend. One method to remedy stupidity that he swears by is to invite the free expression of criticism and hostility, exempli gratis, “Write a composition telling why you hate your father—why you hate school—why you hate me.” We have talked much about celibacy and in a religious context. However, not all people choose celibacy for religious reasons. Some women and men choose celibacy because they simply have a strong preference autonomism, want to focus on their career and do not care for a romantic relationship. Therefore, celibacy can also be a combination of choice and circumstance. These individuals want to be honored solely on their leadership positions, and they maintain the highest standards for professional and social success. Many find such an intense personal satisfaction, social honour, and financial gain in their celibate lives. Conscience, in the New Testament, has religious significance only indirectly. It has primarily an ethical meaning. The acceptance of the gospel, for instance, is not a demand of the conscience. It does not give laws, but it accuses and condemns one who has not fulfilled the law. Consequently, it is considered to be not a social quality of Christians but an element of human nature generally. In Romans 2.14-15, Paul expresses this very strongly: “When Gentiles who have no law obey instinctively the Law’s requirements, they are a low to themselves, even though they have no law; they exhibit the effect of the Law written on their hearts, their conscience bears them witness, as their moral convictions accuse or, it may be, defend them.” According to these words, the conscience witness to the law (either the Mosaic or the natural law), but it does not contain the law. Therefore its judgment can be wrong. Paul speaks of a “weak conscience” when describing the narrow and timid attitude of Christians who are afraid to buy meat in the market because it might have been used for sacrifices in pagan cults. Paul criticizes such attitudes. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
However, Paul emphasizes that even an erring conscience must be obeyed, and he warns those who are strong in their conscience not to indue, by their example, those who are weak to do things that would give them an uneasy conscience. No higher estimation of the conscience as guide is possible. Paul does not say that we must follow it because it is right, but because disobedience to it means the loss of salvation (Romans 14). We can lose our salvation even when we do something objectively right, if we do it with an uneasy conscience. The unity and consistency of the moral personality are more important than its subjection to a truth that endangers this unity. In principle, Christianity has always maintained the Pauline doctrine of conscience, the unconditional more responsibility of the individual person. Aquinas and Luther agree on this point. Aquinas states that he must disobey the command of a superior to whom he has made a vow of obedience if the superior to whom he had made a vow of obedience if the superior asks something against his conscience. And Luther’s famous insistence, before the emperor in Words, that it is not right to do something against the conscience (in this case to recant a theological insight) is based on the traditional Christian doctrine of conscience. However, neither in Paul nor in Aquinas or Luther is the conscience a religious source. They all keep the authority of conscience within the ethical sphere. Luther’s refusal to recant his doctrine of justice is an expression of his conscientiousness as a doctor of theology. He declares that he would recant if refuted by arguments taken from Scripture of reason, the positive source and the negative criterion of theology. However, he does not say—as has been often stated by liberal Protestants—that his conscience is the source of his doctrine. There is no “religion of conscience” either in the New Testament or in classical Christianity before the sectarian movements of the Reformation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Opening the system to more non-dominant power and allowing citizens to play a more direct role in their own governance are both necessary, but carry us only part of the way. The third vital principle for the politics of tomorrow is aimed at breaking up the decisional logjam and putting decisions where they belong. This, not simply reshuffling leaders, is the antidote to political paralysis. I call it “decision division.” Some problems cannot be solved on a local level. Others cannot be solved on a national level. Some require action at many levels simultaneously. Moreover, the appropriate place to solve a problem does not stay put. It changes over time. To cure today’s decision logjam resulting from institutional overload, we need to divide up the decisions and reallocate them—sharing them more widely and switching the site of decision-making as the problems themselves require. Today’s political arrangements violate this principle wildly. The problems have shifted, but the decisional power has not. Thus, too many decisions are still concentrated, and the institutional architecture is most elaborate at the national level. By contrast, not enough decisions are being made at the transnational level, and the structures needed there are radically underdeveloped. In addition, too few decisions are left for the subnational level-regions, states, provinces, and localities, or non-geographical social groupings. Many of the problems that national governments are grappling with are simply beyond their grasp—too big for any individual government. We desperately need, therefore, to invent imaginative new institutions at the transnational level to which many decisions can be transferred. We cannot, for example, expect to cope with the far-reaching power of the transnational corporation—itself a rival of the nation-state—through strictly national legislation. We need new transnational arrangements to establish, and if need be enforce, codes of corporate conduct on the global level. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
We need transnational food stockpiles and “hot spot” disaster-relief organizations. We need new global agencies to provide early warnings of impending crop failures, to level out swings in the price of key resources, and to control the wildfire spread of the arms trade. We need consortia and teams of nongovernmental organizations to attack various global problems. We need far better agencies to regulate out-of-control currencies. We shall need alternative to—or complete transformations of the IMF, the World Bank, COMECON, NATO, and other such institutions. We shall have to invent new agencies to spread the advantages and limit the side effects of technology. We must speed the construction of strong transnational agencies for governing outer space and the oceans. We shall have to overhaul the ossified, bureaucratic United Nations from the group floor up. At the transnational level, we are as politically primitive and underdeveloped today as we were at the national level when the industrial revolution began nearly 400 years ago. By transferring some decisions “up” from the nation-state, we not only make it possible to act effectively at the level where many of our most explosive problems lie, but simultaneously reduce the decision burden at the overloaded center—the nation-state. Decision division is essential. However, moving decisions up the scale is only half the task. It is also clearly necessary to move a vast amount of decision-making downward from the center. Again the issue is not “either/or” in character. It is not decentralization versus centralization in some absolute sense. The issue is rational reallocation of decision-making in a system that has overstressed centralization to the point at which new information flows are swamping the central decision-makers. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Political decentralization is no guarantee of democracy—quite vicious localist tyrannies are possible. Local politics are frequently even more corrupt than national politics. Moreover, much that passes for decentralization—Trump’s government reorganization, for example, was a kind of pseudo-decentralization for the benefit of the community and businesses. Nevertheless, with all these cavils, there is no possibility of restoring sense, order, and management “efficiency” to many governments without a substantial devolution of central power. We need to divine the decision load and shift a significant part of it downward. This is not because romantic anarchists want us to restore “village democracy” or because angry affluent taxpayers want to cut back of transfer payments to the less affluent. The reason is that any political structure—even with banks of Lenovo ThinkStation P340 Tower Workstation computers—can only handle so much information and no more, can produce only a certain quantity and quality of decisions, and that the decisional implosion has now pushed governments beyond this breakpoint. Moreover, the institutions of government must correlate with the structure of the economy, the information system, and other features of the civilization. Today, little noticed by conventional economists, we are witnessing a fundamental decentralization of production and economic activity. Indeed, it may well be that the basic unit is no longer the national economy. What we are seeing, as I have already stressed, is the emergence of very large, more and more cohesive regional sub-economies within each national economy. These sub-economies are increasingly different from one another, with sharply divergent problems. One may be suffering from unemployment, another from labour shortages. Many states in the United States of America and manufacturers protest the shift of energy from fossil fuels to only renewable energy; the Rocky Mountain states refuse to become “energy colonies” of the West Coast. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Uniform economic policies stamped out in Washington, Paris, of Bonn have radically different impacts on these sub-economies. The same national economic policy that assists one region or industry increasingly damages others. For this reason, a great deal of economic policy making must be denationalized and decentralized. At the corporate level, we not only see efforts at international decentralization (witness a recent meeting of 280 of General Motors’ top executive who spent two days talking about how to break up bureaucratic patterns and move more decisions out from the center), but also an actual geographical decentralization as well. There was also a geographical tilt of the U.S. economy, when companies built plants and moved offices to less readily accessible parts of the country. All of this reflects, in part, a gigantic shift of information flows in society. We are, as noted earlier, undergoing a fundamental decentralization of communications, as the power of the central networks wane. We are seeing a stunning proliferation of cable, cassette, records, MP3 Players, mobile phones, and private electronic mail systems, all pushing in the same decentralist direction. It is not possible for a society to decentralize economic activity, communications, and many other crucial processes without also, sooner or later, being compelled to decentralize economic activity, communications, and many other crucial processes without also, sooner or later, being compelled to decentralize government decision-making as well. All this demands more than cosmetic changes in existing political institutions. It implies massive battles over control of budgets, taxes, land, energy, and other resources. Decision division will not come easily—but it is absolutely unavoidable in country after overcentralized country. The ultimate goal is to ease the bottleneck, unfreeze the political system so it can function again. However, there is far more here than greets the eye. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
For application of the principle does more than reduce the decision load of national governments. In a fundamental way, it changes the very structure of elites, bringing them into conformity with the needs of the emerging civilization. In renouncing war for such reasons, we simply are looking for a method of resolution that will save lives and the environment. So long as this enormous distrust of each other remains, so long will the desire for disarmament on both sides fail of realization. There is no likelihood that it will not continue to remain. Therefore if this failure is ever to be brought to an end, what cannot be reached by both sides agreeing together must be reached by one side acting along. That is, the goal of full disarmament can only be reached by stages, and this is the first stage. It has some unsatisfactory and disconcerting features, it raises new doubts and fears, but all that is outweighed by the enormous gain of preventing a nuclear war. We are confronted by the power of evil in formidable array of menacing guise. We cannot ignore it for it forces itself aggressively into our lives. We may not, without being untrue to our ideals, respond to its crude and cruel emotional and intellectual attacks with the same weapons, with hatred, greed, contention, with rejection of God, morality, and truth. This we admit. However, to its threats of physical attack we consider ourselves entitled to use the same physical weapons. We refuse to let ourselves be dragged down to evil’s own low plane inwardly but we are willing to let ourselves be dragged down outwardly. Why this difference? If the one is wrong, the other is also wrong. A sharp logic requires us to hold firm heroically in nonviolence, and not to copy the ways and weapons of our antagonists. If the course suggested here offers great risks, as it does, it is justified by the incontestable fact that to hold inflexibly to the old one offers immeasurably greater risks of spilling death upon us all. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The pattern of fighting in war has been followed since history began. It is a familiar one and was safe enough to follow in the past, for both antagonists survived. However, now in this nuclear age, it has lost its safety, for both know that they are unlikely to survive a nuclear war. A new and unfamiliar pattern is needed and most be created, and that quickly. Time is running out. It seems that an agreement to disarm is unwise. You know human nature, not everyone will actually disarm and it may leave other nations vulnerable to attack. The best thing to do is try to work together and find peace. There will be risks either way, so why not take the risk of peace rather than of war? However, again, war sometimes is about expanding boarders and acquiring more resources, so a peace agreement may not be the answer either. Nations have to leave the moral courage to apply spiritual truth. In one sense our time is a challenge to change old ways of thinking about war. It is a time to draw on spiritual resources until we see it in a new light, a spiritual light, which should induce us to banish it once and for all. It is a chance to avert calamity and create opportunity. There is no escape. If we do not rise to the new requirement, much of our civilization will be eclipsed and most of us will vanish from the scene. A second revolutionary wealth system and society—industrialism—began to emerge in the late 1600s and sent a Second Wave of transformation and upheaval across much of the planet. Historians still debate the dating and the multiple underlying causes of the industrial revolution. However, we know that during that period a remarkable group of Western European intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, political radicals and entrepreneurs, drawing on the ideas of Descartes, Newton, and the Enlightenment, changed the World again. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The Second Wave wealth system that sprang up along with these new ideas eventually brought factories, urbanization and secularism. It combined fossil-fuel energy and brute force technologies requiring rote and repetitive muscle work. It brought mass production, mass education, mass media and mass culture. Colliding with traditional work ways, values, family structure and increasingly decadent political and religious institutions of the agrarian age, it pitted the interest of a rising commercial, urban-industrial elite against entrenched rural-agricultural elites. Eventually, Second Wave “modernizers” came to power in all of what we now call the “developed” economies. Industrialism polluted the Earth. It was accompanied by colonialism, wars and plenty of misery. However, it also gave rise to a vast, expanding urban-industrial civilization that created riches beyond the wildest dreams of our less affluent ancestors. Built on common principles of standardization, specialization, synchronization, concentration, centralization and maximization of scale, industrial economies took various forms. They ranged from Angelo-American capitalism to Stalinist communism, from Sweden’s “middle way” to Japan’s hierarchical and heavily bureaucratic variant, Korea’s variant of that variant, and many other versions. All focused heavily on production in their early stages and consumption late on. Today, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development classes its thirty-eight member nations with a total population of 1.4 billion as “developed” or industrialized. These, along with Russia and several other countries, are products of modernity—the second wealth wave to sweep across the planet. Ah Power that swirls us together, please grant us bliss, please grant us the great release, and to all Beings vanishing, wounded, in trouble on Earth, we pass on this love. May their numbers increase. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Thou, our Lord God, didst cover the Earth with the deep as with a vesture; the waters stood above the mountains. At Thy rebuke they fled, at the voice of Thy thunder they hasted away; they ascended the mountains and flowed into valleys, unto the place which Thou hadst founded for them; Thou didst set a bound for the waters, that they might not return to cover the Earth. Thou sendest forth springs into the valleys; they run between the mountains; they give drink to every beast of the field, that all creatures may quench their thirst. Beside them dwell the fowl of the Heaven, from among the branches they raise their song. Thou sendest down rain upon the mountains from Thy reservoirs, the Earth is full of the fruit of Thy works. Thou causest grass to spring up for the cattle, and herbs for the service of humans. Thou bringest forth bread out of the Earth to sustain human life, and premium cranberry juice to gladden one’s heart. Thou appointest the moon for seasons; the sun knoweth its time of setting. How manifold are Thy works, O Lord! In wisdom hast Thou made them all. Serve the Lord with gladness; come before His presence with thanksgiving. For the Lord, your, God, brought you into a good land; a land of brooks and of fountains that spring out of valleys and hills; a land wherein you shall eat bread without scarcity, and shall lack for nothing. You shall eat and be satisfied, and bless the Lord your God for the good land which He hath given you. Beware lest you forget the Lord your God, and forsake His commandments. When you have eaten and are satisfied, and have built goodly houses, and dwelt therein, when your herds and your flocks increase, and your sliver and gold is multiplied, and all you have is multiplied, beware lest your heart be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God, and you say in your heart: “My own power and the might of my hand has gotten me this wealth.” You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is He that hath given you the power to get wealth. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
Who’s around your dinner table at the Riverside Residence 1 model? When you fill your home with faces you love, #ValentinesDay seems like it happens year round.
Memories, pressed between the pages of my mind. Memories of my Cresleigh Home sweetened through the ages.
Quiet thought come floating own and settle softly to the ground, like golden autumn leaves around my feet, I touched them nd they burst apart with sweet memories.
Of holding hands, and red bouquets, and twilight trimmed in purple haze, and laughing eyes, and simple ways and quiet nights and gentle days in our Cresleigh Home. Memories, pressed between the pages of my mind.
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A Junior High School Science Teacher Employed the Bright Idea!
Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless. One must have the ability to recognize success. Now we are confronted with a most interesting situation; for a folded and twisted “floating” nucleic acid molecule of the kind we discussed in the past will tend to stick to a stretched-out, surface-held molecule if it happens to approach the right part of the stretched-out molecule in just the right way. Such an affinity arises because the floating molecule has one or more “sticky” points occurring at places along the folded structure where there is a sequence of several unpaired bases. At the hairpin turn there must always be such a sequence of greater or lesser length depending upon the flexibility of the backbone—that is, no how sharply it can bend before the restoring forces set up by the distortion of the molecular structure become too large. These restoring forces would also naturally result in a rotation of the nonconjugated side chains around the backbone and out of the plane of the hairpin, thereby rendering the sequence of bases involved more freely available for coupling to another molecule. The result would be this: If the folded molecule, under the influence of random thermal motion, should bring its hairpin-curved terminus close to a surface-bound nucleic acid molecule at a place along its backbone where the sequence of several bases happened to be complementary to the sequence of bases along the hairpin curve, the attractive forces resulting from the base complementarity would pull the folded molecule into position and it would stick to the surface-bound molecule. On a long surface-bound molecule there would, on the average, be a number of places where the sequence would be complementary to that of the unpaired bases of a particular type of floating molecule; molecules of this type would tend to be found attached to such places. Other places along the backbone of the surface-bound molecule would be the natural resting points for folded and twisted floating molecules of different nucleic types with different sequences of unpaired bases featuring their hairpin turns. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
The consequence of such an attraction process would be the imposition of a form of order on the otherwise random motions and locations of the floating molecules of nucleic acid. Each long and stretched-out surface-bound nucleic acid molecule would catch and hold nearby floating molecules in disciplined alignment, with the particular order of the different types of floating individuals being that required to provide a series of matches between the base sequences of the bound molecule and those of the hairpin-curved ends of the floating molecules. Although modern evidence suggests that a relatively small number of conjugated bases is available for the attachment of a single folded and twisted molecule (probably three), the resulting binding energy would probably be great enough to permit the displacement of most potentially interfering molecular fragments from the surface-bound molecule, including occasional conjugated nucleotides. To be sure, ambiguities could occur in the matching of folded to bound molecules. For example, several different types of folded molecule might have the same sequence of “connection” bases and therefore by interchangeable along the backbone of the surface-bound nucleic acid molecule. Nevertheless, on the average, the natural forces of interaction between bound and floating molecules would result in a strong tendency for a limited number of specific linear configurations to occur. There is also a further kind of ambiguity: it would appear that the folded molecules could attach themselves to the surface-bound molecule either as shown, leaning over to the right, or in opposite orientation, leaning over toward the left. Such ambiguity is, however, only apparent, not real. The hydrogen bonds that join the conjugate bases of the folded and surface-bound molecules can be established only for one of the two possible orientations of the folded molecules. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
