When Rosalyn Bettiford, a forty-seven-year-old editor, arrived at her weekend house in Washington, Connecticut—a two-hour drive from Manhattan—the July night had turned chilly. Her teenage son was asleep in his bedroom. The living room was dark. As her eyes adjusted, she noticed that one of the big sliding-glass windows was wide open. She reached for its handle and—as the heavy window suddenly slipped out of its track—she plunged, screaming, glass and all, to a flagstone terrace twelve feet below. In that fall, Rosalyn (her name has been changed here for privacy reasons, but the story is true) fractured her skull, cracked a number of vertebrae, broke an arm and smashed all her toes. Her terrified son found her moaning and semi-conscious, with colorless fluid seeping out of her ears. The young men who arrived only minutes later quickly splinted her arm and drove her madly over country roads to the nearest hospital. They saved her life and vanished quietly into the night when doctors came to her side. The next day they turned up at her bedside in the hospital to see how she was doing. They were volunteers at the local firehouse. Rosalyn and her family did not need the horrors of 9/11 to remind them of the range of emergency services volunteer firefighters provide—and not just in the United States of America. Japan in 2022, there are approximately 900,000 men as members of shobodan—local volunteer firefighter associations. Similar groups exist in Austria, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Portugal, South Africa and other countries. Their member risk—and all too often lose—their lives. In economic terms, volunteers are prosumers, delivering valuable services without remuneration for their time, skills and risks. The scale of volunteer work in the United States of America is huge with something like 84 million people devoting at least a few hours a week to unpaid volunteer work, contributing an estimated 8.8 billion hours, valued at $195.0 billion—additional “free lunch” for the visible economy.

In 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated American’s Gulf Coast, destroying hundreds of thousands of homes and jobs, and led to an almost total breakdown of government emergency assistance efforts. By contrast, volunteers all over the South opened their homes and offered food, medical care and other necessities to the stricken population. In Japan, domestic energy services were seriously underdeveloped until the Great 2011 Tohoku Earthquake with a magnitude 9.0-9.01 struck in the Pacific Ocean, 72 km east of the Oshika Peninsula of the Tohoku region, and lasted six minutes causing a tsunami. This disaster destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes and jobs, killed 15,899 people, and cost $360 billion USD. That catastrophe galvanized the nation, and 960,000 volunteers rushed to help with construction, medical care, food and water supplied and counseling services. What was the monetary equivalent of their services to the Japanese economy? Was any of it counted as part of Japan’s GDP? More important, what was its human value? In South Korea, an estimated 6.5 million residents serve as volunteers. They provide relief after typhoon flooding. They help build homes for Habitat for Humanity. They teach refugees from North Korea how to adapt to life in the south. In Italy, volunteers help care for cancer patients and work in hospices. And when unprecedented floods struck Germany in 2002, tend of thousands of volunteers traveled cross-country to battle the rising waters. All these activities are part of the hidden half-the largely off-the-books part—of each country’s wealth system. If their full value were properly calculated, it would change many of the decisions now made by business leaders and politicians.

When economies were local and decentralized, prosuming, too, remained a strictly local phenomenon. With the rise of national markets and the nation-state, helping hands reached beyond the village or neighborhood. Recently, as economies have globalized or re-globalized, many volunteer organizations have gone global as well—expanding their definition of community to embrace the entire human race, and extending their operations accordingly in every field. Examples of international volunteering abound. In 1989, after the San Francisco earthquake, the Japan Emergency Team flew student volunteers across the Pacific to help the victims. When thousands of horses were left to starve in Zimbabwe in 2002 as farmers were ordered off the land, volunteers from as far away as Scotland, Switzerland and South Africa rushed in to rescue the emaciated animals. On a far larger scale, the Red Cross and Red Crescent operate Worldwide. They claim 105 million volunteers in 178 counties and, like other global non-governmental organizations (NGOs), send doctors, nurses, teachers, agronomists and other specialists all over the planet to perform professional services. Almost invariably, these volunteers are assisted by local “amateurs” who pitch in during crises or emergencies. Nothing compared with the outpouring of volunteer assistance after the great tsunami of December 2004. If it ever did, government and organizations publicly pledged huge amounts of emergency assistance money, much of which took a long time to materialize. By contrast, volunteers quickly came from everywhere. The government of Australia closed down an overloaded hotline for volunteers after ten thousand calls “exceeded all expectations.” Aid organizations around the World found themselves so flooded with volunteers they had to turn them away. Amateur radio operators, pilots, nurses, teachers, construction workers, and truck drivers freely applied their skill to the common good.

Here we saw invisible wealth, over and above monetary contributions, being transferred from one country to another, from one end of the Earth to another. The domain now supervised by psychiatrists, as well as other specialists in the deeper understanding of man, is the self. It is another one of the discoveries made in the state of nature, perhaps the most important because it reveals what we really are. We are selves, and everything we do is to satisfy or fulfill ourselves. If not the earliest, Locke was one of the early thinkers, to use the word in its modern sense. From the very beginning it has been difficult to define; and so Woody Allen helped teach us, it has become ever more difficult to do so. We are suffering from a three-hundred-year-long identity crisis. We go back and back, ever farther, hunting the self as it retreats int the forest, just a step ahead of us. Although disquieting, this may, from the point of view of its latest interpretation, be the essence of the self: mysterious, ineffable, indefinable, unlimited, creative, known only by its deeds; in short, like God, of whom it is the impious mirror image. Above all, it is individual, unique; it is me, not some distant man in general or man-in-himself. As Ivan Llyich in Tolstoy’s story explains, “All men are mortal,” in the famous syllogism that guarantees Socrates’ death cannot apply to this Ivan Llyich who had a striped leather ball when he was a child. Everyone knows that the particular as particular escapes the grasp of reason, the form of which is the general or the universal. To sum up, the self is the modern substitute for the soul. All of this goes back to that audacious innovator Machiavelli, who spoke admiringly of men who cared more for their fatherland than for the salvation of their souls. The higher demand made on humans by the soul inevitable lead them to neglect this World in favor of the other World.

Millennia of philosophizing about the soul had resulted in no certitude about it, while those who pretended to know it, the priests, held power or influenced it, and corrupted politics as a result. Princes were rendered ineffective by their own or their subjects’ opinions about the salvation of their souls, while men slaughtered each other wholesale because of differences of such opinion.  The care of the soul crippled men in the conduct of their lives. Machiavelli dared men literally to forget about their souls and the possibility of eternal damnation, to do so in theory as well as in practice, as did those men whom he praised. Hobbes, among others, took him up on the dare with a very new interpretation of the old Delphic inscription “Know thyself!,” which Socrates had interpreted as an exhortation to philosophize, and Dr. Freud was to interpret as an invitation to psychoanalysis. Dr. Freud was unknowingly following in the line of Hobbes, who said that each man should look to what he feels—feels, not thinks; he, not another. Self is more feeling than reason, and is in the first place defined as the contrary of the other. “Be yourself.” Astonishingly, Hobbes is the first propagandist for bohemia and preacher of sincerity or authenticity. No wanderings to the ends of the Universe on the wings of imagination, no metaphysical foundations, no soul ordering things as well as men. Man is perhaps a stranger in nature. However, he is something and can get his bearings by his most powerful passions. “Feel!,” Hobbes said. In particular you should imagine how you feel when another man holds a gun to your temple and threatens to shoot you. That concentrates all of the self in a single point, tells us what counts. At that moment one is a real self, not a false consciousness, not alienated by opinions of the church, the state or the public. This experience helps much more to “set priorities” than does any knowledge of the soul or any of its alleged emanations such as conscience.

Throughout the whole tradition, religious and philosophic, man had two concerns, the care of his body and the care of his soul, expressed in the opposition between desire and virtue. In principle he was supposed to long to be all virtue, to break free from the chains of bodily desire. Wholeness would be happiness; but it is not possible, at least in this life. Machiavelli turned things upside down. Happiness is indeed wholeness, so let us try the wholeness available to us in this life. The tradition viewed man as the incomprehensible and self-contradictory union of two substances, body and soul. Man cannot be conceived as body only. However, if the function of whatever is not body in him is to cooperate in the satisfaction of bodily desire, then man’s dividedness is overcome. Simple virtue is not possible, and love of virtue is only an imagination, a kind of perversion of desire effected by society’s (id est, others’) demands on us. However, simple desire is possible. This absoluteness of desire uninhibited by thoughts of virtue is what is found in the state of nature. It represents the turn in philosophy away from trying to tame or perfect desire by virtue, and toward finding out what one’s desire is and living according to it. This is largely accomplished by criticizing virtue, which covers and corrupts desire. Our desire becomes a kind of oracle we consult; it is now the last word, while in the past it was the questionable and dangerous part of us. This unity of man in desire is fraught with theoretical difficulties, but it is, as we would say, existentially persuasive because, unlike the incomprehensible and self-contradictory union of body and soul, it is affirmed by powerful experiences, such as fear of violent death, that do not require abstract reasonings or exhortations.

Kathleen Norris, the Protestant author of The Cloister Walk, was so drawn to monastic life that she became a Benedictine oblate attached to St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota. This involved pledging to abide by the Rule of St. Benedict insofar as her personal situation permitted. Because Norris is married, she observes her vows by frequent visits to the monastery, by assiduous and contemplative reading of the Scriptures, and by learning from the wisdom of St. John’s religious residents. The Benedictine nuns’ reflections on celibacy are so grounded in love that Norris titles one chapter in The Cloister Walk “Learning to Love: Benedictine Women on Celibacy and Relationship.” Older sisters recall the days when they were taught to avoid thoughts of pleasures of the flesh and, of course, actual pleasures of the flesh itself. Surprisingly, several sisters confided that falling in love is an essential element of celibacy. One nun told Norris that she first realized what celibacy really meant when she fell in love with a priest. A prioress elaborated publicly on this theme: “The worst sin against celibacy is to pretend to not have any affections at all. To fall in love is celibacy at work. Celibacy is not a vow to repress our feelings. It is a vow to put all our feelings, acceptable or not, close to our hearts and bring them into consciousness through prayer.” Another nun explained to Norris that when a nun falls in love—a common occurrence—she can use the occasion to shed her romantic images and develop her understanding of what being a nun is really about. The Benedictines also realize that nuns and monks define celibacy differently. The men think of it as abstaining from pleasures of the flesh, the women more as living together in a community and as a way to manage affective relationships. Celibate monks believe their celibacy conserves vital energy, which they divert into church service or expend in consuming food and alcohol, playing sports, and working.