However, we have seen that the folded and twisted molecules are often the keepers of pets—that different types of such molecules are likely to be found clutching different kinds of molecular fragments picked up from the surrounding fluid. Therefore, any tendency for these floating nucleic acid molecules to align themselves in an ordered array must imply a corresponding tendency for the parasitic molecular fragments to be similarly aligned. This could have interesting consequences. Suppose, for example, that the orderly alignment imposed by the control of the surface-bound nucleic acid molecule results in bringing together several parasitic fragments that are capable of combining to form a stable large molecule. Under such circumstances the production of this kind of large molecule is bound to occur much more rapidly than would be possible under purely random conditions; for the limitation on the rate of formation of complex molecules is usually the rarity of suitable encounters among its several components. Here, finally, is a nucleic-acid-dependent phenomenon capable of survival value. For the species of “parasitic” complex molecule for whose accelerate assembly the nucleic acid mechanisms are responsible could be important to the primary mechanisms are responsible could be important to the primary metabolism of the host cell. If so, cells equipped with a combination of the mechanism we have described and a starting quantity of nucleic acid molecules of the particular types required to promote the manufacture of the parasitic ingredient in question would grow more rapidly than other cells not so equipped. In accordance with the simple economics of evolution, this could ultimately result in a predominance of the favourably endowed organisms and in the ascendancy of the nucleic acid mechanisms to a position of importance in the control of growth and reproduction. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
With this conclusion we have reached a most important stage in our speculation on the origin of the nucleic acid mechanisms. Let us briefly review the argument to this point and make sure that, in retrospect, it seems plausible. We started with a brief consideration of the molecular structure of nucleic acid—the repetitive backbone segments that hook together to form long chains and the side chains, or bases, that bestow individuality on the different segments of the molecule. We also reminded ourselves of the evidence of an earlier report for the automatic formation of simple nucleic acid molecules under the conditions that prevailed at the Earth’s surface several billion years ago. In commencing our attempt to reconstruct the chemical adventures participated in by nucleic acid molecules during the late coacervate period of evolving life, our attention was directed to the small number of different side chains appearing in nucleic acid—4 instead of 20 of protein construction. We also found ourselves at an early stage considering the consequences of the fact that in nucleic acid not only the backbone segments but also the side chains or bases have a tendency to hook together in certain ways. In particular, we learned that the unattached end of the base that projects from each nucleotide of the backbone of a nucleic acid molecule has an affinity for the corresponding end of the base projecting from one of the three other types of nucleotide. We learned, further, that the resulting two-base configurations all have about the same overall length. This coincidence, we found, permits the joining together of the sugar phosphate ends of the “captured” nucleotides, resulting in the formation of a new and complete nucleic acid molecule “complementary” to the original one and tied to it in Siamese-twin fashion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
To separate our new double-stranded molecule into two single-stranded pieces of nucleic acid, we postulated a time-varying metabolic cycle that would from time to time introduce into the fluid of the host coacervate or cell a quantity of catalyst or other ingredient capable of breaking the relatively weak hydrogen bonds holding the two strands together. Cyclical repetition of the two-stage process—accretion of nucleotides to the single-stranded molecules to form double-stranded ones, followed by splitting of the double molecules—was assumed to occur continuously and automatically as a natural consequence of the postulated time-varying metabolism. The result was a “nucleic acid factory” in the cell, with a steady output of molecules exactly like those originally present in the cellular fluid together with a corresponding output of molecules with a base sequence “complementary” to the original nucleic acid. We next considered some of the activities of the single-stranded nucleic acid molecules other than those related to reproduction. Without introducing major new postulates, we were able to see that the strong base-pairing affinity of nucleic acid, together with the flexibility of its backbone, would naturally lead to the appearance of certain kinds of folded and twisted molecules. We concluded also that some of the longer varieties of nucleic acid would be able to “lie down” in stretched-out position on membranes or solid inclusions that might be found in the cell. We were, of course, helped to these conclusions by experimental evidence for the existence in the fluid of modern cells of various types of folded and twisted molecules of the general nature described, as well as by evidence for the surface binding of extended nucleic acid molecules on the cellular microsomes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
Given the “surface-bound” and “floating” forms of nucleic acid to which we had been led by our combination of speculation and experimental evidence, two further deductions came easily. One consisted of the inference that some of our folded and twisted floating molecules of nucleic acid would probably possess three-dimensional configurations of electric charge that would provide an effective fit for other kinds of molecular fragments found in the cellular fluid; this led us to the idea that a specific type of floating nucleic acid molecule, with a characteristic folded and twisted configuration determined by the sequence of bases that embellish its backbone, would frequently carry enmeshed in its coils an equally specific “parasite,” such as a particular sugar or amino acid. The second deduction arose as one more consequence of the base-pairing affinity of nucleic acid: at the horseshoe bend of the folded nucleic molecule, limitation on the flexibility of the backbone must result in leaving several successive unpaired bases protruding from the structure; if this end of the floating molecule were to approach a region of a surface-bound nucleic acid molecule where there just happened to be a sequence of several bases complementary to the horseshoe sequence, the floating molecule would stick to the surface-bound molecule. From these two deductions we finally reached our important conclusion as to the architectural capabilities of the nucleic acid mechanisms: each cell contains specific types of long surface-bound and shorter floating molecules of nucleic acid; the specificity of the floating molecules is matched by a corresponding specificity in the parasitic molecular fragments to which they become bound as they float about in the cellular fluid; the particular sequence of unpaired bases at the horseshoe bends direct the different types of floating molecules to complementary regions of the surface-bound molecules; this in turn lines up the various types of parasitic fragments in an order that is determined by the specific base sequence of the surface-bound nucleic acid; the resulting juxtaposition then facilitates the hooking together of some of the parasitic fragments to form more complex molecules; a fortuitous set of relationships among the base sequences of the bound molecules, those of the horseshoe bends of the floating molecules, and the specific parasitic affinities of the floating molecules occasionally results in a “factory” producing substantial quantities of a type of parasitic molecule of importance to the cellular growth process; when this happens, the happily equipped cell and its progeny possess an advantage in the continuing evolutionary battle for species survival; as a consequence, cells embodying the new nucleic acid mechanism become conspicuously numerous among the organisms of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
There is probably a point of complexity at which, cut off from the country, the city ceases to advance beyond being so agricultural; it becomes impractical and begins to induce its own kind of stupefaction and ineptness. The endless city-spread of suburbs makes the real farming and open country unavailable. The city becomes the only World, getting duller and one leaves the center, through first the inner ring of blight and then the deadly dormitories and suburbs. Within the big metropolises at present, industry and commerce are shut off and concealed. The freight yards of underground. Manufacture is in great walled plants on the outskirts. In Sacramento, California, even the American River and its ships are cut off by impassable through-highways, and thoughtless planning has provided a mile of child-useless landscaping, so that few kids get down to the river any more to fish. The newer high dwellings make the streets inaccessible to small children. The automobiles make the streets dangerous. Also the streets are strange, because there is a loss of neighbourhood. This is due not only to bad planning but to the greatly increased mobility of families. Children are torn from their school chums and this destroys culture. For instance, the street games and game song that I remember, in Sacramento 1911-1921, were the ancient London (Dublin?) games; and this tradition has now considerably faded. However, it is not easily that a new child-tradition could develop, especially among marginalized populations of various cultures. Quite the contrary, history and bad social planning have conspired to create Sacramento huge income and transitional neighbourhoods—it makes no difference whether low-income or high-income; children of all classes are equally deprived of the human community. Whereas mixing sharpens intelligence, any segregated differences created prejudice and make people less well educated. The very space has been crushingly pre-empted. The cars in Sacramento seem finally to have discouraged many of the ball games; we see boys going several miles in search of a Sunday-deserted parking lot to play stickball which previously they played on their own street with the small children chosen in. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
With increasing traffic, the policing is more strict. In San Francisco 40 percent of the area has been swallowed up the cloverleaves and express highways so that people can drive bumper to bumper in and out of the Bay Area! This is certainly out of human scale and is a dead loss for skating and bicycles. In Northern cities, the snow is never allowed to pile up; city sleighing is finished. The streamlined functional architecture is bare of useful stoops. In brief, concealed technology, family mobility, loss of the country, loss of the neighbourhood tradition, and eating up of the play space have taken away the real environment. The city, under inevitable modern conditions, can no longer be dealt with practically by children. Consider the dehumanizing complexity of the city just as a problem in municipal administration. In Sacramento in charge of housing are many agencies, some for housing the less affluent, some for housing generally, some agents of the city, but other agents of the state and federal governments. They are, in part, the Housing Authority, the Mayor’s Commission on Slum Clearance and Urban Renewal, the Comptroller’s office, the Board of Estimate, the Bureau of Real Estate, the Department of Buildings, and the State and Federal Housing Agencies. Meantime, unco-ordinated with these, there are agencies in charge of location of schools (Board of Education), and playgrounds and parks (Parks). Transportation by rail falls to the Transit Authority, but if it is automotive it may fall to the Port Authority (for certain highways, tunnels, and bridges) of the Triborough Authority (for other highways, etcetera). When cars are moving or parked in the streets they belong to the Traffic Department, and safety in general belongs to the Police. Nobody as such attends to the specific relation of workers and their particular industries, the cause of all this commuting, but there are zoning laws for broad kinds of occupancy, under the City Planning Commission. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Neighbourhood quarrels, family disruption, delinquency, etcetera, might be handled by the Police and various social agencies. Other departments, too, have a hand in the community planning of Sacramento, exempli gratia, Public Works; Gas, Water and Electricity; etcetera. It seems reasonable to ask if the integration of these function is not relevant? But nobody is in charge of that. To give a partial list: housing, slum clearance, location of industries, adequate schools and teacher, transportation, clear streets, traffic control, social work, racial harmony, master planning, recreation. The list could be long extended, not to speak of a beautiful city and local pride. A part from such a unified view, the solution of this or that isolated problems inevitably leads to disruption elsewhere. Escape thoroughfares must aggravate central traffic. Slum clearance as an isolated policy must aggravate class stratification and delinquency. New subways aggravate conurbation. “Housing” makes for double-shift and overcrowded classrooms. No master plan guarantees foolishness like the rewilding housing projects. These consequents evils produce new evils among them. Even so, confusing as these factors are and much as they cut down the available child-games and child-objects, it is hard to know what things look like from the child’s-eye view. For instance, the new public housing sites seem, after a few years, to swarm like any old-fashioned slum, disrupts the community, and creates more violent crimes, vandalisms, noise pollution, infestations, parking problems, and it perhaps developing its own jailhouse culture, without the police to manage the inmates. At first, these people are shunned from the traditional communities, but now, driven by necessity, they have agreed to ignore the dominate culture and blend in to the community, but they try to take them over and turn them to their own uses, games, adventure, necking, and battle. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
People use machines that they do not understand and cannot repair. For instance, the electric motors: one cannot imagine anything more beautiful and educative than such motors, yet there may be three or four in a house, cased our and out of sight; and when they blow, they are taken away to be repaired. Their influence is then retarding, for what the child sees is that competence does not exist in ordinary people, but in the system of interlocking specialties. This is unavailable to the children, it is to abstract. Children go shopping with Mama; but supermarket shopping for cellophane packages is less knowledgeable and bargainable than the older shopping, as well as providing tasteless Texas fruit and vegetables bred for nonperishability and appearance rather than for eating. Cooking is more prefabricated. Few clothes are sewn. Fire and heat are not made. Among poor people there used to be more sweated domestic industry, which did not do the adults any good but taught something to small children. Now, on the contrary, the man and perhaps the woman of the house work in distant offices and factories, increasingly on parts and processes that do not mean anything to a child. A child might not even know what work his daddy does. Shop talk will be, almost invariably, gripping about interpersonal relations. If the kid has less confidence that one can make of fix anything, his parents cannot either; and what they do work at is beyond his grasp. Parents, especially fathers, feel that this way of life offers too little to make their children, especially the son. They tend to blame it on the city—just as many dog lovers will not keep dogs in the city. Some guilty give the kids more money to go to the movies. Other choose the suburbs, where they can putter and fix, even though they thereby limit their own lives in other ways. We must return to the meaning of this fateful movie. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