Nuns, on the other hand, deal with their celibacy more directly, thinking, talking, and praying about it. Above all, they must accept it as a personal commitment. “It is a daily choice to live as a celibate,” one nun concluded. Norris extrapolates from nunly meditations on celibacy, particularly its roots in religion and love, to her own state of matrimony and its vow of fidelity. Like Benedictine celibacy, marriage begins as a sacred lifetime commitment that requires self-transcendence. Both celibacy and matrimony “are a discipline. Both can be a form of asceticism,” Norris quotes one nun approvingly. She worries, however, that today’s culture promotes an incompatible view of true love, equating it with possessing and being possessed, whereas the nature of the celibacy she celebrates is precisely the opposite because it “seeks to love non-exclusively, non-possessively.” Indeed, mature Benedictine celibates often speak about their freedom “to love many people without being unfaithful to any of them.” Simply put, their deepest wish is that celibacy will give them “an undivided heart.” It is not that pleasures of the flesh in itself is a sin, but that self-respect demands it should be an expression of something finer than mere barter. It is more satisfactory in the end to establish yourself materially through determination and courage than to yield to temptation. Another point is that promiscuous pleasures of the flesh not infrequently leads to disagreeable entanglements of the universal law which has to be disentangled at the price of suffering. That is one of the several reasons why marriage has been laid down as the normal path for humanity. From a certain time onwards, greater asceticism may be necessary. Dietary changes, with which the individual may experiment, are one step in the right direction.

One should strive to improve one’s whole general condition. All matters involving self-restraint where diet, drinking, smoking, and so on, are concerned should be watched and inner promptings carefully followed. It is also advisable to have regular periods of complete chastity—partly to exercise and develop the will and partly to prepare oneself for the practice of higher meditation. Although a philosophic discipline rejects permanent and exaggerated forms of asceticism, it both accepts and uses occasional and intelligent ones. It remains merely an animal act, an expression of the body’s lust, an nothing more. The reasons are obvious and have prompted many spiritual aspirants, both Asiatic and Christian, to become celibates and monks. These reasons may not be so obvious to those who are obsessed by pleasures of the flesh, as so many modern writers have been who have influenced the younger generations, who are stupefied by the sense-pleasure of it, who are slaves to its recurring habit-forming urges and understanding nothing of the need for its discipline. The philosophers have long known that there is a higher view of pleasures of the flesh, and some among them know that there is even a higher practice of it which eliminates the spiritual obstacle and raises it to the level of spiritual co-operation. This is brought about by substituting stillness for passion. Such a change cannot be achieved without the practice of physical, nervous, emotional, and mental self-control. Just as the high point of meditation provides its glorious result under the condition of a thought-free stillness, in the same way raising pleasures of the flesh to his immeasurably higher octave requires the condition of an inward and outward immobilization. That this can be reached, that the coupling of the two genders could possibly have any relationship with the higher development of man, may seem incredible to those who know only its true purpose.

That inferior tantric sects have eagerly used the teaching to make their desires for pleasures of the flesh appear as holy aspirations is quite true. This is part of the danger in such methods and why they are held in ill repute by many Christian authorities. Pleasures of the flesh must be controlled. It may be conquered, but its strength differs at different stages of the fighter’s life. Chastity is a mind that is completely free from all image making, all the pictures, sensations, which thought has built in its search for pleasure through intimate passions. Then you will find an abundance of energy. Man and woman, having the power between them to create another human being, may use this power either in submission to animal urges or in consonance with their highest ideals. In the former case, only physical or social penalties will keep them from being unrestrainedly self-indulgent. In the latter case, only the serious decision by both parties to provide a bodily vehicle for a higher type of reincarnating ego will bring them together in the procreative act. Children will then owe their birth to the serious act and deliberate purpose of two calm, mature persons, not to the chance union and ungoverned passion of two drifting ones. A substance so valuable that it can create another human being, must be used in accordance with its value, not squandered in unthinking indulgence. History gives enough evidence to show that too many stern attempts to impose celibate ways of living unloosed some of the lusts and monsters they seek to bind. They could not be enforced on the unready. Yet, humans still need to be taught how they can be lifted up to the Heavens. They can be brought to dismiss their ancient enmity towards spiritual aspiration, to unite and work together for humans’ redemption, their enlightenment, and their salvation.

When he tried to eradicate all desires for pleasures of the flesh, Tolstoy took long cross-county walks and bicycle rides in the early period. Those who have no desire to go to the extreme length to which his highly ascetic turn took him, may nevertheless find cycling a helpful and healthy exercise. When this process of balancing the two forces comes to an end, the male-female consciousness of the real human being will be established at last. The person who is pure of heart, experiences that God is good to one. One does not experience it as a consequence of the purification of one’s heart, but because only as one who is pure in heart is one able to come to the sanctuaries. This does not mean the Temple precincts in America, but the sphere of God’s holiness, they holy mysteries of God. Only to one who draw near to these is the true meaning of the conflict revealed. However, the true meaning of the conflict, is the wicked, for the pure in heart is not only too easily misled into thinking—that the present state of affairs is replaced by a future state of affairs of a quite different kind, in which in the end things go well with the good and badly with the bad; in the language of modern though the meaning is that the bad do not truly exist, and their end brings about only this change, that they now inescapably experience their non-existence, the suspicion of which they had again and again succeeded in dispelling. Their life was set in slippery places; it was so arranged as to slide into the knowledge of their own nothingness; and when this finally happens, in a moment, the great terror fall upon them and they are consumed with terror. Their life has been a shadow structure in a dream of God’s. God awakes, shakes off the dream, and disdainfully watches the dissolving shadow image.

Speaking of images, there has been so little research on the neurophysiology of television viewing. However, TV viewing is known to affect children’s verbal abilities and other physical, cognitive, and emotional development in psychological studies. However, the brain structural development associated with TV viewing has never been investigated. Here we examined cross-sectional correlations between the duration of TV viewing and regional gray/white matter volume (rGMV/rWMV) among 133 boys and 143 girls as well as correlations between the duration of TV viewing and longitudinal changes that occurred a few years later among 111 boys and 105 girls. After correcting for confounding factors, we found positive effects of TV viewing or rGMV of the frontoplar and medial prefrontal areas in cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, positive effects of TV view on rGMV/rWHV of areas of the visual cortex in cross-sectional analyses, and positive effects of TV viewing on rGMV of the hypothalamus/septum and sensorimotor areas in the longitudinal analyses. These anatomical correlates may be linked to previously known effects on TV viewing on verbal competence, aggression, and physical activity. In particular, the present results showed effects of TV viewing on the frontopolar area of the brain, which has been associated with intellectual abilities. Nonetheless, when we watch television, our usual processes of thinking and discernment are semifunctional at best. While television appears to have the potential to provide useful information to viewers—and is celebrated for its educational function—the technology of television and the inherent nature of the viewing experience actually inhibit learning as we usually think of it. Very little cognitive, recallable, analyzable, thought-based learnings takes place while watching TV.

TV viewing can lead to reduced amounts of cranial gray matter—home to the neurons that perform the bulk of our mental processing. Individuals who watched, on average, about an hour and a half more daily television than their peers throughout mid-to-late adulthood saw their brain volume reduced by approximately .5 percent. That percentage may seem small, but prevailing scientific thought indicates that preserving our brain integrity can prolong the time until we notice age-related cognitive decline. Longitudinal study data points to a correlation between excessive TV viewing and poorer performance on cognitive tests. The evidence is that television not only destroys the capacity of the viewer to attend, it also, by taking over complex of direct and indirect neural pathways, decreases vigilance—the general state of arousal which prepares the organism for action should its attention be drawn to specific stimulus. The individual therefore may be looking at the unexpected or interesting but cannot act upon it in such a way as to complete the purposeful processing gestalt. The continuous trance-like fixation of the TV viewer is then not attention but distraction—a form akin to daydreaming or time out. Since television information is taking place where the viewer is not, it cannot be acted upon. The viewer must deliberately inhibit the neural pathways between visual data and the autonomic nervous system, which stimulate movement and mental attention. To do otherwise than inhibit the process would be ridiculous. The viewer is left in a passive but also frustrated state. The nature of the processes carried out in the left cortex and particularly area thirty-nine [the common integrative area] are those unique to human as opposed to other mammalian life. It is the center of logic, logical human communication an analysis, integration of sensory components and memory, the basis of humans’ conscious, purposeful, and time free abilities and actions. It is the critical function of humans that makes one distinctively human.

The evidence shows that human beings “habituate” to repetitive light-stimuli (flickering light, dot patterns, limited eye movement). If habituation occurs, then the brain has essentially decided that there is nothing of interest going on—at least nothing that anything can be done about—and virtually quits processing the information that goes in. In particular, the left-brains common integrative area goes into a kind of holding pattern. Viewing is at the conscious level of somnambulism. The right half of the brain, which deals with more subjective cognitive processes—dream images, fantasy, intuition—continues to receive the television images. However, because the bridge between the right and the left brains has been effectively shattered, all cross-processing, the making conscious of the unconscious data and brining it into usability, is eliminated. The information goes in, but it cannot be easily recalled or thought about. Therefore, television information enters unfiltered and whole, directly into the memory banks, but it is not available for conscious analysis, understanding or learning. It is sleep teaching. All of this helps to explain recent findings that children, after watching television, have difficulty recalling what they have just seen. Whatever “knowledge” they gain is the sort that passes through the conscious regions where it would be available for recall and use. Television a sleep teaching would also help explain other observations, from political work, that the more that public issues are confined to television, the less knowledgeable the public seems to be about them. The voter cannot process information, or is apparently receiving. When Carter and Ford made their implicit agreement to avoid content and concentrate on style, they were right on the mark. Brain activity during television viewing, no matter what program it is, human brainwave activity enters a characteristic pattern.

The response is to the medium, rather than to any of its content. Once the set goes on, the brain waves slow down until a preponderance of alpha and delta brain waves become the habitual pattern. The longer the set is on, the slower the brainwave activity. As a universal medium, a supremely versatile extension of our senses, our cognition, and our memory, the networked computer, which is another electronic device that takes up our time and alters the way the brain works, serves as a particularly powerful neural amplifier. Its numbing effects are equally strong. The computer extends the processing capabilities of our central nervous system and in the process also alters it. Electronic media are so effective at altering the nervous system because they both work in similar ways and are basically compatible and easily linked. Thanks to its plasticity, the nervous system can take advantage of this compatibility and merge with the electronic media, making a single, larger system. There is another, even deeper reason why our nervous systems are so quick to “merge” with our computers. Evolution has imbued our brains with a powerful social instinct, which is a set of processes for inferring what those around us are thinking and feeling. Recent neuroimaging studies indicate that three highly active brain regions—one in the prefrontal cortex, one in the parietal cortex, and one at the intersection of the parietal and temporal cortices—are specifically dedicated to the task of understanding the goings-on of other people’s minds. Out innate ability for mind reading has played an important role in the success of our species, allowing us to coordinate large groups of people to achieve goals that individuals could not.

As we have entered the computer age, however, our talent for connecting with other minds has had an unintended consequence. The chronic overactivity of those brain regions implicated in social thought can lead us to perceived minds where no minds exist, even in inanimate objects. There is growing evidence, moreover, that our brains naturally mimic the states of the other minds we interact with, whether those minds are real or imagined. Such neural mirroring helps explain why we are so quick to attribute human characteristics to our computers and computer characteristics to ourselves—why we hear a human voice when a digital assistant speaks. Our willingness, even eagerness, to enter into a single, larger system with our data-processing devices is an outgrowth not only of the characteristics of the digital computer as an informational medium but of the characteristics of our socially adapted brains. While this cybernetic blurring of mind and machine may allow us to carry out certain cognitive tasks far more efficiently, it poses a threat to our integrity as human beings. Even as the larger system into which our minds so readily meld is lending us its powers, it is also imposing on us its limitations. To put a new spin on the idea that we program our computers and thereafter they program us. Even at a practical level, the effects are not always as beneficial as we want them to be. As the many studies of hypertext and multimedia show, our ability to learn can be severely compromised when our brains become overloaded with diverse stimuli online. More information can mean loess knowledge. While the computer may show some benefits in the beginning with software programs that can help solve puzzles, calculate equations, and correct spelling, in the end there are declines in the ability to use these functions when software is not available.

However, people who use their own brains to solve puzzles, calculate equations, dictionaries to check their spelling may start off slower, but build up enough cognitive ability to become more proficient and quicker at dealing with these tasks. Those who use their own brains are better able to plan ahead and plot strategy, while those using the helpful software tend to rely on simple trial and error. Often, in fact, those with the helpful software are shown to become so dependent that they no longer rely on their brain, they may even trust their own intellectual ability less, which decreases their confidence and brain functioning. Eight months after the study, people who use their own brains more frequently, instead of depending on computer software some more confidence and quicker intellectual abilities, they tend to be twice as fast as those who relay on computer software. People who use their own brains consistently demonstrate more focus, more direct and economical solutions, better strategies, and better knowledge. The more that people depend on explicit guidance from software programs, the less engaged they are in the task and the less they end up learning. The findings indicate that as we externalize problem solving and other cognitive chores to our computer, we reduce our brain’s ability to build stable knowledge structures—schemas. The brighter the software, the dimmer the user. That is why old fashion men are always planning for a time when the lights go out. They always want to make sure they know how to drive and park their own cars, to use their own brains to think, write by hand, and make sure they know how to build things and repair stuff without waiting on a machine or another person.

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For the most part we understand only gradually the decisive experiences which we have in our relation with the World. First, we accept what they seem to offer us, we express it, we weave it into a “view,” and then think we are aware of our World. However, we come to see that what we look on in this view is only an appearance. Not that our experiences have deceived us. However, we have turned them to our use, without penetrating to their heart. As a result, the material World has become condemned as a carefully laid trap, set up by the Devil for the purpose of deluding and ensnaring man. Christians were warned by the priesthood to beware of the delights of material existence, lest they be sidetracked from their true Earthly purpose, the preparation for a spiritual afterlife. All joys came under the rule of the Church, to be dispensed as the clergy saw fit. Pleasures of the flesh, people were informed, was to be indulged in solely for the purpose of propagating Christian babies and nothing else. The ecclesiastical severance of man from nature went so far that in the twelfth century a book entitled Hortus Deliciarum issued an ominous warning that the joys of gardening might well be harmful to the redemption of the soul. However, while these ideals of asceticism and self-denial were taking root in Christian dogma, the inequities of administration were apparent for all who had eyes to see. The hypocrisy of the clergy was flagrantly displayed, and, on this account, many had ceased to listen to long, tedious sermons dealing with the inevitable damnation of sinners. Priests were constantly seducing female members of their own laities, and as early as the eighth century, many convents had been condemned by high ecclesiastical figures as being “hotbeds of filthy conversation, drunkenness, and vice.”

As the peasant masses were considered to be the property of the feudal lords whose lands they occupied, they found themselves subject to the caprice of these lords and felt crushed beneath the injustices of the system. The serfs were taxed unmercifully and were subject to the foraging raids that were frequently made by the soldiers of the nobility, who came to carry off their grain or their women, depending on the inclination. One feudal law went to the extreme of declaring that before a peasant could consummate his marriage, he had to bring his bride to his lord in order that the lord might have the “first fruits” of the marriage. The peasant might forestall this, thereby preserving his wife’s virginity (at least temporarily), by making a prescribed payment to the noble, but the payment was usually too large for the peasant to afford. These injustices usually had the weight of the Church behind them, for the Church was a de facto part of the aristocracy. The social order was presented to the people as being ordained by Heaven and therefore immutable; the Church took the attitude that if God had wanted the situation changed, then He would change it. As long as they were on top of the heap, the Church and the nobility had little impetus to rock the boat. However, soon the peasantry became resentful of the oppression forced on them from above. Peasant revolts spread across Europe and one by one were put down by force of arms. The Church backed up the efforts of aristocracy to quell the rebels, deeming them to be anarchists inspired by the forces of Hell trying to topple God’s empire. The result was that the lower classes had ceased to listen to a God who had become in their eyes a solemn and unfeeling hypocrite, who dealt fortune to those least deserving and inflicted punishment on those most virtuous. God was the friend and ally of the corrupt nobility, the enemy of the common human.

The disaffection with the Christian hypocrisy was not only widespread among the peasantry but was shared by many members of the nobility themselves. It was no wonder, then, that the organized heretical movements that had begun to trickle into the Empire from the south had taken root in the minds of many. New ideas, carried from the east and south by the Crusaders, who had been sent, ironically enough, to stamp them out, began to take seed in certain Christian circles. Many of these movements, such as the Knights Templar and the various Gnostic heresies, were clear-cut reactions against the corruption rampant in the Church, and they instituted strict vows of chastity and poverty among their priesthoods. By the thirteenth century, the officials in Rome, exhausted from the senseless bloodshed and humiliating defeats in the Holy Land, began to call the troops home and turn their attention to more domestic problems. When they opened their eyes, they not only found blasphemous idolatry being carried on by the peasant masses but also saw their own position being undermined by heresies that had grown too big to be considered lightly. Christianity was rotting beneath its own weight. If the kingdom of God were to be saved from the jaws of Hell, these devout and pious men saw that something would have to be done, and done quickly. The laws grew steadily tougher because they felt that the only possibility man had for redemption was to expurgate evil by denying all forms of carnality. Christianity to them was a corrupt force, leading humans into sin and degradation, and the rabid opposition they expressed to the Church caused the papacy grave concern.

Manichaean sects, which had been brought into northern and central Europe from Bulgaria, such as the Albigenses and the Cathari, had attained such power that they had managed to send out missionaries to various parts of Europe in order to gather converts. In many areas they had been successful. To the Manichaeans, procreation was the ultimate sin, since it was the propagation of materiality. Realizing that the lower elements of the movement would not be able to expunge their terrestrial drives entirely, the elect of these sects may have given their unofficial sanction to pleasures of the flesh that would not result in reproduction. At any rate, under the direction of Innocent III, these pockets of dissension were exterminated, many of the groups going underground to carry on their opposition to Christianity. By the time of the suppression of the Manichaeans, the death penalty had come to be used freely in cases of heresy. Today, as in the past, hundreds of thousands of Catholic priests’ question and rail against the discipline of celibacy. Those tormented by doubt have options. They may take leaves of absence up to a year, to meditate, pray, and resolve their personal crises. They may seek counseling with the Catholic framework. They may also seek counseling within the Catholic framework. They may also abandon their vocations and return to the World, a course of action once unthinkable and even now, difficult to negotiate successfully. No Catholic religious doubts that celibacy freely chosen, or granted by God’s grace, has the power of infusing the priest with a profound love and serenity that strengthens his ministry and enrich his relations with parishioners. Coerced celibacy, on the other hand, weakens and saddens, embitters and alienates.

Some priests simply endure, with loneliness their overriding companion. Many cheat and take lovers they either disguise as housekeepers or friends or flaunt as mistresses. Others find the struggle intolerable and finally leave; of those who do so, 94 percent identify their discomfort with celibacy as they prime motive. Since Vatican II, over one hundred thousand have joined the exodus, more than one every two hours, early one-quarter of the World’s working priests. In the United States of America 42 priests leave within twenty-five years of their ordination, which translates into the bleak statistic that half of American priests under the age of sixty have already gone. In Canada in the past two decades alone, the number of priests and nuns has dwindled by a quarter, though 46 percent of Canadians are Catholic and the vast majority—84 percent versus 71 percent in the United States of America—are amenable to ministry by married priests. At the same time that droves of priests have been defecting, far fewer novices have felt called to join holy orders. Swiftly and steadily, the World’s complement of Catholic clergy is dangerously eroding, so that nearly half of all parishes have no priest at all. At the root of this phenomenon is compulsory celibacy, the issue that has racked the Church since its earliest days. “It was mainly about celibacy,” said Dominic, an America ex-priest, about his decision to leave. “I was spending too much of my time, my energy, my inner strength, on coping with it. Celibacy was presenting me from being the priest I wanted to be…The Christian I wanted to be. Celibacy had become an end rather than a means. That is the case with any number of priests.” Another priest, returning to his empty house after the emotional outpouring of Sunday mass, felt he “was like a driver who had gone down deep and did not have a decompression chamber when he came up.”