With the World as it is and in humankind’s present evolutionary condition, it would be imprudent to reject violence at all times and during all events. However, to reject the violence of nuclear weapons would be the highest prudence. In earlier eras that duty of armed resistance to armed aggression was both a practical and more one. In the present era changed conditions required a revision of this duty. The evil powers of human produce wars which, in this nuclear age, can end only in destroying both sides alike. Therefore for rulers even to talk of the possibility of taking part in such war today is sheer madness. The threat of nuclear bombing has created a situation so entirely new that the old ideas about defense have to be scrapped. Formerly it was logical and morally right to meet violence with violence, but now it is suicidal and morally wrong to do so. In the past, international aggression accompanied by force had to be met by national defense accompanied by force. The resultant war was, unhappily, inescapable. It was bad, but it was better than surrendering to evil. In the present, this is no longer true. The use of nuclear forces in war is a completely immortal act. It is so not only because the scale on which it annihilates men, women, and children alike is unheard of, but also because the aftermath which succeeds it will be so savage as to be worse than what some nations set out to destroy. The means used being wrong, the end result will be equally wrong, besides being unwanted and perhaps unexpected. What the Bomb has done is to show up for war for the evil thing that it is. Are its warnings to pass unheeded simply because we do not wish to be troubled by such sombre morbid thoughts? The greatest value of the atomic bomb, after its compulsory prevention of way, it is compulsory abolition of frontiers. It renders them meaningless. It makes a World authority inevitable. It renders a merely international league insufficient. Only a World federation and World authority will suffice to meet it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
With this change in media, all military manuals become obsolete overnight. What gunpowder did to the bow and arrow, atomic bombs have done to gunpowder. However, gun-type fission weapon exist, which are based on nuclear weapons whose design assembles their fissile material into a supercritical mass by the use of the “gun” method: shooting one piece of sub-critical material into another. Although this is sometimes pictured as two sub-critical hemispheres driven together to make a supercritical sphere, typically a hollow projectile is shot onto a spike which fills the hole in its center. Its name is a reference to the fact that it is shooting the material through an artillery barrel as if it were a projectile. Since it is a relatively slow method of assembly, plutonium cannot be used unless it is purely the 239 isotope. In order to produce a nuclear explosion, subcritical masses of fissionable material must be rapidly assembled into a supercritical configuration. The simplest weapon design is the pure fission-gen assembly device, in which an explosive propellant is used to fire one subcritical mass down a “gun barrel” into another subcritical mass. Gun-assembly weapons are made with highly enriched uranium, typically more than 9 percent uranium-235. So the political struggle to secure strategic frontiers has not lost all meaning. The goal in the future will be to mass produce nuclear weapons and laser guns that are handheld. Stun guns will be a wireless laser light, possibly making law enforcement far less deadly for officers and suspects. As there will be lasers that will move faster than the human body can run, and go a far distance. We are told that adequate means of defense must be maintained, else the evil powers arraigned against us will overwhelm the liberties, the justice, the religion, the decencies we hold dear. We are told further that the policy of unilateral nuclear renunciation is a policy of surrender to those powers. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
The answer is that those who support the traditional way of defending those liberties—the military way—are today the real enemies, since the traditional way will lead inescapably to war, which in turn will lead to their total destruction, and our partial destruction. Those who claim that the next war will not be necessarily be a nuclear on, talk like fools. When such power in made compact and put within reach of humans, they will act like human beings, with all the pride of human beings and will use the new weapons they have forged, to grasp it. If not rejected now, in the calmer atmosphere of peace, it will certainly not be rejected later in the tenser atmosphere of war. If the unilateral policy is not accepted now, the penalty will inevitably flow. War is no loner the same. The revolution which has taken place in it is so absolute that it has not merely destroyed an old form of war, but made it about global domination of one’s culture and survival of the fittest. No one or culture wants to be overcome by another, and have its boarder penetrated until their World is alien to them and their race extinct. The weapons of physical warfare are not the symbols of man’s hates or greed, suspicions or fears. It is the manifestation of the Christian Biblical Law of regeneration—“And God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the Earth.’ When God says, ‘Go forth, and multiply,’ by the way, after the flood, He meant ‘Go as mate, as husbands and wives, and have children to repopulate the Earth,’” reports Genesis 1.22. And with Dr. Darwin’s interpretation, it means to make sure your race or blood life is the one that survives and rules the Earth. It is all about self-preservation, not hate. So, lack of peace and lack of law and order could send people into a frenzy and create World War III. The nonviolent way to bring peace to the World is today the only way even through the pre-atomic age it may not have been. For under this menace of nuclear weapons war cannot be prevented, nor peace attained and maintained, by the traditional arms race. The World needs a quota system to keep a racial harmony and balance. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
If people are happy with the way their communities look now, then set up a quota system to allow immigrants to come in to certain countries that will keep them balanced and not discriminate against others, so people are not worried that their race is being overwhelmed and this will allow communities to live more harmoniously. Otherwise, is it practical and realistic to turn this Earth into a gigantic incinerator? Yet that is just what those leaders who insist on making and piling up atomic weapons are doing. Nothing could be more practical than repurposing nuclear weapons to produce energy, so in the meaning of practicality we are to include actions which promote or survival. The practice of nonviolent pacifism at this juncture of history where the menace of atomic warfare is so unprecedented, is not mere surrender. It is a new way of fighting which uses spiritual weapons instead of physical one. However, whereas atomic warfare would destroy both antagonists and bring barbarism, this new way will save both. It will save their lives and their civilization. More, it will give a tremendous spiritual boost to the side which tries it first and ultimately give some uplift to the other side too. However, war is not inherently evil, as self-defense is not. Behavioral self-control training (BSCT), can also be applied to help people gain control over their substance-related behaviours. BSCT applied to alcoholism in particular therapists first have clients keep trace of their own drinking behaviour. Writing down the times, locations, emotions, bodily changes, and other circumstances of their drinking, they become more aware of the situation that place them at risk for excessive drinking. They are then taught coping strategies to use when such situations arise. They learn, for example, to set limits on their drinking, to recognize when the limits are being approached, to control their rate of drinking (perhaps by spacing their drinks or by sipping then rather than gulping), and to practice relaxation techniques, assertiveness skills, and other coping behaviours in situations in which they would otherwise be drinking. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Approximately 70 percent of the people who complete this training apparently show some improvement, particularly those who are young and not physically dependent on alcohol. In a related cognitive-behavioural approach, relapse-prevention training, heavy drinkers are assigned many of the same tasks as clients in BSCT. They are also taught to plan ahead of time how many drinks are appropriate, what to drink, and under what circumstances. The approach sometimes lowers the frequency of intoxication. Like BSCT, it seems most effect for people who abuse alcohol but are not physically dependent on it. The approach has also been used, with some success, in the treatment of marijuana and cocaine abuse. Joan of arc took her BSCT to another level, she was one of the World’s most celebrated virgin martyrs. She was burned at the stake for not wanting to fit in to the roles of traditional society. Of course there was an investigation to make sure that she was a chaste virgin, and it was confirmed. Her divine mentors had first spoken to her at the age of thirteen. On the spot, she had pledged her chastity to St. Catherine and St. Margaret, “for as long as it may please God.” These multiple testimonials to the young woman’s absolute purity convinced the Dauphin of her divine mission. Accordingly, he entrusted some of his best troops to her so she could accomplish her first goal: to raise the siege of Orleans and lead him to Reims to be crowned and consecrated king. She fought her way to victory and led the Dauphin and twelve thousand troops through English-occupied territory to Reims Cathedral, where he was crowned Charles VII. The Dauphin had taken a staggering risk. No woman had ever commanded troops during the Hundred Years’ War. Joan was an untrained nobody, whose main selling points were her resolute confidence, convincing story and confirmed virginity. Yet her soldiers responded enthusiastically. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
With one single exception, noted an eyewitness, “they all had great confidence in God and in the good justice of their king and their lord.” A contemporary war chronicler added, “All regarded her with much affection, men and women, as well as small children. And there was a very extraordinary rush to be near her or even the horse on which she sat.” Joan even deprived her men from looting and pillaging. On the battlefield, Joan was spectacular. Miraculously, she commanded armies and motivated her soldiers, drew up battle plans and waged war as if she had had a lifetime of military training and experience. Joan’s religious values reinforced her genius and personal courage. She refused to shed blood and carried her standard rather than her sword into battle. She refrained from fighting on Ascension Day, prayed “assiduously,” heard daily mass, and often celebrated the Eucharist. She banned blasphemy, gambling, and camp-following women of the evening. However, Joan’s career was very short. On May 23, 1430, while defending the town of Compiegne, north of Paris, the Burgundians captured her and sold her to their English allies for the substantial sum of twelve thousand crowns, and they threw her into prison. She was subject to examination, which proved, again, that she was a celibate virgin. Joan so impressed the duchess of Bedford, that she forbade all males, including the guards and soldiers, to touch their prisoner. In April of 1431, the Bishop of Beauvais and the papal deputy inquisitor tried Joan for heresy and sorcery. She was sentenced for her sin and on May 24, she made a panic-stricken recantation by singing a document of confessing to “adoring and calling up evil spirits,” “breaking divine law, Holy Scriptures, and the canon laws….[and violating] against the decency of nature.” The court, reassured, commuted her sentence of death to life imprisonment. Presumably Joan brooded and prayed in her cell, begging God and her spiritual mentors for guidance. And in the churchyard of St. Ouen, Joan, the virgin warrior, was ultimately burned at the stake. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Cultural phenomena such as Greek tragedy, with its emphasis on personal guilt and personal purification, or in later Judaism, the stress upon person responsibility before God, prepared for the rise of conscience by creating a definite ego-consciousness. The self, says a modern philosopher, has been discovered by sin. The merely logical self-consciousness does not have such a power. Without practical k knowledge about oneself, produced by the experience of law and guilt, no practical self-consciousness and no conscience could have developed. Predominately theoretical types of mentality lack a mature self. Even Nietzsche, who attacks more passionately than anyone the judging conscience, derives the birth of the “inner human” from its appearance. In pointing to the subpersonal character of guilt and punishment in primitive cultures, he praises the discovery of the conscience as the elevation of humankind to a higher level. The fact that self and conscience are dependent on the experience of personal guilt explains the prevalence of the “bad conscience” in reality, literature, and theory. It supports the assertion that the uneasy, accusing, and judging conscience is the original phenomenon; that good conscience is only the absence of bad conscience; and that the demanding and warning conscience is only the anticipation of it. Since ego-self and conscience grow in mutual dependence, and since the self discovers itself in the experience of a split between what it is and what it ought to be, the basic character of the conscience—the consciousness of guilt—is over. Shakespeare, in King Richard III, V Scene 3, gives a classic expression of the relation of individual self-coconsciousness, guilt, and conscience: “Oh coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me! What! do I fear myself? There’s none else by. Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I. Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am. Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why, lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself? Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good that I myself have done unto myself? O, no! alas, I rather hate myself…my conscience hath a thousand several tongues, crying all, Guilty! Guilty.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
In the next moment, however, Richard immerses himself in the we-consciousness of the battle, dismissing self and conscience: “Conscience is a word that cowards use. Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law. March on, join bravely, let us to ‘t pell-mell; if not to Heaven, than hand in hand to hades.” While the Old Testament describes the experience but not the notion of conscience (Adam, Cain, David, Job), the New Testament, especially Paul, has the word and the reality. Through the influence of Paul (who in this case, as in others, introduced elements of Hellenistic ethics into Christianity) conscience has become a common concept to the Christian nations, in their religious as well as secular periods. “The Lord may fulfill His promise to me, saying, If your sons take heed to their way, to walk before Me in truth with all their heart and mind and with all their soul, there shall not fail you [to have] a human on the throne of America,” reports 1 Kings 2.4. The Second Wave revolutionaries who invented today’s basic represento-kit institution were well aware of the possibilities of direct as against representative democracy. There were traced of direct, do-it-yourself democracy in the French revolutionary constitution of 1793. American revolutionists knew all about New England town halls and small-scale organic consensus formation. In Europe later on, Marx and his followers frequently invoked the Paris Commune as a model of citizen participation in the making and execution of the laws. However, the shortcomings and limitations of direct democracy were also well-known—and, at that time, more persuasive. Yet, direct democracy allows no check or delay on temporary and emotional public reactions. And, the communications of that day could not handle the mechanics. These are legitimate problems. How would a frustrated and inflamed American public in the early 2020’s, for example, have voted on whether or not to shutdown the economy, lock people in their houses, and forced them to get vaccines before returning to work? #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Or a Middle American proposal for the creation and development of more American farms and a band on foreign produce, dairy, and meat products? What if America had held an investigation into voter fraud a weeks after Biden took power? Elected representatives are presumed to be less emotional and more deliberative than the public. The problem of overemotional public response, however, can