William Cleary, a Jesuit for twenty years, left the priesthood when he became convinced the celibacy is not a virtue and, in its denial of God-given sexuality, may even be “a vague kind of sin.” After all, Cleary argues in “A Letter to My Son: The Sin of Celibacy,” sexuality is God’s vehicle for perpetuating life on Earth and “reveals the Divine Being, and…reveals who we humans are, the incredible depths of this World’s goodness…[and] helps toward prayer, contemplation, and all the religious and human values.” No wonder that Dean R. Hoge notes, in The Future of Catholic Leadership, that “the celibacy requirement is the single most important deterrent to new vocations to the priesthood, and if it were removed, the flow of men into seminaries would increase greatly, maybe fourfold.” It should also be emphasized that traditionally the Church has treated apostates with brutal indifferences; leaving is often a miserable experience, emotionally, psychologically, professionally, and financially. In the United States of America, they were “solitary, shuffling parish, from whom Christian society asked only that they should disappear off the face of the Earth.” Italians refer to them as the Church’s “White Homicides” because despite years of service, they are pushed out into the World jobless, scorned, with only about $300 to their name, bereft of friends, ostracized by former colleagues. Even in countries where the Church does not actively persecute those who renounce their vows, the transition from religious to secular life is almost always trying and often frightening. Ex-priests who continue to work for the Church—as pastoral assistant, for example—report that they are underpaid, stigmatized, and humiliated, and that celibate coworkers are unfriendly, hostile, and envious of them.

As if they are in the same category as disbarred lawyers or other disgraced professionals, too often, ex-priests are dismissed. However, the majority remain devout Catholics who long to continue practicing their profession of serving God. Thousands of the attempt to so through Rent-A-Priest, a nonprofit agency begun in 1992 in Framingham, Massachusetts, which now has branches in Canada and South Africa. In the U.S., Rent-A-Priest claims a database of over two thousand estranged priests available to conduct baptisms, funerals, and other sacraments. The majority of these men are now married and call themselves “married Catholic priests.” However, the Church does not acknowledge them as such—the Canadian diocese of Toronto, for instance, refers to them as “laicized priests,” an ambiguous and unsatisfactory classification. Worldwide, the Church deplores Rent-A-Priest’s swelling ranks as a manifestation of the raging conflict over celibacy. More seriously, it refuses to sanction the sacrament they perform. No wonder, then, that so many priests prefer to remain in holy orders and defile the vow of chastity they find so onerous. However, how many is “so many”? Approximately 40 percent of American priests are chronically uncelibate, 20 percent in stable relationships with one or more adult woman, nearly as many with adult men. Subtract this cheating 40 percent from the priesthood and 60 percent remain. As its members at least celibate? Not necessarily. Many of them indulge in occasional erotic adventures, but slack Church tallying of pleasures of the flesh lapses permits about four such episodes annually before it labels their perpetrator sexually active. In other words, about half the Catholic clergy sworn to celibacy is uncelibate. Underneath all the tales there does lie something different from the tales? How different?

People must learn to love the soul, and especially seek to purify one’s thought-life. There are different requirements about the extent and nature of pleasures of the flesh discipline at different stages of the path. One’s own innermost promptings are the best guide here for they come from the higher self. However, they need to be separated from bodily impulses and emotional broodings, which is difficult to do. It is immaterial for the adept whether one lives a celibate or married life. The attitude toward pleasures of the flesh will always depend upon individual circumstances. A celibacy reached through insight and not by institutional behest, or an asceticism practised within marriage—in both cases as immaculate in thought as in deed—shows its value in peace and strength. However, for those who cannot arrive at this admittedly difficult condition, there should be periods of temporary withdrawal from pleasures of the flesh activity ranging from a few weeks to a few years. For single persons and dedicated married ones it is a voluntary inner self-discipline. Under the urge of intimate passions men will form undesirable relationships which bring mental and emotional sufferings, or fall into unpleasant habits, or behave quite ridiculously under the delusion that they are finding happiness. To gratify the desire of the moment without thought about its possible distant, but undesirable, consequence, is the fact of immaturity. If a human wished to become truly adult one should cultivate the needful qualities. The price of excess pleasure has to be paid in the end. It is paid in unwanted children, unhappy castaways, unpleasant diseases, lost health and premature ageing. Strength is squandered in undisciplined activities of pleasures of the pleasures of the flesh. When the mating urge descends on humans, they develop a temporary but immense capacity for glorifying the beloved person, seeing beautifies and virtues which may be quite slight or even non-existent. With the eyes so widely out of focus, nature achieves her purpose with ease.

In this—that the thing which is involved is a thing of a different nature, how it may put on a human appearance or indulge in its servants their human appetites. It is cold, it is hungry, it is violent, it is illusory. The warm blood children and meeting at the Sabbath do not satisfy it. It wants something more and other; it wants “obedience,” it wants “souls,” and yet it pines for matter. It never was, and yet it always is. To explain what I am getting at, I find it helpful to refer to two films, which taken together embody the main lines of my argument. The first film is of recent vintage and is called The Gods Must Be Crazy. It is about a tribal people who live in the Kalahari Desert plains of southern Africa, and what happens to their culture when it is invaded by an empty Coca-Cola bottle tossed from the window of a small plane passing overheard. The bottle lands in the middle of the village and is construed by these gentle people to be a gift from the gods, for they not only have never seen a bottle before but have never seen glass either. The people are almost immediately charmed by the gift, and not only because of its novelty. The bottle turns out, has multiple uses, chief among them the intriguing music it makes when one blows into it. However, gradually a change takes place in the tribe. The bottle becomes an irresistible preoccupation. Looking at it, holding it, thinking of things to do with it displace other activities once thought essential. However, more than this, the Coke bottle is the only thing these people have ever seen of which there is only one of its kind. And so those who do not have it try to get it from the one who does. And the one who does refuses to give it up. Jealousy, green, and even violence enter the scene, and come very close to destroying the harmony that has characterized their culture for a thousand years.

The people begin to love their bottle more than they love themselves, and are saved only when the leader of the tribe, convinced that the gods must be crazy, returns the bottle to the gods by throwing it off the top of a mountain. The film is great because it can be a metaphor about how leaders in the Catholic Church need to set an example by remaining celibate and not let this false idol of pleasures of the flesh overcome them and the entire Earth. However, it also raises two questions of extreme importance to another situation: How does culture change when new technologies are introduced to it? And is it always desirable for a culture to accommodate itself to the demands of new technologies? The leader of the Kalahari tribe is forced to confront these questions in a way that America have refused to do. And because his vision is not obstructed by a belief in what Americans call “technological progress,” he is able with minimal discomfort to decide that the songs of the Coke bottle are not so alluring that they are worthy admitting envy, egotism, and greed to a serene culture. The second film relevant to my argument was made in 1967. It is Mel Brook’s first film, The Producers. The Producers is a rather raucous comedy that has at its center a painful joke: An unscrupulous theatrical producer has figured out that it is relatively easy to turn a buck by producing a play that fails. All he has to do is induce dozens of backers to invest in the play by promising them exorbitant percentages of its profits. When the play fails, there being no profits to disperse, the producer walks away with thousands of dollars that can never be claimed. Of course, the central problem he must solve is to make sure that his play is a disastrous failure. And so he hit upon an excellent idea: he will take the story of Adolf Hitler—and make it into a musical.

Because the producer is only a crook and not a fool, he assumes that the stupidity of making a musical on this theme will be immediately grasped by audiences and tht they will leave the theater in dumbfounded rage. So he calls his play Springtime for Hitler, which is also the name of its most important song. The song begins with the lyrics: Springtime for Hitler and Germany; winter for Poland and France. The melody is catchy, and when the song is sung it is accompanied by a happy chorus line. (One must understand, of course, that Springtime for Hitler is no spoof of Hitler, as was, for example, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. The play is instead a kind of denial of Hitler in song and dance; as if to say, it was all in fun.) The ending of the movie is predictable. The audience loves the play and leaves the theater humming Springtime for Hitler. The musical becomes a great hit. The producer ends up in jail, his joke having turned back on him. However, Brook’s point is that the joke is on us. Although the film was made years before a movie actor became President of the United States of America, Brooks was making a kind of prophecy about that—namely, that the producers of American culture will increasingly turn our history, politics, religion, commerce, and education into forms of entertainment, and that we will become as a result a trivial people, incapable of coping with complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty, perhaps even reality. We will become, in a phrase, a people amused into stupidity. For those readers who are not inclined to take Mel Brooks as seriously as I do, let me remind you that the prophecy I attribute here to Brooks was, in fact, made many years before b a more formidable social critic than he. I refer to Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World at the time that the modern monuments to intellectual stupidity were taking shape: Nazism in Germany, fascism in Italy, communism in Russia.

However, Huxley was not concerned in his book with such naked and crude forms of intellectual suicide. He saw beyond them, and mostly, I must add, he saw America. To be more specific, he foresaw that the greatest threat to the intelligence and humane creativity of our culture would not come from Big Brother and Ministries of Propaganda, or gulags and concentration camps. He prophesied, if I may put it this way, that there is tyranny lurking in a Coca-Cola bottle; that we could be ruined not by what we fear and hate but by what we welcome and love, by what we construe to be a gift from the gods. And in case anyone missed his point in 1932, Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited twenty years later. By the, George Orwell’s 1984 had been published, and it was inevitable that Huxley would compare Orwell’s book with his own. The difference, he said, is that in Orwell’s book people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. The Coke bottle that has fallen in our midst is a corporation of dazzling technologies whose forms turn all serious public business into a kind of Springtime for Hitler musical. Television is the principal instrument of this disaster, in part because it is the medium Americans most dearly love, and in part because it has become the command center of our culture. Americans turn to television not only for their light entertainment but for their news, their weather, their politics, this religion, their history—all of which may be said to be their serious entertainment. The light entertainment is not the problem. The least dangerous things on television are its junk. What I am talking about is television’s preemption of our culture’s most serious business.

It would be merely banal to say that television presents of with entertaining subject matter. It is quite another thing to say that on television all subject matter is presented as entertaining. And that is how television brings ruin to any intelligent of public affairs. Political campaigns, for example, are now conducted largely in the form of television commercials (and you will notice parties with the smaller number of commercials usually lose). Candidates forgo precision, complexity, substance—in some cases, language itself—for the arts of show business: music, imagery, celebrities, theatrics. Indeed, political figures have become so good at this, and so accustomed to it, that they do television commercials even when they are not campaigning, as, for example, Geraldine Ferraro for Diet Pepsi and former Vice-Presidential candidate William Miller and the late Senator Sam Ervin for American Express. More currently President Joe Biden endorsing Masks on TV and Vice President Kamala Harris endorsing vaccines. Furthermore, political figure appear on variety shows, soap operas, sit-coms, and YouTube videos. Barak Obama appears on Armin Van Buuren’s State of Trance, episode 1000, I believe. George McGovern, Ralph Nader, Ed Koch, and Jesse Jackson have all hosted “Saturday Night Live.” Henry Kissinger and former President Gerald Ford have done cameo roles on “Dynasty.” Tip O’Neill and Governor Michael Dukakis have appeared on “Cheers.” Michelle Obama has appeared on “Ellen. Richard Nixon did a short stint on “Laugh-In.” The late Senator from Illinois, Everett Dirksen, was on “What’s My Line?,” a prophetic question if ever there was one. What is the line of these people? Or, more precisely, where is the line that one ought to be able to draw between politics and entertainment? I would suggest that television has annihilated it.

There was a time while working on this report that we became thrilled about the implications of the human ingestion of light. As we began to understand for the first time that there is a concrete relationship between our bodies and light, and that light is a kid of thing we ingest for nourishment and growth, like food, we began to feel that humans probably hungered for and sought light the way plants do. We know that humans seek food. A lot of life is spent in this process. We can say that seeking food is instinctive in all humans. Even babies know how to do it, with their limits. If light is also food, then might we not seek it, as plants do? Id this why we look at the moon? Is this why we gaze at fire? It there an innate longing for light, like a kind of cellular hunger? If so, then I suppose Anne Waldman could be right. With natural light gone, we seek a surrogate light: television. Every culture and religion in history has placed light at the center of its cosmology. “Receive the light.” “Seek enlightenment.” “The truth always comes to the light.” “The mind of light.” “The luminescent soul.” The Hopi Indians speak of light as entertaining them through the tops of their heads. It is a goal of theirs to keep the tops of their heads open for light. Of course they are speaking in spiritual terms. It is very efficient and sensible to develop religions around natural processes which are the bases of survival. Most indigenous cultures do that. The Bolivian Indians have a meditational routine every day at the same time, sitting high on a cliff facing the sun. They called it “taking light.” They give it the same kind of meaning as “taking waters.” They claimed it had medicinal value, as well as stimulating spontaneous insight. There is hardly a medicine/healing system in the World where light is not used for health purposes…physical, mental, spiritual.

Chinese healing systems coordinate treatments of carious organs with foods of specific color. For example, for lung disorders, white foods like turnips and onions will be prescribed. Heart disorders are assisted by eating red foods such as beets and pomegranates. These might be combined with meditational practices in which the patient is asked to keep a certain color in mind. A spleen problem is considered to be caused partly by the body’s insufficient absorption of nutrients found in green vegetables. Intestinal problems may be caused by an insufficiency or an overabundance of foods containing pink light. In Mahayana Buddhism, each chakra (energy center) of the body is described as processing certain parts of the color spectrum, while also intermixing the colors processed by other energy centers. In acupuncture, the two principal light-reception glands, the pineal and the pituitary, are the subject of specific light treatments, designed to keep them in balance. Many cultures consider the body’s experience of color, which is to say spectra, as a prime factor in health. However, when faced with this kind of evidence, this culture places it all in a “primitive” category. We consider it superstition or mythology rather than knowledge or science. Another fascinating science topic is how much remains to be learned about the workings of explicit and even implicit memory, and much of what we now know will be revised and refined through future research. However, the growing body of evidence makes clear that the memory inside our heads is the product of an extraordinarily complex natural process that is, at every instant, exquisitely tuned to the unique environment in which each of us lives and the unique patter of experiences that each of us goes through.

The old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on continual, indeterminate organic growth, are, it turns out, remarkably apt. In fact, they see, to be more fitting than our new, fashionably high-tech metaphors, which equate biological memory with the precisely defined bits of digital data stored in databases and processed by computer chips. Governed by highly variable biological signals, chemical, electric, and genetic, every aspect of human memory—the way it is formed, maintained, connected, recalled—has almost infinite gradations. Computer memory exists as simple binary bits—ones and zeros—that are processed through fixed circuits, which can be either open or closed but nothing in between. One salient lessons to emerge is how different biological memory is from computer memory. The process of long-term memory creation in the human brain is one of the incredible processes which is so clearly different “than artificial brains” like those in a computer. While an artificial brain absorbs information and immediately saves it in its memory, the human brain continues to process information long after it is received, and the quality of memories depends on how the information is processed. Biological memory is alive. Computer memory is not. Those who celebrate the “outsourcing” of memory to the Web have been misled by a metaphor. They overlooked the fundamentally organic nature of biological memory. What gives real memory its richness and its character, not to mention its mystery and fragility, is its contingency. It exists in time, changing as the body changes. Indeed, the very act of recalling a memory appears to restart the entire process of consolidation, including the generation of proteins to form new synaptic terminals.

Once we bring an explicit long-term memory back into working memory, it becomes a short-term memory again. When we reconsolidate it, it gains a new set of connections—a new context. The brain that does the remembering is not the brain that formed the initial memory. In order for the old memory to make sense in the current brains, the memory has to be updated. Biological memory is in a perpetual state of renewal. The memory stored in a computer, by contrast, takes the form of distinct and static bits; you can move the bits from one storage drive to another as many times as you like, and they will always remain precisely as they were. The proponents of the outsourcing idea also confuse working memory with long-term memory. When a person fails to consolidate a fact, an idea, or an experience in long-term memory, one is not “freeing up,” space in one’s brain for other function. In contrast to working memory, with its constrained capacity, long-term memory expands and contracts with almost unlimited elasticity, thanks to the brain’s ability to grow and prune synaptic terminals and continually adjust the strength of synaptic connections. Unlike a computer, the normal human brain never reaches a point at which experience can no longer be committed to memory; the brain cannot be full. The amount of information that can be stored in long-term memory is virtually boundless. Evidence suggests, moreover, that as we build up our personal store of memories our minds become sharper. The very act of remembering appears to modify the brain in a way that can make it easier to learn ideas and skills in the future. We do not contain our mental powers when we store new long-term memories. We strengthen them. With each expansion of our memory comes an enlargement of our intelligence.

A great way to encourage students to study is to tell them one day they will be as rich as Bill Gates. He spent like six hours a day studying. Nowadays, the person to be like might be Elon Musk. Nonetheless, the Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory, but we when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying out minds of their riches. In the 1970s, when school began allowing students to use portable calculators, many parents objected. They worried that a reliance on the machines would weaken their children’s grasp of mathematical concepts. The fears, subsequent studied showed, were largely unwarranted. No longer forced to spend a lot of time on routine calculations, many students gained a deeper understanding of the principles underlying their exercises. Today, the story of the calculator is often used to support the argument that our growing dependence on online databases is benign, even liberating. In freeing us from the work of remembering, it is said, the Web allows us to devote more time to creative thought. However, the parallel is flawed. The pocket calculator relieved the pressure on our working memory, letting us deploy that critical short-term store for more abstract reasoning. As the experience of math students has shown, the calculator made it easier for the brain to transfer ideas from working memory to long-term memory and encode them in the conceptual schemas that are so important to building knowledge. The Web has a very different effect. It places more pressure on our working memory, not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas. The calculator, a powerful but highly specialized tool, turned out to be an assistance to memory, but think how much smarter one’s brain would be without the assistance of a calculator. When you are racing a student on the blackboard to finish a math problem first, you cannot use a calculator. Additionally, the Web is a technology of forgetfulness.

Patients do not prosume health just by exercising more or quitting tobacco. They invest their money in technologies that can help them better care for themselves and their families. In 1965, about the only equipment available in the home were canes, crutches, walkers, and beds. In 1980, when we first called attention in The Third Wave, that market for home-use medical instruments was still relatively tiny. Today, patients are responsible for 99 percent of diabetes-management responsibilities, and sales of home-use diabetes-management products are $25.31 billion and is expected to reach $41.88 billion in 2028. However, home-care technology is no longer limited to a few basic products such as insulin-infusion kits, blood-pressure machines and pregnancy-test kits. An ever-widening array of technologies are springing up to help prosumers care for themselves or their loved ones. Anyone going online today can buy self-testing equipment for the detection from everything from allergies to COVID-19, prostate cancer to hepatitis. Trouble with your hand? The FlagHouse catalog for “special populations” offers a “finger goniometer” for measuring range of motion in metacarpophalangeal finger joints. Along with it you can get a hydraulic dynamometer and hydraulic pinch gauge for other measurements of the hand. Trouble breathing? You can buy an ultrasonic nebulizer, a spirometer, even a lifesaving ventilator unit. You can lay in a neurologist’s hammer or your own pediatric stethoscope. Women can regularly monitor their estradiol, testosterone and progesterone levels. There are new home tests for osteoporosis and colon cancer. According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), home-care systems are “the fastest growing segment of the medical device industry.” However, all this empowering self-help technology is still primitive compared with what lies ahead.

An FDA magazine reports that “the list of planned and imagined medical devices reads like a work of science fiction…imagine a toothbrush with a biosensing chip that checks your blood sugar and bacteria levels while you are brushing…computerized eyeglasses with a tiny embedded display that can help those who wear them remember people and things…a smart bandage…that could detect bacteria or virus in a wound and tell the wearer if treatment with antibiotics is warranted and which to use.” There is a “smart T-shirt” that monitored the vital signs of climbers on a recent expedition to Mount Everest. Upcoming developments also include a hands-free device that allows disabled person to operate machines by blinking an eye or by brain activity. Imagine home CAT scans in the privacy of your own marble bathroom. Automatic urine analysis with every flush. Computerized life-expectancy projection updated after each meal. As with any such forecast, not all of these products will ever see the light of day, or prove affordable, practical and safe. However, they represent only the first drops of a technology torrent to come. It will change the economics of both self-care and paid care. And it represents yet another way in which the mostly unmeasured prosumer economy interacts with the money economy. Prosumers invest money to buy capital goods that will help them perform better in the non-money economy—which will then reduce costs in the money economy. Would not the overall “output” of health be increased by recognizing the essential role of prosuming and changing the ratio of input by doctor, on one side, and patient on the other? Whether we look at demographics or costs, changes in the amount and availability of knowledge or coming breakthroughs in technology, it is clear that prosumers will play an even bigger role in the massive health economy of tomorrow.