be overcome in various ways, such as requiring a cooling-off period or second vote before implementation of major decisions taken via referendum or other forms of direct democracy. One imaginative approach is suggested by many political leaders and that is to have an actual program that allows the public to participate in the formulation of a national energy policy, like the Swedes did in the mid-1970’s. The government recognized that most citizens lacked adequate technical knowledge of the various energy options, from solar to nuclear or geothermal, the government created a ten-hour course on energy and invited any Swede who took it, or an equivalent course, to make formal recommendations to the government. Simultaneously, trade unions, adult education centers, and parties from one end of the political spectrum to the other all created their ten-hour courses. It was hoped that as many as 10,000 Swedes would participate. To everyone’s surprise, some 70,00 to 80,000 flocked to discussion in homes and community facilities—the equivalent (on the American scale) of some 2,000,000 citizens trying to think together about the national problem. Similar systems could easily be employed to cancel out the objections to “overemotionalism” in referenda or other forms of direct democracy. The other objection can also be met. For the old communication limitations no longer stand in the way of expanded direct democracy. Spectacular advances in communications technology open, for the first time, a mind-boggling array of possibilities for direct citizen participation in political decision-making. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Not long ago, I had the pleasure of keynoting an historic event—the World’s first “electronic town hall”—over the Qube cable TV system in Columbus, Ohio. Using this interactive communications systems, residents of a small Columbus suburb actually took part via electronics in a political meeting of their local planning commission. By pushing a button in their living rooms, they were able to vote instantly on proposals relating to such practical issues as local zoning, housing codes, and proposed highway construction. They were able not only to vote yes or no but to participate in the discussion and speak up on the air. They were even able, by push button, to tell the chairperson when to move on to the next point on the agenda. This is only the first, most primitive indication of tomorrow’s potential for direct democracy. Using advanced computers, satellites, telephones, cable, polling techniques, and other tools, an educated citizenry can, for the first time in history, begin making many of its own political decision. The issue is not either/or. It is not a question of direct democracy versus indirect, representation by self versus representation by others. For both systems have advantages, and there are highly creative, as yet underutilized, ways to combine direct citizen participation with “representation” into a new system of semi-direct democracy. We might, for example, decide to hold a referendum on a controversial issue like nuclear development, as California and Austria have already done. Instead of turning the ultimate decision over directly to the voters, however, we might still want a representative body—Congress for example—to debate and ultimately decide the issue. Thus if the public voted pro-nuclear, a certain predesignated “bundle” of votes could be delivered to the pro-nuclear advocates in Congress. They might, on the strength of the public response, by given an automatic “edge” of 10 percent or 25 percent in Congress itself, depending on the strength of the pro vote in the plebescite. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
In this way, there is no purely automatic implementation of the citizens’ wishes, but these wishes do carry some specific weight. This is a variation of National Plebescite proposal mention above. Many other imaginative arrangements can be invented to combine direct and indirect democracy. Right now members of Congress and most other parliaments of legislatures set up their own committees. There is no way for citizens to force lawmakers to create a committee to deal with some neglected or highly controversial issue. However, why could not voters be empowered directly, through petition, to compel a legislative body to set up committees on topics the public—not the lawmakers—deems important? I am hammer away at these “blue-sky” proposals not because I unhesitantly favour them but merely to underscore the more general point: There are powerful ways to open and democratize a system that is now near breakdown and in which few, if any, feel adequately represented. However, we must begin thinking outside the worm grooves of the past 400 years. We can no longer solve our problems with ideologies, the models, or the left-over structures of the Second Wave past. Fraught with uncertain implications, such novel proposals warrant careful local experimentation before we apply them on a broad scale. But however we may feel about this or that suggestion, the old objection to direct democracy are growing weaker at precisely the time that the objections to representative democracy are growing stronger. Dangerous or even bizarre as it may seem to some, semi-direct democracy is a moderate principle that can help us design workable new institutions for the future. Across the millennia, agriculture was the most advanced form of production, far more fruitful than hunting and gathering. By AD 1100, the heavy plough, the open fields, the new integration of agriculture and herding, three field rotation, modern horse harness, nailed horseshoes and the whippletree had combined into a total system of agrarian exploitation. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
There was a zone of peasant prosperity stretching across Northern Europe from the Atlantic to the Dnieper. This first wealth wave also brought with it a greater division of labour—hence the need for exchange in the forms of trade, barter, buying and selling. However, hunger and extreme poverty remained the norm. As late as the 1300s in parts of Europe famine might still strike every three or five years. Famine constituted an almost structural feature of reality down through the seventeenth century. Hamburg lost one quarter of its population in 1565, Venice one-third in 1575-1577, Naples nearly half in 1656. In a satirical play performed during a famine in 1528, a character declares, “I shall kill myself…And it will be even better, because I myself shall eat me, and so I shall die well-nourished.” Grim humour in even grimmer era. Camporesi’s unforgettable book Bread of Dreams quotes original, vivid sources on the ravages of hunger on the skin and organs of its victims, the putrid smells, the filth, feces, and urine, the foul odor of their neighbour’s chamber pots and the pests they attracted, the heaped bodies on piles of dung, and the cannibalism that saw mothers eating their own babies. Almost tactile association and intimacy with the products of death—corpse bones, the diseased dying. Starving peasants periodically flooded the towns, creating “semi-marginalized” populations and mass mendicancy. Today First Wave populations predominate in many countries. And while cannibalism may be rare, many of the other horrors described by Camporesi can still be found in backward agrarian regions where peasants even work and live the way their ancestors did so many centuries ago. And let me never forget, beholding providential food on the loot-loaded table. I hold at the heart, as the timeless center, all feature, all form, and am thankful to God for the food He provides. And let me never forget the globular wealth of genetic wheat crumbled to meal. Nor forget the great generational strength God has allowed nature to nurture for thousands of years. Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Lord my God Thou art very great; Thou art clothed with glory and majesty. Thou buildest Thy chambers on the waters above, Thou makest the clouds Thy chariot, Thou ridest upon the wings of the wind; Thou makest the winds Thy messengers, the flaming fire Thy ministers. Thou didst establish the Earth upon its foundations, that it should never be moved. The Lord is great. While you are sitting on your designer sofa listening to Maria Callas, count your blessings. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 