It is, therefore, time for economists, instead of regarding the non-money economy as irrelevant or unimportant, to systematically track the most significant ways in which both these economies feed each other, and integrate with one another to form an overarching wealth-creating, health-creating system. If we understood these relationships better, they would cast important light on the global health crisis. At a minimum, they might introduce vital new questions into today’s relentlessly predictable political debates about health in many countries. If prosumers make huge, unpaid contributions to the level of health everywhere, if they invest their own money to make those contributions, might it not make sense to reduce overall health costs by educating and training prosumers as we now train producers? One of the investments governments could make in health care would be to instruct schoolchildren on how to be better health prosumers. That would include teaching some of the same things we teach in medical school—basic human anatomy and physiology and the causes and treatment of disease…Teach them to diagnose and treat common minor health problems. We should also teach them which kinds of health problems really require professional help. There needs to be a community-based, predictive game for children with type I diabetes. Professionals aim to develop mental models of their physiologies to motivate these children to check their glucose levels more frequently. The game would encourage diabetic kids, linked together wirelessly, to play on a computer to predict their own and others’ glucose levels. The idea is to leverage untapped social dynamics rather than relying entirely on doctor-patient instructions or parental nagging. In a densely cross-connected knowledge-based economy, why continue to think of the health crisis and the educational crisis as separate, rather than as interlinked? Can we not use imagination to revolutionize the ideas and institutions in both fields? Millions of prosumers are ready to help.

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As God has set the king of America, so in our Psalm he has set the intermediary—beings—here called “gods” and elsewhere called “sons of God,” over the nations of the Earth, each over one of the nations, in order to manifest in its structure and government the justice of the Judges of the World. In His first speech God accuses them of having judged not in accordance with His order and regulation, but in the manner of what is false and evil: for they have confirmed and substantiated in their power those who have acted wickedly against God’s speech and the end—with only a hint of the fall of the “gods”—of the visionary event of which the Psalmist has to inform us. However, his song is not ended. Rather now, for the first time, the real Psalm is heard, in only a few words, and yet saying all that has still to be said. The speaker turns away from us to God. “In my vision,” he says to him, “I have seen how Thou dost bring to destruction the rule over history of Thy rebellious governors. So be it, Lord. Since those who were entrusted with the office of judge succumbed to injustice, do Thou abolish the intermediary rule, renounce the useless work of underlings and Thyself judge the World immediately in Thy justice. Thine are the nation, lead them as thine own! Close the history of man which is pray to delusion and wickedness, open his true history!” In the human World, which has been given over to the intermediary beings, they play a confused game. From the unknown One who gave this World into their impure hands, no message of comfort or promise penetrates to us. He is, but He is not present. What has not entered into the view of humanity, of the humans of our time, is that the formlessness of darkness should be removed first of al by the production of light. In the firs place because light is a quality of the first body, and thus by means of light it is fitting that the World should first receive its form.

The second reason is because light is a common quality. For light is common to terrestrial and celestial bodies. However, as in knowledge we proceed from general principles, so do we in work of every kind. For the living thing is generated before the animal, and the animal before the man. It is fitting, then, as an evidence of the Divine wisdom, that among the works of distinction the production of light should take first place, since light is a form of the primary body, and because it is more common quality. Indeed, the third reason: that all other things are made manifest by light. And there is yet a fourth, already touched upon in the objections; that day cannot be unless light exists, which was made therefore on the first day. According to the opinion of those who hold that the formlessness of matter preceded its form in duration, matter must be held to have been created at the beginning with substantial forms, afterwards receiving those that are accidental, among which light holds the first place. In the opinion of those who hold that the formlessness of matter preceded its form in duration, matter must be held to have been created at the beginning with substantial forms, afterwards receiving those that are accidental, among which light holds the first place. In the opinion of some the light here spoken of was a kind of luminous nebula, and that on the making of the sun this returned to the matter of which it had been formed. However, this cannot well be maintained, as in the beginning of Genesis Holy Scripture records the institution of that order of nature which henceforth is to endure. We cannot, then, say that what was made at that time afterwards ceased to exist. Others, therefore, held that this luminous nebula continues in existence, but so closely attached to the sun as to be indistinguishable. However, this is as much as to say that it is superfluous, whereas none of God’s works have been made in vain.

On this account it is held by some that the sun’s body was made out of this nebula. This, too, impossible to those at least who believe that the sun is different in its nature from the four elements, and naturally incorruptible. For in that case its matter cannot take on another form. Once Americans become convinced that there is indeed a basement to which psychiatrists have the key, their orientation will become that of the self, the mysterious, free, unlimited center of our being. All our beliefs issue from it and have no other validation. Although nihilism and its accompanying existential despair are hardly anything but a pose for Americans, as the language derived from nihilism has become a part of their educations and insinuated itself into the daily lives, they pursue happiness in ways determined by that language. There is a whole arsenal of terms for talking about nothing—caring, self-fulfillment, expanding consciousness, and so on, almost indefinitely. Nothing determinate, nothing that has a referent. There is a straining to say something, a search for an inwardness that one knows one has, but it is still a cause without an effect. The inner seems to have no relation to the outer. The outer is dissolved and becomes formless in the light of the inner, and the inner is a will-o’-the-wisp, or pure emptiness. No wonder the mere sound of the Existentialists’ Nothing or the Hegelians’ Negation has an appeal to contemporary ears. American nihilism is a mood, a mood of moodiness, a vague disquiet. It is nihilism without the abyss. Nihilism as a state of soul is revealed not so much in the lack of firm beliefs but in a chaos of instincts or passions. People no longer believe in a natural hierarchy of the soul’s varied and conflicting inclinations, and the traditions that provided a substitute for nature have crumbled.

The soul becomes a stage for a repertory company that changes plays regularly—sometimes a tragedy, something a comedy; one day love, another day politics, and finally religion; now cosmopolitanism, and again rooted loyalty; the city or the country; individualism or community; sentimentality or brutality. And there is neither principle nor will to impose a rank order on all these. All ages and places, all races and all cultures can play on this stage. Nietzsche believed that the wild costume ball of the passions was both the disadvantage and the advantage of late modernity. The evident disadvantage is the decomposition of unity or “personality,” which in the long run will lead to psychic entropy. The advantage hoped for is that the richness and tension present in the modern soul might be the basis for comprehensive new Worldviews that would take seriously what had previously been consigned to a spiritual ashcan. This richness, according to Nietzsche, consisted largely in thousands of years of inherited and now unsatisfied religious longing. However, this possible advantage does not exist for young Americans, because their poor education has impoverished their longings, and they are hardly aware of the great pasts that Nietzsche was thinking of and had within himself. What they do have now is an unordered tangle of rather ordinary passions, running through their consciousness like a monochrome kaleidoscope. They are egotists, not in a vicious way, not in the way of those who know the good, just or noble, and selfishly reject them, but because the ego is all there is in present theory, in what they are taught. We are a bit like savages who, having been discovered and evangelized by missionaries, have converted to Christianity without having experienced all that came before and after the revelation.

It is an urgent business for one who seeks self-awareness to think through the meaning of the intellectual dependency that has led us to such an impasse. “Future shlock” is a name given to a cultural condition characterized by the rapid erosion of collective intelligence. Future shlock is the aftermath of future shock. Whereas future shock results in confused, indecisive, and physically uprooted people, future shlock produces a massive class of mediocre people. Human intelligence is among the most fragile things in nature. It does not take much to distract it, suppress it, or even annihilate it. In this century, we have had some lethal examples of how easily and quickly intelligence can be defeated by any one of its several nemeses: ignorance, superstition, moral fervor, cruelty, cowardice, neglect. In the late 1920s, for example, Germany was, by any measure, the most literate, cultured nation in the World. Its legendary seats of learning attracted scholars from every corner. Its philosophers, social critics, and scientists were of the first rank; its humane traditions and inspiration t less favored nations. However, by the mid-1930s—that is, in less than ten years—this cathedral of human reason had been transformed into a cesspool of barbaric irrationality. Many of the most intelligent products of German culture were forced to flee—for example, Einstein, Freud, Karl Jaspers, Thomas Mann, and Stefan Zweig. Even worse, those who remained were either forced to submit their minds to the sovereignty of primitive superstition, or—worse still—willingly did so: Konrad Lorenz, Werner Heisenberg, Martin Heidegger, Gerhardt Hauptmann. On May 10, 1933, a huge bonfire was kindled in Berlin and the books of Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, Emile Zola, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and a hundred others were committed to the flames, amid shots of idiot delight.

By 1936, Joseph Paul Goebbels, Germany’s Minister of Propaganda, was issuing a proclamation which began with the following words: “Because this year has not brought an improvement in art criticism, I forbid once and for all the continuance of art criticism in its past form, effective as of today.” By 1936, there was no one left in Germany who had the brains or courage to object. Exactly why the Germans banished intelligence is a vast and largely unanswered question. I have never been persuaded that the desperate economic depression that afflicted Germany in the 1920s adequately explains what happened. Humans do not become tyrants in order to keep warm. Neither do they become stupid—at least not that stupid. However, the matter need not trouble us here. I offer the German case only as the most striking example of the fragility of human intelligence. My focus here is the United States of America in our own time, and I wish to worry you about the rapid erosion of our own intelligence. If you are confident that such a thing cannot happen, your confidence is misplaced, I believe, but it is understandable. After all, the United States of America is one of the few countries in the World founded by intellectuals—men of wide learning, of extraordinary rhetorical powers, of deep faith in reason. And although we have had our moods of anti-intellectualism, few people have been more generous in support of intelligence and learning than Americans. It was the United States of America that initiated the experiment in mass education that is, even today, the envy of the World. It was America’s churches that laid the foundation of our admirable system of higher education; it was the Land-Grant Act of 1862 that made possible our great state universities; and it is to America that scholars and writers have fled when freedom of the intellect became impossible in their own nations.

Because America has been so innovative, educational, and productive is why the great historian of American civilization Henry Steele Commager called America “the Empire of Reason.” However, Mr. Commager was referring to the United States of America of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What term would he use for America today, I cannot say. Yet he has observed, as other have, a change, a precipitous decline in our valuation of intelligence, in our uses of language, in the disciplines of logic and reason, in our capacity to attend to complexity. Perhaps he would agree with me that the Empire of Reason is, in fact, gone, and that the most apt term for America today is the Empire of Shlock. In any case, this is what I wish to call to your notice: the frightening displacement of serious, intelligent public discourse in American culture by the imagery and triviality of what may be called show business. I do not see the decline of intelligent discourse in America leading to the barbarisms that flourished in Germany, of course. No scholars, I believe, will ever need to flee America. There is will no bonfires to burn books, but Congress and other politicians sure are burning the Constitution of the United States of America and sending up back to becoming a developing nation by sending all our jobs and money to other nations, while over taxing Americans and making it impossible for wages to keep up with inflation. Yet, I cannot imagine any proclamations forbidding once and for all the all art criticism, or any other kind of criticism. However, this is not a cause for complacency, let alone celebration. A culture does not have to force scholars to flee to render them impotent. A culture does not have to burn books to assure that they will not be read. And a culture does not need a Minister of Propaganda issuing proclamations to silence criticism. There are other ways to silence criticism. There are other ways to achieve stupidity, and it appears that, as in so many other things, there is a distinctly American ways.

To determine what mix of spectral ingredients is likely to produce the most vital humans, a logical place to start is with natural light, since this is the only light that humans ingested for millions of years. During all of that time, the only human experience of light was of natural light: sun, moon, stars and, more recently, fire. Therefore, whatever light-receptive capacities exist in humans, and whatever cellular reactions humans have to light, they must have evolved to be attuned to the particular spectra emitted by those light sources. For generations ago, representing one one-fifty-thousandth of the human experience, we invented artificial light. It has been only two generations since artificial light became so widespread that we moved into artificially lighted environments. Now, most of the light we ingest through our skin and eyes is artificial. Meanwhile, we no longer receive the light we formerly received, because we are no longer outdoors. It is a kind of madness to think that this change would not affect us, another sign of our removal from any understanding of our interaction with the environment. The term “malillumination” describes the results on the body. We are “starved” for some natural light spectra, and we have “overdosed” on those spectra that come from artificial light: incandescent, fluorescent, mercury vapor, sodium, LED, television, and others. Imagine that you suddenly have up eating all fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts and meats, and began eating pasta, candy and sugary cereals only. All these groupings are “food,” but the nutrients within each are substantially different. Where they are the same—there is some protein, for example in candy, and there is starch in some vegetables—they are of entirely different proportions.

Eating pasta, candy, and cereal will keep you alive, but it will affect your health. And so it is with alterations in light-diet from the “natural” mix of spectral ingredients to the artificial mix. Malillumination cases disorders ranging from lack of vitality to lowered resistance to disease, and hyperactivity. Researchers believe it can also lead to aggressive behavior, heart disease and even cancer. The body cannot handle this intervention in a natural human relationship with the environment any more than it can handle food additives or chemicals in the air. The body breaks down on the cellular level. As our lifestyle removes us further from the full-spectrum natural light and into artificial environments, our condition becomes worse. Even when we are outdoors, we filter the light that we receive in our eyes with sunglasses (which eliminate certain spectra, while allowing others to pass through) as well as eyeglasses and window glass. Smog also has a role. During the last eighty years, there has been a 20 percent decrease in the amount of sun that reaches the planet. My interest in the effect of light on humans was rooted in my investigation of television. Considering that human beings had not only moved away from natural light into artificial light, but that now our experience of artificial light is confined for four hours daily to television light, it began to seem obvious to me that a new level of distortion was underway. Human beings are soaking up far more television light, directed straight into their eyes, than any kind of artificial light that preceded it. It seemed to me that if variations in kind and volume of artificial light can affect humans, then there might be specific effects to be discovered from the enormous amount of television light most people absorb.

If you will inspect your color television screen closely—I suggest you use a magnifying glass—you will find that your picture emanates from a collection of red, blue, and green pixels, or lines. As you move away from the screen the colors merge in your eyes to seem like other colors, but the television is emitting only red, blue and green light. These pixels are made of a light-modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers. Liquid crystals do not emit light directly, instead using a backlight or reflector to produce images in color or monochrome. Many of the current LCD TVs are a lot like fluorescent lighting. However, the LED TVs (light-emitting diodes) are the newer type of LCD backlight which has become predominately the primary LCD backlight source in LCD monitors today. LED backlights care better than the CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamps) used in LCD TVs as a backlight as they are brighter, they take less energy, and LEDs last longer. We have studied the greens, reds, and blues that come from fluorescent lights, which of course would be very similar since both involve the excitation of mineral phosphors. It may not be precisely the same. The TV CCFL have three narrow wavelength peaks, just as in fluorescent, but how broad the bands are, we just do not know. (A narrow wavelength peak would indicate a very high concentration within one spectral range; this would be suspect because it would more seriously concentrate and distort what the human ingests. Color television is probably less harmful than black and white because color sets produce wider spectra, although seriously distorting the natural range of sunlight. On the other hand, color sets produce more X rays. If we are thinking there might be a relationship between the light emanations from color television and other fluorescent lights and chemical food additives, causing hyperactivity in children, there may be some truth to this.

All those artificial colorings have a certain wavelength resonance. Eliminating some of these artificial colorings and flavorings from children’s diets will reduce their hyperactivity and also their allergic responses. What I would like to do is take this and tie it to wavelength peaks of mercury-vapor lights, fluorescent lights and television light, because the heart of the matter could lie in an interaction of wavelength resonances between the chemicals and the light the body takes in. In television it could depend upon what the spectral peaks are. If they correspond to the wavelength absorption of some of these synthetic materials, then you can get tremendous reactions. It is the same with food. Different pigments have different wavelengths resonances, so different food ingredients may resonate with different light ingredients. Let us say you eat a lot of spinach and raisins, both which contain iron. Iron has a certain wavelength resonance, as do all metals. In fact, all matter interacts with other matter which may be similarly resonating. This is why soldiers will break ranks when they walk across a bridge. Too many of them walking in steps set up a wavelength pattern which has been known to resonate with that of the materials of the bridge and the whole thing can collapse. It is the same with food and light. If you eat a little bit of iron or calcium in your food and that wavelength is lacking in light you get, then you are not going to get any benefit. One the other hand, if you find yourself in a peak of light, whether it is television light or any other that reacts to iron, then you would have to watch your quantities, because if you get too much, you get an overaction. [Allergy, hyperactivity.] It could be too much of one or not enough of the other. Now with sunlight, you do not have those kinds of peaks. I am sure that one way or the other your diet of both food and light is responsible for a lot of different physical reactions that we have not been able to measure yet.

Now, implicit memories—the unconscious memories of past experiences that are recalled automatically in carrying out a reflexive action or rehearsing a learn skilled—are drawn on when one is dribbling a basketball or riding a bike. An implicit memory is recalled directly through performance, without any conscious effort or even awareness that we are drawing on memory. When we talk about our memories, what we are usually referring to are the “explicit” ones—the recollections of people, events, facts, ideas, feelings, and impressions that we are able to summon into the working memory of our conscious mind. Explicit memory encompasses everything that we say we “remember” about the past. Explicit memory is a complex memory—and for good reason. The long-term storage of explicit memories involves all the biochemical and molecular processes of “synaptic consolidation” that play out in storing implicit memories. However, it also requires a second form of consolidation, called “system consolidation,” which involves concerted interactions among far-flung areas of the brain. Scientists have only recently begun to document the workings of system consolidation, and many of their findings remain tentative. What is clear, though, is that the consolidation of explicit memories involves a long and involved “conversation” between the cerebral cortex and the hippocampus. A small, ancient part of the brain, the hippocampus lies beneath the cortex, folded deep within the medial temporal lobes. As well as being the seat of our navigational sense—it is where London cabbies store their mental maps of the city’s roads—the hippocampus play an important role in the formation and management of explicit memories. Much of the credit for the discovery of the hippocampus’s connection with memory storage lies with an unfortunate man named Henry Molaison.

Born in 1926, Henry Molaison was stricken with epilepsy after suffering a severe head injury in his youth. During his adult years, he experienced increasingly debilitating grand mal seizures. The source of his affliction was eventually traced to the area of his hippocamps, and in 1953 doctors removed move of the hippocampus as well as other parts of the medial temporal lobes. The surgery cured Molaison’s epilepsy, but it has an extraordinarily strange effect on his memory. His implicit memories remained intact, as did his older explicit memories. He could remember the events of his childhood in great detail. However, many of his more recent explicit memories—some dating back years before the surgery—had vanished. And he was no longer able to store new explicit memories. Events slipped from his mind moments after they happened. Molaison’s experience, meticulously documented by the English psychologist Brenda Milner, suggested that the hippocampus is essential to the consolidation of new explicit memories but that after a time many of those memories come to exist independently of the hippocampus. Extensive experiments over the last five decades have helped untangle this conundrum. The memory of an experience seems to be stored initially not only in the cortical regions that record the experience—the auditory cortex for a memory of a sound, the visual cortex for a memory of a sight, and so forth—but also in the hippocampus. The hippocampus provides an ideal holding place for new memories because its synapses are able to change very quickly. Over the course of a few days, through a still mysterious signaling process, the hippocampus helps stabilize the memory in the cortex, beginning its transformation from a short-term memory into a long-term one. Eventually, once the memory is fully consolidated, it appears to be erased from the hippocampus. The cortex becomes its sole holding place.

Fully transferring an explicit memory from the hippocamps to the cortex is a gradual process that can take many years. That is why so many of Molaison’s memories disappeared along with his hippocampus. The hippocampus seems to act as something like an orchestra conductor in directing the symphony of our conscious memory. Beyond its involvement in fixing particular memories in the cortex, it is thought to play an important role in weaving together the various contemporaneous memories—visual, spatial, auditory, tactile, emotional—that are stored separately in the brain but that coalesce to form a single, seamless recollection of an event. Neuroscientists also theorize that the hippocampus helps link new memories with older ones, forming the rich mesh of neuronal connections that give memory its flexibility and depth. Many of the connections between memories are likely forged when we are asleep and the hippocampus is relieved of some of its other cognitive chores. Though filled with a combination of seemingly random activations, aspects of the day’s experience, and elements from the distant past, dreams may be a fundamental way in which the mind consolidates the myriad of explicit recollections into a coherent set of representations for permanent, consolidated memory. When our sleep suffers, studies show, so, too, does our memory. Now, enforced clerical celibacy is a principle Church theologians cherish largely on the specious grounds of tradition, despite and avalanche of evidence that it has usually been widely ignored or violated, sometimes more, sometimes less than it is today. They also mouth rigid interpretations of the same scripture that all other Christian denominations find compatible with their own married clergy. They brush away all else—loneliness, depression, alienation, for example—as feather weight concerns.

Yet in the mid-1990s, a new situation crushed all their pervious objections to dust. Married Roman Catholic priests? Certainly—at least when those priests were converted, ex-Anglican clergymen who had staked their professional lives on a principle of misogyny so breathtaking, it resonated like a familiar echo in the hallowed precincts of the Vatican. This principle was, of course, that women must never be ordained, and the new—and married—priests were former Anglican priests who bucked their Church when, finally, toward the end of the twentieth century, it lurched into the minefield of female ordination. For decades, Rome had already made exceptions to the rule of celibacy in isolate cases, usually of priests converting from other churches, such as the Greek Orthodox, which permits married priests. However, North America and Australia were specifically exempted from this indulgence, though married priests were sometimes “lent” to them by European dioceses. Unlike these men, however, attracted to the Roman rites by any number of factors, the outraged ex-Anglicans were egregious misogynists, untied in their range over female ordination. Many of the ex-Anglican priests who quit their church because of its decision to permit women into the priestly ranks turned to Rome s a solution and requested permission to become Roman Catholic priests, despite their married status. With an alacrity astounding in such a sluggish institution, the pope approved these requests. The United Kingdom’s five Roman Catholic archbishops explained this ruling in a letter to their Church’s other, forcibly celibate priests. “At the present time the Catholic Church is welcoming into full communion a number of married clergymen of the Church of England, often together with their wives and in some cases their children,” their letter began.

“Many of these clergy wish to be ordained priests in the Catholic Church…We are convinced that their ministry will enrich the church…The Holy Father has asked us to be generous. We are confident that you also will welcome and appreciate these new priests when, in due course, they take their place in the presbyterate of our dioceses.” The archbishops, anticipating outcries of resentment from some priests and joy from others, attempted to forestall both. Ordaining these ex-Anglican husbands as Catholic priests in no way implied a change in the ages-old rule of celibacy: “The special permission needed in these cases are by way of exception from the general practice of accepting only single men from priesthood.” The new priests would be required to “accept the general norm of celibacy and will not be free to marry again”—in fact, the bishops would investigate the stability of their new member’s marriages and evaluate the strength of their wives’ support for this new priestly venture. As well, the Church limited the admissions procedure to four years, so that the dissidents had to act relatively quickly. It also prohibited the suddenly Catholic clergy—men from assuming all the duties of regular parish priests. What about former Catholic religious who, forced to choose between ministry and marriage, had opted for the latter? Would they be eligible to resume their places in the Church? Not at all.  Unlike the Anglicans who had taken the holy vow of matrimony, the Catholic ex-religious had sworn their vows fully aware that celibacy was an integral component of their vocation. In other words, it was unthinkable that they could be exonerated after having defiantly broken these vows. The most truly stunning aspect of these Statutes for the Admission of Married Former Anglican Clergymen into the Catholic Church is their unbridled misogynism. How else to explain the otherwise inexplicable reversal of the celibacy-principle-cum-policy sanctioned by centuries, popes, and cannon law?

How else to understand how the same Church that shrugged off the protests, pleas, and anguish of its own Catholic clergy was suddenly so responsive to the spirituality of clergymen whose sole reason for resigning from their God-given vocation was their church’s decision to permit the ordination of woman? Why else would the pope and his advisers, who normally proceeded at a maddeningly sluggish pace, hurtle forth to snatch up this gang of ultraconservative Anglican dissidents? Certainly, after years of indifference to them, the Church did not have a crise de conscience about its unmanned pastorates, nor a moment de panique about the relentless flight of conflicted religious from their cloister back into the uncelibate World. No, what motivated the Church was the strength of the Anglican rebels’ conviction about the fundamental unsuitability of women as priests, a conviction today’s Church Fathers share and are committed to sustaining. Indeed, so strongly did this antiwomen ideology resonate with the Catholic hierarchy that it drowned out questions about just how sincerely these Anglican newcomers could ever accept such tenets as papal infallibility and the Immaculate Conception. The Church’s enthusiastic embrace of the resolutely misogynist ex-priest was, in a general atmosphere of ecumenicism and goodwill, an uncontrolled outburst of antiecumenicism. It was, in fact, nothing less than the public salvaging of men who had defied and challenged the Church of England, the self-serving gesture of fellow loyalists who recognized, and immediately recruited, these fundamentally kindred spirits.

Celibacy might be a brilliant jewel, but it pales beside the harsh light that directed women away from the path of humans treaded and blinds them whenever they band together to challenge the dogma that deems them unfit for priestly ordination. This is because, as we have seen, official Church celibacy stems largely from fear of women’s allure in pleasures of the flesh—an oft-cited image describes them as temples built over sewers—which only complete abstinence can successfully counterbalance. Now-married priest and John Hopkins Medical School lecturer Richard Sipe writes in A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy: “It is hard to overestimate the importance of antifeminism in the foundation of celibate conscientiousness and priestly development for over two centuries when discipline of celibacy was being solidified (1486 and following).” Seemingly humans stand alone, but they actually do not. One is conscious of a loving presence ever in one and around one, but it is love which has shed all turmoils and troubles, all excitments and illusions, all shortcomings and imperfections. It is hard to overcome desire for pleasures of the flesh, and neither ashamed repression nor unashamed expression will suffice to do so. Hunger and surfeit are both unsatisfactory states. The middle way is better, but it is not a solution in the true meaning of this term. At the time when a child is conceived, two factors contribute powerfully towards its physical nature and physical history. They are the state of the father’s thinking and the mother’s breathing. The pleasures of the flesh urge, bodily urge, physical attraction, animal urge—is often covered with romantic or sentimental tinsel and called love. That most human beings make their paradise depend on the mere fiction of paired bodies is something for a planetary visitor to marvel at.

It is not just the fantastic growth of medical knowledge (and obsoledge) in recent decades that holds revolutionary potential for improving health; it is also the parallel shift in control of that knowledge. Patients today are inundated with previously unavailable medical information instantly available on the Internet and on news programs, many of which routinely feature segments with a physician as host. A degree of background knowledge is also conveyed, with varying degrees of accuracy, by popular TV dramas with titles like Chicago Med, The Good Doctor. When a medical show did an episode about human papillomavirus (HPV)—which, though barely known by that name, happens to be the most frequently transmitted sexual disease in the United States of America—more than five million views learned something about in one night. Health documentaries abound. A prize-winning program about cochlear ear implants in deaf children took a top prize for TV documentaries in Japan. Since 1997, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration first allowed big pharmaceutical firms to advertise prescription drugs on television, viewers have been bombarded by commercials touting everything from anti-inflammatories and cholesterol-lowing drugs to antihistamines. Most hurriedly list side effects and urge viewers to ask their physicians for further information. Permitting such advertising no doubt encouraged the creation of the twenty-four-hour cable-TV Discovery Health Channel. This avalanche of health-related information, misinformation and knowledge hurled at the individual varies in objectivity and credibility. However, it directs more and more public attention to health issues—and changes the traditional relationships between doctors and patients, encouraging a more take-charge attitude on the part of the latter.

Ironically, while patients have more access to health information of uneven quality, their doctors, driven by pressures to speed up, have less and less time to peruse the latest medical journals, whether online or off, and to communicate adequality with relevant specialists—and with patients. Moreover, while doctors need knowledge about different conditions and see streams of patients whose faces are scarcely remembered from one visit to the next, educated, persistent, Internet-savvy patients may actually have read more recent research regarding their specific ailments than the doctor. Patients come with printouts of Internet material, photocopies of pages from the Physicians’ Desk Reference or clips from medical journals and health magazines. They ask question and no longer tug their forelocks in awe of the doctor’s white lab coat. Here, changes in relationship to the deep fundamentals of time and knowledge have radically altered medical reality. In economic terms, the doctor selling services is still a “producer.” The patient, by contrast, is not just a consumer, but a more active “prosumer” capable of making an increasing contribution to the economy’s output of wellness or health. Sometimes producer and prosumer work together; sometimes they work independently of each other; sometimes they work at cross purposes. Yet conventional health statistics and forecasts, by and large, ignore today’s rapid changes in these roles and relationships. Many of us change our diets, quit smoking or drinking, and adopt exercise regiments. If, then, our health improves, how much should be attributed to the doctor and how much to our own efforts? Put differently, how much of the health-care output is created by producers and how much by prosumers? And why do most economists count one and not the other?

According to Lowell Levin, professor emeritus at the Yale School of Public Health, “85 to 90 percent of all medical care in the United States of America is provided by ordinary people. Self-treatment remedies, he says, include aspirin for headaches, ice packs for sprains, ointments for burns, and much more. Dr. Levin, according to an interview in The World & I, “views all doctors and hospitals s necessary but undesirable social evil, like jails.” Whatever the actual percentage now, the combination of demography, costs pressures and knowledge all point toward a radical increase in the prosumer factor. However, all this so far ignores what may yet turn out to be the most important change of all: Tomorrow’s technology. Add that to the mix and watch what happens. Overpopulation has increased the poverty of the underdeveloped World. Overpopulation is due to oversexed activity. The belief that pleasures of the flesh are here solely for enjoyment is universal. The belief that it is here solely to produce wanted children with pleasures of the flesh thrown in as an inducement is usually rejected. However, the second belief is the correct along with a marriage clause. Humans have abused their instinct for pleasures of the flesh so that only its exaggerated continued act is considered normal and proper! The human who is called to the spiritual quest is also called to engage in battle with the terrestrial instincts. If they are to rule one, one will never know peace. And pleasures of the flesh being one of the most powerful of such instincts, it must necessarily be brought under control and disciplined. This is trye of all its three phases: mental, emotional, and physical. It is quite possible, healthy, and natural for a human to live a perfectly continent life for many years, the vital force being re-absorbed into the body, provided one’s mental life is kept equally pure. This is achieved by constant reflection upon the matter from the standpoints of experience, observation, and idealism, as well as by deliberate sublimation when passion is felt.

Cresleigh Homes

As the largest model in the community, this home knows it’s got responsibilities. 💪

It’s not easy offering four bedrooms, a great room, loft, and a covered porch, but Residence 4 at #Havenwood is up to the challenge and more. After all, we designed this community to grow with you! 👍

No need to book that spa 🚿 appointment – we’ll just enjoy the incredibly appointed bathrooms in our #Havenwood home!

Let’s hear it for @CresleighHomes in #LincolnCA! 👏

#RedBenchStudio